Seesaw

by Connor M, posted in Philosophical woo

Pain and pleasure on a spectrum, they can come in an IV drip or in a crashing flood. Both swing the pendulum back and forth in a predictable manner.

Sleep gets mildly disrupted, wake up to a somewhat humid room your eyes are crusty, back feels a bit sore.

Grateful to be here, grateful to be alive.

The mood wall. It plays news, music, uses a slight filter for the mirror (depending on where your trajectory will go for the day). It makes you look more gaunt and baggy, or maybe it tightens your skin to uplift your spirits before you walk out.

The shower water temp is a bit hot; the eggs are a bit overcooked.

You go through the same motions; these are pre-programmed as they have created a predictable dopamine ride to prepare you for the day and harness your cortisol awakening response. You dry your hair this way, put on your socks just so. You meditate. Since your minute motions are predictable, the smart environment knows how to tweak these to change your internal feed.

Traffic patterns show a delay you weren’t notified about, at work there was a last-minute meeting scheduled that you didn’t receive notice of a system update.

Maybe the barista doesn’t remember your name, though you’ve been there several times over the past few months. Maybe the pretty girl’s eye you’ve caught doesn’t happen to look up today, your chance to meet fades away again.

But what if you locked eyes and smiled? Fleeting moments of beauty- that’s what gets sealed in. “Core memories” If you use Instagram and adopt that vernacular. Smells, noises, swish of hair and a side look. That feeling hits you unexpectedly, whether scrolling aimlessly on the toilet or stuck in traffic. Hopefully not at the same time.

Those are what the hippocampus imprints, replays, and yearns for forever more. The forgettable laundry moments require discipline though, they are what are championed. You have to put in that dopamine groundwork to prepare you to appreciate the perfect gaze, that song that sends shivers, that sexual moment where you feel like a fucking animal and forget about the world.

You need the predictable to appreciate the moments of unexpected beauty. But what if predictable is pain skewed, and you are constantly fighting for the baseline? Using that IV drip from your phone to fart you along from 10-1, then to 1. Caffeine, Adderall, anti-depressants, Instagram, Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs leading you through the day. But the ups and downs turn into a seesaw attached to a jet engine. Up and down until your brain is whiplashed. No wonder It’s hard to fucking feel ok.

It’s all relative, all based on your programming. That day is set by the day before. The synapses clock in and clock out. They’ll eat what you feed you them. They grow diabetic from TikTok, or turn into David Goggins if you live off grid and make straw dolls for fun.

I’ve smashed the seesaw before. My ass got sore, my eyes were baggy, and I was having self-righteous arguments with imagined foes in the shower.

So I sat in a jungle staring at the wall listening to the rain. I stroked a female’s hair and held in a delicate fart to not break the silence. Sweat dripped off my face into rocks as I labored up a mountain at dawn. I congratulated myself for doing insanely normal human shit because I had forgotten what it was. Unplug the seesaw, instead, make it a bike ride over hills. Never easy, but not so abrupt.

Laura

by Connor M, posted in People, Uncategorized

In Montanita, Ecuador I hit a lull. Doing snoopy walks at sunset hoping to catch the glance of a cute female, or slough off some energy from the Brazilians playing football in the sand. I was quite in my head, surrounded by a majestic beach, green cliffs and jungle in the distance.

Still sunsets and nights were tough. You see people get closer as the day dies, and I’m just a lonely gringo shuffling through the sand daydreaming.

But one night I was sitting and a girl I’d seen up and down the beach came along.

She was 5 feet tall, with long hair light that was considering whether to dread itself. She wore beat up sandles and a scarf dress. As she got closer though I could see her beautiful dark eyes and quick smile.

People often compared her to Shakira, which she hated (loved). She ambled up the beach toward me holding an empty paper towel tube around which were wrapped little bracelets and necklace type things.

She waved and walked up to my chair, standing to my right while the sun sank behind her and the surfers made their final cuts in the waves. I noticed her thick legs and round butt.

Her name was Laura, she was from Bogota, Colombia, and she had been a lawyer working for indigenous rights, but became disillusioned with corruption, an uphill battle that seemed futile in her country. So, she quit her job, sold everything, and found a band of roving South Americans and decided to just travel and survive.

