Jon Cogburn's Blog

extended existential freakout

Today was one long existential freakout.

In yoga class this morning the  person next to me was chewing gum the whole time. I don't know what is more inimical to the point of yoga, noisily smacking gum while doing it, or being so bothered by someone noisily smacking gum that your blood pressure goes up while doing it. In both cases you are conspicuously failing to instantiate Patanjali's extraordinary promise of liberation through stillness.

Then right outside the yoga studio there was a big Lamar Advertising billboard that touted the virtues of advertising in something called "The Sunshine Pages" (it's some kind of yellow pagey thing). Still traumatized by the sounds of the inside of my yoga friend's mouth, I thought something to the effect of, "If advertising in the Sunshine Pages is so great, why do they have to use the billboard," not even realizing that advertising for the Sunshine Pages in the Sunshine Pages is equivalent to believing the Bible is true because the Bible says so. Some days my fancy book learning avails me nothing.

Then we went to the mall to get haircuts.

Is there anything more forlorn than all those kiosk things selling useless crap in between the stores? I was taking a stroll while Emily got her hair cut and the kiosk people kept importuning me like prostitutes in Amsterdam's red light district. O.K. So I guess there is one thing more forlorn than all those kiosk things selling useless crap in between stores. But I had not taken a wrong turn on the way to the Van Gogh museum; I was just trying to walk around the mall while my wife got her split ends taken care of. I did not want skin care products, holographic pictures, jewelry, smokeless cigarettes, air-brush tatoos, remote controlled miniature helicopters, a shoulder massage, or Rosetta Stone software, etc. It all looked alien and vaguely threatening (because it all is). But my wants were immaterial; all the depressing kiosk people kept trying to lure me in over and over again until my walk became the stations of the mall. However, instead of scourging and what-not there was the forced joviality of saying, "No thanks," and again and again watching the depressing kiosk person's hopes get gradually more crushed by life.

And all the benches had these little sqwauking computer screens advertising a contest where you fill out a form and put it in an enclosure and you get contacted about being a model. I couldn't block out the burbling, and my tinitus driven ears did what they always do when there are barely audible voices, refusing to tune it out, instead attending to it and trying to figure out what is being said. So I went up to the stand and bent down to the screen, to listen to the pitch about how modelling is a lucrative career that just might be right for me. But then I was in the way of a pimply high school kid who was trying to submit his little form.

I could see the excited imaginations on his pock marked face. Him, pulled out of obscurity in Baton Rouge to walk the runways in glamorous company in all the great cities of the world. But reality painfully contradicted his fantasy. I saw him years from now standing by a kiosk and bothering shoppers. He thought he was a top model in training, but he was really a kiosk person in training.

What was I to do?

I bowed my head and headed back to the salon. Emily's hairdresser let me slump defeated into one of the unused barber chairs. I'd moved up in the world. When I was a kid they'd have to put a board on the arm rests so my head could reach the barber's hands. Not any more.

 I read Heidegger.

And only what is unmeaningful can be absurd.

Heidegger had never been to the Mall of Louisiana, but it still made sense.

deep thoughts

I had a big epiphany in yoga today. I realized that the point of yoga isn't to have big epiphanies, but rather to just basically feel O.K.

Later on I realized that that's why the overwhelming majority of people do the overwhelming majority of what they do; everyone's just trying to achieve the state of basically feeling O.K.

I don't know why human beings make such a hash of it. A priori, it does not strike me as too much to aspire to.

Yes, yes, all of our ridiculous vanity and destructive stupidity is ultimately rooted in the desire to basically feel O.K., but I can't help it. It still doesn't seem like too much to ask.

Lord of the Pies

While riding my bike home yesterday a group of people on the corner hailed me. I slowed down, and one of them yelled, "Where Pighead?"

It really threw me off. They were friendly people, and the mood was one of festive camaraderie. It made me sad that they had confused me with someone else. I was depressed yesterday after a departmental meeting (with the exception of church, yoga, and classes, all meetings involving more than three people end up depressing me; I don't know if this reflects the specific meetings I've been attending, or speaks to something more general about humans in groups). In any case I wanted to stop and tell my new friends where Pighead was. But I couldn't, I don't know Pighead.

