Systems.

 

Recently I ran across a quote I like from a guy named James Clear from his book Atomic Habits:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”

I have not read Atomic Habits because I try to steer clear of anything that has the whiff of a self-help books, because I think it is a fairly exploitative genre, however I have head about a couple of books recently that seem to be carefully straddling a line between self-help and just — you know — topic-oriented non-fiction. Clear’s book seems to be one and Greg McKeown’s Essentialism is another.

I have heard both of these guys on podcasts and … I’m not sure. They seem like nice people, but I also suspect they may be on that Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, Donald Trump axis somewhere … white men, amIright?

Anyway, my point is simply that I agree with Clear’s quote above. Your goals only really matter to you, it is the work you do underneath them that makes all the difference. This is why I write here all the time about the schedules and diets I am trying to refine. However I also thought about it the other day when I was walking through Target and half the lights were out because California is trying to avoid rolling blackouts. It is also what I thought about when I talked to a friend up in Portland who is backing in 112 degree heat with no AC, just sitting in front of his fan and trying not to move for days at a time. 

We are a nation of people and those people all have a lot of goals, but we do not seem to be a nation of effective systems, which begs the question of the level we will fall to.

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Man Love.

To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize,and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire … those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.

Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.


Excerpted from The Politics of Reality by Marilyn Frye

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How Bullshit Works.

How terrible is our political life right now? Our civic life has all but gone up in smoke.

I think it is important to understand the how and the why. Below you will find a link to a recent episode of the show On the Media, which I trust. This episode explores what we call “the alt-right” and what that actually is. It explores how Breitbart News is only one thing Steve Bannon does, and it explains how all that works. It also deals with “fake news” and Facebook.

It is my humble opinion that this episode should be required listening for all Americans.

You should listen to it. It will make you feel better, it will piss you off, it will make you sad. But no matter what, it will help you understand the country we live in now. I think most of the people talked about here are sons of bitches, but I am happy to learn that their reality (just like mine) is underwritten by a basic machinery of logic. That means we can beat them.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.

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A Glimmer of Good News.

So how are you enjoying post-election America???

I had been looking forward to the end of the election-cycle and to maybe getting to worry about something else, please god anything else!

Well I guess I should have been more specific about that, huh?

It is hard not to obsess over everything going on. It is counter-intuitive, but I came across the below article and it is such a deep examination of the election that I actually found it relaxing to read. Perhaps because it is SO long and SO wonky. It also dispels some of the “narratives” surrounding this election by examining the actual information we currently have. As I am a fan of really wonky and deep examinations of … you know, basically anything, I found this to be a fantastic read. If you’re not burnt out on this kind of stuff, I would suggest giving it a shot. It is VERY long and VERY boring, but worth it.

If you’re hanging out online because you’re looking for something, anything to make you feel a little better, I will leave you with a little summary of one point made in the article:

Donald Trump received fewer actual votes than either John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012. That may change a little when we have all the numbers finalized in a few weeks, but it means that Trump did not actually discover some vast and previously invisible group of voters.

What happened in 2016 is that Hillary received about 6 million fewer votes than Obama in 2012 and about 9 million fewer votes than Obama in 2008.

Here is what that looks like:

What that means is we don’t actually live in a country overrun with racists and bigots and people pushing us toward collapse and chaos. It means we live in basically the same country we always have, we just got apathetic. Apathy is fixable.

Here is the article:

The 10 Most Common Post-Election Narratives, and Why They're All Wrong.

Keep your chin up and try to be nice to each other.

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My Open Letter to America.

I am an FDR Democrat and I have been wandering around in a daze since the Presidential election on Tuesday. I had expected that the election would be close, but I did not believe that Trump would win.

Over the past couple of days I have cried and I will probably cry more in the days to come. I have been imagining a gestapo secret police state funded by our tax dollars and waving our flag. I have been imagining an America where people who believe what I believe would be rounded up and put on trains and killed. That is the version of Trump’s America I have been thinking about and I have been asking myself how that could possibly happen here?

Today I realized that it has not happened. It certainly could, but it did not happen today and I doubt it will happen tomorrow, and - this is the important part - I do not believe it will happen in January, in 2017 or 2018, or ever.

Maybe I am naive.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that Trump is a feckless thug and a bully and I believe that he is a very real danger to our United States of America. However, more than that, I believe that he is a self-interested opportunist. He’s not a populist and anyone who voted for him thinking that, has been duped. He does not care about the middle class or the working people of this country. And while I agree that he is a racist, I don’t think he actually cares that much. He does not care about anyone who is not named Donald J. Trump. The border wall would be virtually impossible to actually build and I do not think it will actually get built because he doesn’t actually care about it.

Donald Trump only wanted to get elected President. I don’t think he cares about the next four years.

I’m not saying that nothing will happen. Plenty will happen and it will be bad. The next two years are going to be a horror show. Trump will put someone on the Supreme Court. Taxes will be cut, public programs will be defunded. Obamacare will likely get repealed in pieces, though some provisions are too popular to completely disappear. Women and minorities of every kind will be mistreated in some form. None of this is right. None of this good. None of this is fair. But these are things we can fight and I am ready for those fights. I am not going to apologize for the things I believe. I am every bit an American. But because I am an American, I am willing to admit that my side lost. We had more votes, but we lost the electoral college and that’s how it works in America.

