It warms my heart to hear of the violent death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.  Fuck that guy.  May he burn eternally.

N.P.: “Get Your Body Beat” – Combichrist

What a ludicrously long day.  Started before 0500 and is still going strong.  Well, I don’t know how strong it is, but it’s certainly still going.

N.P.: “Strangletage” – Umphrey’s McGee

Interesting times, dear reader.  And busy…my god.  I suspect there are world leaders who are less pressed for time than I am these days.

Gotta write.  Gotta sleep.

N.P.: “Rowboat” – Johnny Cash

Well, shit, dear reader…took another big ass nap today.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me.  It might be late-onset narcolepsy.  The inappropriately high temperatures may have something to do with it.  Just disgusting.

I didn’t get a damn thing done today.  I guess I needed to rest, but it seems wasteful.  I’ve still got a little time to write.

N.P.: “Ashes to Ashes” – Faith No More

I took a big-ass nap and now I’m fussy.  Oddly and inappropriately awake for this hour of the night.  Probably pissing the neighbors with my music, but fuck them.  I dislike the neighbors.  I wish them ill.  I’m considering dynamiting their obsessively manicured lawn.

Well, since I’m so awake, I going to write.

N.P.: “Absolution” – Ghost

I got a lot of words down today, dear reader.  You would have been proud.
I wish it was snowing.  Or at least raining.  Or at least cold.  It’s time, dammit.

N.P.: “Many Thanks” – Dope Stars Inc.

You can’t talk about stoicism without talking about Amor Fati.  This is a classic Latin phrase meaning “the love of one’s fate.”  This means, basically, accepting and even embracing whatever outcomes life gives you.  Most of us desire or expect a certain outcome from the choices we make and the actions we take in pursuit of our goals.  This is perfectly normal.  Who isn’t disappointed and discouraged when things don’t turn out the way you wanted, the way you intended, the way you worked hard to achieve?  But the wisdom of Amor Fati tells us that this is wrong.  Things quite often don’t go our way.  Things simply don’t work out.  Robert Burns (may God bless his sweet, sweet soul) reminds us that, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”  We have free will, and there are something things that we control (at least to a degree), but the vast majority of factors and variables are well out of our control, and even our mildest influence.  So knowing that, why give a universe we know is prone to chaos such power over our emotions, over our happiness and contentment?

The Buddha tells us that such expectations of outcome not only consistently lead to disappointment, but are actually the main cause of all human suffering.  He calls it craving or desire.  We feel we deserve a happy life.  We make plans.  We plan to be happy.  But when things don’t turn out the way we wanted, we become unhappy.  We become resentful.  We feel we are somehow owed happiness or contentment from life.  And the fact that we are not getting it causes us to be discontent, to suffer.  As soon as we accept the tenet that “life is suffering,” we will accept our fate and be content with it.  Our eternal disappointment will end.

Nietzsche’s said, “My formula for greatness in a human being is Amor Fati.  That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.  Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it.”  He endorsed a belief called “eternal recurrence.” which is similar to the Buddhist concept of reincarnation.  Eternal recurrence was the belief that one should live one’s life in such a way that one could live the exact same life, down to the smallest details, repeatedly for all eternity.  When this concept was first explained to me in college in an evening undergrad class, I immediately gathered my things, stood up, and left.  I was told later that the professor just smiled and said, “He gets it.”  (This was the same professor who had a rather strict and vigorous policy on tardiness.  When I was 15 minutes late to one of his morning classes, he demanded an explanation.  I told him that when I’d gotten out of the shower, I’d turned the radio on, which was on the classical station, and as I was getting dressed, the 9th Symphony came on.  “I had to hear it through,” I said.  “You can’t possibly start the thing and not hear it through to the end.  What kind of person would I be if I could turn off the 9th in the middle of things, just walk out on Uncle Ludwig in his finest moment?”  My tardiness was excused.)

Some practitioners of Amor Fati ask of every major event in their lives, even the tragic ones (especially the tragic ones), “How can this be the best possible thing that could have happened to me?”  Most events you can’t control, but you can control how you react to events, and how you feel about them.  The point of Amor Fati and stoicism in general is that any event can be the best or worst thing that has ever happened to you, the disposition of the event is determined totally by your perception, reaction, and feeling about the event.

N.P.: “Sing Along” – Sturgill Simpson

Today’s lesson in stoicism comes, again, from the ancient Romans who put for the the idea of Momento Mori: “Remember you must die.”  The Romans had a tendency to elevate their generals to Ceasars whom were considered to be gods.  One conquering general was not comfortable with this idea, despite being treated as and considered a god everywhere he went.  This general assigned a slave to walk behind him the many parades being held in the general’s honor and repeat the phrase, “Respice post te.  Hominem te esse memento.  Memento mori!” (“Look behind.  Remember thou art mortal.  Remember you must die!”)  The lesson here is not at all morbid, but simple: thinking about death allows on to better appreciate being alive, and thus inspiring one to truly live.  Marcus Aurelius said, “You could leave life right now.  Let that determine what you do and say and think.”  And that quote I told you I was looking for yesterday from Hagakure?  Found it:

“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.  Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a giant earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master.  And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.”  ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo

If one is actually prepared for death at any moment in every day, then how upsetting can anything that isn’t death possibly be?

I deal with a lot of survivor’s guilt, which is a very irrational thing.  One angle I take when the thoughts turn to “I should have died…it should have been me,” is that maybe I did.  Maybe I did die, and am really already technically dead, but the paperwork hasn’t yet made it through the supernatural bureaucracy, so in the meantime, I’m just kind of kicking around like Lazarus.  Bonus time.  That makes me appreciate things a bit more, and it takes some of the pressure off.

There is a Nietzsche quote about suicide that kind of taps at the essence of this whole line of thinking: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”  What he’s saying is that when things are truly bad, and one is feeling trapped, it can be helpful to remind one’s self that no matter how bad things are, even if it seems like there is no escape from a situation or no solution to a problem, one can always choose to “check out.”  That thought has given me and a great many other non-suicidal people a bit of existential breathing room that has made all the difference when dealing with things that seem impossible.  Memento Mori is not at all about suicide, but I think the root notion of these two ideas is similar: when one is truly and actually prepared to die at any moment, priorities shift dramatically, and the most insurmountable and dire things suddenly because almost trivial, and in some cases, even amusing.

Stoicism is ultimately about controlling one’s emotions, and thus not giving ephemeral and irrational emotions any power over one’s self.  A key part of this is deemphasizing the importance of events that might otherwise completely derail a person’s life.  Memento Mori does this quite effectively.

N.P.: “Leave Me Alone – Remix” – Jerry Cantrell