One of my debaters asked me last weekend whether I was superstitious. It was a good question. I reflexively answered that I wasn’t, but then he started talking about debate superstitions about writing on the board and how and who does it and I started quickly clarifying that when it came to that, I was extremely superstitious!

He asked me why I thought people were superstitious and it seemed pretty obvious to me that people are because they seek to exert control on their environment or circumstances in a way that they know they can’t otherwise in life. While we all like to think of ourselves as being in control of our own destinies, the reality is that none of us has particular control when we hold just one-seven-billionth of the power in our planet. I’ve discussed the cacophony of wills extensively before, but it’s crippling to really internalize how much that abrogates our free will into a collective free will as disjointed and chaotic as our world itself. No wonder people try to claw each other’s eyes out getting into the 1% where that one-seven-billionth can seem like one-one-millionth for a while.

If we believe that we secretly control events larger than ourselves – sports outcomes that we watch on TV or in person, the life or death of someone far away, the heart of another person, the thought processes of a debate round judge – by simple actions of routine or pattern, then we can believe there’s some connection between our own personal effort and the outcomes that affect us so deeply. And once there’s confirmation of some sort of link, however tenuous or absurd, between writing in a certain style on the chalkboard or saying a particular set of words or wearing a hat in a particular way and the desired outcome, then repeating that becomes almost holy.

We all hunger for free will, all crave the ability to dominate merely our own lives. And while we all probably have more actual will than we acknowledge when we’re not being overtly superstitious, the fact is that humanity’s not actually well organized yet to maximize reasonable choices for people. Most people do most of what they do with the verve and volunteerism of one with a gun aimed squarely at their temple.

Is it any wonder that I sit here waiting for my life to come back to me? Maybe today, maybe if I mismatch my socks and think only the best thoughts, maybe if I don’t sleep enough to let the nightmares in, maybe if I can ward off the migraines and do everything she would have wanted, look at the clock at the right times and focus my mind in just the right way, maybe I can find a little hope that this message will travel across the universe, the Atlantic, the bridge between half-souls, and remind her of what she threw away.

I am patient. I can do this.

The cruel reality is different, of course. Like any superstition of debate or sports or life, I’m winking at myself. I see the image of her, hopeless and claiming to be tempest-tossed, citing the need to commit an affair and cast aside compassion like they were mandates from Heaven of which she mildly disapproved but was robotically forced to comply. I can imagine her eye-rolling at reading this, the clucking sigh she used to make about how naive, idealistic, stupid I was. Like she had a monopoly on understanding the universe and how it was out to get her.

The universe isn’t out to get anyone. We use our limited will as an excuse for abusing each other. As soon as we wake up and realize that no matter how little will we have, maximizing its utility for good, compassion, and the further maximization of will is our best hope, then we might start making the best use of our individual slices of light. We can all hold a candle and watch it dance in the harshness of wind and rain, or we can join together to merge our lights into a fire that could burn all the architecture of the past that holds us back.

Hoping our light will magically be transported to create that conflagration is surely not enough. But I can’t do this alone.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

They gather in a circle, an oval maybe, an oblong landscape of green felt with a surprising amount of give. They stare intently at their cards, their drinks, each other, the red-shirted personage before them who manages the distribution of cards and chips and changes identity twice an hour. The whole pattern would be entirely inscrutable to one unfamiliar with the general practices of gambling and maybe even specifically the rules of poker, the seamless and implicit passage of items and their corresponding emotions out of all proportion with normal human behavior.

There is the medical student from Temple who comes in to discuss high-level philosophy, suggesting to the assembled table at 3 in the morning that maybe they are all merely past memories of someone who doesn’t exist. He guesses almost the entire plot of my third novel at one point, quietly, accidentally, making almost everyone but me eye-roll as I sit more erect and alarmed in my chair and fold my cards. Twenty minutes later, he busts out of money and twitches a bit before asking someone at the table for a loan. Eventually he finds traction with the way-up nurse who’s passing time before she goes to work with in-home elderly in need of care, offers his watch as collateral, gets a third guy to vouch for the watch’s quality, and reboots with a crisp $100 bill for another run at busting out just a few hands later. He promises to be back in an hour with the money, letting the woman keep his watch as promised, but he never returns. Maybe he didn’t exist. The woman debates briefly what to do with the watch and where she might sell it before departing for her employment.

