Outis Niemand

About Outis Niemand

http://asundayofliberty.com

Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension. (Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)

Posts by Outis Niemand:

If I Could Be All By Myself I Could Be Me

By in foolosophy, identity, solitude

Chris Colin:

There’s an essential freedom in being alone with one’s thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else’s. Diminish that aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective. Do I really think Blue Bottle coffee is that great? Or Blazing Saddles that funny? Do I really not like that pizza place because it isn’t authentic New York-style? Sure, it’s entirely possible to arrive at one’s own opinion amidst a cacophony of others. But it’s also possible to bend, unknowingly and imperceptibly, toward a position not naturally our own.

Not “naturally” our own? When do we ever have our own “natural” opinions, uncolored by the years we spent as impressionable youths, unknowingly and imperceptibly absorbing the ideas, prejudices and social mores of everyone from our parents to our teachers to our peers to the commercials during our Saturday morning cartoons? And why is he talking as if we are born with preexisting, uncorrupted, pure opinions on consumer products anyway?
Of course, I don’t dispute that it’s a good thing to try to consciously resist going along with advertising campaigns or the mob’s collective opinion, but the idea that we ever develop our sense of selves outside of our context as social animals is ludicrous. Every idea you have has been thought of in some form by someone else before. The language you use to formulate your thoughts and express your hopes and wishes has been a work in progress for thousands of years with contributions from countless other people. As the Zen koan says, show me your original face before you were born.

Your Body is the Temple

By in moralizing, religion

Mark Edmundson:

Health should manifest itself as a means to an end. We want to be healthy so we can get something practical done—or better still, something divine, something celestial. But now, since we do not know what we are doing here, do not know what we want or need, health has become an end in itself. People pursue health for its own sake. Why do you want to live? we ask the compulsive exerciser. The answer is not So that I can finish the work; so that I can make the discovery; so that I can find enduring love. The answer now—implicit, but to me, alas, unmistakable—is that I want to live simply to go on living. With the disappearance of tenable ideals, life, simple life, has become the great goal.
…All of the energy that once went into the pursuit of the ideal is now dormant, for almost no one can believe in ideals anymore. A quest for artistic perfection? Absurd. A search for true and absolute knowledge? A joke. A life’s dedication to compassion and lovingkindness? You must be kidding. So what is to be done with the power of human will that might once have sought after these things? It is redirected to more quotidian business. People now pursue a means—staying alive—as though it were an end in itself. Epic measures of energy invest a rank banality, for in truth there is no sustaining meaning to be had, no triumph to be achieved, simply in the maintenance of biological life.
I agree that the effort to simply prolong existence has become a raison d’être for many people, but I think he’s overlooking how fanatical health regimens provide one of the few socially acceptable opportunities for condescending, judgmental moralizing, at least among the class of people who have the time and leisure to carefully tailor their diet and exercise for maximum benefit. Not to mention how it allows for the reappearance of that good old Protestant work ethic, and the accompanying smug pride in knowing you’re one of the saved, the elect. The temple might be biological these days, but priests will always be with us in some form, it appears.

I’m Too Busy Acting Like I’m Not Naïve, I’ve Seen It All, I Was Here First

By in art, identity, waiting for the barbarians, writing

John Barth:

If I could time-travel back to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, I would console Khakheperresenb with the familiar paraphrase of Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.” Or André Gide’s comforting remark, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” Originality, after all, includes not only saying something for the first time, but re-saying (in a worthy new way) the already said: rearranging an old tune in a different key, to a different rhythm, perhaps on a different instrument. Has that been said before? No matter: on with the story!

Postmodernism held sway during the last few decades of the twentieth century and is the end of the Romantic emphasis on medium rather than content, the notion that outside of words there is nothing. Postmodernism is characterized by a fin de (vingtième) siècle weariness: all has been said, all done; we are merely adding footnotes to footnotes. Pastiche, as in the works of Walter Benjamin, was held to be the most profound artistic expression; doing literature in the voices of others (espoused by the Russian theorist Bahktin and exemplified in the ingenious fables of postmodernism’s patron saint, Jorge Luis Borges) was all we had left. Some of the postmodernists, to be sure, give the sense they’d like to be direct and fresh again, but can’t forget what they know: so academics tried unsuccessfully to blow up the walls of their ivory tower through the Marxist “cultural studies” of the 80s and 90s, focusing on Barbie and Princess Di instead of Tolstoy and King Lear. Yet making Barbie academic just brought Barbie inside the ivory tower and displaced the things already there, classics of art and literature (written, it was pointed out as if this were the deal-breaker, by dead white males); the meat changed but the smothering sauce of academic jargon, the lingua franca of the educated classes, made it all taste the same as before.

