Top Ten Girls (The Clean Version)

Every now and then one of the girls at work asks me who my favourite women are, and though usually I come back with “You of course”, I’ve never had a slick answer to that question. Aside from Jessica Alba. If a man doesn’t have Jessica Alba on his Hot List, he’s actually a Martian. Even girls accept that Jessica Alba is off-the-charts hot. And Eva Mendes, whose mere presence in a movie is enough for me.

Aside from Jessica and Eva, it’s never really been about actresses (or singers) for me. It’s always been about editorial fashion models (as opposed to catalogue models, who are chosen for different reasons). These girls come and go, except Kate Moss, who goes on forever, because that’s the nature of the business, and a lot of them are girls with This Year’s Look. Some, however, have something special - even if it only lasts as long as the morning dew of their youthful wonderfulness. If I was a Man Who Had Money And The Life To Go With It, right now, these are the women I would wish to squire. Since I’m not, they are pictures in magazines, as real as one of Boldini’s society women.

Daria Werbowy

Eniko Mihalik

Esmee Vermolen

Eva Mendes

Jessica Alba

 Kristen McMenemy

LouLou Robert 

Melina P.

Rumi Neely

Soo Joo Park

The Marchase Casati - Giovanni Boldini

Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Rome

Self-Improvement Has Consequences

“Know thyself” said Socrates, “and lift weights” adds every Manosphere guru. Confidence and self-knowledge are supposed to be attractive to women, who like men who know what they want from life.

Well, it’s messier than that.

What does a well-brought up young man with a STEM degree, an in-built desire to make sense of the world, a strong work ethic and a quart of mind-bending testosterone in his bloodstream do?

(i) He takes an inventory of himself, his ambitions and resources
(ii) But first, he needs to know what works and what doesn’t to achieve his ambitions
(iii) Then he drops the stuff that doesn’t fit, or makes specific plans to fill the gaps

The catch, of course, is the second one. As I’ve argued before, as soon as other people’s decisions are involved, the process becomes random. Investors look for different opportunities and take different risks; employers choose as much on “cultural fit” as they do on observable qualities; your placing in a race depends on how fast your competitors run as well; and as for cinema audiences? Who knows?

However, our young man has plenty to do just fixing his obvious weaknesses. It might not work every time, but it sure improves the odds, and lets him go in with more confidence. And that confidence can be off-putting.

Shrews are looking for a man they can wear down; parasites are looking for a man who will support them without making demands; users are looking for a man they can manage; low-libido girls are looking for low-libido boys… so when a confused young man decides he’s going to stop being confused, set and enforce his boundaries, call people out on their BS and be swift kicking the users and abusers to the kerb, he is going to get through a lot of people at the start, before he learns to spot them out of the corner of his eye and treat them like traffic. His self-improvement opens his eyes to the fog, chaos, flaws and complacency of the people around him. Women who may have seemed acceptable for a relationship now become suitable, if at all, for a short-term sexual fling. And they can see it in his eyes.

This isn’t just about women, but also employers. Abusers hire unpaid interns and use zero-hours contracts; pay under the market rate wages for over the market rate hours; demand weekends and overtime at short notice; and lay off staff at the slightest pretext. Parasites don’t make it easy for their staff to develop their marketable skills, and sometimes subtract value from them. A young man with some self-respect and skills will soon learn to speak Recruitment and recognise which firms he is and is not prepared to work for, and which ones will reject him the moment he walks through the door, because something in his manner says “Not a Victim”.

Raise your standards, and you shrink your supply. In an responsive consumer market, some suppliers will raise their standards and prices to meet the demand from that niche. But people aren’t responsive suppliers. You see men in the gyms, but not women. You see employees getting skills, but employers are reluctant to upgrade their software and equipment.

Raise your standards and the competition gets tougher. Our self-improving young man is competing with all the men who weren’t as confused, and all the men whose degree of confusion is less important that their superior resources. There aren’t enough good clients, jobs in the Top Fifty Firms To Work For, hot women or supportive investors to go round. Nor, we should mention, are there enough cool centrally-located apartments, restaurants, cafes, holidays, or anything else of quality.

