We Need Our Dark Places

"When you move into an apartment, you cannot start to illuminate every last corner with neon light. If there are no dark corners or hidden niches, your house becomes uninhabitable. Human beings who are trying to self-reflect and explore their innermost being to the last corner become uninhabitable people."

~

Werner Herzog

25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing

This was fun to read.

Best part:

"Momentum is everything. Cut the brake lines. Careen wildly and unsteadily toward your goal. I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is by not stopping. That story isn’t going to unfuck itself."

Thanks to Timothy Gager for linking to this on his facebook page.



The Righteous Battles of Privileged Atheists

The other day, my friend Bridget McKinney made the following statement on her excellent tumblr Greater Than Lapsed:

"I’m increasingly convinced that the reason that movement atheism is so dominated by white men is because there is no other way they can experience oppression."

She received a flood of rebuttals, rebukes, and high-fives on this statement, but one of the more interesting thoughts that came out of this conversation is a statement by Bridget that--to pararaphrase--many white atheist men, unaware of their privilege, are overwhelmingly concerned with the few first world problems that their lifestyle and our social structure allow to get through to them. I.E., whether or not 'under god' is on our currency, keeping 'merry christmas' greetings out of public schools, etc.

David Silverman of the American Atheists' group seems to have made it his goal in life to  embody this complaint. From the Friendly Atheist site:

"This morning, American Atheists’ Dave Silverman made an offer to Cee Lo Green after the singer altered the lyrics to “Imagine” on New Years Eve:
Come to the Reason Rally and sing the song with the line “And no religion, too.” Dave even offered to pay the expenses for the trip."

I don't know. When movement atheists go after Tim Tebow, or make too big of a deal out of vulgarities like Cee Lo Green's embarrassing (to him) rendition of Imagine, I can only roll my eyes. It's fine to engage in trifles. It can be fun. But when a group that is supposed to represent America's Atheists becomes overly identified in the popular consciousness with waging righteous battles over the kinds of issues listed in this post, I think it trivializes them.That's too bad. In movement politics, it's important to consider the perceptions of the casual follower.

UPDATE:

There was a lot of misunderstanding of this piece over at Daily Kos, so I thought it might be useful to clarify a few things.

This is by no means a piece telling anyone to shut up. I think it's great and important to put the spotlight on stupid and regressive things that occur in our culture. There are a lot of stupid things that we could turn our spotlight on, and some stupid things deserve our attention and scorn more than others.  I also should say that I'm a member of the American Atheists'. I support the group, and think Dave Silverman is a charming and thoughtful spokesperson. However, he has made a series of public comments that have been groan-worthy, and I think the initiative against the 9-11 cross was a terrible waste of time and energy that was totally counter-productive. I suppose the bottom line is that I wish more atheists in the public sphere would put their gravitas behind issues like poverty and homelessness. When atheism fuels the pursuit of social justice, you get a bigger sense of urgency, I think. We also have all of these charming and intelligent spokespeople out there (way more charming and intelligent than me) who I think would be great advocates. Atheism and social justice fit beautifully together, and I'd like to see more freethinkers speak up about these issues publicly.

Leave Cee Lo to the Lennon fans.

How Dexter & Howard Stern Make Us Better People

I’m not a media critic, and I don’t read media criticism, but I’m guessing that many people have dissected the popular appeal of Dexter & Howard Stern over the years. As a big fan of both, I thought I’d take a swing not only at explaining their general appeal on a psychosocial level, but also at trying to sell you on why I believe they make us better people.

When a person finds out you’re a Stern fan, or a fan of Dexter, their eyebrows go up (it’s slightly less controversial to like Dexter than Stern though; something to think about). You immediately feel the need to apologize, or explain why you would be attracted to figures that are so stigmatizing. Stern is funny, Dexter is well written.  Both are true. But I think it goes deeper.

In Dexter, we have a character who hacks people up in his spare time while he tries to keep the façade of a normal life. This is appealing because there are uncomfortable things in all of our lives that we try to keep hid while outwardly maintaining normalcy. We may not all have literal bodies to hide, or an appetite for killing human beings, but we do have appetites that we have either been told or decided we are not supposed to have, and we are good at hiding the evidence that they exist.  Dexter is cathartic in that sense. He also gives us hope, because he is indulging in his darker impulses and still functioning in society. Dexter doesn’t feel guilty about what he does. He knows that it would be bad news for him if he was found out, so he takes care to conceal his nocturnal hobbies. But he understands what he is. We should be so lucky as to recognize our darkness as clearly as he does. When it comes to self awareness, Dexter is a hero.