I wonder how much of our modern angst over originality in art is related to our conceptions of individuality, as in the individual personality, the one-and-only author, being responsible for this particular thought. Without that perceived importance of specific credit being acknowledged, does it matter how derivative a song or story is? It will still be new to someone.

On a slightly related note, it occurs to me that those who eagerly anticipate life-extending medicines and technologies might want to consider how jaded and weary they’ll feel if they aren’t able to forget most of what they’ve seen and experience the world anew again.

Elude the Human Race, Discover What Still Feeds Me

By in getting and spending, work

Rob Horning:

Maybe those people living paycheck to paycheck who are running out of money at the end of the month are learning to see that it’s actually best that way. They are enjoying the really important things that deprivation can reacquaint them with—togetherness, family, nature, and so on. Likewise, underemployment is a chance to enjoy the riches of leisure, if you can block out the nagging insecurities of precarity from your mind.

…Has there been a general shift in values, though? Do people want less stuff and are thus willing to work less? Do we choose unemployment over drudgery and better appliances? Are we all eager to “take our share of the economic surplus in leisure,” as it’s sometimes technocratically expressed? (I wonder if this is a reason new households aren’t forming. Opting out of parenting, say, is a frugal lifestyle choice.) Reading values from macroeconomic data seems like slippery hermeneutics. (The mere fact of a drop in consumer spending doesn’t necessarily mean a drop in the desire to spend, unless you assume revealed preference is the only reality that matters.) Wilkinson makes the case that for creative-class types, being an economic free agent isn’t so terrible once you choose autonomy over material goods. Rather than make as much as you can, you can be a “threshold earner,” make what you need for your minimalist lifestyle, and then segue into “medium chill” mode, to use David Roberts’s coinage: “This is me,” Wilkinson admits. “I don’t want to maximise income. I want to maximise autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work.”

Well. It’s easy to romanticize poverty, but I’ve spent a lot of time worrying like crazy about not being overdrawn at key times of the month, and I’ve spent months on end having no less than a few thousand in the bank at any given time, and I know which one I prefer by far. The stress of never knowing if you have enough to get groceries this week or pay the rent on time is no small thing, and probably contributes to a lot of ruined relationships. Make and save your money if you can, by all means. Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash. Staying out of debt is the most important thing, though. One less chain around your leg when it comes to your employment options. One less way for the bastards to hold you by the short hairs.

Life is What You Make It, and if You Make It Death, Well, Rest Your Soul Away

By in music, the big sleep

Samuel Smith:

To some extent The 27 Club represents an observational fallacy. There are only so many ages at which a person can die, after all, so of course a lot of famous people have died at any particular age you want to consider. The 28 Club, if there is such a thing, includes The Big Bopper, Jeff Buckley, Shannon Hoon, Heath Ledger, Brandon Lee, two Kennedys and Caligula. The 29 Club? Marc Bolan, Anne Bronte, Josh Hancock, Christopher Marlowe, DJ Screw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ronnie van Zant, Hank Williams and yet another Kennedy. It’s always tragic when talented people die young and our society – perhaps any society – feels an excess of pain when we see wasted potential. We can’t help imagining what might have been accomplished over the course of a full lifetime.
We spend a lot less time thinking about those who do great things by the age of 27 and then live out long, comparatively pedestrian lives, though. That kind of narrative doesn’t make especially good fodder for songwriters or filmmakers, as it turns out.
Talented. Potential. Accomplishment. Oh, how dreadfully bourgeois to drag such considerations into art! Again, what’s this obsession with longevity? Seriously, what shall we call the crowded club of artists who put out two or three great records and then spent a long, slow decline into mediocrity and the sort of mortifying, self-unaware embarrassment that you watch with one hand clamped over your face, peeking out between two fingers? (Besides “The Metallica and Aerosmith Club.”) There are fates worse than death, you know.

