Well, it’s taken two nights of extraordinary sleep (13 hours and 11 hours, respectively), but I’ve recovered from last week’s trip to New Orleans. I made the journey with 1500+ other money nerds to attend Fincon, the annual “digital marketing event for anyone creating personal-finance content”. (We used to just call it a money bloggers’ conference. That’s how I think of it still. I’m old.)
As I do every year, I flew in early. Although the conference generally runs Wednesday to Saturday, I’m always at the hotel from Sunday to Sunday. I treat this as a mini vacation. Besides, I really really really like the quiet time at the start when there are only a few people around. It’s my favorite part.
This year’s trip got off to a rocky start. Corvallis is midway between the Portland and Eugene airports. Portland takes maybe ten minutes longer to get to and offers more flights for less money, but it’s also a frickin’ hassle. The drive to Eugene is pleasant and the airport has six gates. It’s a joy to travel to and from there. The downside? Well, the downside is sometimes — as for this trip — I have to get up at two in the morning to catch my flight. Ugh.
No worries. By flying in a couple of days early, I had a chance to recover from the lack of sleep.
![[photo of New Orleans street art]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/greetings-nola.jpg "Welcome to NO-LA!")
Let the Good Times Roll
“I’m going to be good,” I told Kim before I left. “I’m not going to drink very much, and I’m going to watch what I eat.”
“WHY?” she asked. “You’ll be in New Orleans with your friends. Just do what you want for a week.” Still, I was resolved to exercise restrating. That resolution lasted for the one day that I was by myself. On that one day, I exercised for ninety minutes, drank no alcohol, and ate relatively healthy food. As soon as people began to arrive, though, all of that was out the window.
Because, let’s be honest, New Orleans has great food. It’s one of my favorite food cities in the world.
The good food started Monday night when a small group of us wandered around the city and ended up at Herbsaint. We were woefully under-dressed compared to the other patrons, but we didn’t care. We had fun and the food was good. (Turns out, Herbsaint is a highly-regarded New Orleans restaurant. We picked it purely by chance.)
![[my autism self-test scores are high]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/autism-score.jpg "This is all probably unsurprising to folks who know me")
At dinner, Ashley and I talked about autism. My doctor has been asking me to see a therapist to talk about “childhood trauma”. I’ve told her that I don’t remember any childhood trauma. “That’s why you need a therapist,” my doctor says. She’s convinced that my collection of symptoms is indicative of childhood trauma, and the reading I’ve done supports this conclusion. Anyhow, Ashley suggested that I complete the RAADS-R self-report questionnaire, which is designed to detect adult autistics. I didn’t know what to expect.
While taking the test, I sent Ash a series of complaints about the questions: they’re vague, they’re worded poorly, they don’t have clear answers, etc. “I think complaining about the questions is a big indicator,” she said. Sigh I scored a 90 on the inventory. According to the website, “A score of 65+ indicates you are likely autistic.” Apparently, I am likely autistic. Is anyone shocked?
That said, my score of 90 is well below the average score for autistic folks (around 150). In fact, my results for three of the four areas tested were just at the minimum threshold for autism. But my score for the fourth — “social relatedness” — was closer to autistic average. I struggle in social situations. No news there!
“This doesn’t surprise me,” Kim said when I told her. When I got home, she’d made a list of my habits that she considers in line with autism: hyper-fixation, inability to read social cues, etc.
Okay, back to Fincon.
On Tuesday, a group of us old-timers — Ashley, Miranda, Larry, Tom, and me — walked down Decatur into the French Quarter to have lunch at Coop’s Place, a hole-in-the-wall that some locals had recommended. It was fine. That evening, a very large and loud party of Fincon folks ended up at Felix’s. Again, the food was fine, but it was here that two notable things happened.
- First, Miranda single-handedly set off the decibel alert on my watch. This was the first of three times that she managed to do this. Wow!
- Second, I met the energetic Allison Baggerly. Allison has been coming to Fincon for several years, but somehow I’d never met her until now. (She has a story of briefly interacting with me in Orlando in 2018, but I don’t recall the encounter.) Allison and I ended up spending a lot of time together this year, and I’m glad to add her to my circle of friends. But we have very different energies haha. Sitting with her at dinner was…overwhelming. She grilled me about my current quest to de-google-fy my life.
I spent much of the next day turtled in my room, but I did come out for food.
![[Allison Baggerly!]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/jdallison.jpg "The vivacious Allison Baggerly")
Jewel of the South
On Wednesday morning, I had breakfast with long-time friend Andrea Deckard. Andrea and I met in 2008 when she, Toni Anderson, and Erin Chase started Savvy Blogging Summit in Colorado. That was my first-ever speaking gig, and it’s weird to think back to that time. I was a completely different person. The J.D. of 2008 is almost a stranger to me now. Andrea and I ate at Ruby Slipper just around the corner from the hotel. For two hours, we talked about our respective challenges with mental and physical health. Good bonding time, as always.
After breakfast, I retreated to my room for some downtime. In the afternoon, a group of us ventured down Bourbon Street to the vampire speakeasy. We sipped drinks from blood bags and petted the resident cats while laughing and enjoying each other’s company.
On Wednesday evening, our not-so-secret mastermind group got together for its annual Fincon dinner at Coterie. The restaurant was unprepared for us, and I’m not sure why. But they made it work. The food, drink, and conversation were good, although the space was cramped. (Someday, I’ll write about this not-so-secret mastermind. It is highly controversial in the Fincon community.)
After dinner, we wandered through the raucous streets to the 49th best bar in the world, Jewel of the South. Our verdict? The drinks were indeed damn fine but the service we received was shitty af.
We arrived at about 9:30 and sat outside in the courtyard. We were friendly with the waiter, but he was cold as ice toward us, refusing to utter even one word in response to our attempts at conversation. The place closed at eleven, so we didn’t feel like we were pushing politeness with time. He just wasn’t into us. I ended up paying the bill (everyone else sent me cash) and I left a very small tip. I never leave small tips. I’m usually a generous tipper, but this was easily the worst service I’ve received since before COVID so I felt zero remorse. In retrospect, I ought to have tipped nothing.
But, yeah. Jewel of the South has great drinks and probably has great service in most cases. Check them out when you’re in New Orleans.
Lobbycon
Throughout Fincon, I spent a lot of time lingering in the lobby. It’s my favorite part of the event. I enjoy randomly bumping into people and catching up on life. There’s magic in the ebb and flow that comes from bumping into friend after friend after friend.
On Thursday, I met Todd Tresidder for our annual breakfast. We put our name in at Ruby Slipper, then wandered around the French Quarter until they were ready for us. We had a long conversation about aging (Todd is 62, I am 54), fitness, and more.
In the afternoon, Paula Pant and I were guests on the Mile High FI podcast. Host Doug Cunnington asked us about sabbaticals and career breaks. Paula recently took a year-long hiatus to complete a prestigious journalism program at Columbia University. I, of course, am trying to be retired. Paula is diving deep into her business and is full of ambition. I am explicitly trying to be non-ambitious as I pursue the zen-like state of simply enjoying the moment. Fun contrast.
