today’s ride

about 11 miles.
I wasn’t too sore this morning, so I decided to go for another ride. This route has a lot more hills than the one I took yesterday. Bill Black Road has a nice section that winds a little bit through tree cover and crosses a creek bed.

this is the thing I hate about Nashville

I hated it when I lived there, and I still hate it.

It’s the flip side of loving it, actually.

I always hear about a show I’d like to see, when it’s JUST TOO LATE to go.

Gordon Lightfoot apparently played the Tennessee Performing Arts Center tonight.

oh well, Bob Dylan doesn’t play the Ryman until next week. Bet it’s sold out, though.

oh man

about half an hour ago I turned on the Acid Jazz channel on Slacker.

This is some fine, fine stuff.

easy listening

I took the iPod along on the bike ride today (see below). I listened to a podcast about Louis Armstrong’s singing, and an episode of Pod of Funk.

The first thing I did when I got my iPod was rip my entire CD collection. That took up maybe 10 of my 55.79 GB. Then I put some video clips on it, and from time to time I put photographs on it so I can show them to people I visit.

I almost never use those things, though; what I really use my iPod for is listening to podcasts. (I should put the podcasts on the blogroll.) Probably about half of them are talk programs from various places around the world, and the other half are music.

I have some really great music from my CDs on the iPod; it’s nice to have all of them at the touch of a finger. I wind up not listening to them very much, though, because there’s so much great music out there on the net yet to be discovered.

When I was a kid, I had trouble sleeping at night if I didn’t have a radio going next to me. I loved listening to shortwave radio when I was a teenager, at the height of Communist propaganda broadcasting. I listened to the news from Moscow; I listened to the BBC World Service; I tried to learn Dutch from Radio Nederland.

There’s not much to listen to on broadcast radio any more. Right-wing morons like Rush Limbaugh and Gordon Liddy, religious fanatics, endless raving about sports. When I drive to Nashville every few weeks, I enjoy listening to WPLN-AM, but down here in Aluhbamuh, even the public radio is mostly limited to classical music and post-modern soul, neither of which really turn me on. (Remind me sometime to tell you the one about the college roommate who used to stand across the room from a cassette recorder and conduct Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.)

But there’s lots to listen to on the Web. Right now I am listening to Groove Salad from SomaFM. AOLRadio has quite a few of the XM satellite channels, in addition to many of their own (they seem to have gobbled up Spinner, my favorite music radio from my old Windows-using days).

I like Pandora and last.fm, but they’ve been one-upped recently by Deezer. They’ve actually worked things out with the rights organizations so that the artists get paid royalties, so you can listen to the song you want to listen to, on demand, legally.

There are three other amazing music radio sites I’ve discovered in the last week that I have to mention: from the government of Denmark, there’s DR NetRadio; from San Diego, there’s Slacker; and most amazing of all, there’s Musicovery.

There’s still lots of good stuff on Live365, notably Radio DavidByrne.com. There are all the great jazz streams on public radio, especially KPLU, and then, of course, there’s the incomparable WWOZ, the voice of everything that is quintessentially New Orleans.

There’s other stuff worth mentioning, but I’ve got things to do right now. Bye.

seeing the world through your beliefs

Takuin responds to my comment at his blog:

What is the world to someone that is dependent upon belief for survival? That is what is feels like, doesn’t it? The world revolves around whatever the particular beliefs happen to be. What would happen if the person could not believe in anything? What would be the result of that loss?

Evangelical Christians place quite a literal interpretation on the words of Jesus to the rich merchant Nicodemus:

3Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

4Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?

5Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

Many evangelicals insist that a true Christian must have had an intensely emotional conversion experience, which they describe as “being born again”.

I had such an experience at a Methodist youth camp at the age of 13 – an intense, almost hysterical euphoria and a sense of what I knew then as the “presence of the Holy Spirit”. I can say, in all sincerity and with certainty, that at the time, and for many years afterward, I was what is frequently described as “a born-again Christian”.

