TV Addiction

You cannot examine your own behaviors impartially. The fog of bias is far too thick to ever dissipate. There are countless studies to back this up, I'm sure, but I think any reasonable adult would find personal experience enough of a dataset to prove the point. 

It's especially difficult to accurately judge how much time you spend doing things. Time being an elusive force (see previous posts) withstanding, I find it impossible to line up my expectations with realities on this front. With nothing is this more true than with the temporal void that is TV. 

TV is so addictive. When on, it's this glowing orb of bright light and shifting colors that your eyes instinctively gravitate towards. I catch myself fixated on the screen when my dad watches in the kitchen like my cats on a bird flying by. I'll walk into the room and, before I know it, I'm watching a pharmaceutical drug ad or those incessant, sarcastic, self-righteous CNN anchors supposedly "reporting" the "news." It's like Gollum with the Ring. 

And when the TV is off, it's dark and foreboding, just waiting for you to bring it to life, to open the endless portal. When I get into the habit of watching TV, which for me can happen from literally one sitting, it's almost like it beckons me. 

TV addiction used to be a major talking point in culture. It was the tool degrading society, ruining the children. The great evil. David Foster Wallace talked about this many times, including his own addiction to it. (That interview I linked, by the way, is fantastic. I listened to it with my mom while driving through Arkansas. Worth the full listen.) Infinite Jest rides heavily on the topic of addictive entertainment, among other things. Don DeLillo writes in the same vein. 

Now, with smartphones, TV seems relatively benign. Nobody thinks of it as the menace it was in the 90s. A stationary bulk can't really compete with the ubiquitous handheld. But I think it's just been repackaged into a different form. We're basically watching TV on our laptops and phones, but it's more interactive and has more options. Reading Nature on a screen is one thing, but how much more time are we spending on TV derivatives (YouTube, TikTok) if we're being honest. I realize I feel the same infuriating, frightening beckon from my phone as I do the TV. I think we understate the role TV has as the granddaddy of our digital crisis, and we overlook the dangers it still poses today.

 

When I succumb to the pressure and watch, I enter a time capsule that takes focused effort to escape. And when I exit, I have no conception of how much time I was in. Thirty minutes is the same as two hours in there. Life slips away unconsciously. It scares me. 

The habit is so easy to make and so, so hard to break. Screens are constantly everywhere, and we know they're made to addict us. And, at least for me, TV is like any other addiction; it just ends up making me feel bad in the end.

Foucault and Insanity

It takes considerable effort to read Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. A friend and I have been working through it since summertime. We're a bit over halfway done as of now.  

 

The writing is incredibly complex, for one. Each sentence is structurally creativity, rife with references to other ideas and sophisticated vocabulary. The sheer quantity of scholarly research needed to write this book is almost unimaginable; obscure citations range from 18th century German doctors, priests in post-Enlightenment Paris, even ancient Latin sources. How he organized and collected this information is beyond me.  

 

The content itself is a dive into Europe's evolving relationship with insanity after the Enlightenment (approx. 17th century). The way Foucault approaches historiography adds another dimension to the book. He circles an argument with a wide arc before rushing to the core, like water down a drain. So at first you're bombarded with diverse snippets of source material that builds to the main point. It's inverse to conventional argument design (thesis then evidence), and it requires focus even when you don't really know the significance of what you're reading.

 

The overarching story Foucault is trying to tell, from what I understand so far, is that of the insurmountable conflict between logic and insanity. After the Scientific Revolution, madness came to be seen as an inexplicable phenomenon in direct contradiction to the methodical, precise, deducible nature of the world. On one hand, it was seen as the externalization of internal urges and spirits, but on the other an unnatural entity, for nature is logical and ordered, while the paradigms of madness, "melancholia," "mania," "hysteria," and "hypochondria," were not so. An aberration. 

 

The reaction to these insane realities that should not, could not, exist alongside the contemporary worldview, was distrust and fear. Gone were the days when madmen were an accepted part of life, a common sighting in urban centers, a regular part of the breadth of humanity. Now, these conditions threatened the understanding of a rational world. They needed to be removed. Placed out of sight out of mind. Thus, the creation of asylums.  

