Birding and enjoying nature in Discovery Park, Seattle

Yesterday I walked this gem of the Seattle parks. It’s my second favorite place after Seward Park and it is also vast in area.

I visited the undulating prairie area that overlooks Puget Sound. The prairie ends in steep vertical cliffs that drop off abruptly where the soft sand continually gives way. I am a person of woods and waters but I like to check out prairies and I wonder if my North Dakotan mom imprinted this natural sympathy on me.

In the prairie I saw two little songsters: a savannah sparrow and a white-crowned sparrow. Each one had distinctive features that helped me when I looked them up. They sing from a prominent perch so you can get a good view.

The savannah sparrow had a yellow wash on its face. The white-crowned sparrow sports a little black-and-white crew cut.

Many other people were out enjoying the place by biking, trail running, birding, picnicking, playing with dogs and kids, and just sitting on benches and the ground taking in the views.

The exquisite ache of Trio Élégiaque by Rachmaninoff

Rachmaninoff has been a companion for many years. I sometimes feel I am listening to the music of life itself. Some of his music is dark and hints at a submerged and hidden well of experience, punctuated by a technical onslaught that grips your attention, like in Piano Concerto #2 opus 18.

Others, like Trio Élégiaque, provide an exquisite ache. I came across this term recently and found it matched my experience with this piece. For me, a favorite piece of music is always paired with a specific era in my personal history, and sometimes with a specific place or day. And Trio Élégiaque is paired with a hot day during the covid pandemic when I hiked up a long trail in the Columbia River Gorge and reflected on where life had led me so far, and on what a ride it’s been.

I love “Isle of the Dead” too. The composer’s imagination was carried away by a small black-and-white reproduction of a famous painting of a mythical place where the dead are ferried away to rest forever. He composed a magnificent piece of music based on this impression. Later, when he saw the full-color, full-size painting, he was underwhelmed. He liked the small black and white version better.

This was a good example of a rich mind’s ability to dilate on an impression and draw it out into adjacent and unexpected effects, like a drop of brilliant dye expanding in clear water in a way that’s endlessly complex and dynamic and impossible to predict.

Rachmaninoff was a “technician of the emotions.” He once said:

“The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt – they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.”

Rachmaninoff’s music exalts.

MY LATEST REDHEAD CRUSH: Jen Psaki, White House press secretary

Sharp, poised, smart and beautiful.

Her pupils and irises are similarly dark in color and shift from “get to the point” to warm humor instantly.

She favors solid colors and floral designs and sometimes has jewelry or a corsage and her shoulder-length red hair moves buoyantly and frames her pale face nicely.

She has the creamy white skin of a ginger, a long, symmetrical face and a quick smile that can be warm or subtlety impatient or mocking when the reporter is fumbling or just plain dumb (i.e. Fox News).

She addresses the reporter’s question conversationally while addressing them head on instead of addressing the room. She peppers her responses with comic jabs at political opponents.

A reporter asked if the administration had a messaging problem on an issue. Without missing a beat, she said the previous administration had a morality problem, and then launched into a cogent and complete response, one of several in that conference.

She has the fluidity and confidence of someone who knows she’s right. If we met, I would probably be very, very afraid of her. She is thin. I wonder what she does to work out.

Firefox browser readability button

On mobile and desktop, there is a little button in the URL bar that turns a noisy, crowded, ad- and toolbar-jammed page into a readable format. This allows you to read an article from start to finish without being prodded and interrupted.

Seattle bouldering gym

This place is half a mile from my home and has everything I need for complete fitness.

I joined two movement classes and they kicked my ass and opened me up to a new relationship to my body. For many years I ran. I put on many miles and sought to increase my mileage. I began to question this. What was the point?

I then moved on to strength training. This was extremely rewarding, but after getting strong and bulking up a bit, I wondered what that was all for. It seemed like another grind, where you put forth brute effort without developing skill and finesse.

Now, with movement, I am increasing what the instructors call “body intelligence.” As a gown man, entering a class and learning the most basic movements while feeling gauche and not knowing where my own limbs are feels like a keen transition. But as the instructors emphasized, I am setting down new neural pathways. Eventually conscious thought will cease to get in the way of putting one foot in front of the other and those pathways will be efficient and well-rutted.

For one class it was just me and the instructor, an attractive, muscular woman in her early 30s. I think about sex. A lot. And when she was up close, motioning to her hips and thighs and back and telling me to watch her and follow, I though about how she might move in the sack. And she probably knows how to move her body there in a way that’s as far from “starfish sex” as possible.

The other class was led my by a male instructor and his style was very different. The class was full and he pushed us hard. Some of the class involved pairing up and engaging in a boxing-like dance. This moves you beyond mastering your own movement and trying to meld and interact with that of another person, which is far more complex.

