Daybook 1.

The same bus.

I was on the bus recently, let’s call it the number 68. Not long after the bus set off another number 68 overtook us while we were waiting at a stop. And then this happened again a bit later at a different stop. And then not long after that it happened again. And I thought to myself: we must be going really slow for so many other buses to be overtaking us! Then I realised that it was almost certainly the same bus that was overtaking us. And that we were overtaking it when it was at a stop as much as it was overtaking us when we were at a stop. And I thought: what a dope I am for not realising this sooner! And then I waited for some voice to say to me: “no, no, you’re not a dope, this is the kind of mistake anybody could make, don’t beat yourself up about it”. But I heard no such voice.

Like it.

Mary: Let’s listen to some Chopin. I really like his music.

Jack: No you don’t.

Mary: I’ve told you before about this Jack! Don’t tell me what I do and don’t like.

Tautology.

From the 1973 Christmas hit “Merry Christmas Everybody” by the band Slade there’s a line “Look to the future now, it’s only just begun”. But that’s always true of the future, isn’t it? The future has ALWAYS only just begun. So is that line an example of a tautology? - The other eternally famous Christmas song is “I wish it could be Christmas everyday” by Wizzard. But if it was Christmas everyday it would cease to have that special quality which is the very reason you are wishing for it to happen every day.

Misdirection.

The 2009 UK parliamentary expenses scandal came the year after the 2008 financial crisis. Which made me think: wasn’t the former (promoted as it was by the right wing Daily Telegraph newspaper) just to distract us from the latter crisis? Because the parliamentary expenses issue wasn’t really a story. Members of Parliament have been fiddling their expenses for hundreds of years. As has any group of people who claim expenses as part of their job. It’s one of those things where it is just accepted. (In the same way that it is accepted that cars on UK motorways exceed the 70 mph limit.) I think the dialogue went something like this: the MP said “what? is my salary only this much!?” and the reply was “well we can’t pay you any more because the electorate won’t like it, but don’t worry we’ll put you on expenses so you can top up your salary using that as you please and nobody will be any the wiser”. That the MPs’ expenses thing ever became a story is surely an example of misdirection by the media. I’m not saying this because I’m generally into conspiracy type explanations. But this seems obvious to me and I’m surprised I’ve not heard anybody else say it. ... When news media does this it’s like they are instructing us who to hate. Like the Two Minute Hate in George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’. They tell us “politicians are liars” and I think: yes they probably are but then so are lots of people I have to deal with in my daily life. Why pick on politicians in particular?

Deprecation.

About something I heard someone say: “That sounds very pretentious to moi!” they said. And by (deliberately) using the French word ‘moi’ they were being pretentious themselves. Is there a word for this sort of self-mocking? It’s not serious enough to be called mocking or self-deprecation. (Note this whole “pretentious, moi?” is from Fawlty Towers.)

Next year.

At this time of year (late December) people are going to be off work over Christmas and New Year. And they say “see you next year!”. Some people will even say this on 31 December when they will see you again on 2 January. But, while it is strictly speaking correct to say “next year”, they are just being silly. (I think to myself: it’s not funny and it’s not clever.) On a Friday it’s OK to say “see you next week” if you are going to be seeing somebody on Monday. But on 31 May it wouldn’t be right to say to someone “see you next month” if you were going to see them the next day on 1 June.

Inside outside.

One evening on a train I joined in a game of ‘I spy’ that a strange family were playing. The girl said “I spy something beginning with T” and the parents could not guess it. I said “train” and the girl said “yes!”. But then I thought, wait no that’s not right. If you are on the inside of a train it’s not right to say that you can see a train. Surely the word ‘train’ refers to the exterior of a train. But on the other hand what would you call what you can see when you are on the inside of a train? If somebody asked you what you can see would you say “the interior of a train”? That sounds clumsy.

Anonymity of the guilty.

I understand anonymity of the accused pending the verdict. But what if there were anonymity of the guilty after the verdict was arrived at? So imagine Jack commits a crime against Mary. He denies his guilt to her. “I’ve done nothing wrong!” he protests. Mary reports him and the case is investigated and he is found guilty. Mary receives an apology and an instruction that the whole thing must remain confidential. And that’s it. Jack’s guilt remains confidential. Even from him! He is unaware of the fact that he has been found guilty. Neither is Jack punished in any way which means that there is nothing which might cause him to change his behaviour in the future. Because in his mind he has done nothing wrong. Mary is not happy with this but the authorities tell her not to worry as they have arranged it so that Jack will no longer be able to commit acts against her of the sort that he committed. They do this maybe by just relocating him and giving him a different job to do somewhere else. Mary objects saying: no, Jack needs to know the verdict not only so that he won’t repeat his behaviour. The authorities say no. They say that the point of punishing someone who has done X is so that they will not do X in the future. And if this can be achieved through means other than punishment then why should they punish somebody?

Life Revolution.

If you just changed how you behave towards other people. And these were the sorts of change which might happen as the outcome of a political revolution. Then that would be an immediate and successful political revolution albeit for one person. (You would feel the joy that people felt in history when the revolution that they were waiting for finally happened.) Of course a lot of these things require people to change their behaviour collectively. For example I could not start behaving as if the railways had been nationalised on my own. But I could start behaving now as if, for example, there were price controls on bread. I could refuse to pay less than a certain price to the producers of bread.