![[photo of me and Paula during our podcast interview]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/paulajd-podcast.jpg "Paula is one of my favorite people")
In the evening, Paula hosted a small group at Calcasieu to celebrate her 40th birthday. This was easily the best meal I had during my time in New Orleans, and it must have cost Paula a small fortune. (Thank you, Paula!) I sat next to Crystal Hammond, who is one of the most fascinating people I know. I’d like to get to know her better.
After dinner, I ignored the barrage of texts asking me to come sing karaoke. Trust me: Nobody wants to hear me sing. Nobody. I was in bed by midnight, and I’m glad I made that choice.
Letting Go
On Friday morning, I mostly turtled in my room. I did have a nice chat in the lobby with Ryan Guina, though. We ran into each other in the Starbucks line, then sat and sipped our coffee while solving all of the world’s problems.
I came out of my shell to have lunch with Julien and Kiersten, two of my favorite folks. There’s just something I love about their perspectives and our conversations. We chose our restaurant at random, stumbling into Lufu Nola, a sort of up-scale modern Indian place. I’m excited that Fincon is in Atlanta next year. That’s where Julien and Kiersten live, and I’m hoping they’ll show me one or two of their favorite spots.
After lunch, Rocky Lalvani and I met for our annual pow-wow. Last year, Rocky was responsible for helping me to find my “center”, as it were. He introduced me to Marissa Peer and her admonition to believe “I am enough”, which was what I needed to hear at that moment. It carried me though the end of my shitty 2022. This year, Rocky told me about Ally Boothroyd‘s yoga nidra meditations on YouTube. We chatted about aging and spirituality.
Each year, it seems that my Fincon has a theme. I know it’s simply my mind parsing events and conversations to create connections, but I like it. This year, that theme was the importance of letting go. I had so many conversations with people who are doing just that. They’re learning to let go of things. Or, in my case, I’m embracing the tao-ist idea of wu wei, of “effortless action”. To me, this means letting go of preconceptions and expectations, drifting with the flow of “the universe” (which sounds more woo-woo than I mean it), not fighting what life seems to be pushing me toward. Anyhow, I was shocked by how many of us are in similar mental places. Is it because we’re aging? Because we’re having similar reactions to the state of our culture? Both of these things? I don’t know.
After chatting with Rocky, I joined a large group for drinks at the carousel bar in Hotel Monteleone. Somehow we missed the hostess station and slipped our way to a large open space in the back of the bar. (Seriously, we didn’t even see the hostess was there.) We managed to bypass a huge line. The drinks were excellent — I had the Mezcál-cased Oaxacan Midnight — although the space was loud. But not as loud as Miranda on her own. 😉
![[photo of our group at the carousel bar]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/carouselbar.jpg "This was a fun group")
In the evening, I was pleased to run into Tanja Hester and her husband Mark. Tanja is a mind bomb. Every time I chat with her, my brain feels like it’s ready to explode. I keep telling her that I wish we’d known each other in high school. She’s exactly the sort of person I connected with when I was younger (and now, it seems). Anyhow, Tanja and I have a shared love of pens and paper and other office supplies — as does Allison, apparently — but this year I was surprised to learn that she’s spent the last twelve months taking art classes, just as I’ve started to do. She showed me her progress over the past year, and I’m impressed. Her stuff looks great! I should have asked to purchase something from her. I want a Tanja Hester original.
Closing Party
Saturday was the final day of Fincon, and thank goodness. I can only take so much fun!
In the morning, Miranda and I were joined by Sarah Li-Cain (and her roommate, Jen) for a three-mile walk down Magazine Street to the Graden District. There we met several other friends for a guided food tour. It was a blast. Delicious. Cozy. Fun.
![[Photo of our food tour group]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/foodtour.jpg "What a fun bunch of folks!")
Miranda and I walked the three miles back to the hotel with full bellies, where we joined a handful of folks (Jim Wang, Ashley Barnett, Allison, etc.) in the lobby for a long afternoon and evening of laughter and conversation. The highlight of the evening was the two-hour Halloween parade up and down Canal Street. It passed directly in front of our hotel, where a bunch of us gathered to watch the show. Eventually we all migrated upstairs for the Fincon closing party, the only official Fincon event I actually attended this year.
That’s right. I paid several hundred dollars for a ticket (and a couple of thousand dollars for food and lodging) to attend a conference where I didn’t actually do anything. All I did was eat and drink and hang out with friends. And you know what? It was 100% worth it. I’d be happy to do it over and over and over again.
For many of us who attend Fincon, this is our second family. Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time together. We text and email each other year-round with jokes and questions, etc. We have regular calls with each other. We go into business with each other. More and more, we go out of our way to spend time with each other when traveling. Sure, we live in cities across the country (and the world), but we don’t care. We share so much in common. Like autism, apparently haha.
Here’s the remaining few who have attended every Fincon:
![[photo of the eleven of us who remain]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/survivors.jpg "There are ten of us plus Jessica, who organizes the event")
Going Home
I woke early Sunday morning to make a harrowing taxi ride to the airport. I’m not joking. The driver was erratic in a sort of South American kind of way. (If you’ve ever taken a taxi in Lima or Quito, you know what I mean.) On the drive, we witnessed two strange things:
- A motorcycle flying down Canal at probably 120 miles per hour, running all of the lights at four in the morning.
- A junkie on a bicycle who ran a red light and got clipped by a car. Dude seemed to be okay, but my taxi driver wasn’t about to stop to check. He had lanes to weave through!
On the flight home, I watched an entire season of Survivor at 2x speed. It was the only thing I had the mental power to focus on. I was so tired! And that’s why after I reached Corvallis, I slept 24 out of the next 36 hours.
My obsession with the music of Taylor Swift is no secret. I’ve been fan for more than a decade. I think she’s one of the great songrwiters — not just of her era, but of all time.
I think the best way to demonstrate the quality of her writing is to listen to other performers cover her songs. Swift is a decent singer but she’s not great. She wasn’t very good at the start of her career, but she’s put in a ton of effort to improve, and her voice has become much better with time. Put her songs into the mouths of others, though, and you can really hear why people are drawn to her music.
One of my favorite things over the past two years is listening to real musicians (whether famous or real-life amateurs) talk about how much they appreciate her songwriting. Kind of cool.
Anyhow, I’ve been building a YouTube playlist of Taylor Swift covers for the past couple of years. Recently I added Sabrina Carpenter’s version of “I Knew Your Were Trouble”, which Swift herself has shared and praised.
It occurred to me that now that I’ve resumed writing at Folded Space, it’d be fun to share some of my other favorites from my playlist. So, that’s what I’m doing today: sharing my favorite Taylor Swift covers. (Note: I’m only sharing my very favorite covers here.)
One, two, three, let’s go bitch!
First up, here’s “I Did Something Bad” by Shoshana Bean and Cynthia Erivo.
Here’s a hard-driving version of “You Need to Calm Down” by Halocene.
