An actual blog post? Sure, why not?

From the department of Extrinsic Benefits, here is a legitimate piece of self-knowledge I've recently gathered from a decadent leisure activity: studying Scrabble words wears me down. I am almost as motivated to study words as I am to read books or write annotations of them for sharing here, but the end result is not the same. I don't ever remember being quite as worn down by work on a large musical composition, a practical musical project, a reading project, an annotation, or a blog project. I do recall being "tired" a few times. I recall wondering what sort of demons or dark forces were goading me to devote such time and energy to such trivial matters. But these latter projects have always produced new energy at least as quickly as they deplete the old. I have found them to be "life drugs." I recently realized that what word study has been doing to me has more the contour of a "death drug." The only comparable fatigue I can remember experiencing came from teaching, but I was never doing quite enough teaching for this to add up to anything debilitating. And, I've heard from more experienced teachers that teaching is exhausting for them too.

Of course I have also heard from all sorts of people that, say, reading all of Capital in the Twenty-First Century or writing 10,000 words on the concept of artistic expression sounds like both pure torture and a total waste of time. And I get the impression that very few people who play in Scrabble tournaments spend more than a few hours a year really studying words. I have been told explicitly and signalled implicitly for my entire life that "most" people just aren't interested in this particular kind of toil. Something has always been driving me in precisely this direction, for which I could offer any number of plausible explanations but none which shed any real light on things. Maybe there's an ass for every saddle, and there's not much more to be said about it beyond that.

This much I've known about myself for a long time. Scrabble seemed at first merely to fit a pattern that had already been established. But I recently realized that it doesn't fit the pattern at all. It leaves me cranky and fatigued. It weakens both my immune system and my feeling of self-worth. None of this has ever been the case with music or writing. Music and writing have always led to the "good tired," that feeling that many hard workers talk about. I think Scrabble is the first thing I have ever been drawn to with this same intensity which does not, for whatever reason, give back what I put into it. It gives back slow gains in tournament performance, at least, but not in general well-being. This is a new problem for me.

I have a very cheap Chromebook, the cheapest I could find with a full keyboard. I initially bought it solely out of curiosity, but quickly I realized that there's something liberating about something as seemingly indispensible as one's primary computing device being in fact easily replaceable. It is also very lightweight. These two things taken together mean that I take it and work with/on it almost everywhere I go.

I went out the other night to watch sports because the game I wanted to watch was only on ESPN and not on NBA League Pass. I wasn't too interested in the early game, so I worked on my Chromebook and worked on my first couple of beers. Eventually I had to go to the bathroom. One often sees very pricy MacBooks and such left open and unlocked while their owner runs to the loo. I am good about locking the Chromebook, but I have begun to feel liberated to leave it unattended because it is so cheap and because it is now so easy to backup work to the cloud. But something possessed me the other night to fold it up and stash it on the floor, behind my backpack, while I made a run for it. Perhaps because this is a precaution I've rarely taken over the past few years, perhaps because I continued drinking, or perhaps because a fellow Minnesotan expatriate saw my Timberwolves shirt and came over to strike up a conversation, I ended up leaving it there at the end of the night. I then had the evening and the next morning to contemplate the real rather than merely theoretical possibility of having allowed the thing to get lost simply because I was not interested enough in finding it.

I had done too much work since the last backup to justify letting it go, and I also don't really understand anything about just how secure one of these devices really is, so I went back the next morning and it had indeed been found and was being held for me behind the counter. The woman seemed a bit annoyed. I don't think it was a general annoyance at customers because she didn't greet me in an annoyed fashion. Rather, she got annoyed when I told her why I was there, at which point she knew exactly where the computer was being kept. "Yep, we have it...." Eyes rolling. Said more with the frustration of an exhausted parent than a cashier.

