The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Aphorisms are picture-less memes.  Change my mind.

 I actually thought this was going to be a book discussing historical aphorisms, brief pithy truisms or observations like, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  It is in fact hundreds of Taleb’s aphorisms.  Oh well, if anyone deserves my $12 it’s Taleb. 

 The Postface chapter is actually the most important part of the whole book.  I like aphorisms, but I prefer much more meaty discourse and dissection of ideas.  Aphorisms are powerful and useful mental tools, and when you throw it out, it gives you a certain credibility for no reason except that other people have heard the aphorism.  For instance, at work, I keep using the term, “mission creep.”  So many times, we’ll embark on a temporary fix or an initial plan, but it starts to keep growing and growing for no other reason than momentum.  It usually happens when people do not work on principles and foundations.  In fact, most people are like this.  In school, we don’t learn principles and foundations which would then enable us to improvise and create our own methodologies, processes, techniques, and tactics.  Instead, we learn to memorize thousands of existing methodologies, processes, techniques, and tactics without a true understanding of why we are doing it.  When you learn why you’re doing something, you can then go off and work by yourself and come up with your own solutions.  Our modern education system does not appear to be interested in that.  It would rather have millions of people simply memorize thousands of rules and techniques not ever questioning why.  As a result, you have mission creep.  People keep on doing what they started to do even when it accomplishes its objective.  They don’t know when to stop, because they don’t know why they started. 

 One of the most important concepts Taleb touches upon in the Postface is the fact that nature and the universe are filled with mysteries and unobservable and unmeasurable things outside our senses, our intelligence, and our technology.  How do we exist in such a world?  The answer provided by humans since the Scientific Revolution is to be arrogant and conceited and pretend that you know 99% of everything there is to know, and things outside the realm of our sense or scientific study is total nonsense, meaningless, impact-less, bullshit you can pretend does not exist at all.  The Scientific Revolution was more a counterrevolution against organized religion, but they threw out the baby with the bathwater.  What they did was simply replace a religious  rigid, authoritarian intellectual despotism with an academic, scientific rigid, authoritarian intellectual despotism.  The only redeeming quality of the new order was that one could use science to disprove existing convention albeit slowly and with great resistance.  When people question the all-encompassing authority of science to explain and exist in nature, they are immediately labeled either anti-intellectual religious types or in the case of Taleb, an over-intellectual rabble-rouser.  If you get Taleb, however, you are on your way to intellectual freedom and much deeper understanding and appreciation of nature than any rationalist scientist.  If science proves anything it is the more you know, the more you realize you know very little.  There is little evidence to show that we are close to a total understanding of nature.  All evidence shows that we are realizing we are increasingly further and further away from this place that may not even exist.  Yes, nature may create creatures that will never at any point in time fully understand it.  The question is, however, how do you want to live in the meantime?  By no means, am I encouraging people to live under a rock and stop questioning and investigating nature.  Quite the contrary, I am suggesting that there are other ways to both understand and appreciate nature outside of the scientific method, and using only the scientific method requires one to discount and ignore the vast quantity of reality that cannot be explained or measured by existing technology and intelligence. 

 Whether we like it or not, we are not completely rational and logical beings.  In fact, our desire for science to explain everything is irrational.  Our desire for complete, comprehensible answers to everything is irrational.  Ask anyone if they believe in god or not.  Very few will say, “I honestly can’t say.  Sometimes I feel god may exist, sometimes I don’t.  It all depends on the weather and time of day.  And my definition of god is not going to be the same as anyone else.”  We like much more definitely and concise answers like, “No way, there’s no scientific evidence,” or “Hell yeah, praise Jesus!”  In fact, aphorisms point to our desire for concise, simple answers for complex questions and phenomenon.  We are much more likely to accept something if it just sounds right, even if that means it rhymes and we can sing it. 

 If we were rational beings, we would simply accept the fact that we know very little, what we do know is probably wrong, all scientific knowledge will be rewritten with new tools and technology, much of our lives are spent in an irrational and unconscious stupor, we have no true freewill, we live in an ambiguous ephemeral state that may not even be real, the reality in our heads is not the same as the reality outside our heads, we are constantly reinventing our motives and reasons for doing things, our memories are twisted and corrupted, we will die never knowing the truth, and I’m completely okay with that.  Fact is, the reality that we know and love, would not exist without our irrational instincts and desires and fears.  In other words, we have constructed a reality around perpetuating our DNA, but that is the only reality we know, and if we were to observe a reality outside of this, it would not make any sense, it would have no purpose, it would be neither good nor bad, neither ugly or beautiful, and we would simply hate it. 

