The Daily Grind

I haven't much to say. Since I finished school the pace of life has dropped off significantly. That always happens after those sleepless and anxiety filled weeks of professional school exams, and I have learned to enjoy it. People who are runners will understand what I mean...that feeling after a great long run where you have taken a shower and you sit down with a big bottle of water, a bowl of fruit maybe, and turn on the music and just relax. This is easily one of the best feelings in the world and its important to take it in while it lasts. So it is with the post-exam feeling.

I am looking for work, though to no avail. My day basically goes as follows. I get up and read a couple newspapers and then go for a run. Come back and have some late breakfast or early lunch depending on when I did my run and then get ready to go look for jobs. So far the job hunt is confined to a plan...I will devise the night before a few places I need to hit and go for it. Soon the structure will come apart and I will start cold-searching. Job hunting is a lot of walking around, which is one of my favorite activities anyway so that's not bad. If the weather is nice, which it has been a lot lately, I will try to squeeze in a skate. Then at the end of the day I go to my favorite cafe and catch up on some reading...often this is the high-point of the day.

I cannot help but plugging my new favorite cafe, its called Cafe Moccador and its on Falkoner Alle in my commune, Frederiksberg. Its a 15-20 minute walk if the weather is nice otherwise its right next to the Metro station. The prices are very reasonable for Copenhagen and the staff is super friendly...nicest cafe staff I have come across in Europe yet. The lighting is adequate, and the front room has floor to ceiling windows that are open on nice days. The chairs are not Lazy-Boy recliners, but they have a varied assortment and I have not found a chair there yet that is bad enough to require me to cut my work short. I should say that style and design are very big in Denmark, and often the chairs make a nice artistic statement...they tell me about the artist's unconscious desires, but they do not tell me why I should sit my bony rear-end in a metal chair shaped like the solar system or an amoeba. They do have us outclassed by a long shot though in style and design though, speaking of San Diego the land of the slacker slob! Anyway, they do not mind at Moccador that I tend to stay for hours and work, and the servers even keep the water coming. The place is never crowded either.

Though I have not been writing here much, I have been quite active lately. Usually the discipline of exam period has a lag-effect so that when I get back to the work that matters I can work well for long periods. I have been reading and writing at a break-neck pace lately across a wide range of topics.

For leisure reading I am nearing the end of another Trotsky biography which has been nice. It was written by an ex-Soviet historian who was removed from his post for writing "un-Soviet" things about Lenin (aka, the truth). He has a healthy dose of criticism for Trotsky which is good cause Trotsky tends to be treated as either the angel of the revolution or a fascist counter-revolutionary (this was the party line in the 20s, 30s, and 40s when Stalin was using Trotsky as an excuse to kill all his political enemies and eventually Trotsky himself...all of it was exposed as lies, like Trotsky had been saying, after Stalin's death).

Trotsky is a really interesting story though. A glorious romantic youth followed by a tragic and cataclysmic fall that saw his family and loved ones killed off one-by-one by Stalin's henchmen and eventually his own murder by a Soviet agent in Mexico. Trotsky was an ambiguous man and by no means either the "good" or the "evil" man that history has tended to cast him as. Along with Lenin he committed terrible crimes in the revolution and civil war, but he was one of the few with the courage to call Stalinism for what it was, a murderous bureaucratic totalitarian government...for his crusade he paid dearly.

Besides that I am trying to close down a few things I have had to put on hold for a while to deal with the persistant bother that is law school. I am finishing up a few things with Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, the philosophy of Buddhism, and a book on the concepts of modern art. This is the ideal life for me...one spent reading and writing. Oh, I forgot to mention Foucault, I have been dabbling a bit with Foucault in the context of late theories of power relations and hegemony (less Gramsci and more Laclau and Mouffe). I have picked up something unexpected there that has drawn my thoughts a bit lately, but I won't speak of that now. My writing has been quite fruitful lately and spanning quite a range of issues, but my big project, which I am only beginning to outline, is an essay (a blasphemous little ditty I must say!) criticizing liberalism and legality (the rule of law). So far it has a name and a central theoretic idea and that's it. I hope to rehabilitate a communal theory of justice implicitly relied on in a book I wrote a criticism on last year, faulting it for a lack of conceptual soundness.

