The new blog is here, and you’ll probably notice the difference.

WM Commons CC-BY-2.0

Apparently, she has dutifully filed her “sovereign citizen” paperwork and is thus no longer under the jurisdiction of the state of Utah or the good ol’ U.S. of A. On it’s own, this is cute, but not blog-worthy. What makes this into a four-star story is the phone call that she made (and which was aired in part on the radio) to the 9-1-1 emergency line, in which she orders the dispatcher to have the police call off the chase and tries to explain that they do not have jurisdiction over her.

Naturally, they spiked her tires. Chase over.

— § —

It all reminds me of the son of a couple of white supremacist parents that lived in the neighborhood in which I grew up. They’d moved to the metropolitan area from one of the rural corners of the southwest, and he tried to explain this to me one day when we were pre-teens, one one of the odd occasions in which he and I ended up in conversation (we weren’t close friends and often ended up in fights rather than conversation).

“So let me get this straight—the government just arrests people that they don’t like politically, not on the basis of any crime they’ve committed,” I answered in response to an assertion he’d just made, “and then locks them up and throws away the key?”

“Yeah, exactly,” he said.

“But if you become a sovereign citizen, which you can do by sending some official U.S. government paperwork to the U.S. government, they can’t do this anymore?”

“No, because you’ve seceded from the country. You’re a country of one, completely independent. They can’t arrest you, take your money for taxes, make you agree to policies you don’t like and shit.”

“But instead they have to deal with you as two countries would deal with each other?”

“Yeah, exactly,” he said again.

“So instead of reading you your rights and arresting you when you do something they don’t like, now they’ll just bomb you with F-16s or blast your head off with a tank, just like they’d do to another country if it came to that?”

“No, no, you don’t get it, they can’t do that either,” he replied quickly.

“Why not?” I asked.

“That’s murder, it’s against the law!” was his answer.

In retrospect, I’d guess that this pre-pubescent kid didn’t get his ideas about sovereign citizenship and the practices of the U.S. government from watching teen programming on television. It may have had something to do with his ultraconservative parents (particularly the father, in this case, who was a real case study as I recall).

— § —

The Wasatch Front/Salt Lake City metropolitan is such a strange place right now; it’s being listed as a “major American city” in policy research, is a heating job market with a population in the multiple millions, and is being targeted by the likes of Google Fiber, Adobe, eBay, Kickstarter, and others as a top place to build, invest, and locate major operations. We have some of the world’s largest data centers and most cutting-edge medical research going on here, with big names involved. We’re an Olympic city. Park City and Sundance, each less than an hour away and both basically metropolitan satellites, are regularly packed with movie stars and the Hollywood set.

And yet, at the same time, it’s a Wal-Mart wasteland in which you’re still likely to run into dust-covered, barely literate “cowboys” in decaying leather rags, buying milk with their tobacco-chewing teenaged sons and trying to figure out how in the “sam hell” to operate something as mind-numbingly complex as the self-scanning machine.

I suspect that something will have to give. To listen to the talk radio and read the op-eds, the indigenous population is increasingly furious that it is being displaced. No, I don’t mean the Ute tribe, I mean the population of sovereign citizens that have been given this “country out here” as their birthright by God and the destiny that he once, for them, made manifest.

— § —

I still can’t decide whether I’ve made this post in jest or in all seriousness, or how likely this sort of thing is to happen in New York. At least in NYC, I suspect no one would be unsophisticated enough to bait a cop, then call the dispatcher to tell them that the police have no jurisdiction.

Even amongst nations rather than citizens, it takes a truly dumb nation (say, North Korea) to stick a finger up the nose of a political, economic, and military superpower.

Word to the wise, sovereign citizens: next time, at least wait until you have a tank to try to goad the U.S.A., or even the relatively harmless state of Utah, into war.

— § —

I take back what I just said about Utah, given the fact that one of our local military bases (a major U.S. one) will soon be one of three in the nation to host the national drone warfare program.

Get something more than a tank. At least wait until your sovereign self could take out Kim Jong-Un before you try to play realpolitik I’m-10-minutes-late-and-a-small-country-so-I’ll-just-blow-by-some-cops-and-not-even-on-the-road games with Uncle Sam or his local highway patrol adjunct.

