30 Day Focus Challenge: Day 5 again. Life without the Feed

October 8, 2021 by ejayo 3 Comments

So, I’m trying to tie the meditation into a trigger, which is coffee; drinking it, finishing it. Failed today, got distracted, but I’ll keep at it.

I’m resetting the clock, going for a full 30 days in a row, because I want to be sure I can do 10 minutes before I go to 15.

So, without my Facebook feed, I look at my other feed-like things; email, my indy-pub sales, (somewhere between 0 and 3 books a day; closer on average to 1.) my NYT alerts. Check my blog hits.

I read the promotions tab in my gmail.

I waste time. But you know, these things hit empty. And then you gotta do something else.

Because none of these things is designed to keep you glued in. You can waste time this way… but you have to put some effort into it. It is not effortless to waste time reading the news, looking at your email.

I miss the feed, but not how it made me feel, often. My political screeds would get some positive feedback, as i articulated a shared rage, but more and more, I wonder what that is for.

I like writing. I like people reading my writing. The feed is instantaneous. You don’t get paid but you barely get paid for writing fiction most of the time anyway, even if you can sell a fair amount of it at professional rates, which I can, and do.

So the feed is seductive. But it’s insubstantial. It’s ephemeral, topical. It creates cortisol spikes, rage, anger. Or rather it takes a rage, an anger, and it feeds that flame, so that temporary feeling of rage becomes a solid glowing coal. The feed fans the flame. The feed adds fuel to the fire.

The feed leads you around and you know it does that, but you pretend you are doing what you want to do, that what you do for the feed is your choice, but if you get away from the feed for a time, you discover, no.

You’re not really like that. You’re not the person the feed makes you. Not really.

The feed encourages you to perform an identity which creates feedback. It’s operant conditioning. The feed has you creating a bazillion niche content channels, cultivate an audience, filling those attention markets with free product, an endless long tail, that becomes eyeball glue, which becomes profit. But not for you. Never for you. Unless you win some sort of viral lottery. If you’re amazing, or sexy, or cute, or outrageous, or lucky, or some combination of those things, which 99% of aren’t and never will be.

You bring yourself to the feed, but you’ll find that much of what you bring sinks like a lead balloon, and you shrug, and you don’t mind, because that’s how intermittent reward schedules work. Nobody stops being addicted to slot machines because they don’t always pay off.

What matters is they spin, and and ping and pong and ring and clatter, and all of that bonds to those moments when you do win, and so every time, it starts up again, you remember, you could win. You could win. Like the time that open letter to those assholes at the radio station lead to a thousand shares and tens of thousands of hits and phone calls and sponsors pulling support and that actually did something.

That one time.

Life without the feed is this endless succession of things you find yourself gradually losing interest in; because that is how consciousness is supposed to work. That is how we find balance in our lives. By doing various things. But getting enough of some things.

I may be an extreme case, an edge case, someone for whom social media is particularly fucked up. I don’t know. But I find myself standing here staring into the sky wondering what the hell am I doing. Really. Who am I talking to.

Why am I talking to strangers at all.

30 Day Focus Challenge Day 6: Why Meditation is So Much Harder than it Should Be

October 5, 2021 by ejayo Leave a comment

So, I did about five days of my daily focus challenge before missing a day.

I missed a day. I resolved to not let missing the day derail me. To not beat myself up. Meditation is about acceptance, to some degree, at least for me.

Then I missed two days. I was amazed, as it seemed to me I had, at most, missed one. But no, two. I decided to not get too mad at myself, and resolved to do better.

Then I missed two days again, only, looking at my app, and here is where bookkeeping is essential, the two days was really four days.

Four days.

So, this isn’t working. Why? Well, I am not shaming myself into doing it. I’m not paying myself, nobody is paying me, to do it. Nobody but me cares if I do it. There are no immediate consequences for not doing it. There are things that call to me more urgently. The habit doesn’t take, or if it does, it can die away almost instantly.

I repeat the ‘making a habit stick,’ google search, which has like five ideas, which, it seems, I have to google over and over again as if I’m cooking dried beans in a pressure cooker. That’s one fucking number per bean. I eat two kinds of beans. I keep forgetting.

I need a schedule, or at the very least, a trigger for the new habit to stick. How do I know that?

One day missed, two days missed, then four, all while thinking I’m building a habit, when I am most definitely not.

I am shit at schedules. I slip on one thing and the whole day goes fucking out the window. So triggers.