 

The crime of insanity became moral. The depraved existence of madmen, corrupted and vulnerable individuals, defied the modern God, the laws of science. For they are illogical, irrational. And the world is apparently not so. 

 

It's clear that this is the origin of the present mass prison system in the U.S. We use the same rationale today, and we continue to view mental illness as a nonconformity fundamentally criminal. We have yet to break from this mindset. Just look at the statistics; our jails basically function as wards for mental health patients. I could only find older data, but numbers suggest something from 15-75% of all prisoners have mental health issues.

 

I think this book shows how fragile our moral and intellectual foundations are, which seem to come from a place of arrogance. This negative outgrowth of the Enlightenment is often ignored, but it is real. The broad disillusionment increasingly common among all social strata must be a manifestation of this. We think we know how things work, and when something doesn't fit into our established framework, we feel threatened, compelled to remove it from sight. It's unsustainable. It's actually a tragedy for everyone involved. Rigidity makes the world a more bland, incomplete place. We have the same approach towards many things that don't fit neatly into our quantifiable structures, like spirituality and drugs. If we really wanted truth, we would be more open-minded.

The Arrow of Time

There's this term, "The Arrow of Time," that refers to the way time is unidirectional, always pointed to future from past. This simple fact is maybe the defining trait of life itself. So we wonder, quite naturally, if it could be different. Whether the nature of the arrow is necessarily fixed. 

 

I've been reading a book about the concept called From Eternity to Here by a Caltech physicist named Sean Carroll (he actually was one of my friend's professors). His writing is dense and hard to follow at times, unsurprisingly, but it's made me think of time in a different way; as a dimension, a coordinate in 4-D spacetime. That in itself is challenging enough to conceptualize, much less moving on to understand singularities or closed timelike curves. 

 

One insight that has especially stood out is how we orient ourselves in time. Carroll says we use the Big Bang to create temporal asymmetry the way we use Earth to do the same for space. Out in dark matter, all directions are symmetrical, equally filled with nothing. On Earth we recognize up and down because the planet is our reference point. The Big Bang serves as a similar reference point for time, clarifying the distinction between the low entropy past and higher entropy future.

 

I found Tenet, the newest Christopher Nolan movie, to be no help at all in this mindbending exploration. The concepts and budget he toyed with made for cool scenes but the logic, lost in an opaque, convoluted storyline, the mumbling dialogue, the total intentional confusion injected into the soul of the entire project, made for a personally unfruitful watch. I also found it neck-deep in the worst of action movie tropes; one man responsible for stopping the end of the world, he must choose between saving everything or saving his love, a doe-eyed attractive woman who lacks any defining trait besides those innocent and vulnerable optics. It somehow managed to not make any sense and be numbingly predictable at the same time. I do like Nolan's other movies, though. 

 

I'm not sure where all this thinking about time and reality has left me. I think it might be limited as just a mental exercise, a stirring not disruptive or imminent enough to spill over the levee separating daily life from the lake of my thoughts. Which is fine. I don't expect every endeavor to bear juicy revelations that turn my world.

 

Nevertheless, time ceaselessly marches on. The only thing to do is embrace it. I can be grateful for the good, like my new job, and thankful for what once was so, like Playboi Carti's vibe. I don't think any other response is appropriate.

 

 

The Civil War

As we reel from a traumatic, tumultuous year in American history, I find myself wondering, in accordance with millions of others, how it is we reached this point. What led us here. What is this, this incompetence and polarity and gridlock, a manifestation of. Is there reason for hope, pragmatically speaking. And I've found, in my brief and superficial explorations, that the answers lie in history. Specifically, the Civil War. 

 

The connection crystalized in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine by David Blight, a Yale Professor of American History, called "The Reconstruction of America." He reminds us of the result of the unfinished Reconstruction, the curtailed rebuilding and integration of the South after the Civil War; the issues that caused the war itself, the driving forces of our great schism, were never resolved. These questions, in particular:

"Who is an American? What is equality, and how should it be established and protected? What is the proper relationship between states and the federal government? What is the role of government in shaping society? Is federalism a strength or weakness?"