And then there’s Howard. I love Howard. After I listen to the Howard Stern show, I feel cleansed. I feel joyful. Howard Stern is no serial killer, yet he makes people even more uncomfortable than Dexter does. Why? Well, probably because he’s a real man. But that’s not the worst of it; Howard Stern is an honest man. He—like Dexter—is aware of his darkness. He’s also aware that much of what we have collectively deemed to call ‘darkness’ is not actually dark at all. Much of what we call darkness is simply human nature. It can be funny and it can be strange, but it’s not dark. Howard is moral hero because he embraces his darkness publicly, and calls bullshit on the diet darkness of the surface world. Howard doesn’t  keep his worlds separate the way Dexter does. His are both in plain view, as ours should be.

When we repress things, we hurt ourselves and others. It’s only when we really look into who we are, what we do, and why we do it, that we can be healthy. You are not healthy if you pretend you have no problems. You’re also not healthy if you think it is a problem to be who you are.  Steven Pinker just wrote a pretty good book called ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’ that makes the case that mankind has become less violent over time. I believe that if this trend continues, it will be in part because we have cathartic icons like Dexter, and aspirational icons like Howard Stern to look towards in our culture. In these two phenomena, we see our society looking at itself, and recognizing things about itself that it could not have in past decades. In these two characters we are permitted to sigh from deep within our beings. Dexter and Howard help us know ourselves, and people who know themselves are more likely to contribute positively to the world they live in.

Hello, Police State.

The President signed NDAA last night.

 from the ACLU's press release:

“President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.  The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

This is seriously fucked. The Obama administration sought to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in the U.S. court system to show the world how good and just our legal system is. Now he has signed a bill that allows U.S. citizens to be detained indefinitely 'until the end of hostilities', if they are suspected of aiding terrorist agencies. Why is our court system good enough for foreign combatants, but not good enough for home grown terror suspects?

This was a very undemocratic act. The president deserves to get nailed hard for this in both the media and his poll numbers. This is his Alien and Sedition Act.

PS: The republican presidential candidates are no better on this issue. The only one to come out against NDAA was Ron Paul.

*UPDATE*

from a piece at Daily Kos:

"A presidential statement accompanying the bill signing says the administration will interpret and implement some parts of the law in way that gives counterterrorism officials flexibility and upholds the nation's values."

Oh, Christ. I didn't think I could be made to feel less comfortable with this legislation, but I was wrong. Any time the 'nation's values' are invoked, you know a good forced sodomizing is on the way.

Everything In the Medicine Cabinet Is Available

in book form. If you're interested in buying a copy, click the link below:

 


I think I've put all of my best pieces in this collection. If you buy it, I hope you like it. Let me know what you think either way.

'I Celebrate Myself, and Sing Myself'

“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.”

- Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

Newt Gingrich Sums Up Ron Paul Concisely.

"Gingrich said Paul's "total record of systemic avoidance of reality" makes him unthinkable as a president."

Right on. I know Paul is a fetish candidate for certain segments of our population to whom 'passionate' is the default p.c. way to refer to their and their dear leader's nuttiness, but Ron Paul is a terrible candidate for president. If you have any interest in protecting America & Democracy on a global scale, or would like to prevent America from falling into a serfdom, you shouldn't vote for Ron Paul. He is that crazy customer at the coffee shop who comes in daily to talk deeply to you about the very narrow slice of history and philosophy he has internalized, reconnecting all thoughts to his very specific belief system, all the while spraying your sweater with bits of moist scone and flecks of cappuccino foam.

Ron Paul should be annoying and entertaining Starbucks baristas somewhere. He shouldn't be in charge of the nuclear weapons (not that he'd ever have the nerve to use them).

On Evil

Today, I heard someone refer to a film as 'evil'. After recovering from the jealousy I feel whenever someone sees something that I have not created as sufficiently harmful to the social and spiritual fabric of mankind to call evil, I became a little perplexed. And then I was offended, because the film in question wasn't evil by any stretch of the imagination. It was slightly irreverent, a little bawdy, and contained a few favorable references to Satan. All in all, a good family film. Not high brow, but definitely not evil.

It's been so long since I've heard someone refer to some pop-culture trinket as evil that I am shocked and amused to remember that this is the mindset of some folks. In a world where people starve to death not long after birth, where dictators crush democratic movements, where children are taught not to question authority, where people mutilate the genitals of infants at the behest of ancient crime anthologies, there are individuals out there who lose sleep over Harold & Kumar's latest hijinx.

They say that the smartest thing Satan ever did was to convince people that he doesn't exist. As a person who looks favorably upon Satan in general, I think this move was probably just good self defense. If the plebians who believe Lady Gaga has been sent to corrupt the souls of our young ever got wind of such a sophisticated and moral being, they would undoubtedly tear him limb from limb, or crucify him, just like they have done to all of our truly original thinkers. But there's something to this idea though: if you ask me, the greatest evils in this world are the evils Charles Dickens warned us about in A Christmas Carol: Ignorance & Want. Ignorance of the true extent of our human freedom--from gods, leaders, parents, authorities, traditions--ignorance of each other that leads to tribal thinking and insular protectionism. And then there's the want. Want of education, housing, healthcare, a steady food supply, access to the arts and other culturally enriching treasures. Want of justice. Want of equality. These are the real evils.