Coffee. I always have coffee. It’s hard to say when I finish the coffee, sometimes I sip at it for a long damn time, but now, when I finish it, boom. Ten minutes.

Let’s try that.

The Definition of Insanity and What I am Trying to Do Now

October 4, 2021 by ejayo Leave a comment

Down the street from me sits a dark shingled, two story home oddly canted in its sizable lot, surrounded by this purple fence densely inscribed with inscrutable ramblings. I have heard that his house was built on another lot, which some big institution wanted, and they moved it here at great expense, and he had them orient it along a north south axis for mystical reasons.

The guy must be wealthy; the house and property would go for a few million now. Cambridge hasn’t figured out, yet, how to squash this guy’s identity with zoning regulations. The stuff on the fence reminds me schizophrenia, but it isn’t a nasty sort. It’s all curiously upbeat. Or at worst, opaque.

One part of the wall has a huge moose silhouette on it, labeled, the cosmic moose. I love it.

This public identity works for this guy, who dresses like a hippie, in rainbow threaded embroidered layers. We used to sit in cafes together. He had a shoulder bag full of action figurines he would set up around him on his table, before he started writing in his spiral notebook.

This identity works for this guy. My hat’s off to him.

My identity doesn’t work. My social media identity. Maybe my entire identity down to the core, but let’s start picking away at the upper layer first, shall we?

So, everyone knows the aphorism about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

This is the top line of what I am now trying to do with my relationship, broadly, to the internet. I mean, to stop doing that, to be clear. This isn’t about Facebook and Twitter and blogging; this is about everything flowing through the broadband pipe. News. Streaming movies and TV. Oversharing. Finding freelance work. How I exist as a political being. Everything. All of it, more or less at once.

I’m trying to not do the same things, over and over again, and expect a different result.

My single identity, the train wreck, we can call it, rams together overshares, accountability posts, my professional ambition, my teaching impulses, my attempts to find freelance work, my posting of creative work, and my vitriolic politics, shot through with cries of fury and despair at, uh, lots of infuriating and despair-inducing things.

This can work, if one is a genius. If you’re Kanye West, you can do whatever the fuck you want, and you will continue to make a living. Sure, some people will think you’re an asshole. But you can just chug along and keep making hits, being a nut, shrugging off the articles you see about how maybe the media should not broadcast your bipolar issues. You don’t even have to admit you’re bipolar!

I’m not Kanye West.

As I try to pull this blog together, I am realizing that I need a set of outlets for each kind of content, with appropriate audiences for each. I need to curate separate identities, or, simply move some identities out of the web all together.

I have, for sometime, wondered, am I just not trying hard to enough, to do the stuff I want to do, or, does my social media identity sabotage my efforts?

The internet is forever; to some degree I will never escape the identity I have built with 10,000 posts. But I can at least tidy this shit up. Curate what I am putting out there now. I’m not important, and so relatively few people are gonna hold stuff against me if I just make sure that shit is gone when they look for me, professionally, do that sanity check, we all do, when we have to create any kind of new relationship.

So this site if a transitional object. What does the endgame look like?

The writer-author-teacher identity.
The graphic designer illustrator identity.
The personal identity’s internet footprint / residue.
The political identity.

I could do the personal is political thing, merge the two, that’s understandable. But personal, political and business and creative all rammed together in one steaming mess?

That doesn’t work. For me. I’m not Kanye.

And I need to stop pretending I ever will be, or that this will ever work.

The amount of work to do in all this is daunting; the desire to burn everything to the ground is great. But I have made many wonderful friends and had many meaningful interactions in the social media space, all of which of course, helped Mark Zuckerberg get paid to elect Donal Trump president.

That has to stop. I have to stop doing that.

So I’m trying. To save the best, to abandon the rest, and that, I am now admitting, is going to take time and effort.

Blog Clean Up: Deleting Spam Subscribers

October 3, 2021 by ejayo 4 Comments

I have some basic spam control plug-ins set, but hadn’t noticed that I had over 4500 subscribers with randomly generated looking names.

I deleted about 1500 of them before realizing that I have no way of telling the few real subscribers to maybe come back and re-subscribe if I, uh, delete them first. So. Yeah.

So those of you tucked into the remaining 3000 or so, you will be cut off shortly. I have a new deterrent for the new malicious signups, and will keep on top of the human spammers who get in.

