The next morning, my friend, Erica, commented on Facebook:

Our monkeyselves need meatspace, no matter what we can sit and stare at.

While humourous, her reply hit upon an idea echoed by friend, Matt, on Twitter:

“Different medium, same old problem. Connecting with someone still requires effort from two people.”

I replied to both:

And therein lies the dilemma. Sometimes I think we’re like galaxies in an ever-expanding universe: drifting off into oblivion. As the world appears to get smaller with advances in technology, we seem to be drifting farther and farther apart.

And then added on Facebook:

I don’t know. Maybe I just feel that way because I’m so socially awkward, but as I was sitting on the bus last night — watching all the people listening to their MP3 players and playing with their cell phones (not to mention me with mine) — the alienation was palpable.

Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Marx, but I can’t help but feel this invisible barrier between me and my fellow bipedal primates, a barrier that doesn’t feel natural at all.

I feel like the cow tongue of meatspace; nobody likes cow tongue, they’d rather have their Matrix-steak.

Less than 10 minutes later, Erica responded with:

Well, 20 years ago on the bus folks were doing their very best to ignore each other in an analog fashion (newspapers, books). I really think the invention of the suburb and the television have done much more to isolate ourselves.

I think a lot of us feel that barrier, just not everybody admits it. I think it is a common longing of a social animal that no longer lives in communal spaces. That’s why I throw myself into whatever food rituals I can, get out into nature whenever I can, go out on a limb to make connections no matter how minor (smiling at the grocery store at the smallest end of the spectrum, having a child at the greatest end). You do what you can. Most of us have cow-tongue and are relieved when we find out the truth, that others do too. Matrix steak just doesn’t have the nutrients.

I was kind of taken aback by how much she seemed to get where I was coming from. At this point, my friend, Brian, got involved by pointing out the role technology has played in connecting people with one another:

You can’t blame technology; I know many people whose social interactions and lifestyles have improved because of increased connectivity. Think of how many new friends YOU personally have BECAUSE of technology and the internet. It’s probably in the high dozens, perhaps hundreds.

Your friend Erica nailed it: It’s always been this way, as long as we’ve been a society of suburbs. It’s not like there were these rousing and engaging conversations on city buses or subway cars before cell phones, dude.

He brought up a great point, one that Matt had also touched upon via Twitter in response to my “ever-expanding universe” comment:

Says he who didn’t want a mobile. We Twitter / txt more in 2 days than we communicated all last year between your visits.

I couldn’t argue with either of their points, but then again, I wasn’t referring to simple connectivity as much as what I saw to be an erosion of meaningful social interactions and relationships in general. Attempting to address this, I wrote:

I completely agree. And just to be clear, I wasn’t blaming technology, simply commenting on the fact that I can still feel so lonely despite having the “world at my fingertips” via technological advances that have made the world so much smaller. (Seriously, it’s hard to get all philosophically complex in just 140 characters. You know how I usually write. :p)

For example, just being able to communicate with others via things like the internet doesn’t necessarily make those interactions truly meaningful on a deeper, more intimate level. I think there’s more to it than that (e.g., being able to tear down those invisible barriers, etc.).

I mean, I’m not denying that increased connectivity has improved the social interactions and relationships of certain people (hell, I was at ICOK: meaningful social interactions were off the hook!), but I think it’s also made some of them more artificial (for lack of a better word), and even somewhat shallow.

As for the origin of the kind of alienation I was referring to, I didn’t mean to imply that technology was the cause. In fact, I agree with you both that no longer living in communal spaces is one of the major causes. But I also believe that there are other factors involved, factors which have directly contributed to our no longer living in communal spaces (e.g., Marx’s Theory of Alienation).

In the end, I still don’t have any concrete answers, but at least I’ve been reminded of some things I forgot along the way. The most important one being: we’re all more alike than we often realize.

Like Erica said, we’re social creatures, and we all feel isolated at times, even if it’s not always easy for us to admit it. But that shouldn’t stop us from doing what we can to reach out and make connections with other people, whether it’s by smiling at the grocery store, starting a family or creating a place like this where people can come together and discuss all things Buddhist.

It’s great that people want to share things. This is a very welcoming community, but there is still etiquette and protocol to consider.

The problem is; it’s rude to spam, no matter which way you spin it. It’s not that the content of whatever site was linked is not valuable or helpful, it’s the way it was delivered to us.

It is considered impolite–bad online etiquette, if you will–to sign up to any site and, as a first post, make a link to another site. No matter how altruistic the post or link is, it’s considered “spam”. If the poster really wants to share their content with the community that we’ve fostered and built over the years, by all means, they are welcome into our humble home. Engage. Discuss. Make friends. We encourage it!

After they’ve been here for a while, have made some friends, have become a presence, and we can be sure that they’re not here just to get visitors for their site, then by all means, we’ll let them post their links.