Advice.

Imagine I go for walks in the evening and I find it helps my health. And so I say to other people that they should do the same thing. I say it in that keen way people have: I would say something like “you absolutely must go for walks in the evening it will do you so much good!”. But I would be wrong to say this. Because not every person is the same and they won’t all benefit from going for walks. This failure to take account of the fact that other people aren’t exactly like us is a very common one. And we do this because we don’t really know what other people are like. We don’t put much effort into understanding what other people are like.

Waffle.

I really hate this sort of writing: “When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small scale, is therefore a political act.” This is from the book ‘The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible’ by Charles Eisenstein. Certainly these two sentences sound nice but when you pay attention to them they are nonsense. The first sentence is not true. Imagine I met someone who thought it was OK to torture and murder small children. That would be someone who has rejected dominant norms and values but he wouldn’t really make me feel less crazy for having rejected dominant norms and values. Because I almost certainly won’t have rejected the same norms and values that he has. Maybe the author means “When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values in the same way that we have done”. But even then that shouldn’t make you feel less crazy. Maybe it will. But it shouldn’t! Sheer numbers of adherents doesn’t make a viewpoint more likely to be not crazy. ... Then the second sentence “Any act of rebellion ... is therefore a political act”. That’s a tautology: rebellion is by definition a political act. And why has he put the word “therefore” here? He seems to be suggesting that the truth of the second sentence follows from the first but I don’t see how that could be the case.

Signatures.

How are signatures any sort of proof of identity? When you write a signature for example on a written agreement. Then you give that document including your signature on it to some other person. So you have given them the thing the possession of which purports to prove your identity. If the production of some thing X is going to be a proof of the identity of the person producing it then that thing X can’t be something you can just give to somebody else. Because that defeats the purpose of that thing as an identity proving item doesn’t it? Somebody else has got it now so they can copy it and so claim to be you. ... In response to all of this you’ll say: that assumes that the person you have given the signature to is skillful enough to replicate it. Well maybe they are. I don’t know. But you would have thought that a secure method of identification would not carry even the slight risk of somebody replicating the identifying item. The odd thing is that people will put electronic signatures into computer documents. And these are replicable simply by clicking copy and paste. So how silly is that!

Children.

John Peel once had a radio show (called ‘Home Truths’) the content of which was pretty much just people talking about their everyday lives. Not as boring as you might think. Once a man was explaining how he regretted having had children. He made it clear that he loved them deeply and that he would do anything for them now that he did have them. But that he wished he hadn’t because the disadvantages far outweighed the advantages.

Whole persons.

Imagine you went to the doctor because you had a pain in your knee. But you also had a horrible rash on your face. And you said to the doctor: “Hey doc, I’ve got this pain in my knee”. It would be a bad doctor that ignored the rash just because you didn’t mention it.

Schools are a bit like that. They don’t see their job as being to do something for the person as a whole. They will teach children something X because that’s their job but they will not stop to think if there is something else about the person that means they will not benefit from X. Or that they might be better off having something else done for them instead of being taught X.

For example suppose there was a student who had the habit of mumbling when talking. For them education (in the vocational sense) is pointless. In the sense that they won’t get employed regardless of how good they are at doing something if they mumble. Any school needs to address that first.

And if they don’t because it’s too much effort then that’s a false economy. And these kinds of things aren’t usually very much effort at all anyway. Especially compared to the effort of teaching what they are teaching.

I think the problem might be one of correlation. Good grades correlate with getting on in life. But that doesn’t mean that getting the former will always get you the latter. Good grades might be a necessary condition of getting on. But not a sufficient condition.

(Don’t) Ignore this.

I’m the sort of person that others find easy to ignore. Like once at work a few years ago we were talking to some tech guy who had come to tell us about some new software we were using. And I pointed out an issue. I said something like “but isn’t it a problem that X”. And the tech guy’s response didn’t address my point at all, he just brushed it away. I said it again and again he just evaded the content of what I was saying. Then a bit later somebody else made the same point I had made. And the tech guy said “oh yes, what we’re going to do about that is …” and proceeded to address the point the way I had wanted him to. And I exclaimed: “Wait a minute! I already asked that!”. Actually I didn’t do this last thing, I just kept quiet and, instead, I later complained about it to someone who wasn’t that interested. I said: “have I got the words ‘Please Ignore This Person’ written on my forehead?” ... I am so ignoreable that I could be telling somebody something that is obviously the solution to all the world’s problems and they would still ignore me. ... This is a manifestation of a general problem where dull people are ignored regardless of the value of the content of what they are saying. Whereas someone shiny and exciting is paid attention to despite the fact that what they are saying is nonsense. It reminds me of the lines from that poem by Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity”.

Music lines.