In the meantime, a man gotta eat, gotta rest his head someplace, and what a long period of incel does to anyone is not a pretty sight. Our young man has to learn to separate the mediocre world with which he has to do in his daily life, from his own life and ambitions, and to dip into it when he needs money, or sex, or even food (sometimes Pizza Express is all there is), but not to stay any longer than he needs.

So, sure, the upsides in his life have been made harder to get, but he has reduced the downsides by orders of magnitude. Something else has happened.

A world that once seemed full of possibilities is gradually changed to a world full of flawed people who seem inexplicably ignorant or tolerant of their flaws, and who, while he may work with them, he would never socialise with them. He sees the weakness or arrogance in the men, and the entitlement and delusion in the women. He knows he is not perfect, and that others may see him as a nerd who doesn’t quite fit into the regular world, but he doesn’t care about that. The regular world now seems to him a slack place, full of mediocrity and compromise, with which he engages only when there is no alternative. There are good people in it, but it’s too chaotic, too messy, too unaware of itself.

In the Manosphere, this is called “Red Pill Isolation”, but it’s a much more general phenomenon. Young men and women coming out of the Armed Forces regard their civilian counterparts as slovenly, disorganised and under-motivated. Those of us with toned bodies look upon the softies as, well, a bit slack. Self-discipline and increased self-understanding, the urge to create a coherent person of ourselves, separates us from the majority. After a few years at it, I really do feel like I’m walking through a world of ghosts.

The Human Soul is Chaos and Fog

(Warning: large chunk of theory ahead. The practical comes later.)

We have expectations about what we will do and have in our lives; we have an idea of the moral, physical, cultural, social, and intellectual person we want to be; and we have an idea of the person we are at the moment. These three thing - ambitions, personal development and self-image - make up the majority of what we are as a person. The assumption is that as people we are coherent: that our ambitions, personal development and self-image are consistent within themselves and with each other, and are compatible with our circumstances: that is, our ambitions and development are attainable given our resources: wealth, income, talents, opportunities, family, education, physical appearance and strength, social position, energy level and social skills. We assume as well that we are accurately self-aware: that we have an accurate understanding of what our ambitions and assets are, and our self-image is one that other people would accept was a description of us. We assume that having coherent ambitions, development and assets, as well as being accurately self-aware, will lead to effective behaviour directed towards the attainment of those ambitions.

I say all that with deliberate pedantry, because I want the background against which to state my theses:

(i) Only a very small proportion of us are ever coherent and accurately self-aware

(ii) The rest of us are varying degrees of chaos in fog, and that causes us to make poor decisions and behave badly at times

(iii) Living closely with another person raises to a near-certainty that we will behave badly

(iv) The richer the culture, the more wealthy, active and uncertain the economy, the more ambiguous the key social roles, the greater the emphasis on the primacy of the individual, the greater the chaos and fog in which young men and women start their adult life

(v) Without that chaos and fog, "we would still be living in grass huts”.

In other words: most people don’t make sense, a fair number are slightly crazy and more than enough reached adulthood outright damaged. How many? I’m no great fan of the psychiatrisation of everything, but let’s let the National Institutes of Mental Health have their say (though translated into the Vulgar tongue):

Bipolar: 2.6%
Schizophrenia: 1.1%
OCD: 1.0%
Chronic Anxiety: 3.1%
Eating Disorders: 4.4%
Psychopathy: 1.0%
Socially withdrawn: 5.2%
Borderline: 1.6%
All: 19.5%

If you looked at the source, I didn’t count the depressions because those don’t indicate personality damage as much as bad luck, ADHD is otherwise known as “being a boy” and Social Phobia seems to me to double-count Avoidant (Socially withdrawn in my list). PTSD is a big deal in the US where they haven’t stopped sending young men to fight in shit-holes since about 1990, and it’s not so prevalent over here. Panic Disorder (Panic attacks) is agoraphobia and other stuff, and isn’t what I mean by “damaged”. OCD I can take or leave. The NIMH have left out drunks, junkies, coke-heads, speed-freaks, cutters, sex-addicts and other substance abusers, and none of them are healthy people. However, it’s difficult separating them from the recreational users. I’m going to put the messed-up addicts-of-all-kinds at around 2%. We’re looking at about one-in-five people. Even if accept that the American psychiatric profession has an unhealthy relationship with the pharmaceutical companies and trim this all, it’s still over one in ten.