Public Domain

I don’t mean as a matter of time constraints, necessarily, though that’s certainly a part of the reason.

But there is a deeper dimension to the process of becoming mute for some of us—a process that in my case has been ongoing since I first entered my twenties.

— § —

I’ve spent a good deal of time over the years engaged with various forms of personality evaluation, self-help and motivational literature, spiritual traditions of various kinds, and so on.

I know all the criticisms. In fact, I may have internalized them, as a consumer of these kinds of goods.

But as I get older and just a bit more wise, it has begun to dawn on me that the criticisms aren’t entirely innocent; they’re part of the ongoing process—not a conspiratorial one, by any means—by which certain kinds of personalities, certain individual value systems and orientations, and certain problem archetypes for enlightenment rationality and the totalized (along whatever axes) societies that it characterizes are repressed and displaced.

— § —

I’m an introvert. This is held to be maladaptive.

I’m not resource- or consumption-oriented. This is held to be maladaptive.

I’m a naturally dubious, inquisitive, and critical thinker. This is held to be maladaptive.

I enjoy nonproduction/nonactivity. This is held to be maladaptive.

I’m rather sensitive. This is held to be maladaptive.

I’m also stubbornly attached to my own judgment. This is held to be maladaptive.

— § —

The problem with trying to improve oneself in the world—which is really code for trying to figure out how to feed oneself after all in the extant political and economic systems that own the day—is not that the outlined techniques don’t work; in many ways, they do.

It is instead that self-improvement techniques are secretly tools of domination, designed to cause those of us that don’t naturally sustain and reify existing orders to become more like those that do.

— § —

It’s an extrovert’s world.
It’s a crass materialist’s world.
It’s a world of knowing, not a world of questioning.
It’s a world of action, not a world of thought.
It’s a world of rationality and externality, not a world of intuition and sensation.
It’s a world of the inessential, not a world of the essential.

The group of most successful archetypes is indistinguishable from the group of extroverted, productivist, consumerist, doubt-free, thoughtlessly acting, rationalistic, and inessential ones.

— § —

As I have become better at feeding myself—as I have, in other words, striven to be ever-more like that which I am not—my ability to produce or to feel motivated to produce—anything at all—has declined.

As a young person, I was incredibly generative, so far as I was concerned. Now, not so much so far as I am concerned. The lack of writing here (and elsewhere) is evidence of this.

The trick (and evidence) lay in the fact that to dominant eyes outside myself, I wasn’t particularly productive before and I am more or less in the same boat now.

— § —

For all the striving for change, what I have most lost is myself, something that disappeared along with the many habits of thought, feeling, and desire that characterized it—habits that I have spent a lifetime trying to change in order to “reach my potential” and to “be a better person.”

It is only now, as I get older, that I realize what a fool’s game much of this is. It doesn’t matter how hard I strive to be one of “them.” I will never be so “them” as they are—those gregarious personalities in suits that ask questions about price but not about value, about representations but not about their meanings. There’s a place in the world for MBAs, lawyers, politicians, enterpreneurs, and so on. They have a distinct value all their own.

But for the rest of us that sacrifice 90 percent of what we ever were on our own terms in order to manage to become 10 percent of what they are on theirs—the exchange is hardly an equitable one.

— § —

And once habits of thought, feeling, and desire are lost, they are difficult to re-establish.

But (for anyone young that stumbles across what I’ve written here) don’t imagine that by strangling your own nature you’ll fill any resultant vacuum with a new nature.

Instead, for the most part, you’ll be left with the vacuum—and you won’t be what you otherwise might have been.

Those that don’t understand—they’ll pat you on the back and say that you’re “getting better” and “maturing” and “growing” all the time.

Don’t listen to them; your instincts are correct. You’re not. You’re losing what makes you great. Pursue it, and let the naysayers complain bitterly—as they will, over and over again, unable to understand what you’re on about and what you’re all about.

But they need you, even in the midst of all their complaining, lack of understanding, and tendency to persecute you. The world needs you every bit as much as you need yourself—do don’t let yourself be sacrificed, and by all means, don’t perform the sacrifice with your own two hands.