It's clear that these are the exact disagreements plaguing us today. How little rhetoric has fundamentally changed in 150 years; how distant we remain from solving these hard questions. They stubbornly persist at the core of our national dysfunction, generation after generation.

Realizing the conserved nature of our foundational American debates has given me angst and idealism. Frustration at the failure to implement lasting reform during Reconstruction that could have ended, or at least mitigated, the extreme geographic disparities in governance and social structures that persevere today, the squandering of a raw, leveled slate by our worst president, Andrew Johnson, that could have birthed a more united nation. Optimism at the potential for improvement that we've embraced, time and time again, despite resistance and the lingering of root questions, that have raised millions from destitution, oppression, poverty and hopelessness. We somehow live in a reality of both, a confusing history we're still reckoning with, still unsure of.

One thing I do know is that I need to learn more about both the run-up to the war and the aftermath. Therein, I think, are the keys to unlocking our doors to a brighter future. Better understanding the ramifications of decisions made then, and how we can move towards ending our monumental disputes, should be an enlightening process.

Bicycles

Like so many others this past year, I've had the pleasure of cycling more than ever before. I found myself fiending for outdoor activity after coming back to the sunshine from a dreary land. A simple, engaging way to bask in the love that is warm temperature. So I got on my bike. Over and over and over again. 

 

I've been riding two to four times a week since March. At first my routes were short, familiar outings on the shaded streets I grew up on. Then they became longer. I strayed farther from home to parts of town I hardly visit. I wandered neighborhoods where I don't know a single resident. Sometimes alone, sometimes with company, I learned of creekbeds to follow for winding miles, hilltops with serene, uninhibited views, parks and taco spots and strange murals (Andrew Yang and Kobe are a duo I never would have expected). The excursions became day-trips; explorations into unknown folds of the place I've known for my whole brief life. 

 

For most of the year I rode an old mountain bike that was passed to me from my dad almost a decade ago. Earlier this month, my parents gifted me a sleek city bike. It's gorgeous. Deep blue frame, white-rimmed 700cc wheels, brown leather seats and grips. It has no gears (single-speed) so it's lightweight and minimalist. The design is both classic and modern. I can fly on that thing.

 

Now I cruise around town with a contagiously laid-back ambiance, each pedal a beat of my soaring wings, each moment more liberating, more enjoyable, than slower or faster transit could ever offer. Maybe it's because I'm fully out there; the asphalt is inches away, it's imperfections physically impactful on my body; the wind in my wavy hair, uncut for months now; the sun on my exposed forearms; the hot closeness of rumbling cars giving way to the quiet openness of a residential backstreet. It makes me feel present. 

 

Anyways, this feeling I get on my bike reminded me of an essay called The Wheels of Freedom: Bicycles in China by Fred Strebeigh. He describes how people in China were banned from talking about the Tiananmen Square Protests in the aftermath, but while cycling they could and would because the state couldn't monitor people's conversations while they were biking. Bicycles gave individuals personal space. A dose of sanctity that helped them go on with daily life.

 

I know China has changed dramatically since 1991, when the essay was published. The sea of bicycles has given way to four-wheeled traffic jams and cutting-edge public transit. The surveillance state wields expansive new technologies. But I think, when I read this, I see how millions of others have felt the same overflowing vibrancy I find on my bike. It's cool to recognize that connection across time and space.

Sound of Metal

I really liked Sound of Metal, a new movie on Prime Video. The main character, Ruben, plays drums for a heavy metal band that screams passionate, esoteric angst to small crowds of black-clad modern punks in dank dingy halls. His hearing begins to rapidly and dramatically degrade, throwing his life into uncharted waters. 

For one, the narrative is original, which is always appreciated in today's franchised media industry. Every step felt unexpected. The uniqueness of story nurtured an empathy that flowered as the movie progressed; ardent character development, which happens in the passing scenes, the shots of daily intimacies and raw solitude, made this possible. And this, the empathy, was the real strength of the movie, I think. It's the most powerful thing an artist can create. 

