“Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
I really wanna know (who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
Tell me, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
‘Cause I really wanna know (who are you? Who, who, who, who?)”

– The Who, Who Are You? (Lyrics by Pete Townsend)

__________

“Each one of us is a synthesis of the real and unreal. We all wear a guise. Even within our own minds, we make constant efforts to conceal ourselves from ourselves, only to be repeatedly found out.”

– Charles Simic, The Life of Images

__________

Who am I?

I could give a simple answer based on my job, family, place of birth, physical characteristics.

I can dig a little deeper for an answer: interests, hobbies, goals.

Then I descend into the murky depths of ill defined dreams, desires, fears and hopes.

Is my answer the same as it would have been last year, a decade ago, next year?

No.

That is my main argument against tattoos. I change my mind about what I like all the time.

I can’t imagine committing to a lifetime piece of public artwork.

Of course my choice of physical presentation isn’t an answer to who I am, but certainly others will catch a glimpse.

The mask we choose to wear shows us what we are afraid of showing of ourselves.

The stories we tell ourselves, are told to us, and we share with others are another part of the equation used to attempt to calculate who we are.

Yet no matter what data I collect on myself, I can’t give a clear answer.

Who am I?

Despite the chronic ambiguity, I still ask the question.

Perhaps there is some kind of answer amongst these blog posts.

I write them not for a clamouring public, but for myself.

I am choosing to narrow my focus on what I read and how it makes me think.

So I can say with some certainty: I am a reader and a writer.

Anything else is liable to change.

“Not only do adults avoid disciplining the children of others, they often don’t even discipline their own. They lack confidence in their authority as parents. The children pay a terrible price for this failing because, without authority, adults cannot give children what they need. Love is not enough. Children lack the experience and perspective to deal with the world around them. The role of the parent is to guide children by actively setting limits and teaching them to restrain themselves. Without a strong inner sense of authority, this job is impossible. Children feel you more than they listen to you. They do not decide to accept what you tell them because it makes logical sense. They accept it only because they feel your authority in a positive way. If children do not sense that you are stronger than they are, you are useless to them as a parent. You have not prepared them to deal with reality and in that sense you have failed them.”

– Phil Stutz, Lessons for Living

__________

“But it’s just the fact that if we as parents don’t teach our kids structure, responsibility, they’re gonna be lost. It’s like them being in a country full of anarchism. There’s no control, they do whatever they want, and so on.

And so as kids, they need that. Because when they get out in the real world, that you’re going to be so disappointed, they’re going to be crushed, because somebody is going to tell them the same stuff that we as parents should have taught them when they were kids.

Yeah. And it’s gonna crush him. It’s gonna crush him. So I’d rather prepare my kids now, right, than wait until they become 20 or 21 years old and someone rips them a new one verbally at work because they didn’t do what they supposed to.”

– Bo Jackson, on The Forward Podcast, 12 December 2016

__________

To be a better parent isn’t about doing more for our children, it’s about showing what enough looks like.

Those of us who didn’t receive that structure in our own childhoods struggle to catch up.

Our inner anarchy causes great turbulence.

Isn’t it better to get something right the first time round?

If we are going to build a house, it needs a strong foundation, solid walls and a roof that doesn’t leak.

We don’t want to have to keep patching leaks and bracing the cracks.

Children need firm foundations.

We, as parents, are responsible for building the initial structure.

If we make mistakes we cannot go back to correct them.

It’s too late. Our children are forced to do that alone.

Are we going to force our children to weather the storms of life in a leaky shack?

Or, through our strength, integrity and high expectations shall we construct something durable.

We have these precious years to do the good work as parents.

The question though is how do we know what good workmanship looks like when we ourselves reside in such fragile abodes?

“Read solid books, history, biography and travel—and above all take notes on what you read. Reading without note taking is as senseless as eating without digesting. It is easy to condense into a single page all that you really want to remember out of a big book, and there you have it for reference for ever. When you have done that systematically, for five years, you will be surprised at the extraordinary amount of available information which you can turn upon any subject, all at the cost of very little trouble.”

