Off the Rua do Jasmim, Barrio Alto, Lisbon

So there are going to be a heap of posts with photographs from my second visit to Lisbon with the gang this year. This is the first, for no special reason.

Walk down the Rua do Jasmim from the Jardin de Principe Real, and this is half-way down on the right. One little alley, so many images.

And those 3.5" diskettes? Who even knew there were any left in the whole of Europe?

September 2013 Review

September usually goes by in a flash.

Swimming after work is now part of the routine. I'd been thinking about doing that for a while, but it took the insomnia thing to kick me into it. My swimming has rapidly improved, and I aim for fifteen minutes of fairly serious exertion, rather than long marathons. I graduated to proper dead-lifts on the Big Wheels, and am now at 3x10x60 kgs. Stop sniggering: you don't have my curved lower spine, which means I have to be super-careful about style, and need I remind you, you're way younger than me. Pull-ups are still a sticking-point: I'm doing more reps, but at levels of support that are truly embarrassing.

Sometimes the little things make a difference. I replaced the XL tee-shirts I've been wearing for years under my blue office shirts with some L Autographs from M&S, and though those hug my abs in a non-flattering way, my office shirts now fit a lot better.

One lunchtime I went down to Byron near Spitalfields Market and ordered a Classic-no-onions to take away, and haven't looked back. One big dose of cow at half-one or so sets me up for the rest of the day. I don't feel drowsy at 15:00 and I don't feel sugar-crashed at 16:30 either. It's not the cheapest lunch, but what use is a snack that sends me to sleep and bounces my blood-sugar?

Sis and I had supper at Marco Pierre White's Steak and Alehouse on Middlesex Street, which is not as expensive as you might think and a solid meal, and was given a little drama by the Central Line halting for long enough to make me think that catching a bus in the rain at Holborn would be a good idea, which lasted for as long as it took to find out on Tube Checker that the line was running again, and so I jumped off at the next stop and went back to Chancery Lane.
Taking Krauser's comment about not listening to "Woe is me my girl walked out I hate everybody" music, I started to put more instrumentals on the phone for travel-to-work music. Much though I like Seether's Holding On To Strings Better Left To Fray, it does have a negative emotional load I don't need. So as I write, I have Digweed's Structures 2, Bedrock and Live In London, Maya Jane Cole's Heaven, DJ Kicks and Comfort, Sasha's Airdrawndagger, Renaissance's The Mix Collection: The Tale of Us, and a bunch of post rock from Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai.

I saw Upstream Colour and Rush - I'm just less and less captivated by the movies at the moment; and I read a bunch of stuff, including Sandy Nairn's Art Theft, about recovering the Turners for the Tate, the first volume of Transmetropolitan (Back On The Streets)  and short studies on the history of Pop Art, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns and Nan Goldin, as well as Fight Club, and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist ….. Nick and Norah is way better than the movie and it's genre as a "teen novel" suggests, and I was struck by how much the Manosphere makes more sense after I read Fight Club (the movies isn't quite enough).

The end of the month was Lisbon with side trips to Caiscas and Sintra. What can I say? Amazing food, Bar Baia and Urban Beach Friday night to Saturday morning, hanging out with the guys, dodging the rain, the Paula Rego museum and Atlantic waves in Caiscas, a Sunday morning stroll round the Botanical Gardens, and generally chilling in Barrio Alto cafes and squares while the rest of the gang slept off their hangovers. There are going to be a whole bunch of posts on it.

And I finally found a decent explanation of what a twisting sheaf is and why - props to Andreas Gathmann. So the slow crawl to Riemann-Roch just speeded up a lot.

Sao Domingos, Lisbon

Nothing can prepare you for being inside Sao Domingos Church in Lisbon. It burned down in 1954, was re-built it, but not re-prettified. Instead it has been left with cracked pillars, burnt rock, and a blood-red interior. This is a serious church, in which life is in danger and under threat, and God is not smiling on us and protecting us. This church reminds us that we die in accidents and earthquakes and fires, and that there is dark side to life which is God's as well. I'm a heathen, and it connects with me. Visit it, but don't do the tourist one-lap-and-out. Stay. Absorb. Take photographs because that will make you look. Notice the old women praying and sitting in silence. And still people light candles in hope, because there is hope in this blood-red darkness.

