My operating rules and way of living. This is a m.o. (mo) page, or modus operandi page. It lists out the way I approach my life and the rules I apply to it to thrive. This is a living document and will be added to as more comes to mind, or as I develop new ones. It is mirrored at /mo. Feel free to make your own. Let me know if you do, and I'll list yours at the end of my mo page. Simplicity and defaults keeps things simple: stock apps, stock methods. Only specialize and customize if a need really can't be met. I stay away from almost every chain when it comes to purchasing something. I seek out locally-owned businesses or small niche businesses. Given the option between a small business and a tiny business, I opt for the tiny one. Even more so if it's owned or operated by BIPOC, immigrants, and/or queer folk. Scale and choice matters. I want people to be unafraid to start tiny businesses and to be encouraged to continue to do so. I do not buy from Amazon. I am not a hardcore minimalist, but operate like one. If something comes into my possession, it has to be necessary. If something comes into my possession, it should do more than one job. If something comes into my possession, it must do its primary job best. Most items should be thought of as tools: to enable me to do something. Items owned should be of the highest quality possible at a reasonable budgetary spend, but would likely be too much money than most would consider reasonable. I seek items that can be repaired whenever possible or have as long a life as feasible. Items should be grail items: it is the pinnacle of its kind, is timeless, and durable. Buy used: modern culture treats life as disposable. I rail against that and seek things that you will pass down to your grandchildren or similar. Walking is preferred, when possible. Take public transit when possible. Ride a bicycle. Drive less, and only drive when I must. I own a vehicle. It's used. It's now 17 years old. It's made by Toyota. It enables me to go very far, and into the backcountry. It is driven mostly for adventure. It is parked when in the city and at home. I will do my best to extend its lifespan and keep it running until it can no longer. I do not ingest highly processed foods. I eat whole foods as much as possible. I am restrictive in my diet, partly out of age and care for my body, but also because I have been diagnosed with SIBO and have nummular/discoid eczema (a rare form). I was able to come off long-term topical steroid use and keep my horrendous all-over eczema at bay because of adopting the AIP protocol. I will pay for high quality food. My body requires movement. I provide this to it through running (formerly decades of cycling), rock climbing, yoga, strength training, and general physical play. I am not an early adopter of technology. Most tech should be repairable, easily replaceable, or used until it reaches end-of-life. See item purchasing above. Phone is Airplane mode at night. I'd keep it in another room like others do, but I tend to wake up in the middle of the night and need music (downloaded) to listen to, to fall back asleep. Computers, modems, and wi-fi are powered down at night. I love Airpods because of my hearing loss and physically smaller left ear, but detest that they are ultimately disposable products. I am moving back towards wired headphones. I wear natural fibers on my body almost all of the time. I keep synthetic clothing to a minimum — typically limited to running shorts (lowest friction for my eczema) or for outdoor pursuits (rain shell, down jackets). I wear cotton and merino wool. With my eczema status, all plastic-and-oil based clothing feels creepy-tingly-gross on my skin. At an eatery: prioritize establishments that have reusable dinner- and silverware. Coffee shops: for here, please. Worst case scenario: paper or compostable containers. When possible, and remembered, I have a Snow Peak titanium spork on me to reduce utensil use when eating out at a fast casual or for food to-go. I love to cook. You don't need to, but you should be able to do some basic cooking so you can feed yourself. Pick up food takeout when possible and tip the restaurant versus using a delivery service which is already gouging you on pricing, and getting reamed on their cut of the profit. Pay them directly. Do your own groceries. Spend the time to get out in the world and community and talk and be amongst people. I do not pay for video streaming services, but am paying for a YouTube Premium subscription because creators and artists and filmmakers and nerds and enthusiasts have better and real stories to tell. Always take the stairs. Always walk the travelator. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email

The future of democracy is direct, online, and doesn't require politicians.