The song “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie starts with a 10 note phrase which repeats a number of times. Then David Bowie starts singing “You’ve got your mother in a whirl, she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl”. The tune he sings this to is not the same as the first 10 note tune. But the initial 10 note tune continues at the same time as David singing the new material. This means I am forced to listen to two different tunes at the same time. And it’s not as if one is the main tune and the other is just a weak accompaniment. They both have equal significance. ... I like this layering effect and if it doesn’t happen when I expect it to happen then I am disappointed. For example in “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones where the initial phrase stops when the singing starts.

Limp.

Sometimes I get days where my shoelaces become untied as I am walking along and I have to stop and retie them. And I think to myself: am I so limp-wristed that I can’t even fasten my shoelaces tight? It is clearly a manifestation of my mood at some level that I can’t even be bothered to put the effort into tying my own shoelaces sufficiently tight.

Everybody loves somebody.

To qualify for ESA (Employment and Support Allowance which is the British state working age disability benefit payment) you have to satisfy certain descriptions about your condition. One of these, number 5, is: “Cannot either: (a) press a button, such as a telephone keypad; or (b) turn the pages of a book with either hand.” Maybe I’m having a brain fog here but I don’t understand this description. Because let’s say Jack can’t turn book pages but he can press a button. Then does description 5 apply to him or not? Do both parts of the description have to apply to him? Normally “not (a or b)” means the same as “not a and not b”. Or does it? .... A similar ambiguity exists in statements like “everybody loves somebody”. Does that mean there is one person and everybody loves that person. Or does it mean that about everybody it is the case that there is some other person (not the same one for everybody) that they love.

Thus it was written.

There is a latin term ‘sic’ used in written texts to disown errors. So, if I am quoting what somebody has written and there is a spelling mistake that they have made then I will write ‘(sic)’ after the mistake to show that the mistake is in the original that I am quoting and is not a copying mistake that I have made. The term ‘sic’ is short for “sic erat scriptum” which means “thus it was written”.

The idea of doing this made sense when copying was done manually (by writing with a pen or by typesetting for printing). But nowadays it’s all copy and paste so the term ‘sic’ is redundant. There can’t be copying mistakes because all copying is machine performed and so mistakes are impossible. If you see on a website some quoted text from another website it’s unlikely that the author of first website typed it out from the second. They will have used copy and paste!

These days knowing how to do copy and paste (and any number of other computer usage techniques) is as essential as reading and writing. To lack knowledge of such things is to be ‘illiterate’ in the developing sense of that word. I remember once at work a few years ago I was sat next to somebody who had to email some text. This was a task of the sort they did not usually have to do. They did not know anything about copy and paste and so they printed out the text and then propped the print in front of them and typed it all out into the email. I am not making that up I promise!

Stupid.

School teaching is probably the only profession where it is OK to behave in a rude and condescending way towards the people you are delivery your service to. Of course teachers would not describe their behaviour using those words, they’d use the word ‘strict’.

It was certainly like that when I was at school. Maybe it is marginally better now, I don’t know. When I was in the education system I hated teachers who were impatient with students. And pretty much all of them were like that. If they said something and some student didn’t understand straight away they would get annoyed. They would vindictively berate you as if you had done something wrong. And then maybe punish you too. Eventually this extreme attitude went out of fashion. But still they would be angry with you when you didn’t understand straight away. They wouldn’t express it as much but it was obvious, like they were saying: “oh you are so stupid!”. And I was thinking: “Yes of course I’m stupid, that’s why I’m here: to become less stupid. If I wasn’t stupid I wouldn’t be here.” What teachers didn’t realise is that asking a lot of dumb questions is a sign of intelligence and motivation rather than of stupidity.

A joke about Democracy.

Say Jack and 11 of his friends are stuck in Leeds and need to get to Manchester in a hurry. They have no transport and not much money so they can’t hire a cab. They don’t have enough money for a train but could afford the bus fare. But the next bus to Manchester is not for another hour. They see a bus leaving for York in the next 5 minutes so they all get on there. The existing occupants are 8 people going to York. Jack says to the driver: “drive us to Manchester please”. And the driver says: “sorry mate this bus is going to York”. And Jack says “but most of the passengers on this bus, 60% in fact, want to go to Manchester! Don’t you believe in democracy?” So the driver sets off for Manchester. As he does so the people who wanted to go to York get up to leave the bus. Jack says to them “where do you think you’re going? In a democracy you must follow the will of the majority!”

Show me.

Some people don’’t like religions because they are too controlling of their lives. But I dislike religions because they aren’t controlling enough! I want a religion that takes charge and shows me how to live my life in all its tiny details. Religions at the moment don’t do this. For example Christianity doesn’t say whether you should be a vegetarian or not. You can be one or not and either way still be a Christian. Which seems odd. Really Christianity should give you clear guidance on the matter. And neither can it give the excuse that it’s not capable of doing so. How can it not know the right way of doing things?! The job of Jesus was to tell people what was right and what was wrong. If eating meat was wrong wouldn’t he have said? This means that if you are a Christian then you should not be a vegetarian. By being a vegetarian it’s like you’re saying Jesus failed in his job of explaining how to live.

Note that I say I want a religion to “show me” how to live my life. By this I mean it should demonstrate and explain to me. Not “tell me” as in the sense of “giving orders”. It will be instruction rather than orders. The way a recipe is a set of instructions not orders. The showing me I want would be a sensible explanation. (For example it might give me a tip like: if you do this like this it makes the job easier.) I don’t want to just give blind obedience to something. Or be told I have to do something or else I’ll burn in hell forever. That would be silly.

