One last post about The Zeroes

Speaking of nihilism.

A few months ago an old friend of mine who really, really didn't like The Zeroes got around to telling me why she hated it. (This isn't to inveigh against her at all; The Zeroes ain't a book for everyone.) She gave a lot of reasons, and I won't enumerate them here, but she did keep coming back to the failures of the main characters: they make stupid choices, they don't treat each other well, they don't really change (at least not for the better in most cases), and most of them are either too myopic to have learned anything or are incapable of getting their heads around what they did learn, and nothing gets better: the book just drags and drops the reader into a dark, shitty place, and then leaves them there. (Mr. Kierkegaard did say that being brought to despair is a prerequisite for reaching truth and deliverance, and I'm pretty sure I had something like that in the back of my mind at the time.)

But at one point she asked if I was a nihilist, which I thought was interesting. I wouldn't call The Zeroes a nihilistic book at all. Even though the "heroes" of the story—the narrator and Charlie—crash, burn, and sink into the mud, the thing they're both after is something of authenticity and beauty, even there's a kind of selfishness to their pursuit of it. (And we could say the ideal itself has been deformed by the environment. That was one of the reasons why I thought it was important that most of the main characters skip out on college: their horizons are never broadened beyond the mall where they work.)

There was supposed to be an implicit happy ending. Back when I was revising it and trying to get it published legitimately—and I think I can be forgiven for believing it was relevant enough to the frustrated millennials of 2010 to get picked up by a small press somewhere—I was planning on doing something like what Mark Twain had done with Huckleberry Finn, claiming in a foreword that I only found the anonymous manuscript on a shelf at the Borders where I worked and just touched it up a little. The fact that it had gotten published and was being read (and related to) would be the "1234, 1234" to the "As the Footsteps Die Out Forever" note on which the text actually concludes. It would verify that, contrary to the narrator's fears, it wasn't all for nothing. (And I still don't think it was.)

I see it more as a book about frustrated idealism, about truth, beauty, value, etc. under siege. They're getting leeched and warped by the cultural forces represented in the book by the mall, but they do exist, they're still alive. A nihilistic book would begin with the premise that they're either already dead or just worthless. That book wouldn't be called The Zeroes: maybe it would be I Never Had To Stop Worrying to Learn to Love the Mall: I Loved the Mall, I Love the Mall, I Love and Live For The Gap, Inc., and Its Successes Are My Successes. Or maybe My Life of Artistic and Personal Fulfillment as a Marketing Consultant. Or maybe a story where the narrator graduates from high school, gets a job as the assistant manager of a Thomas Kinkade store, spends his paychecks on beer, porn, and action movies, and the happy ending is when he gets promoted to manager and can afford to buy the $900 massage chair he's had his eye on at The Sharper Image. That would be nihilistic.

I tried to make sure The Zeroes had windows and trapdoors to better places, so that there were better worlds and possibilities within that world. Unfortunately, out heroes usually didn't notice them or didn't go through them. In a nihilistic book, there would be no trapdoors or windows: those places simply wouldn't exist.

Do me a favor. One of the links at the top is to a track by a vaporwave artist called Saint Pepsi. Three paragraphs up are two links to a pair of Catch 22 songs. Listen to the one, then listen to the other two. Tell me the sensations and even memories that one evokes; then do the same for the other. Describe their textures for me.

That might be why I'm still hung up on this vaporwave thing: it's much more bleak than anything I've ever done. My stories have a tendency to visit dark places. Vaporwave and its relata simply deny the existence of the sun.

I'm calling this the last post about The Zeroes because I have another book dropping in about a week. More details forthcoming!

Élan Vital and Vaporwave

A life-form.

The other day my friend Lizzie asked me how I felt about vaporwave. Lizzie is much more attuned to the diastolic thumpings of culture than me, so by now I'm used to having to run what she's talking about past Google before giving her a reply.

