I’m exhausted today from yesterday, mentally and physically, and have decided that today is officially a rest day. I’m getting used to this city now and enjoy everything about it. I wake up at around 3 PM, cook some oatmeal with slices of Banana and toast some multigrain bread. I steal a little Flora butter from some random person’s bag in the fridge in order to make my toast a little less plain tasting. After a little deliberation I figure I’m going to treat myself to a nice steak dinner tonight after such a simple brunch today.
My bike chain is rusting and my cables are still broken, but I don’t quite have the funds yet to even buy a couple of 2 dollar shifter cables or WD40 lubricant. God knows how much the dubs d quats is over here and if they even have my father’s favourite kind of oil. Market city is fairly empty today, but just as Asian as ever! For some reason Dr. Pepper in the country is more valuable than gold. It’s fucking 3 AUD for a can. Crystal methamphetamine is probably cheaper here. I grab a rump steak, some mushrooms, tomatoes, onions and lettuce for my balling dinner. The celery is 5 AUD per bunch. That’s ridiculous. Oh well, no celery for 6 months unless the price rapidly drops at some point. When I pay by credit card the girl behind the desk is almost impossible to understand! After swiping my MasterCard, this Asian girl keeps saying, “Pinosine! Pinosine! Pinosine!” I just stand there and keep repeating that I don’t understand! What I really wanted to say was yes I have a penis, but refrain from doing so. An Australian than tells me that here you have to either enter a PIN number or sign your name when using a credit card. I laugh and tell the girl I’ll sign. She needs ID though and after showing her my Ontario driver’s license she happily says, “You rook diffarent now! Rook rike Hugh Jackman in photo!” She even does the Wolverine claws. I grin and think to myself that’s a new one. I grab a double shot of espresso from Gloria Jeans Coffee on the way back to the hostel and this makes me feel like million quid. I find a post card in the shop that has an art display I really want to check out involving an artistic reinterpretation of ukuleles, a hobby I have recently become interested in.
Before dinner I read an article by my personal favourite self-help authors (Tyler Durden). In this article he discusses how easy it is to live in the year 2010. Once you have a sufficient shelter, clothing and have eaten a big meal. Your mind tells you that it is time to rest and chill out. But this is the time when you are supposed to get stuff done. Our bodies, after thousands of years of evolution, have been programmed and hardwired with emotional responses that keep us safe and alive. It is the people who fight through the bad emotions and even sometimes positive ones that are holding us back to strive for more. He also discusses how being crazy and weird (like myself) is a great thing. Tyler says how in caveman times he was most likely one of the crazy troglodytes who was scared to death of the woolly mammoth. Even though he was afraid and all the other cave dwellers told him it wasn’t worth it, he knew he had to kill it in order to make a better life and step up to his full caveman potential. My personal interpretation is that you have to think for yourself and not let your emotions or other people dictate the way you live your life. He also discusses how emotions and the chemical reactions in your body are the most addictive things in the world. Some people are addicted to being happy while others are addicted to being sad. The happy person’s brain releases high levels of Serotonin, thus telling your mind that you are happy. At the other end of the spectrum the person who is addicted to negative emotions will allow their brain to release Cortisol which causes stress. So the next time you fall into a negative state of mind, just tell yourself that your body is having a chemical reaction and you are ok with it (in eastern philosophy they call this non-resistance or accepting the now –Eckhart Tolle).
The kitchen in the hostel is so busy tonight. Everyone seems to be using it. I have trouble lighting the element of the gas stove since I’m used to the electric kind. A kiwi woman, maybe in her thirties, helps me light it after chopping what looks like Rutabaga. Another fellow can’t do it either and she helps him with it and I remark she should charge a dollar every time she has to do light a fire. She doesn’t get it, but the English guy chuckles a couple of times. In my best Jim Morrison impression I start to sing, “Come on baby light my fire... Come on baby light my fire… Come on baby light my…fyyaahhhh!” The English dude and his friends are now clapping and telling me I rock, while this lady just stands there expressionless. Way over her head I guess. I proceed to cook my steak and I must say it is bomb as fuck! My cooking must be improving.
Zen and motorcycle time and I’m about to pass the point in the book I haven’t been able to get past when previously reading it. I just enjoy the first part so much that I want to picture the main character riding in the Dakotas with his son and his friends the Sutherlands forever. It is now getting complicated in a philosophical way as the protagonist explains why Phaedrus was chasing the “ghost of rationality itself”. Pirzig starts to get into inductive vs. deductive thinking. Inductive thinking basically starts with an observation and leads to a theory while deductive thinking starts with the theory and ends up with a confirmation of the experiment.
