(6/23/21)

There has been a mosquito living in my room for the past four days, and honestly I was a little annoyed when I kept seeing him (at the wildlife rescue place I volunteer at they tell us to call animals—and I guess bugs are animals—by the pronouns he/she/they, never it) humming around and discreetly sucking my blood when I wasn’t looking, but on the third day of our cohabitation I had a change of heart.

In one of the lectures at the meditation retreat I went to, it was emphasized that karma is instant—as soon as you feel a feeling well up inside you, you have experienced the karma. You don’t have to wait for a brick to fall on your head as you walk to the cornerstore to know a karmic fate has been fulfilled. Intention is more important than action—the feelings that guide the things you do are themselves karmic phenomena. I mean honestly I can’t remember what was in the lectures that well but this sounds right enough. Also, there was this constant emphasis on not generating new saṅkhāras—a saṅkhāra refers to a conditioned thing, in this case meaning a thought but in Buddhist philosophy all things—trees, clouds, ladybugs, Bush’s baked beans—are conditioned things. Saṅkhāras, as mental processes, also arise due to volition—you know, your personal willpower—but simultaneously lay the groundwork for future volitional actions. So they’re conditioned, but I guess you can also uncondition them. The last words of the Buddha were, according to the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (but I’m quoting my personal favorite spiritual text, Wikipedia) were: “Disciples, this I declare to you: All conditioned things are subject to disintegration – strive on untiringly for your liberation.” I think in the context of a ten-day meditation retreat during which these lectures were my only source of hope, understanding, and entertainment, this resonated a lot faster and made more sense. Sorry. 

But regardless of whatever I just said and whether it made sense or not I experienced this when I was walking through the forest maybe a day later and I kept getting perforated by mosquitoes and their high-pitched whining just ignited a visceral sense of subdued rage while I was trying to be tranquil and equanimous and peace-loving. And that made me want to clap them between the palms of my livid hands. But I restrained myself. Whenever I felt annoyed, I did my best to radiate positivity toward the mosquitos.

So, concerning the mosquito in my room, I decided that since I had been this mosquito’s sole sustaining food source for the past three days, that we share an immeasurable connection. But since bugs don’t feel pain, and he’s a fucking mosquito, I could’ve killed him and been fine, I think. I don’t think the gods would’ve smote me. But the rage in my heart was harshing my vibe. I am literally this mosquito’s only life support. I give him life, in return, he gives me a sense of connection and camaraderie and like I’m part of some purposeful, greater whole. So it made me happier and the next time I saw the mosquito, instead of being annoyed, I was delighted that he wasn’t dead yet. 

So bugs actually don’t feel pain. Does this mean we can eat them? Is it vegan to eat crickets? Eating crickets is both healthy and good for the environment, but what is the motivation for veganism? Not to hurt living things? End animal abuse? For the environment? What about plants, like avocado trees, that consume an egregious amount of water? Since insects don’t have nociceptors, crickets, like plants, don’t feel pain. Crickets and plants alike don’t have emotional experiences. Or do they? Do plants have feelings? Do crickets? Honestly the research isn’t fully clear. But that’s not why it’s ok to eat them. 

In How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell quotes somebody who says something about nature and the ecosystem. I let somebody borrow the book but I took a picture of the page it was on with my phone because I found it so interesting (also, you know how the phone camera makes that ridiculous shutter sound that only real cameras make? That’s an example of a skeuomorph. Even new technology can’t let go of the past. We all crave the familiar. Even the Ancient Greeks were doing it, when they kept wood-like details in their architecture even after they transitioned from wooden to masonry buildings). So the quote was actually from Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, in which Chris J. Cuomo (the author) says that we can’t privilege sentience and animals that feel pain in our animal rights stances because ecology relies on both “sentient and non-sentient beings.” But humans privilege sentient beings because they are more similar to themselves, and humans think they’re “paradigmatic ethical objects” and that “other life-forms are valuable only in so far as they are seen as similar to humans.” The better perspective is realizing that the ecosystem itself and maintaining the balance within it is what’s important when deciding who or what you consume. Jenny Odell quotes Aldo Leopold who says “the land is one organism.” So yeah, let’s eat bugs. 