I've been falling out of touch. It's true. I've resisted getting a smartphone; that's been a big part of it, I think. Slate was once my ear trumpet to the conversations of the middlebrow intelligentsia, but I had to stop reading it two or three years ago when its gratuitous contrarianism and clickbaiting got on one nerve too many of my nerves. The Quaker center had subscriptions to magazines like The Atlantic and Mother Jones, but I haven't lived there since 2013. The undergraduates and young radicals have taken their discourse to Tumblr, a forum I find too stressful to participate in or visit more than sporadically. Same goes for Reddit, really.

My tuning out and dropping off has been exacerbated over the last month. To review: I relocated to a tropical island for love and for fun. The house I'm living in has a television, but nobody ever really watches it, except when a bored housemate is catching reruns of Seinfeld, Friends, or Sex and the City. The only time I've seen television news during the last month was when the all bars switched their TVs from ESPN to CNN to catch the overdramatic blizzard coverage. There's not much in the way of journalism here: the only newspaper you're apt to find is the Saint Thomas Source, and I've really only seen it in racks at gas stations. If there's a newsstand on this island selling The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or The Economist, I've yet to see it. (Correction: if there's a newsstand on this island, I've yet to see it.) The household wifi router isn't the most powerful or reliable, so I'm not always guaranteed an internet connection in the bedroom. I'm not driving a car anymore, so I'm not listening to NPR or CSPAN Radio (a hangup we'll talk about another time) very much these days—except for Saturday mornings, when the missus and I stream Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!, and exchange surprised looks for the whole forty minutes. "What? Did you know that happened?" In short, my conception of the culture sphere has dramatically decreased in resolution. I can hardly keep track of the rotation of mainstream talk show hosts, let alone stay abreast of the latest pop art/art pop movement. (I even hesitate to use the word "latest;" vaporwave has already been around for a couple of years.)

So. Vaporwave: smooth, seductive, soulless beats synched with collages of corporate emblems, classical statuary, video game and anime staples, and strings of Japanese text. It sounds like cyberpunk muzak and looks like an old GeoCities page as viewed the lens of amphetamine psychosis. Its raison d'être is to express the desertification of the soul effectuated by global capitalism, and to this end it apparels itself in the colors of the thing it ostensibly pillories. There's something of it that reminds me of Andy Warhol and Takashi Murakami, which might account for why I find myself unable to look away.

It's been said that vaporwave's intellectual moorings lie in the philosophy of accelerationism, which holds it a given that the raving demons of Wall Street will not be persuaded or compelled to turn off the music and call it a night. The solution, then, must be to join the danse infernale, to crank up the volume, hand out ecstasy and booze until the DJ collapses from dehydration, all the toilets back up, the dancers succumb to exhaustion, and the dance floor caves in beneath their weight. A cleaner metaphor might be one in which Planet Earth is a living human body and the culture-consuming, resource-depleting, alienating effects of capitalism enter as a malignant alien parasite. Accelerationism would seem to prescribe bathing the monster with radiation to facilitate mutation and more rapid growth, to feed and feed it until it gets so big and consumes so much of the patient that it starves to death from malnourishment. Maybe the patient doesn't survive, but hell—he was going to die anyway, right? At least this way there's a chance he might make a recovery after the parasite dies. And if our physician has a mad scientist streak, maybe he's hoping that the radiation warps both the patient and the parasite such that they fuse together, bringing some prodigious new birth to the light of the world (cf. transhumanism).

The other day I swam with a green sea turtle (endangered, thank you us very much) in the bay. No joke. I followed her at a distance of about ten feet while she meandered about the seabed, munching on turtle grass. What endeared her to me was her calmness—she demonstrated none of the skittishness I've come to expect from reptiles and sea critters. She regarded me with some caution, but never lost her cool, never blasted off in the opposite direction. Every four minutes or so, she'd reorient herself and rise like a quilted balloon to the surface, where she'd pop her head out over the waves for a second—probably less than a second, really, and only exposing her eyes and beak—and in that time the sea turtle inexplicably gulps down enough air to keep her underwater for another four to five minutes.