So I’m going to say that about five per cent of the population are coherent and accurately self-aware; about ten percent are outright damaged, another ten per cent are slightly crazy, leaving three-quarters of the population as not quite making sense. Sounds like the world I live in.

Where does the chaos and fog in the human soul come from? Genetics, family, school, the culture we choose, all these need to interact in a limited number of ways to come out coherent. I came from a classic ACoA household, but the stories I read, the films I saw, were all about getting on in the world - the last thing an ACoA will be any good at. I found a better fit between me and philosophy, but then I had to go back out into the world again. I was a complete mess for decades, and I still don’t fit together well.

The chaos and fog does not explain everything, as if a calm, civil, composed personality could be achieved by self-knowledge and acceptance alone. Some people are just born violent, shrewish, aggressive, bitchy, nasty, cheating, dishonest, lazy, complaining or generally unpleasant. Others are born weak, indecisive, cowardly, retiring, withdrawn or introspective. Just as we are not born with an intellectual tabla rasa, we are not born with a perfect personality that is messed up by some traumatic event: most of us are born messed up already, and parents, schools, peers, television, novels, songs and everything else just make it worse. Mild dysfunction is the natural condition of humanity.

What does this mean? That with few exceptions, most relationships of any kind are going to fail, and most attempts to start a relationship are not going to get past the introduction. Divorces, sexless marriages, dead-eyed husbands dreaming of the day their wife falls under a bus, irritated wives wishing their husbands would give them a cash-generating reason for divorce, lovers who tire of each other, friends who drift apart, band members who split for “artistic differences’ or ‘personality clashes’, novelists who switch agents when they get successful and artists who trade up galleries for the same reason… it’s built right in to the human-social condition.

When an inter-personal relationship goes wrong, nothing "went wrong", it was just natural decay. Of course, a society can encourage that decay, and make it easy for people to quit, or it can stop producing stuff that makes relationship-decay easier.

All this also means that attempts at building a more coherent self might not have the beneficial consequences you would imagine. In a crazy world, the sane man is utterly confused. But that’s for next time.

My Top Ten Joni Mitchell Songs

Recently a columnist in the Guardian did a Top Ten Joni Mitchell songs, which prompted this.

Joni Mitchell writes songs for sensitive girls of all ages and both sexes. But listen carefully, and you’ll hear that she’s nobody’s victim. The Sisterhood doesn’t revere Joni like they do Laura Nyro, whose weird avant-garde genius was tinged with a just the right amount of Sister-friendly victimhood. Joni might be “coming to people’s parties / stumbling, deaf dumb and blind” but she’s not apologising for it, and she’s not blaming anyone, it’s just how she feels, and she’s slightly cross with herself for feeling that way.

Anyway, this set me to thinking what my Top Ten Joni’s are. In the end, pretty much any ten songs from up to 1980 will do, but these are mine:

First and always for me will be Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire


That sinister riff, the haunting vocal and the precise lyrics convey the emptiness and squalor of career-junkie-dom,making Bert Jansch’s Needle of Death a sentimental ditty by comparison. First time I heard this song, one November afternoon in 1972, it blew me away.

Next up is You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio



“I know you don’t like weak women, you get bored so quick / And you don’t like strong women, ‘cause they’re hip to your tricks” – and she never even met me. How did she know? Back then I thought it was the weak (strong) woman’s fault she bored (intimidated) me, but now I know it’s my addict-y character.

The rest I’ll leave to you to find on You Tube.