I should have said, "I'm sorry, I don't know Pighead," or "You've got me confused with someone else," but instead I just pursed my lips, raised my eyebrows, looked up, shrugged my shoulders, and pulled my head back. The benefit of that gesture is that it is indeterminate between not knowing who Pighead is and knowing who Pighead is but not knowing where he is. It's less embarassing for everyone concerned.

two freakouts on the UCO campus in the sunshine

When I'm coming down with a mild cold the most minor dissonance can wreck my serenity.

Yesterday was a beautiful day even by spring-in-Edmond standards. The sky was almost the color of Indian jewelry. Though it was not windy on the ground, the clouds continued a stately procession across the sky, many doing the cloud equivalent of the slow exercise of the elderly San Fransiscan Chinese

For an hour or so I sat by the artificial lake on the UCO campus reading Bulgakov, thinking about what makes good writing good, and enjoying the planet. At the UCO lake there are four or five adult Canadian geese with strange iridescent highlights in their plumage. They sun themselves and swim around in the lake. This day there were also eight tiny goose chicks (goslings?) following two of the geese (their parents?) in another stately procession. As a new parent myself, and a fellow child of God, it was amazing to watch. One led the chicks to a place where water runs over rocks and watched them carefully as they drank, bathed themselves, played their somewhat inscrutable, yet gentle, goose games. The other goose (the first one's spouse?) stood guard the whole time, keeping an eye on everyone. It was a perfect moment.

But then across the lake these undergraduate males started hooting and hollering about something. "Whoo! Yeah!" etc. . . followed by whoops of forced laughter. I couldn't tell what they were so excited about, but I knew in my heart that teenaged perpators of genocide made the same whoops the world over and throughout all history. They kept laughing and screaming and it made me deeply ashamed to be human. I could tell the goose on watch duty was becoming incredibly anxious and I wanted to tell him that it was going to be alright, but it really wasn't. There he was, being the best Canadian goose he could be, but surrounded by humans doing hideously lousy jobs at being humans. It was bone-weary sad.

Then as I was about to cross a street on the way home it happened again. This elderly black woman was waiting to turn left in her ancient Econoline van. She looked over at me as if to say, "I'm sorry I'm pulled so far forward into the pedestrian crossing." We smiled at each other and I began my traversal behind her van. But then I heard, "Fucking hurry it up already!" and then almost jumped out of myself from a car horn. The hurry-man was of course male and he drove a new jeep with his cigarette bearing arm hanging out of the window. He was healthy and privileged, and in his ecosystem the old black woman and me only existed as creatures to serve him or get out of the way. He didn't look enraged, just inhuman (or all too human, when I think of the geese). He kept screaming obscenities and of course I did the dysfunctional thing I almost always do in such circumstances. I froze in the middle of the street. The only way I got myself moving again was by making the sign of the cross. I don't know if he saw it, and it really wasn't a very nice thing to do, sort of the Christian version of giving him the bird.

I trudged home.

I wish I could say I've been making prayers for all of the impatient people, the rude people, and the geese, the goslings, and drivers of rusted out old vans too. I wish I had been praying for the sick, the prisoners, the heartbroken, the meek and weak. . . But I've really just been playing with my dog. He really likes it when you throw a tennis ball. You can do it like a hundred times and he never gets bored. Neither do I.

Success Dopplegangers

One of the pitfalls of our increasingly inter-connected world is that we are all doomed to be haunted by dopplegangers who are vastly more successful than ourselves at the tasks nearest and dearest to our hearts. And I don't mean being haunted by someone who is just more successful in your field; I mean someone who is more successful in actualizing your very specific life goals. Examples:

Past Success Dopplegangers
In high school and college I tried to play music equally influenced by blues and punk, and often it was just me and a drummer. Then along come Jack and Meg White and do this vastly better than I ever could. In graduate school I (with my friend Eric Ward) tried to harnass the early Bowie's specific form of dystopia in a way influenced strongly by Nine Inch Nails. Then along came Marilyn Manson who did this vastly better than I ever could.

