Barnett Weekly

What would we do without statistics? Newspapers would actually have to report on events, sociologists would talk about feelings and baseball commentators would have almost nothing to say. Such is the state of the world.

Statistics are particularly appropriate to our digital age where every keystroke, email, website visit, credit card purchase, auto trip, plane ride, and so forth can be tracked, catalogued, correlated, calculated, compared, analyzed and data-mined for patterns. Today’s computer power and storage capacity is so great keeping all this information for eternity poses no problem, that is unless the electrical grid fails and humanity falls off the proverbial cliff.

In the meantime, stats dominate. They fill reams of paper before congressional committees, form the basis of economic policy, drive automated buy-and-sell transactions on Wall Street, inform law enforcement on success and failure, predict elections, reveal your chances of winning the lottery and calculate the odds of doomsday’s arrival. In other words, lots of useless crap that we’re told is terribly important but that most everyone ignores.

Does it matter what breakfast cereal most people will eat today? I only eat a high-fiber, low-carb shredded-cardboard-like brand with a name like Heritage Fiber. That 13.6 percent of America will eat Kellogg’s Corn Flakes each morning makes no difference to me. Nor does knowing 72.3 percent will begin brushing their teeth on the upper left side or that only 61.5 percent use soap in the shower. (Note: these stats are completely imaginary, but did you notice how well they got your attention and how easily you believed them?)

We love stats even though we ignore them. Stats give us ground, something we can believe in while we go about our daily lives making stupid decisions based on how we feel moment to moment. When is the last time you reminded yourself that studies show 83 percent of ice cream is sold to obese Americans as you took a bite of that Hagen Dazs Almond Crunch Vanilla Milk Chocolate-covered 260-calorie carbohydrate laden treat at the movie theater while watching the film voted as “most intense” by 61 percent of America’s film critics? Odds are 92.4 percent the answer is “never.”

Herein lies the failure of stats: on an individual basis stats are useless. Individual human beings are particular and complex while stats are general and simple. As a predictive tool stats are over-rated and while their application to decision-making might prove to be useful in hindsight in the aggregate, they offer little in the way of knowing if I will eat cardboard this morning. Sure, I might open the cupboard and look at the carefully designed box intended to stimulate my salivary glands but perhaps the thought of applewood-smoked bacon will pop into my mind instead. Or watermelon. Or peanut butter on toast. Or perhaps I’ll lose my appetite altogether and write a column. Like I said, human beings are complex.

We don’t care about statistics, but we like to follow the herd. Seeing our fellow humans doing something interests us and provides a much more reliable predictor of behavior than stats. Stats can confirm our predilections and responses as a group, but the success of websites like Trip Advisor proves that the simple opinions of ordinary people mean more than stats in the conduct of our lives.

Here’s the bottom line: 99.9 percent of stats are for zombies.

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By all accounts, particularly his own, poet Charles Bukowski was a miserable wretch. I attended one of his readings in my youth, and from the mini-fridge next to his stool on stage, he extracted beer after beer; as the evening progressed he ended up falling-down drunk and unable to continue.

But Bukowski was a poet precisely because he knew he was wretched, a condition he dubbed Ordinary Madness. One cannot be a complete wretch while enjoying that level of self-awareness, and the gritty, unvarnished nature of his poetry reveals him as an extraordinary sensitive wretch. Bukowski revealed the nature of Ordinary Madness through his poetry of Ordinary Awareness.

This, of course, is the teaching of great sages; the Buddha, Jesus and others taught about the suffering of Ordinary Madness, a malady peculiarly affecting people. Ordinary Madness, simply put, is the suffering of ego, and the extent to which we consider ego to be real is proportionate to suffering.

Ego constantly engages in activities to justify its reality and to make itself appear as solid and permanent as possible. To all effects inseparable from our sense-of-self, we rush to its protection and defend it to the death. Accordingly, we also project individual ego onto others, communities and nations, creating a vast metaphysical structure of social conventions, rules and identity. Millions have died in defense of ego’s imagination, and sadly, they continue dying to this very day.

Ordinary awareness, however, is inherent and continuous. The busy mind of ego, having split the world into “us and them,” leaves little room for us to see the workings of Ordinary Awareness, which by its nature dissolves the solidity of ego. Ordinary Madness is a full-time job, highly compelling and requiring close attention to its own insatiable needs. Little wonder Ordinary Awareness gets so little “air time.”