There is the drunk who everyone knows is going to bust out after just a few hands, maybe winning one or two beforehand. There are many of these. They are the poster-children for why this whole operation should probably be illegal, was illegal for a long time, may yet be illegal again. It is arguable that it is the alcohol doing far more of the damage than the gambling, but it is also hard to imagine where the money is coming from to fuel the kind of waste that can be observed on any given night. At least this is a game of skill, though it’s hard to imagine why we allow skill to equate to standing in our society. The problems that money creates.

There is, relatedly, the story one dealer tells us of her table earlier tonight, unprecedented in her experience she says, wherein the losing player asked for his money back after cryingingly imploring that he lost his child support money and was (understandably) sure his four-of-a-kind would win the hand. She describes in vivid detail the awkwardness of the experience, the apparent grief of the man who eventually wandered away bewildered, the discomfort of the winner who offered $10 of his winning hundreds so the man could at least get a taxi home, the overall unreasonability of putting up one’s child’s support money on a game, ultimately, of chance. It takes a cynic like me at the table to suggest that maybe it was all an act, a sacrifice of dignity and honesty for the sake of recouping some dollars. This is before the watch guy shows up, but my suggestion to the dealer that she ask after the man’s kid at a future table has her in paroxysms when I follow-up with preparing her to hear “What kid?” Life has taught me all too well where people tend to rank honesty, their emotions, and money.

There is the drunk couple who shows up, resplendent pretty people in resplendent pretty clothing, fresh from a wedding with some hours to kill before their flight will return them to the girl’s home in Indiana for sedentary Midwestern living. They’ve both played before, but the girl never prior in a cardroom, and she intones stage whispers in my ears as she begs for advice in stern tipsy confusion about the arcane procedures of the poker table. I make an effort to be patient and kind as all poker tables require, only periodically cracking that this may all be an act for her to extract maximal compensation from the encounter with the casino. At one point she looks me in the eyes and asks where I’m from, says she feels like she knows me, like one of her closest friends is just like me, and there’s a hint of something heavier behind all the hiccupy banter and discussion of the way things work with cards and chips and felt. It is when her boyfriend gets busted out and wanders off in confusion that she begins to complain about his carelessness and my distaste for this particular movie mixes with my natural inclination toward it, like I’m in some sort of Eternal Sunshine infinite loop to keep making the same mistake, a moth infinitely drawn to the bug-zapper. To the point where it’s almost a relief when the lanky bearded boyfriend ambles back to collect his girl and all her chips (she’s tripled up or so in an hour under my tutelage) and stumble toward taxi, hotel, plane, Indiana.

There is the man who talks loudly about divorce, growing apart, the final date of September 12th and his kids of 8, 6, 4. He is wearing a Dallas Cowboys hat, a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, a Dallas Cowboys watch, and holds his cards in place with a weighty Dallas Cowboys coin of some sort. At one point he stands up from his chair, having downed four beers after the five-hour curfew on such drinks was lifted at 7:00 AM, and lifts his shirt and sweatshirt to reveal a Dallas Cowboys tattoo on the back of his right shoulder. He and I have nothing in common, but we have everything shared in this average American life I have somehow been left to lead in my own wandering wake. I wonder what it’s like to be his six-year-old girl, what his wife must be like, how she tells the story of their separation, whether he started drinking at 7 AM only after the breakup. There are times I have to be reminded to play because I find this person, obnoxious, unpleasant, brash, and loud, to be so compelling.

