Month: August 2025

I saw Bright Eyes in concert last night. Conor Oberst seems to be doing okay.

last weekend, walking through Berkeley, at the corner of Solano Avenue and Modoc Street, in front of a Wells Fargo, Jordan alerted us to a wad of $120 on the ground. the cash had been folded as though to be placed in someone’s pocket, but, due to circumstances beyond our knowledge, the money wound up not securely stashed on the withdrawer’s body, landing instead in the middle of the sidewalk. the only person we could see who it might reasonably have belonged to didn’t respond when Chris shouted after him as he skated away down Modoc and around the corner onto Marin.

so we were presented with a moral dilemma. a smaller quantity might have been viewed as mere good fortune; who hasn’t picked a loose bill off the ground, feeling the Fates smile kindly upon them? but six twenty dollar bills is a weightier entry into one’s karmic ledger. is it mere good fortune, or a test of one’s integrity? if it is such a test, what is the proper way to exercise that integrity?

Vicky would have left the money on the ground and let someone else wade into the murky waters of moral chance. an understandable reaction. certainly it’s preferable to not assume more ethical quandaries than one already bears in the regular course of life. there are enough decisions to make in the minute by minute task of being a present and empathetic person, more than enough. trouble with this is that there’s no guarantee the next person to stumble on the cash would use the money any more honorably than you might, and you leave open the possibility they would use it far less honorably than you would. besides, I had already picked the wad up, and putting the money back down on the ground entails more responsibility than just pretending to not see it. I had already allowed a god to enter the fray.

a few days prior I was made aware of one of the few genuinely organic internet happenings in recent memory (in my recent memory, at least, I don’t try to keep up any more): the Donald Boat Unemployment Fund Saga. it’s something that defies easy summary, but since I don’t want you to leave this post to spend a very long time scrolling through the substack summary: donald boat aka laserboat999, a power twitter user, through sheer force of will (and just a dash of well-aimed bullying), managed to get a bunch of people, mostly techbros, to buy him a bunch of stuff. initially he set out to, it seems, build a gaming computer, but the requests ranged from podcasting equipment (from the Red Scare girls), to music gear, vinyl records, and, of interest to me, a great deal of literature. he also assembled a team of interns to run the numbers on his requests (breaking slightly less than even on “ignored/refused” vs “fulfilled”) and to ultimately build the PC for him. all while driving back and forth across the bridges of the Bay Area, sipping Steel Reserve, PBR, and Celsius.

someone asked the twitter AI chatbot account to explain the phenomenon. @grok put it this way:

The “Donald Boat” phenomenon centers on laserboat999, a 21-year-old X user famed for surreal, deadpan posts blending humor, philosophy, and high-agency antics. He crowdsources ambitious projects (like his recent satellite/rocket expert hunt) via wishlists and ads, turning online clout into real-world resources. It’s why fans call him a “Kwisatz Haderach” of Twitter—enigmatic and unstoppable

the descriptor “high-agency” has been stuck in my head ever since reading this. it’s apparently a linkedin business term, something you’d call yourself in a job interview. I’m not a writer, I’m a “creative, people-oriented, high agency project manager with strong written and verbal skills.” this, obviously, sucks. the way language is used in the selfhelp/grindset circles depresses the shit out of me. but not knowing this provenance, I did think that characterizing donald boat as demonstrating a high degree of personal agency was a pretty apt description. and regardless of how many people might list it on their linkedin profiles, I don’t think of many people nowadays as being particularly agentive. myself included—in fact, I think a lot of my gripes with myself and my general malaise comes down to a subconscious recognition of how little I resist the ukases of habit and laziness. to make an impact on the world, the dream of all artists with some measure of self-regard, requires that one be “high agency”: like donald boat, or Conor Oberst.

Angie suggested we each give one of the 20s to a homeless person, probably the best solution to the dilemma of finding a wad of cash on the ground. I’m glad that’s what we did, and I’m glad I picked up the money, not out of some self-righteous satisfaction I got from later giving $20 to a homeless man in Oakland who definitely needed it more than I did, but because it was an opportunity to exercise agency.

now, truth be told, if I was alone, I’d still have picked up the money, but I don’t know if I’d have been altruistic with it.

some kind of clarity has dawned in my intellectual life, but like the light of the sun I can’t glimpse it directly. last post I wrote about Bertrand Russell, because I was inexplicably compelled to pick up the one book of his I have, Unpopular Opinions, and flip to an essay at random. as is often the case, the Book Angels arranged that the exact thing I needed to read in that moment is what I landed on. the call Russell makes in that essay, about the value of grappling with ideas, in solitude, without concern for what’s contemporary or modern, hit me squarely.

