I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.

(quote: William Saroyan, video: Alan Moore's advice to young artists)

For a minute there I was a nihilist. I came to a philsophical conclusion that I shirked away from telling people because it sounds so bleak and inhumane. The crux is this: that we can never achieve social stability or equality or sustainable prosperity or peace or freedom if our population continues to grow. The thesis, generally, being that a confluence of phenomenon (including but not limited to the Tragedy of the Commons, False Consciousness, the quantitative/psychological constraints of human interaction [i.e. how many people your brain will allow you to know/trust/etc], and a sheer logistical impossibility) strongly suggest that a group as large as, for instance, the United States, could never accomplish utopia. That is, there is no model for governance with a system this large that provides for satisfaction to all of its participants.

First, the Tragedy of the Commons is an observation that self-interest will cause users of a shared resource to abuse their privilege to that resource. In Hardin's original essay he spoke of common grazing areas in a village, but the best way to understand this (I am a transportation engineer after all) is to think of how commercial vehicles (big trucks) operate on our highways. Large, multi-axle trucks do virtually all of the damage to the publicly-funded (i.e. 'common') road system. They do pay higher use fees (above and beyond driver's licenses, fuel tax, etc for passenger cars), and yet without close supervision it would be in commercial vehicle operators' best interest to run the heaviest loads they could at top speed. Human beings cheat to get ahead, they use resources disproportionally, they leave things worse than they found them.

Now, this problem is mitigated in small communities. The home, for example, has many common areas and goods. And they are generally respected because of the authority of the household (complete) and the familiarity between the members. And it could work in a neighborhood, perhaps, where everyone knows each other somewhat intimately and their lives are crushed into shape by their public identity. But expand the numbers of the community to some threshold and people stop giving a shit. This number likely has some connection to the group-sizes that we spent much of our mental development in. Australopithecus hung out in very small groups. A few families. Even allow for a thousand and it might work. But,we live in a country of 300million, in a world of 6billion plus. We are not wired to give a shit about any of these people. The fact that we do is actually sort of weird.

Logistical impossibility doesn't have a link because I haven't heard of anyone who has done a great deal of work on it. The idea is that even in a purely-executed Communist state there would be no way to equitably distribute resources. The same amount cannot be put in each cup, because the things used to fill them are not distributed equally. Arizona does not have the water to survive, but if they are to use the water of some place else how can that water-bearing land be thought to have the carrying capacity of both places? Especially when we humans grow so densely and rapaciously. And live for so long. But further than the efficiency of moving resources around, there is a certain chaos in the economy of ideas when the numbers get this high. anarchists can conspire, religions can procreate, language can vary . . .and in the end you get smaller political communities. These subcommunities distrust each other, formulate nonsensical rivalries. Shun those of the other tribe. Anyway . . .I have many more thoughts on this that I'm going to discuss further in an upcoming blog on Terminalism (this is a name I've given to a philosophy that amalgamates Marxism, Darwinism, aspects of Existentialism, and Absurdism)

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'The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.'

(quote: William Saroyan , video: Hard Time Killing Floor Blues)

Yesterday I recieved notice that I have been accepted to the MFA program at The New School University in New York City. Of the programs I applied to, this one was for me the most interesting, exciting, and attractive. The school is enmeshed with the writing community of NYC and the emphasis is heavily on writing. In the last semester you do not attend class. You simply write and talk about your writing with your advisor. This program in particular looks to provide the greatest degree of freedom. I can truly thrive in this environment.

And it came about as late as it could. I was beginning to get a bit whiny and dejected. 10+ rejections had shown up in my various mailboxes. Copies of the manuscripts I sent sat glowing in the corner, heckling me with their inconsistencies and chunkiness and shortcomings. I began to make plans to move to Istanbul for a year, intending to apply again. Creeping hints of failure assembled in this little pile of quality, off-white stationary. The familiar artistic questions emerge, enlarge, take on a severity they never had. The time-stamped question of "did I do that right?" stretches out over the last three years. And you think for just a moment that you went at it all wrong. That the way to do this wasn't simply working your ass off. It wasn't losing sleep to catch those last drunken thoughts as you drifted into the kaliedoscope. It wasn't soaking yourself with narrative, with exuberance and depression and anxiety. It was something you didn't get. And as a writer you shouldn't have nudged that line, or advocated the tribal philosophy that I did in that work. Expectation was to be honored. And then came the believing in the work and thinking, like Saroyan: "One of us is obviously mistaken". But this acceptance is that slightest of validations, that noteeth smile given by someone you respect. It feels like a punctuation in these long few years, like when I wake up tomorrow morning I can take a deep breath and look around without feeling as though time is wasting.

