Be the Change

Don't Change the Bee

There’s a lot of talk about loneliness and the difficulty of making friends as you are older. Some of it is from me! One of my solutions was to end the pity party and get active. I have many friends, but I moved 90 minutes away from them for a new job (which is now remote, but we bought a house, so we’re here for the time being.) They come visit, and I visit them, but it’s not as often as I’d like.

So I changed what I could control: I started visiting them more often. Even if it means getting a hotel room and staying overnight, so we can hang out late. I put my bike on the rack, stash it in my hotel room, and go for a ride in the morning before I drive home. This way I get to explore some trails far from home. Or I tie it into a family visit. It’s going to add up, but I can move things around in my budget to pay for a hotel once or twice a month.

Be the change, and all that. Sarah wants to come along, so she can visit her friends and we can spend a Sunday morning in New York. We’ve considered moving back to the NY Metro area, but I really like the Pine Barrens, and our house. I just bought a hammock, which I highly recommend. We should all recline in a hammock.

We got some much-needed rain right before my Sunday trail ride, and I had fun splashing through the washouts. My favorite part was when I met a shiny new Dodge Ram 1500 coming the other way, asking how deep they were. Dude, if a Subaru can make it, your fashion truck can…

New Jersey can’t top Florida for its unique brand of violent strangeness, but we have our share of weirdos. Like this guy, who was caught using a drone to drop rescue dye packs into community pools to turn them fluorescent green.

Books: I really enjoyed Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. You don't have to know video games, but if you were born from 1971 to 1984 or so and played any, whether arcade, PC, console, or online, this powerful story of friendship and love will resonate with you powerfully. I did not like The Fifth Beginning by Robert L. Kelly, which sells itself as a hopeful look at the future, but is actual some anthropologist’s doctoral thesis turned into a pop science book that rehashes what we already know of the past, and a tedious recitation of why we can’t predict the future. It was a colossal waste of my time, but the first 2/3 might be a good primer if you want to know how humans evolved from hominins, and then developed tools, culture, agriculture, and the state. He conveniently ignores the Industrial revolution and instead of focusing on the good metrics that point towards a possible hopeful future, a la The Better Angels of Our Nature, he recites news of the past two decades to show how uncertain thing are. Well, no shit, Sherlock! You sold me on hope, and reminded me how little there is if we focus on the bad. Asshole. Maybe I’ll write my own goddamn book that actually does what you said you would.

Movies: If you want good dumb bloody fun about killing Nazis, Josh Stallings recommended Sisu and I pass it along to you. Director Jalmari Helander also created the Santa folk horror flick Rare Exports, which is delightful and strange. This one includes land mines thrown like a discus, Finnish women mowing down Nazis with Schmeissers, and a gold-digging commando named Sisu who the Russians dubbed “Koschchei the Deathless” after the old god, because of his ability to survive. It’s better than most action flicks I’ve seen lately. It’s streaming on the usual tech giant platforms.

If you’d like something more thoughtful, After Life by director Hirokazu Koreeda is available on the Criterion Channel and is another of my favorite genre, afterlife movies. In this one, the newly deceased must choose a favorite memory to be reenacted by their caretakers, and we follow several people as they decide, and the caretakers as they try to recreate them. The movie incorporates documentary footage that Koreeda took of non-actors, asking them which memories they would choose, along with improvised scenes and scripted ones. Much like our memories, the story is part real and part fiction. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Music: Sarah and I went to see Beck, Phoenix, and Weyes Blood at the Mann Center, a venue I will return to. It’s in Fairmount Park in Philly, with free parking, comfy seats, and fresh air. You probably know Beck, but even I was surprised at how many songs of his I recognized besides the biggies. He’s been there in the background ever since “Loser” blew up the ‘90s with his Zappa/Beefheart-esque brand of fun. Phoenix are a French band best known for “Lisztomania” but they also have cranked out good music for decades. Weyes Blood was newer to me, but she’s amazing. And she’s named after the Flannery O’Connor novel.

Thanks to

Lauren Hough

, I read about Dungeons & Dragons players on death row. The U.S. criminal justice system is atrocious from top to bottom, and our cruel & unusual punishment of prisoners—which is outlawed by our own Constitution, yet we permit it to go on daily—is a disgrace. The fact that so many of us take joy in the punishment of others, whether in prison or on social media, tells me how many of us are suffering, and that we would rather see others suffer than cure our own pain. The podcast The Sum of Us (and I assume, the book) goes into detail of this peculiar American trait.

And I get it; I’ve been wronged, and seen the perpetrators go free. I’ve had loved ones endure far worse, and their abusers go unpunished. To project this anger onto some stranger, because we feel wise enough to weigh their souls on the scales of Anubis and cast judgment upon them, is weak catharsis. If we turned that same ruthless judgment upon ourselves, we would not pass the test. We pillory ourselves for minor sins and forgive the venal ones we commit every day, just to get by.

Whoa, this got heavy quick. I set out to write a quick, lighthearted post! This Hidden Brain podcast talks about our inner critics, and how they hurt us. But also how they help, and why they exist. Also how to be more compassionate to yourself. Most people are more compassionate to others than themselves. It’s a good listen.

I do have hope for the future. I expect the weather to suck, thanks to our dilly-dallying on climate change, but I think more and more of us seek real community, which we’ve been swindled into thinking we don’t need. Even if we buy into the colonialist frontier homesteader bullshit of American myth, people survive by creating communities. One good thing from The Fifth Beginning was how Kelly explained how hunter-gatherer societies work together and share, by being self-effacing, not hounding glory, and sharing the spoils because they might be in need someday. It’s a good way to think, versus the selfish “ant and the grasshopper” mentality that the capitalist prepper mindset has drilled into us.

So, who wants to build a compound with me? Ireland looks nice. Be the change…

This Sunday’s post: Photos from my visit to the Michael Hubler Prairie Warbler Preserve in the Pine Barrens.