And a stripped-down version of “Clean” by Sara Bareilles. If you want to skip the preamble, jump to 2:24. This song gives me chills no matter who sings it. It is so so good.
“Red” covered by Fifth Harmony.
I really like this cover of “All Too Well” by Jake Scott. But then I like all covers of “All Too Well”. (Yo, Swifties. Here’s Jake Scott singing this live with a guitar instead of piano.)
“This Love” by Nicholas Connell. This is over-produced, but then the original was sort of over-produced too. That’s what makes it so ethereal.
Another rockin’ cover is this version of “Anti-Hero” from Our Last Night. Warning: Gets a bit screechy haha.
It’s surprising how many punk/hard-rock covers of Taylor Swift songs exist. Here’s another one: “Blank Space” from I Prevail.
“I Know Places” covered by Vance Joy.
Here’s an orchestral cover of “Enchanted” by Joseph William Morgan. So pretty! As a sort of aside: I suck at singing, yet am often in a situation where karaoke is an option. I want to learn a TSwift song that I can sing passably well. I think “Enchanted” would be fun/funny to learn.
Okay, I’ll stop now. Because I could go on and on (and I will).
I should mention that my playlist also includes Taylor Swift covering other people’s songs. Those are fun too. For instance, here’s her version of Vance Joy’s “Riptide”.
I should also note that one of my many ideas for fun websites is to create a TSwift songopedia of sorts, where I make a page for each TSwift song, then collect all available versions I can find of it. I have so many other things going on right now, but if I resolved to do one page/song per day, I could get this done in a year. And it’d be fun!
As a footnote, Larry sent me a funny Instagram post this morning. Blogging J.D. is pretty good to keep his Taylor Swift somewhat quiet. Real-life J.D. is less good at this, which makes this short especially funny (and apropos).
I’ve finished my second- and third-ever watercolor paintings. These are both assignments for my “Jump into Watercolor” class. I’m not unhappy with either of them, but I’m not happy either. I liked my jellyfish better.
First up, we were supposed to paint three eggs. This painting was an exercise in the value of light, shading from light to dark.
![[a still life of three eggs]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/three-eggs.jpg "parts of this are okay")
I’ve been learning how to do a background “wash”, and this is the biggest one I’ve tried yet. Basically, you wet a piece of paper, then you gradually apply color to it from top to bottom. Ideally, the wash is even (unless you deliberately want it otherwise).
I can actually do an even wash in small areas, but this was a 9 inch x 12 inch piece of paper with areas “cut out” for the eggs where I didn’t want the wash. It was…complicated. My results are also complicated haha.
Anyhow, I got the wash mostly even here, although I felt like I was racing against time. I had too much water and not enough pigment at first. As I was fussing with things, the paper began to dry, which was problematic. Also, the right side was fussy. You can see where I tried to fix a problem on the right…and only make it larger and more problematic. Oh well. It was a learning experience.
I thought I had a method to shade the eggs — and I still think it was the right method — but I struggled to blend the pigment evenly. My color gradation has sharper lines than I want. I wanted something subtle. Still, not bad for the second painting I’ve ever done in my life.
Next, we have a painting of aspens against a landscape.
I’ll say straight out that I’m pleased with my aspen trunks. They turned out far better than expected. Best work I’ve done yet with watercolor. Also, I like the wash for the grey sky. That is what a wash is supposed to look like! Even color.
I also like parts of my trees and mountains, but only parts. I learned a lot while putting this together. Sometimes I should have waited for the painting to dry before moving on; other times, I ought to have moved to the next step sooner while the previous layer was still wet.
In any event, I feel like my trees and mountains look kind of big and chunky, as if I drew them with crayons. Plus, my colorful trees in front look as if they’re just evergreens with leaves haha.
Again, though, not bad for painting number three in my “career”.
I’m really enjoying this process. It gives me a productive focus and outlet. I like it so much, in fact, that I’ve bought a small travel palette and some travel brushes. I intend to take my watercolor travel kit to New Orleans next week. Let’s see if I find time to get some practice in!
During a break in the rain this morning, I took the dog for her walk. As always, she sniffed for squirrels. I relished in the renewed green around me. Summer has faded in the Willamette Valley, and the return of the rain has made everything lovely and lush. I had stopped to look at a Little Free Library (as I am wont to do) when the old man across the street hollered, “Can I meet your dog?”
Tally wagged her tail in agreement.
“Sure,” I said. We walked over to the old man’s driveway so that he could pet her.
“I’m Dave,” said the old man. He was tall and gaunt with papery skin and liver spots on his face.
“I’m J.D.,” I said. “David is my middle name.”
“Want to see my trains?” Dave asked, motioning to his garage.
“Sure,” I said. Dave led me up the driveway through his open garage door. The entire space was packed with model planes, trains, and automobiles. But despite the density of toys, everything was orderly and neat. It was clean. Dave also had a fine collection of military memorabilia on display. I’m not actually interested in this stuff, but two things prompted me to stop for a visit.
- First, even after sixteen years, I continue to practice the power of yes I first wrote about during the early days of Get Rich Slowly, back when it was a new concept to me. Over the years it’s moved from an abstract idea to a sort of guiding principle. If somebody asks me to do something, I usually say “yes” (unless that something violates my personal ethical code).
- Second, Kim and I have been making a deliberate effort to meet more people in and around Corvallis, especially neighbors.
Stopping to chat with Dave seemed like a worthwhile detour. He’s a friendly, chatty old man, although I suspect he’s struggling with his mental faculties. I like him. He talked almost non-stop, rarely pausing to let me get a word in unless he had a question. I was okay with that. Dave was entertaining.
Dave’s Garage
We spent five minutes touring the stuff in his garage. He showed me his model train — HO scale — and some of the special railroad cars of various gauges that he had on display. Below a bunch of military memorabilia, Dave had made a spot four large train cars carrying tanks. He saw me looking at his medals and uniforms.
“I was in the Navy,” Dave told me (although I might have the branch of service incorrect here). “Got out in sixty-three.” That was right around the time Kim’s father was entering the Navy and my father, a conscientious objector, was starting his stint doing laundry for the armed forces in Portland.
“We’ve been in this house for 52 years,” Dave told me. “Care to guess how much we paid? $17,000! And it’s waterfront property,” he chuckled. He was referring to Dixon Creek, which runs along the edge of his lot.
“I’m embarrassed nowadays to admit we paid so little,” Dave told me, “although it didn’t seem so cheap in 1971. The place across the street [where I’d stopped to view the Little Free Library] just sold for $600,000. Can you believe that?!”
“I can,” I said. I didn’t tell him how much we paid for our place two years ago. And I didn’t explain to him how I’ve come to believe that home prices and home buying are merely an exercise in accounting.
“Are you retired?” Dave asked me.
“I’m trying to be,” I said.
“You look awfully young to be retired,” Dave said. “I’ve been retired twenty years. I retired at 65. That means I’m 85 now.”
“I am a bit young to be retired,” I said. “I’m 54.” I wrestled with the dog’s leash; Tally was sniffing under tables and around boxes. She liked Dave’s garage.