I’m going to set up a very clear blog to email feature plug-in thingy. I have to research them a bit. I have mailchimp but ever since realizing that mailchimp content all ends up in people’s promotions folder at gmail, I have wondered if maybe another solution makes more sense. You would need to dig me out of the ads folder and do something to keep me from always landing in there… this is why nobody does blogs anymore…

WordPress link spam and comment spam is weird and depressing. The degree to which any and all functionality on any sort of website can be hijacked, abused, and used to make criminals a few pennies or so, isn’t something we thought about, back when we dreamed about this global computer network.

Ah. Our dreams. Well, Cyberpunk captures the feel of the present pretty well, actually. Dystopic in many ways.

The Covers You Looked at Forty Years Ago

October 1, 2021 by ejayo 2 Comments

Signet Mass Market Paperbacks of Heinlein’s stuff, mostly from the 50s and 60s, including the justly hated Farnham’s Freehold written when I was one. See the black guy on the cover? Yeah. Not a good thing. Discrimiflip genre. Ouch.

ADHD brain (you’ll notice I use ADD and ADHD more or less randomly) decided recently that collecting old books I liked as a kid in sets, by one publisher, was a good use of my time. So that’s the image above, the Signet edition Heinlein (non-juvenile) novels of a certain era.

I found a feature in photoshop that did a lot of the work, and then, spent another hour or so tweaking the images, trying to get them to similar yellowing, trying to tease detail out of the random scans and iphone shots I pulled from antiquarian book sites. I discovered issues with the brand template being slightly deviated from, over the editions.. and I tweaked them mostly away, so they looked better lined up. (I had similar minor issues doing my Amber covers. I sympathize with the 70s designers, using their old, shitty analog tools, trying to get it perfect. They had a good excuse; me, not so much.)

My father read a lot of this stuff in Astounding magazine before it became Analog, issues his mother and then mine diligently discarded over the decades; he would re-buy paperbacks now and then, from different publication eras, and I filled in the missing titles from used bookstores—but always random editions, some very worn, that I destroyed while reading.

When I read a paperback I didn’t treat it kindly. I read the hell out of it, leaving pizza stains and, in older books, sometimes shattering the spines.

Over the years I saw most of these titles on the shelves, in this edition, but never bought them; first of all, I never collected books so much as read them. I was ambivalent on the tie dye illustration style, preferring oil paintings that looked like scenes from the book, if they were done well and didn’t look stupid, or something generic and science fictional.

Nowadays I find this illustration style wonderful, dated, perfect.

Every time you pick up a real book and read it you look at the cover, and the cover intertwines with your memory of the book, at the same time pinning that reading to at time and place, often, the three things merging; the text, the cover, the time of your life.

Of course Kindle ebooks advance you past the damn cover when you ‘open’ them; you mostly see the cover as a shitty thumbnail and maybe a slightly larger thumbnail and then, if you buy it, you probably never page back and look at the cover ever again, which is, of course, horrible, if you are a designer, or illustrator, or I suspect, any kind of human being at all.

Anyway. A lot of these RAH titles were republished subsumed in a single huge, unwieldy, is the word, tome called The Past Through Tomorrow which had a very Meh typographic cover displaying a few boring impossibly arranged planets on a blue field. I read this paperback off and on for years, checking off the short stories and longer ones; at the end of the book there’s a whole damn novel, Methuselah’s Children, which I didn’t have to suffer with, as I had this Signet edition of it. I grew to love the cover.

The Past Through Tomorrow deteriorated quickly, I mean, the paperback, and I have seen cracked and falling apart versions for decades.

So now, I want to have a set of these, but not spend more than five bucks a book. This is only a little hard to do, as I look at lots of lots of vintage paperbacks. And I see… the end of my childhood, my perpetual adolescence, hours spent staring at covers loitering in Economy Books in the late, great, Shopping Town Mall, at first as a strip mall, and then an enclosed, faux village with the food court, and a public library, and the steak house that would be my first real (bad) job.

I’m back looking at images of books I thought about reading, thought about buying, reading the cover copy, knowing that so many I wouldn’t, when they were written by people like me, randos. Folks who wrote a book or three. Who never won awards.

ADD brain, post parental death brain, nostalgia ridden brain, looking for my own future in past brain.

The Tomorrow Through The Past brain.

Burning the time I once spent being mad because many people were wrong on the internet. And still are, I’m pretty sure.

I think I’m better off; but maybe not much?

30 Day Focus Challenge: Day 6… but not in a row.

October 1, 2021 by ejayo 1 Comment

The light outside my window. The old cat that helps me make the bed. Stacked clean laundry my wife keeps there.