Now I must be going, I know this was not such a thrilling entry, but I thought the nicer points of how boring my day-to-day life really is would be helpful to debunk the myth. I will keep my eyes open for something absurd and funny that the Danes do so that I can write something more entertaining.

Nothing to Say

I have nothing to say...school is done and I am looking for a job. I was more qualified to work when I was in high school than I am now. Blogger keeps messing up my posts. I have lost about 3 in the last week and I am fundamentally opposed to starting and finishing a "draft." This is not class...I write and I post. Even when I write papers, even if it is a 50 page paper, I will write it in one sitting. I don't like starting and stopping things. Do it once, hard and as fast as you can. So now my file on blogger is full of "drafts" I will never finish. They will be released post-humously as my "missing letters." The weren't missing, they are right here, I have just discarded them so there are huge spaces in the narrative of my life. If you don't keep telling the story than you are no more! As Bartleby says, "I'd prefer not..."

One "Hot Racket"

Guys we have to get in on this. I was at the mall today and I thought I would stop in the sporting goods store to look at some shorts to wear to the gym. I usually like to work out in an old pair of boardshorts or something, but I have not coaxed myself into working out in what is essentially underwear like the Europeans yet. So I figured they may finally have some shorts in the stores since its getting warm, and if I am lucky they will have a pair that are longer than 2-3 inches from the waist to the end of the leg. I saw some boardshorts and thought they would be perfect until I noticed the price, 699-799 DKK. Folks, thats like more than $100-$120 for a pair of shorts.

So I got to thinking, unfortunately...as many of you know we can pick up name brand boardshorts in the US for $30-$50 tops, and we can get Target brand boardshorts for about $15 tops. So I want to get in the importing/exporting business, we will be called "Vandalay Industries." The plan is to buy a couple thousand dollars worth of board shorts and bring them out here in suitcases. We will mix name brand and generic boardshorts. I figure we can mark them up to right around $100 and still undercut our competitors. The generics we can sell for $60-$75 dollars. Everyone knows that a pair of Quicksilver boardshorts is functionally equivalent to "Wham" or "Tubular" boardshorts at 4x the cost.

The only problem I can foresee is that nobody wears boardshorts in Denmark, but I think a good marketing campaign could change that...like any good "free" market where people can "choose" what they want we will con people into thinking they are freely choosing Southern Californian attire. We have precedent for fooling people into buying the surf culture, in about 47 of the 50 states for instance. We can either open up our own little shop and put some crummy dinged up surfboard in the window, or we could just provide them wholesale to other retail stores.

Some may object that I am contributing to spreading the gawdy and valueless culture of Southern California as American hegemony, or just ripping people off to my own advantage. This is not how I see it though...I think of the young Danish lad who has worn out a copy of Endless Summer and spends his nights thinking of barreling waves. I suspect I would be a criminal if I let this child, call him Lars, buy a pair of Quicksilver boardshorts for $120...so what if I get filthy rich in the process and never have to suffer some stupid job.

The Interview

"Well, Mr. Carey, is it? Why don't you tell me why you think you would be a good fit for our firm?"