There is the woman who speaks in Russian on the phone to her husband asleep downstairs, then in person to him as he awakens and drifts upstairs, reminding me how much of that language I’ve forgotten but also of how much of any language is the basic exchange of extremely simple phrases. How I almost get one of their jokes well enough that concealing my reactive mirth is challenging, especially knowing that those who speak in a foreign language publicly take being understood as akin to CIA-level eavesdropping. It is such an easy assumption to make in America that your mother tongue is oblique to anyone you haven’t already identified as sharing your heritage.

There is the man who talks about his wife and child like they are quartered soldiers in his home, not ones he quite resents but rather respects in spite of their slightly uncouth way of being with his property. He is delicate but off-put when she calls, he is one of the nicest people I have ever met at a poker table, he is someone I don’t really want to share my story with but feel I almost must for the sake of his greater appreciation of his own life circumstances. You can tell people to appreciate what you want all you want, but does it sink in in a way that’s meaningful? People are going to want what they’re going to want and the first rule of wanting something is that you yourself must decide that you want it. Other people’s efforts to sway and bend must be couched and timed almost perfectly to have any impact whatsoever, and even then it rattles down the echoey wind tunnel of resistance like a thorny pebble trying to nestle in your foot. Even when you know it’s right, it grates and demands extractive rejection. Even if you end up looking at the remaining indent and missing it almost immediately as it sails away into the just-hurled-at distance.

There is the dealer who asks about my sweatshirt, the sweatshirt I always get comments on, the one from Nepal, that prompts a whole discussion of that trip and my life and brings me almost to tears. Merely because I remember that day so vividly, feel its slice across time as we waited for the shops to open in Kathmandu, the impulse purchase that became my identity the rest of that trip and for some time to come, the unpredictable randomness of me selecting something orange, red, and brown when all the colors of the rainbow were available, including the normally preferred green, blue, and gray. The colors were brighter there, our last day in Kathmandu before heading out to the rest of Nepal and India, Emily encouraging me fervently to get something for myself despite my unmaterialistic inclinations, complimenting how warm and comfortable and happy I looked in the wide-sleeved selection, reminding me for years later, like my Yellowstone sweatshirt and the honeymoon thunderbird T-shirt from the Vancouver Aquarium, that she always knew when I should get something I wanted.

Everything I own is a souvenir of Liberia.

It was not my night at the poker table and it was entirely my night. It broke my October winning streak but it took twenty solid hours at the table to do so. It was a total waste of time and it was an encounter with humanity that evoked more depth than a hundred hours of conversations with apologetic friends and eager young debaters. It made me never want to go back there again and it made me want to go back the next night. It consumed my weekend in pretty much all the ways a weekend can be consumed: physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

I stepped outside to find the same daylight I’d encountered when entering the place, a wan grayish bluster that sent, finally, cagey crinkled leaves rattling down the asphalt. It has been summer all October. We’re headed for a fall.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

There has long been a debate in the community of moral philosophers and thinkers about the idea of being “good without God”. In the advent of a neo-atheistic culture in the United States and other post-modern, post-WWII Western societies, people have increasingly felt the need and interest to establish a moral framework that is devoid of the divine, arguing that humans can derive their own moral precepts intuitively or empirically and that there’s no need to rely on some higher power for inspiration. They cite the idea that it would be irrational to believe in a God who advised things we would not otherwise consider moral and that atheists empirically seem to be just as good as believers.

It’s this last part that I want to take issue with today, especially since it tends to be the one most closely guarded and obviously apparent to those defending the idea. This issue is further complicated by it often being played out in a heated conversation between a believer (me) and an atheist (not me) and their accusatory glare at whether I’m accusing them of innately being a worse person or less moral because they happen to not derive their moral standards from a divine or higher being. It is challenging, to say the least, under the white-hot spotlight of the cornered debater, to look them in the eye and explain to them why they actually may be less moral without drawing a diatribe of vitriol or disregard in response.