At one point I deflated my lungs and descended to the bottom (maybe ten, fifteen feet below the surface), placing myself face to face with the turtle. She wasn't afraid of me. She stayed right where she was. She waited until she'd finished chewing and swallowing her mouthful of seagrass, then looked drowsily up at me and said "fuck your middle class morality." And then she was gone, kicking bubbles into my face as she sped out to sea.

Okay, that last part was another fib. But there was a turtle.

And until recently there was a gecko living in our bedroom. We saw him skittering across the ceiling beams at night, but it wasn't until a few days later that I caught him snooping around my shaving kit. And I was worried that he wasn't getting enough bugs to eat in the bedroom, so I took him down the block and dropped him off at the termite's nest at the edge of the woods.

The termite's nest is really a sight to behold. The damn thing is the size of my torso, and looks something like a combination of a burl and a Borg ship. I've been noticing them everywhere now; I usually notice the tunnels first, and can easily follow them to the main hive. At a glance, these might be mistaken for vines creeping up tree trunks, or roots snaking out over the walls and walkways of derelict or underused buildings. But on a closer look, you see that they're actually composed of dry, grainy dirt. It's actually a combination of wood pulp and whatever else the termite workforce has in its digestive tract on a given day. Break into one of them, or jab a hole in the nest, and the termite workers come pouring out. Watch them for a few minutes. Once they finish surveying the damage, they stumble over each other to stick their butts out over the edge of the cleft and repair the breach to their fortification log by log (we might say). They're very efficient at their job; I've broken one of their passageways and returned after an hour and a half to find it better than new.

By every indication, geckos enjoy termites as a delicacy. I've seen groups of lizards camped out at a by a ruptured termite tunnel, devouring the whole procession of workers come to investigate the site. The bugs never see it coming. (No, really; the members of their hardhat caste are all blind.) I've never been able to observe the banquet for much longer than a single course, so I'm not sure how it ends. Perhaps the survival of the colony depends on the extent to which the profusion of the swarm outdistances the reptilian attention span.

I got a lesson the reptile brain's capacity for focus as I tried to persuade my erstwhile guest to just chill out and eat some of the termites I'd gone to the trouble of liberating for him. I was practically dangling them in front of his face, and he refused to eat any of them. I guess the survival algorithms of his executive control meat assign greater priority to vigilance against predation/squishing over feeding.

I miss the gecko. I loved him. There's a sense of dysphoria, even impotence in loving something that can never love you back, will never understand you, and really can't respond to you in such a way that you feel the satisfaction of a reciprocal exchange made in good faith. But I also believe in the potential for edification through communion with things that are alien to our nature, even if there's a fundamental and unbridgeable culture gap between the participants.

Wait. What do these things have to do with the aesthetic/philosophical underpinnings of vaporwave and the millennialist nihilism of accelerationism? Nothing. And that's just it.

If vaporwave is the expression of this moment of our culture an an augur of what's ahead, we find a present and a future devoid of the wild. It is irrelevant. More's the pity for the turtles: by neglect or design, we shall exclude them from the blueprints for our continent-spanning airport terminal futureworld because they don't exist today.

They suffer the misfortune of being real in an epoch where that which is communicated supercedes that which is substantially present. Vaporwave strikes me a one facet of a worldview in which the contents of digital spaces (the fact that we ascribe characteristics of dimension and volume to the flat and temporally impersistent contents of a screen is tremendously significant) enjoy a status of elevated immediacy over physical existence. A world in which the medium is not only the message, but the world itself. (In such a world, that which is wild and beautiful is not something to be found in one's physical vicinity, but as photogenic simulacra posted and shared and upvoted and reproduced ad infinitum.)

