Getting It Wrong All Over the Place

Here are 13 things that every skilled chaos-surfer understands:

1. How something appears to you may not be how it is.


2. What is said or shown may not be all there is.


3. What is true for me may not be true for you.


4. The same words may mean different things to different people.


5. What people say may not be what they mean. Because comms is lossy and language is me

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This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish... See more

Before an interview, I sometimes re-read this great passage from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral :

You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wr

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My taste often deviates from many. I am not a willing contrarian. I’m just kind of weird. I possess no real frustration over this because art is something subjective, but it scares me. It scares me that I’m missing something, that everyone else is on a wavelength that I can’t harmonize with, that for all the books I have in me, none of them will ev... See more