Maybe a better way of explaining this last point is that when a religion tells me how to live my life (which is what I want it to do) then it needs to explain it rather than just tell me. Like when you tell people to follow some safety rule, like don’t smoke. We don’t want them to just to as they’re told. We want them to understand why they should not smoke.

Sex Pistols.

The lyrics to the song ‘Seventeen’ are: “You’re only twenty nine, Gotta lot to learn, But when your mummy dies, She will not return”. I always assumed this was referring to Prince Charles who was age 29 in 1977. Where “mummy” refers to HM The Queen. But I have never heard anybody else say this. The song later says that the subject of the song is “a lazy sod”. That figures too I guess. ... By the way, what happened to all the intense rage of that era? Maybe people didn’t really mean it. It was all just an act. But at the time it seemed real. It seemed like punk was the herald of the downfall of Western Civilisation.

Inspiration.

Sometimes an artist (or poet or composer or whatever) will say “I really admire and/or was inspired by X”. And I think: but you’re really good and X was rubbish! (Or vice-versa.) And your work is nothing like the work of X!

Being a writer.

When (or I should say ‘if’) people ask me: “what do you do?” I say: “I’m a writer”. And then I wait for them to ask: “oh, what do you write?”. If they don’t ask me (which, surprisingly, happens a lot) then I have to tell them to ask me. So that then I can give my answer which is: “sentences”. And I assume they understand what I mean. What I mean is that I put a lot of effort into making sure every sentence is clear and well written. And it’s very important to do that so that the message gets through clearly to the reader. But most people don’t understand what I mean when I answer “sentences”. They say: “Of course you write sentences! but about what?” So then I have to explain what I actually mean. And then I also have to explain that I’m not actually a professional writer and that I only said “I’m a writer” so that I could make that clever point about sentences. Let me make this clear: I am not a writer and don’t want to be one. I’m not so vain and ridiculous that I want to make my living by writing!

Television.

What if television had never been invented. And/or never really caught on. What things would be different? Sometimes I think maybe television is the main reason why there wasn’t another war in Europe after 1945. It’s an excellent vent and an outlet and solace for the population. I mean none of those terms in a negative sense. ... It’s easy to think OMG! how did people in previous centuries even manage without it! What did people do in the past that has been replaced by watching television? Was it going out and meeting friends and family? ... By the way, I don’t watch television at all but I don’t deny its attractiveness and efficacy.

Oblivious.

Sometimes I will be talking to someone and I will think: you are so oblivious! By which I mean they are so unaware of something which seems obvious to me. And then I think: what about all the things that I am oblivious to? Surely there will be many such. And I don’t know what they are. I can’t even know what it is that I’m oblivious to because if I did know then I would stop being oblivious to it.

Negative.

Jack asked Mary what she thought of the poem he had written. And she said she didn’t like it. In fact she thought it was really bad. Jack felt disappointed. Maybe even upset.

Mary said: But Jack I’m just saying what I think, you wouldn’t want me to pretend to like it would you? And also, although I’m saying something negative about your poem I’m not being insulting. I mean like the way some critics sometimes are. It’s not as if you’ve done a painting and I’ve said that you’re a coxcomb who’s got the nerve to ask 200 guineas for “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”.

Jack: That’s what Ruskin said about Whistler isn’t it?

Mary: Yes. You see there’s plenty of other things about you that I like, Jack. Like, as you have just demonstrated, your knowledge of art history. So you shouldn’t be bothered by the fact that there’s some things about you I don’t like. Such as your poetry. ... The problem is that it’s impossible to say something negative about somebody without sounding like you’re insulting them. Go on try it, it’s impossible. You could say to me that I’m no good at baking bread.

Jack: Yes but baking bread isn’t something that you do and want to be good at.

Mary: How do you know?

Dates and weeks.

For dates within a month 4th to the 24th (inclusive) is always exactly three weeks. In general nth to the 2nth is always exactly three weeks. I noticed this recently and I thought: wow that’s something interesting and clever which I should have known long ago. But now I’m thinking maybe it’s not so great.

Shouting.

Newspapers advertise their lead stories in large disposable posters hung outside the shops that are staffed by people who are so desperate that they have stooped to selling newspapers to make a living. (Shame on them!) These posters regularly ruin my day when I accidentally glimpse one and am, in effect, subjected to someone shouting at me their tawdry and upsetting stories. Like “WORKER DRAGGED OUT OF SHOP AND STABBED” which I recently saw. And which instantly put me in bad mood. ... The same can be said about the Metro newspaper which I find, as a regular user of trains, annoyingly very hard to avoid.

Reading vs watching.

