Beware, Be Aware of Perception, or Lack Thereof

I was just trying to explain something to a professional associate regarding who I am, how I am, and how I think. As an individual, I am really very easy going. That's a story unto itself. But I love humor, and I can come off as a bit goofy, or a screw up even. But I am not.

That demeanor of mine has confused people... all throughout my life. I've been taken as a fool, or ignorant, or a slacker even, until one starts talking to me in detail and finds I shoot past them into issues unseen, unknown, or unacknowledged by my interrogator, or at times, my tormentor. It is interesting that when I used to fight in martial arts tournaments, I won fights with that same..."talent"? Don't judge the book by its cover? After years in IT work, at some fairly high levels, some of that has been sloughed off.

I spent the first part of my life, fully intending to go into espionage. I heard early on that those who stand out, tall, big, loud, do not make for good spies. They stand out. And a spy doesn't want, especially literally, to stand above a crowd. It's too easy to get shot that way. Or uncovered when... undercover. I learned to blend in, I could disappear into a crowd. And I was 6'2". I learned how to be seen as someone not to be concerned about.

But that began in grade school to avoid bullies, and groups of guys wanted to pound me into the ground. Because I was loud. Because I did stand up for myself. And because I was a big toddler, who got used to terrorizing bigger, older kids. Until one day I was smaller than the other kids and they realized they could fight back en masse. I didn't get bigger again until 10th grade when I lost a few pounds, shot up a few inches and then had to regain my footing.

It didn't help that in grade school I had been in five different schools, in two different states before sixth grade.

I started learning about killing people in fifth grade. I spent junior high school years learning military thinking and skills. I learned weapons, firearms. Hand to hand combat. I practiced sharpening my mind (for what it's worth). Sadly, I also found emotional issues difficult in my life and sought out because of my family life, my personal self, and the counter culture (which wasn't counter to me, it was my culture) in the 60s and 70s and even 80s. 

I entered the Air Force and worked around very serious equipment and people. The most serious in the world in working around nuclear weapons. Though we also had a good time. Work hard, play hard. 

After I got out of the service I went through various life events, got a couple of college degrees, one a university degree in psychology majoring in perception and phenomenology in the Awareness and Reasoning division from Western Washington University. I worked over seven years at the University of Washington, and at two major Medical Centers associated with the UW, one the regional trauma center 

My point being, I've had a serious high-level attention to detail lifestyle for much of the first part of my life. I've built a mindset that is based on life or death, unlike (and thank "God" for that) most Americans. I don't view things as armchair quarterbacking, but will if I will die if I get it wrong. That being said, sure, everyone is wrong sooner or later. But not usually on major issues. 

That is my basis for how I think today.

Yes, I've gotten lazier, older, somewhat sloppy in my old age. But that level of accuracy is still, as I've discovered repeatedly of late, above and beyond that of most Americans... on their best days. Yes, that is sad. No, that is not bragging. That is stating something I originally found surprising, and find on an ongoing basis, very sad, and at times, pathetic.

We don't take the time today, we don't delve deep enough into things today. We don't have the time, the attention span, the desire, the dedication, the awareness even. We are seriously lacking in many important considerations and our decisions are suffering for it. Our country is suffering for it. Humanity is suffering for it.

We need to seek the facts, not our desires. We need to seek reality, not our personal or tribal fantasies. We have to see into and beyond the issues into the bigger, and sometimes, the smaller picture. We need to see the forest for the tress and the trees for the forest.

We in a word, need to be, or become, "Enlightened" in the Buddha Dharma sense. In the Buddhist sense of reality.

When you bite into an apple, you need to feel, to "see" where it came from, who picked it, what their life is about, how they suffer in seeing that deliciousness into your mouth. How those trees exist. How they thrive or do not. How these trees support our air, our world, our physical and our aesthetic.

How those apples are picked, cleaned or not, sorted, bought, sold, transported and sold to us.

How we metabolize those apples and secrete them back into the world.

Doing that with all things, whenever and wherever possible, will bring us, some of us kicking and screaming, back into reality.

If ever we were there in the first place.

And the world and all of us, will suffer far less for it. 