The photo is of my bedroom, where I sit, on three square ikea shelves taped together on my Purple brand matress, with a magic foam neck pillow between my ass and the laminate particleboard.

The shelves provide support, get rid of the sinking into quicksand feeling. And the magic neck pillow doesn’t work for magically fixing your fucked up neck. No matter how many you buy.

The light shifts on the blinds. When I start hallucinating I open my eyes, glasses off; the blinds are less interesting and catch my attention less than the eyelid movies that start playing after ten minutes or fifteen. I’ve read of traditions where the eyes are kept half open, half lidded, focused on a spot on the ground several feet ahead of the sitter, to avoid being interrupted by the scenes emerging from neural noise and overactive patter recognition circuitry.

I have a fan in the room, and I play a nature sound playlist from spotify, and the two create a stable sonic environment, again, just interesting enough to keep me from listening for distant cars, distant voices, picking out HVAC sounds, my wife typing at work downstairs.

I have to shave a lot of yaks, before I sit, make bed, pick up room, brush teeth, sometimes a neti pot, wash face, light incense, to blot out sensations that will annoy me that, undistracted, I will tune into. Is there something stuck in my beard? Can I smell my own fucking breath? Did the cat pee somewhere in the condo it wasn’t supposed to, again, like it used to?

You get the idea.

Of course, a real pro could just plop the fuck down and let them all go, one by one, accept them, let them recede, but, as I gleefully admit, I suck at this, several thousand hours into the practice.

And that’s fine. It’s the thing I let myself suck at without self recrimination. God that’s wonderful.

So. Why is it so hard to make myself do this?

It’s harder for people with ADD to make and maintain habits, I have been told, and this makes sense to me, as my life is amorphous haze of activity, hyper focus, procrastination, meaningless planning, good intentions, unachieved ambitions, self-flagellation and a kind of plodding progress toward long term goals.

Anyway, focus, we were talking about focus, right. I’ve been told the squirrel joke is really shitty by some people with ADD, but this is me, and let me say, ok, wait. I see. squirrel and what were we talking about again?

Focus.

So, rather than throw up my hands and say, ‘Ok, we start again at ONE, because, you know. I SUCK,’ or saying, “Okay, if I miss a day I have to just make it up with two sessions the next day…” I’m saying, “I took a break but will just do it today.”

So, I did, yay me, and I looked at my zen timer app, the biggest and bestest iphone timer app in the world, where I meditate with at least 10,000 other people all over the world at any given time, and jesus, why is that even a thing, knowing that, and I discovered, to my considerable chagrin, a word I seldom use, that I’d missed TWO whole days, in a row, and how did that happen?

So, new sub-goal, try to keep the missed days down to ONE for fuck’s sake.

30 Day Focus Challenge Day 5: Social Media Makes You Feel Bad

September 28, 2021 by ejayo Leave a comment

Three Brains from Star Trek TOS episode Gamesters of Triskilion — Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube enjoy manipulating their slaves. Also, for some reason, they have the matte painting from The Devil in the Dark behind their dome on Triskelion.

So, to cross the two challenge streams here, I took a 50 day break from FB, and a 30 day break from Twitter, and glancing back through my feed to see how folks are doing, again and again I find people arguing with idiots. (GOP/ Trumpist Wing Nuts)

I feel like I need to join in, and add my two cents.

My heart speeds up. The words start forming in my head. My fingertips itch for a keyboard. I search for a link, to a recent NYT piece, to counter the dumb ass meme about Biden’s COVID deaths being just like Trump’s. The deaths are red-shifted, see? Because the fucking morons aren’t getting fucking vaccinated; because of fucking Trump and fucking right-wing hate radio, and social media, and also because people are sometimes stupid for other reasons, too.

Then I think why?

Why would I do that?

Who’s mind is going to be changed? Why? Oh, and what’s the primary cesspool spreading the poison?

Facebook. Social media. Youtube.

It’s the fucking Gamesters of Triskelion. (It’s a Star Trek episode, TOS, The Original Series, look it up I guess?)

We fight for their amusement. Oh, and our fights are monetized. Am I a hot chick in a green wig in a metal bikini? Or maybe I’m a megalomaniac in a toupee.

The brains laugh and make bets. Kirk tricks them into trying to care for the pathetic drones they have been parasitizing. Says that’s an interesting game. The Enterprise flies off.

I hope to hell the candy colored brains stuck with the program. And didn’t just go back to the pitch black oven like robot warehouses and the monetized dopamine trigger rage machines.