Sometimes I think that movies are just for very lazy people. So, in a movie where there’s a scene where two people brush against each other in the aisle of a train, then, in effect, the movie watcher is someone who is saying: I can’t be bothered to exert the effort required for me to read and then imagine that short scene, so instead please can hundreds of people get together with thousands of dollars worth of equipment and produce a few seconds of moving picture images that will show it to me instead. ... This laziness is most noticeable when people go to watch a movie which is a realisation of an already perfectly fine existing novel. They could just read the novel but they won’t because it’s too much hard work. (Sometimes I think that even movies that are not based on existing novels could just be written out and the reader do the imagining.) Reading itself is already a rather passive experience. Movie watching turns that passiveness up to 11.

If a movie is just showing me something which I could just read and imagine for myself then I think: what’s the point of this When I am watching a movie I expect every scene (if not frame) to be a work of visual art. In other words something which had to be filmed and couldn’t be done just as well with words. A film that isn’t like this seems like a waste of time. It’s (a little bit) like suppose someone spent an enormous amount of time and effort and expensive materials making a table. And the end product was indistinguishable from a table I could get from the store for a fraction of the cost.

Conversation.

I don’t know how to hold an intelligent and communicative conversation with people. But then I don’t think anybody else does either. And when you think about it, this isn’t surprising at all. Because that particular skill of conversation is not fostered in people either explicitly or implicitly. At school we were busy learning more important things like how to solve quadratic equations or how an ox-bow lake is formed. ... There are things which happen in a good conversation that don’t happen elsewhere. Like sudden enlightenments and realisations of things that had been hidden. Mysterious intimate things like that. For it to work you have to let the other person do things to your mind, so to speak. Let them be critical of your thoughts and play around with your ideas. It’s a bit like play fighting where you let the other person push you about but you know they don’t mean it.

Creativity and vanity.

Artistic people are often (ridiculously) vain by which I mean that they desperately crave the adoration of their audience.

This leads to feelings of insecurity because the adoration of others is not a stable thing. It is very fickle and mutable. If your wellbeing depends on something so unstable then you are bound to feel insecure.

The reliance of artists on the opinion of others is understandable. Because the value of what they produce necessarily requires the good opinion of some other people. Either the mass of the population or the critics. Other sorts of people do not suffer from this problem. So compare artists with mathematicians or scientists. When the latter produce something of value they instantly know its value. Because what they produce either works (or does whatever they think it should do) or it doesn’t work. If it didn’t work they would see that straight away.

On the other hand maybe an artist might just create things for themselves. Where only their opinion matters. They can be immensely pleased with it even if nobody else is.

The Musical Theatre.

The written equivalent of a musical would be a novel which broke into verse (poetry) at certain points.

Decisions.

I use the formula “decision = conclusion + explanation”. You can’t have a decision which is just a conclusion. Imagine we go out with measuring equipment and I ask you which out of building A or building B is the tallest. And you toss a coin and say: building A. That’s not a decision. A decision has to include a relevant and appropriate explanation. In this case your decision should include details about measurements that you took. Note also that your explanation can not include somebody else’s conclusion. If you know that someone else has done measurements and got to the conclusion that building A is taller. That is not part of a relevant explanation that could be part of your decision. Also: you can tell somebody to make a decision but you can’t tell them what decision to make. You can say to someone: “please make a decision which says WHETHER building A is the tallest”. You can’t say to someone “please make a decision which says THAT building A is the tallest”.

Good conversation.

I hate it when you’re talking to someone and they are persistently failing to answer your question. And when you persist in asking the question then they say “oh we’re just going round in circles”. As if it’s your fault! ... A similar thing is when you ask someone “what would you do if it was the case that X?” and they say “well it isn’t the case that X!”. And you have to say: “yes I know, it’s a hypothetical question!”. ... Both of these are examples of failure to engage in open conversation. I hate that. When I am talking to someone I need them to be open and not be at all disingenuous or evasive. ... It reminds me of a talk show host I heard once berating a caller: “you keep saying “my point is”, but then you don’t say what your point is!”.

Lift/elevator.

I am on the ground floor and I want to get to floor 8. There are two buttons that I can press to call the lift. One button tells the lift I want to go up and the other tells it I want to go down. There are two basement floors. And I thought to myself: why do I need to tell the lift now which way I want to go? Why can’t I just press a button for the lift and then tell it where I want to go once it is here and I am inside it? It took me a while to figure out the explanation which is as follows. If I am on the ground floor and the lift is on a higher floor and is already on the way down because the people in it want to get to a basement floor then the lift needs to know that I want to go up so that then it won’t stop for me on the way down to the basement. Instead it will go to the basement and let the existing occupants out and then come back to me on the ground floor to take me up to floor 8. Is that clear? ... There is even an up button on the upper floors because there is the possibility that somebody might want to go further up from an upper floor. … The only outstanding question then is why does the lowest basement floor have a down button. And why does the top floor have an up button. Actually I’m not sure that they do. If I was that interested I’d check it out tomorrow but I probably won’t. ... Anyway I hope you’ve understood my explanation of this matter. Or maybe you understood it all anyway without me having to go into so much detail. Maybe you’re thinking: “hey, what a dimwit this guy is for not having figured this out straight away!”

Beethoven’s character.

This was summed up in a TV drama I saw a few years about the composer. Beethoven, out for walk, remarks: “I love nature!” Then he adds: “I don’t think anybody loves nature as much as I do.” So he is both sensitive and arrogant. I often wonder what people from the past were really like. What sort of persons they were in ordinary real life. What they were like to know as people. I’m not sure that even contemporary accounts of the time convey this.