It speaks to the penury of a digital existence. Imagine an urban landscape erected over the pastures of the imagination, a city that's looking less and less like, say, Boulder or Asheville than like Robocop's vision of Detroit, or a Manhattan in which Times Square has expanded to encompass more than half the island. Like any metropolis, it tends to foster a kind of parochialism, a belief that the city is the world itself, or the only part of the world that matters. A hall-of-mirrors myopia is the issue of overanthropized environments, and I'd posit that a more digital existence amounts to a kind of overurbanization of the spirit (for lack of a more scientific description).

The kind of place the web is turning into can't be discounted here. I might feel more at ease with our migration from Earth to cyberspace if the web weren't so squalid. ClickHole is as lucid a portrait of the twenty-first-century spirit as you can ask for, and I often find it too soul-chilling to be funny. And the realities of digital capitalism should really worry those of us who aren't already spending a few hours a week in a board room somewhere. (Fortunately we have entertainment like ClickHole and the constellations of sites it parodies to keep our minds off of it.)

When such a world is one's only world, or is the neighborhood in which one takes up residence, one can't but be acclimated to the aesthetics and sensibilities vaporwave represents; one will more readily bob his or head to sleekly sterile mashed-up muzak, find charm in mosaics fetishizing corporatism and nostalgia, and conclude that the victory of the bankers and bastardizers can't but be inevitable because they are (from one's point of reference) everywhere, they have their tentacles in everything (as far as one can see), and there's no escaping them (within the confines of the world one inhabits).

This has all been a roundabout way of admitting to myself that it might be a good thing that I'm not as tuned into the frequency of the cultural moment as before. So why have I actually struggled with it? Why have I found myself occasionally feeling anxious, even a little guilty for not following my Facebook timeline as closely as before, for not reading The Onion anymore or falling into Clickhole, for not clicking on the very important links that my friends tout as being worth the while of everyone they know, and for—fuck, for not knowing what vaporwave is?

Earlier this evening I noticed a  piece in Nicholas Carr's blog about the ethical imperatives our new world foists upon us:

Just as the clock and the railroad gave our forebears lessons in, and indeed models for, industriousness, thrift, and punctuality, so the computer today offers us its own character instruction. Its technical features are taken for ethical traits. Consider how the protocols of networking, the arcane codes that allow computers to exchange data and share resources, have become imbued with moral weight. The computer fulfills its potential, becomes a whole being, so to speak, only when it is connected to and actively communicating with other computers. An isolated computer is as bad as an idle computer. And the same goes for people. The sense of the computer network as a model for a moral society runs, with different emphases, through the work of such prominent and diverse thinkers as Yochai Benkler, David Weinberger, Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson, and Kevin Kelly. We, too, become whole beings only when we are connected. And if being connected is the ideal, then being disconnected becomes morally suspect. The loner, the recluse, the outsider, the solitary thinker, the romantic quester: all such individuals carry an ethical stain today that goes beyond mere unsociability —— they are letting the rest of us down by not sharing, by not connecting. To be inaccessible to the network is to waste one’s social capital, a deadly sin.

Quite so. I suppose it cuts both ways: as per the new ethics, not keeping track of the conversation is as profligate as not contributing—but sitting in audience can be sad as hell. I think I might prefer to think of myself not as disconnected, but habitually tuning in to a different frequency.

The other day I was sitting on a cliff overlooking the sea and spent ten minutes just watching a magnificent frigatebird wheeling across the sky like a swallowtailed dragon from another world. There were cactus blossoms in the vicinity, and they were attended by at least three hummingbirds. (There are two species of hummingbird here, and I've gotten pretty good at distinguishing between them at a quick glance, which is often all they give you time for.) On the walk home, I kept passing more hummingbirds. I've seen more of them in the last month than in the last thirty years of my life.