We live in a country that elected Donald Trump fair and square. The result of that is going to be an increase in global warming, an increase in fear, a growing national debt, and a weakened, less-respected America on the world stage. That is just reality and I agree, it is awful.

However, it is not the worst-case-scenario. The worst case scenario is the utter descent of America into a fascist nightmare. I do not believe that is going to happen. Trump is a selfish and silly little man, but he is not actually a Hitler. Hitler cared enough about his anti-semitism to become a monster. Trump doesn’t care that much. He is a snake-oil salesman, all he cares about is selling his snake-oil, and America bought it. Those Americans who voted for him will very quickly figure out that he is not going to keep his promises to them, because he does not keep promises, because he never cared about those promises in the first place.

The people who are cheering him this week will hate him next year. They are angry and they are afraid, so they voted for someone who told them what they wanted to hear. That is all that has happened here, the quarter of this country that elected Donald Trump got played. Because tell me, does this make sense: They revolted against the establishment by voting for a rich New Yorker who used to be a Democrat?

The last 36 hours I couldn’t figure out how people I know and love could have voted to end our democracy, I realized today that none of them see it that way. For those of us who lost, this is a devastating and existential defeat. But to those who won, it’s just a win.

If you are reading this and you voted for Trump, I think you made a mistake and I think you will realize that soon. If you’re reading this and you voted for Hillary, take a deep breath, I promise you that the sun will come up tomorrow.

In the weeks and months and years to come, the one thing I am sure of is that this country is going to change quite a lot. I want to do my part to make sure it changes for the better. I think you want that too. So while we have difficult days ahead, they need not be the end days. Donald Trump is a punchline to a not very funny joke, however he is not a demon. I, for one, refuse to be afraid of a man that ridiculous.

To my Trump friends who are tired of getting called racists and sexists and xenophobes, now will be your chance to prove you aren’t those things.

To my Hillary friends who feel that the light has gone out of the world, I am here with this one little candle and I will keep it burning as long as there is blood in my body and a beat in my heart.

God bless America.

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The way that words mean things.

Thinking on the American Presidential general election which is fast approaching us in the way that a bullet approaches a body, I can not help but think that the Republicans are going to make us learn the difference between the words “collaborative” and “collaborationist”.

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An Old Pearl.

I have had a little but stuck in my brain all week. Something stuck in my craw. I had not been able to put my finger on it. It was like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue, but it never seems to come. I have had an idea, or a memory down there in the folds of my brains, like a little pearl down in the gray pink meat of an oyster, but I just couldn't quite figure out what it was.


Well I just realized what it was. JUST NOW! this is literally happening in real time!


So what was stuck in my craw? It was a fake short play I wrote in 2011!!!


It is reposted below.


The more things change, the more they stay the same

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Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.

Some of you may know that I have a background as a playwright and that from time to time I like to dash off short plays for fun. Well, here is a short play re-imagining a conversation/lame publicity stunt which recently took place between Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. 

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Scenes From an Italian Restaurant 
a short play 
by james bezerra 

ACT I SCENE I A man and a woman and the man’s disastrously bad “hair” sit at a table in a pizzeria. The woman is former Alaska Governor and current media-whore Sarah Palin. The man is former and current and perpetual media-whore Donald Trump. The hair is of an unknown composition. The three quietly eat their pizza slices. 

TRUMP: Hey Sarah, remember when we were politically relevant? 
PALIN: I don’t know what that word means. 

CURTAIN. 



Fin! 

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An Open Letter to Gertrude Stein.

An Open Letter to Gertrude Stein

by james bezerra

Oh Gertrude Stein you strange giant beast of a person you Nazi-collaborating tastemaker you who died decades before I managed to get to Paris who once upon reading the poetry of Picasso took him by the shoulders and proclaimed “Pablo go home and paint” you reminded me of something and in doing so made me happy immediately after having made me so unhappy you reminded me as I was sitting at the table where I do my writing you reminded me as I was reading you reminded me that I was reading like I read and that in so reading was failing to really read you. You. Gertrude. You strange giant.

Which is to say that I put the wrong hat on before I read you the other day. I guess I had forgotten what your deal is. It took me a page and a half of banging my face into the rough brick wall of “Composition as Explanation” before I took a step back and wiped the blood away and remembered that you were basically an anti-semitic Jewish lesbian before it was cool. When you wrote, “No one thinks these things when they are making when they are creating what is the composition, naturally no one thinks, that is no one formulates until what is to be formulated has been made” I jotted in the margin, “Can a brother get a comma?” and you (apparently) replied down through time: “No.”