 “The mind can be a wonderful tool for self-delusion-it was not designed to deal with complexity and nonlinear uncertainties.  Counter to the common discourse, more information means more delusions: our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age…  Our mental architecture is at an increased mismatch with the world in which we live.

 This leads to sucker problems: when the map does not correspond to the territory, there is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic “scientist,” the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call “epistemic arrogance,” this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved-who enter a state of denial, imagining the territory as fitting his map.”

 “Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of “rational” models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.”

 I haven’t even finished reading the book and may not.  I’m not particularly fond of an endless list of soundbites, profound or otherwise. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Bed-Procrustes-Philosophical-Practical-Aphorisms-ebook/dp/B004C43F9S/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1533436960&sr=1-6&keywords=taleb

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston

This true story captures not only the archeological journey to find the legendary Lost City of the Monkey God but also a wild history about how other explorers tried or made it look like they were trying to find the Lost City.  It goes under the category of quests for things that are more about the quest than the thing.  It’s all about the setting and buildup, and the author does a great job of building up the suspense and background.  The story has everything except romance.  It has a mystery, history, charlatans, outrageous dangers, death, disease, greed, gold, a multi-millionaire collector, and adventure.  It’s sort of like the Wizard of Oz.  It’s not so important finding the Wizard of Oz as it is making the journey where Dorothy gets to discover her heart, her courage, and her intellect as they do battle with her wickedness, evil, anger, jealousy, and fears.  In the end, the Wizard is revealed as not this external entity that can fix Dorothy’s problems but rather the journey itself is what fixed Dorothy’s problem.  Another way to look at the story is that some trauma, what is symbolized by the tornado, has caused Dorothy to dissociate and develop a fractured personality where her brain, heart, and courage are acting independently.  The yellow brick road puts them all back together as a unit, and as such, they help her combat evil, anger, and fear instead of separately which happens when you suffer a trauma.  When they find Oz, they realize Oz is not a pill you take to fix your problem, the fix is the journey you take where you pull your brain, heart, and courage together again.  In a sense, the journey to find the Lost City is about humanity itself trying to put pieces of itself back together, and along the way, you encounter greed, fear, suffering, wonder, awe, teamwork, brains, compassion, etc. 

 One of the most profound books I ever read was the Self-Illusion which completely obliterates the notion of the individual.  The question then remains, what are we?  On one level we are an illusion, but on another level, we have to be something that creates an illusion.  Are we DNA carriers, DNA donkeys, DNA slaves, DNA worker ants?  I have another hypothesis.  Our DNA creates the illusion of self, but it also creates the illusions of good and evil, love and hatred, fear and courage, curiosity, wickedness and compassion, etc.  Do you get where I’m going?  We are all these separate illusions that come together to form a journey, and we are not the person at the end of the journey or the beginning.  There is no person remember.  We are the journey.  We are the amalgamation of good and evil, love and hatred, fear and courage, all coming together.  That’s all there is, the journey.  DNA is the plot, but we get to play out all the characters, we are all the characters.  When you look at other people, the illusion makes you see individuals, and you think the cause of their behavior comes from inside them, whereas in reality, the cause of their behavior is the result of everything outside them interacting with the DNA inside them.  There is no line.  Only our skin makes us think there is a line to cross.  When you see someone acting out of fear or love, what you see is fear and love simply being expressed differently through what you think is a different person.  In reality, we are all truly one, but one amalgam of different illusions perpetrated by DNA.  What happens when you die, the only thing that ceases to exist is the illusion of yourself.  Once that illusion is gone, what remains are the illusions of good and evil, love and hatred, wickedness and kindness, etc. that are still perpetuated in other vessels that continue to believe that they are individuals.  Perhaps somewhere the history of your self-illusion remains, perhaps an ASI stores it somewhere, and you get to play out your self-illusion again or at a different level somewhere, but if this is not the case, then when you die, you simply stop perpetuating the illusion of you, John Doe, and you evaporate.  While that certainly sucks, perhaps its mockingly soothing to know that you never really existed in the first place anyhow, and quite simply, you awake as some god or sentient being that is self-aware and encompasses all good and evil, hatred and love in the universe.  You wake up as if from a dream and go, wow, that was a weird person to be, John Doe, what a weird life. 