 

Filming details, subtle yet discernible for the non-trained eye (mine), were a substantial part of the aesthetic quality. The audio specifically stood out. Perspective shifted, smoothly and frequently, from a ubiquitous narrator with acute hearing to Ruben in his stages of auditory deterioration. Dripping coffee. Vibrating drums. Honking buses. Clanging bells. The incongruity between the two realities was all the more evident because of this technique. 

Ruben is played by Riz Ahmed, who nailed the performance. He's was stellar in The Night Of and The Reluctant Fundamentalist too. Dude can act. In my view, he is a great representative of South Asian Muslims. His roles and style are atypical. This helps break pervasive stereotypes about South Asians, like the idea that we can't be in heavy metal bands. Ruben is not written as a South Asian character to be played by a South Asian actor. His character has nothing to do with Ahmed being South Asian. Ruben is ethnically ambiguous. Usually, minority actors only get cast in roles for characters of that same minority. The "generic" character is always white. It's cool to see Ahmed representing a person, not just a South Asian person. That's real equality.

12/2/20: The Slaughter

We turned off an unpaved road after a series of rights and lefts through the dry, South Texas grasslands. I didn't get to see much of the homestead upon entrance; I was driving through a dust cloud kicked up by the speedy Dr.--------, our companion and leader on this excursion. What I did see was three chained dogs lunging at our passing tires, restrained by metal but itching for a chance to attack. A bluff, in my experience, but intimidating nonetheless. 

 
Dr.-------- parked behind a shed on a flat expanse overlooking a tilled field, the stubby greenery and vacant tractor hinting at its recent cultivation. The tractor had a bulldozer attachment in the front. In the bucket of the attachment we saw a heap of fur, bits of intestine, and a decapitated goat's head. Flies swarmed over the open eyes. This was Dr.--------'s goat.

The reason for our visit to Abu -----'s farm was to slaughter a goat. My family (I mean my mother) buys one from a local farmer once or twice a year to supply our meat. The curry my mom makes (something like this) from the mutton is my favorite meal. This time, Dr.--------, a meat aficionado and resident "busy eccentric man who is expert in a variety of random things and finds obscure farmer in Poteet, Texas who will halal slaughter goats for you," came with for his own purchase. He was not interested in participating in the butchering process. I, on the other hand, was. 

About a week earlier, my mom asked if I had any interest in doing the zabiha, the Islamic tradition of humane slaughter, for she had placed an order for a young goat with Abu -----. Almost immediately I said yes. Maybe because I wanted to experience an ancient, universal human experience that I had yet to truly know. Or because I wanted to prove my metal, my masculinity. Or general curiosity. Probably all three. I think of myself as open-minded and usually willing to try things that aren't a serious threat to my emotional and/or physical well-being. Hell, people for time immemorial have been doing this all over the world. I can overcome my modern, urban sensitivities, I thought. We're disgustingly disassociated from our food sources anyways. This is as good a time as any to cross that gulf. 

Greeting us is Abu -----, a middle aged man donning work clothes and a kind smile. Dr.-------- led with "As-salamu alaykum," a salutation reciprocated with "Wa ʿalaykumu s-salam." We were introduced with the same friendly exchange, and he had no problem pronouncing my name. He was passing chunks of flesh through an electric buzzsaw, skillfully picking his way around the vibrating steel teeth with exposed fingers. I was nervous just watching. 

He led us around the two small sheds to a fenced pen with a few dozen goats and sheep. The area was clean, no smell of feces and sweat and fear like at the cattle auctions I used to go to with my grandpa. The animals were standing around quietly. Two mothers nursed lambs only a few weeks old in a separate enclosure. Abu ----- pointed to a couple different goats as options for us. These are young, he said, about one year old. The meat will be tender. We chose an 11 month old (approx.), on the smaller side, but healthy, a good choice according to the experts. 

I went in the pen with Abu -----, who grabbed the goat by the hind leg. It had beige fur with brown spots. He told me to hold the leg and bring the goat behind the pen, next to the tractor, out of sight from the other animals. It whined and squirmed for a bit, then succumbed as I pulled it towards its final spot on Earth. 