“Good for you,” Dave said. “Do you want to come inside and see my den? The dog can come.”
Dave’s Den
Tally and I followed Dave into the house, through the kitchen, and down the hall. “This used to be one of the boys’ bedrooms,” he said, then told me about his children and grandchildren. As he talked, I looked around. Dave’s den was filled with treasures: more model planes and trains, stacks of World War II books, and shelves lined with war and science-fiction movies. In the middle of the room, facing a television, sat a comfortable black leather recliner.
Seeing this room, and listening to Dave talk, flooded me with memories. A wave of nostalgia washed over me. Dave reminded me of the old men I knew when I was young. In the 1970s, it was not uncommon to meet older guys who had served in the military at some point, and who had let that experience direct their interests in civilian life. Like Dave, they watched war movies and read war novels. They built model jet planes and tanks. They collected uniforms and medals. My mom’s father, for instance, flew a bomber in World War II; he too had an interest in military memorabilia.
Dave showed me two enormous model railcars displayed on a shelf. “When I bought those in Wenatchee, they were basically scrap,” he said. “I restored them. I don’t know what gauge they are. They’re big. The number on that car is the street number of my childhood home in Seattle. The number on this car is the street number for this house. We’ve been in this house 52 years. Can you believe it?”
Dave repeated a lot of info during our conversation. As I say, I suspect he has memory issues — and maybe more besides. He remnains a charming, engaging person though.
“I like your set-up here,” I said, pointing at the chair and TV. “It looks cozy.”
“That’s where I watch my movies,” Dave said. “I watch a lot of war movies. And science fiction movies. I especially like zombies. Do you recognize that character?” he asked, pointing to a toy on a shelf.
“That’s Groot,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “From Guardians of the Galaxy. I paid $1.50 for him at the McDonald’s in Philomath. For that price, I figured why not?” That’s another habit Dave has; he knows where he got everything, and he likes to tell you about it.
Dave’s Kitchen
As we walked back through the kitchen, he stopped to point out several large pieces of furniture. He told me their origin, including when he bought them and where. “That’s where my wife watches TV,” he said, indicating the television in the living room. “She likes those women’s movies on Hallmark and Lifetime,” he said sotto voce. “I prefer zombie movies.”
“Your house is very comfortable,” I said. And it is. It reminded me of the cozy ranch homes my friends lived in when I was growing up during the 1980s. And no wonder. It occurred to me that Dave was the same age as the fathers of my friends in high school. I’m the same age as his kids. If I’d grown up in Corvallis instead of Canby, it is possible — likely, even — that I would have spent time in this house. No wonder it felt so familiar. It reminded me of my youth because it was my youth.
“We bought the house 52 years ago,” Dave told me for a third time. “But it didn’t look like this. We’ve had the kitchen remodeled since then, and we added on this living room to expand the house. It’s been a fine home. Someday it will belong to my boys.”
We walked out through the garage, past Dave’s trains, and into the driveway. Tally sniffed for squirrels.
“Did you see my palm trees?” Dave asked. “You might not notice them from the road. We planted those trees 47 years ago. My oldest boy was five. We moved into this house 52 years ago, and we planted those trees five years after we moved in. They’re protected from the north wind, so they’ve survived. Now they’re big enough to have acclimatized.”
Tally was tugging at her leash. She was impatient. A pit stop like this wasn’t part of her doggy plans. There were squirrels to find. “It was nice to meet you, Dave,” I said. “Thank you for showing me your trains.”
“No problem,” Dave said. “Come back anytime. You have a good walk.”
And we did.
I decided to watch a movie last night, but which movie? There are so many that I want to see! Instead of choosing something from my watchlist, though, I decided to browse the $5 sale movies at iTunes.
I feel like most of the $5 sale movies at iTunes are “junk” films, films I have zero interest in seeing. But every now and then, I find a gem. Last night, I found a gem: Sorcerer, the 1977 thriller from William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection).
I first read about Sorcerer last spring. It’s notable for two reasons.
- First, it had the unfortunate fate to open soon after Star Wars in 1977, meaning it was destined to be forgotten.
- Second, it’s a remake of the 1953 Cannes Palme d’Or winner, The Wages of Fear.
When I read about Sorcerer and Wages last spring, I vowed that someday I’d watch them as a double-header. Last night, I did that — watching the remake first, then the original.
Both films share the same basic story: Somewhere in Latin America, a group of colorful characters live and work in an impoverished oil town. Things are gritty. People have no money and are willing to do anything for work. The first 45 minutes of each film explores this set-up with no real plot progression. It’s basically “life in a squalid company town”. The Wages of Fear does this part much better than Sorcerer.
For some reason, Sorcerer finds it necessary to show us the back story for our four main characters. Why? Why do we care? We don’t, and these backgrounds play no real role in the story. The intro to Sorcerer comes off as disjointed and irrelevant.
The intro to The Wages of Fear, on the other hand, is much more effective at imparting its setting. The film is ostensibly French, but it shifts from French to English to Spanish to German in a fluid fashion. (It’s kind of like the way Everything Everywhere All at Once has an effortless blend of English and Chinese. It works.) This intro is low-key amazing. It’s interesting to see such a diverse cast of background characters (black, brown, white, what have you) all relating to each other in a natural way. Wouldn’t have happened in an American film from 1953!
In both films, the central crisis is this: An oil well has caught fire and the only way to extinguish the inferno is with a nitroglycerin-based explosion. The trouble? The nitro is hundreds of miles away across nearly impassable terrain. The company’s solution is to offer a large reward for whomever can make it through with the explosives. Sure, it’s probably a suicide mission. But if everyone dies, it doesn’t cost the company anything. If the mission succeeds, then the price was worth it.
The second half of the story is very different than the first. The first half is all getting to know the setting and the characters. The second half is all thriller as our four main characters travel in two trucks, trying to reach the distant oil town in order to collect the big bucks they so desperately need.
Here I feel like Sorcerer is far superior to The Wages of Fear. I know that critics adore the last half of the original, but I didn’t find it that compelling. This probably reflects the fact that I’m jaded by 50+ years of action-adventure films. My standards for this sort of thing are very high. The Wages of Fear seems pretty tame. Mostly.
Sorcerer, on the other hand, does a damn fine job of building and sustaining the tension. Here, for instance, is my favorite — eleven minutes featuring two harrowing bridge crossings above a raging (and rising) river. Remember: these trucks are loaded with nitroglycerin and they could explode at any moment if there are any sudden shocks.
I think one of the big reasons this is so effective is that we, the audience, know the film isn’t cheating. This is clearly all done on location with real actors and with practical special effects. Sure, there’s Hollywood magic going on, but it’s not the super-fake CGI stuff we get nowadays.
Today, scenes like this are much less exciting for me. We know they’re done digitally. They’re filmed against a green screen on a sound stage and there’s zero jeopardy involved. There’s no real sense of danger.
Anyhow, I enjoyed both The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer. They’re both good. They both could have potentially been great, but they have their flaws, including very strange sequences near the end of each film. So bizarre. In any event, either (or both) is worth seeking out simply to enjoy the quality of filmmaking during the good parts.
