Not An Account of Myself

I don’t feel I owe my audience anything in particular – that’s one of the joys of blogging, to my mind. You meet a blog as you meet a cat on the sidewalk far from home: it doesn’t expect you to feed it, and you don’t expect it to let you pick it up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a bit of a love-fest, including possibly ear-scritches but probably not (except in extreme cases of flooziness) belly-rubs. You both know you’re going to resume your walk.

So I have no intention of accounting for myself. There are maybe half a dozen people who can demand accounts from me, and most of them don’t read my blog. Still there is this hovering phantom of the reader, probably mythical, like the supposed general reader that academic editors sometimes invoke (used to invoke? It’s been a while) while knowing of course that there hasn’t been a general reader spotted in the wild for a century or more.

But common courtesy towards phantoms is something I would cultivate, and this phantom is politely asking: where did you go? And what are you doing now? And so perhaps I will answer, beyond a chirrup and a rubbing under the chin.

I began this blog in 2003 as a Buddhist practice journal, which may be a bit of a contradiction in terms. As time went on I became less and less comfortable with making my practice public, and (in a small way) trading on it; after a year or two I stopped saying much about my practice. Nowadays I’m not sure I count as a Buddhist at all. Then I took to writing what I called poetry, which sort of occupied that same blog space. At that time I was figuring out that I would be miserable as long as I was a full-time software developer:I quit IBM, went to massage school, and became much happier. I got halftime work as a data guy at a nonprofit, and did massage half time, and probably had as happy a work life, for the last half of it, as occurs in unhappy modern America. My luck has always been absurdly good. (See, among other things: meeting Martha at 17; being born just too late to be drafted for Vietnam, but just early enough to get an excellent college education practically free; having a minor gift for programming at precisely the right historical time; etc.)

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected, and I discovered that I was not and never had been a Buddhist: my deepest spiritual aspirations were those of the liberal humanist who believes in a utopian future. For some ten days after that election, I was able to sleep maybe two or three hours per night. I was consumed with distress and anxiety. I had been betrayed by the world. You don’t realize where you’ve really laid your bets until you decisively lose them.

There were those whose faith was unshaken. We can go back, they thought. Trumpism was a detour, a strange perversion, a kink in the American character that would work itself out when people came to their senses. There are still people who think that, bless them.

So I spent much of my thinking time after that in unraveling the net of my devotion to a utopian future. I read some political science and political theory, and realized that the depth of my political convictions was only rivaled by the flimsiness of their foundations: I knew far, far less than I thought I did. I was also a far more typical American than I had thought I was: my knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism and anti-elitism, my impatience with political process, my conviction that I could solve my country’s problems by the force of my ideological purity and intransigence – these were exactly the qualities I deplored in my political enemies. In a word, I was stupid. But more than that. I experienced Trump’s election a spiritual disaster. How could it be that, unless political progress was really where I had laid up my spiritual treasure?

All this time, fearing to say the wrong thing, fearing I might, by calling in question liberal utopian teleology, discourage opposition to this thoroughly nasty regime (whose only saving disgrace is its transcendent incompetence) – and painfully aware of how stupidly I have shot off my mouth in the past, in my political ignorance – I mostly shut my damn trap. I needed to think. And for that I needed privacy.

So that, my dear reader, is where I’ve been, at least from one point of view. I have been thinking a lot and changing my mind about a lot of things. I am coming to the surface again; the wind is moving on the lake.