She sold little bracelets on the beach that probably took ten minutes to make, but her personality was the selling point.

All 5 foot of her was built with ancestral sass, no nonsense, however tinged with a sentimental side. She told of her fight to help people and how it had inspired a tattoo that covered her entire right arm. It was the chronological history of Colombians, from the indigenous onto colonialism and independence. The heroic figures and battle scenes all etched from her shoulder down to her wrist. She had tattoos up and down both arms.

As she talked, I picked up her tongue ring and choker necklace. Every man will notice, daydream, then return to conversation. Details that are planned and can’t go unaccounted for.

We ended up chatting a few minutes, but I didn’t have any cash, so I grabbed her number and we decided to get together soon. She flashed her smile and carried on down the beach.

We eventually got dinner and she told me about Colombia’s sordid past. We sat at a meat griller, smoke and yells flying around us. Me shirtless, eating pounds of chicken, staring into her eyes while she recounted how the government would kill farmers, dress them up as guerillas and broadcast on the news that they had taken out some anti-government force.

They used the poor as pawns in a raging battle against narco-traffickers that effectively controlled the southwest portion of the country. As she spoke a I watched a street performer just outside who was her friend. He was a quiet Peruvian man who never spoke but dazzled with an acrobatic show perched perilously close to the numerous grills lining the street. This nightly circus just became the norm. When he finished and came around for a tip she glared at me, I noticed and popped a coin in his hat.

When I said something dumb, or made a joke, she called me the n-word but pronounced “eegah”. It made me so happy to hear this sassy Colombian from the street influenced but unencumbered by American slang. Try saying that in Chicago my dear tiny Colombian.

At the chicken grill she delved into her past. Her father was a cop, fighting the same corrupt system that she was. He was the prototypical shut off Colombian man, hardheaded, unable to show affection. She fought for his approval, worked her ass off to become a lawyer, and gained all the trappings of success that one could hope to find.

Eventually, as the corporate grind does, you find yourself in a sweet apartment overlooking a city filled with destitution that you haven’t made a dent in, and a government that will never truly care about its people. She sold it all, grabbed a few trinkets and headed south to Ecuador.

And now she lived in a commune with 6 other wanderers, sleeping in a hammock, cooking group dinners at 11pm listening to Argentinian rock. She was happier than she had been in a long time, and she didn’t have to convince me.

There are certain people you see walking by that can paint a vivid picture in your mind without every meeting them. Thankfully at that sunset I got to open this wild book for a little while. A glimpse into a vast universe I’d never be aware of. Hopefully she’s off lecturing another gringo in a smoky chicken shop while the restless beach town churns around her.

The Mediator?

by Connor M, posted in Uncategorized

The mediator app, which will listen in to conversation with parents talking to kids, people talking to people, homeless people arguing over sidewalk real estate, and analyze their speech patterns and offer different ways to communicate. It will help people to be kinder parents, more gentle partners, better at productive arguing, sharing their view, standing their ground with grace.

Who knows, we way as well harness the AI future with open arms. There’s no reason to suspect it will back down at any point. Let’s optimize our human faults, the repeated, fetid, sewer pipes of conversation. Of co-dependent, abusive, half-truths that somehow never get resolved and instead are pulled out like daggers at the most inconvenient time. In steps the app collects feedback, to remind us of our humanity, to offer a gentle nudge in the right direction while we’re going astray, or afterwards? Reminds us how fragile and cyclical we are, tied to nature, hormones, yearning, the seasons.

If only a few turns of phrase were dropped, a barb replaced by an olive branch in that split second, how many downward spirals avoided? How many little bad words, mannerisms, or flashes of ego add up to disaster in any one group of human interactions over time? We’ll never know, but it’s definitely all documented, and has been for a while as the phones just sit judging.

Siri is cringing as the emotional abuser withholds love for the thousandth time, and the wife is caught in the moment, and later goes to be consoled by her friends. On second thought, would that really help? If people knew the damage they were doing would they stop, or change a few salient words?

Every great tyrant had a mirror, but also had yes men who wouldn’t clean it for him or else they’d be kicked out of the hive. Would a normal, fallible, powerless man or woman be ready to accept their faults if laid out by a prescient counselor robot, sitting there having a drag while the air reeks of falsehoods, black and white thinking, over generalization, projection, etc. etc.?