Not Long for This World

By in foolosophy, the big sleep

Intensity is what I need to suffer for the pleasure
Heat, hard, life and death living all together
Need a small room full of me and my friendsTrying to find the means to justify the ends

— I Mother Earth

David Berreby:

Until that moment comes, Clendinen says, he is having a good time, appreciating what he calls “the Good Short Life.” He believe it is fine, sweet and decorous—fully and naturally human—not to make old bones. We could use more of this strain in our national conversation. In which we assume (if talking about future Federal deficits) that millions of people can and should live as close to forever as they can. In which we assume (if talking about our own lives) that we’re obligated to hang on until the last machine-aided breath. In which we assume, if talking about technology, that the right question is how it can extend our lease on Earth for centuries—instead of asking what point and value all those lingering years might have.

It is sad to exit at age 27, or even at age 66. But it doesn’t mean one didn’t have a good life.

I’m fortunate enough to have someone in my life who makes me want to enjoy many, many years of shared experiences. It wasn’t always that way, though. I used to often think that living until my late forties, early fifties would be all the life I’d need. Some of that was melancholic thinking, yes, but some of it was also a realistic sense that that age was a good balance between wisdom and zest, serenity and passion. It’s the sort of thing I know better than to say in most company, but when I hear about someone who died before reaching senility, the nursing home, etc., my thought is never “Oh, how sad, they went too soon,” but rather, “Did they like the story they told?” I mean it in the Nietzschean sense of creating your life like a work of art, making yourself into an interesting character. If you reflect on the life you’ve lived, does it feel compelling to you? Would you be interested to read about the character you’ve inhabited? It’s about living well, not living long.

Indisposed, In Disguise as No One Knows

By in identity, prying eyes, writing

Ilana Kowarski:

“Names are loaded, full of pitfalls and possibilities, and can prove obstacles to writing…” Ciuraru explains. “A change of name, much like a change of scenery, provides a chance to begin again.”

With skilled research and palpable empathy, Ciuraru chronicles the lives of secretive storytellers – those who wished to communicate without being known. In our tell-all age, such shyness might seem strange, but there was a time when pseudonyms were common.

…But – as Nom de Plume reveals – pseudonyms can also facilitate honesty. Without fear of retribution, authors like George Eliot felt empowered to express their controversial views on religion and politics.

It’s like the Buddhist saying about the finger pointing at the moon: My everyday personality isn’t important, so I try to remove myself from the picture and let my words and ideas speak for themselves. Conversation will always gravitate toward gossip and irrelevancies, alas and alack, but goddamnit, I’m going to do my best to keep my little nook of the Internet focused on the life of the mind!

It’s true, though — I express myself more openly and honestly here than I do in everyday life. Why, you lucky few know more about me — the stuff I consider important, at any rate — than people I’ve known for years and seen on a regular basis. Don’t you feel special now?

The Last Men

By in religion

Garth Risk Hallberg:

“The truth explains everything,” runs one of Grayling’s “Proverbs.” It’s an article of faith for these writers. But they must sense, even as they affirm it, that the real threat to the cult of human reason in the 21st Century is not the religious, but epistemological. We live today under the dispensation of what one contemporary wise man calls “truthiness.” In the great ecumenical marketplace of our culture, belief systems thrive not on compulsion, or verifiability, but on narrative interest.

I think he’s right. Religion is certainly a major repository of unreason, but it’s not the only one. More prevalent is the widespread cynicism that says no one can be trusted, that earnest truth-seeking is a quaint and outdated brand in the ecumenical marketplace, that you might as well just tell yourself whatever story flatters your vanity and seek out an echo chamber to reinforce it. It’s not even that we can’t agree on the answers of how to live, we can’t even agree on how to frame the questions, or whether to even bother asking them at all.
(cf.)

Solvency, Well, It Hurts Like a Bitch

By in getting and spending, waiting for the barbarians, work

Shake the slab of flesh, taunting for a fetch,
Time to ring the chime
Whet the appetite, teeth are grinding tight,
Reinforcing life
Drooling down the sides,
Eyes are bulging wide
Yes, the price is right
The cut is very tough,
Gristle’s good enough
They all need a bite
No tolling of the bell, just the one to hell
There they’ll all know
Thimbleful to chance, pay the luxury tax
Do not pass go
Try and bring the beef, see what is to keep
Not a pretty sight
The cut is very tough, you bit the big bluff

Take another bite

– Prong
David Leonhardt:

The notion that the United States needs to begin moving away from its consumer economy — toward more of an investment and production economy, with rising exports, expanding factories and more good-paying service jobs — has become so commonplace that it’s practically a cliché. It’s also true. And the consumer bust shows why. The old consumer economy is gone, and it’s not coming back.
Sure, house and car sales will eventually surpass their old highs, as the economy slowly recovers and the population continues expanding. But consumer spending will not soon return to the growth rates of the 1980s and ’90s. They depended on income people didn’t have.
The only major economic burden I have to bear is a mortgage, and even that has me working longer hours than I want at a job that often drives me insane. I don’t mind making the sacrifice for the time being, but I would much rather look to simplify my life even more than struggle indefinitely like this. I have no idea how most people manage to sleep at night with the amount of debt they’ve incurred for all the shit they have that they don’t need.