"I could tell you how I would be a good fit for your firm, but please, allow me first to tell you a short story...a story of hope, the tale of a young boy's dream. As long as I can remember forming hopes and aspirations mine were fixed. I was unwavering, determined, and singularly-focused...I was of one mind, no, I was of considerably less than one mind. My childhood friends would move like a flock of pigeons from dreams of space travel, dinosaur excavation and professional sports glory. Not I, from the very first time I laid my blessed eyes on the cold, modern contours of an industrial strength Swingline stapler I knew, it was my destiny to spend hours behind a desk or in a cubicle collating paper and filling out forms. Some may call it a humble dream, but as I ran my hand over the handle of that cold black stapler there was nothing modest about my thoughts...with slight pressure and a melodic click an entire stack of paper could be bound together for easy transfer from desk to desk. I dreamt in sleep and wakefulness alike of having a time and date stamp where the rubber face could be rotated to reflect the perpetual cascade into the future, with each rotation I could thank providence for my rigid and menial life. I dreamt of stacks of paperwork to be scaled as some men scale the great peaks of the Andes and Himalayas. I dreamt of cavernous desk drawers as deep and mysterious as the abyss of the deepest seas. I would be a good fit for your firm because, like any other cog prefashioned for the turning of a wheel, I was destined to toil away behind a desk, or, god-willing, in a cubicle."

As I finished I had noticed the tears well up in her knowing eyes. I reached for the small stack of tissues I kept in the breast pocket of my black two-piece suit, the pocket closest to my heart, and handed her a tissue.

"Mr. Carey, that is the most touching thing I have ever heard. I did not know there were others out there! In this world of careerists and social-climbers I thought I would never meet another for whom the task itself was profit enough."

I took her hand, fingers hardened from hours of tireless work on a computer keyboard. I imagined her at work, drafting form-memos, those hands gliding across the keyboard like the fingers of Chopin carried lightly, but firmly over the ivory keys of a grand piano. The sound of the keys, some may call it a cacophony of clicks and taps, to me that sound is the very sound of music. As I clutched her tired hands and looked into those tear-filled eyes that seemed to reflect the lost soul of every corporate functionary the world over, I said, "There are many out there like us, you should never feel alone. Those of us for whom toil is inherently rewarding. We who, under weak backs and inadequate spines are banished from the world of manual labor. We who of rigid, inflexible minds are the diaspora of a once creative land. We who choose to carry, but to carry lightly...who choose to think, but to think along the strict confines of an employee handbook. We are the bureaucrats with no bureaucracy! We, we desk-jockeys of the world, we will find each other in another time...a time where everything is firmly scheduled and only endeavored with the permission of an authority. Another time in a place where the edges are hard and the colors black and white. No, you should never feel alone, and absolutely not ashamed! For the world relies on the efficient allocation of paperwork and storage of data...we are the very substratum of the universe!"

The lovely glow re-entered her eyes in a flood of relief as she said to me, "Mr. Carey, you have truly inspired me. I find you inspiring! And therein lies the problem. You speak of banal wonders the size of worlds. You tell tales of ordinary heroics. You would be a wonderful fit for our firm, were it not the blatant creativity the telling of your tale betrays! You are an imposter! You are one of the many-minded cosmopolitan free-wheelers who besmirch our very name.

Overtaken by obvious horror I moved to contain the situation, "I fear your evaluation to be in clear error! Though I tell a story, and I am a man of many stories, they are not my own. I have lifted these stories from others and I can give you the authorities themselves to prove it!"

"Authority?," she answered puzzled, "like precedent even, like legal precedent!"

My confidence restored I continued, "Precisely like legal precedent. Fear not, I can assure you that I have not had a creative thought in my life! No, absolutely not. The outer bounds of my thinking go no further than the dark-lined confines of a cell in a Microsoft access database."

Together we took a collective sigh of relief and she immediately extended me an offer, "I hope you will consider working here, I think you will find our compensation quite competitive."

"Consider? Nonsense, I will do nothing of the sort! Give me a line to sign on with an 'X' next to it and I will sign. Furthermore, I hope to put my name to many a line on the parchment of this firm...and that will be compensation enough for me!"

Teenage Kicks

I finished studying today at around 5 pm and decided I would walk home. I figured I had been sitting inside all day anyway, I could use some fresh air and I am NEVER in a hurry to get back to my apartment. Between the library in my neighborhood and my apartment there is a construction site that is used in the evenings as a local skatepark by skaters from the neighborhood. I usually sit for a spell and watch them skate. Most of them are really good and the site is great. It is various concrete levels with steel edges that seems almost made for grinds.