Just, don't be this guy:

On Being Creative and Writing

I've been asked, as have so many other creatives...

"How do you come up with your ideas for things you write?"

Well...I have a thought, I put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard and, produce. I heard an author once say that the difference between hobbyists or amateurs and professional writers is the latter writes down their good ideas for later and they throw away, nothing. Saving it for a future story. Not infrequently it happens at bedtime, so I keep a notepad by my bed. Or I may get up and go to my keyboard and writer it out, dumping it all into a file for later.

I have a file on my laptop and desktop for ideas and another for titles. I have an "ideas" folder in my short story, screenplay and my novel folders.

A spark happens, an idea hits me, the framework for that idea shoots through a tunnel into the future in my mind, in a multi dimensional pathway from concept to fruition. That journey into a new reality begins. As I write, the structure further reveals itself to me. Logic and satiation fill in the cracks and crevices as I experience the story unfolding within and before me.

At some point I hit a juxtaposition, or a void. At that point I have emptied my mental and creative buffers and need to come up with something new. And that I think, is what interests people.

Brian Eno, once of Roxy Music fame and then from his own, studied art for a short time. He and his cohorts were like many others at the time interested in John Cage's book Silence (1961). Music can be art and why cannot one listen to a waterfall or the wind and experience the same euphoria one could get from say, Beethoven? Eno getting involved with Robert Fripp and his with King Crimson were all expansions of previous leanings.

Six Melodies, by John Cage.

I was very into avant garde and experimental music since my childhood in the 1960s, as well as some classical, pop (as a kid) and much rock music. From as far back as I can remember I have been attracted to the unique and unusual and the beautiful. I didn't even hear of the aesthetic of the ugly until the late 1980s and it went against everything I had believed in to that point. Yet, I had loved horror films and books and I did get it on a visceral level.

I bring all this up because of the need and desire for creativity, for uniqueness and the unknown and for the fascinating. It is a quest always for more and beyond.

Concepts like the synthesis of systems and ideas, the dynamic rearrangement of information, the rearrangement of the echoes of one sense upon or in place of another or synesthesitic observations, all organized to be highly pleasurable and\or productive have always fascinated me. And yet again and again I find myself falling back into formal structures.

And so I continue to bide my time, to explore, and to strive for that uniqueness that I hope one day to uncover. And of course, to share.

A good example of this in my catalog of writings is in my latest novella, "The Unwritten" coming out in the sequel to my first book to be titled, Anthology of Evil II. In the novella, I decided initially to take three disparate universes and write about them, then at some point bring them all together in some way. That is all I had to start with.

It was a singular journey that took me two years to finalize. Once I returned to it, my mind having had worked on it in the dark recesses of thought over the period of my putting off writing the last half of the story, had worked much of it out, unbeknownst to me. It flowed out of me onto the page and it somehow all came together.

That is the way of it so very often.

I had studied what creativity is during my university years. I felt crippled, unable to be creative. Until I realized what it is. Creation. The more you have to bring to that creation, the more you learn in life, the more you practice things, the more interesting and useful will be your creations.

My point being, learn your craft. Learn all you can about everything. Try to experience and produce all types of, all forms of whatever your craft is. And then... the creative happens. It will happen.

Bring your creative voice, or vision to us. Because we want to see it.

Intellectualism and Education

First off...wishing you all a very happy and prosperous and New Year in, 2015 especially to all those who have read this blog so far today, in order of numbers reading from the...United States, Russia, France, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Germany, Iceland, Poland, Australia, Brazil and anyone else my analytics page didn't mention!

Now I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I've considered myself an intellectual for decades. Though I know in some cases now a days it's considered un "PC" and some revolutions they tend to kill first, all the intellectuals. Which, I'd argue, is really stupid. When all the doctors are killed off during a revolution with fighting and shooting and the killing and all, well, doctors are a necessary thing, kind of.

Since childhood it was my primary orientation to learn about new things, to stretch my imagination, to expand my mind. Oddly enough, I just seemed stupid to many around me, mostly because of our educational system and parents who didn't have a clue what to do with a kid like me who was always getting into trouble. And asking questions.

