On my honeymoon in Oaxaca, I met an Australian pharmacist who told me the story of a young couple who came to her in a panic, desperately seeking the morning after pill. It was a regimen of two pills to be taken immediately.
She handed them the pair of pills and said, “take these right now.”
They looked at each other, took a breath, and each took one.
Take a couple hundred thousand ants, chewing a swath through the jungle. They’ll cut a fairly straight line until they get to a stream. Then they’ll chew their way along the stream until they find a crossing. Then they’ll chew their way back to where they left off and continue the straight line.
Interview one of them along the way and he’ll just say he’s keeping the ass of the ant in front of him in relatively the same place. But take all of them together, and they’re thinking fairly clearly with one brain. Acting together, they can bring the mountain to Muhammed. Even though they don’t realize it.
(Hat tip to Alan Fletcher. )
One cold and dreary Sunday afternoon in Scotland in 1740, David Hume trudged across a bleak and windy heath to his favorite public house. As he walked, he imagined the warmth of the fire he knew would be crackling on the hearth, the greeting of the blokes he knew would be sitting along the bar, and could almost taste the suds at the top of the creamy stout.
He arrived, greeted the blokes, took his first sip of stout by the aforementioned and predictable fire and thought, “ahhh, this is that authentic and meaningful, total 1740’s Scotish pub experience.”
But something bugged him. The taste of the stout, the pop of the logs, the laughter of the blokes... his suddenly realized his brain was running these sensations on separate tracks like some sort of pre-industrial ProTools session... but it was the chord they played inside him that convinced him they had any meaning.
And then it struck him… he was the chord they played. There was no David Hume sitting in that pub, there was only a bundle of sensations and experiences traveling simultaneously through the same noodle.
And so, faced with the sheer terror of having no self, he dutifully got shitfaced.
If everything is weird, then nothing is weird. And everything is weird. You? What you think is normal? That’s some weird shit. And if that’s weird, what else is weird? Fucking, everything. So nothing is weird. So everything is its own version of normal. So judgment is a pretty weak reaction. Don’t be weak. Be weird.
But, you wonder, what about studies? Studies that have shown things? Don’t they point to some form of normalcy? I have bad news. Actually I have bad news and worse news. The bad news is: normalcy isn’t a word. It was made up as part of a campaign slogan for Woodrow Wilson. The worse news is: “studies” that show things about “us” are almost entirely performed on very weird populations: Wealthy Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies.
As such, judgment of weirdness is inherently flawed. So shine on you deranged diamond.
The older I get, the clearer it becomes that everything… everything is economics. So it should probably have come as no surprise that the oldest known identity we have on record is that of a man who live 5,000 years ago, in 3200 BC Mesopotamia, whose name was Kushim, and whose profession was as an accountant.
He did well in math, had perhaps a healthy dose of skepticism, and so when the time came he hung out a shingle. His name appears on a receipt tablet for barley.
Ancient Roman gladiators had product endorsement deals. Ancient Greece had mortgages and college and restaurants. Temporally, we really are just specks.
Last June, Koko the gorilla — who could communicate through sign language — died at 46. In her time, she told Mister Rogers she loved him, she jammed with Flea, she had a tickle session with Robin Williams (and grew morose for days upon learning of his death), and she kept a pet kitten she named All Ball.
According to Koko, this kitten was known to fly into fits of rage, and she once reluctantly implicated All Ball in the crime of having ripped a sink out of a wall.
“Equipoise” is a balance of forces and interest. For dancers, outfielders and cats of prey, it is the state between stillness and motion. It’s when you’re ready to pounce, you’re sprung, you’ve stopped just for a second but your momentum may tip your body weight onward.
In the town of Mahabalipuram, there rests on an incline a 250 ton granite boulder named Krishna’s Butterball. For at least 1200 years, it has paused briefly (in geological terms), to collect itself before continuing its choreo-tone poem performance down the hill.
In 1908, the local British administrator was so unnerved by its equipoise, and so emboldened by a colonizer’s arrogance, that he hired seven elephants to yank it from its place. He failed. It’s still catching its breath today.
Trudging the vast hellscape of made up product words meant to sound like the solution to the problem created by the company selling you the solution— which are at best a portmanteau like Pinterest and ‘broccoli’ (a man-made hybrid of brussel sprouts and cauliflower), and at worst gadflies of meaning, like Abilify and Instagram — it can be hard to know exactly what this thing is you’re expected to insert into your head.