Communities like this are online homes. It is just as rude for you to come into my online home and paste advertisements as it would be for you to do it in real life. To me, it’s the same as those annoyingly cute precious old ladies who come to my door with pamphlets advertising all manner of noble and worthy charities.

No matter the message, it’s the method that is distasteful.

In the end, I simply emailed this well-meaning woman, and let her know that after she joined our community and engaged more, she would be more than welcome to post her link. Polite, simple, and the same thing I’d do at home. At least bring brownies or something!

My first business died a quick death because of youth, inexperience, and rapid life changes (marriage, babies). The second became moderately successful (financially), but was undermined and ultimately destroyed by a number of factors, including a massive drop in my state’s economy, as well as plain bad luck and lack of planning for such.

The third was born of passion, however. I am fervently passionate about what I do, and I can truly and honestly say I love my job. I love my job.

The problem is: it doesn’t remotely pay the bills. Not even close.

I have reached that point that any entrepreneur in the audience will understand: Jump off the cliff.

I am standing on the cliff that overlooks the land of dreams. Jumping off of cliffs is scary. There’s no safety net, there’s no guarantee of a soft landing, it’s far, and it’s painful. I could, I should, turn around and walk back to safety.

But behind me is a life of unhappiness and misery. Behind me is a life that I cannot lead. I have accepted and resigned myself to the fact that I am not cut out for that life. I’ve tried; believe me, I’ve tried, to be a member of that world, to live that lifestyle, to play that game. I do not have it in me. One of the things age and wisdom brings is the gift of self-acceptance; I accept that I cannot be that person.

I’m at that point again. The bills are piling up, money is not coming in, and things are looking bleak.

I have found, however, that this is when the magic happens. If I had never gone through this before, I’d be terrified right now.

I’m not scared. I’m tired. I’m introspective. I’m a little sad. But I am not scared.

I’m jumping.

I’m more confident than ever that identity is a phenomenon that’s influenced by a myriad of internal and external conditions and experiences, and that even some of the most seemingly concrete aspects of our identity are little more than shackles that we as a society unconsciously place on ourselves. That’s not to say that certain things aren’t beyond our control, but I’d argue that what’s in our control is a lot more than we might imagine, that much of our identity is fluid and malleable.

One of the things that I’ve been learning about over the past few months is Marx’s materialist conception of history and the idea that “the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.” While Marx’s theory was set within a specific context — that of the complex relationship between the production and reproduction of material requirements of life and the historical development of human society — it has much wider implications. For example, I’m of the opinion that things such as identity are conditioned, at least in part, by the historical and material conditions that we find ourselves in, and that changes in those conditions can fundamentally alter our identity and the ways in which we express ourselves, and vice versa. Not in a rigidly deterministic way, however, but in a complex and symbiotic way.

This idea isn’t necessarily new. The Buddha, for example, developed similar ideas about identity in his teachings on karma, dependent co-arising, etc. In short, he viewed our sense of self as a continuous process—something which is always in flux, ever-changing from moment to moment in response to various internal and external stimuli. Furthermore, he observed that there are times when our sense of self causes us a great deal of suffering, times when we cling very strongly to that momentary identity and the objects of our sensory experience on which that identity is based in ways that cause a great deal of mental stress. But his focus was primarily on how to relieve the suffering of the individual by mastering this process of “I-making and my-making” while Marx’s focus, the bodhisattva that he was, was primarily on how to relieve the suffering of society by changing the material conditions that support it.

What really got me thinking about all of this, though, were the potential contradictions I saw inherent in “identity politics.” The Socialism 2009 conference had a fair amount of talks centered around LGBT rights and racism, and I completely support equal rights for, and treatment of, everyone, regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. But during some of the talks I started to feel a bit uncomfortable.

The main reason for this, I believe, was that many of the speakers and audience members were separating people into classes based on their gender, race, sexual orientation, etc., and I started to feel alienated by my own gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. being that straight white males have historically been the most exploitative and oppressive class the world has ever known. I began to feel as if I couldn’t relate to others because I was on the outside looking in — even though politically we shared the same views — simply because of being born a straight white male. I even felt attacked at times when people attacked these aspects of my identity in an indirect way. I mean, I know that they weren’t talking about me personally, yet being a part of the very class that has systematically exploited and oppressed blacks, women, gays and lesbians, and whole plethora of others classes caused me to feel alienated nonetheless. It wasn’t that “I” was being attacked, but by clinging to my identity of a “straight white male” as a fixed thing, I found myself becoming alienated from the very people I was supposed to feel solidarity with. It wasn’t an omnipresent feeling, either, but it was strong enough for me to be aware of its psychological impact. And these feelings lead me to question who “I” was.