While I was a Christian, I interpreted my experience using the mental framework I had been taught, or according to my “beliefs”. Today, I would interpret it differently (although I’m not quite sure exactly how to describe it). I don’t claim that my experience was foolish, bad, or delusional; I felt something real that night. I just wouldn’t describe it the way I used to, because I no longer use the same framework.

This is something that confuses so many people. They get to the end of the line, as far as the self is concerned, but get pulled back into themselves out of fear of loss. They have so much energy invested in the self, that they cannot fathom life beyond it. It seems like death, they say. It IS death, I say.

I struggle with this. I understand intellectually that all I really need is food to eat and a place to sleep, and that everything else is nonessential. At the same time I often get quite upset about my lack of professional accomplishments, about how little money I earn, about how my life and social status compare with old friends my own age – about all these aspects of my self.

People have romantic notions about enlightenment. They think they’ll be in peace and have everything they need. They will gain what they want to gain. And while that might be true to some extent, there is nothing that is gained. Enlightenment is the end of the line; nothing is gained and everything is lost. Adyashanti said something very interesting on this same topic. He said (about enlightenment), “Don’t go for it unless you absolutely have to.” Wise words, but I don’t think too many people will listen.

Enlightenment is an accomplishment of the self. How can you transcend your self, lose yourself, while you are pursuing enlightenment? I am confident, from reading Takuin’s writing, that he already understands this.

bike ride

I went for a bike ride today.

Whenever I go somewhere, if it’s practical to ride there on my bike, I do. Up until today, my idea of a long ride was to the Starbucks and back, with a frappuccino stop at the halfway point.

Today’s ride was twice that far – about sixteen miles. Not bad, I don’t think, for a 47-year-old man. The piece that shows on the map as being along Alabama 127 was actually along the railbed that runs just east of the road, which has been converted to a trail. It’s very nice, as trails go: the part of it I rode today runs through the woods, with a couple of bridges across creekbeds. The initial purpose of the trip was to find out where the south end of the trail was, and whether the trail itself is good for bicycling.

It isn’t, really. The surface is coarsely crushed rock, which is no good at all for road bike tires, and presents a challenge even to my bike, with front fork shocks and knobby tires. The trail is good for horses, and for hikers who don’t mind looking out for horse dung.

The whole trip took about an hour and a half. With a good rest stop I think I could probably do about twice that. My big regret about it is that I had my phone in my pocket the whole way, but didn’t take any pictures.

iFone

I ain’t gonna buy one of these, but it does look like a helluva lotta phone for $159.

God forbid you should have one break on you, though. You send it to Hong Kong, they forward it on to the factory in Deepest Darkest China, send it back to you, and bill you for the shipping.

cheap pens

I have a little bit of a stationery fetish.

One of my irrational obsessions (doesn’t everybody have them?) is a fascination with inexpensive writing instruments and paper. Since I don’t really like getting ink all over my fingers and clothes, I haven’t gotten into fountain pens, or the other really expensive writing instruments, but I have an aesthetic appreciation of a well-made cheap pen, akin to my fascination with other cheap but well-built products of Asian (these days, mostly Chinese) technology.

While at the local Dollar Tree store a couple of weeks ago to pick up some balloons for a birthday party, I reflexively grabbed a $1 package of 10 ballpoint pens. It’s possible to get cheaper pens than this, but these seemed more interesting than the 5-cent Bic Biro knockoffs. They’re retractable, they have rubber-like grips, and the barrel of the pen is made of the same kind of plastic as the old Bic Cristal design. By twisting the button, you can pop it out of the barrel, which enables you to remove a deceptively ordinary-looking ballpoint cartridge refill, although I wouldn’t characterize the pen as “refillable” because the advance/retract mechanism depends on the flexibility of a plastic hinge on the inner end of the advance button, and on the flexibility of the pocket clip you must push to retract the pen, both of which are bound to fail over time. They’re relatively short, about 152 or 153 mm.