Months.

I don’t like the Month. I mean as a measure of time. It claims to be a measure of time but it isn’t because it isn’t always the same. If it’s February or May or September it will be of a different duration each time! In each of those months if I said “I’ll see you in a month” it would mean something different each time! What if I said there’s something called a Zoff which is a measure of distance. It is the equivalent of 4 kilometres. But if you are north of Manchester then it is 3.8 kilometres. So whenever somebody said how many Zoffs there are between A and B they would also have to specify the location of A and B.

Writing and talking.

Nobody talks the way things are written down. The way things are written down does not accurately represent the way people speak. All writing whether factual or fictional sounds stilted when spoken out loud. But there’s no reason why that should be. There’s no reason why writing shouldn’t be more or less as you would speak. (Obviously writing can’t cope with very diffuse speech with all its pauses and stops. I’m talking about considered speech. This latter is still different from writing.) ... My point is demonstrated by the fact that the novel “Wuthering Heights” purports to be an oral narrative as spoken out loud by Mrs Dean to Mr Lockwood. As if Mrs Dean spoke in that high literary voice that most of the novel is written in. In fact it’s worse than that because the text is supposed to be Mr Lockwood writing down the story after hearing it from Mrs Dean. Which is an even more preposterous idea. That he has such a prodigious memory!

Talking and writing.

When you talk there are no pauses between the words to correspond with the spaces between words when you write. This is what you say when you talk out loud:

“whenyoutalktherearenopausesbetweenthewords”.

Despite this my mind still thinks there are pauses between words when I talk. But I am wrong about this and I only think this because I am previously aware of the words as discrete separate items. I can show I am wrong by talking and making a conscious effort to remove the pauses that I think are there. Because when I do that it turns out that what I say then is the same as when I leave those imaginary pauses there. Conversely if I talk and consciously insert the pauses which I think are there. Then I sound like a robot talking. ... We could probably even write without spaces too (as above) and it would still be readable. Again because we are aware of the discrete words.

Practical.

What if your clothes could got washed and dried as fast as you when you showered. And they did not need ironing. You would then only need one set of clothes. You would take them off and by the time you’d finished showering they’d be fresh and ready for you to wear again.

Perspective.

Say you are looking at Jack who is a couple of metres away from you. And Mary is standing 10 metres behind him. But the two are more or less in the same line of vision. Mary looks a lot smaller. Your perceptual belief compensates for this and you don’t think that Mary really is tiny. But you can force your mind to think that they are both at the same distance from you. And that what you are looking at is a tiny Mary standing next to Jack. This is an amusing thing to try to do. What sort of aberration of nature is this tiny Mary creature? you will think to yourself.

Fridge light.

A little while ago I thought: what if when I shut the fridge door the light doesn’t go off. For a while I shut the door trying to see if the light goes out in the instant the door shuts but this did not work. I thought to myself: “if I was small enough I could get into the fridge and then shut it and see what happens to the light”. Finally what I did was I shut the fridge door for a few minutes. Then opened it and touched the bulb to see if it was warm. It was not which meant it had been off. Problem solved.

Diary journal.

The trick to keeping a good diary is to write only the things that, first, you will (in the future) want to remember. And that, second, you will (if you hadn’t written them down) forget. The problem is that right now you don’t know what in the future you will want to remember. Neither do you know what you will forget until you have forgotten it. At which point it will be too late. (PS See also HERE.)

Prostitution.

Mary: Jack, there’s no such thing as prostitution. Not the way you think there is.

Jack: How do you mean?

Mary: I mean that you think that you can pay a woman for you to do sex with her. But you can’t. All that is happening is she is letting you rape her. And that’s what prostitution is. It’s when a woman lets a man rape her.

Jack: Oh please! That is such a shocking thing to say!

Mary: But it’s true.

Jack: No. In fact logically and semantically it’s not true.

Mary: I knew you’d bring up logic.

Jack: Look, the word rape refers to having sex with someone without their consent. But if I have paid a woman then she has given her consent.

Mary: No. This issue is far more sophisticated than that. Say I put a gun to your head and told you I want your wallet. And you let me take it. Is it true that you consented to me taking your wallet?

Jack: No. But.

Mary: No buts!

Jack: No, wait. There’s another issue here. Let’s say that your argument establishes that prostitution is rape. But that doesn’t mean it’s not still sex as well does it? So that disproves your initial assertion that there’s no such thing as paying for sex.

Mary: Again that’s a nonsense, Jack. Think of this example. What if a man rapes a woman. And says to people afterwards that he’s had sex with her. I don’t mean that he’d be saying this as part of any legal proceedings against him where he is denying that he raped her. Say he accepts that he has raped her and, just as part of ordinary conversation, someone asks him has he ever had sex with that woman and he says yes he has. But he would be wrong. I don’t mean wrong in the sense that it would be tasteless and immoral for him to say that in such a casual way. (Although it would of course be wrong in that sense.) But rather because he’s not using the phrase “had sex with” correctly. Although in the strict biological sense of the word ‘sex’ I suppose he would be correct.