— § —

So, in an obtuse (and, for the “other” kind of people, probably frightening, troubling, or bewilderingly nonsensical) way, that’s why I don’t write nearly as much as I used to, and why over the years since I began writing regularly, my writing frequency, quality, and volume have declined linearly over time.

I’m gradually training myself not to write. With every day, I get better and better at being “successful,” something that never quite measures up to the “success” that others—the ones that pat me on the back for it—enjoy, nor to my own values. And, with every day, I am less and less able to make use of the talents that I once had.

Dominant social and cultural forces, both individual and gestalt, didn’t value those talents. I made the mistake of imagining that—as a result—I didn’t, either. And even now that I have realized that I did, there remains the very practical problem and reality that they are maladaptive if I want myself (or my family) to eat.

I’m making a conscious effort to try to find certain things in myself again, writing (real writing) amongst them. We’ll see if it bears fruit. Even if it doesn’t in any real way, the attempt—if I manage to remain sincere about it—goes, at the very least, some way to restoring some sense of integrity, in the literal sense.

WM Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0

— § —

Patience is a virtue.

Self-control is a virtue.

Kindness is a virtue.

Forgiveness is a virtue.

Generosity is a virtue.

Love is a virtue.

Intimacy is a virtue.

Detachment is a virtue.

Pursuing virtues is a virtue.

— § —

Many understand that action is a form of communication. Even amongst specialists, most can’t conceive of what it means that communication is a form of action.

— § —

Very few people are legitimately capable of anything resembling cultural relativism or a multicultural sensibility. Humans just aren’t created that way.

Lots of people think they exemplify this sensibility. Others are happy to grant this to them, having no better equipment with which to make the judgment.

— § —

Some rules and axioms to live by:

Make it happen and you will destroy it in the end.
Let it happen and it will serve you forever.

Ask clearly for what you want or be satisfied with whatever you get.

Don’t doubt people so that they won’t doubt you. Support people so that they will support you.

Act before it’s too late, even if it’s hard. Stop before it’s too late, even if it’s hard.

Tell the world how you feel but don’t blame the world for your feelings.

Measure yourself by your generosity to others. Come to understand what it means that generosity is neither about giving nor about things.

Try new things without forgetting the values of old ones.

Don’t refuse to wait for anything so that you don’t find yourself forced to wait for everything.

Appreciate what you have so that you don’t you don’t have less.

Have regrets but don’t let these regrets dominate life. Beware of anyone that has no regrets or anyone that is ruled by regrets, both of which amount to the same thing.

Make life and death your friends and companions—your life and your death, not those of others.

Read Lao Tzu.

Drink some.

© 2005 Aron Hsiao

Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History is the single greatest piece of writing in the western canon. The Tao Te Ching by mysterious quasi-figure Lao Tzu is the single greatest in the eastern canon.

When considered together, I’m quite sure they come to something. But it will take me a few more years to figure out just what.

— § —

Some days you drink all day.

Some days you send hundreds of text messages.

Some days the hours never quite get off the ground, and you go from “wake up” to “wait for it to end” without anything in between.

Some days you hear Johnny Rotten over and over in your head, asking “Do you ever feel like you’ve been cheated?”

— § —

I don’t remember what I did on the way to Los Angeles, on the way to Vancouver, on the way to Chicago, on the way to New York, on the way to Austin, or on the way to anywhere else I’ve ever been.

That’s too bad, because I often feel as though these are the most important moments in life. And I’m fairly sure I felt that way while I was “on the way” in each case.

And in each case, I’m sure I thought I would never forget.

— § —

Playlist for the day:

Red Hot Chili Peppers
Alice in Chains
Led Zeppelin
KMFDM
Gorillaz
XTC

— § –

Sitting in Broadway Deli in Salt Lake City, drinking coffee and wondering.

Sitting in a bus station in Texas, drinking coffee and wondering.

Sitting in a Barnes and Noble in Goleta, drinking coffee and wondering.

Sitting in a Village dump in NYC, drinking coffee and wondering.

Wondering, wondering, wondering.