Now watch, Abu ----- said. He pushed the fore leg behind the goat's head and, with his left, held the head down from the chin. The neck lay exposed, aiming skyward. He was behind the goat, I in front holding its other legs down. The neck faces quibla, he said, pointing to Mecca over the horizon. You sure you want to do this?

I could have told him no, you do it. I wanted to say so. He wouldn't have thought twice, and neither would my mom or Dr.-------- or anyone. It was frightening in the moment. I wanted to walk away. But I told him the opposite. Yes. I want to do this. 

He switched places with me. Now my left hand held the head. My other held the knife that sat on a flat stone nearby, the glinting tool of Abraham the same as it always had been.

He touched the neck, its own entity now separate from everything else in my mind, the head, the legs, the cute baby lambs a few feet away, the concept of mammals and animals and life and the universe. Cut here, fast and hard. Back and forth. Say bismillah, then Allahu Akbar three times. That is all.

My heart was pounding my ribs. My ears heated up with the torrid fluid racing through my arteries. I felt the creature under my hand, but I wasn't paying attention to that. All I saw was the neck, protruding and alone, and the knife right above.

Allahu Akbar, I said as the blade dug into the flesh. I pushed down and cut; blood squirted from the jugular. Allahu Akbar. The trachea flopped in two, severed. Crimson red pumped out onto the dark soil. Allahu Akbar. The goat never cried, it never knew what happened. The head was bent at an unlivable angle before a second had passed. Abu ----- snapped its neck backwards in a swift jerk, it twiched and kicked its floundering legs a few times, and within a minute the blood stopped running, and it was dead. 

I stepped back, knife in hand, looking at what I'd done. My face scrunched under the KN95 mask covering most of the area below my eyes. The smell was strong. The scene was gruesome, violent in the most primal sense. 

But the emotions that came were not sadness, nor guilt, nor regret nor shame. I'm not sure what it was. It was a moment almost free of emotion, honestly, the way a shocking, climatic moment is, when you don't have time or the capacity to process and display a feeling. It just happened. I stood in emptiness. It was real, and it was my doing. It was remarkably sudden, tangible, and now a strange memory of me acting without reservation. To think that was me. Strange, right? That's all there is to it.

I watched as Abu ----- butchered the slaughtered goat in a bare shed with tin walls. He started from the heels and cut the coat from underlying muscle the way you pull a sweater off after a long cold day. He cut the head and hooves off. He removed the intestines and the pancreas, kidneys, liver. He hung the goat by the ankles from a coat-hanger hook to do this. When he did, undigested corn pellets fell out the stomach, and a bit of deep coagulated blood from the heart dripped out too. He hosed this down a drain on the concrete floor. Otherwise there was relatively no blood or gore at all. The pink flesh looked like raw meat from the grocery store. 

I spoke with the man while he cleaned the goat (sometimes delicately, sometimes with force). He's actually a lawyer in his home country of Sudan. After law school he worked in Abu Dhabi in criminal investigation for fourteen years. That was before moving west for his children's future. His oldest, whose name is the "-----" in "Abu -----," recently finished medical school. Mr. Hassan (Abu -----'s birth name) told me he wanted his kids to study law, but they wanted medicine instead. Breaking from the path of the father: an older story has never been told. Except maybe about slaughtering an animal. 

He explained that this farm is his hobby. He learned butchery during camping trips in high school with friends, when they would cut and cook their own meat. Even I can tell he is well-versed; within thirty minutes, the goat is in pieces in a bag in my mom's trunk.

As we drove away, the dogs still yapping at the rubber, back onto the dirt road, I found myself confused as to what I should take away from this experience. Here in my bed at night, I'm still confused. I'm sad the goat will never see another dawn or dusk. I wonder about the nature of death; where is the goat? What exactly did I do to it? I think about what this means for me. I know inside I am strong enough to do things that have never been asked of me before, and this was another instance of my rising to the occasion, proving myself to myself. I am glad, for my own sake, that I took a life (actually two, because I slaughtered a lamb for Dr.-------- afterwards, but I wanted to focus on the first one because it was more monumental for me. Do not doubt, I have great respect for the second zabiha; it's just the act was basically a repeat of what happened before. It is amazing how fast we acclimate), because it was a valuable lesson in so many respects. And I think about what it means to be a human being; about our relationships with animals, with our surroundings, with each other, with ourselves.  