This is not the first time I've left something important just sitting on the ground and walked off completely oblivious to it. Like most millennial males, I have a combo platter cluster of subclinical psychopathologies. Generally these keep me straight rather than running me off the road. I tend to be overly anxious about checking my pockets, e.g. But it seems that if anything does manage to break my psychic armoring then all bets are off as to what I might forget to do. I have a very good memory, better than most people but not quite rising to any -ics or -isms. I'm far enough outside the normal range of intelligence to be immediately alienated from almost everyone I meet, but I'm not far enough up the ladder to accomplish anything really outlandish or weighty.

Two recurring thoughts have become more frequent lately:

(1) Some pretty intricate thoughts seem to come pouring out with only minimal prompting. A good problem to have? I'm not sure what kind of problem it is except to say that yes, actually, it is a problem of some kind. It might be expected that a project such as this one would involve an element of "finding yourself," but I fear the opposite. More and more of the time I have the sensation of being merely a conduit, not after but in fact during the initial spilling of guts. It isn't quite right to say that it feels like it's not me talking. It's definitely me, but what I'm saying doesn't always comport with consciously held beliefs or with prior arguments. Particularly when a complex thought arrives fully formed seemingly in an instant, it indeed has an "automatic" quality. It's the stuff that has been worked over that feels more personal but less "brilliant," which is consistent (I gather) with what laboratory psychology has found. Slow and steady progress in exposure, learning and application can be expected to result in some epistemic drift; that's precisely the point of it, actually. But besides outright self-contradiction, which is observable here and there, I seem to be at risk of becoming uncentered, not in psychopathological way (I don't think!) but just in terms of ever landing back in a coherent worldview that can function on a day-to-day basis, IRL as the kids say. "Both sides" of many of my pet concerns seem, often times, to have some merit. This is not unusual. Being able to at least smell the other side of something is, again, pretty much the whole point of certain intellectual projects. But this can also land in circularity or in nihilism. Maybe that's (also) the point. I'm not sure. You sometimes read about a thinker or artist reaching their intellectual maturity with "a personal synthesis" or some such phrase. But the moments of true "synthesis" here seem to me products of un-consciousness rather of consciousness or of the ego. There is often just a hint of "trance" quality as I am writing them. They come from me, but they are not mine.

(2) In music my brain has always tended to outpace my chops, and "blogging" is proving to be no different. One of my most consistent experiences, from the very beginning of this project, whenever looking back at earlier posts, is to find some basically "technical" terminology misdeployed. i.e. At some point, somehow, apparently I internalized the phrase "radical empiricism" without knowing what it refers to, and then I deployed it rather literally to describe the distrustful petit-bourgeois. I am at a loss to locate the source of my exposure here. It's always possible that I just put the two words together literally and then applied them in a way that would make literal sense to someone who was raised by a card-carrying Marxist mother. But that is unlikely. Generally when this happens people have in fact heard or read the term and (most likely) forgotten where, and perhaps consciously "forgotten" the term itself without completely purging it from the dark corners of the psyche (i.e. "cryptamnesia," a well-known scourge of facile, non-detail-oriented writers and thinkers). Anyway, a recent source consulted here credits William James with coining this term to describe his "original epistemology." "Pragmatism," then, "can be considered as radical empiricism's companion theory of truth." Mystery solved. There really is nothing remarkable about any of this except that I have never read William James or any others among his cohort or really much of anything that deals with it and them until I read the Reybrouck paper a couple of years ago, i.e. years after I misused "radical empiricism" in another connection. So, there really has been an "amnesia" here. The "use it or lose it" aspect of learning and skills can be so incredibly frustrating, and yet it is possible, somehow, for something that you've literally forgotten to bubble up seemingly out of the blue. Again, nothing new here, except to reiterate that there is a sort of teetering-on-the-edge sensation anytime I stop to think about this more than casually. And also practically, even when I try to take a step back and write more cautiously, my mastery of terminology usually proves to be several steps behind. All of this merely to say: expect more of the same.

(#) My most valued sources tend to inspire only insipid commentary.