– Arthur Conan Doyle, quoted in On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda

__________

“Wherever and whatever I read, I have to have a pencil, not a pen—preferably a stub of a pencil so I can get close to the words, underline well-turned sentences, brilliant or stupid ideas, interesting words and bits of information, and write short or elaborate comments in the margins, put question marks, check marks and other private notations next to paragraphs that only I—and sometimes not even I—can later decipher. I would love to see an anthology of comments and underlined passages by readers of history books in public libraries, who despite the strict prohibition of such activity could not help themselves and had to register their complaints about the author of the book or the direction in which humanity has been heading for the last few thousand years.”

– Charles Simic, quoted in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs

__________

I love defacing my books.

They are branded as mine.

If we take notes when we read, we are already translating the ideas of others into our own.

We underline where we wish to cut.

We can be brazen, because these heists are done in the privacy of our own books.

I hate not having a pencil to hand when I read.

There is a force that acts so strong when I read a sentence that needs to be preserved for my collection.

I must underline, scribble in the margin, drop breadcrumbs to help me find my way back to it.

I hate not to be able to do this.

It’s not real reading if there isn’t the opportunity to take notes.

It’s like a one-way conversation: the book talks at me. I might aswell not be there.

But with a pencil, I get a word in edgeways.

Then the book talks to me. I am the only intended audience.

Our conversation is preserved forever.

I can share the highlights with others.

My archive of conversations with quotations.

“Thoughts about the degree to which I’m a slave or lowly employee of the system I’ve created: cigarettes smoke me, food eats me, alcohol drinks me, house swallows me, car drives me, etc.”

– Jim Harrison, Just Before Dark

__________

“An uncomfortable question arises, could we humans be in the same boat as those hapless bees? Have we too been duped by caffeinated plants, not only to do their bidding but to act against our interests in the process? Who’s getting the best of our relationship with the caffeine producing plants?”

– Michael Pollan, Caffeine

__________

Jim Harrison was writing before social media, even before the internet.

Imagine if we added “the social media that posts me“ to his list, then he would really be in trouble.

But isn’t that most of us, most of the time?

One big FOMO.

We let our technology rule us because it connects us to the rest of the world.

If we don’t check, or post, then we fall behind.

But staying ahead online is like trying to chase a river.

What are you competing against? The river? The individual water molecules? The Pooh stick floating in the current?

There are simply too many people to consider online.

But worse, the algorithm and the AI will always be out there, with a carrot dangling in front of our noses.

I am happy to be manipulated by the coffee plant.

It’s a relationship between me and the few dozen coffee beans I consume daily.

But social media? I am manipulated by a virtual plant that has choked the planet.

A weed.

An invasive species.

A system that I cannot control or fully comprehend.

Technology should work for me rather than I work for technology.

How did I become its slave?

I should be the one snapping my fingers, demanding attention and service.

How do we be more like Odysseus when we venture online?

How do we tie ourselves to the mast and plug our ears against the siren’s call?

This blog passes through no social media.

It’s just me posting on my own domain, a tiny island that I control.

I can hear the river rushing by.

I am happy to turn my back and attend to my own business.

Now, what did I do with my pen…?

“What I didn’t understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn’t the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it’s “worth?” The only way you’re ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don’t have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.”

– Paul Graham, Stuff

__________

“But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can’t remember ever reading a story without judging it. If that sounds sad, it isn’t. From an early age, the constant reader accepts a story as an artefact. Alive to the artificiality of texts, he finds it hard to understand the fundamentalist viewpoint, Christian or otherwise, which casts certain phrases as sacred. The constant reader is sceptical, irreverent and fickle. He doesn’t make a god of any text, because he knows it is provisional and there’ll be another one along in a minute.”

– Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self

__________

Books are the greatest stuff in the world.

Immediately useful.

Unlike most other stuff, there is always a need for more books.

When you realise the infinite number of books available then you know you cannot settle.

There is no one book, to be pored over, ad infinitum.

There is a constant stream of new words to digest.