Anyway I sat for about and hour and it reminded me of a few years back when skaters and freestyle bike riders would gather at the end of Ventura Blvd. in Mission Beach and do tricks until a little after dark. Often me and my friends would hang out there and grab a bite to eat or something. If you were really lucky, and the sandbars were lined up right, you could get a session out in front of the roller coaster and then come in, throw on a sweatshirt and watch the sunset (when they are testing the ballistic missile defense system it lights up the sky in SoCal incredibly).

I gathered myself to finish walking home when...I like the idea of willing myself into action as a process of "gathering," it gets to how fractured I feel. Anyway, almost without volition, I closed my eyes and was found in the middle of a daydream. I was surfing around sunset, and I had just popped into a little left and set a line off the top. It was not big at all, maybe pushing chest-high, and a not too fast but standing up enough that you could get some speed. So I set a line off the top and didn't make a bottom turn, I just started pumping hard right off the take-off. The wave had a crumbly section at about 15 yards and I hit it just right to cutback in time to hit the lip backside as the wave was closing. Then I tucked and punched through to paddle out for the next wave.

It must have been PB cause it was so crumbly and sectioned so quickly (and it was a dream of course, PB would have sectioned off at 5-10 yds!)...The whole thing lasted less than a minute and I could actually feel the wave as if it were real. I even had the residual stoke of having just ridden a wave well.

Surfing stoke is almost all about after the wave cause there is never enough time to think while you are riding the wave. You definately feel though while riding the wave and that feeling is like nothing else in the world. But stoke, well stoke is derived from the reflection on the wave as a whole combined with a recollection of the feel.

You think about how you will ride it just before, as you are paddling in. You go over quickly how the waves have been breaking that day, where the sections are popping up and how crisp they are. Do you have enough time, or is the wave breaking right, to to lay out a full bottom-turn or should you just start downline off the top? Maybe its super-hollow and fast and you should just airdrop into a stall and catch the barrel right away.

Should you float the section or hit it, maybe even try and pop a little air or just fly-out over the back...is it hollow? Can you backdoor a little barrel, get shacked for a second or two?

Then you see who is with you. Is someone paddling in closer to the peak or below you? Should you call them off? If its your buddy you usually get in a little friendly ribbing as you take him/her to task for the wave. If its not your buddy a hostile whistle or some, not so subtle, nastiness may be in order depending on how things have been up to that point.

So you have a plan and you go. Then there is the often mid-wave change of plan (the whole thing is a considered improvisation really)...is someone paddling through? Maybe you should bring it right up to them and snap it at the last second to shower them with water...this is always recommended if its your friend. Think quick! Is this guy paddling through the same guy who has been snaking you and dropping in all day? Sometimes you have to take one for the team and run the board right over them, which will certainly break your board, but it will also drive home a point that needs to be made (especially if its summertime and this kook is some yahoo tourist).

So you're finished...this is when you get a sec to think and the stoke really wells up. Its best if you just got a really rad ride and your buddies or the rest of the guys in the line-up saw and they share your stoke. Collective stoke has a cumulative effect on everyone involved. Sometimes you have some unsettled business with the jerk who just dropped in on you and its necessary to make a bee-line for them to either return the favor or make a comment, maybe two.

After the little daydream I got to thinking that if things "work out" I will be 26 years old the next time I ride a wave! Man, that brings about a mountain of ambivalence.

On a last note...along with "collective stoke" there is a collective drag. I remember a not-so-good junky sesh with my buddy Pher in PB where he took off on a right into the pier. You could not see him cause the waves were overhead. Then I see his board shoot up into the air (brand new board, like a couple days old I think) and wrap around one of the support columns under the pier. There was a simultaneous "oh man" from me and the other guys in the line up that day. This also reminds me of the time that Pher broke another board on an absolutely killer, heavy and hollow day at K-58 in Mexico. We sat for what seemed like four hours afterwards, and I watched him torment over whether or not he should bring the two halves back to California (it was probably only one hour, in Mexico time slows down about 4x as long as it normally is). Finally, in a fit of disgust he stuck the board remains in the trash can and we loaded the van to head back to the states...