One final note: The story here isn’t overtly political or anti-capitalist, but the “bad guy” is pretty clearly the company. The company is willing to risk the lives of several employees in order to save a bunch of money. In this regard, the company reminds me of The Company in the Alien films.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to rewatch that bridge-crossing scene again.
p.s. I want to write this down so that I remember it. Just a couple of minutes before the bridge crossing, there’s a short bit where the Roy Scheider character reaches a fork in the road in the middle of the jungle. There’s a sign with an arrow, but it’s been knocked to the ground so it’s unclear which direction to go. That’s how they end up on “the wrong road”. Steven Spielberg clearly re-used this as a gag when Nedry is trying to smuggle the dinosaur eggs during the rainstorm in Jurassic Park. This is one reason I like watching older films. You find references you never noticed before. Cinema is full of in-jokes like this.
Well, after years of talking about making art, I’ve finally made some art. Yesterday, I finished the homework for my watercolor class. I painted a jellyfish.
This project was fun because I got to put into practice various methods I’ve learned about during the past two weeks. Mostly, though, I tried to turn off my brain and just see the jellyfish, you know?
Our instructor recommended we use this photo from Unsplash as our reference, which I did:
Yesterday morning, I spent about thirty minutes making a small study as a sort of proof of concept. (I guess that’s probably what a study is intended to be. I’ve never thought about it before.)
![[my small jellyfish study]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/wc0001-study.jpg "this study was postcard sized, about 10cm x 15cm")
I didn’t like my colors here, and I didn’t like how I messed up the background wash by fussing with it too much. So, I made some changes for my full-sized piece. The biggest change I made, though, was that I just went for it. I didn’t overthink anything. Once I started painting, I kept on painting until I had to pause to wait for the paint to dry. So much better to do things this way!
My end result isn’t perfect (in that it doesn’t completely match my vision), but I do like the outcome.
![[my full painting of a jellyfish]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/wc0001-jellyfish.jpg "this full painting is about 31cm x 23cm")
I think it’s funny that you can see certain problems in both the study and the final painting. I really wanted to add some black (or Payne’s grey) to darken the edges of the jellyfish, for example, because the reference photo has some dark spots. But every time I tried to add darker pigment, I just messed things up. Oops. They’re less messed up in the final version, though.
I’m not really complaining. For a first painting, I like this fine. I’m especially pleased with the adjustments I made to the color palette from the study to the final product. I didn’t like my colors in the small version, so thought a lot about how to mix things up. This painting is the result of eight hours of class time, maybe another eight hours of YouTube videos, and eight more hours of messing around with paint on my own. In other words, this the result of my first full 24 hours of watercolor exploration.
I didn’t intend for watercolor to be the gateway medium to my foray into art. I didn’t choose watercolor; watercolor chose me. But I have to say: It’s a hell of a lot of fun. It’s allowing me to exercise a part of my self that hasn’t been exercised since grade school. I look forward to starting my second project later today. My next assignment is to paint a still life of three eggs. It’s much more difficult than it sounds…
![[cover to Travels with Charley]](https://jdroth.com/wp-content/uploads/Travels-with-Charley.jpg "I would love to do a similar trip with my dog, Tally")
During my high school English classes in the mid 1980s, we were required to read a lot of John Steinbeck: The Pearl, East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath. And during our cross-country RV trip a decade ago, I made a point of reading East of Eden. I liked all of these books.
The John Steinbeck book I didn’t like is one that I think most people enjoy, Travels with Charley. I don’t remember much about the book now because I read it in college, probably in 1989 or 1990. I know it’s a travelogue documenting Steinbeck’s drive across the U.S. with his dog, but I don’t remember much else and I don’t remember why I didn’t like it.
During a walk across town with my dog the other day, I found a great old copy of Travels with Charley in a Little Free Library. I picked it up.
(Corvallis has a couple hundred Little Free Libraries. They’re everywhere. They’re also dangerous — for me, anyhow. As a guy who likes free things and likes books, free books are just about the best thing on Earth. I pick up a lot of them.)
As Tally and I strolled along, I read the prologue. (The book doesn’t have proper chapters, but it does divide each section. The first section is basically a prologue to introduce what comes next.) Now, in my fifties, I thought it was great. I thought it was so great, in fact, that I decided to type it up to share here.
Because my blockquote CSS is shitty (and won’t break paragraphs properly), I’m going to type this up as a separate section below. All of the next section is the prologue to Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. I hope you like it as much as I do. (Note that I’ve added additional paragraph breaks to make this more readable on the web. Steinbeck liked long paragraphs.)
Travels with Charley
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.
Nothing has worked.
Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from.
Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination.
And last he must implement a journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teenagers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.
Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away.
In this a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.
Travels with J.D.
I understand it. I understand what Steinbeck is describing here. I feel it deep in my bones. I’ve been itching lately to get out again and see the world. This was the reason for my month-long journey to England, Norway, and Iceland this summer. I was scratching that itch.
Some observations:
- First, note how lovely is Steinbeck’s craft. His sentences are a joy. They’re mostly short but with sufficient variation in length. His words are obviously carefully chosen to impart rhythm and rhyme, to sort of sing from the page. There’s an artistry here seldom seen in modern writing.
- Second, I identify so much with his sentiment here. I didn’t care to roam when I was younger. And there’s still a large piece of me that wishes to remain permanently in place, to have deep roots. But larger part of me wants to roam. I too am something of a bum, I guess. My friend Becca once described this state of mind as “Roots with Wings”. That’s an apt characterization.
- I love this sentence: “I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.” This sounds remarkably like the reason I’ve decided to resume writing here at Folded Space — and the reason I started blogging in the 1990s to begin with. I’m not doing this to instruct others (although that’s a happy side effect); I’m doing this to inform myself. Writing is how I process my thoughts and feelings. It’s how I synthesize everything to see what I know and understand and believe.
Anyhow, I’m not convinced I’ll like Travels with Charley any more today than I did thirty years ago. But I might. I’m going to give it a shot. I have it sitting on my nightstand, and I’ll set aside my ongoing exploration of the Tao Te Ching in order to journey across the U.S. with Steinbeck and his dog.
Today I am only four years younger than Steinbeck was when he wrote the book. There’s a very real possibility that I’ll be much better able to relate to it now.
I’ve had a metaphor in my head for a couple of years, but haven’t found a way to share it until today. I’d intended to use it at Get Rich Slowly but never got around to it. Let’s use it here instead.
Last weekend, Kim and I took the dog into the hills outside Corvallis to go mushroom hunting. (Well, the dog barked at things. We hunted for mushrooms.) We were walking back the car down a steep trail and I was kind of lollygagging and staring off into the trees when bump! I stubbed my toe against a stone and stumbled.
When I was younger, a stumble like this would have meant a fall. I would have instinctively panicked, and that panic would have caused me to overcorrect or to stiffen, and I would have ended up on the ground. This certainly would have happened when I was a kid, but I think it would also have happened into young adulthood.