Had I been more clever or alert I might have heard and recorded my brother’s last words before he died last August in hospice. A reader asks about this, and I admit I blew it. For the last week or so of his life, Ken was unconscious, occasionally moaning when the nurses shifted him in bed. It’s customary to focus on last words. Perhaps we expect wisdom, reassurance, a lifetime’s lesson pithily expressed. There is precedent. William Hazlitt, not the happiest of men, is reported to have said while dying, “Well, I've had a happy life.” Assuming its accuracy, I find that enormously touching. And there’s Gerard Manley Hopkins, dying of typhoid fever: “I am so happy, so happy.” Delusion or gratitude? I prefer to avoid the cynical interpretation.  I’ve just finished reading Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth, 1993) by Theresa Whistler. I’ve grown deeply interested in de la Mare and his work in the last several years. The poet would die on June 22, 1956 at age eighty-three. He had been ailing for several years. On the evening of June 21, Whistler reports de la Mare told his nurse: “Oh, N [Sister Natalie Saxton], I do feel seedy!” To the end, interesting word choice. He had suffered another coronary thrombosis, was given oxygen and repeatedly pulled off the mask. He slept intermittently. Sir Russell Brain, the eminent neurologist and close friend of de la Mare, visited. “He was bright, even happy,” Whistler writes, “and joked: ‘I think we shall cheat them yet.’”   To a pretty nurse, de la Mare said, “It’s a long time since me met – you must have come out of a dream.” With prompting, de la Mare recited his poem “Fare Well.” Whistler writes:   “The longest day drew in quietly, and the short night fell. N had gone out of the room for a brief rest. The nurse who had taken her place tucked him in – it was 2 a.m. – and bent over him. She asked if he was quite comfortable. ‘Yes, I’m perfectly all right,’ he answered – then he caught his breath in one gasp and died. There was no time to fetch N or the others. The nurse could only wake them and tell them he was gone.”

Another remarkable Russian novel finally made it into English last year, Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur, written in 1929 but not published until 1972, in Paris. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have been translating Platonov for decades now, and this novel and the apparatus they include with it are a triumph.  The Foundation Pit (1930) is a better novel, more focused and inventive, but this one is an event for English-language readers.  By current standards, Chevengur is at least the fourth best book published in the last twenty-five years. Platonov was, to reiterate my distant last post, not just a writer but an engineer, somehow a scientist but also a mystic who deeply believed in communism but also in its inevitable failure.  In Chevengur, his first novel, this is all as clear as fiction can make it.  A character theorizes about “the possibility of destroying night for the sake of an increase in harvests” (141) – you know, keep the sun out perpetually, by means of science or collective Leninist willpower or something – and although Platonov recognizes that the idea is crazy he, and not just his character, also kind of means it.  It is like, a descendant of, Charles Fourier turning the sea into lemonade.  It is like a communist Atlas Shrugged, if you can imagine that book continually undermining its own ideas, which in a sense it does, but I guess I mean knowingly. The novel begins in pre-Soviet crisis: famine, typhus, war.  An orphan theme runs through the whole book.  “Horselessness had set in” (91).  “Horselessness” is a fine piece of Platonov, a screwy word that accurately describes the disaster.  There is also hopelessness, of course: “Where are we going”? said one old man, , who had begun to grow shorter from the hopelessness of life.  “We’re going any which way, till someone curbs us. Turn us around – and we’ll come back again.” (92) Yet the novel is also a comedy in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky, full of hysterical laughter, as well as Gogol’s tendency for anything to come alive.  The mechanic Zakhar Pavlovich “began to live with resignation, no longer counting on universal radical improvement” (62), a sad condition in a Platonov novel, but he can still talk to the locomotives he repairs: “I know,” the locomotive sympathized in a deep voice – and sank further into the dark of its cooling strength. “That’s what I say!” Zakhar Pavlovich agreed.  (64) The comical catastrophes turn into a long picaresque section, characters wandering through the ruins of the Revolution, bumping into Dostoevsky – “The lame man was called Fyodor Dostoevsky” (140) – and a crazy man named God – “Dvanov set off, along with God” (99).  One of the wanderers is openly a Don Quixote-figure, horse and all, although unlike Quixote he has a strong socialist horse.  Then later there is a second Don Quixote, this time with a suit of armor and a pile of disarmed grenades. In the second half of the novel, the characters concentrate in the steppe village of Chevengur where perfect communism has been established by the usual bloody methods, but where the great joke is that none of the surviving peasants and rural villagers have any idea what Marxist-Leninist communism is.  