But you reminded me of something Gertie, with your incoherent waterfall babble that at first pissed me off because when I sort the contents of my brain by effect I often place you Modernists at the same campsite as the Post-Structuralists whom I adore as one adores their own child but not other people’s, I blame the Deridian destruction of language as (one of) the philosophical underpinnings of the Neoliberalist resurgence that gave us Reaganite Doublespeak and made it possible for Connecticut-born millionaire and son of a President W to call himself “an outsider” I blame you because Patron Saint Stephen had to make the word “truthiness” just to keep the fuck up with the language of lying that you helped make possible when you turned the page into a swirling vortex of word gravy. Goddammit Gertie.

But you reminded me of something. You reminded me as I started marking the breath pauses in your sentences just so that I could keep up, you reminded me that you were basically writing poetry and I was notating it like music and you reminded me that together we had just invented jazz and you reminded me that Kerouac didn’t write about jazz he wrote in jazz and so why had I put on my reading hat to read you when I was sitting at my writing table and should have been reading you like I was writing you.

You reminded me to snap my fingers and to tap my foot along with your beat. You reminded me that when one seeks to manifesto on the virtue of the incomprehensibility of all things, that one need not do it in sentences that make even any small amount of sense. Basically.

You reminded me of my conflicted relationship with Donald Rumsfeld. You compelled me to watch that whole documentary again where Rummy mugs at the camera as he reads his memos the collected works of the greatest ever language poet of bureaucracy and in the silence on Errol Morris’s side of the camera you can hear him wanting to scream, “You’re a fucking maniac! But I just can’t quit you Donald.” Known knowns and unknown knowns and known unknowns. You did this to us Gertie. Somehow you made this possible from Paris a hundred years ago. Somehow with a bottle of wine and a chat with Hemingway and Woolf you made this possible Gertie and bombs and bombs and bombs from the sky fell. Awe. Shock. When you make things mean nothing you are stealing from the future because when you remove the inherency of meaning other people will always come along and fill the empty place with something else. We are a race of meaning hoarders Gertie it is our addiction and just because you have cleaned our home out and shown us how pretty it can be when it is empty does not mean we want it pretty and empty. We want things Gertie and maybe your thing is pretty but it is too pretty for us. We like carnival barkers and Apple watches and shit that is bad for us. We prefer even lies to the chilling existential dread of the meaninglessness that you are trying to show us. We don’t want to eat our vegetables Gertie. And so we get Donald.

We were fine Gertie with general mediocrity. When you take that away from us by showing us that it is mediocre we like bratty children or teenage daughters will always say to you, “Oh yeah? Well watch this!” and like a rebound relationship we overcorrect into a different kind of vacuousness one that at least is willing to claim to have meaning. Donald Trump is running for President Gertie and not sucking at it and that is okay because we all know that he is actually just a bunch of rats wearing a trenchcoat, but he like you is going to enable the lunatic psychopaths to seem like not craven lunatic wolf psychopaths. When you pull back the curtain and expose the lack of meaning in everything then you put us in a situation where we have to buy meaning from the pimps of fecal ideology (ie: Ted Cruz) because we just can’t stand for everything to be nothing. We are not all equipt to be nihilists Gertie. We don’t like knowing that the universe was started by an accidental explosion and that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Can you please just let us have some birthday cake and let us watch The Big Bang Theory in peace Gertie? And of course down through time you reply: “No.”

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Blogger's Guilt.

Sometimes I feel the odd tickle of blogger’s guilt when I check my ‘stats’ on Blogspot (I don’t do it often, but basically you can see your traffic and what particular posts got looked at today or this week or this month, etc). Well a lot of my posts here are nonsensical – no, it’s true! – and I know this and you know this, but today alone two different people ended up looking at a post I wrote like 6 months ago about how I had a dream that I was hiking with Nancy Reagan. And you just KNOW that both of those people left this blog shaking their heads and asking themselves, “What in the holy hell was THAT about?”

Also today five people have read a short play that I wrote about Donald Trump and Sarah Palin and Donald Trump’s hair all having lunch together.

And two poor souls (certainly accidentally) ended up looking at a post I once wrote about how the yellow submarine that the Beatle’s sang of would be just terrible for inserting Navy SEALs.

So, on behalf of all of the editors here at Standard Kink, I would just like to offer a hearty apology to anyone who has innocently stumbled onto this blog while looking for biographical information about Nancy Reagan or Donald Trump’s hair.

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A Short Play!

Some of you may know that I have a background as a playwright and that from time to time I like to dash off short plays for fun. Well, here is a short play re-imagining a conversation/lame publicity stunt which recently took place between Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.

***
Scenes From an Italian Restaurant
a short play
by james bezerra

ACT I SCENE I A man and a woman and the man’s disastrously bad “hair” sit at a table in a pizzeria. The woman is former Alaska Governor and current media-whore Sarah Palin. The man is former and current and perpetual media-whore Donald Trump. The hair is of an unknown composition. The three quietly eat their pizza slices.

TRUMP: Hey Sarah, remember when we were politically relevant?
PALIN: I don’t know what that word means.

CURTAIN.



Fin!


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Odes to The Donald.

Odes to The Donald
by james bezerra

Writing a haiku
about Donald Trump is as
hard as is his hair.


Who is a classy
guy? Donald is! Yes he is!
Except not really.


Sorry I can not
run for President but it
turns out I’m a joke.

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