Independence from procrastination, or what?

And does writing this take care of it?

By Moristotle

Months ago (a year?) I told colleague Bob Boldt and others that I planned to write a sestina on the theme of my being discovered dead under the persimmon tree (near our bird feeders). I’ve been saddened to discover a few dead birds there, and I identify with birds (and many individual creatures generally). And we are all mortal....
​    But I have not yet written this sestina....

The sestina’s not the only post I haven’t gotten around to writing. I have written notes on numerous bits of white card stock (which I salvage from packages in order to have heftier note paper) to write notes such as of these for possible Blog posts:

• Interview: of lost friends and acquaintances
• Revisiting my views on valuing experience for its own sake
• Outside the Box: reversal’s power as a heuristic
• A reason for hoping that Hell actually exists

    And today (Independence Day!) I decided to step up and address the question posed by the title. Or maybe I didn’t “decide” but was forced by embarrassment to do something to preserve my self-respect. Independence from the sense of that I am powerless to act on these ideas?

Interview: of lost friends and acquaintances. A number of old friends and acquaintances have at some point stopped replying to my “reachings out,” and this has bothered, saddened me. Why has each stopped? Is it them? Is it me?
    My conceit was that each person I had in mind would somehow read the post and thereby learn of my concerns and self-questionings, and perhaps be moved to get in touch with me and renew our acquaintance.
    My approach to devising “interview questions” for this post was going to be to list (privately) a number of the old friends and formulate questions tied closely to the particulars of my relationship with each of them. “Did I offend you when I wrote of…?” “Was I too much wrapped up in myself?” “Was I to you not the friend I thought I was, but to you only a passing acquaintance?” “Were those questions I asked you too personal, intrusive?” “Should I have telephoned rather than texted or emailed? Should we have gotten together rather than corresponded?”
    In reflecting on this, I remembered learning something astounding in group therapy almost 30 years ago, when I was dealing with the depression into which I had been thrown by a several-monthlong bout of chronic fatigue. Not everyone in the group liked me! However good-hearted, well-meaning, “interesting” a person I was, I nevertheless turned some people off. It wasn’t necessarily “them” or “me.” It just was.
    Whether procrastination or something else, this particular idea for a blog post raised serious questions of self-awareness that might very well be the reason I have never (or not yet) written the interview.

Revisiting my views on valuing experience for its own sake. As a response to republishing my June 5, 2014 essay, “Value Experience for Its Own Sake,” Neophyte commented that

the trouble is how personal beliefs thwart the level of acceptance needed to just be content that others, others with other beliefs, are having their own experiences...The reaction of [divergent] camps to Moristotle’s way of thinking would be diametrically opposed precisely because each camp is doing the same kind of excluding or devaluing of the other camp’s thinking and experience. We seem to have moved since the Enlightenment far away from the integrating, inclusive thinking that could allow us to truly value all experience. How to embrace other people’s right to believe and experience in a way one doesn’t believe in oneself, when the “rational” impulse is to critique those other beliefs in defense of one’s own? It’s like trying to build a bridge by creating a chasm.

​    Neophyte’s apparent suggestion that my essay’s strong criticisms of the Abrahamic religions implied that I did not value the experience of people immersed in those religions prompted me to re-read my essay. And it did seem possible that my critique of “flaws” in those religions might be interpreted as a rejection of others’ “right to believe and experience in [their own way].” But that isn’t (and wasn’t) my position. We all have a right to our ways of living (so long as they don’t harm others). And we all have a right to make moral judgments, according to our respective sense of what is morally right and wrong.
    It seemed to me that the worst I was doing was to suggest that experience that grows out of, or is founded on, what I regard as “flawed” beliefs could be new and different and – even from the point of view of those believers, if reformed – deeper, richer, more inclusive than their old experience. I hoped to be shining a torchlight. But clumsiness on my part might have caused the torch to fall on someone’s head! And in retrospect it didn’t seem very friendly of me to suggest that the person whose head was banged should simply pick up my torch and continue shining it on his “flawed” thinking!
    Suffice it say that these second-thoughts led to the thought that maybe beliefs don’t so much “grow out of” – aren’t so much “founded on” – beliefs as the other way around? I had discovered a reversal!
​    But I have not yet revisited the “Value Experience”​ post....

Outside the Box: reversal’s power as a heuristic. The “Value Experience”​ revisitation noted above was closely linked to a discovery I made one morning on poop patrol in the neighborhood where I reside. The discovery had to do with the way I record each day’s route and my collections (of piles of dog poop) on each block walked. I had up until then been recording them this way:

June 9: Route: counter-clockwise full loop CD
Finding: shown foot loot (4)

where the “finding part” uses mnemonic codes for each block on which poop was found. The mnemonic “shown” encodes “2 piles on the 600 block”; “foot” and “loot” encode “1 pile, respectively, on the 800 & 500 blocks.”
    My “invention” was to lay out a whole month of routes in advance and, from that, quickly compress routes and findings into one, with the route being specified by one-syllable mnemonics representing common routes. For example:

June 9: sh c f b G X m r l

where “sh c f b G X m r l” specifies the route "600 block, 700 block, 800 block, 900 block, Green block, 1000 block, 300 block, 400 block, 500 block.”
    When June 9 came, I’d take that route and, afterwards, specify the second syllable to indicate piles of poop found (and collected), if any:

June 9: shown c foot b G X m r loot (4)

This signifies “2 piles on the 600 block; 0 on the 700 block; 1 on the 800 block; 0 on the 900 block, the Green Block, the 1000 block, the 300 block, and the 400 block; 1 on the 500 block.”
    A pleasing mystery for me was that I couldn’t remember just how the reversal heuristic came about. Did I actually first invent the new way for recording the poop patrols and relate it to the “Value Experience” essay? Or did my insight into experiences’ maybe not being conditioned by our beliefs so much as our beliefs’ being conditioned by our experiences lead to the new way of recording poop patrols?
​​    Anyway, for an “Outside the Box” essay, I set myself the task of thinking of other examples of “reversal” or “turning up-side-down,” and I would point out that what comes of the use of a heuristic is indeterminate, but comes (or not) in a way peculiar to the individual employing it. Minds are different in myriad minute details.
​    But I have not yet written this “Outside the Box” post....​

A reason for hoping that Hell actually exists. In a nutshell, Trump’s recent hypocritical statement about how terrible it was for those journalists to be killed, when he has for months attempted to kill them with his vile epithets of “fake,” “traitors,” etc., sparked the idea that it might be worth having an actual hell for Trump to join me in, so that I might have the pleasure of watching him burn there. Satan might even let me shovel on some coals.
    And now the Trump supporters’ boycott of Walmart has caused Walmart to stop selling a T-shirt [“Trump supporters call to #boycottWalmart over ‘Impeach 45’ shirt”]. If I were very, very rich, would Walmart start selling them again if I ordered a couple million of the item?

Copyright © 2018 by Moristotle