Etc...

I think I would sell my soul for just one surf sesh. I would take Crystal Pier even...give me blown-out waist-high PB, I will take it. To be honest with you, I do not know what people who don't surf do for fun. I like to read too and a few other things, but I need some balance to my life. Now don't get me wrong, I am thrilled to death with the prospect of another day that includes 5-7 hours of reading statutes, court opinions, treaties and conventions. Its really a wonderful undertaking. What is best is that the modern court opinion, statute, and treaty is so formulaic that you do not have to worry about seeing anything you have not seen a thousand times before. I usually wake in a panic thinking that I might encounter an ECHR opinion that is not divided into sections that begin "As to the facts..," "As to the law..," etc...but my anxiety is immediately comforted upon a moment of cool reflection. For my career I have chosen to be a well-trained hamster running in a wheel. So here's to 12(b)(6) motions, preambles, procedures, fact patterns and damages...and God help us avoid any excitement!

Waltzing Matilda

Today I decided to study in an Irish pub in the old town center. I realize this is an unorthodox place to work on exam preparation so allow me to elucidate the situation.

First of all, as I have mentioned repeatedly, the fine distinctions of cafe/bar/pub are quite blurred here in the Old World. The situation is quite postmodern I suppose...the neat little constructed categories of social dining have been decentered. Notice that I have been forced to identify "cafe" by alienating it from "bar." A cafe is a cafe because it is not a bar; and then I can go into a list of the characteristics, but these too are simply particular examples of positing "X" as "not Y."

Now if you follow me, the identity of the cafe derives from its opposition to "others," which it is not, and in this case the "other" in question is a bar. But, alas, we have a clear problem! In staging the opposition between the two things we demonstrate their non-discrete, interrelational nature.

In order for the cafe to be understood as a cafe, as identical to itself, its properties are to a degree defined by being not the properties of other things and by the way they affect other things. So the other things, or "objects" have entered into the "subject," and vice versa. With each new confrontation the subject and its objects flow into each other, and in reality there is no point where a "thing" is a "thing in itself" so the process of alienation and strife is perpetual. This results in each "thing" never identifying with itself through time nor standing neatly opposed to supposed "other things" ontologically. As Nietzsche says:

"The properties of things are effects on other 'things:' if one removes other 'things,' then a thing has no properties, i.e., there is no thing without other things, i.e., there is no 'thing in itself.'"

In truth, there are neither cafes nor bars, only a set of interrelated effects gathered grammatically into things and ultimately binary things. So here the binary has simply been deconstructed and we are left with bricolage, or new de-centered constructs. These bar-cafe things are just as legitimate as the cafe as opposed to the bar, in fact, they are more playful. So I was not actually studying in a pub, so much as I was studying in this particular set of effects...and if you want to really get your hair blown back consider that there is also no "I." The "I" too does not exist except as gathered effects on other things, so there is no difference between me, you, and the very chair I am sitting in! (The intimacy of this is pleasant upon reflection).

So its perfectly reasonable to study in an Irish pub. I can get my double expresso there (I am a convert, the expresso offers more bang for your buck than tea), and I can listen to those wonderful little sad Irish folk ballads. I have really developed a thing for Irish ballads and I could not resist when I walked by and heard them playing.

I usually take another book with me when I study so that I can read it as a break. I study as a break from studying! Today I brought Marx, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy reading Marx. Were it not for my studies in formal, illusory bourgeois human rights I could have studied Marx all afternoon. That is beside the point though because something colossal happened today...someone struck up conversation with me at the pub!

I have complained many times about how impersonal people are here, and how often at home you end up having great conversations with strangers at cafes. Nobody has so much as asked me for the time here...until today. This was a Copernican revolution in my Danish social experience. It was not much, and it was an Irish girl so the Danes are not off the hook yet.

She too was studying in the pub, and she asked me, "Are you studying Marx?"

