Kurt

He's tall, but he hopes to achieve more in life than just that.

Still kinda thinking about converting one of my books into a GIF and selling it as an NFT…

by

Well, maybe I’m not thinking so much about converting one of my books into an NFT — that just seems too futile and heartbreaking an endeavor — but I am still thinking about and trying to understand this whole nutty NFT/cryptocurrency thing.

So, yeah, a while ago I posted an entry that basically said I wasn’t interested in the NFT thing so much because of the massive amount of power required just to mint one NFT because NFTs are minted/dependent on the Ethereum blockchain, which, in order to validate each block on the chain, requires a massively massive amount of power — not as massively massive as Bitcoin, mind you, but massively massive nonetheless… which is less than healthy for our less than healthy environment.

Yeah, I love runon sentences so what?

Anyway… long story short… or, in today’s parlance, tl;dr: This whole NFT/cryptocurrency thing is all kinds of confusing and a bit depressing.

But it wasn’t too long after I published that foresaid entry that I learned that, since December 2020, Ethereum has been in the process of transitioning to a much more energy efficient process to validate its blockchain, one that, once the transition is complete sometime in Q2 2022, should make the new validation process almost 100% more energy efficient than the old one…

Or so they say.

Yeah… so since that last forementioned entry I’ve been doing a bit of research into the whole blockchain/cryptocurrency/metaverse thing and, while a very dark and thick cloud of confusion securely engulfs my head regarding it all, I am slowly beginning to find it all quite amazing.

And more than a little bit ridiculous.

Especially the amount of money folks are willing to pay for some — a very small percentage — of these NFTs.

I mean, this beeple dude is making a crypto killing with his art.

And, yes, I do think his multimillion dollars NFTs are pretty cool and worthy of the art label.

But the amount of money being shelled out for the CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club and other nutty “art” collections is just nutty.

IMHO.

But hey, who am I to judge what the nutty future has to shove down our throats, you know?

Anyway…

I have taken the plunge and jumped into the cryptocurrency mining game. It’s actually pretty easy to do.

I think the whole metaverse thing is just going to explode hugely and in a very short time so I decided to mine the coin of Decentraland, one of the sites vying for metaverse dominance.

For perspective, just to buy a plot of virtual land in Decentraland, you need to be able to shell out a cool $10K… but first you’d have to convert that legacy money known as dollars into MANA, Decentraland’s currency, in order to purchase the land (which is a process — money conversion that is — that is very confusing with the whole wallet thing but which I’m slowly beginning to grasp).

For further perspective, recently a virtual real estate company just purchased a $4.3M, that’s M as in million, plot of land in a competing metaverse site called The Sandbox, outdoing a not quite as recent $2M Decentraland purchase…

Yeah… nutty.

Ergo, I joined a mining pool and I am now mining me some MANA at unmineable.com. If you want to give it a go, use my referral code and it will decrease your payout costs and earn me a little extra coin.

Referral code: 04kp-cr5c

Send me an email through the contact page if you have any questions or need help getting started mining and we can schedule a video chat. The mining thing is quite easy, once you get the whole confusing wallet thing covered.

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on my nutty NFT travels and travails.

And if you have any NFT/crypto skin in the game, let us know/share a link with us so we can check it out.

#staysafeoutthereandgetvaccinateddamnit

The Way Better Day Than Tomorrow

by 
I'm told to live my life like
There's no tomorrow
But truly
There has to be a better way
For if the morrow never comes
And it's my last breath I breathe today
How will I know to appreciate it
For won't I be too enthralled, too focused, too busy with
Living
As much as I can, as hard as I can, as fast as I can
Before the day's end and the morrow that may never come
To simply catch my breath and just
Breathe
Slow and steady
In and out
Filling my lungs
Feeling my lungs
Expand and
Contract
And listen to the fresh-filled blood pounding in the ears
Echoes of the patient heart
Sounding throughout the rest of today and in
To the morrow and beyond
Forever

The Pandemic of/and Poverty

by

Americans felt the effects of this kind of spending* during the coronavirus pandemic, when the government extended unemployment benefits and sent close to $1 trillion in direct stimulus payments to about 85 percent of households. This temporary expansion of the social safety net caused poverty to drop to the lowest levels on record in the United States (underlining emphasis mine).

Extreme Poverty Has Been Sharply Cut. What Has Changed?, New York Times, December 2, 2021
Wikipedia

Now seems like a good time to deeply consider implementing a national universal basic income initiative, no?

