Form: Diary

In hospital. Ambulance. Anaphylactic shock. Thought I bought it. Seriously. Thought I bought it.

Update: intolerance for aspirin (stomach problems) turned into ‘life threatening’.

(Sick for a week. Incapable of any work. Turns out it was one of those plug-in-the-wall scent things. dammit. … I swear. I need to live in a cabin in the Carpathians with a wood burning stove, a couple of dogs, and some farm animals. Because modernity has become toxic.)

I lost one of my best friends in high school to cocaine. In college I lost a lot of friends to cocaine, and I lost my best friend to pot, acid and alcohol. He’s been dead for years. In my early career people were dropping like flies from cocaine. My family has been vulnerable to alcohol. I’ve lost very talented six-figure staff to opiates or alcohol. I’m pretty oblivious so I assume it was more prevalent than I thought. I’ve lost my best talent to the stress of divorce, and more from debt.

Consumer modernity is not bad for the reasons marx anticipated. It’s bad because under stress, we eventually stop being able to substitute consumption isolation, stress, and signaling.

(diary)

You know, while my ambition was to emulate the visualizations of Becker, when I write, try to emulate Hayek, because I see my work as the continuation of his.

But like Spinoza and Wittgenstein who ‘sensed’ the format of the future of philosophy – they just couldn’t solve the underlying problem of measurement – they understood that the argumentative structure was that of law. Unfortunately, Jews adopted idealism as a means of improving pilpul and they just couldn’t escape it.

That’s where I’ve made my mistake. I’ve been trying to emulate Hayek who argued from history, information, and incentive, rather than Spinoza and Wittgenstein that tried to (and failed) write proofs – when, de facto, all I write is proofs, even if unlike them, I work, like hayek from history, information, and incentives. You cannot write proofs from idealism. The measurements don’t exist like they do from actions.

Greater parsimony. Historical parables. And eliminate the intermediate narrative, rather than attempt to construct the intermediate narrative.

Do you know why they’re smiling? Because when I went to get a dessert, I came back to the table, and gave a dessert to Bart, he offered a toast. I said some nicety like “love you man”, took a gulp of coffee, and emma had conspired with the waitress to put a shaker full of salt in my coffee. I spit it immediately back into the cup and called them a foul name. They laughed. and the waitress laughed hardest because she was in on it. Pranksters. We had fun.

(my family gets upset when I say I miss Ukraine, but I miss Ukraine every day so much that it’s like a trauma.)