Inductive example: I turn on the gas of the stove. I try to light the stove by striking a match and holding to the gas. It doesn’t ignite. I try this a second time and it doesn’t ignite again. A third time results in failure, as does the fourth attempts. I can than conclude that the stove doesn’t work. (In my case it was while cooking my steak)
Deductive is a bit more complicated: You probably remember scientific method from chemistry or physics class where the experiment starts with a general question such as A) Solve Problem: What is is wrong with stove? The next step is stating a hypothesis: B ) The stove is out of gas. You can then think of many other hypotheses as you can and design experiments to test which are true and which are false. The next step is the experimenting where you conduct experiments to test your hypothesis. A true scientist will make as many of these experiments as possible until he finds the exact cause of the problem. For example: C) I will turn on the element of the stove, strike a match and hold it to the point where the gas should be coming out of. A true scientist will test this many times checking every connection on the stove or adjusting the amount of gas released or using different types of matches trying to get the element to ignite. If he can’t get it to fire than he can conclude that: D) the stove is in fact out of and the hyposthesis is correct.
(If you are still reading I thank you for being so patient but it gets more complicated than that)
It is getting very complicated as the author discusses the philosophies of David Hume and Emanuel Kant. David Hume states that if a person were to be born with no senses (sight, smell, touch, taste or hearing) than that person would have no reality, wouldn’t even know they were alive and have no thoughts. Kant opposes Hume and argues that “there are aspects of reality which are not supplied immediately by the senses”. He calls these a priori. Pirzig than gives the examples of space and time as a priori since we cannot see, hear, touch, smell or taste them, but we have the “intuition” that they exist. Once again it is important to accept both streams of thought, acknowledge their existence and not to divide them in a logical manner. “To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.” Technically this is a “logical” definition for of ZEN where you acknowledge mind, body and spirit as one thing and not a division of three different things.
It is getting very complicated as the author discusses the philosophies of David Hume and Emanuel Kant. David Hume states that if a person were to be born with no senses (sight, smell, touch, taste or hearing) than that person would have no reality, wouldn’t even know they were alive and have no thoughts. Kant opposes Hume and argues that “there are aspects of reality which are not supplied immediately by the senses”. He calls these a priori. Pirzig than gives the examples of space and time as a priori since we cannot see, hear, touch, smell or taste them, but we have the “intuition” that they exist. Once again it is important to accept both streams of thought, acknowledge their existence and not to divide them in a logical manner. “To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.” Technically this is a “logical” definition for of ZEN where you acknowledge mind, body and spirit as one thing and not a division of three different things.
(How fucking perplexing is all this stuff!)
So much for this being my rest day! While writing this I’m overhearing some English guys trying to pick up these two German girls. I can’t even see them but hear them logically trying to convince them that they are cool guys. These English guys have some great stories though, one involving a close friend who got a blowjob from an off duty prostitute at a foam party while having his balls shaved after drinking an entire bottle of absinth. They tell the girls that Grey’s Anatomy sucks after both girls said it was their favourite show. One guy even comments on how he would like to “check out gray’s anatomy anytime”. In other words he wants to fuck Ellen Pompeio. They have these girls laughing hysterically which I saw as a good sign, but I know now that girls stayed because these guys were entertaining and ultimately hold the girl attention temporarily while the REAL PLAYERS JUST CLOSE. Ultimately though in trying to impress these girls, they have failed to pick them up and instead scare the girls off after getting hammered off of beer. Being the entertainer guy or having “dancing monkey syndrome” is my biggest sticking point in life. Like I mentioned yesterday I have to have people know I am funny instead of just assuming they know. The pattern is like this:
Say a funny joke. They laugh. I feel confident or get validation from their reaction. My mind tells me to say another funny joke. So I do. They laugh. Joke. Laugh. Joke. Laugh. I stop telling jokes finally and they leave or stop reacting to me. I feel now sad and lose confidence because they left and have to be alone with myself.
Has it ever occurred to me that I should feel happy, the way I do when people laugh at my stupid antics, all the time? Do I really need other peoples validation that much to feel good in my body. NO… I don’t, but I haven’t internalized this concept yet in any way, shape or form. And that is the reason why this journey is so important: Internal validation is the hardest thing in the world to achieve and I value getting it over any material possession ever dangled in front of me. It might takes me a day, maybe couple months or even 25 years…but I must have it. CORE CONFIDENCE AND INTERNAL VALIDATION.
I get tapped on the shoulder and the guy from the hostel lets me know he closing the patio. Wow, I was really in my own little world there for a few hours going deeply within myself. I’m still edgy from the espresso earlier but I’m going to attempt sleep now, which might be difficult. Look, I don’t know what any of this stuff means and it is just random shit that I think about in my everyday life, so don’t take it too seriously.
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