I wanted to say, "No, I am actually using this book by Marx to shield the sun while I study the wood grains in the table," but I decided my acute sarcasm would have been out of place. So I said, "Well, yes and no. I am just looking over him for personal research."

She asked, "Are you into Marxist politics?"

I said, "Actually, I am looking into Marx's early philosophical essays, proto-Marxist really, to see how they fit into post-Kantian German metaphysics and attempts to approach the problem of a two-world metaphysics." I think I should have said yes or no if I wanted the conversation to proceed beyond this point.

"Sounds interesting, well, I won't bother you," she said and then she turned and left the pub (she was on her way out as it was). I was thrilled to have some social interaction! My wavering faith in humanity was restored.

One of my friends has suggested that people so often talk to me in public places when I am studying because I study "sexy philosophies" like Marx and Nietzsche (I think "sexy" here is best understood as charismatic philosophies)...Not sure this bears out empirically, but the scientist in me could not avoid the experiment. So far Marxism has the clear upper hand. I will keep you all posted...

Bad News

30, 15, 60, 23 killed in insurgent attacks in Iraq...sorry to damper the mood guys, but this is killing me piece by piece. I feel sick everytime I read the news...physically ill. I suppose I should read about the Michael Jackson trial or how Paula Abdul helped a contestant of American Idol two years ago...diversion? No! In a market economy, self-delusion? But of course not.

Anyway, could you imagine living in a place where this is as much of the routine as brushing your teeth? Maybe I should just delete this and not send...but I will...why is this happening? How can people do this to each other? What "interest," value, or ideology is worth one person...much less 60?! 60 people! Can you even imagine if one person you loved times 3? I do not know what to say...I cannot say anything...

The First Exam

Well, the first exam is over. After working myself up to the brink of physical sickness, and its not just the exam, it was not bad at all. I got a 10, I have no idea what a 10 is, but I need a 6 to pass so I will take a 10. Its an oral exam of 20 minutes and if feels like you are in there for 3-4 minutes tops. I am, of course, blessed with a high degree of bravado and charisma so the oral exam is nothing for me (right!).

I take it like a conversation, like any conversation I would have in my daily life. I have a rule of thumb for when the conversation is getting out of my control or is just getting boring, and that rule is as follows: work the conversation immediately toward Socrates, Marx, Kant, Arendt or Nietzsche. There is an emergency rule too if you are having trouble accomplishing that: deconstruct the foundation of what the other person is talking about and then take the fragments and spin them so quickly in dialectics that the other person loses track of time.

I am not sure what just happened, but I just took a 20 minute "law" exam where in tenth minute I refuted the subject-object binary and then the last 7 minutes or so was a pleasant discussion of Heraclitus, the Buddhist teaching of the "not-self," and Schopenhauer's book The World as Will and Representation (which, for no apparent reason, I threw in my backpack this morning before I left for the test). Not quite Nietzsche but in the orbit of that great star, and close enough that I could breathe a sigh of relief.

So I have given you my secret! I do not even know how many people, or who, reads this webpage. Some of you are probably laughing to yourself thinking about the times that I seemed to ramble incoherently about truth being born out of falsity, the non-existence of cause and effect, etc...and then brought up one of the holy Dynamicisms like "thinking," love, flux, the One Will, or will to power. You've been had I suppose.

The really funny thing is that I do truly do this in all conversations, and not just academic conversations. This is why I have historically been such a hit with the ladies I suspect...

More Tremendous News!

You guys know that radio show that I am always talking up (Swami Sound System Saturday Nights 10pm-1am Pacific...7-10am in Denmark) on that radio station I am always talking up (www.fm949sandiego.com)? Well, it turns out the DJ, the Swami, is John Reis of the Hot Snakes, I think he also played on Rocket From the Crypt. The Hot Snakes are a good and very legit San Diego band, even did one of the last Peel Sessions with John Peel before he died. Check them out if you can. They are about to tour Europe (not Denmark, we'll see what we can do about that though) and I hope beyond hope to catch them. Check out the radio show!!! Its uber-rad!