Journal

It’s a rough time of year for my garden. Every plant in my garden has been suffering the wrath of the hot summer sun. The natives have of course been doing better than the plants less adapted to the 100°F+ weather, but even they have been suffering. The one plant that seems uniquely immune is the Texas mountain laurel. I love that plant. I just wish it would grow faster!

Fruiting trees

Since the fruiting trees have only been around for a year or so, I wasn’t expecting any fruit this summer. The persimmon tree held to those expectations, but the fig tree surprisingly produced some figs this year! Unfortunately due to the heat and my lack of watering the figs didn’t turn out super edible, but it’s still progress.

Watering the wildlife

Inspired by my dad, I’ve started leaving water out for the wildlife in this extra-dry summer of ours. I set out a little flower-pot platter I had sitting around and I fill it up daily. I put a rock in the water to give wasps and other small wildlife a perch to sit on or a means of escape. It’s been really neat seeing all the wasps and birds come by to refresh themselves.

New edging technique

As I’ve begun replacing my grass with various trees, shrubs, and other plants, I’ve created mulch islands around them. The big battle I’ve had is with the grass attempting to encroach on this area since I don’t have any boundaries preventing it. Recently I’ve learned of a natural edging technique meant to help with this. I’m going to try it out and see how it goes!

Planting things too early

I couldn’t help myself when I went to the plant store recently and I bought a couple of plants. I got a native mountain laurel and non-native bottlebrush. Here’s to hoping I can keep them alive in this brutal heat.

[Silence is] about getting inside what you are doing. Experiencing rather than overthinking. Allowing each moment to be big enough. Not living through other people and other things. Shutting out the world and fashioning your own silence whenever you run, cook food, have sex, study, chat, work, think of a new idea, read or dance

The book had its strong moments, but also fell flat at times.

Starting with the bad, the inconsistency and general lack of cohesion are what keep me from rating this higher. Luckily the chapters—and overall book—are short. This keeps the below average chapters from being too much of a slog.

There was another especially off-putting moment in the book when the book ventured in to the author’s thoughts on Elon Musk and the author’s perception of how Musk takes advantage of silence. In the moment we find ourselves, with Musk being a techno-conservative-cringe-memer, this left a sour taste in my mouth and made me question the authenticity of the rest of the author’s thoughts.

Beyond these moments though, the book had some thought-provoking chapters. One of the more interesting ideas that I would love to explore more deeply is the connection between class, wealth, privilege, and noise—

I believe silence is the new luxury.

Noise is also connected to class divisions. Noises made by anyone other than the person being disturbed by them, secondary sounds, set the foundation for great disparities in society. People in the lower classes are usually forced to tolerate more noise in the workplace than those in the upper classes, and their homes are poorly insulated against their neighbours’ noise. Wealthy people live in places with less noise and better air, their cars run more quietly, as do their washers and dryers. They have more free time and eat cleaner, healthier food. Silence has become part of the disparity that gives some few people the opportunity to have a longer, healthier, richer life than most others

I could read a whole book about that connection!

Overall, would I recommend this book? Probably not. But it’s short enough that one could check it out from the library, flip through the pages, and get something from it.

As the title and subtitle of the book would suggest, this book attempts to illuminate what ‘capitalist realism’ is and to understand what a realistic alternative would need to look like. With a heavy emphasis on popular culture as a lense by which we see and understand ourselves, the book deconstructs modern capitalism.

Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.

One challenge the author notes is that capitalism itself subsumes anything and everything, including the very anti-establishment culture that could provide discourse on a realistic alternative. For example, the author notes on alternative or indie music—

Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. No-one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliche scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliche.

How do you create something new when everything new is old and narrative on power structures are absorbed into the very monolith that you critique?

The author goes on to discuss the inevitable consumeristic tragedy of the commons that capitalism creates including the environmental and mental health toll that hides behind the scenes, unincentivized from changing.

The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

By privatizing these problems - treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual’s neurology and/or by their family background - any question of social systemic causation is ruled out.

From chapter six, the author focuses on the ineffective bureaucracy created by capitalism, comparing and contrasting it against critiques made against socialism. A specific example is around propaganda created by these systems. The author’s thesis is that modern capitalism optimizes for is not reality, but PR and the perception of reality—

In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

Around here the author devotes a lot of time to discussion on academia and modern bureaucracy. The author clearly had a bone to pick with academic bureaucracy which was fine but—in my opinion—was also a bit of an imperfect fit for the book.

Here, Kafka is raised. As part of this tragedy of the responsibility commons—who’s really responsible? How do you break through the walls of ‘not my job’ to fix the big problems the world faces?

Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.