Present Success Doppleganger
In philosophy I've long had two goals: (1) use my linguistics training to make non-trivial suggestions to outstanding philosophical debates, and (2) philosophize about my cultural practices, especially video games. Then along came Peter Ludlow (who, by the way, is a real mensch) doing this better than me.

Future Success Doppleganger
I've long wanted to write an accessible book that incorporates zany philosophy of language views in a way that has cultural and meta-philosophical relevance. Mark Silcox and I are almost finished with such a book (or at least with the version that gets initially sent to Routledge). A priori I know that the book will not have a smattering of the cultural or philosophical cachet that Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. And this is not because he hit the zeitgeist at the right time. Rorty was a much better writer and philosopher and the book deserved the influence it had.

If anyone feels like sharing their success dopplegangers, that would be cool. Again, they have to be doing something very specifically analogous to what you have been doing. It's better if you didn't know of their work when you undertook your project (by this criteria Rorty is not a good example for me).

For what it's worth, I think that everybody has to just try to learn from their success dopplegangers and not be upset about it. Very few people are even competent at very much of anything, and somebody is going to be better than you at anything you do. Our hyper-connected society rubs our face in this, and I hope the result is not that people stop trying. I'm not sure culture would have produced a Jack/Meg White, Marilyn Manson, Peter Ludlow, or Richard Rorty if a lot of people weren't doing analogous things. So just being part of the millieu is important too.

existential freakout in the Denver airport

Last week on the way home in the Denver airport I was pretty stressed out.  I had just come through Seattle, where they've now followed Atlanta's suit by installing non-directional Bose speakers so there is no way to escape Big Brother blaring CNN into your skull (the noise even penetrates 30 db blocking ear plugs).  Add that to everything else that is horrible about flying today, and then add to that what the complimentary cheese and fruit plate was doing to my dig estive tract, and J. Cogburn was a not a happy camper.

So I was in no way prepared to find myself the only one of four people in a Men's bathroom not talking on a cellphone. When I went in to the bathroom there were just two of the cellphone people, one standing with his elbow on the paper towel dispenser, one standing over the urinal, both blabbering away inconsequentially.  Nearly doubled over from a fruit and cheese induced cramp I hobbled into a stall, only to have a third cell phone person enter the stall next to me, talking on the phone the whole time. 

If this wasn't bad enough, there were several performative contradictions in the guy's conversation.  He kept blabbing about how his relationship with "Jess" was nobody's business but his own, and how Jess had no right to tell anyone, including his interlocutor "those things."  After several minutes of overhearing him, I had gathered that the problem was both extremely embarrassing and of a medical nature.  It made me really nervous that the next guy who came in would catch the third cellphone jerk's disease from the toilet seat. 

That's when I started to have a freakout.  What if these people were the first wave of an advancing army of cyborgs, come back from space to colonize what is left of the old style humans?  After all, talking on a cellphone while defecating is exactly the kind of thing that a cyborg would do. 

I though of our dismal future then, or rather the dismal future of all old-style humans like me.  The cyborg colonization would not be military, but rather economic and cultural.  I saw then an impoverished future where earth was essentially a reservation for old style humans who are reduced to sending their leaders off planet to beg for financial help.  I saw a future where old style humans make no holographic picture shows themselves, but avidly consume the junk holograms foisted on us by the cyborgs.  I saw that our book and music output would diminish, old style human publishing companies purchased and shut down by their cyborg competitors.  I saw a world where all fashion is dictated by cyborg whim, and began to fear when I left the stall everyone would be wearing block robot suits made out of cheap cardboard.  I saw a world where eating is something furtively done in dark corners because to eat food is to admit that you are not one hundred percent cyborg.