Stop fucking wondering.

— § —

I’m old.

— § —

What’s genuine and what’s manipulation?

From yourself or anyone?

I don’t mean this to be a research question.

These are stupid terms, ideological to their cores.

If only no one anywhere thought the world was essentially a power play, it wouldn’t have to be a power play for anyone.

Since a few people, here and there, are sure it is, it is a power play for everyone.

Live or die.

Hammer or anvil.

Have or have not.

To be or not to be.

— § —

Regret is the substance that pervades the universe, a fundamental physical quantity from which all others come to exist.

Superstring theory, combinatorics, evolutionary psychology, bioinformatics, blah, blah. All just understudies for regret.

— § —

Background vocals.

Supporting singers.

Hollywood stories.

Unauthorized biography.

Sensationalism.

Trash.

— § —

Once on Ellwood Beach there was a small beach house made of driftwood, scrap, and palm leaves, and in its center, apart from the sand and crab shells, was a partially rotted tree stump into which a chess board had been burned.

A guy that ought to have been working kept going there and looking for some kind of truth. In the end, he found nothing, took it as a sign, and quit his job and headed for the edge of the world.

He never made it there; instead, he found himself trapped in a two-bit hotel in the middle of nowhere, running out of money, drinking to excess, and phoning nobody in particular to tell his story. Nobody cared.

Years later, he died alone.

— § —

The hardware stores sell several kinds of wax log, designed for cheap, extended fireplace burning.

For $14.00 one can purchase a box of six two-hour logs. Two-hour logs are better than natural wood, but two hours is still brief.

For $18.00 one can purchase a box of six four-hour logs. Four hours is much better; it’s long enough to do almost anything requiring a fire, and in relation to their converse quantities the price difference ($4.00) is much smaller than the time difference (twice the time).

The four-hour logs, however, burn much less brightly than the two-hour logs, and provide much less warmth.

— § —

The atheist that waits for the Messiah is a fool.

He is, however, a typical fool, with many comrades.

© 1999 Aron Hsiao

When done well, personal writing—fiction or nonfiction—requires death.

Its origins lie in finality; in confrontation with those things that ought to remain hidden, that have been painstakingly buried, written out of history. It’s not that in writing they mst be resurrected, but rather that in writing they return victorious, sneering, not the undead but the ever-living, the uncanny, malicious others that populate a frightening universe of strangers, foreigners, spies, and assassins.

There is one time and one time only when consequences no longer exist; that time is death. Writing comes in all shapes and sizes, but when the most real and important forms of writing are happening, it is consequences instead that are buried, written out of history entirely, as a matter of expedience.

Some say that good writing requires suffering, or sacrifice, or courage. Not true. It requires something both easier and more difficult: that you find—or allow yourself to find—the entrance to yourself, the one that you have not—despite everything—yet managed to completely and permanently close, but have at least managed to push to the farthest and most final reaches of life.

— § —

Thanks to NaNoWriMo and a collection of fortuitous circumtances, I had begun to approach that entrance, to wind my way toward it, throughout November.

I was nominally productive on everey writing front of my life, and what I wrote had begun, happily, to frighten me in some way—to give me pause.

But the Thanksgiving holidays came, and were a convenient excuse to save myself from things unknown, and my progress was interrupted. I slyly set up camp and bided time, “waiting” for a break in the storm of quotidia in which (I told myself) I would reclaim the path.

But with the break here, the path is lost, and I realize that I have been a liar.

I am back to where I started; as lost and far away from good writing as I was in October. The work must be redone. And, once again, the emotional mountains challenged.

— § —

There’s no time for good writing in the world anyway.

And it’s not clear that I could ever do it if there were.

And there’s no value in it anyway; it’s a narcissistic (or perhaps nihilistic) exercise.

But no doubt I’ll try again. That is, regrettably or fortuitously, where I am in life.

— § —

I suspect that if I’m to find my way again, it will involve music.

If there’s one thing missing from my life, it’s music. The reason is simple: the music that I have I have because it is true. But the father in me cannot face any truth. Those things that I know about the world are the things that I cannot bear, any longer, to know.

Music, of all things, takes me back.