No Feeling Is Final

By in foolosophy, philosophy

JMH:

 

But what Aurelius was talking about was heartache, depression, grief, despair, and disappointment. He called himself a Stoic and Stoicism had long claimed and developed the idea that we could think our way out of the pains of living. There were lots of different ways they used to reframe life so it didn’t hurt so much. The big idea was that you are part of the giant machine of humanity and the universe and you shouldn’t be taking so seriously the specifics of what happens to little you. Stuff’s gonna happen. Roll with it. Aurelius tries to cheer up his own blue self, and you, thusly:

>For with what art thou discontented? With the badness of men? Recall to thy mind this conclusion, that rational animals exist for one another, and that to endure is a part of justice, and that men do wrong involuntarily; and consider how many already, after mutual enmity, suspicion, hatred, and fighting, have been stretched dead, reduced to ashes; and be quiet at last.

But perhaps thou art dissatisfied with that which is assigned to thee out of the universe.- Recall to thy recollection this alternative; either there is providence or atoms… and be quiet at last.

… But perhaps the desire of the thing called fame will torment thee.- See how soon everything is forgotten, and look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of the present, and the emptiness of applause, and the changeableness and want of judgment in those who pretend to give praise, and the narrowness of the space within which it is circumscribed, and be quiet at last.

Consider that the whole earth is a point, and how small a nook in it is this thy dwelling, and how few are there in it, and what kind of people are they who will praise thee.

This then remains…all these things, which thou seest, change immediately and will no longer be; and constantly bear in mind how many of these changes thou hast already witnessed. The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

I’ve never really liked that about Stoicism. It feels slightly… disingenuous to me. Not that one shouldn’t try to view frustrating circumstances from different perspectives, but trying to hop back and forth from the universal perspective, where nothing really matters because the heat death of the universe blah blah blah, and the individual perspective that we have to inhabit just to function as human beings in a social context seems like trying to have it both ways. You can’t derive meaning and joy from the things you consider most valuable and then try to brush off their eventual loss with philosophical sleight-of-hand tricks. Some losses may indeed be too intense for a person to bear — but so what? The fact that we don’t ultimately matter should be an invitation to feel more deeply while we are here.

 

Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
– Rilke

I’m Very Ape and Very Nice

By in macho macho men, solitude, Ω

Simon Pegg:

Masculinity reached a certain point in film where it became so ridiculous that it couldn’t go any further. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the perfect male in the “Terminator” pictures, in that he was made of metal and he was super-built. What happened then is that masculinity sort of got chipped away until you had a character like John McClane in “Die Hard”, who was slightly more vulnerable and, as such, imperfect. That was almost the beginning of dismantling the super-male into something more normal. Through that process, what used to be the Beta male became the Alpha male. You’ve got people like Seth Rogen, I guess myself, and Steve Carell and Paul Rudd—all slightly more normal guys that are taking the lead roles because it’s okay now to be imperfect and nerdy.

Okay, dismantling boneheaded machismo is fine and all, but I’m still staking out the Omega Male territory for myself and putting up a barbed-wire fence and a crocodile-infested moat. Not every outcast is hungering for acceptance and respectability.

Martyr, Martyr, Burning Bright

By in nietzsche, nihilism, religion

There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most important.

Once one sacrificed human beings to one’s god, perhaps precisely those whom one loved most…

Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to one’s god one’s own strongest instincts, one’s “nature”: this festive joy lights up the cruel eyes of the ascetic, “the anti-natural” enthusiast.

Finally — what remained to be sacrificed? At long last, did not one have to sacrifice for once whatever is comforting, holy, healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and justices? Didn’t one have to sacrifice God himself, and, from cruelty against oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice God for the nothing – this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us already know something of this.

— Nietzsche

Costica Bradatan:

Self-immolation in the Buddhist tradition is not the same thing as political self-immolation: the mindsets and motivations involved are different, and so is the societal impact. Yet even though the importance of religious-cultural background is undeniable in the case of the Vietnamese monks, political self-immolations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have become a major symbolic gesture in their own right. Still, regardless of their different specific aims (mystical enlightenment or political protest), all self-immolators share the same desire to transcend the human body as a strictly biological entity and to turn it, through fire, into a tool for other, higher purposes.