The better question to ask is not whether people are more or less moral, in part because this question is incoherent without context. It’s also ridiculous to try to conclude globally, since there are of course hypocrites on both sides and plenty of people who fail to act in accordance with their own stated beliefs, goals, and ideals. The question that I find interesting and salient to this issue is which approach to life tends to bring out the more moral behavior and why. And I’ve been coming to some interesting conclusions about how this question relates to the idea of privacy vs. publicity and what that has to do with what people think they can get away with and how that informs moral choices.

To start off with, I find it to be trivially true that someone can be good without God. We can imagine a believer and an atheist each making the exact same choices in all places at all times and the difference between one person believing and one person not is in no way a meaningful tipping point between whether one or the other is good or not. To me, the God question is more an issue of fact globally. We can imagine a perfectly moral actor who happens to believe that New Jersey is south of Florida. The fact that they are incorrect about this fact in no way affects or impairs their moral judgment – at worst, it may lead to a poorly informed choice that could still probably be forgiven in light of the fact that they were misinformed. One can argue, as I sometimes do, that the illogical clinging to atheism in the face of the legion evidence against it becomes tantamount to willful denial, but this still seems like something short of actual moral breach. The goodness of an action ought be determined by its innate morality, not by its happenstance in relation to a correct set of factual beliefs about the universe.

What becomes problematic, though, is when we descend out of the thought experiment structure. Yes, if we imagine two people making the same actions and reactions and choices, then the lone fact of belief or not isn’t a tipping point. But no two people act the same way, and the way they believe and even the facts they understand impact the choices they make almost entirely. At that point, how does belief meaningfully change the way someone interacts with their environment as opposed to non-belief?

Clearly, there are lots of ways. There’s prioritization of values over mere survival in life. Faith in an afterlife gives someone more perspective about the temporal and physical reality of life on Earth. There’s a certain humility in not believing one belongs to the highest order intelligence that exists in the universe. There’s acquiescence to not controlling one’s fate or destiny. But none of these have such a clear impact on behavior as the idea that one can keep secrets and only need be accountable to oneself. The notion that what’s private is permanently private (unless admitted or exposed) is perhaps the most damning (pun intended) part of non-belief.

Those who believe in God believe they are living a life in public. Maybe not a public of seven-billion people, maybe not a public they will be exposed to for all-time, but that there’s an audience of some kind for every single action and choice they make, no matter how small or internal or invisible. At all times and in all actions, they must hold themselves accountable to the standard of not just what they claim or hope to believe, but what they actually believe, for someone is watching them and observing. They are likely to be less concerned with the optics of their actions to mortal observers because they know there are immortal observers as well and that eventually their actions will be assessed by that entity in a much more meaningful way than any temporal judge. They fundamentally can’t believe in privacy in its truest sense, for nothing they do is truly private.

Meanwhile, the non-believer believes that walls and secrets truly cloak their true selves. They may aspire to higher-order moral action, may attempt to be their own top-drawer accountant, but at the end of the day, whatever they can get away with doing is fine for themselves, because they have no one to own up to at the end of it all. The only person holding the person accountable is that person themselves, once they’ve navigated whatever court of public opinion is necessary to traverse. These people thus tend to put a great deal more stock in the perspective of others, for convincing those people or not is all that matters to their ultimate worth. Public actions cast a much longer shadow on their lives than those they believe to be private. And those actions that are private that might inspire shame or discomfort or regret become much more susceptible to the murky cloud of denial, revision, and editing. The person who does something wrong and convinces themselves it was right has actually erased the wrong that was done if there’s no accountability at the end of life. The person who does something wrong and has to account for it is less likely to worry what they themselves think of it, for they know there’s an objective arbiter at the end of the show.

Which line of belief tends toward inspiring the more moral actions? Empirically, we see that people tend to be better people in front of others. They are more likely to pick up trash, offer generosity, be kind, help someone, disregard selfishness if someone is looking. When that extra impetus of judgment is removed, people tend to devolve toward their baser selves, prioritizing self over others and ignoring moral obligations. This impact is clearly flattened for those who believe they are always being watched, especially by the most important judge of character. And where do things that even devout atheists believe to be dubious take place? In secret, in the shadows, behind closed doors. Stealing, cheating (on tests, spouses, or contests), individual violence – these things are all shielded from public scrutiny and almost none would take place without the veil of privacy. Those who believe or imagine that someone is always over their shoulder observing and taking notes are far less able to take such actions.