 In my opinion, dreams and stories represent reality a lot better than waking, conscious experience which is all predicated on illusions.  In our dreams, if you ever looked at yourself in the mirror, you would soon realize that you are not who you think you are, and your face morphs and changes around.  The dream is telling you what only recently scientists and researchers are discovering about the mind, and that is, the self is an illusion.  What all dreams and stories have in common is the simple threading together of good and evil, love and hatred, adventure, courage and fear, etc., and while these are all illusions too, that is all that really exists.  Certainly, the apparatus for the illusions exist, the DNA, the particles, the atoms, the quarks, but the they mean nothing.  What exists is the journey they take, the illusions they create.

 After a while, you actually don’t care whether they find the Lost City or not, but you know there has to be one or else it would not have brought all these nutty, colorful characters together.  Personally, I’d like to skate professional roller derby, but sometimes I wonder if that’s just a pipe dream.  But the important question is, if I knew the ending, the possibility that it is just that, a pipe dream, would I regret the amazing journey and not do it all over again knowing the ending?  Sometimes we have to just accept the fact that goals and dreams are not always meant to come true, that what makes them more valuable that attainment is the journey, the excuse to make crawl out of your comfort zone, exercise your body or mind or spirit, and meet a lot of interesting people along the way.  Perhaps unfortunately, people who are overly obsessed with their goals miss the whole point of life, don’t actually even enjoy the journey at all, and without enjoying the journey, they are much less likely to actually reach their goals.  When I was in high school, I became obsessed with padding my college resume with extracurricular achievements.  One goal was becoming a national cycling champion, but in obsessing about that goal, I set about to train more, but I lost my passion for the sport, and training became more of a chore, a means to a more valuable end, and I actually started to train less with less intensity while spending more time reading about cycling and trying to find shortcuts to my goal.  When your goal becomes more important than anything else, it makes sense to invest less in the process as possible, to find shortcuts, but for most goals, actually, there are no shortcuts, and you have to really enjoy the journey to get to the goal, and then you realize, hopefully, that it was the journey that meant more than achieving the goal.  The goal was just there to put all the pieces together.  I actually took this roller derby class in Vegas recently, and it was about introducing play into practice, and we did one exercise aimlessly without any goal, and then we did it again with the goal of being the fastest one to do it, and suddenly, everyone was energized and excited and started colliding and having fun.  It never really mattered who did it the fastest.  But by just inventing that goal, it made the game a lot more interesting, vigorous, exciting, and fun.  But people who are so obsessed with winning would probably have no fun at all and become outraged and frustrated by losing. 

 One of the more interesting side stories is the history of Honduras and how it became known as a Banana Republic, because it was exploited for bananas.  The British banks had loaned the Honduran government more money than they could possibly repay and threatened to have the British Army invade Honduras.  US President Taft thought any European power invading Central America was unacceptable so JP Morgan was recruited to buy Honduras’ debt at 15 cents to the dollar, but “Morgan’s agents would physically occupy Honduran customs offices and shortstop all tax receipts to collect the debt.”  Imagine if banks have this much power to threaten war and occupy a nation’s government agencies to collect on debt, could they in fact be doing this with larger nations, notably our very own government?  This isn’t a conspiracy theory, at least for Hondurans.  I think it’s actually a crime how US history classes in school breezed over so many crimes committed by our country and virtually ignore the outsized impact of banking and their powers on global history.  This isn’t a conspiracy theory, at least for Hondurans.

 One appropriate thing occurred which bridges what had happened to the natives of the New World.  Half the people of the expedition were infected by leishmaniasis braziliensis which is a horrifying parasitic worm that is deposited into the human blood stream by blood-sucking sand flies.  It actually uses our own white blood cells against us.  White blood cells consume the parasites, but then the parasites multiply within the white blood cells and then burst out like in Alien.  The result is skin and bones that gets destroyed without causing the victim to bleed out immediately, so the victim slowly gets eaten up without dying.  If it happens on the face, the entire face gets eaten up until the victim basically can’t breathe or eat anymore, but that’s after the entire face disappears. 

 Previously, I read a book about the Black Plague and my hypothesis was that it really unshackled Europeans from religion and precipitated the Enlightenment and Existentialism and then an almost religious worship of science and technological progress.  You can just imagine that all these Europeans worshipping away to a god that doesn’t seem to listen as most of their loved ones die in the most horrific way.  What would you do if you were religious?  As a culture, wouldn’t you ditch religion and embrace science with the promise of doing a better job at finding out what causes diseases and how they can be prevented?  However, almost the opposite occurred in the New World.  The natives worshipped their own gods, and the pandemic that was even more lethal than the Black Plague wiped up possibly 90% of their populations with records of 100% in some places.  First, you would ditch your religion, but as it happened, the invaders brought their own religion and actually engaged in a systematic, widespread campaign to convert all the natives.  Instead of embracing science which they had yet to discover, why wouldn’t you embrace the religion of your victor who seems less vulnerable to disease?  Perhaps their god is the true god, and your god is the false one who can’t even protect you.  So the native of the New World embraced Catholicism, and to this day, they embrace it with greater zeal than the Europeans. 