Mostly because no one knew how to channel my needs. My mother was quite good however and inadvertently, in her being exhausted and simply farming me out to the best teachers she could find, just to take me off her hands in the afternoons for a few hours. A purely selfish thing, turned genius.

I saw intellectualism as a pursuit that is aside from ego concerns, had nothing to do with it, really. I've seen many groups over the years devoted to "intellectualism" that really should have been labeled as Ego or Social groups.

All that intellectualism was ever to me was a pursuit of the mind. And again, not the ego. Although one can't ignore the ego, one can certainly give the pursuit of knowledge a far higher consideration.

One can have an IQ of eighty (not that it's important as a number but it's a good cliche everyone understands), and still be an intellectual. It has nothing to do with how smart you are, it's just an orientation, a pursuit in your life.

I find people who hammer on this concept and those who hold it oh so dear, as again, being all about ego. Either because they have either run into those groups I referred to above, or they are themselves people to whom intellectualism is some kind of a threat; and so once again, an ego issue.

I see many people in the public eye now a days demanding to be considered intellectuals, and yet all I see in that is their ego. Or a misrepresentation of intellectual pursuits, an inability to properly navigate the pillars of knowledge among the pits of misrepresentation and illusory knowledge. Of information dressed as knowledge with people trying hard to show how knowledgeable they are, when they have a complete inability to interpret information into knowledge.

I'm sure there was a point in all this....

I guess what this is all about is that being an intellectual, it is far more important than being considered or viewed as one. Perhaps it should be a quiet and personal pursuit? So when it does come out in public it should be carefully played and deftly used. Otherwise it merely supports the generally accepted misconception that intellectualism is all about (once again) ego.

And, it's not.

It's just, not.

There is more to that, too. It's about seeing a broad spectrum of things and not just the specifics of one's trade, or the areas most needed by society.

The reason I mentioned the higher education situation is that it's important, it has to do with our future, and bettering society. Also we need as some have indicated, alternatives to college or education. An environment allowing young people to brainstorm, to learn, to start businesses.

However, having a generation learn through this type of paradigm only advances certain elements more than others, though not enough elements. The thing about liberal arts educations is it offers a broad spectrum understanding of the world.

To find one day that we have a majority of new people running things who have very specific educations is to support and pursue leaders who do not have a broad spectrum of understanding on a wide variety of issues, and at more in depth levels. Something that would lead to very different kind of society. Possibly one that will not fully consider everything that needs consideration, merely from a lack of perspective.

Obviously we need people with more specific and technical educations, but certainly not all of them and we seem to be heading that way.

The thing I never understood was what people think intellectualists are. If you are the bluest of blue collar workers, if you dig in a coal mine, an oil field, or whatever, a garbage man, there is no reason you can't also be an intellectualist. At very least, learn about your field. If you are something, be professional about it. Be the best you can be. And if you are going to do that, learn all you can about your field, and ANY FIELDS that touch upon it.

Then, you will be the best, smartest, the most safe, the most productive...coal miner, oil field worker or garbage man (or woman), or whatever, that there is. And even if you're not, you can certainly try to be and that, enhances the quality of your life, the life of those around you and you could argue, the entire world.

Typically, an intellectual might be considered to be someone who strives to know much about many things. There is however, nothing wrong with choosing a slice of that to be best at or most knowledgeable at. It is also to strive to enhance one's intellect and pursue things that increase various aspects of one's intellect, and that is up to your own interpretation.

There has been a move for some time now to fight against the more liberal arts degrees. To give up on them altogether because the corporate mindset has finally invaded our education system at a systemic level and that, is problematic to say the least.

We are at a crossroads and need to see the map and not just gaze down the road to guess at what direction we should take. Or to simply take the road nearest, or most easy to travel upon. Otherwise, this direction that we've been on for some time now, and are finally starting to understand is not the best road to take, will become the only road available to us.

It already in many ways, appears to be. But it isn't, not really. Not yet.

There is still time to do something about it. We just need to understand that being an intellectual is a good thing, and understand what that good thing is really about. And then, do something about it.