As corporations massage the lexicon into an oblivion of monetizable syllables, it’s sometimes hard not to just take nonsense sounds at face value.
Like Spap Oop or, my favorite, Spunow.
The 1580s were a time great lovemaking throughout Europe. So much so that basically everyone had syphilis. And without modern medicine, this meant—for many—open soars, blindness, dementia and baldness. Of these, Europeans found baldness to be the least tolerable.
So when the kings of England and France had dueling syphilae microbes laying waste to their follicles, they commissioned local wig makers to fix the problem. But the dementia among the syphilitic wig makers led to massive, curly beasts for the head, powdered with fragrances to mask the various olfactory offenses flowing through court.
“Bigwigs” then galavanted throughout the continent until a tax was levied on wig powder in 1795, whereupon all sex stopped, and natural hair got its European reboot.
I once walked into a friend’s new apartment, which he had decked out with black leather couches from a yard sale. “This,” he confessed, “is my American Asshole furniture.”
The phenomenon of the American asshole may have begun in 1919, with the Dodge brothers. The day after attending Henry Ford’s son Edsel’s wedding, they sued Ford (in whom’s company they owned a 10% stake).
Ford had wanted to use his extra profits to raise employee wages and hire more people. The Dodges argued in their suit that a corporation’s only responsibility was to increase shareholder value. They won, of course.
The Dodge brothers: American assholes.
The longest running lab experiment in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, began in 1927. Professor Thomas Parnell set out to prove that pitch, in this case natural asphalt, which shatters like glass when you hit it with a hammer, is in fact an extremely slow-moving liquid.
Since the experiment’s inception, there have been nine drops. Parnell survived to see two of them. The first seven drops were, on average, about 8 years apart. The last two were spread out by 13 years.
Until the last drop, the ninth. on April 24, 2014, no one had ever directly witnessed a drop. The next one is due in 14 years.
After Trish Vickers lost her sight to diabetes, she strapped a bunch of rubber bands around a clipboard and used them as guides to write a 110,000 book in longhand. Every week, her son would come over and read to her what she wrote, but one time she gave him 27 blank pages. Her pen had run out of ink during a burst of inspiration.
The forensics lab of the local police spent 5 months extracting the information and saved her work.
On March 9, 2017, the first copy of her book, Grannifer’s Legacy, arrived at her door. She lost a battle with breast cancer the same day.
Human troglodytes lived uninterrupted in these half-caves in Italy from 7,000 B.C. to the 1950s. They shared ovens and harvested rainwater in complex networks of porcelain pipes. They hung curtains and swept everyday.
Roughly 411 generations of recipes, feuds, love stories, fist fights, palace intrigues, tribal justice, rain, gods, births, sorrows, dawns, wars, inventions and handshakes… before they were kicked out for being poor.
The inestimable Matthew Humphreys at Pace University’s School of Performing Arts had the deranged notion to give me six of his acting seniors, a camera, a theatre building, a snowy weekend in February of 2017 and carte blanche.
The result—when combined with my hatred for plutocracy—was my second short film, Unpaid Interns.
This is the trailer (full film below the jump):
In 600 B.C., construction began on a paved trackway at the Isthmus of Corinth, which became known as the Diolkos. Wheel ruts of the exact gauge of then-modern wagon wheel axles were built in to the road, so that boats and other heavy industry could be carted from Ionian Sea to the Aegean Sea without having to sail around the Peloponnese peninsula, windy as its headlands were.
Until then, wheel ruts were an annoying fact of ancient life. And would continue to be for millennia thereafter. Wheel ruts dug themselves into the Oregon Trail and other routes to the American West leaving such deep scars that it became difficult for subsequent wagon trains to travel anywhere else on these roads but exactly in these carved out trenches.
When someone feels they are “in a rut,” they are referring, knowingly or not, to this phenomenon of following a predetermined route and being carried forward as if on autopilot.
And the problem is that this is what the brain wants us to do. The Greeks got the idea for the Diolkos from the natural behavior own brains.
In 1967, research psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner, who were studying Human Performance Theory at the University of Oregon, published a landmark finding in which they identified the three phases of learning a new skill.