 What is actually scary and perhaps poetic justice is that many of these warm-climate diseases which overwhelming affect the Third World because of both the heat and unsanitary, overcrowded living conditions, are migrating north because of climate change.  In an interesting twist, the northern First World is like the New World that has not yet been exposed in large quantities to these diseases whereas Third World people are, simply by natural selection, developing more robust resistance to these diseases.  Once these diseases hit the First World, they will be hitting a significantly less resistant population and infecting disproportionately more people. 

 We now go back to the old adage that nature wins, always.  Arrogant humans love to claim that they have transcended or mastered nature.  Particularly odious is the passage in Genesis 1:26, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”  You arrogant, stupid son of a bitch!  This one passage has legitimized the systematic and thoughtless destruction of our planet, and to this day, right-wing religious conservatives use this passage to ignore climate change and justify the Capitalistic rape of our environment.  It has also implied that since man is permitted to rule over animals, why not permit man to rule over other men, men who behave like animals, who you can claim are nothing but heathen, godless, savages?  This passage then legitimizes slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and the wholesale exploitation of entire human populations in service of a few lucky elite.  Unfortunately, for the arrogant assholes who have no idea what science and nature are really all about, nature always wins.  The deadly diseases that are now mostly isolated in the Third World will – like the parasitic leish that explode out of white blood cells like in the movie Alien – will devastate the First World.  Not only will the First World face the uncomfortable reality that they are reproducing less and less, but the remaining few will now face more and more deadly diseases.  While certainly, the First World can argue that they can successfully replace their dwindling population with intelligent robots, none-the-less, as a population, they are being effectively contained and controlled by nature.  Nature always win.  The Third World which they have exploited, raped, enslaved, and pillaged, will simply overtake them just as the Old World had overtaken the New World. 

 “The Maya created a vibrant and brilliant society that, in the end, failed to adjust to a changing environment and the needs of its people; so did the Roman Empire and the ancient Khmer…”  Are you fucking kidding me?  What part of “failed to adjust to the needs of its people” is brilliant?  More like arrogant, elitist, obtuse, and stupid.  Do you really think that a civilization that exploits its workers for the sole benefit of a few wealthy and powerful elite is a good thing?  Is the author still brainwashed into believing that civilization is a wonderful human invention that liberated us from the “savagery” and “evils” of hunter-gatherer groups, and without civilization, humans would be roaming about like zombies eating other humans and their own children?  It is ultimately tragic that the author has yet to unshackle himself from this old public school indoctrination.  Why should we celebrate and describe as “vibrant” and “brilliant” a social phenomenon that causes pandemics, that causes widescale destruction of our habitat, that causes over a billion to die in countless wars, that caused slavery, that causes countless social divisions and discrimination whereby women are always treated as inferior?  Sorry asshat, you’re still brainwashed.  What part of the Roman tradition of eating until you vomit and then eating more and watching religious minorities get consumed by lions in an auditorium is vibrant and brilliant?  So a few people created cool poetry, literature, and some scientific breakthroughs that would allow for cooler weapons and even more exploitation and destruction of the environment.  Is that a price you’re willing to pay?  The British Empire murdering, raping, enslaving millions, but hey, without it, we wouldn’t have Shakespeare!  Wah-wah.

 One day, extraterrestrials land on Earth.  It’s a rotting wasteland, but they discover lost civilizations, Manhattan!  They go, wow, this place was vibrant and brilliant, they had the opera, the Met, the Mets, computer hard drives will uncover cool novels and poems, and the aliens will lament about how such a great civilization was destroyed.  Or will be slightly more intelligent than the author and go, wow, what a bunch of fucking idiots, they spent all their time enjoying the Met, the Mets, opera, and reading cool novels, but in the meantime their government and big businesses completely annihilated human life on the planet through the destruction of the environment and perpetuation of global chaos and war for profit.  What a bunch of fucking IDIOTS!  My guess is that if the aliens are smart enough to travel through space, they were smart enough not to make the same mistakes we are making.  Now imagine this, they’re so smart, they have recreated Earth and its lost civilizations, and we are in fact part of that recreated simulation so they can study what Earthlings were like and how we behaved and thought.  And they’re like, hey, look, a few of them were actually smart enough to see this coming, and they tried to warn everyone else, but nobody listened.  Shame.