We’d have to ask ourselves if we want to be better humans or want to be righteous. Seems like an easy answer.

Your God(s)

by Connor M, posted in Mountain, Philosophical woo

We all have our gods, perhaps less ethereal and enlightening than the days of old, gods waging war in the sky, ritual sacrifices for the rain to come. Steve Caporizzo, news channel 6 weather man doesn’t have to kill a goat on air to solidify this weekend’s sunny holiday commute.

Our gods still exist, we pray to them, make sacrifices whether we know it or not. They set us straight with a tender hand or a stinging wrath. We question our faith, or whether it ever existed when the rules don’t seem to add up.

Diarrhea is a god of traveling. He pokes his head up at the fruit stand as you examine the coloration on a mango. He giggles, a small child hiding behind his mother’s skirt as she pulls chicken out of a bucket sitting in the sun onto a flat top grill. He swoops in after you’ve had a majestic day hiking to a remote Incan gate that overlooks the valley and towering Andes mountains. Whether you know it or not, he will have to humble you eventually.

That day in particular had such a drastic swing in fortune I had to wonder If I had angered some spiritual force. My birthday, waking up before sunrise to hike several hours up a grueling path to the most beautiful outlook I’ve ever seen. Only on the return did I feel the gurgle, as I began to see the town reappear. It grew as I hit the cobblestone streets. It started screaming as I rushed through the alleys past merchants and loitering tourists, praying for the merciful toilet. I made it barely, only to start my gastrointestinal rebirthing.

I went through this process many a times. Starting to eventually see some karma in my matrix of decisions, bigger than simply eating spoiled food that handed me this unfortunate but temporary fate. Finding yourself in a new location, tied to the toilet, you slow down and reassess.

Watching the enormous moths dance around the candlelight in a porta potty deep in the rainforest. Listening to cars zoom below as you shiver in a tiny apartment in an Andean town, sitting at an angle because your knees don’t fit in the space between the wall and toilet. Dripping sweat in a beach bungalow as you swat away mosquitoes.

No Amazon prime, or CVS, or calling into your primary care. You are in the elements paying the natural price. Momentum swings to a halt to force reflection. We’re reminded how little control we really have despite our western conditioning to the contrary. Fate changes much faster than your conscious awareness. Accept your gastric meditation. Thank the gods for allowing you safe passage to your rebirth, and not greeting you on cobblestones in front of cute families walking their kids to Sunday mass.

You believe in higher powers when life is this abrupt, comforts are gone, and beauty and destitution sit hand and hand smiling at you every day. The intersection of fate and control is in much sharper contrast. Coming down to the Sacred Valley on a steep treacherous road, one very tight curve was strewn with flowers and placards. I could only imagine the awful fates at this very spot.

I watched a woman say a prayer as we decelerated slightly towards it. I could have stared up at the looming peaks or the lush river valley and never noticed. I could have felt the thrill without any grounding, chatted with the soccer team heading to a game, listened to the loud reggaeton coming from the front. But this tia, she has done this every time she takes the bus from Cusco for work. It wheezed up and down these mountains, breaks faltering, frame rusted to the core, and necessity and collective good faith allowed it safe passage. Some buffer against a huge indifferent universe.

 So, with lack of empirical evidence and beast gurgling within, you turn towards the heavens and wait. You buy some pepto and beg a tia to make you rice, wondering how you angered the God, but grateful for this opportunity for reflection.   

Manuel

by Connor M, posted in Coast, People

Sit in the ocean, facing the rhythmic pulse from the horizon, pelicans swoop along the cresting waves. They always head north, up the endless green coast. Fishermen grunt when they roll out of their hammock, get in the boat, and finally again when they settle back in 12 hours later. Rhythms.

Maybe you’re only born with, or only capable of exacting so many motions. You have 1000 micro habits, tics, subtle machinations of your body and psyche that you can use in endless iterations throughout your corporeal life. I remember when I was really high at basketball camp trying to explain this theory to my friends.

You only get a fixed number of moves; like a chess piece with a certain range of motion that you aren’t fully aware of, but is hardwired in. This walk, this greeting, these 25 steps to the store. Open door and smile, ask if they have the cake today?