Books are never wasted.

I buy books speculatively – not every one will be a winner.

But one useful sentence from a book makes the investment worthwhile.

You start to see not individual books, enclosures of space, but books as a natural wilderness, where everything is connected.

An ecology of words.

“Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.”

John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

__________

“The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor. They are a people who can make you laugh, who do so deliberately because they like to hear you laugh. They like to see you feeling amused enough to forget that you really feel terrible about the whole thing, as many people do, from the beginning to the end of their lives, outraged first because they have been born, and then outraged because they must die.”

– William Saroyan, Chance Meetings

__________

It’s easy to be miserable.

Simple to find a grievance about something or other.

Quick to communicate displeasure to a fellow human.

A frown spreads quickly like mould through a loaf of bread.

A laugh can cut right through all that.

A smile radiates anti- misery matter.

A joke can upend all the seriousness with one yank.

You don’t need to be happy, just funny.

Jokes at a funeral are an emergency dose of life.

Laughter is a wonder drug.

A device to blow fresh energy into a room.

Avoid the human vacuums, who suck the fun out of any enclosed space.

They are more tolerable if you turn it into a game.

Avoid getting got.

You won’t be the only one dreading an encounter.

Create a team.

The Vacuum Dodgers.

It is your moral duty to recruit as many players into your team as possible.

It’s more fun to play with others.

Just try to avoid being cruel.

Don’t focus on the human vacuums.

You may find yourself complaining about them too much.

Negativity demoralises the team.

And if you aren’t careful, you could find yourself on the other side, wondering where everyone else is running to.

Slow to realise they are in fact running from you.

“For four years in the 1980s, I wrote a film column for The Spectator. Eight hundred words were requested, and though from time to time I turned in 799, I was seldom expansive to the tune of 801. After a while I didn’t even have to use a word count function. All my views–on anything–fitted into 800 words. ‘Should we be in Iraq?’ Eight hundred words. ‘Is it cold out?’ Eight hundred words. Then, for a while, I wrote an opinion column, successfully concealing the fact that I had no opinions–or at least, not of the sort broadsheet editors want. If I were to be granted a coat of arms–an unlikely scenario, I admit–my motto would be ‘It’s not that simple’. Being a novelist has taught me, if I didn’t know before, that almost all human situations are complex, ambiguous and shifting. There is always more information, and more emerging information, than you can process, but the crudities of public debate require oppositional postures, the drawing of lines in the dust.”

– Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of my Former Self

__________

“The materiality of this first moment is so obvious that some of us take it for granted. It does not imply that facts are meaningless objects waiting to be discovered under some timeless seal but rather, more modestly, that history begins with bodies and artifacts: living brains, fossils, texts, buildings.The bigger the material mass, the more easily it entraps us: mass graves and pyramids bring history closer while they make us feel small. A castle, a fort, a battlefield, a church, all these things bigger than we that we infuse with the reality of past lives, seem to speak of an immensity of which we know little except that we are part of it. Too solid to be unmarked, too conspicuous to be candid, they embody the ambiguities of history. They give us the power to touch it, but not that to hold it firmly in our hands—hence the mystery of their battered walls. We suspect that their concreteness hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully dissipate their silences. We imagine the lives under the mortar, but how do we recognize the end of a bottomless silence?”

– Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

__________

We can never know all the facts.

There is no perfect knowledge.

Often what we can find has been fashioned by its creator to fit into their own agenda.

Our lives shouldn’t be spent as preservation machines.

Not every conversation needs to be recorded.

Not every building is precious.

There has to be some curation. Or rather, a lot of curation.

How do I choose two quotes?

What makes Hilary and Michel-Rolph worthy of preservation in this blog?

Because they have snagged on a jagged edge of my subconscious.

I know they both speak to the complexities of the world and that any attempts to wrangle truth is a mighty strenuous job.

But if we all truthfully engage in what truly engages and interests us, then ours will be a happy entrapment in the mire of our reality.

I cannot know all people from all times and all places but I can invite the ones I meet along the way to help broaden my own world view.