If I were king** for a day of these less than United States, I would mandate UBI and the only requirements to receive it for those subjects of mine so impoverished would be for the entire household to receive regular health checkups and for all school-age children within the household to stay in school, similar to succeeding initiatives to end extreme poverty in other countries… such as Mexico as discussed in the referenced NYT article.

But what do I know, I’m just a caveman**…

*social initiatives to end extreme poverty, defined by the United Nations as a household having to survive on less than $1.90 a day

**non-gender specific

/////

PSA: I have a new newsletter initiative coming online soon. My old newsletter, Newsletter Love, one hosted through the clunky Mailchimp service which made it hard for me to get motivated to attend to it properly, is being superseded by a new newsletter hosted by SUBSTACK, a super smooth provider.

The newsletter is called HumanZen: one man’s attempt to discover the Zen of being human…

Each new edition will be delivered weekly on Sundays. All new subscribers will still receive a copy of my short story collection LEAVE: And Other Stories Short and Shorter.

To learn more about the newsletter and subscribe, venture forth to here.

You have got to be kidding me…

by

Omicron?!

Really?!

Couldn’t they have forgone the Greek alphabet for this variant of the Covid virus and come up with a less frightening, end of times name to call it?!

On Friday evening, the World Health Organization gave the variant the name Omicron. “This variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning,” the W.H.O. said in its official description. “Preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant.”

W.H.O. says new variant in South Africa is ‘of concern’ as countries impose travel restrictions, New York Times, November 26, 2021

#prayfortheend
#ofthepandemicthatis

A Privilege to be Apart

by

I wonder if there could be scientific research done that could come up with a way to measure how much privilege an individual possesses and then create a scale that tells us that this amount of privilege will lead to this amount of life.

Presuming that more privilege equals more life.

And visa versa, I suppose.

By all accounts I should be dead: leukemia in 2009, a year later a lung disease as a result of the bone marrow transplant and of which was to knock me off within five years, heart failure in 2014 as a result of my prophylactic chemo pills, forever more a decimated immune system as a result of all the above, and most recently this summer, also as a result of all the above, pneumonia, of which my oncologist said if I ever contracted it would be game over.

But the game continues…

I guess I’m kind of like a cockroach that there ain’t no gettin’ rid of.

Who knows for sure why I’m still here.

But my guess is that my off the chart privilege score has a heck of a lot to do with it.

Some of the points you can add up by site: white, male, tall, all my limbs and digits intact.

Some points can only be determined by knowing a bit about me.

For instance, by knowing that my ultimate privilege has to be that there never has been a moment in my life that I have not felt loved. That’s got to be worth beaucoup points, oui?

Or that there has never been a moment in my life that I have been without good health insurance.

Good medical coverage + lotsa love as medicine = one long-living cockroach.

And another big privilege of mine is that for the most part I could walk into just about any room of my choosing and feel accepted, or at least unthreatened.

Even without understanding that the ability to do something like that is a privilege, it’s gotta be good for one’s well-being, no?

Yeah…

But it goes the other way, too.

I’ve also had the privilege of self-induced estrangement without having to worried about being labeled as strange… or as a threat.

I used to love being in a foreign country, especially in Asia where I look completely different from most, and riding a bus or a train by myself and not understanding a single word being said around me. Everything just hummed in the background and I could be surrounded by masses of people crammed into the subway car with me and yet be completely apart from them… at peace, without fear.

It was almost spiritual.

A privileged feeling like that’s gotta be worth a few points.

I wonder how many of those from other parts of the world coming to my country today, the less than United States, can ride alone in a crowded subway car not understanding what’s being said around them and feel at peace and without fear.

There is a beautiful piece in the New York Times by Elisa Gonzalez titled How Alienation Became My Superpower…

In 2016, I moved to Poland to study and write poetry on a Fulbright arts fellowship. Doing so required stripping myself of fluency and the cloak of native understanding. With each failure of action or speech, I squelched around in touristic self-pity. “I live on Smutna Street,” I told someone, momentarily forgetting “Smolna” was my street’s actual name; her laughter reminded me that smutna means “sad.” I was often sad during that first, dark autumn, dealing with a disintegrating marriage and the parched loneliness of the unlanguaged.

Fortunately, later in the piece we learn that Ms. Gonzalez was eventually able to find peace with her alienation.

But I don’t suppose everyone who feels alienated and alone because they look different, or speak different, or love different, can find such peace.

But I wish they could.

My work in progress is a story about alienation and estrangement. The main character, white, male, old, kind of like yours truly, gets so fed up with the state of humanity that he decides to no longer identify as a human and disassociates himself completely from society.

