It’s been a really great trip yet again, though they always are. Stayed a couple days with an old friend and his new wife down in the Seattle area, then came up here to Bellingham and Burlington and as I do once or twice a year just spend every night with different sets of old friends. Also the restaurants. Love the restaurants out here. Boundary Bay is closing down so I need to go eat there soon. Seems strange that I haven’t eaten there in ten or fifteen years and I’m not sure why because I remember the food always being fantastic.
I went to Cornwall Park after dinner one night but it was after dark and I was alone and listening to this book called Your Next Five Moves about entrepreneurship and I wasn’t sure if the park was actually closed or not. I remember from when I was 19 sneaking in there with friends and a backpack full of alcohol and hiding from the cops.
This time I really noticed how bad my eyes are getting. I don’t use a flashlight because you can actually see better and it’s kind of safer without one so you can see all around you instead of having blind spots. Anyway, it was a good walk and near the end I couldn’t find the trail and was trudging through the woods toward it and suddenly someone on a bike rode by and I hid behind I tree like I was playing ninja like I used to as a kid. I thought he might be a cop at first but I was just being silly they wouldn’t have just one riding through the park like that. So then he stopped not too far away and I started moving again and snapped a twig under foot and suddenly a dog started barking at me and this guy like suddenly shined his flashlight right at me and started scanning the woods back and forth like he was looking for me, so I just stood there frozen, hiding the light on my headphones, and he scanned back and forth and I just waited him out. I’m not quite sure why I did that. Just reminded me of my old pretending to be a ninja days from like 35 years ago.
I started listening to How to Boost Your Physical and Mental Energy by Kimberly Bethany something on The Great Courses and it’s talking about the need for play in our lives and having fun and that’s something I’ve always believed in. You gotta try to have fun in little ways with everything you do. That’s why I”m building that marble run in my house to fulfill this silly old childhood dream that most people would have stopped caring about.
This book is also confirming a lot of my other beliefs about overall health. It actually said there’s been studies showing that people who choose public transportation over driving tend to be happier. That is certainly true for me. It also says that happiness is most largely correlated with the size and strength of your friend network. That is also very true for me. That’s why I spend so much time going around maintaining these old friendships from decades ago.
And it also talked about parenting and the cycles of punishments, saying that studies show that kids recommit the offense usually within ten minutes of being punished for it. That seems so wild do me as my parents never punished me. They talked to me and reasoned with me and perhaps used like negative penalties like “Look, we aren’t going to be able to go do this fun thing if you can’t behave” kind of thing, but there was almost never punishments of any kind. And so I would see all these other kids in school misbehaving, getting punished for it and just laughing it off like it didn’t matter then go right back out and do it again, often with new strategies to get away with it. Me, the thought of being a drain on the community by being a bad kid was such a shameful thing that I became kind of obsessed with following all the rules to the point where I promised myself that I would never ever commit any sort of crime ever, even something like jay walking.
Obviously if you know my marijuana dealing history that didn’t turn out the way I planned, and I guess the marijuana is justifiable because it should have been legal and is now.
It’s weird how punishments are so deeply ingrained in our culture when it comes to children. The more I think about it the more deeply thankful I am for the way my parents avoided them. Someone asked me the other day how my parents punished me but I had previously told him that my parents didn’t believe in punishments and I guess it didn’t click for him, just like so many in our culture can hear the science that clearly shows that punishments are counter productive to getting good behavior and teaching good coping and ethical skills to children but it’s like punishments are so ingrained in many cultures that people just can’t wrap their brains around how to actually apply that science.
So thankful for my parents loyalty to science.
I mean, you never hear anyone ask a company exec, “how do you punish your employees when they don’t meet expectations?” You never hear, “how do you punish your pets?” or “how do you punish your friends?”. In many other areas, as a society we’ve seemed to realize that punishments just don’t work for a wide variety of reasons that could be much better listed out in a science based parenting handbook but we still have this ingrained belief in punishments for children and criminals.
There truly is a better way for both.
Okay, let me get down off my high horse and oh yeah, next subject: one of my old friends from like ’98 when I first started selling pot, she showed me a movie called The Substance with Demi Moore.