But I cannot afford to go back.

And yet, at the same time, I will continue to try.

There is a paradox here that can’t be resolved. It’s not a moral riddle. It’s an insignificant tragedy.

— § —

Any innocence lost once must be lost again and again and again, the cycle repeated in perpetuity.

That is the nature of things.

If it weren’t, life would have no meaning. Since it is, meaning forever threatens life.

— § —

My daughter said tonight, suddenly, amidst bouts of wordless, unexplained tears: “I hate Christmas.”

All that is required to understand is the removal of the words. Take away the “I.” Take away the “hate.” Take away “Christmas.” Let the rest remain.

It pains me that she has felt it already. Everyone comes to parenthood convinced that they can hold off the storm forever, preserve something ineffable and invaluable ahead of its ever-raging front. But that which was not there to begin with can never hope to be preserved.

— § —

The equivalent adult line, thanks to Chris Cornell, goes:

There must be something good—far away, far away from here, far away…

— § —

You can turn out the lights, drink, smoke, wait until the wee hours, turn out page after page of nothing in particular. None of it helps you to write what you think. Because you must never, ever, ever admit to yourself what it is that you think.

Until you do.

And those of us with aspirations will continue to press on toward that day with all the naivete and resignation that the journey demands.

— § —

Too emo?

What can I say?

I grew up here.

Wanna go for a ride?

© 2005 Aron Hsiao

It is only our biological capacity for culture that gives us a glimpse of what we could be in the first place, that makes it possible for us to accomplish anything at all.

But the very same biological natures that give rise to it ensure that we will use it to continuously and unwittingly sabotage one another and to continuously and unwittingly be sabotaged.

Even at those rare moments when you realize what could be, you’re powerless to do anything about it. For the only cure is that which wouldld make the cure pointless in the first place: to forcefully separate humans from one another as a matter of course; to live as atoms.

Human existence is a tragic satire of human existence.

— § —

Anyone that has never trusted their own sanity cannot be trusted with anything of significance.

— § —

Living in New York is, in fact, exactly like living on Sesame Street.

— § —

Living in Provo is like living in hell, in a land of lost souls and endless, purposeless suffering, so useless as to be unvalorizable on its own terms.

— § —

There is nothing worse than pointless suffering so tepid as to be undeserving of the term. That is where the catastrophic end of humanity lies.

— § —

When I arrived at the University of Chicago, I was told in no uncertain terms by more than one senior person that it was the most intellectually exciting environment on the planet.

I am here to tell you, Chicago: bullshit.

The New School is twice as intellectually exciting as your boring, overpolitical, stodgy quad. Maybe there was a time when you were interesting. Now, like Harvard and Yale, you’re all hat (and endowment).

– § —

Someday, when global warming is on the verge of taking us all and the human suffering has risen to historical levels, my own strife will be ameliorated at least a little bit by the immense schadenfreude that I feel about so many that were deniers.

Justified schadenfreude is one of the greatest joys of life, and no, I don’t feel small saying that. The lack of awareness demonstrated by some cultures in this regard (e.g. Buddhist culture, Christian culture) is shocking and ironic.

— § —

Suffering is the meaning of life.

Joy is the medium in which it is rendered.

— § —

The world is far too big for anyone, no matter how well-traveled, to be able to grasp it. Personal experience dissolves quickly, going from insight to ignorance in the blink of an eye, without this change ever becoming evident to anyone.

Always doubt anyone that claims to know anything, especially about things that are not directly in front of their eyes at this moment, or buried deeply in their forehead.

— § —

To love the human race is to hate it, and vice-versa.

Anyone that claims a love for the human race without a matching hate for the human race doesn’t know or understand a single God damned thing about the human race.

© 2003 Aron Hsiao

This poses a bit of a problem during those moments when I can’t for the life of me think of a single universal anything, in any context whatsoever, and at the same time don’t want to concede that I am so completely unwise as to be unable to even conceive of wisdom.

— § —

Every now and then I wonder about these popular quanitites that are less quantities than they are value orientations and symbols for ethical and moral allegiances.

Wisdom. Courage. Discretion. Perserverance. Grace. Hope.