Wu Wei: The Art of Effortless Action
Now, at age 54, I rarely fall when I stumble. I can’t remember the last time I did so. I’ve mastered the tao-like secret to staying upright: When something causes me to miss a step, I do nothing. I let my body continue moving forward at the same speed even though it feels like I’m falling. That’s it. That’s the entire secret to stumbling without falling, in my experience: Do nothing. (This really is tao-like. It’s wu wei, the art of effortless action.)
By doing nothing — by not trying to correct but instead continuing with my normal stride — I keep from throwing myself out of balance. I think the reason I used to fall so much after stumbling was my overcorrections. I was causing myself to fall.
Now it’s true that I don’t wholly do nothing when I stumble. I still have to get the foot that stumbled forward to catch the end of the stride, so that means lifting it over the obstacle quickly and planting it, but it’s no different than what I would have normally done if my toe hadn’t stubbed a stone, right? It’s just a sort of unintentional stutter step.
I suspect it’s very clear how I want to use this as a metaphor. (Or maybe this is complex enough to be an allegory? I don’t know.)
Often in life, we make mistakes. Mistakes are a part of being human.
Mistakes, in isolation, are rarely catastrophic. They’re usually very minor, in fact. What exacerbates a mistake is how we react to it. We’re better off not reacting at all.
Cataloging My Mistakes
As a human — and a particularly flawed specimen — I have a lot of experience with mistakes, and with overreacting to them. Here’s a catalog of ways I’ve made things worse in the past.
- “Well, I fucked up. Because I already fucked up, I might as well continue making this mistake.”
- “Oh shit! I fucked up! I feel so bad! I will assuage my guilt by making the same mistake — or a similar mistake — to comfort myself.”
- “This isn’t a mistake. It’s just a one-time thing. It’s only a problem if I make the mistake over and over again, if it becomes a habit.” And, of course, I proceed to make the mistake a habit.
- “Oh shit! I fucked up! I am such an awful, terrible person. I can’t believe how pathetic I am. Since I’m such a fuck-up, it doesn’t matter if I make more mistakes. That’s just who I am, I guess.”
- “This isn’t a mistake. Nope. It feels good. I like it. I know that popular opinion says it’s a mistake, and that there’s tons of scientific evidence that says it’s a mistake, but I am a Special Case. It is not a mistake for me in this instance.” (Spoiler: It’s almost always a mistake.)
When I react in these ways, I turn a mistake from a stumble into a fall. I am especially bad at catastrophizing, as my therapists and romantic partners will attest.
Here are some specific examples of turning stumbles into falls:
- “I didn’t mean to drink today. I shouldn’t have had that glass of wine. Well, since I already started drinking, I might as well have another glass.” (There’s a saying attributed apocryphally to F. Scott Fitzgerald that encapsulates this common problem: First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.)
- “Oh shit, I inadvertently offended somebody whose opinion matters to me. I feel so awful! To compensate, I will eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra. Maybe two.”
- “Crap. I’ve already wasted two hours playing Hearthstone today instead of doing yardwork. What an idiot. Since I’ve already wasted most of the day, I might as well continue playing. Maybe I can get my rating to 7000!”
- “Oops. That piece of chocolate wasn’t on my diet. Better not make that a habit.” Next night: “Oops. That piece of chocolate wasn’t on my diet. Better not make that a habit.” Next week: “Oops. That piece of chocolate wasn’t on my diet. Better not make that a habit.” Etcetera. Etcetera.
- “I can’t afford to buy this book, but I’m going to do so anyhow. And since I’m buying this one book, I’ll buy this one. And this one. And this one too.”
- “I can’t believe I forgot to do the work I promised to have done by today. I am such an idiot. I’m a loser. Why does anyone bother to ask me to do anything? I suck.”
Anyhow, you get the point. A stumble is only a stumble unless we choose to make it a fall.
Stumbling in September
I bring this up because the entire month of September was a metaphorical stumble for me. (Or an allegorical stumble?) After nearly nine months of concerted effort with my diet and fitness, after losing 25 pounds since 13 December 2022, after building a regular routine at the gym and establishing healthy eating patterns, in September I pretty much abandoned everything.
I ate poorly. I drank too much beer. I went to the gym only twice. I re-installed Hearthstone on my iPad and played many, many hours. (I’d uninstalled it in April and had gone without playing for months.) I stopped reading. I stopped watching films. In fact, you can see precisely when I went off the rails by looking at my Letterboxd profile.
I’m not kidding. See how I went from watching many movies a week to suddenly not watching them at all? That’s precisely when I stumbled with everything else.
Now, I’m not exactly sure why I stumbled. It doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that I don’t allow this to become a fall. And to do that, I need to do nothing. I don’t mean that I ought to keep drinking beer and eating crap and playing Hearthstone. No, I mean that I ought to resume the things I was doing before. I don’t need to panic that I’ve “wasted” a month. I don’t need to overcorrect by adopting extreme measures. No, I just need to subtly shift my habits back to where they were, say, six weeks ago.
(Sidenote: Actually, maybe I do know why I stumbled. After a long period without using pot, I started ingesting it again when I got home from my trip in late June. “I’m doing fine,” I told myself. “I can gradually re-introduce it.” Well, I think this stumble is a result. Since stopping my marijuana use last week, I’ve already begun to feel more motivated and be more productive.)
Because I knew I’d stumbled, I’ve avoided looking at metrics for the past couple of weeks. As a nerd, I keep a daily spreadsheet of my fitness stats: weight, body fat, blood pressure, and so on. I was scared to look at the numbers.
This morning, I looked at the numbers. Turns out, they’re not so bad.
Yes, I messed up. The numbers aren’t as good as they were a few weeks ago. But they’re not terrible either. Here are my numbers for the past two months:
This is a clear stumble. Everything is up, especially my blood pressure. But none of this is catastrophic unless I choose to make it so. And it’s good for me to remind myself where I started last December:
Choosing Not to Fall
Last night, I struggled to sleep. The stupid dog had something to do with it: grumbling and burrowing her hot doggy body close to mine. Ugh. While I was not sleeping, I was beating myself up about my recent poor choices. I told myself that when I woke up, I’d seek comfort by making a big breakfast: sausage, pancakes, syrup, more pancakes, more syrup. But you know what? I’m not going to do that.
I’m sipping my coffee now. I’m not hungry, so I’ll wait to eat. (When I’m being healthy, I don’t eat until 11:00.) And when I do eat, it’ll be lots of protein and a complex carb. No sausage, pancakes, pancakes, syrup, and syrup.
I have stumbled, but I will not fall.
In my crazy post yesterday about talking animals, I briefly mentioned that I am working on watercolors. This made me realize that I failed to provide an update to my earlier failed attempt to take art classes.
I’d intended to take both Realistic Drawing and Ink Pen + Watercolor from the Corvallis Community Center this autumn, but the classes were cancelled due to low enrollment. Boo! (Apparently this is a thing since COVID, especially in older progressive communities like Corvallis.) Rather than give up, though, I heeded advice of Folded Space readers and looked for alternatives. I found one at Linn-Benton Community College.