That guy with the scalp tattoos who was vegan also mentioned something about veganism not really being any better for the environment (I mean in the grand scheme of things) because of every factor that goes into it. And it’s hard for people who aren’t well-off or live in areas where veganism is accessible to do it. Like it can’t be a look-at-me-I’m-so-cool type thing. But it does help. You know what’s crazy? British asparagus has the highest carbon footprint out of any vegetable in the UK. Also, there were these two vegan Italians who had a larger carbon footprint than most individual meat eaters because they exclusively ate fruit.

Mushrooms are fucking insane. What the fuck are they? No one knows. They are the future of meatless burgers apparently. People are literally growing particular meat flavored mushrooms. I’m trying to read The Mushroom At The End of The World right now, but I haven’t gotten very far. I can’t wait to read about the globalized commodity chains of Matsutake mushrooms. Are truffles mushrooms? They better be. I just looked it up. In the vein of square-rectangle logic, a mushroom is a fungi, but a fungi is not always a mushroom. Truffles are fungi. They also look like old lychee, like someone left a lychee out in the sun and it turned into a brown grape, a shadow of its former self. Truffle pigs are absolutely wild. They’re actually illegal in Italy because they ruin the mycelia of the truffles when they root around for them.

Anyway, the piece of art that I will be ekphrastically examining today is the album You Won’t Get What You Want by The Daughters. But before that, let me tell you about Bush’s bean chips.

They’re fucking awful. I went to H-E-B to find some bean chips because two years I had the absolute best lime flavored chip in my life, and it was a bean chip. It was at a very discreet music festival. The brand was Beanfields, but they don’t have the jalapeño lime variety at H-E-B, and all the lime-flavored Beanitos were gone (so they must be good). But the Bush’s chips were completely stocked. H-E-B was also all out of their in-store beef jerky, so I guess Monday night is not when H-E-B typically stocks up on their most important goods. I need to go to H-E-B really early or figure out when they restock everything. The Bush’s chips were awful. I still have them. The lime flavor is correct but the rest of the chip sucks. It’s like eating seasoning powder bedded on a small wedge of bean that still tastes way too similar to corn. The beauty of a bean chip is that it doesn’t taste like a corn chip.

But what doesn’t suck, according to rave reviews, is this album by The Daughters. It’s an acquired taste I think. Personally, I love music that’s mostly noise. I wrote my entire English on hyperpop. BlackDresses, JPEGMafia, give me anything that’s only sometimes music in its traditional sense. It’s better that way. It doesn’t satisfy you—it doesn’t give you what you want and I think withholding true satisfaction from people is one of the most beautiful things music can do. Still, I could only listen to half of it. It’s just a little too harsh to me.

Anyway, the title is something I repeat to myself often, especially lately. You can’t want things because you will never get them. My parents have been trying to buy a new house but all the ones I like on Zillow get bought so quickly and I am obsessed with this one dog on PetFinder and there are some people who are no longer in my life that I miss and I will never get those things. 

Part of the problem is that you want things from the past, but you are constantly existing in an unfamiliar moment. You always want the familiar, but you can never truly have the familiar. Every moment is novel, every moment people are changing, getting older, time just moves forward and forward and forward. Things will never be like you imagine them, because all you know is what you’ve known before. You won’t get what you want. And reality is a lot more interesting and better than the things you want.

I’m trying to read more books on spirituality and meditate more because honestly these self-help books have run their course. I started reading The Happiness Project, and as much as I don’t want to critique this author, she’s too normal. I need somebody who built a hut in the woods and ate tree bark for a year. I haven’t even finished the book yet. I’ve realized there’s nothing you can do to make you happy because it all comes from the inside (another something that stuck with me from the personal torture that the meditation retreat was for me). But still, I could really use a personal schedule. 