That list of words that makes its way undeservedly onto greeting cards and birth certificates and more deservedly into literature and speechwriting.

Without wanting to read a lot of originalist or essentialist nonsense about what are, after all, socially constructed and spatiotemporally local quanitites, I sometimes wonder whether I oughtn’t to spend more time thinking about them.

After all, without even trying to do so, I’m relatively certain that I hold these up to be goods in much the same way that others do, and pursue them haphazardly and often implicitly and failingly, again in much the same way that others do.

But I’ve never taken the time to dissect what I understand most of these to mean (much less to try to do any sort of wider cultural or linguistic analysis in this regard). Without knowing what they mean, we take them to be self-evidently good and desirable, the territory of the aged and of those that have suffered at extremes that we “cannot possibly imagine and no doubt would never survive.”

But what I want to know, at the end of the day, is this—and it’s a question that I can’t actually answer offhand, even intuitively—are these taken-for-granted goods compatible with one another? What do they look like when plotted on a Venn diagram? Might they, in their most virtuous extremes, even be mutually exclusive and incompatible?

What then?

It would seem an untenable and ethnocentric position to suggest that they are universalist tendencies in practice and substance, or even that there is a universalist basis in moral reasoning for each of them. That would appear to legitimate much of the colonial project and many historical ills.

At the same time, if there is no unversalist basis for them, then what is the nature of their value, and how are they different from either cynicism on the one hand or martyrdom on the other?

— § —

Nope, not a philosopher. And haven’t read anything that would seem to be on point, at least not to the layperson.

They chuck a bunch of Kant and Hegel and Hume and Heidegger at you in the social sciences, along with a bit of Rosseau and Lock and Hobbes in literature departments, but for the most part you’re kept out of the grand traditions of western philosophy.

But then again, if we’re talking western philosophy, the same questions tend to obtain regardless of the canon.

— § —

Do I have the sense that there is a proper hierarchy of values as outlined above?

How about a proper hierarchy of disciplines?

If mutually inconsistent, does wisdom trump courage, or vice-versa?

The same thing goes for the social-scientific ethical universe on the one hand and the canons of western philosophy on the other.

— § —

Does any of this even mean anything?

Hardly.

It’s only that tonight, as is the case now and then, I was feeling particularly unwise and ungraceful.

So I consciously tried to be wiser and more graceful.

Which led me to feel uncourageous and lacking in perserverance.

And at the end of it all, the morass led me to want to have a drink, put some words down, and throw my keyboard against the wall.

That, at least, would have been unwise, ungraceful, uncourageous, and so on.

Perhaps it all works out, like so many other things, in negative space.

Or perhaps Marx was right and we all ought to pull our heads out of the clouds and turn Hegel on his head. I used to be sure that Marx was right.

But the moral universe that Durkheim outlined is a real one, and leads me at times to doubt.

— § —

At the end of the day, without having ever wanted to be one, I sometimes suspect that I am, simply, a *skeptic*.

© 2005 Aron Hsiao

The holiday season arrives every year as a collection of expectations, the promise of rewards whose coming has sustained everyone through the darker, more work-intensive periods of the year.

Those expectations are not the same from individual to individual.

— § —

For me, the release of the holiday season has always come in a particular form of collective down-time.

The holidays are, in my deepest imagination, a period during which all rules and all activity end. Family members are drawn together not by “doing things” together so much as by being “down” together, by developing—for once during the year—the particular sort of intimacy that comes from being inactive in collectivity, from seeing one another passively in mutually inactive states.

For some in my family over the years, this meant television for days on end. For others, this meant quiet time reading in solitude behind a closed door. For others, it was a matter of undirected talking or reminiscing. All were able to observe, in a quiet way that drew no attention to itself, what others did to unwind—what others did when there was nothing to do.

There was an unwritten rule that no plans could be made or proposed. To do so would have shattered an unwritten detente, drawn time and choices back into issue, would have required interaction that for some were irreconcilable with the notion of non-being-in-the-world that was always woven through the holiday expectations of others.

And so it was that on the morning following a major holiday, all would gradually make appearances and, in some cases, follow these with disappearances back into rooms or corners. Little would be said; littler still would be done. There was no talk of the future, either future hours or future days.