The Men's Version of the ACoA Promises - Part Two

Okay, it's time to deal with the "intimacy" stuff.Because this is about the same place asthe feelings of loss and emptiness I mentioned at the start. So let's take a look at the ACoA promises:
1. We will discover our real identities by loving and accepting ourselves.
2. Our self-esteem will increase as we give ourselves approval on a daily basis.
3. Fear of authority figures and the need to "people-please" will leave us.
4. Our ability to share intimacy will grow inside us.
5. As we face our abandonment issues, we will be attracted by strengths and become more tolerant of weaknesses.
6. We will enjoy feeling stable, peaceful, and financially secure.
7. We will learn how to play and have fun in our lives.
8. We will choose to love people who can love and be responsible for themselves.
9. Healthy boundaries and limits will become easier for us to set.
10. Fears of failures and success will leave us, as we intuitively make healthier choices.
11. With help from our ACA support group, we will slowly release our dysfunctional behaviors.
12. Gradually, with our Higher Power's help, we learn to expect the best and get it.

I'm right there with 3), 6), 9), 10) and 11) and using words loosely, I'll go with 2) as well. I have no problem with 12), though I'm not good at expecting the best, nor with 5) and 8), though putting both into practice in this town could leave a man with an empty diary.

What give me the heebie-jeebies are 1), 4) and 7). And until I was half-way through this, I thought that was my fault.

"Discovering our real identities", "sharing intimacy" and "learning to play and have fun" arethe promises held out by therapists and self-help authors everywhere. That's because those goals appeal to women of both sexes, who make up the main market for therapies, and everyone gotta keep the customer satisfied. I'm a man of the male sex (there are men of the female sex as well, and I get on rather well with them), and those things don't describe my way of being in the world at all.

The dictionary says "intimacy" means something along the lines of "comfortable familiarity". However, that's not the freight it carries in these circumstances, where it means a mixture of closeness, empathy, trust and mutual understanding. And that's not the freight it carries for the insecure and needy people who fill therapist's rooms and read self-help books: for those people it means "making me feel as if someone cares about me and that the huge hole inside me gets filled up just a little".Dealing with needy and insecure people, our provisionof "intimacy" gets judged by the easing of their pain, which is a recipe for disaster, and anyway, their pain isfor them to pay a therapist to treat.And let's just say something else while we're at it:regurgitating the minutia of Her Day or Her Fears when you get back isn't intimate and it isn't sharing, it's dumping the garbage, and it's just rude and thoughtless.

Okay. I'm done with that.

ACoA and the therapists claim that we will feel connected with others by sharing our past experiences, hopes, fears, ambitions, circumstances and dreams. That happens to be true, but it also happens to be as rare as a big Lottery win. A prudent life has to be built on the assumption that, after we leave university,we will not meet anyone with whom we will connect, let alone connect and want to have sex and live with. (This is one reason a lot of clever young men and women go into accounting and consultancy, so they continue to be surrounded by clever, personable and ambitious young people for another few years. From my experience, regular companies do not have many pretty people working in them. And the people in the hip companies are painfully intent on letting everyone know just how freaking hip they are. Way too hip to get next to co-workers.) Whether or not you lead a good life should not depend on having the luck to meet someone who doesn't put their meanings to your words. If you believe in Evolution (or God) you have to believe we Evolved (or had Created) mechanisms for that. And we did: it's called art, literature, drama, comedy. (Only some art communicates, the rest is entertainment.) Art can let us know there is someone else who shares our views, beliefs and concerns.12-Step movements tell us that we will find such people in their Rooms, and for some alcoholics, druggies, adult children and the rest, that might be true, but it's not true for all of them. (I found getting sober changed some things but not everything: I couldn't make friends when I was drinking, and I can't do it sober either.)

After all, if it was easy to find people with whom to share in this marvellous way, why would the human race have invented booze, drugs, maypoles, dancing, travelling theatres, fireworks, the printing press, the movies, chocolate, nightclubs, painting, sports and free weights? Our forefathers did it because they needed stuff to add pep, zest and contemplation to their lives. I have a friend who can remember as a young girl sitting round the village fire listening to the adults talking and telling stories to make the evening pass. If that was as much fun as it needed to have been, those adults would not have TV's in their houses now. But they do. The human race needs diversions and accomplishments.

