hopelesshappiness.com

This is my final weekly post. From September 3, 2011 to September 5, 2026 there is an entry on every Saturday. For the first thirteen years, with one single exception, I posted on time, before midnight, every time. Discipline. In the fourteenth year and the first half (or so) of the fifteenth year, I had to backdate a few posts by a day or two to keep them on Saturday, but I still posted weekly. In the past six months I have limped to this, the finish line. Though many of these final few are still valid, considered thoughts, some I have borrowed from previous self-published work and some I just posted to post.

I am not quitting - I am moving on.

Fifteen years and more than 650,000 words. I think my goal from the beginning was to save the world. In this regard I have failed. But as a personal accomplishment, this effort and discipline has kept me learning, inspired, and (possibly) functionally sane.

In just the last (very) few years I have realized (what I believe to be) the fact that the world does not want to be saved, so I am changing my focus. By moving on I am not lowering my personal expectations for myself, I am merely downsizing. My world is becoming smaller. Moving forward, my selfish need to be unselfish - to serve, to help others, to improve process, to personally continue to learn and grow - will be more precisely targeted, more productive, more efficient, and more selfish.

I suppose my desire to downsize reflects my emotional evolution. Over the past fifty-plus years my go-to emotional state has traveled from inspirationally hopeful to curiously hopeful to hesitantly hopeful to hopelessly hopeful and my range of emotions when faced with injustice, (personal or otherwise) has always moved from anger to sadness to disappointment then back to my base state of some degree of hopefulness. The difference most especially in recent years is that I move much more quickly through anger and disappointment, splitting most of my time between sadness and hopelessly hopeful. In some instances anger and disappointment are so fleeting, I barely notice them. And in this I hope to find some peace.

Today one-hundred flames will turn to ash

Today one-hundred names will be erased

Must be too fine a spray to make a splash

One-hundred drops per day are barely traced

This many lives you'd think we'd go to war

The press would raise a stink demanding due

Each day doomed to repeat one-hundred more

A shame we can't defeat this deja-vu

'Tis ego that is blind and deaf and dumb

Misguided, we don't mind this place we dwell

No wake-the-dead alarms to unmask numb

Just sleek and shiny charms to cast their spell

A clever spin that tames a deadly crash

Today one-hundred flames will turn to ash

Excerpts from the book 'Defending Jacob' by William Landay:

"And two hours later we had our jury... That is how the system works. In the end, the lawyers and judges happily step aside and hand the entire process over to a dozen complete amateurs. It would be funny if it were not so perverse. How futile the whole project is. Surely Jacob must have realized it as he looked at those fourteen blank faces. The towering lie of the criminal justice system---that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know "beyond a reasonable doubt" who is guilty and who is not---is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street." Pages 256-257.

I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess---a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard." Page 8.

It is the happy lot of defense lawyers to see the good in people. No matter how wicked or incomprehensible the crime, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of guilt, the defense lawyer never forgets his client is a human being like the rest of us. That, of course, is what makes every defendant worth defending. I cannot tell you how many times a lawyer has suggested to me that his baby-shaker or wife-beater "really isn't a bad guy." Even the swaggering mercenaries with their gold Rolexes and alligator briefcases harbor this tiny redeeming fleck of humanism: every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy. To cops and prosecutors, things are not so sunny. We have the opposite impulse. We are quick to see the stain, the worm, the latent criminality in even the best people. Experience tells us the nice man next door is capable of anything. The priest may be a pedophile, the cop a crook; the loving husband and father may harbor a filthy secret. Of course, we believe these things for the same reason the defender believes as he does: people are only human." Page 219.

...there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions---guilty / innocent, criminal / victim---cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel." Page 414.

Dead words, dead thoughts, dead deeds

We watch as midnight feeds

We wait as darkness bleeds

The night takes what it needs

-----

A distant mournful knell

Flesh-rending tales to tell

Of Love, and Hate, and Hell

That cast a numbing spell

-----

The reek of rotting curds

The shriek of flocking birds

Like mindless, rambling herds

Dead deeds, dead thoughts, dead words

I am a lesser being.

With some focused effort, I am able to see how others see me.

I am not seen by others as me; I am seen by others as a lesser being.

This dexterity was recently sharpened in a dream that encouraged me to think inside-out.

This gives me an advantage. By knowing me far more intimately than others could ever know me, I can project that inside out to touch others, and compassionately work to understand them, entangling my inside with their umwelt, enabling me to see me as a lesser being, enabling them to perhaps see me as an individual, and enabling me to better balance my inside with the (often overwhelming) outside that is both individual and universal.

This advantage, nurtured and sustained, will serve as a constant reminder that I am a lesser being.

It should also constantly remind me that being a lesser being should not hinder personal effort; though it sometimes (perhaps often) does. I believe within the entangled dynamic that is inside-out thinking, in theoretical practice my personal effort gains strength and has more potential for Good.

Being a lesser being, some moments are more difficult than others.

Definition of umwelt from the book ‘Ways of Being’ by James Bridle:

“The umwelt connotes the particular perspective of a particular organism: its internal model of the world, composed of its knowledge and perceptions. In this way, the concept of umwelt asserts both the individuality of every organism and the inseparability of its mind from the world. Everything is unique and entangled.” Page 24.

Technically, my umwelt includes the ‘me’ in myself, but (I believe) this inner umwelt (in addition to being a part of the whole) must also be accounted for separately due to its (often) larger and constantly fluctuating influence. My inner umwelt is my internal model of me, composed of my sense of entitlement, my power-hunger, and my feelings of inadequacy in a given moment. In this way, the concept of an inner umwelt asserts both the individual ego and the inseparability of that delusion from the entanglement of my umwelt-as-a-whole with the world. If indeed everything is unique and entangled (which I believe it is), perhaps I should focus more on the entanglement and less on my individuality.

I am a lesser being.