Obviously it would be ideal if everyone were motivated and inspired to act perfectly even without the notion that someone is watching them. Moral action should be taken for its own sake and ideally not merely for the sake of avoiding punishment. (Although I must note that my own theology believes there is accountability and expectation without direct punishment or reward.) However, it seems highly unrealistic that this developmental stage of humans in this backwards and tempting world is capable of expecting most of its denizens to act rightly without someone watching. More importantly, it’s not even clear to me why we would want privacy or to feel like someone isn’t watching our moves. If we are to be good and inspiring people, shouldn’t we be trying to live more publicly, more openly, more clearly in order to interact, communicate, synergize, and motivate?

Privacy is not your friend. Publicity is not your enemy. Even if you don’t believe, imagining yourself taking actions before your best friend or your worst enemy is most helpful to checking your own temptation to act poorly. Even if you believe firmly that there is no evidence for the existence of God, that such a belief is irrational, it seems fairly clear that convincing yourself to act as though there were a God will make you more likely to be a good person and act morally. Forget Pascal’s wager – that’s just trying to game the system for a reward. This is Pascal’s wager for everyone else – they will derive more benefit from you if you don’t believe there are shadows where you can skulkingly give in to your baser instincts. And if we all agreed to this, then we might actually start getting somewhere on this thus far increasingly hopeless rock sphere.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

As most of you know, I used to counsel “emotionally disturbed” kids in a group home. That was my occupation. We used this system generally known as “behavior modification” whereby we rewarded good behavior and punished (to a degree) bad behavior, usually by changing the meter on what kinds of activities someone could do. There were behavioral levels someone would start out on in the morning based on their behavior the previous day. They were color-coded, running red, yellow, green, and then purple and finally gold, which could only be earned after sequential days on purple. For example, you couldn’t watch TV on red. You couldn’t watch TV after dinner on yellow. On gold, you didn’t have to stand at each doorway announcing yourself and waiting to be permitted to cross a threshold, as long as you told the staff where you were going and responded if they asked you to stop.

There were also behaviors which would warrant an immediate “level drop”. Contrary to my ex-brother-in-law’s assessment, this did not indicate that we would dump a kid off the stairs, but merely that they’d go from yellow to red or gold to purple if they swore or made a threat or tried to make a peer act out. And then violence meant “R&R”, a term I guess we were trying to reclaim for the bad, which would be resolution and restitution in this instance and prompt spending the rest of the day on red, usually after long periods of sitting time to calm down.

A lot of our job, other than navigating and assessing people through the process of earning their levels (surprisingly like APDA judging – the level sheets even looked like debate ballots), was about keeping people motivated to meet their goals and make their level. After all, most of the kids had grown up in households where, de facto if not overtly, bad behavior was rewarded and good behavior was punished. If you were quiet and humble and polite and got your homework done, you’d get neglected. If you set the house on fire and kicked the family dog and yelled and screamed at the table, then you’d get some attention. And in the world of six-year-olds whose parents are addicts, any attention is good attention, because it means you get fed or talked to or even physically contacted, even if it’s to be hit.

The hardest part of this engagement and motivation was finding ways to get people on red to believe that tomorrow would be a new day and they’d have some way of climbing out of their bad level. Often they’d be on red after spending significant portions of the day in R&R, which meant no points were being earned toward the next day’s level while they were in the quiet room (an Orwellian term if there ever was one) or restraint or sitting staring at a corner thinking about what they’d done. Usually this meant they’d spent the day not only being unstable and unhappy, but they knew that the next day was doomed to be another day on red – that it’d be 36 hours before they could watch TV or even think about going on the computer. And 36 hours is long enough for a well-adjusted adult human – for an anti-social adolescent, it’s an eternity.