I’m now taking two painting classes each week: Jump into Watercolor I on Tuesdays and Jump into Watercolor II on Thursdays. When I registered, I thought they were two sessions of the same class. They’re not. The Tuesday session is “part one” of the course, and the Thursday session is “part two”. The instructor (whom I like very much) offered to let me drop the Thursday session, but also said I could take it with the understanding that it’s stuff I won’t really understand. I opted to stick with it.
So, now I’m nearing the end of my second week working with watercolors. It’s fun. It’s also humbling.
I feel like I’m a freshman in high school taking my first art class. I see what professionals are capable of producing, but as a raw beginner my work is far from their results. I can’t even get the paint to do the simple things I want it to do! It’s as if I’m learning to write and all I can do is produce big blocky letters written in pencil on pulpy paper when what I really want is to write Harry Potter or something.
But hey. This is how all things start, right? You have to learn the fundamentals.
The in-class stuff is tough for me. Most of the other students have some level of art experience. They’re taking this watercolor class to expand their toolbox. There’s one other guy in the Tuesday class who has never done this before. He and I are both slow and methodical, so the class sessions whiz by and we’re way behind. That’s okay. I come home and repeat the exercises over and over again.
This Tuesday, for instance, we were supposed to paint a jellyfish. The other students were able to produce something roughly resembling a jellyfish during our two hours. Not me. My painting looked like a bunch of blobs. So, I came home and did another. More blobs. Then I watched some stuff on YouTube and made a third attempt. Better. Smaller blobs. Today, I’ll make a fourth attempt, but this time I’ve written out a plan — a “recipe”. I know which paints I’ll use in which order and with which brushes. I know when I’m going to let paint dry and when I’m going to paint “wet on wet”. I’ll probably still produce blobs, but I’ll bet the blobs will look more like a jellyfish.
I have some other random thoughts about this process after ten days at it.
First, it’s amazing how quickly I enter flow state while working with watercolor. Time breezes by! Our two-hour classes seem like twenty minutes. And when I work at home, I have to be very careful not to miss other scheduled activities. The other night, I almost forgot to make dinner. I went downstairs to the library at 13:30 to begin mixing my paint (my new palette arrived, and I wanted to get my color wheel set up in it). Before I knew it, it was 17:00 and Kim would be home soon. Wow.
Second, I’m being very J.D. about this whole thing. I am a slow learner. When I learn something, I learn it well and often become quite good at it. But it takes me a lot of effort to get there. My learning isn’t linear. It’s more like a cubic curve. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the fundamentals, which means I lag behind classmates (or co-workers). But once I have everything figured out, I rapidly improve my skill. I’ve always been like this, so I’ve just surrendered to it. I expect I’ll spend the next three months s-l-o-w-l-y learning basic stuff that others pick up quickly. But once I have it figured out, I’ll be able to put it together well.
Third — and this is sort of related to the last point — I’ve found YouTube tremendously helpful in figuring some of this stuff out. As much as I like my instructor, she assumes a lot of knowledge. I have plenty of basic questions, like:
- How much water am I supposed to be using?
- Are there fixed ratios for mixing colors? Mixing purple from French Ultramarine and Quinacranone Rose was simple enough. Basically a one-to-one ratio. But getting my green from Phthalo Blue and Lemon Yellow was tough. I had to use way more yellow than blue. (And getting my yellow-green was even more difficult!)
- It seems like nearly all the watercolor work I see is with paint that is water-diluted, usually with a lot of water. Do you ever work with thick pigment and very little water? I like the intense colors and want to use them undiluted, but maybe this doesn’t work well? (I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t done because they end up bleeding easily when exposed to moisture or something.)
Anyhow, YouTube is filling in a lot of gaps. I particularly like the videos from Liron Yanconsky. Many of them are too advanced for me, but his tutorials are fantastic. I watched this video on how to do a “wash” yesterday, and everything just clicked. It was my first aha! moment with watercolors.
I also like the videos from Dragonfly Spirit Studio. The presenter doesn’t assume anything and gives lots of detail in his explanations. He covers the whys as well as the hows. So helpful for the way my mind works. Here are two great examples:
Those two videos are exactly the basic sort of things that I’m missing from my in-person classes, so I like that I’m able to supplement the things my instructor teaches with the added detail I need.
I don’t just watch basic videos. I sometimes watch professional artists doing amazing things. I especially like when they explain their thought process. This video about painting clouds from Noelle Curtis is great!
Honestly, if my mind worked differently than it actually does, I feel like it’d be possible to learn any sort of art using only YouTube videos. For the past year, I’ve been building a YouTube playlist that I call “art school” with lots of great tutorials on drawing and painting. What’s funny (to me) is that my absolute favorite art channel is Kezoo Sketch, which is entirely in Korean. I can’t understand a thing he says — hooray for subtitles! — but I love the way the presenter works.
Okay, that’s far more than I intended to write about my first ten days working with watercolor. I’m really enjoying it, though, and it’s helped to share this stuff. Right now, though, I need to head downstairs to complete my homework before class starts at ten.
Warning: This post will probably make some of you think that I’m crazy. 😉
The New York Times Magazine recently published a piece called “The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?”, which explores research that shows animals communicate. With language.
This might be surprising to some people. It’s not to me. For decades, I’ve been arguing that animals are just as smart as people, and that they have rich internal lives. We, as a species, like to believe that we are unique. Some of this is inherent anthropocentric myopia. Some of it is residue of religion. Some of it is just plain ignorance. Nearly everyone believes that Homo sapiens is set apart, superior to other creatures.
I don’t believe this. I believe that we are not unique. We are just like the other animals. And the other animals are far more intelligent than most people believe.
More and more, research proves this. I started my (currently broken) animal intelligence blog three months after starting Get Rich Slowly. At the time, news about animal cognition and behavior was, well, rare. I’d find maybe one article a month about the subject. Now it feels as if we’re in the golden age of animal-intelligence research. The news and stories are constant. (Hmmm. Maybe I should revive my broken blog!)
Different But Equal
The New York Times article I mentioned is fascinating. Here’s an excerpt:
With each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity and the rest of the animal world has eroded. For centuries, the linguistic utterances of Homo sapiens have been positioned as unique in nature, justifying our dominion over other species and shrouding the evolution of language in mystery. Now, experts in linguistics, biology and cognitive science suspect that components of language might be shared across species, illuminating the inner lives of animals in ways that could help stitch language into their evolutionary history — and our own.
This, to me, is a simple, effective summary of the current state of research into animal intelligence. The more we explore the subject, the more we realize humans differ from other animals only in that, well, we’re a different animal. In short, we are not special.
Whenever I bring up the subject of animal intelligence, people try to argue that animals act on “instinct”, implying that humans do not. This always sounds to me as if the other person is arguing that humans have free will but animals live in a deterministic universe. It doesn’t make sense. Whether or not you believe in determinism or free will — and that’s a big debate on its own — the same rules apply equally to all animals.