finding that the next essay I tried in Unpopular Opinions did not excite me at all, I put it down. on a whim similar to that which made me pick up Russell, I picked up Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. philosophy ought to be energizing, driving the reader to consider, practically, the aspects of their life they need to examine for the sake of making change. I’ve been in a bit of a rut about what reading means in my life; like almost everything, it’s become a habit that mostly serves to maintain a certain stasis, which is diametrically opposite what I crave from reading. the reason I love literature is because it, once upon a time, taught me what living could be, if I take seriously the questions posed through the ages by our artists, poets, and thinkers. by really grappling with the dilemma Hamlet faces, or considering what Ahab’s quest might reveal about my own approach to life, I might realize how little I’m actually “living,” and thereafter seek a new degree of radical engagement. this is an especially urgent question here in the contemporary world, where the arrangement of society effectively zombifies its participants, banking, as global consumer capitalism does, on a populace totally alienated from not only their labor but the reality of their individual experiences. the Spectacle not only doesn’t want you to know thyself, but it actively works to deny you that possibility. as such, the artifacts left by people who have tried harder than anyone else to know themselves—books, namely—must be protected and handled deliberately, for it is easy, under the sway of contemporary hegemonic ideology, to appear to be engaging with these questions while totally missing the volatile power of literature.

I won’t bother to recapitulate the meditation on faith, absurdity, responsibility, sacrifice, and morality that Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes de silentio, lays out in his analysis of Genesis 22:1-18, the Binding of Isaac. part of this analysis includes the impossibility of Abraham, the knight of faith, making himself comprehensible, in his embrace of the absurd, to anyone who might condemn him as a would-be murderer. I’ll briefly note that it became clear to me, in reading Fear and Trembling, that it is important for me to dwell on the question of faith and absurdity, seeing as I’ve lost some conviction that my creative pursuits, and the version of myself my creative pursuits reveal, are valuable, despite, or thanks to, the sacrifices they entail.

in a strange synchronicity, the day after I started reading Fear and Trembling, I met a young woman similarly seeking encouragement to pursue her creative impulses. her name? Faith.

the demiurge is not always one for subtlety.

I’m not on Instagram any more. that means there’s nowhere to put the pictures I’m starting to take again but here.

Bertrand Russell wrote that in the modern world, it’s become difficult to pursue the highest ideals of the intellectual life and that we moderns live in the “most parochial” era since Homer. by this he means that there is a tendency in contemporary thought to disdain the hard won wisdom of previous eras in favor of viewing everything through recently conceived frames. “We imagine ourselves at the apex of intelligence, and cannot believe that the quaint clothes and cumbrous phrases of former times can have invested people and thoughts that are still worthy of our attention.” most people making a name for themselves as public intellectuals—that scabrous and embattled profession—do so by applying preapproved dogmas that often only serve to signal their allegiance to some faction while reducing the need to think clearly.

Russell places one cause for this tendency with the need for the money and the fame that support a career in thinking. this appeals both to the psychological desire for validation and also the need to make one’s living. another cause is the rapidity with which the world changes, which creates an anxiety about keeping pace with the times while fearing the inevitability of being surpassed and the risk of appearing “untimely,” as Nietzsche would put it.

these are only epiphenomenal symptoms, according to Russell. ultimately, in the modern world, there is a desperate lack of compelling context. “Every serious worker, whether artist, philosopher, or astronomer, believed that in following his own convictions he was serving God’s purpose.” as the world became more and more secular, principles like Truth, Beauty and Goodness floated the spirits of atheistic “workers,” but their earnest faith in these principles had the paradoxical effect of privileging subjective conviction, which is prone to manipulation by the above mentioned desire for acceptance among one’s peers, over an objective reality. thus, Truth gave way to rhetorical force, Beauty deemed a social construct, and Goodness reduced to mere cultural behavioral norms. deprived of divine justification, a would be visionary/revolutionary was left with a weakened psychic defense against the pressures of dogmatism and social conformity. “For these reasons a greater energy of personal conviction is required to lead a man to stand out against the current of his time than would have been necessary in any previous period since the Renaissance.”

I don’t really care whether this diagnosis is right or not. Russell is kind of obnoxious, even if I sympathize with his opposition to dogmatism in favor of clarity of thought. he spends too much harping on Marxism, as would be expected from a British aristocrat. but what struck me about this brief essay, “On Being Modern-Minded,” were the last two sentences (emphasis mine):

A certain degree of isolation both in space and time is essential to generate the independence required for the most important work; there must be something which is felt to be of more importance than the admiration of the contemporary crowd. We are suffering not from the decay of theological beliefs but from the loss of solitude.

imagine what Russell, who wrote this essay nearly 90 years ago, would say about the chattering classes on Twitter and Substack, hordes clamoring for attention by either parroting shibboleths or rage-baiting.

I have almost entirely removed myself from the social media ecosystem. this was for the exact reason Russell suggests: I recognized a need to develop my attention, and my personal conviction, away from the weaponized consensus manufactured by social media platforms. these platforms also just take up too much of my time, filling my experience with a kind of white noise that dulls my ability to perceive the subtleties of life, a perception that’s indispensable to anyone hoping to represent their impressions of the World via artistic and intellectual practices like literature, film or music.

but now I’m wondering if there’s not still value in trying to express oneself via these most immediately available means. whether a desire to get back online is a sign of strengthened personal resolve, or if it’s the addict’s faux-naive belief that they can use responsibly now.

in any case, I’m back to writing online, and I intend to do so consistently again.