One of the things my boss – an ex-drill-sergeant (literally) and college football player the size of a small house with the voice of an irate seal – was very good at was advising us what to do with these kids in these situations. He told us that the key to their motivation and improved behavior was engagement. Keeping them interested, distracted, putting their minds to something. In a word, keeping them occupied. The man was often a blunt instrument, but he had incredible insight into the mindsets of these kids, having worked in mental health facilities like ours and/or juvenile hall for the better part of two decades. And he implored us to, when times were stable, engage and stimulate the kids who were on red with the few activities always allotted to them – playing outside, playing board games, reading, talking with peers or staff. And there, over time, I learned a fundamental truth: that people act out when they’re bored. It’s something to do.

The human mind despises boredom. Probably more than pain, certainly more than sadness. The brain is too complex, too creative, too active, to tolerate monotony and absence of objects. It will create things to think about where none exist, it will foment processes and possibilities in a vaccuum. The only antidote to this is another element of our strategy in engaging red-level kids: exhaustion. Playing outside was not only good because it kept someone occupied, focused, and not-bored, but it also meant they came in too tired to create a ruckus. Adolescents have restless unspent energy in the best of times – abuse/neglect victims triply so. A kid who comes in tired from his day will be disinclined to take offense at a peer’s comment or a staff direction to a time-out. One who has nothing but seething surging energy beneath the surface will be ready to rumble.

This difference of exhaustion is why so many people can put up with assembly-line jobs or grocery-checking or long commutes, but buckle under the universally feared torture of solitary confinement. The capitalist structure of our country went through a really glorious period of getting humans to willingly accept and even embrace monotonous boredom because the tedium of their jobs created the byproduct of wearing them down. So even if they were getting repetitive stress injuries from twisting the same widget the same way and almost falling asleep from the 3,275th time making the same commute, they would arrive at home too beat to complain about it, having only just enough energy to awaken the next day and do it again. Meanwhile, those confined to small dark boxes alone with little or no exercise were slowly driven insane in their prisons.

Something’s been happening in this country the last three years. People have lost their occupations. No matter how small and crappy and minimally engaging their jobs were, they were still jobs that carried the heavily taxing byproduct of exhaustion. They were still something that took enough mental and physical energy to negate the urge to rebel, to foment discontent, to hold out for something better. But one by one and in droves, they were turned out of the opportunity to spend their energy flailing in the capitalist mill and instead consider the walls and corners and televisions and want-ads of a solitary existence.

Yes, some have turned to creativity. Some have expanded their minds to accept the lack of occupation as a gift and driven themselves to occupy themselves instead. But most, realistically, have not. Most people turned out of work by downsizing or offshoring or consolidation or automation have turned forlornly and blankly into an abyss of disinterested blandness. They wake each day not even sure what to do without someone telling them. They wander aimlessly through a directionless day, storebought distractions no longer working for them in light of the fact that they are only sufficiently entertaining or engaging for an exhausted person, but not someone with all their faculties at disposal. No longer exhausted, they become restless, agitated, rumbling with a soul-deep longing for something to do, be, create.

This, my friends, is the fundamental root of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is the quest for occupation. And despite my framing the question in the context of a job where I tried to modify violent kids’ behavior toward the more productive, I am very much in agreement with the principles and methodology of this budding revolution. The powers that seek to maintain order, stability, and the status quo in America have overlooked some fundamental tenets of how to stave off rebellion by controlling the masses. They have forgotten that bread must join circuses in sufficiently distracting the people, insisting instead on a system which puts bread at a premium as a mechanical rabbit to hold in front of the racers. They have allowed the attitude of those at the top to become perniciously elitist, rubbing superiority and greed in the face of all society. But most fundamentally, they have forgotten that people must have something to do or they will find something to do themselves. That people accept the terms of their social contract when they are too occupied or too tired to read the fine print. When people have nothing else to do but read the fine print because they are so bored, they will realize what they are forfeiting and rail against it.