Even so, the inherent wisdom of Ordinary Awareness is readily available. Like The Wizard of Oz, if ego’s chatter, actually a manifestation of Ordinary Awareness, is revealed and stilled Ordinary Awareness can be found operating behind the curtain. There is the Ordinary Awareness of body; muscle tension, hunger, thirst, pain and comfort. There is the Ordinary Awareness of feelings; love, anxiety, anger, fear and happiness. And there is the Ordinary Awareness of mind; memory, thought, intellect and intuition. All these types of Ordinary Awareness are continuous, unstoppable emanations radiating from the ineffable source contained within the fabric of existence itself. If that sounds mysterious, it’s because it is, and explains why Ordinary Madness and its upside-down logic seems so compelling by comparison.

Despite ego’s story line, Ordinary Awareness is what enables us to survive. If survival depended upon ego, a calculation about how best to accrue benefit to ourselves first and foremost, human society would never have come into being. Though Ordinary Madness creates a convincing mind of separation, we are unalterably and inextricably connected to the natural world and others. Without others, ego itself has no reason for existence. Our need for others is all-powerful; Tom Hank’s character marooned alone on an island in the film “Cast Away” ends up talking to a soccer ball.

Ordinary Madness is the denial of our true nature and like any act of denial generates waves of discontent, resentment, anger, blame and bad behavior. Its antidote is Ordinary Awareness, and that’s as simple as paying attention to your breath.

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Like water circling the bathtub drain, our consumer society expends a lot of energy but ultimately spirals down a bottomless hole, and unless more water is continuously added, nothing but an empty tub remains.

Of late, the “water” being added is money printed by the Federal Reserve Bank, in the form of bond purchases and zero interest rates. Added to this has been federal government stimulus spending, but the sum total of these efforts remains a sputtering faucet and the tub’s still draining, not filling up.

Western economics, what I would call the economics of consumption, has spread across the globe, hastened by policies developed by the U.S. dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and now using state capitalism, China has joined in. Such global institutions force the consumer society ideals of expanded credit and lend money to weak countries by tying loans to “opening up” economies. In layman’s terms, “opening up” means making weakened markets available to multinational corporations and banks for economic exploitation. A form of financial colonialism, the client countries end up captive economies of wealthier countries, dependent upon them for “water” to keep their financial tubs full. Polite words like “development” have been substituted for “exploitation” in an attempt to disguise the raw face of such financial colonialism.

In our American economy, it’s the average citizen that has been turned into a colonial subject. The increasingly complex web of financial and systemic instrumentality that comprise modern life has rendered the notion of self-sufficiency a quaint notion of the past. Society has always required interdependence; farmers grew food and city dwellers bought it, for example. But today’s economy is bound to a consumption machine, and not a hair’s breadth separates them in most lives.

Your wallet, for instance. You might think those credit cards and driver’s license are handy tools, but they are an instrument of colonial control. Your purchases and your movements are tracked and correlated with other data; your car’s license plate, the things you buy, the bills you pay, the shows you watch – everything about you and what you do is scrutinized in the bowels of vast data-mining computer centers owned by the corporate colonial powers. Your privacy is just an illusion.

Meanwhile, the colonial consumer society is systematically destroying the planet. The water rushing down the drain is greater than that which can be added. You may ask, “where does the water go once it goes down the drain?” The answer is into the tubs of billionaires and billionaire corporations. The basis of the colonial consumer society means your tub drains to holding tanks, from which its “water” is loaned to other colonial subjects at a profit. In this way, the wealth of many is drained to increase the wealth of the few. The British used such colonial economics for 400 years, to become for a while the world’s only superpower and the wealthiest nation on earth. Eventually, their colonial subjects gained independence, but have progressively been turned into client states remaining firmly under western domination and control. Those who resist are deemed “rogue” and subjected to subversion, sabotage, and economic starvation until they comply.

Ours is not what we would call an “enlightened” society, but it could be. That transformation will require an honest recognition of how profoundly damaging colonial consumer society is, and discarding it. It’s either that, or the trash heap of history.

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“Ashes to ashes, shed to shed.” So go the notebooks of Von Meier. For over 40 years my friend Kurt von Meier kept a daily notebook. A compulsive documentarian, he stored his filled notebooks in file boxes, and as they accumulated, placed the boxes in a shed in his backyard. When he died in 2011 the thought of his notebooks becoming land-fill or shredded for recycling distressed me, so I carefully repacked them in new boxes and dutifully moved them into the shed in my backyard.