This book is more a call-to-action with many more of its pages devoted to the problems of modern life than to their solutions. Importantly the author notes that any solution should stand on its own and be a distinct entity—not a reaction of the past.

We are now in a political landscape littered with what Alex Williams called ‘ideological rubble’ - it is year zero again, and a space has been cleared for a new anti-capitalism to emerge which is not necessarily tied to the old language or traditions. One of the left’s vices is its endless rehearsal of historical debates, its tendency to keep going over Kronsdadt or the New Economic Policy rather than planning and organizing for a future that it really believes in.

Overall, the author wrote a compelling and well thought-out essay that left me wanting to dig more into this subject. I will certainly revisit this someday. I’d encourage anyone with interest in this subject to check on this brief, but well-written essay.

I finished this book with four hours left on my library loan, showing that this is the kind of book that encourages you to finish what you started. While the book is a long and thorough book, it’s also a compelling page turner.

I understand that the book was one of the first to write about the Japanese perspective during WWII for the western audience. That it does well. It really elucidated the driving factors and rationales behind major decisions over the course of the war. It made me empathize and understand the motivations of the individuals making up the nations on both sides of this horrible war. It also clearly demonstrated some of the mistakes made throughout the course of the war.

By the current year, the book is almost half a century old. Nonetheless it stands up. It’s hard to make a long history book close to a thousand pages long a delight to read, but this book is well organized into well-flowing chapters that made me want to read ‘just one more’.

If there was one part of the book that was tedious, it was the chapters covering the Philippines. I’m not sure that was the book’s fault. A tedious series of battles makes it hard to escape tedious writing.

I highly recommend this book as a broad tome on the Japanese perspective in WWII.

In writing my goals for this year, I realized there was a theme to the goals. They all revolve around mindfulness—doing things in my life with intentionality and thought. As the years go by, I’m noticing that it’s easy to revert to negative behaviors. Doing things well is hard. To combat this, my goals for this year require me to be intentional and proactive.

Communicate mindfully with others

This year I will focus on mindful communication—thinking before I speak, speaking precisely, and speaking with kindness. In the past, I’ve mostly often fallen into this trap of not being intentional when communicating with my wife. I think it’s a sort of auto-pilot that engages when I’ve been with someone for so long. So this goal is to break away from the defaults and be mindful of how I communicate.

While I’m less bad about doing this with strangers and friends, I should cultivate it in those relationships as well.

Eat with intentionality

I will focus on what I put in my body, aiming to mostly fill my hunger with foods that are good for my body. Sometimes due to boredom, I graze at calories I don’t need. Sometimes due to hunger, I eat things that aren’t healthy for my body. I will think more about each bite I take and not be afraid to stop eating.

Eat mostly vegetarian

When possible, eat vegetarian. When socially or culturally necessary (mostly traveling), don’t. Being mostly vegetarian allows me to moderate my ecological and ethical footprint, an ideal that is important to me. This goal—or a variation of it—has been on my list for many years. I think it is worth continuing to note it so that I keep it front and center, reminding myself what I care about.

Read for one hour each day

(And one hour and thirty minutes on days off.) I’ve been pretty good about reading this last year, but I want to make the goal more consistent. I also want to fill wasted time with this habit. Because of this, I’m making the goal a daily one and setting the bar relatively high. If I just browse the internet one hour less, it should be easy to find the time. The energy could be the challenge! I’ll allow makeups and prepaying.

Don’t browse the internet first thing in the morning or last thing at night

I have a bad habit of mindlessly grabbing by phone or tablet first thing in the morning and last thing at night. The goal here is to start small and build throughout the year. Starting with five minutes in the morning at first, and longer in the evening, I will put down my device and spend that time doing something else. In the evenings this will likely be reading; in the mornings it will likely be sitting on my back porch drinking a morning drink and enjoying the fresh air. As the year goes on, I’m hoping to increase the span on both sides to as much as one hour in the morning and two in the evening. We will see!

Run a 13+ mile run at least once a month

I’ve done pretty well running in 2022. One thing I did less well was finding the time and energy for long runs. My goal is to revitalize my long runs, doing at least one 13+ mile run each month. Supporting this will be shorter runs of course, but they’re not my main focus this year.

End the year owning fewer things than when I started

Ideally, don’t purchase or take home unnecessary things. I have enough things in my life for the most part. I will focus on the utility of things and not be wasteful. I don’t have a huge problem with getting excess things, but I’m fairly bad about getting rid of older things. Focus on the second half of this equation without letting up on the first half.

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This year has a mixture of some new goals and some old ones. Overall, the direction I’d like to head in remains mostly the same this year. I feel good about my ability to face these head on and become incrementally better throughout the course of the year.

Happy 2023!