Pragmatically speaking, I see the need to differentiate between these things for the sake of communication, and as long as the words themselves don’t become fixed entities corresponding to permanent realities, there’s no problem. But when these labels become representations of things which we then habitually cling to without acknowledging their limitations, I think they can become a serious problem. Hence my wariness of identity politics.

The way I see it, identity politics that separate individuals and groups into various classes run the risk of becoming antagonistic due to the contradictory nature of the various classes themselves, especially if these distinctions of class become solidified and clung to as concretely, independently existing things. In other words, identity politics can actually reinforce the barriers in society that alienate one class from another by artificially segregating them into separate classes to begin with.

Case in point. When I was young, I came home from school crying and I asked my Mom why I wasn’t black. Although I don’t remember any of this myself, she told me that when she asked what was wrong I told her that I was upset because the kids at school said they wouldn’t play with me because I wasn’t black. Up until that point, I grew up in a hotel in Detroit with a very diverse mixture of tenets. Being the only kid in the entire hotel, I got a lot of attention from everyone and I was never really exposed to the racial conflicts that existed in the outside world.

For me, in my little world inside that hotel, we were all the same—black, white, men, women, American, Filipino, etc. Almost everyone treated me as a part of their community and I saw them as part of mine. But I imagine that the kids at my school — kids who were exposed to different and less sheltered circumstances — were already acquainted with the harsh realities of racism. So even though I didn’t know anything about “race” at the time, and all I wanted to do was play with the other kids and have fun, the idea of race as a class had the unfortunate effect of setting me apart from my own community.

For the majority of my life, I never truly understood that identity wasn’t a fixed thing—that my “white” identity wasn’t something I was born with, but something which arose out of the historical and material conditions I was born into. And now that I’ve begun to questions these things, I’m beginning to see that my sense of identity and subsequent feelings of alienation are being perpetuated, at least in part, by the very set of identity politics which seeks to destroy these kinds of social barriers.

I can’t change the colour of my skin (well, not easily anyway), but I can just as easily identify myself as a “human being” as I can a “straight white man.” Of course, doing so isn’t going to make me classless, but it’ll at least help me to avoid falling into an essentialist trap in which I’m not able to explore my own sense of identity in a fluid and dynamic way—a way that won’t alienate me and prevent me from connecting to all of my people.

The pattern was the same; I was bad with my water intake, I had a beer tonight, I had a crappy dinner. I knew I’d pay the price when I got out there on the bike tonight. To top it off, it has been pouring rain all day, and now everything is soaked and the humidity is through the roof. My bike is already in bad shape, and now that it got really wet, the bearings are shot and the wheels barely spin. If I stop pedaling, the bike coasts about 15 feet and grinds to a halt. The work to get this thing moving has doubled. In addition to that, just like Misery, my music player for some reason stopped working tonight. I have no idea why.  The stage was set for a bad night.

It doesn’t really matter; the point of this is to sweat, work out, and lose weight, not go long distance or set any speed records. Why should it matter if the bike is easy to pedal or hard to pedal? If it’s hard to pedal, that means I’m working harder to move. That’s a good thing, right?

Still, it’s one of those nights where I just want to bitch about it. It hurt, I didn’t want to do it, and I almost turned around before I even started.

In fact, I did turn around after I got to the end of my block. I turned around, and started heading back, and then got really pissed at myself and went right back past my house and kept going.

All told, I got a two mile ride in, and when I got back I was drenched in sweat. I suppose I should give myself a cookie for completing a hard ride that I absolutely didn’t want to take, but I didn’t earn it because I’m being a bitch about this whole thing.

The next week is going to be extremely tough with the Expo Icrontic here; guests are dribbling in. I will have a friend from Norway here tomorrow and a friend from LA as well, and it’s just gonna be more eating bad and making other poor choices. I’ll try to suffer silently.

Blergh.

The 5-4 ruling denies that inmates have a constitutional right to DNA testing after their conviction and places the states in charge of setting their own policies concerning whether inmates can have access to post-conviction DNA testing or not. What this means is that if someone’s innocent and wrongfully imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit, and a new DNA test might clear them of any wrong doing, they have no constitutionally protected right to that biological evidence.

So states such as Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts and Oklahoma that have no laws allowing post-conviction access to biological evidence can arbitrarily decide whether or not someone can have access to such evidence or new, more advanced testing methods. And the states that do have laws often place strict limits on who is eligible, so there’s no guarantee that inmates in those states will be able to exonerate themselves either.

As for the constitutionality of this issue, Amendment 6 states that “the accused shall enjoy the right … to be confronted with the witnesses against him” and “obtaining witnesses in his favor.” And this applies to physical evidence as well. So as far as I’m concerned, the right to, as Reuters puts it, “obtain access to a state’s biological evidence to conduct DNA testing when pursuing claims of innocence” should easily fall under this amendment.