So in a manly no-nonsense spirit I'm going to replace 1), 4) and 7) as follows:

1) We will exercise, eat well, groom and dress well, and experiment with anything we fancy until we find some stuff we really like. We will avoid junk food, junk culture and junk people, and if necessary sit in peaceful silence until something or someone worthwhile comes along. We will not go on being limited by what those SoB's in our past told us we can't do.

4) We will find the confidence to: choose the right people to work with so we can advance our ambitions and plans; choose attractive, well-balanced people to form relationships with; and to handle the occasional crazy person who just makes life more interesting.

7) We will make damn sure we entertain ourselves the way we want to be entertained at least once a week.

Sure I would love to meet someone who "gets me", and who hears what I say, but in the meantime I have to go on breathing. Even if I did, I would still need to earn a living, iron my shirts, stock the fridge, cook my food, commute and exercise. Also sleep and commute.Instead of talking about the benefits of something that may never happen in the ACoA's life, it would be better to talk about how one lives with hope, self-respect and an immanent sense of disappointment that one's feelings could be more vibrant and rich, but just not today.

The Men's Version of the ACoA Promises - Part One

I was reading the official Big Book of ACoA recently, and as I always do when I go near that subject, had mixed feelings: loss, emptiness, relief and irritation. Let's deal with the irritation, because that came from the fact that I started to be convinced I should not be feeling the loss and emptiness.

ACoA's have low-level but chronic psychological pain: they feel empty, unloved, rejected, ignored, fraudulent, isolated, cut-off, unheard and generally are pretty sure that everyone else is having a fun time except them. They feel this all the time, not just now and then, they feel it like the skies in England are grey. They get breaks every now and then, like the famous "sunny intervals" of an English day, but then everything goes back to grey and empty. And here's something you will not read: this is hormonal, it's body chemistry, it's a drug no-one would buy the second time if you could synthesise it. It's not just a belief, or a habit of thought, or an attitude, it's natural drugs, triggered by years of upbringing and experience. That's how it was for me, and I don't imagine I'm anything special.

ACoA and the therapists claim to be able to do two things. The first is to help the sufferer stop feeling that pain, to silence the inner harping voice, to loosen the grip of all the shitty things that people told them about themselves, and after a while, generally to stop feeling bad about themselves. That can be and is done, and I don't have a problem with that claim.

It's the second claim I have a problem with. That is the one where, not only can the sufferer stop feeling bad, they can start feeling good about themselves, without the aid of external props, validations, pills, potions and paychecks. I have two problems here.

First, "feeling good" is hormonal. It's not what you feel when your body has no downer-hormones circulating in it, it's what you feel when you have upper-hormones circulating. When you have none, you feel like I do most of the time: which is nothing, much, except it's a nothing against a long history of horrible, so I appreciate it. Think of my emotional state as one long progressive house track.



Civilians wander around in a much more active hormone state than that, going from blissed-out on oxytocin to jacked on adrenaline in the course of even an hour. Me and mine can do the adrenaline, but not the oxytocin / endorphin bliss. Our bodies never acquired the habit of letting the bliss hormones loose: we were too busy with hyper-vigilant monitoring of our environment and so we could set off the flight or dissociation reactions before whatever it was hurt too much. We never learned to "feel good".I've said before that I don't do oxytocin, and I'm betting I don't do endorphins either. I do some kind of thrill-hormone, these days brought on by very special music



and a few things around peace and contemplation and serenity, but I have nothing around feeling so good I can greet the one hundredth straight grey day with high spirits.

The idea we can "love ourselves" and "feel good" independently of any and all events in the outside world is not a serious suggestion about any real world we live in. It'san over-reaction to the way ACoA's try to fix themselves. Feeling awful, we go to parties, take exotic holidays, pick up girls, get promotions, buy toys, try to win awards, tell jokes, ... and, of course, none of it works. None of it fills the Inner Emptiness.

This is because the Inner Emptiness can't be filled. We can't feel as if we belong, even when other people tell us we do, and may even mean it. This makes external validation all the more important. Not validation from other people, but from progress in our chosen endeavours. Depending on what those endeavours are, this progress might make us better people, but it probably won't make us friends, and it certainly won't fill any empty holes in our emotions. But it does give us a reason for feeling good about ourselves. It gives us a reason to deserve our own respect.