Carey - from Blue

Conversations - from Ladies of the Canyon

Cactus Tree - from Song to a Seagull

Two Grey Rooms - from Night Ride Home

People’s Parties - from Court and Spark

The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines - from Mingus

Refuge of the Roads - from Hejira

Chelsea Morning - from Clouds

April 2014 Review

The big deal about April was my gym-six-days-a-week-for-six-weeks experiment. Did I keep it? I missed two days because of colds with accompanying fever, and skipped Easter Monday because I don’t like crowds. That’s 33 out of 36 days, which isn’t half bad. I did a personal best of 2x2x187lbs on the bench with a spot, and can now knock out sets of 4x176lbs with far more comfort than when I started. (Before you start giggling, you have to do that at my age, not yours.) I gave myself a half-way treat with supper at Picture, and then an it’s-done reward with supper at Picture again. Have I mentioned I really like Picture?

I saw the amazing tap-dancing of Savion Glover at Sadlers Wells, and had supper at Moro in Exmouth Market, with Sis; Divergent, The Quiet Ones and Spiderman 2 at Cineworld; and the first season of the Italian series Inspector Montalbano on DVD. I read Robert Trivers’ Deceit and Self-Deception, James Davies’ Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good, Lawrence Principe’s The Secret of Alchemy, and a collection of essays on the Philosopy of Pseudoscience, and Colonel Thomas Hammes’ The Sling and The Stone.

I made some more decent progress with the interminable Riemann-Roch essay, and watched an fascinating lecture by J-P Serre on How To Write Mathematics Badly.

I had a cold for at least two weeks of the month. So I wasn’t functioning at a very high level, and was kinda inclined to “go home” as a default setting, rather than “hang out for another hour and catch a movie”. I have learned this about having colds: unless I have an actual fever, when exercising can be actually dangerous, the point is to show up and work. In the gym I might only do 80% of what I would ordinarily do, and at work or the keyboard, a lot of it might be deleted and re-written, but when the cold is over, I don’t have to start again after a week off. I’m still about where I was just before the cold.

Oh. And I made my first cold approach for about sixteen years: ten or so in an LTR and five or so just plain not in the mood. If you had blinked, you would have missed it, but she knew I wanted to talk to her, and she had given me a definite IOI a couple of minutes before, and a couple of times before that. When the moment came, I suspect we both chickened out. In the Bad Old Days, I would have beaten myself up for being such a wuss, and be obsessing about what a failure it was even now. But I’m all spiritual and in recovery now, so I decided to treat it as what it was: my first cold approach for sixteen years. It had to be done, and now that’s over with.

7 Habits, Well 6 Actually, That WIll Make You More Successful

I came across this while browsing Business Insider, which I do much less now than I used to. It's from a US Navy SEAL officer (Q: How do you know someone was a Navy SEAL? A: Give them five minutes and they will mention it) and I found myself agreeing with much of it. So here we are...

1. Be loyal. Team loyalty in the corporate environment seems to be a dying philosophy. Loyalty to the team starts at the top. If it's lacking at the senior executive level, how can anyone else in the organization embrace it? Loyalty is about leading by example, providing your team unconditional support, and never throwing a team member under the bus.

2. Put others before yourself. Get up every day and ask yourself what you will do to add value to your team, such as simply offering your assistance with a project. The challenge is overcoming the fear that your team member might say: "Yes, I really need your help with this project…tonight."

3. Be reflective. Reflective people often spend too much time analyzing their actions. But imagine if you could harness this talent into something highly valuable? Reflecting on your mistakes, such as mine in Iraq, ensures you never repeat them.

4. Be obsessively organized. Some of us innately have this ability, often to a fault, and some have to work at it a bit more. You have to find a process that works for you. I've known people who will put something on their to-do list after they did it and then cross it off to feel a greater sense of accomplishment! Whatever your system is, make it work for you.