…Martyrdom (political martyrdom included) is as much the deed of the one who performs it as it is of those who witness it. The self-immolator’s death, no matter how spectacular, will remain utterly meaningless unless it is captured by a receptive gaze—that is, unless it occurs within a community eaten up by guilty thoughts and feelings. The guilt can be due to several factors: habitual toleration of injustices, collective cowardice and ethical numbness, passivity in front of political oppression, a general sense of defeat in front of a force (totalitarian government, foreign military occupation, and so on) perceived as invincible, if illegitimate. In other words, self-immolators are effective in societies that feel responsible in part for their servitude, where feelings of complicity, mutual resentment, and distrust have not only poisoned people’s private lives, but also undermined whatever social life is left.

We seem to be somewhere between the second and third rung — we pay lip service to the idea of “future blisses and justices”, and we’re still big on renouncing the body as a biological entity for, uh, “higher” purposes, but we seem to be worshiping the entertaining spectacle rather than the nothing. Self-immolation would barely stay in the news cycle for a few days here.

Perpetual Motion Machines

By in environment, foolosophy, george carlin, moralizing

Your key word is meaningless. Everything is natural. Everything in the universe is a part of nature. Polyester, pesticides, oil slicks, and whoopee cushions. Nature is not just trees and flowers. It’s everything. Human beings are part of nature. And if a human being invents something, that’s part of nature, too. Like the whoopee cushion.

— George Carlin

Wayne Ferrier:

 

But for most of us the idea of back to nature might be a myth. In our past we might have been closer to nature, but we probably were never truly happy living in it as a group. And for the planet this may be a good thing. Towns and cities, artificial as they are, might have saved the rest of the planet from our kind. If human beings didn’t concentrate in highly populated areas, they would be more uniformly spread out across the continents and human beings are harder on the environment than a herd of elephants is. So cities it is!

 

I doubt humans have ever been “truly happy”, though I also have to wonder if previous generations grappled with the sort of existential meaning of happiness that we do, where comfortable, reasonably meaningful lives aren’t enough, thus leading people to imagine that some sort of magical transformation will blissfully envelop them if they leave it all behind and go live in a cabin in the forest while growing and hunting their own food.

I can see where the shift in perspective can seem beneficial to harried, overworked people who just want days to go by at a slower pace, but that’s only because you’re contrasting it with your modern, frenzied lifestyle. Your kids, lacking that contrast, will grow up bored out of their skulls, and go off to the cities in search of adventures. T’was ever thus.

Deep ecologists pride themselves on finding a supposedly intrinsic worth to nature, independent of whatever practical use humans can derive from it. Granted, there are numerous solid reasons to not simply treat the rest of the world and all the other species as tools or raw clay for humans to mold to their liking. But the idea of intrinsic worth and value is an old Platonic/Christian inheritance. There’s no moral redemption for the ideological children of Rousseau, any more than there is moral damnation for those who live modern lives in big cities. Humans invented the latter because they wanted to escape the drudgery of rural, rustic living. Now we think we cast ourselves out of the Garden and want to find our way back. But if it’s Biblical metaphors you want, it might be more useful to think of us as descendants of Cain, doomed to wander, never feeling at home anywhere.

The Naked and Famous

By in bread and circuses, gender, sex-you-all

Tom Jacobs:

 

Nevertheless, Rolling Stone is a reasonably good indicator of pop-culture attitudes. And while its decisions may be based solely on marketing — sex, after all, sells — the cumulative message its cover images convey is certainly troubling. This research finds men needn’t necessarily be sexy to see their smiling face on the cover of the Rolling Stone. But for women — whatever their artistic accomplishments — hotness is mandatory.

 

Someone actually did an official study of this? Isn’t it painfully obvious? I remember complaining to someone, oh, about a decade ago that I actually found it annoying to see almost every interview with a female actress, musician or athlete accompanied by a cover photo of them in various states of undress, offering a come-hither look to the camera. What, like I couldn’t possibly be interested in what a woman has to say unless I see her tits first?

He said I must be gay. Thus did I realize that the masses were not ready for my insights. But you people are the elect, capable of handling nuance, so I’ll return to the point here.