Later that day I mentioned to an acquaintance that I'd seen maybe eight hummingbirds, and actually got to observe one building a nest in a royal poinciana tree down the hill. She gave me a puzzled look, and said that in eight months living on the island, she'd never seen a single hummingbird. Then she raised her iPhone to her eyes to look at an Instagram photo of a stranger's lunch.

Items of Note

Milkweed bug? Your guess is good as mine.
St. Andrews Cotton Stainers

Hermit crabs that have been sitting in cages in a boardwalk shop or pet store have lost their joie de vivre; pick one up by his shell and he'll just sigh, ensconce himself, and sulk until you put him down. Hermit crabs in the wild really like to be picked up. They see it as an invitation to play a friendly game of Pinch the Fucker. The object of the game, as far as you're concerned, is to drop the crab in the 1–2 seconds it takes him to reach under and around himself with that big nasty claw and break the blood vessels in the softest, fleshiest part of your palm. If you lose the game, don't worry. He's always up for another round.

Also—and this is true—if a hermit crab on a steeply graded surface notices you coming, he'll withdraw into his shell, and start rolling downwards. You'll be walking up a hill, and shells will be tumbling down past your ankles. Real inconspicuous.

Hermit crabs seem to have excellent peripheral vision. Don't ask me how I found out. It's much less interesting a story than you probably think it is.


Geckos are not exactly swift runners; they actually have the power of short-range teleportation. As you approach, BAMF! The gecko 4-D slips two or three feet in the opposite direction, takes a moment to recharge its internal warp drive, and will teleport as many times as necessary to shake you off its tail (so to speak).

The flap on a gecko's neck is called a dewlap. When the dewlap is extended, the gecko is either telling you that it likes you or asking you to fuck off.  Gecko communication is similar to the Japanese language in the extent to which meaning is determined by context.


Hummingbirds will sit and chirp for you if you're patient.


Sea urchins are like Zen poems. You can't help but admire the virtuosity of their craftsmanship, but they obstinately resist all attempts at exegesis.

A lot of people aren't sure who they are or what they're supposed to be doing. Of every living animal I've seen, sea urchins seem the least likely to be able to relate to this, to the angst of existence or the plight of persistent, unanswerable questions about life and the universe. They know exactly what to do at all times, and they might even have a good idea as to why they should be doing it.


The pearly-eyed thrasher has really a striking gaze. Some ornithologists have dubbed it the "insidious thrasher," but I've found it to be a quite congenial bird. Of course, as a critter known for its ruthless voracity and inimical effects on any species with which it overlaps, it must sense in us a kindred spirit.


Tropical axiom: at the bottom of any hole in the ground that seems just large enough for a huge spider to pass through is a huge spider.


We need to disabuse the public of the myth about roosters crowing at dawn. While they are quite vocal at sunrise, this period of activity is overstated. They are just as noisy at dawn as they are during the rest of the morning, the afternoon, the evening, dusk, and at around 2:00 AM.

Most people aren't aware of this, but roosters actually crow to share conspiracy theories.

Examples:

1.) "COCK-a-DOO-dle-DOO."

Translation: "BIRTH-cer-TIF-i-CATE."

2.) "COCK-a-DOO-dle-DOO."

Translation: "BACK-and-TO-the-LEFT."

3.) "COCK-a-DOO-dle-DOO."

Translation: "THER-mite-IN-deb-RIS."


You won't find these facts being reported by any of the major news outlets. In the face of the mainstream media's pusillanimous silence on these matters, the responsibility of getting this important and real information out to the public devolves to intrepid bloggers such as myself.

Overheard in the Pre-K Classroom

An email from Hannah:


"Yeah, I want to go to college! I really want to go! I have lots of money to pay for college!"
[Later on in conversation]
"Wait, college is school? I don't want to go to college! I didn't know college is SCHOOL!!"  


"Maybe it was the devil!"
"Who's the devil?"
"He's green and he lives under the ground in the fire. When you want to do something bad like punch someone in the face, he whispers in your ear. . . DO IT."