Meditation wise? Yeah, five days hasn’t transformed me into Buddha yet. My therapist said it could take, you know, years.

So maybe I should take the Adderal.

We’ll see. But seriously, FB and Twitter is miserable. Get off of it for six weeks, and come back and look at it, and monitor your body, as you do, your heart rate. It is so, so obviously unhealthy.

But you knew that already, didn’t you?

30 Day Focus Challenge: Day 5 Whackamole

September 24, 2021 by ejayo Leave a comment

ADD limits executive function; what we used to call ‘will power’, when we linked the concept to free will. Of course it never made any sense, to berate someone for lacking will power, because if will power was simply a matter of choice, a free willed quality, who the fuck wouldn’t decide to have a lot of it?

People without ADD are better at creating routines which allow executive function to be redirected in various ways; getting out of bed and doing your work and paying your bills can be on a kind of autopilot; your executive function is now free to clear our drawers or plan vacations or take night courses.

Successful people often articulate their success as a series of schedules, or period of focus, time invested in certain things. “I goof around a tremendous amount,” said the famous entrepreneur, never.

You can build habits with ADD; but you will have to expend more of your executive function keeping them going than a normal person would. So adding even something as trivial as a ten minute meditation a day to a schedule can backfire–or rather, that ten minutes can knock something else out of the schedule, not because of the time involved, but because of the limited supply of what I’m gonna just call will power, because I’m tired of saying executive function over and over again.

So, I have been maintaining my weight with intermittent fasting, (is everyone still talking about IF? I’m off social media… so I don’t know!) and filling my apple fitness rings and doing my freelance and chipping in on a weekly adult ed writing course, and I added in the ten minutes, and now I’m eating at midnight again, fasts dropping from 15-16, to 13-14, and the number creeps upward on the scale.

So this is day 5. At some point I should start getting some kind of ball rolling. But this is sad. Because its not the time. It’s the mental energy.

It’s also of course, the yak-shaving, the procrastination, which I’ll talk about tomorrow.

30 Day Focus Challenge: Day 3

September 22, 2021 by ejayo 2 Comments

My insight timer app on my iphone is recording this streak of meditations; this is an example of hijacking the additive, gamified, interruptive nature of the smart phone / watch for health purposes.

So I guess… it’s okay. Big Brother is nudging me to be healthier, instead of going into fits of adrenal rage at the stupidity of my friends friend’s and family who think COVID is a liberal hoax.

Beware the Feed.

My pathetically easy, ten-minute a day rule is hardly something to brag about. But here I am, doing it anyway.

I realize I went the full ten minutes without thinking of my dead parents this time, even though I am again being sucked into their tax stuff. I had a few interactions with the accountant today about deductions. I need a form from a doctor that dropped dead during COVID, ironically, from an unrelated heart attack. This is a perfect encapsulation of the estate process. Not impossible. But in no way straightforward.

Again, this stuff is only a pain when there’s money involved; this is a first world problem.

Every problem I have is really like this. I try to remind myself of this. I try to be grateful. I model gratitude. God knows how good I am at it. Having never been anyone else.

Bipolar 2 and ADHD. And my own decisions, and capabilities, as dictated by the three things interacting. The extant of all my issues.

I am a whirlwind of petty symptoms and partially realized potentials; I am a stack of yellowed paperbacks; I am the voice that chatters endlessly; I am the silence that settles when the voices are stilled. I am the voice that is about to emerge, again, when the last bell chimes. I am a voice like a billion others. I am conscious. For a time.

I am an illusion with delusions of grandeur.

I am getting back to work.

30 Day Focus Challenge. Ten Minute Daily Meditation.

September 20, 2021 by ejayo Leave a comment

I haven’t meditated since my mother died nine months ago. Not really sure why. My apple watch tries to get me to do a minute now and then, but I’ve averaged less than five minutes a week.

Having cleared time, with the social media abstinence, I want to actually use the damn time in some ways other than procrastination.

Lots of research shows tremendous bang for the buck with really trivial interventions in lifestyle. A little walking, a little mindfullness. I want to try to use some of executive function to do this, to see if I net… more executive function. I want to try this before I do a month of Adderall.

I am avoiding head-on approaches (word count; time at the keyboard) that don’t work long term; I want to want to do my creative work, and to be able to keep at it; I want to create an ecosystem from which the work flows without painful, unsustainable effort.

Expect a daily post about this now. You lucky bastards.