I have a lot to learn. I am grateful for an opportunity to scramble what I know, to start from scratch with a genuinely unassuming, defenseless, beginner’s mind.

About the photo

Discovery park, Seattle

I remark on an emotional evolution in me. I have become less reactive and more responsive. I am ambivalent about gory videos.

Watching human carnage on BestGore.com

I used to consume the worst of the worst gore on this site. Almost daily (but not obsessively) I would watch the latest atrocities in graphic detail on my laptop. I watched beheadings by the Islamic State, chainsaw executions by Mexican cartels, mob lynchings in Africa, and sloppy live dismemberments by Brazilians in the forests on the edge of poor jungle towns.

It must have given me a thrill, as much as my stomach sometimes churned. But I also thought I was confronting a hidden truth of humanity head on, a truth that was often glossed over in traditional media. I may have always had an interest in the dark corners of the internet. I recall going to the Wikipedia page about “shock sites” and visiting every single one when I was far too young to be doing so.

The curation and comments on bestgore.com also had an ideological bent. The man who ran the site had a consistent anti-government voice. He had been prosecuted in Canadian courts for no other reason than that he embarrassed the state by exposing the sick serial killers and rapists that operated within the borders. This included Luka Magnotta. He had fringe views against state control. He was racist and misogynistic and eventually left to live in isolation in the Caribbean.

He opposed police brutality and excessive state powers long before the Black Lives Matter movement arose and made the same arguments. Many videos were of police killings of civilians. I would sometimes compare news media coverage of the police killing with the graphic video on the site and see that the media omitted or obscured key facts that were evident in the video.

The gore website runner opposed censorship of all kinds, including the sudden and total process of de-platforming, where his advertisers withdrew, his hosting service no longer allowed the content, and the search engines cut him off.

The comments section was something else. Mostly racist, dumb and voyeuristic, but also a community that critiqued the videos and sometimes shared stories and images of their own self harm and gory accidents. I felt that although I would never want to meet these people, they were right to face awful aspects of life head on, without removing bits of the truth before it can reach the next person.

The commenters ranked videos in brutality. They pointed out, correctly, that the routine violence in Mexico and Central America was worse and occurred on a much larger scale than the geographically limited and temporary Islamic State uprising from the mid-2010s.

The popular press would never display the true brutality that’s out there. Dozens of faceless editors and gatekeepers and third parties intervene to prevent the end user from seeing the full picture. On bestgore.com, you could watch a 15 minute video of Guatemalan drug dealers flaying the facial skin of an enemy and torturing him with boiling water and knives to the eyeballs and throat before killing him. The New York Times might call this “drug-related violence.” Which does not exactly capture the experience of the victim. The readers and viewers of the popular press would rather look away or think about issues abstractly.

One journalist did try to understand the site’s users but gave an insightful but incomplete picture. A true ethnography conducted by a sociologist might have done it justice.

Video testimony of a Ukrainian woman whose husband was killed

I never shed a tear when watching all this. I would watch with detachment and note how fucked up some of humanity is.

But today I opened a few YouTube tabs and found myself unexpectedly crying when I watched this woman describe finding out her husband was dead in a town outside Kyiv, Ukraine.

She said her husband was missing for a couple of days. She searched. She went to a humanitarian facility and they pointed to two bodies. As she neared, she recognized his clothes. The body was that of her husband. He had been tortured and killed by Russian troops as they retreated. She said his face was mutilated and his body was cold.

She wept as she offered to show the journalists his grave, dug three feet deep in an improvised muddy spot, “so the dogs won’t get him.”

I cried and cried over this woman and her story. In my other tabs were dumb movie previews and personal development topics. I went for a walk to get away from it and the tears kept welling up. The rest of the Ukraine video included civilians who were shot while riding bikes or lined up in suburban locales with their hands bound.

I am glad for my inner changes and glad I once watched those awful videos

Thanks to some work and study, I am a more emotionally responsive person. I no longer view my emotions or those of others as a burden. At the same time, I am less emotionally reactive. I don’t feel pushed and pulled by external events like I used to be.

I think if bestgore.com still operated, I would visit occasionally to check out the worst of the worst. I don’t want to look away. But videos there focused on graphic detail of the atrocities themselves. The victims who underwent unspeakable tortures were almost all male. The more impactful and wrenching video would have been an interview with a survivor (typically a woman) who did not undergo torture and execution. Yet one’s heart goes out to her, not him.

Now, when rfi.fr mentions “violence in Congo’s east,” I have an image of what this means. Sometimes it means a public “necklacing” where a mob places a burning tire around a victim’s neck. Or it means an entire village is bludgeoned and massacred with garden tools. I don’t just skip past this mundane language.