As long as there are people out there who think their ears are too precious to be defiled with 'swear words' and ideas that challenge their personally preferred paradigms--and think that the naked human body is the most vile type of blasphemy--the real evils of the world will continue on unchecked.

If the devil is the same kind of vulgarian as many of the people who believe in him seem to be, then his best idea wasn't to convince the world that he didn't exist, but to distract it with something shiny.

Everything In The Medicine Cabinet Will Be Published

I am going to self-publish a collection of my favorite stories, poems, and essays from this blog some time in 2012. Below is the introduction for the book version of Everything In The Medicine Cabinet Has Expired:

This book is a snapshot of my mind and things that happened to me between 2007 and 2012. I think the reason I have resisted self-publication for so long is vanity; If I was ever to be published, I wanted it to be 'legit', i.e., paid for.

But I don't care about that anymore. Life has a way of beating vanity out of you if you don't abandon it willingly.

I'm publishing this book mainly for my wife and children, and the people who have cared for me as a record, so they can visit me--in a way--after I am dead. The specter of being murdered, dying in a terrible car crash, or having my heart suddenly explode in my chest is ever looming, so I thought I should get down to business putting this thing together.

Mainly I'm publishing it for my sons, Spencer, Jack, and Langston. Fathers have a strange effect on their sons, and I thought that if my kids had a record of where I was at emotionally and mentally during their formative years it might help them to understand themselves better at some future moment. I hardly trust myself to give an objective account of my mindset and motives at some future date--the tendency to rationalize and justify is strong--so better to capture it all now.

If I can preserve a few copies for Abby & the kids, and maybe sell enough copies to friends and family to make up the cost of publishing, I will consider this book a success.

-Spencer Troxell, December 20th, 2011.

That's it. I'll let you know when I've got it all together. I assume I'll use a venue like lulu or something.

What I've Got

via Things Greater Than Lapsed Likes

Moving Into a World Without Hitchens

"We barely got our trousers off" ~ Christopher Hitchens.

I'm not inclined to turn public figures into heroes, because I think it dehumanizes them and also removes the impetus from us to try to do great and good things ourselves. We don't have the whole picture of what public figures are like. Even they probably don't have that. What we have is our perceptions, and the recorded perceptions of others.

Many people share many of my perceptions of Christopher Hitchens. I'm sure there are loads of pre-written obituaries being tinkered with and published today. I don't know how many of them I'm going to read, but I'm sure most of the positive ones will notice (and try to subtly equal or outdo) his eloquence and rhetorical skills. Many people will hail him as an important journalist, and a champion of reason and democracy. Some will also relish capturing every idiosyncracy he possessed, and will celebrate his death.

Before he began writing and talking about his atheism, he amused me. After he began writing and talking about his atheism, he inspired me. I began to look into some of his other thoughts a little closer, and found some I liked and some I didn't. I usually had a good time reading anything he wrote about. His most superficial public persona was entertaining, but the more you watched him and read him, the more you saw his essential honesty and humanity. In public he was a passionate defender and believer in human freedom, an epicurean spirit who threw himself into the wonderful carnal aspects of life, and ultimately a deeply moral man. I got a shiver when in a debate he said that if a god asked him to kill his children to please the divine will he would respond with a heartfelt 'fuck you'. I appreciated the moment in another debate where he said to a person in the religion profession who stated he didn't think he'd be a very good person if there wasn't a god, 'don't give up on yourself so easily'. I loved how frankly he talked about dying. I took great comfort in seeing the issue approached without any sugar coating, and with great humanity and reflection. Death is something that I think about a lot, and in Christopher Hitchens I can refer to a person who took it seriously, and didn't move towards it with any blinders on.

Hitchens didn't believe in an afterlife. Neither do I. He is gone, and he'll never make an original statement again. We have his writings and various recorded appearances, but it's not the same. He's dead.

But if it turns out that Hitchens and I are wrong and there is an afterlife, then let me say this: Mr. Hitchens, I'll see you in hell. If it exists it's full of all of the people I have ever loved and admired while on this Earth, so it can't be such a bad place after all.

this was posted in the comment section over at Why Evolution Is True:

Not Dead.

Just busy.

Unfortunately, no one pays me to write these blog posts, so it's something I have to do in my leisure time. Right now there's not a lot of leisure time.

I hope to be back at it soon.

The Horrible Possibility

“In the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.” ~ Phillip K. Dick

via Neil Gaiman via things Greater Than Lapsed likes.