But instead of becoming estranged from humanity, he, or it as it prefers to be referred to, creates a kind of a cult around itself in the process.

Go figure.

Privilege is a powerful thing and its worth can never be accurately tallied I suppose.

But we know, or at least I do, that it is so powerful it can fulfill and extend lives.

Now that’s not just power, that is a true superpower…

One that, unfortunately, not everyone has the privilege to enjoy.

The River and the Bed

by 
The river winds around my head,
Fish before my eyes.
I lay my cheek upon its bed and
Contemplate the skies of
Morning's red, of
Midday's blue, of
Twilight's pink aglow, that
Filters through the rushing stream
Born of mountains long ago.

Where does it go in such a rush from
Rushing 'bout my mind? This
Is the thought I can't escape;
Its answer won't unwind its
Liquid coils from the root where
All such knowledge grows. And
Like the river born of distant mounts,
Its seed sown long ago.

Death is my co-pilot

by

Well, at least my fear of death is…

Well, at least according to the late great interdisciplinarian philosopher Ernest Becker.

Yes, according to Becker, it is this death anxiety of mine – and of yours too so you might want to pay attention – that really drives much of my life’s behavior.

I guess I should have titled this entry, “Death is my pilot,” or better yet, “I am Death’s co-pilot.”

It seems that this mostly unrealized, or at least unacknowledged fear of our eventual turn into worm food is fed mostly by our desire for immortality, which then feeds into our pursuit of it by other and any means possible: by our offspring, by our profession, by whatever means that allows us to achieve some sense of our being being realized long after the worms that fed upon us have passed.

But few of us are able to achieve even this, this immortality by other or any means possible because of our fear of life itself, by our not having the courage to engage it, life, to the magnitude required for us to transcend our mortality by other and any means possible.

From Becker’s monumental book The Denial of Death, one which I cannot recommend highly enough:

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.

Check it out (Ad)

Yeah…

Actually, this whole death anxiety thing is something of a theme of my soon to be finished work in progress.

But that is not what prompted this entry today.

What prompted it was the PsyPost article New psychology research indicates hatred toward collective entities inspires meaning in life.

Heck of a lede, no? I hardly have to quote from the article because the author seems to have crammed the gist of it into the title.

But reading the article, we find that its title is actually as much a mouthful as is the title of the study upon which the article is based: Hate and meaning in life: How collective, but not personal, hate quells threat and spurs meaning in life.

Now, I haven’t actually read the study – I don’t feel like shelling out the $35.00 it would take to do so.

But I kind of want to because I would like to know if Becker is referenced in the study seeing that he was telling us pretty much the same thing way back in the Swingin’ Seventies.

However, according to Becker, this hate (as manifested by racism, sexism, homophobia… you get the picture) that brings us together in collective and harmonious accord is driven by, you guessed it, our collective fear of death.

It was this theory – that our fear of death feeds our hate – that led a mixed group of researchers and huge Becker disciples to put it to the test/studies to see if it could be proved.

Which it could, at least according to them, and which led them to develop the Terror Management Theory (I wish I could come up with such a cool-sounding theory) and which they discuss in detail in their fantastic book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.

In one early [Terror Management Theory] study assessing the [Mortality Salience] hypothesis, Greenberg et al. (1990)[4] had Christian participants evaluate other Christian and Jewish students that were similar demographically, but differed in their religious affiliation. After being reminded of their death (experimental MS induction), Christian participants evaluated fellow Christians more positively, and Jewish participants more negatively, relative to the control condition.[26] Conversely, bolstering self-esteem in these scenarios leads to less worldview defense and derogation of dissimilar others.

– Wikipedia

Must be legit because even the National Institutes of Health published a death anxiety study called Terror Management Theory and the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Well, they also published a study called Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, so… there’s that.

Anyway, long story short…

We all should be doing those memento mori meditations like the Stoics and other ancient smarties told us we should be doing long ago and then, hey, we would have absolutely nothing to fear…

Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Except, maybe, fear itself.

Hope Apple’s new car comes with a fully armored option

by

 The company has apparently decided to pursue a vehicle that would not feature steering wheels or pedals in what sounds like the most futuristic automotive project we’ll have ever seen. Moreover, Apple reportedly plans to launch its first-generation autonomous car as early as 2025.

Apple plans to launch a fully autonomous car as soon as 2025, BGR, November 18, 2021

Because now that our blind (and tone deaf) judicial system has found Rittenhouse not guilty, all the newly empowered gunslingers are going to be aggressively looking for trouble so that they can aggressively stand their ground and aggressively let the bullets fly…

Hence, we’ll need all the armored protection we can get.