 This book was a great read, but the fact that the author just doesn’t get it at the end is a great shame.  Civilizations are not great.  They’re the most diseased form of nature, a way of life that depends on the cruel oppression of the majority of organisms and concurrently, the cruel exploitation of all forms of nature.  Civilizations perish, because they exhaust their human or natural resources and self-destruct.  The lesson here should be that our civilization is headed in the exact same direction as the Easter Island idiots and the Monkey God idiots.  Nature always wins, and whether it is another global war, a catastrophic global economic meltdown, a pandemic, or pollution finally killing us off, nature will always cleanse itself of selfish, exploitative, species-centric assholes.  Fortunately, the author did very poorly to prove his point that civilization is awesome and finding lost civilizations glamorizes civilization.  Rather the opposite, all the stories of con-artists, thieves, drug traffickers, corrupt governments, armies, and even exploitative archeologists is nothing but proof to me that the minions of civilizations are all a bunch of deluded, psychopathic, selfish assholes and every lost or dead civilization had it comeuppance and deserved to perish into the jungle or dirt as they were not even worth the dirt they disturbed. 

 Doesn’t the author get the joke he’s telling?  This is a story of civilization uncovering civilization and then idiotically wondering, is this not glorious and beautiful?  The irony of the scoundrels and idiots who tried to find this lost civilization for glory, wealth, fame, and selfish grandeur.  This is truly the story of the Wizard of Oz but the inverse, where the author is Dorothy, and along the way he picks up examples of greed, egotism, and evil, and in the end, they find the lost civilization which is not some great, wonderful, magical paradise but rather a shithole where greed, egotism, and evil dwell. 

Perhaps the most unintentionally self-revealing books ever written about civilization.

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-City-Monkey-God-Story-ebook/dp/B01G1K1RTA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534828739&sr=8-1&keywords=lost+city+of+the+monkey+god

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Vegas Diaries by Holly Madison

The main reason I chose this book is because I went to Vegas, and I needed to pump up the city in my mind, as if Vegas isn’t already pumped up.  I’ve been to Vegas so often, however, that it’s lost much of its appeal with me.  The resorts are so large, it takes forever to get from one to another.  The malls in them are all pretty much the same shit you’d find at any mall at home.  The high-end malls are so absurdly out-of-reach that I don’t even bother entering them and pretending like I can afford anything except maybe a $300 business card holder.  I’m probably at the age where I don’t fall for the whole glitz and wealth and status bullshit.  The Strip isn’t a novelty for me anymore, and all I see are overpriced drinks and food advertisements everywhere.  For me, it’s actually more about people watching and talking with people from all over the world at bars.  I’m so done with the mega-clubs and hours in line and $40 to $60 covers and all, although, on off-nights, with my Nevada ID, I can get in free to some, and they’re not annoyingly overcrowded.  But what would it be like to be a celebrity VIP in Vegas?  The problem with this biography is that it’s not all that new for Holly who gets treated like a VIP in LA.  In one instance, she gets the casino’s VIP host who walks her through all the back entrances, gets her into a private room at a restaurant, and the best seats in the house, etc.  It sort of sounds mundane, but then again, people who go through trauma make their trauma seem mundane.  It’s actually a rare thing to be able to convey shock and awe into words, and often times the written word deflates the event.

 

Vegas is a place of extravagant dreams or expectations at least.  It’s the perfect con, but somewhere in there, if you play your cards right and budget yourself, you can extract a fairly decent vacation without paying more than you expected.  Unfortunately, the lavish place doesn’t pay the insane air-conditioning bill on people who budget themselves.  It is a place that draws the big dreamers who likewise have suffered big depravations and poverty.  They’re the ones who go to Vegas expecting to win it big at the table, get a VIP suite, get invited as a VIP guest to the VIP table at a VIP club, get limousined around instead of taking Ubers and Lyfts and meeting them at convoluted places hidden in the entrails of parking garages, and some unholy orgy in their VIP suite until the sun comes up.  Nope, never gonna happen.  In fact, the average guy has even less chance of getting a one-night-stand in Vegas, because no normal woman would ever go to a Vegas bar alone to meet quality men.  The bars are loaded with escorts anyway.  Women go to Vegas, but much like the dudes, they go in big groups and are loath to split with the group for some one-night-stand.  Frankly, you’re better off in any big city other than Vegas.  Vegas is just a mirage out in the desert, and if you want to have fun, it’s about people-watching and talking to foreign people from foreign lands who all suffer that fun iridescent glow of being in the biggest party town in the universe without being much of a party anyway because the women are all in big groups so you’re just hanging with a bunch of dudes anyway.