For a moment, at least, the world came to an end, realized in ultimately in the willfull anti-climax of holiday ecstasy. A new world would surely come once the holiday season was over, and everyone knew this at some unspoken level, but for a few days at least, all were between worlds, caught between the end of one and the start of another. There was nothing to be done but to observe what others were inclined to do at the end of the world.

— § —

Those days of complete emptiness, open horizons, limited interaction, yet complete co-presence are amongst my most essential memories of childhood and are the crux of the holiday release toward which I have looked forward every year.

As it turns out, however, this tableaux is more and more difficult to realize; a single thought of the future, a single plan made, a single mention of practical things brings the world back to life again for all; the moment is lost. Ritual and anticipation can only suspend existence outside of time if they are carefully nurtured—if the fiction is gently, painstakingly, and interactively built and respected.

— § —

Rather importantly, this is not everyone’s idea of the perfect holiday season or the perfect holiday release, and it has always been difficult to reconcile the impulse with the very strong competing impulse in the broader culture for the holidays to be a season of frenetic activity and involvement.

It is inevitable that things are changing as others marry into the family and as my own children grow. It is already clear that the previous tacit agreement about the natures of the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year holidays can no longer be sustained.

In short, I’m less and less able to depend on the holiday season for the particular rewards that it once provided to me. I suspect I’ll be able to develop some other avenue in my life that provides for the same escape. It will likely shift, however, from a particular form of collective experience to very different one of individual and sequestered experience, caught in fleeting moments without the awareness of others.

— § —

I suspect that the cultural difference at issue is founded in different valorizations of silence and inactivity as they occur in togetherness.

For me, silence and inactivity are as central to social life as their opposites. I suspect that one cannot know or be properly intimate with another without spending a certain number of hours physically together yet unengaged in speech, eye contact, or ordered activity.

For others, however, this kind of time makes no sense; it is wasted, or at the very least, negative space in the context of human relationships. Time spent in silence facing away from one another in the same room does, according to this other value system, nothing for a relationship. It indicates merely that no one has yet thought of or mustered the energy to engage in meaningful activity or to speak to one another.

— § —

It’s strange as a parent to believe that this kind of time is so important for the development of healthy personhood, yet to know that within the context of mainstream western culture, it may be nearly impossible to organically find.

To try to acheve by open insistence, however, is to try to accomplish by force something that is at its very core the antithesis of force. It is a ritual whose invisibility, unnameability, and easy taken-for-grantedness are central to its substance.

© 2002 Aron Hsiao

Days come and go, but they are never “life.” They are details and rushing; they are tasks and process.

Only when today has become yesterday is it (was it) life, after all.

— § —

I have never believed anyone who said that they have no regrets.

Life is nothing without regret.

If there is or ever was anyone that lives or has lived without regrets, I pity them. I wish them many regrets in the future, to the extent that they are able still to have them. Many wonderful, terrible, heart-rending regrets.

To die without regrets? What sort of a life is that?

— § —

We’ve had snow this week.

Snow changes things. Somewhere in the annals of physics, a long-forgotten author has published on the way in which the particular characteristics of the atoms in the water molecule, at a particular energy level, stop time entirely, catch time out of time.

Every period during which snow covers the ground is a period during which being stops and turns inward on itself.

That’s the secret and hidden nature of the holiday season, the one that I missed when I was living in places where there was no snow: the relentless march of time continued year-round when instead it ought to have paused.

Winter and its snow grant to its children a halting of the accumulation of life.

During this time, while life itself is frozen, it is possible to make a few notes, to take a few measures, and to understand what must be done next.

Without snow, one is quickly overwhelmed by time; it takes only a year or two to find that one is being carried along by the endless current with what feels like little hope of escape.

Experience tells me that there is only one way out: to go somewhere else and wait for snow.

— § —

Every now and then I think that my “blog” (which was never meant to be one in the first place) is and has always been the most pointless, most pretentious exercise in my life.

But every time I stop, I start again, even with no time, no audience, and (I claim) no interest in continuing.

It must be here for a reason.