What is most exciting and inspiring about the Occupy Wall Street movement (and its hundreds of offspring across cities across America) is that it does not overtly seek political solutions. Naysayers and corporate threshers want the occupiers to write their Congresspeople and go to the polls, knowing that anyone accessed in such a way has been bought and paid for to the point of complete imperviousness. Even those not explicitly on the payroll of corporate America are believers in the fundamental tenets of a system that rewards greed and punishes altruism, a way of aligning society to maximize the consolidation and stratification of wealth and power. It is blindingly obvious why this is so, as any student of history (from age eight on) could tell you: those in power like being there and will rig the game so they can stay there. And capitalism is one very effectively rigged game.

I myself have struggled mightily with the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, feeling pulled almost inexorably to the front lines of its tent encampments and yet not even setting foot as yet in the wake of my overwhelmed exhaustion at my full-time job. For me, unlike most, it is not the gun-to-my-head need for the pay of a job or even the expected pressure of finding fulfillment in one’s occupation, but rather the true motivation of actually loving my work and wanting to devote sufficient time to it that it brings me to the brink of capitulation and illness. I hung out with Ariel and discovered yesterday that I may be her only friend whose problems wouldn’t be largely or entirely solved by money. Which itself is no small factor in the Occupy movement, that reality. For me, I work because I want to and I love to, but it has thus far kept me off the sidewalks and streets of a rising tide that could sweep the whole world.

It is hard to feel twin obligations that are mutually exclusive and equally compelling. Even at Glide, I think I might have begged out of work to go join the protests, though there I may have felt the pull of alleviating the suffering that was driving so many to this brink. But I also must self-examine and recognize that each marginal person could be part of a tipping point in creating more change in this country than anyone born prior to this year could have imagined was possible. When I first saw the most recent Zeitgeist movie, I chuckled at the slightly naive vision of hordes of people gathering around Wall Street to give their money back in rejection of the system that printed it. Now it’s underway. And it feels wrong to not only not be a part of it, but to not be a spearhead.

And yet it feels like a hedge is in order too. It is unclear the direction or power the movement will have, whether it can be co-opted by money and politics and all the American powers that have resisted internal change before. And throwing away the best job I’ll ever have, one I created from scratch, and all my obligations to people I feel a deep personal bond with, for what could be a week and a jail term depending on how things bounce, seems crazy.

But it only seems crazy because I am occupied. Were I not, it would be the most obvious thing in the world.

I will continue to wrestle and struggle with the question, continue to dance on the razor’s edge of conundrum. I can’t really see myself abandoning everything to go live in the encampments, at least not yet, so the Rutgers debaters reading this should let out their breath. But there’s a big part of me that feels I should anyway. And I know it’s not zero-sum – I know I can go try to participate without sacrificing it all. And I will. More than anything, though, we need to develop a way that people who are occupied can still Occupy. We need a day where everyone who still wants or has to go to work can show their solidarity and support. Sometimes revolutions can’t all involve defection from the military, because they need people in the military to be quietly sympathetic so they can make sure that institution changes with the rest of society. This revolution needs occupied people too in order to make all the changes necessary.

If those on top of this precipitous pyramid know what’s good for them, they will create new incentives and occupations. They will come up with some way to motivate the masses and make use of their time and brains. But it can’t be through capitalism, at least the way it’s been manifest in society so far. The market is editing out jobs, ensuring they never return. We need a new system to occupy our minds. Until then, we must occupy the streets.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Something is right with me today. It’s a weird feeling and its pervasive presence is underscoring how far from feeling this way I’ve been in a long time and prompting further contemplation of the differences. There are a lot of minor possible and even plausible explanations, but it is only in the incredible convergence that they even begin to seem to explain the way I’m feeling.