Moving to New York City is part of the American mythos. Children from the Midwest go alienated in the sterility and shrug off their lineage and descend into it. For the artist, the thing is rite-of-passage and crucible. A place so vast and chaotic any end-result is possible. You may emerge at the other end differently named, battered by a whole new arrangement of affectations and illnesses and habits. New York City is the surreal tragicomedy writ large. So, while I doubt I will spend the rest of my life there, going there is this instinctive pilgrimage. It is a visionquest.

My good friend Dale Eisinger will be attending CUNY for Journalism during the same period I would be attending the New School. This is one of those coincidences that make people believe in god. If I could take any one thing from Boise when I leave, it would be this young man. I look forward to the whole mess we shall shortly find ourselves in.

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"we regret to inform you"

(quote: e'rbody, video: Gnarls Barkley Who's Gonna Save My Soul?


I don't have a lot to say these days. In a kind of limbo waiting for the other MFA shoe to drop, six rejections thus far. One waitlist. However, I'm still a writer. So here is something I just finished. I wrote the first draft of it over a year ago, and changed nearly every letter. It may be the last thing I write in past tense for a very long time.

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"Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee"

(quote: The Judge, video: Black Moth Super Rainbow)

I'm submitting a proposal to the Modern Language Association for their annual conference in Philadelphia. The topic is the "Evolutionary Origins of Narrative". This subject represents the confluence of much of the extracurricular study I have done over the last two years, and upon suggestion by a professor multiple thesii immediately jumped to mind. Basically, evolutionary psychologists, philosophers of art, and kids with nothing better to do, are trying to understand what function art serves from an evolutionary perspective. If it is in fact a functional adaptation, in what way does it aid reproduction? There are generally about 5 theories that I am familiar with. Steven Pinker suggests that art has no evolutionary function, that it is a mere byproduct of complex brains. Others suggest that art is simply the effort of individuals to become appealing in the eyes of the opposite sex. Others proclaim that art is a survival strategy that benefits either social cohesion or mental organization. A fifth theory suggests that art began as a means by which to share attention. None of these is quite complex and holistic enough for me. None of them answer the fundamental four questions required to identify an adaptive mechanism (or in Pinker's case, show how art does not meet some of these requirements). The four questions for adaptation, as formulated by Niko Tinbergen are: 'What benefit does the adaptation provide for reproduction?', 'What is the mechanism by which this adaptation occurs?', 'What is the origin of the adaptation in human evolutionary history?', 'When does the adaptation develop in the individual human?'.
Any theory for the evolutionary origins of narrative or art will be forced to handle these four questions. My proposal is to synthesize a new theory focusing on narrative specifically. Essentially, a sort-of anthropology or genealogy of the "Narrative Mechanism" in human behavior. In evolutionary psychology, every definable behavioral phenomenon comes from a 'mechanism', a system of actions, feedback, requirements, problematization strategies, perspective, and subconscious analysis. My paper would, more or less, begin to define the Narrative behavioral Mechanism. Essentially, I believe that narrative as a meme in cultural evolution have worked so well because they are aligned with the way that we sort information already. All of our myths are in narrative form, and the most efficient way to convey some idea is generally to have an accompanying narrative (anecdotes work better than statistics, even when they are misleading). It is a result of our biological understanding of time: we think everything begins, develops, climaxes, and dies. The world around us does this through the seasons, our bodies do this, most phenomenon that we observe seem to behave along the archetypal pattern of narrative. This way of thinking met up with the burgeoning survival value of symbolic language. As we became more complex philosophically, eventually narrative was used as a means of approaching existential anguish (an affliction that may be the true separation of man from beasts). And now in the bourgeois world we occupy, where survival is a given, the role of narrative has been displaced. The art and it's artist have been alienated from their homeland, the Pleistocene. Anyway, much more on this later . . ..

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I've developed a new hobby. I put a draft of something I've been working on in my jacket and walk the mile downtown and deposit myself on the worst lit chair in all of 10th Street Tavern, and I drink whiskey and make red marks on the paper until something adequate becomes something good. Then after a couple hours, in the dark, I walk back home. I take the most circuitious route possible, with something disjointed and beautiful on the headphones. Look for fences to climb, buildings to surmount, etc. The other night I . . .well, I'll keep that moment to myself. It was wonderful to just be cold in the dark alone. Seeing the life that we avoid with our houses and streetlights and televisions and cars.

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