I might have cried for the lot of humanity, but my flight actually left from Denver on time, so instead I just drank a beer in first class, cautiously appraising our new lords and masters as they boarded the plane, some of them blabbering into phones actually attached to their cyborg heads.

another freakout at the DMV

I spent another two hours at the local DMV yesterday, and as usual for my pains I was rewarded with dystopian visions.

This time I saw a future where gene therapy and embryo selection had sped up evolution to the point where every woman looked like a Victoria's Secret model and every man like Brad Pitt.  The parallel evolutions that led to all the Brad Pitt look alikes also led to everyone sharing his sunny disposition and interest in architecture.

As I gazed across the tile floor and underneath the unforgiving fluorescent lights I wondered then what our genetically modified descendants would make of us with our weak chins, flabby necks, unprepossessing cheekbones, and various levels of obesity.  Would they remember us with our unglamorous dreams, hopes, fears, and hobbies?  Would they even know what we looked like?

Then the vision turned darker and I saw what would happen a few years after the time of the first vision.  In this world the very, very rich (and their famous courtiers) inject themselves with designer diseases and then have themselves inconvenienced in order to separate themselves from the beautiful masses for whom robots perform all labor.  In this twin earth, the DMV was hot vacation spot where billionaires go to both be apart together and to experience for a few days at least unending frustration.  In this twin earth, the man next to me who appeared to have a tremendous goiter on his neck had been on the cover of Esquire Magazine on three separate occasions.  The guy with the swollen and misshaped right foot pulling himself along in a filthy wheelchair with his left one had just purchased a new extraordinarily fashionable strain of tuberculosis.  The one guy in there that actually looked a bit like Brad Pitt but also had an obese, hair-lipped, wife covered by oozing white leprous tumors?  The fact that he still looked like Brad Pitt showed him to be vulgar new money, perhaps an injury attorney.  The diseased woman was his new trophy wife.

What had the twin me done in this future world of mirrors to merit citizenship of this posh resort?   I couldn't figure it out and actually went into the bathroom to look myself in the mirror to make sure that I did not in any way resemble Brad Pitt.  In addition, I wasn't cheerful and had no discernible interest in architecture.  What had I done to deserve that blessing?  What would I do to earn it?

near existential freakout at the DMV

Yesterday at the Baton Rouge Department of Motor Vehicles I was one of only two Caucasians in the whole place.  That would have been fine, except for the fact that the other Caucasian had two confederate flag tattoos on his arm, as well as a t-shirt with the flag on it.  He was greasy and angry looking.  Of course he came and sat down by me.  At close range, I saw that his shirt said, "If you have a problem with this t-shirt, you need a history lesson."  He had long hair, a long beard, and a big belt buckle.

Digression- when I was in college, people sitting next to me on airplanes always used to try to convert me to their religion.  I don't know if that was just a popular thing for religious people to do in the late eighties and early nineties, or if it had to do with me in my late teens and early twenties.  I don't know.  However, I got pretty good at sending off "don't talk to me!" vibes without being unacceptably rude or presenting myself as mentally ill.

So as I emanated the "don't talk to me" vibe to the confederate flag dude, I thought of things I would write on his shirt if I could.  Here are a couple- "If you are wearing this t-shirt, you are too dumb to understand history lessons," or less succinctly, "If you are wearing this t-shirt, you are a downwardly mobile white male who deals with his inferiority complex by simultaneously pretending to be a victim and identifying with those you perceive as stronger, in short you are the kind of idiot that makes fascism possible."  Anyhow, these thoughts kept me from having an existential freak-out.  Unfortunately though it got worse.

A woman sat down on the other side of me, only promptly to take her left shoe off and begin massaging her foot with both hands.  I could actually smell her foot.  Periodically she rubbed her foot on the floor and emitted these little ecstatic groans, before picking it up and again massaging it.  She had these really long, fake fingernails.  The thought of their undersides crawling with foot and DMV floor cooties made me ill.

While this was happening a large extended family took about fifteen minutes to get candy out of the machine in front of me.  I was trapped between the loser and the foot rubber and the family.