I enjoy photography. Don’t know nothin’ about it on a technical level, but I love finding a captivating photo of someone, anyone, and using it as a stimulus to meditation (along with music and scent). Hotness really has nothing to do with it, though. And even being arrested by someone’s appearance isn’t the same thing for me as being attracted to them, desiring them, associating them with whatever pleasure I could imagine them bringing me. Some people are just interesting to look at, that’s all. Nothing else necessarily follows from that, believe it or not.

But even leaving aside my quirky definition of true attractiveness, something else always bothered me about the neon-light garishness of images of nearly-naked women on magazine covers — don’t people feel, well, a little offended at such blatant attempts at manipulation? Fellows, doesn’t it rankle your pride just a little to have some advertising schmuck blithely assume they can so easily yank your chain and get a predictable reaction out of you? Don’t you ever wonder how much of your table-pounding, wolf-whistling reaction is just a Pavlovian response to years of inculcation? I mean, I genuinely don’t get turned on by the mere image of a stereotypically pretty woman, but even if I did, part of me wouldn’t want to give Madison Avenue the satisfaction of knowing that.

No More Tears

By in macho macho men, work

See you laugh
See you dance
We take that all away every day
See you cry
We turn your head
And then we slap your face
Bow down
Bow down, live your life
Head down
Head down, hide that smile

— Soundgarden

 

V. started training on the job the same day I did. A young guy, polite, with a gentle, intelligent expression on his face. Working with him, I learned he was a fellow vegetarian (which he was enthused to discover), a cyclist, and a liberal Christian, with “Patience, Compassion, Simplicity” tattooed on his arm. He bemoaned the macho mentality of the electrical company he had worked at previously, but enjoyed working with his hands, he said, so he was hoping this would work out.

I could tell over the past month that the stress was getting to him, especially on one job we did together. He had a brief temper tantrum after we were done. Working with him again a couple weeks later, though, he actually broke down and cried over something relatively minor. I talked him through that one, but a week or so after that, he walked into the office and broke down again when one of the guys asked him how he was doing. I heard my boss’s wife say “Would you like me to have a talk with him, see if I can get him to grow some balls? Christ, I’ve got more balls than he does.”

You can guess what the other guys began to say about him. One of them entered him into his phone contacts as “V. the Flamer”, with a perky techno ringtone. Jokes about him being “an emotional one” soon followed, along with morbid humor about what the signal would be for one of the guys to take him out should he snap and come into work with a gun. He took up smoking just to try to calm his nerves, at the suggestion of one guy, and they made fun of him for the “fruity” way he held his cigarettes.

He had told me at one point that his goal was to try to get through the summer before quitting. Then I saw him two days ago at the office, where he had another crying spell in front of everybody. He told me then he only wanted to work long enough to get out of debt. But he gave his two week notice today, and the only reason he’s even sticking around that long is to avoid getting financially penalized for not lasting ninety days.

There’s the wisdom of experience for you — the only thing separating me from him is that I know most people can’t be trusted to be shown weakness. Never let the bastards know they’re getting to you.

His Smell Smelled Like No Other

By in art, science

Courtney Humphries:

Think of some of your most powerful memories, and there’s likely a smell attached: the aroma of suntan lotion at the beach, the sharpness of freshly mown grass, the floral trail of your mother’s perfume. “Scents are very much linked to memory,” says perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. “They are linked to remembering the past but also learning from experiences.”

But despite its primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history. We tend to connect with the past visually – we look at objects displayed in a museum, photographs in a documentary, the writing in a manuscript. Sometimes we might hear a vintage speech, or touch an ancient artifact and imagine what it was like to use it. But our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized.
…Smell is unique among the senses in the way it is processed by the brain – olfactory information travels directly to a brain region linked with the hippocampus and the amygdala, sites of memory and emotion. Scientists have suggested that the way smell is processed makes smell memories particularly strong and persistent. But outside of our memory, smells themselves are ephemeral: They are formed by volatile chemical compounds that can easily disperse and disintegrate. So smell is both a powerful part of our experiences and an evanescent one.
I had heard as a kid that the memory of a scent lasts longer than that of any of the other senses, despite being the least developed of them. (Alas, I recently learned that it’s not true; yet another lie foisted upon my innocent, trusting young mind.) But I’ve always had a heightened appreciation for smells, especially in an artistic context — I find that both visual and musical sensations are made much more intense and vividly particular when combined with powerful aromas. Looking at photography while listening to trance-inducing melodies and rhythms and inhaling certain fragrances is a pleasant enough altered state for me.
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