Jack: What, so now we are figuring out what the word ‘sex’ means?

Mary: Yes. Or rather this is logical not semantic. Your predicament is somewhat like the one described by Quentin Crisp. He once said something along the lines of (and I apologise if I’ve misunderstood or misquoted him) that, as a gay man, his deepest desire was to be loved by a man. But the defining characteristic of a man, of a ‘real’ man, is that he only loves women not other men. Therefore what Quentin Crisp desires is logically impossible. It’s not that his desire is practically very difficult to attain. It’s that the situation he desires is inherently contradictory and so is never going to happen. Similarly a man who desires to do sex, real sex, with a woman who he has paid to do that is not going to get what he wants. Because it won’t be sex if she is only doing it because she has been paid to.

Jack: I see what you mean. So if what the man wants is to rape a woman. That is the only sort of man who gets what he wants from a prostitute.

Mary: Yes, which is why prostitution should be as illegal as rape. Principles of liberty notwithstanding. And all clients of prostitutes should be accused of rape.

Jack: And the women guilty of what?

Mary: Oh, of nothing! Sorry I might not have made that clear before. When I said prostitutes are women who let men rape them. That makes it sound like I am saying they are complicit in the crime and so not victims. Let me make it clear that I don’t mean this. The women are only, at the very most, misguided. But otherwise certainly still victims. In fact maybe more so. Because if I leave my door open and someone steals something of mine. Then, from my point of view, the thief’s crime is not any less than if they picked the lock on the door. (Assuming getting the lock replaced is not something that bothers me much.) In fact the former crime is greater than the latter because in the latter they are stealing something of mine and at the same time they are also taking advantage of my carelessness.

Getting started.

One of the (many) reasons why it’s hard to get started doing something is the prospect of the arduous process that needs to be gone through to get to the end. Especially the first stages where the output seems not worth the effort. In these contexts there’s a saying which helps: “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

Crazy.

Can you believe something deranged while at the same time being aware of the fact that what you believe is a deranged thing to believe. For example can you believe that you are Napoleon or that you are made of glass or that thoughts are being beamed into your head by aliens. While at the same time knowing perfectly well that what you believe is nonsense.

Buddhism.

What is this? It seems to be that there was some guy who saw lots of suffering and was bothered by it. Suffering such as people being in pain from sicknesses and people dying of hunger and that kind of thing. So he went away and sat down determined to get a solution to this problem. And he thought long and hard. And his solution (to this problem of suffering) was that people should go off and meditate and do that sort of thing. He told people that they should adopt a sort of detached stand-offish attitude to life! Which sounds odd to me. I would have thought that if he was really bothered about suffering his solution would have been maybe for people to put some effort into discovering cures to common illnesses. Or organised a political revolution so that all the downtrodden people of the tin pot monarchy (of which he was prince) could live less miserable lives. But no! He skipped all that. Very strange.

Manners.

The free market economy is based on the basic supply demand price kind of situation. Mary buys widgets from Jack at £10 each. Then one day she finds somebody else who sells them cheaper so she stops buying from Jack despite the fact that he relies on her business. Mary doesn’t stop to think about the effect of this on Jack’s life. Or about the reasons why the others are selling cheaper. (For all she knows the new sellers might have stolen the widgets they are selling. Or obtained them by some underhand means.) The bottom line is the price.

Similarly, in a free market economy, the standard way of earning money is to set up a business. Regardless of whether someone else is already doing what you are setting up to do. You are allowed to just undercut them and put them out of business. So some other person might show up who can make widgets cheaper than Jack and he is fresh out of work. He needs to find something else to do or starve! This isn’t treating Jack very well! ... Is all this sort of behaviour ‘polite’? We pride ourself on manners saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. But just suddenly changing the way you behave to someone (the way you seem to be allowed to in the buyer-seller relationship) seems very rude to me. And yet it is the rock solid foundation of all economics!

Humility.

Scientists are by far the most religious people I know. If we take humility in the face of creation as one of the principle defining characteristics of religiosity. Scientists will say that they might be wrong. That everything they say about the world might be wrong. (In particular that it might be shown to be wrong by evidence that might be uncovered in the future.) But you’ll never get a religious person saying they might be wrong. Suppose you asked a Christian: “is it possible that you are wrong?” they won’t even understand the question! That their religious beliefs about the world might be wrong. Unlike (so-called) religious people, scientists are humble and don’t think they have infallible knowledge. ... Similarly atheists are by far the most moral people. They behave morally without the need of some fabulous deity’s instructions and threats. And many atheists are humble in the sense that, unlike many religionists, they’re not seeking ‘eternal life’. Expecting to live forever seems ungrateful to God who has already given you a reasonably long life. If someone gave you a present would you immediately start fretting about how you might (or even ought to) have another?

Caricature of me.

I ask somebody what they did yesterday and they start telling me about how they went to see a movie. And I say: “No stop! wait you have to start at the beginning! So you got out of bed and then what happened after that.”

Intimacy.