The real magic here, though, is in the ballpoint cartridge. The point appears to be 0.7mm, the ink flows freely and absolutely without skipping, and I’m told it’s waterproof. As attractive as the body of the pen is, I probably wouldn’t care about it if I only knew where to buy the refill.

Anyway, this pen is super-cool, and they’re selling cards of 10 of them for $1 at the Dollar Tree. Whatever Chinese factory is making these probably has a bright future.

note: didn’t occur to me until last night, but these are very similar in appearance to the Pilot Easy Touch retractables.

there is no why

People search for reasons, for explanations, for causes. Human rationality builds on a foundation of causality. The scientific method, criminal law, engineering: all build on analysis of phenomena and identification of causes and effects.

When we find happenings that have no apparent cause, we assume that there must be some kind of cause, some kind of explanation. We imagine an external, metaphysical realm in which such causes and explanations reside. We imagine that this realm is populated by beings which cause phenomena observed in the physical world. The existence of this realm is necessitated by our desire for explanations and causality; Without that desire, there is no need for the metaphysical realm.

Moreover, the postulate of the metaphysical realm doesn’t really solve anything. Our insistence on causality should lead us to require that all events in the metaphysical realm have an explanation. In order to terminate the chain of causality, however, we must eventually violate our own principle and reach a cause which either requires no cause or serves as its own cause – an ultimate cause, if you will.

All this is necessary because we insist on explanations, on answers to the question “Why?”. Alternately, we could accept the possibility that some things need not be explained. If we can convince ourselves that some things just are, that it is all right for some things not to have explanations, then we have no need for the postulate of a metaphysical realm, nor speculation about what it would consist of or what it would contain.

Often, when asked “Why?”, some impatient people answer “that’s just the way it is.” People sometimes use that answer, even when they really mean “I don’t know why”, or “I don’t have the time or the patience to explain it to you”. When they say (or mean) “I don’t know why”, they are implicitly asserting that there must be a cause that they don’t know or understand. They think there must be a why, that there is always a why, that everything must have a cause.

If we accept that some things need not have causes, then there is no “Why?”. There is only the thing itself; there is only a “What?”

you and me

Long ago, I read Martin Buber’s I and Thou. I’ve forgotten most of it, but some of what I’m about to say probably came out of that in some way.

If we are all a part of a created universe, or even if we weren’t created but are all made of the same stuff, then the stuff that comprises me is the same stuff that comprises you. Modern science tells us that the individual atoms that make up you are identical and indistinguishable from the atoms that make up me. It’s even possible, if not likely, that some of the same atoms have been part of both our bodies at different times.

Most of the time, most people think about themselves, and they think about other people. They think about themselves and other people as individuals. Seldom do they think about themselves and others as part of a larger oneness, a larger whole; but if we are all made of the same stuff, and that stuff travels from one of us to another, that is what we are.

This is not a mystical identity, but an actual one; it’s a physical reality.

One of our dogs likes to watch television. He recognizes other dogs on television, and gets very excited when he sees them. Sometimes we explain to him that the dogs he sees on television are not real, and that seems to calm him down a bit.

Our dogs are well-trained. They obey us when we tell them to do things; evidently they understand our language to some extent. If we are attentive to our pets and their needs, we understand their “language” – their behavior and their sounds – to some extent.

I am sometimes frustrated that our dogs cannot speak. If they could speak a language I understood, I could know them better. It would be easier for me to understand their feelings and needs.

I can look at our dogs, however, and know that we are all made of the same stuff. We are all one. If I look carefully, I can see the I-ness in them, and the them-ness in myself; I can empathize with them.

That is real empathy: to be able to look beyond the I-ness of me and the you-ness of you, and to see the I-ness in you and the you-ness in me.