Von Meier was what we call a “polymath,” a person with such extraordinary powers of recall and memory that he was capable of instantaneously quoting passages from a book while recalling its page number. His language skills were prodigious, as were his skills in higher mathematics. He bought and read books like nobody I’ve known; his house became filled with stacks of books piled in every corner, under furniture, and out onto the floor. From time to time he would cull thorough them, offer them to friends, and pack the rest in boxes for storage in the already over-stuffed shed and garage. And by and large, he’d read them all.

I met von Meier in 1970 when he and some friends opened the well-before-its-time Diamond Sutra restaurant in Noe Valley. Though I found him confusing and nearly impossible to understand at that time, I was drawn to him, and it was the beginning of a 40-year friendship. More than that, von Meier became an important teacher in my life, and due to his crazy-wisdom and generosity I am in large part who I am today.

His notebooks contain his daily thoughts and reflections, as well as notes about his cardiology appointments and who came to visit. With a mind as vast and filled as his, a virtual filing cabi

net with the capacity to cross-reference and correlate all the information it contained, his notebooks remain its last vestige. I’ve thumbed through them, of course, and many span periods of my own life and its intersection with his. Yet, how does one begin to work with the accumulation of 40 years of thought and creativity?

I contacted the university at which he taught Art History for 30 years, but without a catalog of content they could not accept the notebooks. Cataloging the content of the notebooks of von Meier is huge amount of work all by itself; a noble task of great reward but one that might require a lifetime of its own. Each page of each notebook is just the jumping-off point for a curious scholar’s interest in understanding the mind of a genius. It’s been done with Einstein’s notebooks, and Virginia Woolfe’s and Hemingway’s. But who will do it for von Meier? I’m afraid I am one of the last who knew him well enough to understand the ebb and flow of his mind and its great wealth of heartfelt wisdom.

So for now, the notebooks sit safe and dry, all 15 boxes of them. If I live another 20 years, perhaps I will have time to read each one, catalog the content and find a way to preserve them. If not, I hope they find a safe, dry place to rest and gather meaning in the shed of someone else who might appreciate them. If not, I suppose that’s alright. One of von Meier’s favorite expressions was, after all, “ah, well.”

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Males of many species mark their territorial boundaries. The other day my wife accused me of marking mine.

I will confess to feeling shocked by her comments at first. The shoes I leave under the coffee table in the living room, a pile of mail stacked on the dining table, my pants draped over the cedar chest in the bedroom…these and other examples came up in our conversation. The more I listened the more I realized she was entirely right; I do mark my territory.

I’ve always thought of my shoes, mail, pants and the like as positive evidence of life, the undeniable proof that I inhabit our house. I like that our house feels “lived in” and not sterile. I’m not a slob, by any means; I like some order in my life. Accordingly, I never lose my keys, my iPhone or my wallet. A man of some routine, I tend to put things in the same places over and over again, and generally know where I can find them. From my mate’s point of view, however, my things are all over the house.

Living in a common space requires accommodation, acceptance, authority or a combination of all three. Of the three, authority is the most challenging; territorial behavior is an expression of authority. In nature, boundaries are soft and flexible but in a house of individual rooms and set dimensions boundaries tend towards fixed. Certain things belong in a dining room, and certain things do not. Moreover, a natural hierarchy exists, conventions about what belongs where. Shoes, for example, never belong on a dining room table and coats are not customarily piled on the floor.

Thus objects from one room often don’t “feel” right in another. Take baseball caps for example. I have many baseball caps of different colors, and choosing my cap for the day is related to the color of my clothes. Perhaps I have a mild case of OCD, but I feel odd in a cap that clashes with my shirt. But I digress. Since I go in and out several times each day, I’ve taken to placing my cap upside down on the kitchen counter, with my keys and my sunglasses put inside. When I go out, everything I need is in one place. However, as I change my cap preference day to day, caps tend to accumulate on the counter, and I now see that in this way I am marking my territory.

My wife’s comment at this point would be that I should put my caps away, and she would be right. And I could counter that I might want to change my cap, or wear yesterday’s cap tomorrow, but this would be a thin excuse for the overt marking of my territory. The fact is that the sight of my colored caps reassures and relaxes me. Please don’t ask me why.

If inclined, I could write Dear Abby: “My wife says my stuff all over makes her feel crowded out of our shared space. She says I’m marking territory, but I say I’m just living. What do you recommend?” Signed, Larry. “Dear Larry,” she would respond, “Your wife is right, you need to pick up your crap and put it where it belongs. What are you, a person or some kind of rodent?” Harsh but true. So I’m working on it.

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