Some people exert way more, build up a scary arsenal. Others have considerably less, out of lack of necessity, or they just excel with their small amount.

Fishermen: Wake up, grunt. Bead of sweat wiped off forehead, pee. Back hurts. Step outside and feel the first rays of sun slant down onto the dusty street. Hack open coconut, have a drink. Put on pants, hop in the back of the truck speeding down the road. Get on the boat, squint up at the gulls.  

Day- Night—Party—Day—how many motions were required? How many minute synaptic calculations fired to send him through the day? The grid was laid out early and he plods along it day after day. The same environment the same maneuvers, recreated like a sentient zombie. Snapshots carried over.

I understand how they’ll do the first prototype of AI robots. Manuel, the fisherman. He’s programmed away in the vaults of the highest security Pentagon laboratories. Created as a middle-aged Ecuadorian tio.

He’s somebody’s uncle from Guayaquil who had a daughter, got laid off, then moved in with family in a tiny brick house on the coast to find work. No one in that family had ever met him but welcome him without question.

He has the distended gut of beer, tropical fruit, and hammock time, but the worn hands of the fishing lines and scars from accidents at work or drunken quincinieras. He has just enough teeth. On his head a plume of black hair, the pride of his lineage, he keeps that full bush well into his stooped over days. He sleeps in his hammock in the living room, plays cards under the buggy lights at night.

He poses for pictures at his nieces graduation party which is on the street outside the house. There is a display of roses and pictures plastered against the wall for everyone to pose in front of.

Is he like anyone else? That crooked smile is tired but warm. A lovable program plopped into the heat and rhythms of the coast, bound to carry on the traditions, the celebrations, the noise.

In his small town all life takes place on that 3-foot strip between the wall and the dusty road, pushing boundaries of plastic chairs and crates and tables filled with fish bones. These often spill well into the street for birthdays or football matches.

In Montanita the party rituals are more ornate. One warranted renting huge speakers and a blow-up pool put directly in the middle of the road, yelling and cumbia music going until around 3am. Another hired a clown and put 30 chairs in the middle of the street so he could perform at midnight to a crowd of bored mothers and kids running around. It’s only a party if your ears are being blasted off by the shoddy equipment, makeshift carnivals at a moment’s notice. Walking by a 5-year old’s birthday in a parking lot, a full PA system is blaring Miley Cyrus to a circle of girls in chairs twiddling their thumbs.

The piece de resistance was the man across the streets 70th birthday.. I should have known walking home at 9pm to see them just starting. 2 huge speakers, no doubt brought in by the wild cousin from the city who’d made a backhand deal. He’s got an earring and perfume so strong the neighborhood dogs cowered away. 70 years old represented some sort of impending spiritual death for my potbellied 5-foot-tall neighbor. There were the holy speakers, the pavilion was filled with streamers, somebody conjured up a mixing board that intermittently broadcast “feliz cumpleanos, es tu dia vamoss..!!” along with other unintelligible hype. My window was directly across the tiny dirt road, full volume.

 By 12am it was picking up steam, I peeked out to see the corpulent tias hooting as they nimbly stepped to the beat. By 4 am, with no change, I walked out in the road in my boxers and stared at them, only to have the birthday boy stumble over to tell me he’s on his property, there is no issue, have a drink.

I lay awake plotting how to cut the wires, throw a rock, file a complaint with god, eventually 9 am rolled around to no volume change, and a look out the window revealed 5 men passed out drunk in a circle. Mission accomplished.

Song, and noise in general is an important ritual. There is no silence, so however you can fill the void is how you participate in the journey.  I was delighted to find there are no scheduled times for the garbage truck, but rather a tune blared from a speaker on the truck signifies that it’s time to take the trash out. Every time I’d hear it, 7am, 4pm, I’d hustle to find the source and sing along. I picture the moms’ ears perking up from making food while holding a baby, spanking her older hijo, ven, sacalo! And he scrambles out with the enormous bag barefoot into the street.

Noise is celebration, part of the rhythm, but it ebbs and flows. The quiet rainy nights are for reflection and watching plumes of smoke sift up through the dim light. The dawn where the gulls swoop along the waves, crabs skitter around the incoming tide, and the breeze comes across the awakening sea offers a brief reset. Once the garbage trucks sound, the store fronts are swept, and dust kicks up, the silence gives way to another round of life, another crashing swirling sequence of everyone’s programming, predictable but beautiful in its synchronicity.