5. Assume you don't know enough. Because you don't. Any effective team member understands that training is never complete. It's true in the SEAL teams, and it's true in any elite team. Those who assume they know everything should be eliminated. Those who spend time inside and outside of the workplace developing their knowledge and skills will provide the momentum for their team's forward progress.

6. Be detail-oriented. Attention to detail is one of our company's values. Do we get it right all the time? Of course not. Imagine, though, if all members of a team are obsessed with detail in their delivery? My lack of attention to detail in the incident in Iraq could have had catastrophic results. Don't ask yourself what you are going to do today to be successful; ask how you are going to do it.

7. Never get comfortable. Always push yourself outside of your comfort zone. If you do this continually with every task you take on, that boundary will continue to widen. This process will ensure that you are continually maximizing your potential, which will positively impact your team.

You may be wondering how you could ever have a relaxed life if you maintain all of these habits. But that's the beauty of it. If you enjoy what you do and form good habits, it all becomes second nature. Maintain these habits, and encourage your team members to do the same

. ... and we're back. Notice that 1) is prescriptive for managers. That's how they should behave and how you should if you make it to management. The good ones behave like that and the mediocre ones are just, well, what they were hired to be. Be one of the good guys.

The only one I disagree with is 2). There's nothing wrong with asking the rest of the team if you can help out, if you've done all your work, and you're pretty sure no-one is going to take advantage of you. The deal with adding value is that you add what they pay you plus some profit. After that, they have to add value to you as well. This very rarely happens in a large company, which, let it be remembered, hired you for the skills you already had, not because you were a smart guy who could pick up their stuff real quick.

I'm going with the others because they are about humility, growth and self-respect, important values all. And you thought the SEALs just blew shit up?

Feeling Functional Can Be a Little Dysfunctional

I was reading James Davies’ Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good recently. The descriptions of how SSRI’s and other happy pills felt familiar:

“Most participants described a general reduction in the intensity of all the emotions they experienced, using words like ‘dulled', ‘numbed', ‘flattened', or completely ‘blocked’, to describe how they felt...A few participants…reported their emotional experience had become more ‘cognitive’ or ’intellectual’...Most participants also described feeling emotionally detached or disconnected from their surroundings… a detachment extending to other people… reduced sympathy and empathy, and felt detached during social interactions…Most participants described a general feeling of indifference to things in life that used to matter to them...All participants experienced a reduction of intensity or frequency of negative emotions… Although this reduction was usually at some stage a relief, many participants also reported it impaired their quality of life."

Which is kinda how I feel, but probably (I hope) not to the same extent as the participants. I noticed a while ago that music played at home just didn’t have the same effect as it used to: sometimes an entire CD can go by and I realise I’ve missed it. (Spanish Sahara on the iPhone while commuting can still send me.)



All the feelings that tug at me are the tired old co-dependent cliches: self-pity, rescuing and the like. Useless, dysfunctional, like smoking. Those are, however, the feelings that I know how to have. If I dial those down, I’m really not feeling very much, and it’s like I’m happy-pilling myself.

Like Carole King says “I’ve been alone so long, that I just don’t know, what to do”.



I couldn’t take the hormone hit of actually having someone touch me, or touch them, with sexual intent. I can air-kiss and tent-hug no problem, but that letting go and sinking in to the kiss and the embrace? Jesus. I would have to trust that it wasn’t going to end then and there, because I would be left with a revved-up metabolism and an awful, awful come-down. I’m staying away from “intimacy” (aka "sex and cuddles”) because I just don’t want the hangover.

I’m being functional. I’m avoiding doing things that will make it harder for me to follow the work-eat-sleep-work cycle, or to need to put up with the many indignities and bullshit that the world inflicts on us. Functional is flat, sober, numb, ‘cognitive’, (emotionally) disconnected. Dysfunctional is highs and lows, drunk and ecstatic, sensational, emotional and connected. All those make you take days off, and argue with people, and have hangovers, and sleepless nights, and grudges, and all those other good things that are, apparently, what living is about.

Just as I would rather be sober, I would rather be functional, even of now and again it means a passage in a book can set me off on a self-pity jag like this one.