"I'm sad because my grandfather is dead."
"How did he die? Did someone shoot him?"
[Confused look] "No. . . . " 


"Once bad guys die, they go straight to lava."
"No! When they die they go to heaven! Heaven's probably underground us, I think."
"No!! When someone dies, they stay inside us. Forever." 


"This is how my little brother counts to 7: 1, 2, 3 . . . then guess what number? 72! He gets crazy!!" 


"Yuck. . . yuck. . . . yuck. . . yuck." [FOR FIFTEEN GODDAM MINUTES STRAIGHT. Sitting in the corner just saying YUCK for fifteen minutes while I slowly went insane.]


Conclusion: children might not be all that different from normal human beings.

Something completely different

Three days later. I've packed a few suitcases and moved to join Hannah on Saint Thomas in the American Virgin Islands. It's a move I undertook with no small measure of trepidation.

When I tell people about the trip and try to explain why I feel so apprehensive about it, their reactions are nothing but incredulous. The way they tell it, you'd think I was moving to a tropical paradise or something.

Tropical, sure: it's the middle of January and I can go out on the porch quite comfortably wearing nothing but my underwear. But paradise it ain't. Hannah has been here since August, and she's still struggling to get into the swing of things. (And she's one of the most adaptable people I know.) One of her coworkers at the private school is raring to move back to Boise, Idaho as soon as the term ends. On the face of it, most people would say they'd rather live in the Caribbean than Idaho. But having lived in both, this woman is now happily choosing Boise over "paradise."

During the flight I sat in front of a woman who was coming to visit the island four months after returning to the mainland. She'd lived on Saint Thomas for about a year before that. For the better part of half an hour she explained to the woman sitting next to her why she left, and she left because she just couldn't take it anymore. It was driving her crazy. The high prices, the lousy transportation, the isolation, being surrounded on all sides by career drunks, having nothing to do but get drunk herself.

This seems to be a place where people from the mainland come to physically age at two to three times the normal rate (through a combination of cheap booze, cheap cigarettes, and fierce sunshine) while intellectually regressing at a rate of 1 to 1.5 years annually. By the looks of things, Saint Thomas is like an island-spanning college town without the center of higher learning at its nucleus. Generally speaking, people come here from the mainland to get shitfaced and laid between bartending shifts. Or to simmer in sun and rum after an early retirement.

I've noticed that people talk about living here the same way people up north describe living in New York. Unless you're already loaded, this isn't the easiet place to make things work out. Actually, I'd be willing to bet New York might actually be easier. At least it has subways and is eminently pedestrian-friendly.

Money's going to be problematic. This is not an inexpensive place to live. For instance: in the house that Hannah has been sharing with three other people, the "if it's yellow, let it mellow" rule is to be followed as a matter of economic necessity. Water ain't cheap. There isn't a room without an air conditioner built into the wall, but they're never to be turned on—not even when it's 95 degrees and so humid that the mosquitoes are actually doing the breaststroke as they converge on you. Electricity ain't cheap neither. Unless you're working two jobs, owning a car is a dicey prospect. Parts aren't cheap, repairs aren't cheap (where else are you going to drive to find another mechanic?), and the hilly terrain and salty air work hell on automobiles. (Right now Hannah's talking about renting a car on a month-to-month basis and sharing it between at least two people.) And it's absolutely necessary to know exactly where to shop for which things: groceries are expensive everywhere, but certain things are less pricey at certain places. I recently watched a friend paying nine dollars for a pint of soy ice cream. I passed a jar of Tostito's salsa in a convenience store that was selling for five dollars. A can of chunky Campbell's soup was running upwards of four dollars. A tiny bag of coffee (maybe eight ounces? maybe a little less?) was selling for eight dollars.

Don't ask me what kind of job I plan to get. I have no idea. It's something I'll have to start figuring out come Monday.