I don’t need to judge and categorise everything I see.

A simple conversation will suffice.

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

– Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, by Douglas Copeland

__________

“The moment a writer disengages from the present world, something vital is lost.”

– J. Michael Straczynski, Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer

__________

It can be tempting to think what I type here is reality.

But it’s simply a way of expressing myself that is real to me, if not part of the reality experienced by the eight billion other people on this planet.

I feel my views moving, twisting, like cogs in an ever changing and impossible to solve puzzle.

Writing is a way to engage with how I see the world.

It is, hopefully, a reflection of what I see, rather than what I want to see.

My version of reality, one day at a time.

By inviting the thoughts and views of others into this conversation do I better understand this world?

Or am I constructing my own escape pod, inviting a select group of companions for the ride away from reality?

If this daily practice is really a way of disengaging then, on reflection, it’s pretty harmless.

I put forward no serious agendas, no curriculum and no ideology.

I am simply curious about how to carry myself a little better through this one life.

Books build me up and at the same time, whisk me away.

I spend serious time with different voices, but I choose which ones I want to hear from.

Is this my own echo chamber?

If so, the messages I hear calling back from the depth are…“keep going”…“listen to your subconscious”…“read more”…and, a little fainter, the undeniable voice of reality…“where are all the women?”…“is this some sort of men’s club?”… “women write books too…”

Roger that.

Message received loud and clear.

Over and out.

“Most people who see the truth refuse to acknowledge it. We can notice an unhappy customer, a shoddy product or a decaying industry, but we don’t want to be aware of it. Our attachment is to a future that looks like the past, and so we ignore the data or diminish its importance. We don’t mean to lie; we’re just in denial.”

– Seth Godin, Graceful

__________

“Never Walk Past a Mistake.

This is one of the first lessons drilled into young military leaders. To put it another way: make on-the-spot corrections. This serves a number of purposes.

First, and most obviously, correcting a mistake shows attention to detail and reinforces standards within an organization. Thus a young second lieutenant will always correct a soldier who fails to salute when he is passing by or who is wearing his insignia an inch off center. Tolerance of little mistakes and oversights creates an environment that will tolerate bigger and ultimately catastrophic mistakes.

Second, it teaches aspiring leaders to have the moral courage to speak out when standards are not being met. You never look the other way and pretend you didn’t see it just to avoid a confrontation or to be seen as petty.

Third, it shows the followers that you care about them, the unit, and its mission. If a follower knows that he has just made a mistake and gotten away with it, he loses confidence in the competence of the leader and has less respect for him.

Fourth, you set the example for all of your subordinate leaders to act in the same manner. High standards and mutual respect will flow up and down the organization.

Fifth, it keeps mistakes and screw-ups from moving to another level or, even worse, propagating. Take care of it now. Don’t assume somebody will take care of it later . . . even if it’s their responsibility.”

– Colin Powell, It Worked For Me

__________

The most dangerous denial is to ourselves.

If we walk past the problems in our lives then we reinforce that we do not need them to be addressed.

If we have low standards for ourselves, morale will suffer.

This can lead to a cascade of suffering.

It might not even be noticeable to others.

But we know.

And the knowing and accepting and ignoring can be dangerous.

If we neglect ourselves and what we know to be true then we erode a litte.

I am terrified to think of the destruction over a lifetime.

If this blog is the right place to say this, then I am a recovering denier.

Every day I follow my own steps to acceptance of the need to create.

I am on day 94 of taking responsibility for this public standards check.

“All sounds made by guitar, bass, drums and vocals”

– Rage Against the Machine, Liner notes to every RATM album

__________

“Creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.”

Rollo May, The Courage to Create

__________

Having only four ways to produce sound is a constraint that leads to invention.

If you have unlimited options for doing something then you might be tempted to take them.

If you have unlimited time then maybe you take it to decide what to do.

Perhaps you never decide.

But if you have a limited space in which to create then you can get on with it.

No day dreaming or wishful thinking.

I do this here, now, with what I’ve got.