They are just making it all up, based on, more than anything, Old Believer Russian Orthodoxy.  How did Platonov think this could be published?  Anyway, things end pretty much as they have to end. The Chevengur half of the novel is full of heightened Soviet revolutionary language so bizarre that it was soon abandoned.  This makes for a challenge for the translators which they often solve by means of notes.  It is all, unfortunately, not much fun.  Somehow the bleak but lively picaresque half of the novel is a lot of fun, but the static, dialectical village half is not. “But communism’s about to set in!” Chepurny quietly puzzled in the darkness of his agitation.  “Why am I finding everything so hard?” (290) Exactly.  Languagehat read Chevengur in Russian fifteen years ago and had a similar experience with the switch between the first half and the second.  And here are two useful posts about reviews of the Chandler translation.  Chevengur got some attention last year. I will tack on some funny bits about books and reading: Dostoevsky’s home housed a library of books, but he already knew them by heart.  They brought him no consolation and he now had to do his own personal thinking.  (141) My worst nightmare!  A few pages later, in “a grove of concentrated, sad trees” we meet a forester who studies his father’s “library of cheap books by the least read, least important, and most forgotten of authors… life’s decisive truths exist secretly in abandoned books”  (150).  “Boring books had their origin in boring readers…” (151).  Chevengur was tough going at times but never boring.

Johnson, Boswell and friends met for dinner at the Crown and Anchor on April 12, 1776. Among the topics of conversation was the evergreen favorite “whether drinking improved conversation and benevolence.” Sir Joshua Reynolds maintained it did. Johnson replies:   “‘No, Sir: before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority, have the modesty not to talk. When they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous: but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects.’”   My experience confirms this. In conversation, the only thing more insufferable than a know-it-all is a drunken know-it-all. Alcohol creates experts. Otherwise modest fellows suddenly start thinking they know what they’re talking about. When one or more meet, arguments ensue, fistfights, bail bondsmen. Reynolds disagrees and Johnson replies:      “‘No, Sir; wine gives not light, gay, ideal hilarity; but tumultuous, noisy, clamorous merriment. I have heard none of those drunken,—nay, drunken is a coarse word,—none of those VINOUS flights.’”   And Reynolds responds more personally: “‘Because you have sat by, quite sober, and felt an envy of the happiness of those who were drinking.’”   It was the late novelist Donald Newlove who first suggested to me that Johnson may have been in his earlier years an alcoholic or at least a “problem drinker” (that anxiety-easing euphemism). In Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers (1981), a meditation on the writing/alcohol connection, Newlove writes:   “Great writing about alcohol is an ocean without shoreline and I have a thick notebook of excerpts from world literature to attest to it, a sheaf of quotations to help me keep sober. One of the most stirring recoveries from excessive drinking was made by Dr. Samuel Johnson two centuries ago.”   To clarify that he is not issuing a blanket condemnation of alcohol or its effects – basically, not wishing to sound like a moralistic wet blanket -- Johnson says:   “Sir, it is not necessary to be drunk one’s self, to relish the wit of drunkenness. Do we not judge of the drunken wit, of the dialogue between Iago and Cassio, the most excellent in its kind, when we are quite sober? Wit is wit, by whatever means it is produced; and, if good, will appear so at all times. I admit that the spirits are raised by drinking, as by the common participation of any pleasure: cock-fighting, or bear-baiting, will raise the spirits of a company, as drinking does, though surely they will not improve conversation. I also admit, that there are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits which are not good till they are rotten.”   I knew guys who were diffident dullards when sober and sparkling entertainers when drunk, at least for a short time, until the demons took over. Some recognized their transformation, drank greater quantities and more often,  and turned into bums or wet brains. Fellow drinkers deemed them weaklings, failed drinkers. Alcoholics are hard on their own kind. Johnson describes my style of drinking: “‘Sir, I do not say it is wrong to produce self complacency by drinking; I only deny that it improves the mind. When I drank wine, I scorned to drink it when in company. I have drunk many a bottle by myself; in the first place, because I had need of it to raise my spirits; in the second place, because I would have nobody to witness its effects upon me.’”   I’m reminded of a wisecrack attributed to Dylan Thomas: “An alcoholic is someone who drinks as much as I do whom I don’t like.”