Closeness doesn’t have to be physical. If I talk to somebody and get really familiar with how their mind works then that’s intimacy too. And neither does their mind have to contain things that are enormously significant. It doesn’t have to be about what their deep feelings are for friends or anything particularly exciting. It could be how they feel when they are sitting in the sunshine. Or how they do mental arithmetic. All the more mundane content of their minds. The furniture of their mind rather what exciting things happen on that furniture. And, just in terms of quantity, the mundane content will be greater than the more exciting bits.

Google.

A few days ago I started typing “can you hire someone to” in Google and the first two autocomplete results were “can you hire someone to kill you” and “can you hire someone to cuddle with you”. It was the first I was looking for but I clicked on the second instead. Damn Google it is so distracting.

Book reading.

Recently someone told me about a book they liked. Whenever somebody does this I rush out and try to read the book they have told me about. Because experiencing something that some person likes brings me closer to them. That’s what I think. Even (or maybe I mean “especially”) if the book they like seems to me (on first impressions) to be rubbish. So anyway I looked up this book. Despite the fact that it seemed to me to be one of those waffly management self-help sort of books. And the first sentence of this book was “From an early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world.” I read that and I thought: OMG what a dreadful sentence! The author is deliberately conflating the (rather mundane) idea of analysing a problem and the very violent negative idea of destroying things. It’s like he’s saying that if you’re the sort of person who likes to break problems into easily manageable chunks then you are guilty of damaging the world. I don’t know what I find worse about this sentence. The fact that it is so obviously wrong. Or the way the author is manipulating the reader into thinking that analysis and destruction are related. Certainly this attempt at manipulation is so crude and blatant that all but the most unwitting reader would fail to be taken in by it. ... By the way (I’m sure I don’t need to explain but) it is obviously wrong that analysis and destruction are related. For example I have the problem that I need to get to London. So I break that problem down into two sub-problems. First how to get to the train station. And second which train to catch. There you go. I have (the way I was taught “from an early age”) broken apart the problem. So how have I ‘fragmented’ the world?

Meditation.

I have tried this on and off over the years and have been trying again recently. But I can’t get my mind to stop wandering off and thinking about all manner of things. And one of the things I start thinking about when I’m trying to do meditation is: what’s so great about meditation? It calms the mind and stops all that internal chatter, is that it? But what if I like this kind of thing? What if that tumultuous ferment of thoughts is the source of ideas and feelings that make me feel great? One of the greatest distractions in my life is curiosity. Do I want to curb that? On the other hand maybe quietening down the noise would give the more subtle and important content of my mind a chance to make itself heard. Maybe that’s what meditation is about. And the other thing is: people never say exactly what meditation is. If it’s a state when your mind is focussed and not wandering then why isn’t being engrossed in watching a movie an act of meditation? ... In any case when I try meditating I end the 20 minutes having failed to quieten my mind. I’ve spent 20 minutes being bored and frustrated and fighting against myself. And this just makes me annoyed and fed up! But hey this time I will persist. I need to!

It’s hip to be square.

Insisting on being on time. (And maybe the associated attributes of following rules punctiliously.) A common view of this is that it is square and uptight and that instead you should go with the flow. In other words punctuality is the opposite of the idea that you should be more “in tune with nature” and that sort of thing. But nature is punctual. The planets are there right on time and things fall at fixed rates. And this is all beautiful and natural. So by being precisely punctual I feel in tune with the universe.

Crows.

Or maybe they were ravens I’m no expert. But there was a dead one in the road this morning. And I was amazed to see lots of others gathered round in the nearby trees. It was such an incredibly human sort of behaviour to congregate like that. I was as astonished as I would have been if I’d seen them playing a game of football! And they were all cawing and flapping their heavy dark wings. I felt quite spooked out by the whole thing.

Dating sites.

People who include their age in their profile names. Like someone who is age 44 will call themselves jack44. If this is on a dating website then they’re being very optimistic! It means they expect to have found what they want before they get to age 45. In other words within a year at the most. Because the thing about profile names like jack44 is that the presumption is that the number is an age. Or if not an age then a year. So if you are going to use a number you need to use one that can’t be interpreted that way. For example jack917. Nobody is going to think you were born in 1917 or that you are 917 years old.

Happiness.

I was talking about happiness with someone once. And I said to her: you should dismiss it. Don’t try to be happy at all. You need to have the attitude of: I don’t care about being happy, happiness sucks, I couldn’t give a stuff if I was happy. And then with that attitude just carry on with your life. Just doing things. ... In response to which she said: I get it! Once you’ve stopped fretting about happiness then you’ll be able to be truly happy. And I said: no you won’t be happy. But it won’t matter. ... Or maybe what I meant is yes you will be happy but don’t think about it like that. Don’t think about it as if it’s something you’re trying to do.

Making sense.

Sometimes I’ll hear someone express their cherished opinion about something. Often political. And they’ll be all over the place. Incoherent and making no sense whatsoever. And then I think to myself: but to them as they are speaking they must sound like they’re making perfect sense and presenting clear and irrefutable arguments. And then I think: but when I speak with conviction about the things I believe, I too think that my logic is faultless. How do I know that I’m not wrong about all of that in the same way they are? I somehow need to be able to step outside myself to assess what I am saying.

[November/December 2014]