Lao Tzu Was A Hero To Most, But He Never Meant Shit To Me (Mostly Because I Had No Idea What The Fuck Any Of It Could Possibly Mean)

When we were adolescents we read a lot of books that as adults we never would have considered reading. The Bell Jar sticks out in my mind. I remember slogging through the Tao Te Ching, too, except that it wasn't really a slog on account of me allowing myself to let my mind wander freely while my eyes skimmed some words on the page; I sort of think that I shouldn't even say that I "read" it, more than displayed it on a bookshelf for however long until my parents moved out of my childhood home and the book disappeared to I don't know where while I was living thousands of miles away.

Reading a book and understanding like none of it is kind of a crummy feeling. Part of me wonders whether high school English instructors keep teaching Shakespeare just to tweak children; they just seem to really enjoy explaining what stuff like "the beast with two backs" means. Me, I hate riddles. And all that is faux-homespun. Like I said, you can feel real crummy sometimes.

Which is why I eventually gave in to my insecurities and at some point decided that I really shouldn't care that I don't "get" Lao Tzu. And once you do that, it's just a slippery slope down past Pynchon, Joyce and whatever else until you one day realize that you summarily dismissed Blue Valentine after 45 minutes on account of it not seeming to have much of a plot: "Don't give a fuck; can we please just watch Breaking Amish already?"

All of which is to say, it wasn't all that clear to me after finishing Herbert Read's The Green Child how much time I needed to spend thinking about all that I didn't understand about the book. I decided it wasn't worth that much time.

Basically, there's a world with no weather where ex-dictators go to stare at crystals and die.

I remember talking to Frank's dad about Edward Albee's The Goat a while back when it was on Broadway and he was just exasperated: "I don't get it; it's a goat! He's bonking a goat!" He didn't use the word "bonk." I don't remember him using a more robust word, either, but you could see it in his soul: Edward Albee wrote a whole play about a guy who fucks a goat. And we're supposed to care why?

The Wikipedia page for Green has a couple of funny moments. One is a relatively recent remembrance of the novel, which I think can be boiled down to something along the lines of, "If you're going to write one novel in your life, you might as well make it fucking ridiculous." (Actually it said, "But The Green Child is the kind of book to write if you are going to leave just the one novel behind: singular, odd, completely original." Go big or go home!)

The other funny thing in the Wikipedia entry is the Orville Prescott The New York Times review of the book, which is basically this: "But, in spite of the limpid grace of his writing, his parable is ridiculous as well as vexatious. One feels constantly that shining truths are about to be revealed; that there is something important, something significant, hidden in these pages. But it is never made clear, while the ridiculous details remain all too conspicuously in view." It's funny how contemporary reviewers feel like they need to really represent a book. I don't know that you have to spend that much time thinking about a lot of stuff, but it's good someone does.

The other thing Prescott rips is Kenneth Rexroth's "pretentious introduction of uncommon density." I read it after finishing the book and thought that I must have really missed something. It's a hoot:

There has been a great proliferation of fiction in our day. There has been an even greater decline in quality. Since Ulysses, if you accept Ulysses as a great novel, there have been very few really great novels in English. Lady Chatterly, The Rainbow and Women in Love; Ford Madox Ford's Tietjens series, really one novel; some of Sherwood Anderson; the unfinished promise of William Carlos Williams' First Act; a few others. The Green Child is fully the equal of any of these, although it is of a rather more special kind. Graham Greene speaks of it as surcharged with a sense of glory — gloire — that special lustre and effulgence which Aquinas marks out as the sign manifest of great works of art. . . .

It goes on like that — for less than two pages, though it seems like 20 given how many names are dropped: Landor, Bagehot, Mill, Clerk, Maxwell, Walton, Gilbert White — you're like, fuck, was I high or something through undergrad? But this is the kicker:

I am not going to tell you the meaning of Read's allegory — the secret of his myth. At Eleusis the priestess rose from the subterranean marriage bed of the hierosgamos and exhibited an ear of barley, and today, scholars in their ivied halls by the Cam and Thames and Charles dispute about what she means. . . . What does it mean: What does the Tao Te Ching mean? What does the Book of Changes, that immemoriably subtile document, mean? All myth, all deep insight, means the same as and no more than the falling of the solar system on its long parabola through space.

Say what now?

So then of course I went down a rabbit hole about Kenneth Rexroth. What a charmed life! I mean, sure, he lost both parents before he really hit puberty and then got locked up in jail after being accused of running a brothel, but when you think about the way life goes, there are way worse outcomes than hitchhiking around the country, bumming around Paris, Mexico, South America and Greenwich Village before moving to San Francisco and becoming a poet. A poet! Who does that?! It's awesome. I mean these days running a food truck is considered "edgy." Artisanal mayonnaise, on the other hand . . .

I'm Not Using My Brain Right Now So You Can Fool Me If You Want To

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is a slog. Not because it's dry or uninteresting but rather because you have to pay attention.

It's not that Thinking is hard to read, but you have to take some time out of your day to do it. It's not something you pick up while you're commuting to work or otherwise distracted because you'll have to read passages again and again. Which is kind of the point of the book.

Kahneman explains that our brains have two "systems," "System 1" and "System 2." To simplify, System 1 is intuitive and unconscious and System 2 applies the rest of your brain to what System 1 perceives. And most of the time, System 2 is a lazy piece of shit who goes back and screws up everything.