The first is the cognitive phase, in which “it is usually necessary to attend to cues, events and responses that later go unnoticed.” Our brains are on overdrive, building new scaffolding through which to fire this new complex task. I was briefly a mediocre rock drummer in college (I couldn’t do fills or I’d end up on the wrong hand, so songs could only start... and then stop), and I noticed as I tried to learn a new groove—with each limb doing something completely different—that the beat stayed impossible day after day until, suddenly, it wasn’t, and suddenly I could sit down and do it without thinking or counting in my head. It was as if my brain was building lots of semi-complete rope bridges and then, one night, finishing them all at once while I slept. That was the threshold between the first cognitive phase into the second ‘associative’ phase.
The associative phase is for gradually eliminating mistakes, such as “grossly inappropriate subroutines, wrong sequences of acts, and responses to the wrong cues.” Learning morse code and keeping an aircraft out of the trees each take about ten solid hours in this phase before you’re off to the races. This is the point where my band-mates could say something to me on stage and I wouldn’t accidentally speed up the tempo when I tried to respond (this was never successfully achieved).
The final autonomous phase is the one in which the skill becomes so reflexive that a human can then re-deploy brain cognition to a new task at the same time. Drummers who can make both of their feet and their left hand hold a 6/8 rocking-motion pattern while tinging out a 4/4 or some sort of satanic 9/8 shit on the bell of the ride are perfect examples of the autonomous phase. Apache Helicopter pilots fly with a monocle over their right eye projecting into it dashboard readouts and radar information while the left eye looked out the windshield. Pilots complain of instant splitting headaches as their eyes and brains adjust to segregated tasks. But after a year of training—a year—the headaches go away. They can also by this point bend spoons with their minds.
Here's the rub: our brains constantly want to usher us into the autonomous phase. It wants news skills to become automatic as quickly as possible so we can look up from clubbing wheat stalks long enough to see a tiger slinking toward our tribe. Evolutionarily, that’s a good thing for survival, and in the case of Apache pilots and Clyde Stubblefield, hot damn, but for the rest of us it means we tend to level off and stop improving at a certain point in the process of learning something new.
Fitts and Posner called this "The OK Plateau."
As we acquire skills our brains are champing at the bit to be like, great, that's a roger. This level of ability will do just fine. Because, of course, tigers. The human brain is basically the worst high school football coach of all time. Look, kids, just catch the thing when what’s-his-name decides to throw it at you and run away from whoever wants the ball. Does... does that guy in the parking lot look like a process server? Okay, we’re done here you guys, watch some games on Youtube this week and I’ll see you on Saturday.
Chess, piano, driving, cooking, not being an asshole, our brains move us on to the next skill as soon as our current level won’t get us killed. And it sets up our egos to be pissed off at the suggestion that there may be more to learn. Because tigers.
But then how are there virtuosos like Bernini and Maria Callas and Bill Burr?
The only way to short circuit the inevitable mediocrity our brains lock us into is to decide to deliberately fail, and to then hungrily study yourself failing. Know that it will happen, that it must if you’re ever going to get any better at something, and be hungry for feedback. I always marvel at major league pitchers, who are under massive pressure as it is, and then the whole game has to stop while the pitching coach comes out and tells him his tempo is off, or that thing he does with his hips is showing up, or he’s rushing through his early checkpoints, and the pitcher usually just takes the note, totally hungry for it. But in his position with 60,000 people staring at me waiting for me to get my shit together, I would just be like, “dude, I KNOWWW!”
But that’s the trick. The best figure skaters spend most of their practices on their ass. Chess grand masters devour their previous false moves, retroactively scrutinizing their precise moments of psycho-intellectual weakness despite not being able to go back in time and fix it. When I leave my dishes in the sink all day only to discover it’s been bothering my wife the whole time, I come unglued at not having a time machine to rectify the situation. (Okay, that was a younger me. Marriage and fatherhood have, in a very good way, broken my ego’s spirit. Now I just very lovingly tell her “that sounds like a YOU problem,” and go back to writing this sentence. Ahem. [*Cracks knuckles*])
When we start to pick up a new skill, our brains immediately start digging a diolkos, preparing for the moment where it can lock us into mediocrity, from the Ionian of noob to the Aegean of meh. But we can’t get better with the wheels locked in the tracks. Because as Vsevelod Meyerhold probably never said, “you can’t get better and look good at the same time.”
We have to fail.
We have to fail hard.
And we have to get horny for failure.
Expertise and success are then merely by-products of our new, weird masochistic fetish. So the next time you meet the world’s foremost expert in something, you can win their heart by saying, “I’m so disappointed in you.” Nine times out of then they’ll respond, “ugh, me too. Let me buy you a drink.”