I blew out my voice at Harvard (not entirely, but close enough), probably more from telling stories while projecting from the front of a minivan than in actually doing my job coaching. I made a serious case advice blunder at Harvard that cost a team that had been cruising through the tournament a trip further in the outrounds and our team a shot at ascending in the rankings. But today I woke up more at peace with the latter and especially more okay with the former. I’m realizing that I’ve been sick in some general sense (allergies, feeling run down, actually sore-throated, etc.) for probably more than two full weeks and today was the first day it didn’t seem debilitating. My voice is still a bit froggy and I still have some congestion, but today made me feel like I’m actually going to beat my association of maladies and I realized how much of my general downtroddenness the last couple weeks has stemmed from just not being physically 100%.

It also is a day where, for the first time in ages, I’m feeling like I’m not behind on anything. This may be an illusory feeling, but I think it’s combining with a particular piece of mail I dropped in the box on Friday that I didn’t even realize was freighting me down the way that it apparently was. Mental energy is a hard thing to gauge, especially when one’s distracted and running behind, and yet the last 24 hours have provided this overarching lift from finally dispatching something I have put off in order to not let it weigh me down. Feels like, once again, I misread that situation completely and its true impact on my daily functioning soul. So suddenly there’s a chirping bird where there was not long ago an ominous crow.

The weather is gorgeous. That doesn’t hurt anything. It’s an October 10th that eats like an August 17th and while that itself can raise disconcerting feelings and perceptions, it doesn’t surprise me that a stock exchange located in New York City decided to jump 3% today for no rational reason. I think it’s almost impossible not to feel optimistic in weather like this, an optimism that just doesn’t burn in the face of reason or logic or the reality of a winter oncoming. Eat, drink, and lay in the grass for tomorrow we freeze. Perhaps, perhaps. Or maybe there is a hope in the innate simplicity of embracing what surrounds us and not resisting.

Even Jersey has felt friendly and warm and open today. I played cards yesterday and felt like I was making friends with everyone, going out way up after a roller-coaster ride that should have fazed me way more than it did. Of course I was doing so in the wake of something more emotionally involving, but ultimately that’s even infused me with a sense of peace. And I retrieved all my stuff from Enterprise today – I somehow left everything in our rented van when we dropped it off after Harvard, including my credit card in the cupholder and my backpack, which is basically my lifeline to existence. The retrieval was one of the friendlier corporate or Jersey interactions I’ve ever had, especially for it being something so boneheaded on my part and so annoying for them to deal with.

There is something, essentially, about being alone and more quiet and rested and healthy and introspective in the wake of several consecutive tumultuous days, that has prompted an internal Zen flame of simple humanity. I could describe it better if I understood it better, but I’m tempted to let it be and try to savor this hurricane-eye kind of calm. I think it has something to do with keeping my own company after so long surrounded, but I even enjoyed grocery shopping a little today. The best I can explain it is that it feels like there’s some sort of lack of pressure, an absence of a pressing weight that’s been there for weeks. Whether that’s more sinus pressure or paperwork pressure or success pressure or simply an amorphous spiritual angst is anyone’s guess. And how long it will remain away is even less tangible.

But as Adam Duritz would say, that’s all right for me today.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Welcome everyone!

Apparently today is the biggest day for traffic at the BP since May 2008. And it’s only midday. Not sure exactly what’s going on, but I’m not going to complain. Hope everyone gets comfortable with the site, its updated sections and archives, enjoys the quizzes, and finds something to keep them coming back.

In other news, I think I may be allergic to the Debate House. As in, seriously. There’s a lot of dust in here. We did sort of rush the building/maintenance people out of here so we could start running practice rounds and using the space, but the consequences may be contributing to the general plague filtering around the team. Hopefully it’s just allergies and not contagious.

I keep meaning to take pictures of the DH too, but there’s rounds to judge and ballots to review and spreadsheets to make and grants to write. And I’m trying to give myself a solid weekend every week too, spanning Sunday/Monday. There are times this starts to feel like just another job and then I remember that I get to be a debate coach for a living and it all seems okay again. Just need to keep my focus on the stuff that makes this fun and not just slogging through requirements.

A good lesson for life generally, come to think of it, not just work.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.