There are some sick jams ripping across this diner. I’ve found myself a booth and have a coffee with soy milk on its way. There is such a skillet here. And this music. For all I’ve been meditating on unzealousness, it brings out the zeal. And it’s buzzing with people. As a garden full of bees. Pollenating stomachs with over-easy eggs. I’m always worried about not having cash and having to wrestle an ATM here, but that’s a silly thing to worry about. The ATM always seems to work, if it’s working. And my feelings of concern melt away when I’m sitting and feeling the garden sound and egg smells. Mmmm. Soy milk coffee. Appropriately watery.
Today is a day like any other recent day. With wide open prairies of open calendar time to roam and play upon. And perhaps I will not go so far afield with my prairie and just sit and watch the flowers just outside the prairie cabin. I’d like to have the job of the author I was recently reading: a steward of a piece of nature conservancy property in a dilapidated house on the desert plain, with horses. Seems like a pretty okay transient profession. Just write a book about your time, care for the birds with broken wings, raise your family, keep people from hunting the land, and consider the way that the sun and the rain influences forgetting (and write poetry about all of this). I can handle that. I may one day handle that. But not alone. Non-zealous exploration of the possibilities in the deserts will lead me there, I expect. And hopefully some continent hopping will be productive in such a direction.
Usefulness, on my mind again lately. A question about markets and some wondering what it is that causes a knee-jerk reaction against them lately. I think it’s because money as a valuing and decision mechanism feels like a broken and old way of living. As I drink this coffee with soy milk out of a mug from the Village of Tobaccoville, North Carolina, I think money as a universal solvent that can help people be the type of “free” they want to be to truck and bargain, I think it’s not that at all. But that could just be because I’m retired from numbers. Pretty much whatever I do next, all the nexts, can’t have much to do with numbers. I can have a little to do with them, we’re afflicted across our civilization with the malaise of numbers, but I’d prefer to deal with them as little as possible. They mean so little, for how meaningful they’ve become. And many forget that valuing is ranking is the use of numbers. So leave the numbers at the door, they’re like your work boots from a day mucking the horse stalls. No one wants that on their carpets.
The buzz of this diner has overtaken the music. Until just now, the beats are ascendant again. Coffee is flowing, the flow of conversation has been diverted. And I can only hear a snippet here and a crunch there. It’s morning in late June and the moon is filling up. Soon to be quite full. But that’s at night. Kelly Clarkson is here, in the day. In re-mix form, fortunately. Now, she gets what she wants. There’s something about the two-pronged sentence that has me in love the with semicolon, with the briefly breaking up the flow comma; it just feels off to add a third. “The rule of threes” does not seem to apply to my brain. I got really into triangles a long time ago, and I think I’m mostly over them. It’s line segments now. The most powerful agents in the Flatland universe. To be dimensional, but only twice. Two dots, one line, infinite dots. Can be cut in half infinitely and cut anything in half. And so I don’t do the lists of three, and it’s not just to avoid debates about the Oxford comma. Though those are quite silly. Form follows nothing and function is formulaic.
Confusing aphorisms are a love language that I love to speak and hear. To have a statement that makes some sense and no sense and could go many different ways, that’s the way. Because to vaguely mean a little bit, that’s the crux of unzealousness. And that’s a vague aphorism to live by. I’m trying. To fly along the world is to be far under the ground. For example. To take orders is to be fully in order, to be fully in love, Stockholm-style. I suppose that one unfolded in three parts. Sometimes such is the way, but not dogmatically.
I’m going places. To the mountains, to the desert. To the past. While seated. While unseated. I think so, anyway. Have you heard of bit rot? The notion that the digital world is always molding, rotting, having mushrooms grow inside of it continuously? An almost biological decay factor that has applied to human thought and things written down on paper as well. My memory feels digital and it feels as though it is a Geocities website from the year 1998 with only some of the text still able to be displayed. I’m not concerned about this, but I feel concern sometimes when I forget something important, like the idea that I’m not to be concerned about such a thing as forgetting. It’s very important to remember. A heritage, a genealogy, a family, all things forgotten. It seems the reason to absorb zeal as phytoremediation happens: strong chemicals come in, marsh grass comes up. But if I can just phyto without the remediation, that would be just fine. So I’ll chug this coffee against the backdrop of this music a little slower.
I often wonder, is it better to be Zorba or the Englishman? To have already lived fully, zealously, full of passion and to continue to do so even when the lignite mine project on Crete falls apart. Or to skeptically, managerially, move along and always second guess. I expect Zorba would reject the dichotomy as foolish overthinking and the Englishman would feel it were under-wrought. The question about “better” is a ranking, numbers, valuation question. That’s a mistake, perhaps. But it’s hard to say for sure. That’s why I don’t have an Ray Dalio-style principles written down. Just because you make a billion dollars a few times with gambling on what might happen, doesn’t mean I’m going to sit next to your craps table and take notes about the whiskey you’re drinking, about the number of seconds that you blow on the dice. So my principles: remain semiprincipled, in a vague way. Stay in the mud with Zhuangzi and the turtle. Read Camus and not worry too much about whether the doctor in The Plague is a hero or a miserable man. Write and write and write, but worry very little about whether I’m saying anything (I’m typing, not dictating).
It seems to be. A potent phrase. Better than the Hamlettian dichotomy, but not as good as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-style wit-comedy-confusion. That’s how I’d like to live, in constant banter in between sips of coffee.
Roman Ryan 