Recently, I’ve realized the benefits of focusing on processes over goals (actually, The Happiness Project sort of emphasized this for me, so I guess I did get something out of this book). If you focus on your processes and not your future plans, you find that you’re already doing everything you want to be doing. Something that I learned from Can’t Hurt Me is that you need to be able to pivot when things don’t work out the way you hoped they would. No time to wallow, just pivot. Another thing from the meditation camp is this idea of whether you’re running toward light or running toward darkness. Some people are running from light to light, others from darkness to more darkness, and then others, from darkness to light or vice-versa. On a daily basis it might be hard to tell, which is why you need processes in place to ensure you’re running in the right direction. Like habits. Things you do every day. Commitment to consistency is way way more important than anything else. I guess The Happiness Project did reinforce the idea that the process, not the goal, is important. As Miley Cyrus says, it’s the climb. People say quality over quantity but honestly quantity creates quality.

Another thing I’ve come to experience lately, mostly when I’m changing the marquee sign at the music venue I work at, is that every second you’re alive you’re dancing with death. The interminable dance with death never ends, until you’re dead. Life is risky, but inherently so. And it’s one big experiment—I think it’s fun to constantly test boundaries and see where the edge of existence really is. 

A quote from The Happiness Project—I guess I’m getting more out of this book than I thought I did—goes “they say people teach what they need to learn.” That is definitely true for me. Also, this is something I particularly tell myself, that the flaws I find the most irritating in others are always the flaws that I’m desperately trying to fix within myself. Everyone is a human mirror reflecting yourself back at you. 

When you call an animal he or she or they, you’re humanizing it. Making it more parallel to a human identity. Which is great if you want to empathically identify with an animal but it goes against an animal’s nature. Animals don’t create identities for themselves. They don’t have names. I mean I don’t think they do, I don’t know how animals think. They simply exist, selflessly, in the great mass of the world. By referring to them using human pronouns we are bringing animals closer to the human instead of the reverse, again privileging humans as “paradigmatic ethical beings.” What if instead of calling animals by names, we, as people, stopped referring to each other by names? Like we barked to get someone’s attention. And no one had Social Security numbers.

I want to find more self-referential documentaries, where the crew and production aren’t invisible, but very present in the process. Like the opposite of White Wilderness where they threw a truck of lemmings over a cliff in a staged “mass suicide event” because lemmings supposedly commit suicide in nature (they don’t) and framed it as a natural event. I mean some animals commit suicide, like Peter the Dolphin. But anyway, documentaries like Minding the Gap. 

I’ve also learned that dirt makes you happy because of a certain bacterium within the soil. It literally eases depression, producing the same effects as—I think Prozac? Don’t quote me on that. It could be a lie. And Vitamin B12 is supposed to be good for anxiety. I’ve been thinking maybe I should sniff soil and take Vitamin B12 for a week and see how I feel, just as a personal experiment. But one of the things I dislike about The Happiness Project book is that it focuses on external factors to make you happy. I mean the outside is important too, but the inside is more important, I’ve come to realize (yes, through that meditation retreat).

Also I can’t find my mosquito. They say if you love something, set it free. And now I miss my mosquito very much. This mosquito that doesn’t feel pain and that I would potentially be okay with eating has become a creature I am emotionally dependent on. But it probably doesn’t care. And perhaps I shouldn’t be bringing it closer to the human, perhaps I should be bringing myself closer to the identity-less mush of the single organism that is the land. The mosquito is not a he, I am an it. Or actually, I am a nothing, part of the great, distinctless mass of time-space, me and the mosquito are one. I feel like the idea of egolessness has become overrated in current media, until you experience it yourself, which is actually very hard to do without the assistance of drugs or meditation techniques. But even if you can’t experience it directly always, it’s a nice thought to have in your head. 

6/23/21 4:38 PM UPDATE: MY MOSQUITO IS STILL ALIVE