I don't know why, but in situations like that I am almost always compelled think of what would be the worst possible thing to say.  I think then it probably would have been to call Mr. Noble Lost Cause a hippie and tell him he should go live in Vietnam with the Beatles and other peaceniks if he wants long hair like that.  As he then would try to establish his proto-fascist bonafides with me, I'd say that I thought he was a girl with his long hair and then ask him if played with dolls and liked to kiss boys. 

Of course, I didn't do that.  Luckily, before it got any worse, the DMV people called my number.  I pushed through the extended family, at this point each member of which was at the beginning stages of high fructose corn syrup high.

When I got up to the lady at the desk, it turned out I didn't have all the right paperwork, and would have to come back next week.

Cogburn men are nothing if not perseverant.  Taking a deep breath I again waded through the candy eaters, to open the door and walk boldly out into the Baton Rouge sunshine.

existential freakout in post office (with apologies to Christa Weil)

I was standing in line in the post office yesterday about to mail a box of philosophy books to Oklahoma.    It took forever.  One guy was trying to do a money order for twenty three dollars and fifty seven cents.  What could that possibly have been for?  I have always thought that it bespeaks a general level of incompetence to do a money order in that quantity, and I was not to be surprised.  He kept nervously asking the teller all these questions as if the U.S. government was trying to screw him over in some way regarding his money order.  In addition, the tubby middle aged guy in an Eric Clapton t-shirt (it said something like "old slowhand" ) right in front of me wouldn't stop drumming on the little table where you can get forms and stuff.  He was really into it! nodding his head back and forth with genuine passion.  I almost couldn't look away, until I noticed the postal clerk's weird makeup.  She had used really dark, bruise colored blush in a half moon shape around her upper cheeks.  It made her look like the kind of creature into which malevalent racoons will evolve thousands of years from now.  She was also not capable of dealing with the old guy's anxiety about his money order, and the process seemed to go on to infinity with the jerk drumming away on the little table.

That's when I had an existential freakout.

I looked at all of the other people in line, and instead of feeling the warm camraderie of shared human suffering, I felt like I'd accidentally landed on the wrong planet and that I was about to be found out and possibly sent to a government research lab to be plied with alcohol like David Bowie in "The Man Who Fell to Earth."  It made me nervous.

Then I started to think about the whole world being destroyed except for the ten or so of us standing in line in the post office.  What kind of species would evolve from such a limited gene pool, one that (to be honest) had pretty clearly already been peed in numerous times?

I closed my eyes to try to stop these thoughts, but that only made it worse.  To the polyrhythmic idiocy of the frustrated drummer it all started to became clear to me.  Our (by "our" I mean those of us in that post office) post apocalyptic descendents would be somewhat like bees, with a stratified society of different kinds of post-humans.  I tried to stop this train of thought by opening my eyes again, but the racoon woman was glaring at me, so I closed them again.  Then the prophecy was on me full force, and here is what I saw.

At the edge of any city/hive live the warrior posthumans, possessing lightning-fast reflexes and endless patience, still as crocodiles for most of their lives, but like crocodiles ready to spring into murderous violence at no provokation.  The warrior posthumans have eyes as big as current humans' heads, each containing thirty thousand lenses and able to spot a mosquito from fifty yards away.  They have four large opaque wings, each capable of independent operation.  Their chitinous bodies and liquid surrounded cardiac system allow them to withstand over 30g of lateral force, and their prey intercept rate is over 97 percent.  These posthumans are asexual and they survive on the flesh of defeated enemies.

Approximately 100 terran meters underneath the city there live legions of posthumans known as "repletes."  Like the fois gras geese of today, these posthumans are overfed to the point of bursting.  Though strongly resembling humans of today, they spend their entire lives hanging in small groups from the subterranean ceiling.  As small children, with still supple endo-skeletons, they are attached to the ceilings and henceforth fed a steady diet of nectar.  As they grow, their abodmens stretch until their skin becomes so thin that it is transparent, the digested nectar glowing inside them and lighting the huge underground chambers.  Repletes are so continuously full and obese that they cannot move, and live their lives dreaming of of the day they will be chosen for consumption during the worker posthumans' religious ceremonies, usually around the age of thirty-three terrestrial years.  At this point, full grown repletes typically weigh over one thousand pounds and upon death provide enough fermented nectar for a two day ceremony involving one hundred and sixty workers.