Holy balls holy holy balls I don’t even know what to say. It’s like I remember as a kid my mom and dad went to see Ghostbusters in the theatre and my mom came back just saying over and over “that movie was something else”.
Well, this is kind of like that, this movie I think may have redefined for me what a horror movie could be. It was the most revolting disgusting thing I have ever seen. I was on the edge of my seat right off the bat. It jumped the shark over and over again and just kept on jumping bigger to the point where I was up and pacing for the second half just screaming at the insanity.
It’s layers upon layers of metaphors. This movie is written by a woman, Coralie Fargeat. I can’t think of a single other horror movie written by a woman which seems odd because most of the people I’ve known over the years who were really obsessed with horror movies I think were mostly women.
I used to love horror movies as a kid. I recorded Friday the 13th part 6 off TV and watched it over and over again. As I got older they stopped being as interesting to me, especially as I got into writing.
But this one had all these layers of meaning that you just don’t see in horror. Metaphors and emotions about growing old, body image, sexism, self-image, loving yourself, hollywood, self confidence, depression etc etc.
Last year this same friend showed me one of those new Mad Max movies and I remember watching it thinking how great the cinematography was, the stunts were wildly creative and beautifully shot and it was well-acted, exciting, well-paced, and the whole movie was just beautiful, but I still just felt like I was wasting my time, like what’s the point? It just didn’t have the emotion or thoughtfulness of the things that will genuinely entertain me.
Okay, what else is happening, I guess I could end on a dark note and say that today is Trump’s inauguration day and I’m hearing he’s already putting down hateful anti-trans executive orders that spit in the face of the freedom that America is supposed to represent. (Just hearing second hand of course. I do not consume mainstream media as part of my goal of long term physical and spiritual health.) It’s wild to me. Just so wild that people have descended so deep into hate these days–and no, it’s not just the Trump supporters who have turned hateful. I’m including most of society here, but Trump is sort of representative of how our society as a whole has embraced hate and division.
And it’s going to work out well for me. As an individual. Sort of.
Like, my brand of compassion and reasonableness is like, just what I always thought Jesus was into, and it’s something people are drawn to but we’ve all somehow forgotten about I guess because of fear. But it feels like the way I think, the fact that for the last couple decades I really have been trying to ask myself “what would Jesus do?” and the more I genuinely follow that path in my heart, the better things work out for me. I stand out in the crowd. I was saying the other day how amazing it is that I have this big list of great friends I’ve had for decades and someone said it’s because I’m so kind and you know, that’s kind of what a number of bosses have said too. I remember my first job, the company dissolved and they kept laying people off until it was just me and the CEO. I was like, “why did you pick me to stick around to the very end?” when he finally let me go and he said it was because I seemed like a kind honest person and I was easy to get along with. And I guess I don’t see why other people aren’t using this strategy to get ahead in life and make themselves happier. Or if they are they aren’t going all in on it–just like my former self I guess. It’s only been the last couple years, maybe it was when Musk bought Twitter and I thought he was going to be reasonable but oh boy was I wrong and I just realized no, I need to go the exact all the way opposite to the kind of community that Twitter is. (To be fair, it was toxic long before Musk got there.)
I think my strategy is going to work even better under Trump as it’s going to be even more unique and bring me even more opportunities and maybe you should try it too.
I was going to end this there. I just re-read it and realized I don’t like that last paragraph where I brag about how wonderful I am and my instinct was to rewrite it or delete it. I mean, to be fair, if I read someone saying that about themselves I’d be like “this guy’s full of shit”. But deleting/editing it feels dishonest and a slippery slope to the writer I used to be who rarely produced anything deep because everything needed to be perfect.
It’s weird how it’s so so difficult to truly know someone and I guess it’s like, maybe we should cut back on how much we try to predict what motivates others and focus on what they’re actually doing in the real world–I dunno why I say that.
I guess what I should have said is that I feel like I have failed many many times at my goal to be a truly “what would jesus do” kinda guy (but still officially atheist) but when I have done it, it has always payed off in the long run and I’m trying my bestest to do more of that and I think others –I guess I’m getting redundant now.
Okay stop.