If you’re religious (or Christian, anyhow), you’ll probably dismiss this idea outright. Your scriptures tell you that Man is special and apart from the other animals. But if, like me, you believe that humans are no different than other animals aside from our current success at over-running the Earth, then it shouldn’t be such a stretch to see that all animals are created equal. Different but equal.
It’s just that for so many years — millennia! — we haven’t taken the time and effort to actually try to understand the animals around us. Now that we’re doing so, scientists are finding that we’ve been far too anthropocentric in our views.
Anyhow, this is an interesting story and a good read.
Animal Intelligence in Real Life
On a related note, I’ve come to realize that the biggest barrier to my dog’s intelligence and ability to communicate is me. Most people “train” their dogs up to a certain point, then stop. I feel as if Kim and I have done better than most in this regard. We’ve continued to teach Tally new things for the entirety of her seven-and-a-half year life. She’s constantly learning new words and concepts. Yesterday, for instance, I taught her to play “hide and seek”. She loves it. Silly dog. (On Sunday, I taught her the word “window” while riding in the car. She learned it after three repetitions. “Window,” I’d say, and she’d turn so that she could stick her head out the window.)
Tahlequah also did something remarkable yesterday. I was downstairs practicing watercolor in the library when I heard Tally whining. I stepped into the basement and there she was, facing the closed “pet closet”.
“What do you want?” I asked. “What is it?” (“What is it?” is one of our keywords with her.)
Tally whined more and stared straight ahead at the closet. So, I opened the door. She immediately lunged forward from her sitting position and nuzzled a package of toy balls on the floor of the closet. These are her favorite “bacon balls”, scented plastic squeaky balls (that only squeak for about ten minutes until she breaks them, thankfully). And the lunge she did was the same lunge she does whenever she’s eager/happy to grab something.
My goofy dog knew there were new bacon balls in the closet, so she asked me to open it so she could have one. (She loves getting a new bacon ball!) And this, of course, is what led me to teach her “hide and seek”.
Okay, here’s another related story, one that I still find hard to believe.
Several years ago, our cat Avery lost his collar. We bought him a new one. He hated it. He was constantly trying to pull it off.
A week or two later, Kim and I were sitting together in the hot tub on the back deck when we heard the scrabble scrabble of Avery climbing over the fence. He hopped down and there in his mouth was his old collar. WTF? Kim and I were amazed — and still are to this day. If either of us had been alone, the other would not have believed this story. But we both saw it.
I got out of the hot tub to replace Avery’s hated new collar with his acceptable old collar. (And that’s the collar he wears now to this day.) The reason Avery wanted the collar off? There was a pointy bit of plastic still in it from the price tag. He was in pain from the new collar, so he retrieved his old collar from the place he knew he’d lost it.
I know, I know. These are merely anecdotes, and they don’t prove a thing. That’s true in isolation. But if, like me, you believe that animals are intelligent, it’s just a glimpse at a tiny part of the Big Picture.
Crazy Man
Like I say, I’ve come to realize that the biggest barrier to my dog’s mental growth is me. She is able and willing to learn as much as I will teach her. She already has a vocabulary approaching 200 words/phrases. But at the same time, I’m learning to “speak dog”. I’ve learned to listen to what she is saying to me.
It’s remarkable the paradigm shift that occurs when you accept the premise that everything your dog does is purposeful. When I view Tally’s actions through that lens, when I view the world through her eyes, everything changes. I’ve come to do this whenever I walk her. It’s made the walks so much more enjoyable because it’s truly as if she and I are having an ongoing conversation about where to go and what to do. (Exception: When she’s in “hound mode”, all bets are off. She’s being a dog and wants no part in communicating with her human. There are squirrels to be had!)
Okay, more anecdata.
When I walk Tahlequah during the summer, I do not carry treats. When she enters “hound mode” — or when she feels strongly about something, such as going a particular direction or extending the length of the walk — she can be very stubborn. She plants her feet, stares at me, and leans the direction she wants to go. I either give in or I squat to explain things to her (which I’m sure people think is crazy).
But during the cooler months (which are just beginning here in Oregon’s Willamette valley), I usually wear a jacket or sweater. And those jackets and sweaters have pockets where I keep dog treats. Tally knows this, and her behavior changes. She still requests that we do what she wants to do — stay out longer, go to her favorite places, seek out squirrels — but she’s more amenable to what I want. She gives in quickly. However, when she acquiesces she “demands payment”. She looks at my treat pocket, asking to be paid for complying. So, I pay her.
Many folks would say that I shouldn’t reward her for doing this sort of thing, that I as the human should be the “alpha” to my dog. I don’t buy the whole alpha thing. And I don’t consider myself to be my dog’s “master”. I’m not superior to her in any way. I’m just another creature who happens to be a part of her pack (along with Kim and Avery). So, I think of these situations as negotiations. I’m stating my will; Tally is stating hers. If I don’t have a good reason to overrule her request, I don’t. We extend the walk or we go to her favorite squirrel spots. It’s no different than when Kim and I try to choose a restaurant. I’m not joking: This is exactly how I view it.
By now, some of you probably think I’m crazy. I don’t care. My belief in animal cognition is one of my most strongly held beliefs. It’s only becoming more strongly held as time goes on.
If this is the case, then why am I not vegetarian? Hold onto your hats, folks, because this is where I really get crazy.
The older I get, the more I suspect that plants are intelligent too. And insects. There have been a couple of recent articles about insect intelligence. And believe it or not there are many books — and a growing body of research — about plant intelligence. My best summary of it is that J.R.R. Tolkien came close to capturing plants when he created the Ents. (I’m not well-versed in the plant intelligence stuff yet, though, so won’t belabor it. I buy the premise, though.)
If plants have intelligence too, if the lines between plant and animal are largely arbitrary, then choosing the position of “ethical vegetarian” (as I did for a year when I was younger) is largely meaningless. If I truly want to keep from harming an intelligent creature, I have to be a “fruititarian”, a person who only eats fruit that has fallen from the tree. (Hat tip to friend Kris Becker who wrote a poem in college that espoused this notion. I found it amusing at the time; less so now.)
Final Thoughts
I don’t expect to have persuaded anyone to my viewpoint through this piece. That wasn’t my intention. But I do hope that I’ve opened a few eyes to the idea that humans might not be so special as a species. There’s plenty of evidence (and more every day) that animals are intelligent, sentient, and capable of behaviors we’ve long classified as human.
Not only that, research is beginning to shed light on the worlds of plant intelligence and insect intelligence.
Am I crazy? I don’t think so. But then I think a lot of other people are crazy for their beliefs while they think they’re sane. So maybe I am crazy. I don’t know.
In any event, it’s time to take Tally for her walk. It’ll be a long one today. “Dog’s choice,” I tell her as we start these long strolls. She does not understand that phrase and probably never will, but she understands plenty of other stuff. (My rule of thumb: If Tally is interested in something, she can learn the word/phrase for it.) Interacting with her as we walk across Corvallis is the highlight of my day, and it’s because I’ve elected to believe that she and I are equals who communicate and negotiate as we enjoy our romps through town.