One of the more poignant parts of the diaries was a passage, “These guys would probably think I was gross, I thought.  Experience had led me to believe that guys couldn’t handle my past.”  No matter how famous, rich, or powerful women get, I sense a lot of them still have huge insecurities that are simply conditioned in or perhaps genetic.  There was a time I was hanging out with this statuesque, gorgeous, model-looking redhead, and although, she knew she was attractive, she knew what kind of guys she could attract, none-the-less, she always felt insecure about her looks, that she wasn’t petite enough.  You can’t win I guess.  Petite women think they’re too short and tall women think they’re not petite enough.  However, Holly does has a big issue that is both her blessing and her curse.  She will forever be known as one of Hugh Hefner’s concubines, someone most people assume would only sleep with an old, fuddy-duddy, boring man because of his fame and money and an opportunity to become famous and wealthy herself.  Of course, in today’s world and for me personally, it really isn’t a big deal, but for many people out there, she must sense the scorn or shame.  The diaries are her attempt to lose that old image and reinvent herself or at least her image, as she notes in a city that is all about reinvention.  But that particular passage hit me hard.  As nice as it is to be famous and wealthy, she walks around thinking that guys that she’s gross, that a bunch of goofy-ass 20-something band dudes would reject her or look down upon her.

One thing people often get wrong about celebrities, especially attractive ones, is that they were always popular and attractive, so they’re probably stuck up and snobby.  Those who seek celebrity, however, are almost always wallflowers in their youth, overlooked by everyone.  They’re the ones who crave attention of any kind, and in their isolation and imagination, they start to crave limitless attention.  When I was a kid, I didn’t have a car, so I didn’t dream about driving a Toyota Camry, I dreamt of driving a Jaguar or Bentley.  Once the wallflower becomes a celebrity, people are amazed at how shy and reserved they really are and this often comes across as arrogance or aloofness.  This seems to be the case with Holly.  She was probably a wallflower as a kid.  Kids who grew up popular and attractive tend to peak early.  They get all the attention they could ever want in high school, and it’s no longer a big deal, so they often find a mate, settle down, and get married and have kids.  It’s the wallflowers who never got attention that still have issues with high school that want to go out and become famous and well-known by everyone.

Another misconception, I think, is that the most popular kids are the meanest.  From my personal experience, a lot of them are actually the nicest and kindest.  They have everything, why flaunt it?  In the movie Mean Girls, the most popular girls make fun of the least popular girls.  In my school, the most popular girls didn’t even know the least popular girls existed.  Why waste your time?  It is actually the gatekeepers that are the meanest and nastiest.  These are kids on the fringe of the popular group, kids who barely make the group, because they have some perceived weakness, like they’re a little chubby, not as rich, they have acne, whatever.  They’re so insecure about their status being on the fringe that they’re the most cruel and vicious with anyone trying to join the popular group.  They’re the ones making fun of the unpopular kids, because in their minds, it makes them look different from the unpopular ones and more popular.

I could only read halfway through before I gave up.  Certainly, Holly comes across as a nice person, but fact of the matter is, she sells her image and her looks, and as a savvy businessperson, she must then focus and become obsessed with her image and looks.  She never goes any deeper than, gee, golly, Las Vegas is where you reinvent yourself.  She never does what would have made this book readable, and that is look even deeper than that and go, you know, what I learned in Vegas is that when you sell an image, especially your own, you fall into a narcissistic trap and actually believe in what you’re selling.  While some con-artists can remove themselves from the con and go, ha ha, this is a total lie and I’m totally taking advantage of people, most don’t.  Most con-artists start to believe in their own con and then con themselves.  It’s natural.  The greatest salespeople live lavish, ridiculous, shallow, consumerist lives, because they’ve sold themselves on the exact same thing they’ve been selling others, you can have it all, material wealth makes you cool and happy, go into debt, live for the moment, be shallow, show it all off like a boss.

Out of curiosity I went and looked up Holly’s World on YouTube and it blew my mind away that once upon a time, people thought reality shows were cool, watching a bunch of shallow, antisocial, self-absorbed people sitting at a café sipping a cocktail and talking about their relationships and almost always whining about someone being disrespectful.  It was almost comical.