We learn to win our own respect, and so gain self-respect. We wake up and go to work, earn money and pay our taxes and due bills because that's what a responsible member of a post-modern urban economy does; we exercise and stay in shape because that's how we respect our own bodies, and we avoid junk food and eat well for the same reason; we avoid junk culture and read science, mathematics, philosophy, law, economics, history and other non-fiction, because that's how we respect our minds.The validation is external because it comes from measured progress in an activity we perform in the world-lived-in-by-us with the equipment ready-to-hand. It is our engagement with the world.The progress is not progress-towards anything: reaching goals is never satisfying - exhilarating maybe, but never satisfying. "It is progress we seek, not perfection" - the satisfaction is in the process.

You may be thinking that this sounds as if it doesn't really need people, and isn't the whole point of ACoA recovery to be able to have proper relationships with people? Especially girl-people, for, you know, intimacy? What's the point of being a well-read Adonis if you still can't get laid, I mean, have satisfying intimate adult relationships? This isn't the time to go into Step Two and outcome-independence, but the short answer is that practising both is essential for your dignity, sanity and mood.

Gherkins and Cheesegraters, The City

I have a number of things in progress that are taking longer to work out than I thought, so in the meantime, here's a photograph. Lunch is currently a Classic-no-onion from Byron near Spitalfields Market, and some developer has just knocked down a totally bland block of brick to put up heaven knows what equally bland modern stuff. In the meantime, there's some open sky and this view of the City Towers.

Three weeks I've been on cow for lunch, and I feel a lot better for it.

Staying Sharp Over Fifty

There's a neat piece by Quintus Curtis over at Return of Kings about staying in shape for older men. Turns out, "older" means mid-thirties over at RoK. At 59, I find the idea that ‘older’ is mid-thirties a huge joke. Anyone under 40 is, unless they have had some serious life-experiences of the kind usually involving bullets or poverty, pretty much a babe in arms to someone who has been through the wasteland. (The wasteland are those twenty years between 40 and 60 or thereabouts when you realise you've seen a lot of this before, your career has peaked, the hormones are easing off, and you have to grind out large numbers of days and years for no other reason than you woke up alive again, and it does not matter how many different reasons you invent for living, you're now doing this on sheer freaking endurance. But more on that later.) I read what these young guys say because the people my age are usually a way more inclined to rationalisation, resignation, flabby triceps, and worst, fake wisdom, like they’re all suddenly Seneca, but without, you know, actually being billionaires like Seneca was. The Manosphere self-improvement guys are much closer to my temperament and attitude, and confirmation always feels good.

A couple of places my mileage varies on the advice. I don’t like travelling: I find the whole to-and-from airports thing way too stressful, though I’m fine once aboard the plane. Also going on holiday on my own brings on feelings of loneliness which I cover up by being busy, busy, busy. And then there’s the whole bit where I have to come back. Yeah – that cab ride back from the airport really puts the cherry on the icing. (This is a very ACoA thing, civilians won’t have the first idea of what I’m talking about.) Travelling on business is fine, and going with good company is okay as well. I don't make great company for myself. Sure I appreciate the sights and sounds, but I did this in 2011, and holding back the t(y)ears  gets to be tiring after a few days. Maybe if I was in a cottage by the sea and practicing sight-reading for guitar for a week it would be better.

Which brings me to the next item. Learning new stuff, sure, but why is it always a foreign language? If that’s what you non-mathematicians do, that’s fine by me. It’s just that everybody says this, and nobody says “learn some of the math / science that you flunked in school” or “learn to play chess properly” or “learn to sight-read - the alto clef”. It’s always a damn language. I’m hopeless at languages. Like all nerds, I remember systems and processes, not isolated facts like what cabbages are called in Romanian. I get that in the context of pick-up, a language is more useful than an understanding of the quantum mechanics of the hydrogen atom, but they might give the science a nod here.

I loved, loved the idea of the  "non-game-changers". The stuff we do that actually doesn't move us forward, but feels like it should be useful or stuff we should do. The original cartoon suggests reading Ulysses as a non-game-changer, and, having read it, I kinda see what the cartoonist means. Reading Proust is a big deal and stays with you, but Ulysses - and maybe even Musil - not so much at all. 

Here's the news from and for 50- and 60-somethings. Take Mr Curtis' advice. All that stuff works. And from what I see everyday, you need to start. Yesterday.