In New York, people bear with the crowds and the noise and perpetual rush and urban isolation because they're getting so much in return: the excellent transportation system, the vibrant arts/music/literary scene, the cultural pluralism, the museums, the good schools, jobs in myriad fields, the easy access to pretty much anything one could ever need, the readily available high-quality drugs, and so on. Saint Thomas has none of these things.

But it has feral chickens and lizards. And cacti and mangrove swamps. And zenaida doves and singing tree frogs. And coral reefs and sea turtles. And pelicans and frigatebirds. And easy access to Saint John and its swaths of protected parkland. And the woman I love and a magnificent view of the sea from the balcony outside the room we share.

Best case scenario: I'm able to walk over the resort bullshit and immerse myself in the coral reefs, the forests, the unfamiliar flora and fauna, meditations on the manifold historical and environmental problems this island presents, and friendships with any other resident mutants to whom the permanent vacation milieu doesn't appeal. And write a whole bunch of cool stuff while I'm at it.

Worst case scenario: the experience will foster a greater appreciation for life on the mainland, with all its warts and cold weather and nonsense.

I'm beginning to suspect that nonsense is inescapable, and the best anyone can hope to do is try find it in a flavor that's the least offensive to his palate. And maybe "paradise" is a state in which you acquire a fond taste for the nonsense.

Meristems (a prophecy)

Two years later. The maple tree outside the bedroom window has pushed out new limbs from the sites of the scars left by the snows the winter before last. You'd never guess it had lost half of itself.

It's January. The tree has already dropped its leaves. Through the interstices of bare branches I can see the first in the row of utility poles on the other side of the street, by all appearances identical to itself as it was twenty years ago.

In the breeze the maple's very last leaf performs a brittle shimmy on its petiole, waiting for a gust to lift it off to obscurity.

This will be the only record of this leaf, that there was on January 14, 2015 in a particular New Jersey suburb on a particular maple tree a particular maple leaf, senesced and shriveled and blanched by the sun, roused to a shuddering dance as it waits for

And there it goes. Exeunt leaf from history.

And the utility pole dreams cable TV and waits until its crows need a perch.

What are we waiting for?


every telephone pole will remember what it was, heaving out green branches to cast off the wires.

2015: Taproot Resolution

Here's to passing another milemarker! And let us also celebrate the typicality of the personal blogger laying out his intentions for self-improvement in the coming 365.2425 days.

I don't even want to revisit my list of resolutions for 2014. Many of them remain unaccomplished, but so much for them. There's always next year.

I have one specific goal in mind for 2015. There's something I recently read in the Analects of Confucius that got under my skin and into my imagination:

Confucius said, "Ah Sze, do you supposed that I merely learned a great deal and tried to remember it all?"

"Yes, isn't that what you wanted to do?"

"No," said Confucius, "I have a system or a central thread that runs through it all."

That's what I would like to find or construct for myself. I have a lot of interests—the various focii (as opposed to any single focus) of this little blog attest to that. But there's nothing that unifies them. I run off in different intellectual directions all the time, but my advances in one area never seem to amount to overall progress, because it's all disconnected, scattershot. Even when I look at all the fiction I've written, I'm at a loss to find some theme or idea common to it all.

It would be wonderful to cultivate a central taproot from which all of my other informal "studies" and pursuits extend as natural and useful outgrowths. I'm interested in ornithology, astronomy, behaviorism, the economic and social effects of mechanization, the position and uses of old media and art with the emergence of new forms, climate change, cartoons, the spiritual desolation of modernity and the ways in which it might be counteracted, arcade games, mathematics, and so on and on. But I'm an expert in none of these things, and my probes into any one of these areas aren't of much use elsewhere.

Maybe what I'm looking for is an ultimate sense of purpose. Sheesh. A more traditional unrealistic resolution to quit smoking, go to the gym six days a week, learn Spanish, do charity work every weekend, and master the unicycle might actually be more viable.