In other words, I think it is a Constitutional issue and I agree with the dissenting justices that “the right to post-conviction DNA testing should not depend on the widely varying laws enacted by the states.” This has got to be one of the most disturbing rulings from the U. S. Supreme Court in recent memory. It’s absolutely unbelievable.

• I would have stared at pictures of her all night
• I would have gotten lost in a sea of memories, reminiscence, and self-loathing
• I would have been mean to other people, snapped back, and been snarky
• I would have taken out my pain in a million subtle ways
• I would have ended the night in tears

now:

• I closed the website of the girl who reminded me of her
• I stopped listening to the song that reminded me of her
• I shut off my computer
• I got on my bike
• I pedaled hard and fast, taking my anger out on the bike and the road
• I came home and wrote this
• I ended the night drenched in sweat instead of tears

By hunting, I mean looking for skunks. I see them all the time on my adventures, but for some reason whenever I take my kids out (neither of them have ever seen a skunk) I miss them. Tonight was no exception.

I even went to the usual haunts. The scrubby field by the expressway ramps, the paths along the factories, the bushes and fences they run along, snuffling and searching for whatever it is skunks eat.

Nothing.

My kids think I’m making it all up.

When I go on a long walk, sometimes I pretend that I stepped through a wormhole and instantaneously appeared in another city, another state, another country, or even another world. Did you ever do that? Consciously try to will your familiarity with a place away and try to see it with brand new eyes? Once in a while I can pull it off, and I find myself talking to myself in my head, narrating my fantasy like a bad science fiction novel.

“Where am I? How did I get here? What’s going on?”

“How is this possible? Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong!”

Et cetera.

My younger son said something hilarious though; he must have read it in a cheesy book or a bad video game. He said, and I quote:

“It’s quiet. Too quiet.”

What a strange night.

When, at mile 2, you start burping and belching, you know something is wrong. We cheaped out tonight, got lazy, and got pizza for dinner. Now, I could make excuses about having company here, or having no food in the house due to lack of proper shopping, or what-have-you, but instead I’ll just own up to it and say: We got pizza tonight and it was not good workout food.

Yesterday, today, and for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be biking with my friend Greg. He’s in much better shape than I am, due to a less slovenly lifestyle and also being a mailman. My intense biking workout is, to him, a pleasant evening stroll. Still, he gamely coasts along behind me, even though I can feel him itching to plow ahead on the pedals and turn it into a real workout. It’s nice to have someone along, even though it reminds me how far I have to go. But that’s a good thing.

Tonight’s ride was definitely better than the last, pace-wise. My technique is not to set any speed records, but to make sure that I am pedaling and working for the entire ride; I’ve found a good gear setting which makes it relatively high resistance on flat ground but doesn’t completely exhaust me. I can maintain my pedaling at a fairly consistent rate (the goal, if you look at my BuddyRunner charts, it to maintain as flat a “pace” line as possible–that indicates consistency over the miles). The idea is that I will eliminate the bike as a variable by keeping it at the same gear whether it is optimal or not. Any increases in pace can therefore be seen as improvements to my own power and speed rather than optimization of the machine I’m using.

The way I see it, if I can pedal for basically the whole ride, I’m getting a good workout. My muscle fatigue and dripping sweat tell me that I am indeed working out.

I knew these days would come; the days of enjoying the crisp cool nights, where even though I was vigorously working out I kept cool because of the weather were destined to end. I knew that the humid Michigan summer would kick my ass.

I was right; it’s starting to get hot, it’s starting to get humid, and it’s just going to get worse.

I did a lot of yardwork the last couple of days. Yesterday I mowed down a hill in my back yard with a roto-tiller. Doing this is like going to the gym and having a major upper body workout. You are constantly fighting the heavy machine as it tears its way through roots, hard soil, and rocks. Your job is to keep it level and keep it moving. This involves a lot of pulling, pushing, grunting, and in my case, sweating.

Today I finished my final phase of transporting and deploying 31 bags of lava rocks for the tree box in front of my house. I have planted Lantana, a couple of petunias, some sage bushes, and a basil plant. I repotted a Ficus that inherited from my grandmother years ago. Things are starting to shape up.

I didn’t bike the last couple of days. Tonight I got back to it, and I knew it would be rough from my weekend with lots of alcohol and my breaking of routine these last couple of days. I did make sure to stay hydrated throughout the day, and accordingly, I seriously picked up my water consumption. That, and the sweaty yardwork I did today were probably the only things that saved my ass from collapsing on my bike ride. My pace sucked, it was the worst ever, and each pedal was a struggle, especially for the last mile. I also really need to do some maintenance on my bike; it sounds like a damned jalopy. It squeaks and moans all over the place.

Bleh. Anyways, I got it done. 3 miles, dripping sweat, hot, miserable, and painful. Sounds familiar? It sounds like when I started my walking blogs, doesn’t it?

More yardwork, and another bike ride tomorrow. See you then.