The Ukraine video also had images of a man on a bike who was killed and left there in the street. This one was piercingly sad for me because I related to it. I thought of myself on a bike, killed while going about my day. The news outlet published the video of his back but not his face. Would it have motivated more international outrage if they had shown his gray, dead face? If I were the victim, would I want my dead, contorted face published, if it meant more intervention from abroad? Or would I consider it exploitation and indecent journalistic liberties with a corpse?

I thought of a Ukrainian music group I saw perform in Portland. I even sat next to one of them on a plane before their show. They started as street performers in Kyiv. I wondered where the six of them went. Would I tolerate seeing their dead bodies in a gory video that provokes outrage? Or just in a sanitized version that provokes concern?

I think if more Americans watched videos of Central American violence, they would be more receptive to asylum requests from migrants fleeing gang violence (not a traditional asylum category).

I think if people watched videos of the carnage that follows the daily car wrecks you read about in the news, they would advocate for lower speed limits and safer design of roadways. They would also be less likely to drive while drunk.

If bestgore.com was still operating, the videos might have prompted more decisive action to stop the carnage. Perhaps people could see what’s going on without so many filters.

I don’t want to ever look away and deny what’s happening out there. I feel I’m still looking at the truth head-on without leering at it. Some people will experience legitimate trauma from this kind of content. Perhaps they should still watch it and make an effort to understand their response.

I oppose genital cutting of infants in the absence of medical need because it is a cultural practice that violates the universal human rights to autonomy and bodily integrity. These are reasons enough to oppose this barbaric and disgusting custom.

But these are relatively abstract ethical values. They make you think but they don’t engage the emotions. A parent can easily disregard a seemingly remote value such as “autonomy” when a team of nurses and doctors pressures them to believe that circumcision is “just something you do” to a baby boy.

Recently I came across yet another to reason to oppose it, a reason that gets at the heart of what’s human and that struck me as piercingly sad: cutting the genitals of an infant violates two of the five innate fears that all humans share.

Five basic fears

An article puts the science in clear terms: all humans have a fear of extinction (ceasing to exist), mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and ego-death.

Infant genital cutting violates and triggers two of these fears: mutilation and loss of autonomy.

“Mutilation—the fear of losing any part of our precious bodily structure; the thought of having our body’s boundaries invaded, or of losing the integrity of any organ, body part, or natural function.

Loss of Autonomy—the fear of being immobilized, paralyzed, restricted, enveloped, overwhelmed, entrapped, imprisoned, smothered, or otherwise controlled by circumstances beyond our control.”

Search online for the Circumstraint Board (pictured) and tell me if an infant strapped into this device would feel a loss of autonomy on some unconscious level. And of course, this device is designed for routine mutilation.

What led me to google innate fears

I was watching the excellent, compassionate and wise Thaïs Gibson in an effort to understand patterns in my past. She mentioned matter-of-factly that there is only a small number of biological fears.

I wanted to understand my attachment style in relationships. Based on my past I think I lean moderately toward dismissive avoidant. Interestingly, a person with this attachment style values autonomy and independence and sometimes zealously defends that independence, to the point of cutting off relationships that might threaten it, in reality or in the imagination. She also said that people with a dismissive avoidant attachment style can be living in a fight-or-flight mode throughout much of their lives.

I looked back and pictured myself strapped down to a board like the Circumstraint, tiny, helpless, and then having part of my penis cut off needlessly, and then requiring weeks of healing, and then developing scar tissue that would last for a lifetime. I had in fact just emerged from days in an incubator thanks to my mom’s gestational diabetes and was a weak and vulnerable life form that was not ready for further cutting, bleeding and pain.

This early experience would contribute to the sense that you cannot rely on others. It would trigger the fear of a loss of autonomy and of mutilation. This in turn would lead to a dismissive avoidant attachment style, where you fight to defend autonomy. And then to a strident defense of autonomy as a biomedical ethical principle.

But it all goes back to the small infant fearing mutilation and loss of control over what is done to one’s body, like any human would.

More reasons to oppose genital cutting of infant boys

· It is not your body to cut

· Infants regularly die from this

· Many procedures are botched (google “botched circumcision” and prepare to be shocked by penile amputations, extremely tight cuts, and doctors who hide and deny their streak of crimes)

· The rate of infant circumcision is declining everywhere and so circumcised boys will soon be in the minority in the US and globally

· The custom was popularized in the US as a way to destroy sexual pleasure because masturbation was considered evil

· It reduces sexual sensation

· Anyone is legally allowed to circumcise an infant boy in the US regardless of medical training, which indicates its cultural nature as opposed to medical

· Circumcised men experience more sexual dysfunction than intact men

· The shocking practice of oral suction circumcision by Jewish witch doctors is tolerated in New York City and New Jersey and has led to infant deaths from fulminant herpes virus infections

· Just take a look at the Circumstraint and picture your baby boy strapped into it for an unneeded genital cutting ritual