Self-promotion, like a gambling addiction, is one of the most self-destructive diseases.  As an author, I’ve been told that unless you already have a national platform from being famous for something, you have to promote the hell out of your own book.  I’ve never liked doing that, not only because it’s a lot of work and money, but because something just innately feels wrong about selling your art.  It feels special to me.  It’s a part of me, a deep part of my soul, and for me to go around trying to convince people to pay $13 for a deep part of my soul, is soul crushing.

Another disease is the idea that you exist at all.  What I mean to say is that, what you think of yourself is an illusion.  The idea of “I” of an individual mind and existence is a warped illusion perpetuated by our DNA and promoted especially by our materialistic, individualistic American culture.  A long time ago, we were more collective-minded.  We thought of ourselves not as individuals, but relationships tied to our family and place of origin.  If someone asked you, who are you?  We once would have said, I am son to Jacob, I am Jacobson.  I am from Martin.  I am Jacobson de Martin.

No matter how much you think you are a freewill individual, you actually belong to something, always.  You may claim that you don’t belong to your parents or family anymore, your hometown, that you’re liberated and free, but you actually belong to the big business and statist machine.  A large portion of your income goes to both.  You worship both.  Your identity is exactly the same as what their demographic researchers say you are.  Middle class, millennial, single, left-wing, brand-name consumer.  They then convince you that you belong to this category, then they target the category with products and services geared toward that group.  Applebee’s and Olive Garden for the Baby Boomers, Five Guys and Buffalo Wild Wings for Gen X, food trucks and Top Ramen for the Millennials.  By convincing you that you are a freewill individual, big business and government trick you into believing that their subliminal marketing and promotional propaganda doesn’t affect you.  You are an intelligent, conscientious consumer who is not biased by endorsements, brand names, ads, promotions, and product placement.  This is like telling an alcoholic that they are not an alcoholic.  The first step to fixing yourself is admitting that you are not a freewill individual.  You are not as intelligent and conscientious a consumer as you think.  You are vulnerable, gullible, biased, mostly irrational, and highly dependent on other people’s values and judgment to make your own decisions.

In Vegas, the message is, you are a rich, glamorous, popular, happening, cool, trendy cat.  You spend lavishly to impress others.  You love to party and get wasted drunk.  After having been to Vegas a dozen times, I’m quite aware that I’m not a rich, glamorous, popular, happening, cool, trendy cat, so I no longer pretend to be one.  I no longer go to their stupid large EDM clubs and waste $100 on over-priced corporate swill hoping to run into some hot lady who just happens to be all by herself by the bar and by some magical Vegas pixy dust, we hit it off and spend the rest of the time together in Vegas.  I no longer believe I’ll put $20 on 13 on a roulette table and win $700.  I no longer believe I’ll get a free suite.  Instead I roam around Freemont and watch people and take Lyft’s to local restaurants off the strip.  This doesn’t mean I’m a liberated, freewill individual.  Instead, I simply identify with and belong to another group, some might call hipster, a big business attempt to tarnish and ridicule people who don’t like big businesses, others may just call anti-big business and anti-big government.

There used to be a time when I wanted to be on a reality TV show and become famous, but I realize it’s just overcompensation for lack of a social life and a sense of belonging with a more intimate social group.  Now I have my own social group, the craving for fame has nearly evaporated.  Perhaps unfortunately, the only biographies you’ll read are about people who lacked a social life and then dedicated themselves obsessively to become the best at whatever field they chose.  Unfortunately, people with social lives don’t sit down alone for hours each day documenting their wonderful social lives, so we will likely never get a closeup view of what it’s like to have a great social life from others.

 

 

 

 

The Comeback: Greg LeMond, the True King of American Cycling, and a Legendary Tour de France by Daniel de Vise

This is the second biography of Greg LeMond I’ve read.  The first was Slaying the Badger which I found extremely entertaining, especially reading about Greg’s hijinks as a clueless American in France.  There really does need to be a movie made about LeMond.  It’s a perfect story of drama, comedy, tragedy, misery, and triumph.  It even has a perfect love story.  It’s not a movie, because Americans are dumb fucks who don’t appreciate cycling, but as this book smartly points out, America once was the cycling capital of the universe and had two of the greatest cyclists ever, Major Taylor and some other guy.