Wa Habibi

Kronos Quartet has been scratching an itch for me this winter:



To me, music is intimately tied to seasons. In the Autumn, it's folk music and smokey sounding jazz. As winter approaches, give me strings. Maybe a little piano. I want sincerity and intensity when there's snow on the ground, maybe punctuated by a little awe.

On Guilt

"But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing." ~John Berryman, from Dream Song 29

Originally I was going to call this piece 'On Christian Guilt', but then I realized that would be somewhat disingenuous. Even if you can put an interesting spin on the kind of guilt Christians experience (they are guilty for the wrongful execution of their deliverer, thousands of years before they were born), we all experience guilt. There is some kind of crucifixion--real or imagined--hanging over everyone's head.

And I harp on the Christians too much. I harp on them like a person in recovery harps on people who are still 'stuck in the lifestyle'. The harping is incessant, and probably misplaced, but it's done--at least 25% of it--in love and concern.

There is a pressure to live right. Or if not right, then at least authentically. To live right & authentically would take a true feat of skill and attention, so maybe the only thing we can really aim for is to live attentively. But even that is hard, because we tend to want to fall into a rhythm. In this regard, maybe music is our worst and most beautiful enemy.

Isn't that what the Buddhists want us to do? To disappear into the process, to become one with the ebb & flow of life? Don't they want us to be just one small motion in a great dance, each of us amounting to the twitch of a muscle or the falling of an eyelash? Can we have it both ways?

Surely there are some of us who feel guilty but aren't guilty, and some who are guilty and do not feel guilty, and some who feel guilty and are guilty, and some who don't feel guilty and are not guilty. Regardless of whether we actually have free will, we feel like we have it, so it bothers us when things don't line up the way we want them to. It makes us feel guilty when we look back on our past and see how badly we've behaved. Anybody with any kind of aspirations to an ideal state is going to be constantly disappointed in themselves. Anybody who's ever known anyone who has committed suicide is going to have plenty of 'what if' questions to ask themselves, and none of us will ever get any rest over it. I don't know if we should want to, really, although maybe it would be nice to take a break every now and then.

Grief is the dirt under the fingernails life. Grief is the understanding that something has gone wrong, and--for me at least--guilt is the result of feeling that more could have been done.

Sin Boldly...Or At Least Be Able To

"Provided that we can keep a young man's will and appetites under control,let us boldly make him used to all nations and all countries, to irregularity and excess, if need be. In his practice he should follow custom. He should be able to do everything, but only like doing what is good. Even philosophers do not find it praiseworthy in Callisthenes that he forfeited the favor of his master, Alexander the Great, by refusing to keep with him in drinking. He should laugh and sport and debauch himself with his prince. Even in his debauches I would have him surpass his companions in vigor and persistency, and refrain from evil-doing not from lack of strength or skill, but only from lack of inclination. 'There is a great difference between a man who does not want to sin and one who does not know how to'." ~ Montaigne, from his essay On the Education Of Children

There Are Other Fish In The Sandbox (Romantic Advice For a 6 Year Old Boy)

My son Jack is an amorous young man. He is very interested in the ladies. Once during pre-school recess, he made a bouquet of flowers for a little girl in his class, got down on a knee and proposed to her. He shows a lot of interest in all of his little girlfriends; holding their hands, practicing active listening, etc. I am half impressed and half terrified by this disposition.

When I picked Jack up from school the other day, he seemed a little down. 'What's up, buddy?' I said. 'My girlfriend broke up with me today', he said.

'Oh!' I said. 'That's too bad. What happened?'

'She said we're broke up'.

'Well', I said, 'There are other fish in the sea'.

'I'm confused by your fishing metaphors'. Piped in Spencer, my 10 year old.

'What that means,' I said, 'is that there are other girls in the sea. And the best way to to turn one of them into your girlfriend is to dangle a worm in front of their face'.

Spencer laughed. 'For some reason I don't think that will work'.

'It has always worked for me'. I said. I patted Jack on the shoulder. 'Don't be too upset about this. She's the one who's losing out, really. You're a cool dude. You don't need a girlfriend to be happy. Besides, you've got to be happy to be by yourself before you can be happy being with someone else'.

I'm not sure that last sentence made much sense to either me or Jack. I have a bad habit of trying to fill empty space with wise words, especially when I don't know what to say. Cliches pour from my mouth when my kids are struggling with something that I don't have the answer to.

Kid: Dad, I miss our pet bunny. I wish it hadn't died.
Me: a bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

Kid: What happens when we die?
Me: Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Kid: What is a eukaryote?
Me: A just man is like a tree planted by a stream.

I'm glad to have my little Don Juan, I just hope he doesn't turn me into a grandfather by the time he's in 6th grade.