Worker posthumans are not really posthumans but rather highly evolved male postchimpanzees, kidnapped by the warrior posthumans from their postchimpanzee camps, castrated, and then educated by other workers in agriculture, engineering, and post-human religion.  At the age of thirteen terrestrial years, they are put to work growing food and keeping the city running.  I hypothesize that through their religious ceremonies a kind of psychic connection between the workers and the posthuman queen is established and strengthened.  I am not certain of this though.

Finally, every posthuman city has a queen posthuman, though "queen" is misleading as the creature is technically hermaphroditic.  If one were to look at a full grown queen (a crime punishable by death!) one would see a slowly undulating six foot diameter sphere, covered in spiky protuberances that slowly drip poison.  Blinded workers attend to her every need. . .

At this point in my vision, the racoon woman said, "Sir, sir. Can I help you?  CAN I HELP YOU?"  I opened my eyes and still found it horrifying to gaze upon her.  Nonetheless, I steeled my resolve by meditating upon the strength of all of the Cogburns through history, and finally stepped forward to mail the books.

today at the mall

While E. Beck was getting her hair cut at the Aveda Salon today I walked around the Mall of Louisiana.

Across from the Aveda Salon there is a "Glamor Shots" photography studio. 

"Glamor" originally referred to the magical power that elves and other such creatures had to bespell us.  Laurall K. Hamilton portrays this very well in her fiction.

In the studio I could see the glamorshots employee applying layer after layer of makeup on a customer, making her glamorous.  She was extremely overweight, but more importantly chewing a huge wad of bubble gum with her mouth open.  Her mouth moved up and down.

I was hypnotized by the movement of her mouth and couldn't focus on anything else.  It was like one of those 1960's films where the narrator intones "you are getting very sleepy" and all the viewer can see is a slowly spinning top and a charm swinging on a chain back and forth.

My soul was in peril.  What kind of evil post-hypnotic suggestion was going to be programmed into me?  Where was Angela Lansbury to comfort me?  Frank Sinatra?  What would I do?

Thank you Jesus; the spell was broken.  The glamor shots employee had to get the accumulated makeup off of her teeth, which caused her to cease the cow-chewing-cudlike motion.  I snapped out of it.

They both turned their heads towards me.  He was wiping lipstick and flesh colored powder makeup stuff off of her right upper bicuspid and the pink wad of gum sat tumor-like, bulging out of the left side of her mouth. 

At that point I had an existential freakout.  I was mad at them for hypnotizing me, but also felt the same kind of guilt as when I gawk at a particularly gruesome car wreck.  And the gum chewer wasn't even dead, or even in the process of being removed from wreckage with the jaws of life.

I wanted to tear my hair.  I wanted to go over to the Abercrombie and Fitch store and rip down all of the horrible speakers blaring techno bass notes into my soul.  I wanted the mall to be still and silent, so we could all get right with the universe.  We would destroy the gumball machines, and then put the gum chewing women and the glamorshots employee on our shoulders, parading them through the Mall of Louisiana, singing, "Hail to the new King and Queen of the Mall of Louisiana."

But none of that happened.  He pulled the washrag off of her bicuspid and waved it at me while smiling.  She smiled too, as much as she could with the gum-chewing.

I realized that they took the "glamor" in glamorshots very seriously, thinking the elf magic had worked on me.  She thought that she had enough glamorous makeup on so that it put me under her spell, and he encouraged her in this lie.  She raised her eyebrows in a sort of come-hither fashion.  I don't think she really wanted me to go into the glamor shots.  Rather, me staring just confirmed for her that she was doing the right thing, and that her significant other would be truly wowed.

I stumbled away, sadder, yet wiser.