 The question I have is what makes a champion athlete, and unfortunately, books like this have led me to believe that not only does it involve unusual motivation and exceptional capacity and enthusiasm for pain and suffering, but also, simple natural ability.  In other words, if you don’t have natural genetic ability, no matter how motivated and delighted by pain or the endorphins that come with pain you are, you will never be a world champion, and this is perhaps the greatest unsung tragedy, athletes, who no matter how hard they train and suffer, they cannot beat that one adversary who trains just as hard but simply has natural ability.  LeMond’s natural ability is proven.  He has unnatural lung capacity or VO2, liters of oxygen per minute.  LeMond has 92.0 compared to the average male of 45.  However, Oskar Svendsen has the maximum of 97.5, but nobody has heard of him because apparently, he is not as motivated or enthused by pain.  The book also covers Laurent Fignon, and tells of how easy it was for him to quickly adopt cycling and keep up with his friends who were already cycling for a while.  But genetic ability comes in all forms.  You may be a great chess master or know a lot about wine with sufficient training and experience, but the masters have that certain extra edge, incredible memory.  Of course, there is a lot to be said of people with average genetic ability becoming exceptional at cycling, chess, and wine knowledge.  It’s not like their efforts are all for naught, but fact is, they will never, ever, ever be the world’s greatest.  By the same token, someone with natural gifts will never, ever, ever be the world’s greatest without the proper motivation and ability to struggle and endure through training.

 Greg experienced the perfect storm.  Along with his natural genetic ability, he started cycling along with his father who was also of course, genetically gifted, and pushed his son to keep up with him.  They happened to be raised in the best training area in the world, well-paved roads high up in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada where US Olympians go to train.  Even as an adult, I would not tackle the roads to Tahoe that LeMond rode as a teenager.  Arguably, LeMond had extra motivation born from sexual abuse by a “friend” of the family.  It is said that if you suffer trauma, you have this odd tendency to relive it or pursue activities or behaviors that simulate the trauma.  Both LeMond and Fignon also “suffered” short attention spans and restlessness.  Another thing I’ve noticed is that great athletes tend to have young parents.  There’s no doubt that your genes deteriorate with age, and children of old parents have a much higher rate of autism and other problems. 

 The author covers the 1986 Tour de France which was the focus of the book, Slaying the Badger.  In 1985, Greg could have easily pulled ahead of Hinault and won the tour, but his coach deceived him about how far back Hinault was, making him think he was less than a minute behind when in fact he was a few minutes behind.  Hinault publicly declared that he would help LeMond win in 1986, but during Stage 12, Hinault mounted an attack without letting LeMond know and broke away from him.  LeMond was not allowed to attack and chase down his own teammate.  For Stage 13, Hinault made a suicidal early attack that would require him to ride alone over 100 km.  The author argues that Hinault’s reason could have been calculated in that if he lost, he would have kept his promise to let LeMond win, but if he won, there would be no question that he was the greatest and deserved to win the tour.  I believe the fact that Hinault didn’t eat that day is evidence that his conscience got the better of him.  It is unbelievable to think that a five-time Tour de France winner forgets to eat especially when he’s out by himself.  Perhaps Hinault went mad with megalomania and truly thought he was a god, but I have to believe he knew he made a promise to Greg, and he also knew that Greg could have beaten him in 1985. 

 I think Hinault was deeply conflicted, and interestingly, I just read an article in Bicycling about how this kid screwed over another kid in a junior national championship race.  The kid, let’s call him Hinault, was able to reach the other kid, let’s call him LeMond, who broke away, but he sucked wheel and couldn’t help LeMond.  LeMond kept trying to lose him by slowing down and speeding up but in the process, both of them were losing ground to the pack.  So Hinault goes, hey, I’ll let you win, let’s just keep a steady pace.  LeMond goes, okay fine, and pulls Hinault all the way to the end of the race, but at the last second, Hinault comes off LeMond’s wheel and takes the win.  Hinault always felt guilty about it, and later on, he reunites with LeMond and gives him the junior championship jersey he won by trickery. 

 In the final analysis, the book and history makes Hinault out to be a loser.  He won five Tour de Frances, but like Lance Armstrong, he did not do it with honor.  If he had truly helped LeMond win in 1986 and ignored all the pressure to steal a 6^th win, he would have gone down in history as one of the greatest.  Instead, at least in my mind, he goes down like Armstrong, as a tragedy of ego and greed.  LeMond comes out the true hero, and in one of the most frustrating twists in sports history, his stepbrother shot him on a hunting trip so we’ll never know if LeMond could have also won 5 Tour de Frances and truly established himself as one of the greatest.  Earlier, Hinault had accidentally shot LeMond on a hunting trip.  You would think LeMond would stop fucking taking neophytes out on hunting trips or at least giving them loaded shotguns. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075VDQD2W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1