As an example, Kahneman opens with a simple question: If a ball and a bat cost $1.10 and the ball costs a dollar less than the bat, how much do each cost? You probably almost automatically answered $1 and 10 cents, which is wrong, because that would be 90 cents less. The correct answer is $1.05 and 5 cents. Most people get this question wrong, probably because they're busy or otherwise distracted and because unless we're really sharp and on it, our brains just suck, and no amount of 5-Hour Energy can ever fix that.

It's a slightly depressing prospect, or at least slightly humbling — if we can't really rely on our ability to rationally work through simple problems, then what of bigger, more important things? Don't answer that.

And to be fair, Kahneman doesn't attempt to do that, which is a little frustrating, but understandable — that's not what he's setting out to do. But if there's one thing Jonah Lehrer taught me, it's that we should demand more from popular scholarly writing, and less of ourselves; sometimes you want Kahneman to lob up some policy softballs for us to glom onto; tell us what to think, what we need to know, you know? Because as it stands now, sometimes Thinking comes off as a 400-some-odd-page parlor trick.

That's not to say that the book is not really fascinating and entertaining and that Kahneman is probably a hoot to talk with at a cocktail party, but in all seriousness, I was sometimes itching for more wisdom about how this insight can be applied to the world — more than just noting that most (90 percent!) of rail projects cost more than was projected and end up serving fewer passengers (the "planning fallacy").

The other thing I'm curious about (maybe Jonah Lehrer can elucidate this point) is why? Which is to say — and I don't think Kahneman explained this, or at least even mentioned it — what anthropological purpose does it serve for us to think so poorly? Maybe it doesn't have to serve a purpose, but it's such a feature of our brains that you start to wonder. And that's really dispiriting, when you think about it.

I remember some teacher at some point in either middle school or high school advising us on standardized test-taking strategies, saying that when a question seemed like a trick question, we shouldn't overthink our answer and instead go with our "gut." (And I'm lucky I never interviewed for a smart-person job, what with all those stupid questions they ask.) Like a lot of bad advice, I never forgot it. And that's part of why Thinking, Fast and Slow never stopped blowing me away.

It's Sixty Hours Later And He Doesn't Appear To Be On The Path To Eventually Talking Through His Troubled Upbringing With Some Social Worker

So when we last left Mr. Baby, we were just into the second night of what Jen euphemistically calls "what is euphemistically called sleep training". And where the first night took about an hour to get him to sleep and the second night took 17 minutes, last night he went to bed by himself without crying at all. I played with him in his room, put him in the crib awake, he tossed and turned and fidgeted for several minutes while I lay on the floor next to the crib, and within ten minutes he was asleep and I was watching baseball back downstairs.

I bounced down the stairs with this "I'm the fucking man, dog" smirk before I cracked open a celebratory Banquet Beer.

And now I'm sitting downstairs again after putting him down the same way for the third straight nap over the last 24 hours — he's used to getting to sleep this way for naps, now, as well.

So from Wednesday evening to now Saturday morning, I think our child has been trained to sleep in his crib without us rocking him to sleep in our arms and trying to put him down in the crib without him then waking up and crying and us having to repeat the process again and again until we finally give up and sit in our bed with him sleeping next to one of us so that we are unable to eat or piss or basically live a normal adult life.

Jen was talking to a friend of ours with a kid who I think is about 18 months now, and she was telling Jen that they resisted "crying it out" for some time for all the typical reasons — i.e., it seems heartless and cruel and whatnot — and then one day they found themselves in similar situation to where we were, where the kid's sleeping patterns were taking over the parents' lives, and they just had a fuck-it moment where they let their kid cry it out and the only thing that they regretted was not doing it a half a year earlier. The more people you talk to, the more you hear that it's usually never more than a few nights, and, what's more, they usually say that they wish they did it months earlier.

And to be clear, we wouldn't have done this with a two-, three- or four-month-old whose brains aren't developed enough to acquire behaviors that can be changed, but rather a seven-, eight- or nine-month-old (we're at about 9 1/2 months right now). Basically, at some point it becomes obvious that "crying it out" is worse on the parents than the child, and that it's a matter of when the parents are ready to do it.

Because, also basically, it's not that big a deal to have a kid cry for one hour or even two hours for one fuckin' night, especially if two nights later, he or she is sleeping without crying at all. In retrospect, it's kind of amazing to me that this aspect of "crying it out" isn't highlighted more: I don't know if we were just really lucky (so far) (knock on wood) (and clearly I don't know shit from shit so I probably shouldn't be talking anyway), but Christ Almighty, it wasn't that bad.

And then there are the positives: A child sleeping in an adult bed, whether at night or during a nap, is in constant danger of falling out, even if you're sitting right there with him; also, I can't believe a child is getting more restful sleep while you fidget next to him tapping on a laptop or watching "Instagram That Ho" than if he is in his own crib; and also, it's much safer to have a parent get stuff done around the house while a kid is in his own crib than if he's crawling around the floor eating paper clips and ant turds.

What's more, after the initial hour of crying, the subsequent spells of crying have been short — no longer, in fact, than if I had been holding him and trying to get him to sleep (i.e., not more than several minutes at the most). So basically people freak out over one lousy hour of crying in a kid's life. It's totally ridiculous; part of me even wonders whether people discourage "crying it out" to keep women down. Conspiracy theories are especially attractive to those who have not had much sleep.

But all the same, last night I got sad thinking that I'd never again have my guy napping on me or curled up next to me looking like a sweet little angel, this warm little bundle sleeping so peacefully. As of Wednesday that's probably gone forever — or at least until the next one. And to think that I didn't even realize it at the time — even though it should have been completely obvious that's how things work — makes you realize how fleeting these moments really are.

But at least I can watch college football again with the sound up, and not for nothing, that's a big fucking deal.