 

How curious and strange this journey of life is. How a moment, vivid as ever, is gone in the blink of an eye, never to return. Yet I'm still there, holding the knife, driving away, eating my favorite curry for dinner. A bizarre cycle, inescapable and simultaneously founded on a beginning and end. Today, I think, I felt more a part of it than I ever have before.

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This book I read, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it's uniquely structured. The interweaving of a storyline and characters with deep examinations of theoretical fields within science, philosophy, engineering, seems really innovative. I don't know enough about literature to make that claim, though. 

One portion I like in particular is about grades. The narrator's past self, Phaedrus, teaches rhetoric at a college. He experiments with abolishing grades for a semester. He believes they're a hindrance to true learning, which arises only from voluntary, self-driven effort. Grades, in his view, mask this true learning by transforming it into a means to a goal; a degree, a quantifiable level of prestige, the grade itself. It's so phony it actively slows down "the cart of civilization," as the author, Robert Pirsig, puts its. 

For a while in middle school I didn't care about grades. Then I started wanting better grades because I realized they were important for one reason or another, but I couldn't figure out how to get them. This was a chunk of high school, and I reverted there for part of college (whoops). Finally I deciphered the maneuvers for As. 

I don't know if it was maturity. Or the classes got better, especially in college. Or I got smarter. Whatever the culprit, I didn't ever get over thinking grades were rotten deep down. I still think they're overvalued, the trophy of a game that does not test for what is most important, learning, instead rewarding a certain type of memorization and participation. Not that people who get good grades don't learn or have sight of what's important, just that the grades themselves are not fostering that process. 

Eh, it's all idealistic.

Anyways, the narrator refers to Quality as the essence of everything, the reality of us and all, the Tao (real one, not spoken one). He proposes that we cannot define "Quality"; it is. It fully encompasses both subjectivity and objectivity. This is an intriguing way of turning things over in the mind.

Nuclear Weapons

There are nine countries that have nuclear weapons. The following is that list along with the number of warheads in each respective stockpile, including retired but still intact warheads. 

 

Russia               6,372

USA                  5,800   

China                320

France               290

UK                    195

Pakistan            160

India                 150

Israel                 90

North Korea      35   

South Africa is the only nation to ever create then disband its nuclear weapons program. Development of a bomb began in 1974 amidst mounting international pressure to break the apartheid system. The U.S. relinquished its support for the program in 1976, but Israel remained steadfast, exchanging technology and raw materials with the segregationist government. UN Resolution 3379 called it "the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism."

The end of apartheid in 1989 marked the end of the nuclear weapons program as well. Under President de Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela, South Africa signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and agreed to IAEA inspections in 1991.

Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery

There is a cemetery outside Tehran called Behesht-e-Zahra, "The Paradise of Zahra" in Farsi. (Yea, I linked Wikipedia. I feel bad because I know this encyclopedia isn't so reputable. But I could find almost nothing at all online about this graveyard. Only a bunch of media outlets re-publishing an AP story that I am using for the rest of this post. The report is also where I learned about this place. But I must say I'm a bit surprised at the lack of information on it. Not suggesting any nefarious reasons, just startled to see the internet not spilling over the brim with data.).

What caught my eye in this article was the size of the cemetery. There are around 1.6 MILLION bodies there. The graves cover more than a thousand acres.  It's in the news because the facilities are being overwhelmed with COVID deaths, bodies coming in at a rate higher than during even the butcherous Iran-Iraq War. They're digging fifty percent more tombs than usual. 

This made me wonder how old this sacred site must be. It is Tehran's main burial spot, after all, the capital of an ancient civilization prospering for over two thousand years. Actually, it was built in 1970. Tehran itself became the national seat of power in 1786, relatively recently in Persian history. Persepolis, in contrast, the Achaemenid capital, was created in the 5th century BCE.