The heat pulses down and sweat blends with the smells of the tiendas and fruit stands, rusty trucks accelerate down the highway at the edge of town. Nothing was planned, but by the time the music dies off, the street dogs curl up, and all you can hear is waves, it all gets done. Manuel is in his hammock watching the kids playing silently.

Somebody delivered a palm tree to be planted but it sat on the pavement for a week until the roots dried up. It was just a sad teeter totter, so people scurried around it and kids kicked soccer balls off it under the moonlight. It found it’s place in the noise.

Ayahuasca

by Connor M, posted in Jungle, Philosophical woo

The first inklings of change are the heat and discomfort emanating from your stomach. The gurgle is more primordial, it feels like the gaseous swamps of creation where meteors slammed into a churning earth and microorganisms split and swam in their perilous and short lifetimes. You can tell an entity is awakening inside you. The dimensions of the room start to change, and the darkness becomes heavier. Each light and figure are like a Plato’s cave, huge and distorted shadows build into castles and vast cities that morph away just as quickly.

You start rolling, heaving with the surf inside your stomach. The Frenchman is the first to go.

I was asleep in a treehouse one night several hundred yards away, and I couldn’t mistake his ceremony commencing hurl. It echoed throughout the jungle with resentment and relief, a bitter purge that only a French could muster.

            He goes first next to me and shatters the relative calm, almost to signal to everybody else that it was time. More faint cries, mutters, or stomachs so loud that they can be heard in full volume. Another person heaves, this time a British girl, so well-spoken and mild mannered, now bent over with a high-pitched wail and spewing into her container. Those shitty little plastic buckets were a stark contrast to the mountains of incense, perfumes, crystals, various feathers and excrements and other high holy insignia of the ceremony that serve less of a purpose than our Fischer Price puke buckets.

            I start to feel the wood floor, in a way that I’ve never felt anything. Like when in the movies an ancient hand graces the bark of a tree at sunset, I’m sure if observed someone would have found it oddly erotic. On the way up you become overwhelmed with beauty, with how its embedded in everything around us. I began to think about women I know, women in the room. How they seemed like a python ready to strike, or a soft and inquisitive bird of paradise. How they moved and held themselves and had an impossible Schrodinger’s box attractiveness that had to be observed to be real. How every ounce of health and beauty and vitality was borrowed, and what we lack or can’t create in ourselves we find balance and potential in others. I understood why beauty exists; it pulls, it compels, I will do anything to get a taste of that which I don’t have but see in you, to bring that light into my own existence even just for a minute.

            I saw vast timelines of life and aging, and how we get this torch to burn and share and show the way, and it fades as you get older and some people hopelessly cling to it.  People get resentful of those more attractive, younger, fitter, wiser, things they can’t touch. Suffering gets bottled up neatly in their organs, and sealed in with alcohol, denial, workaholism. Eventually they become a rusty shell of a human that limps through the day without noticing anything.

Flashing images of traumas, maybe imagined, suffering of people in the room. Thinking about how a guy in the group was named after a prize fish; like his namesake boiled down to being held on a line by a smiling fisherman admiring his physique and power. I was fucked.

            How all my aunts and grandma faked every interaction because a glimpse of sincerity would ruin the whole façade. How unresolved generational traumas slink down through families because nobody can face them in their lifetime, only to hand that baggage off to the next of kin. And those kids develop their own issues that stunt their growth, so they can’t broadcast their beauty or see it in others. Their energy becomes like a blocked stagnant river that starts to smell like shit. People turn away. There is no exchange, no flow, no movement of pain that wants to be let go of.

 Out of all of this, when approached by our facilitator and asked if I was okay, all I could muster was “it’s all borrowed”, as I stroked the wooden floor and rolled around moaning in pleasure. Having sex in this state would have been impossible to conceive, I began to understand why it’s off the menu when doing this. Though curiously it seems like orgy juice in those initial stages when your body is purging normalcy and zooming your consciousness onto another plane.

This was the state of affairs for some undetermined time, minutes, maybe hours, until all hell broke loose.