Futuristic Words

Last week I posted an entry about a girl who texted me out of the blue, a girl who wanted some Future but whom Future did not know.

I found out.

It was Soul.

Well played, sir. I will get you back, but that was very well played.

Congratulations to all the students who completed the workshop in San Francisco this weekend. I have high hopes for all of you. Vercetti and Big Business, I really appreciate the help. You gentlemen make it easy to forget that running workshops is a job because the whole experience is so easy with such ridiculously competent fellow instructors. Starlight, thanks for your hospitality at the tail ends of the weekend. You’re a prince.

I have scheduled a pair of boot camps for December.

New York: 4-6 December
Los Angeles: 11-13 December

If you’re interested, contact Love Systems either through the company website or by calling (310)836-0150.

If you do sign up for either of those boot camps, you will be treated to the sight of a man newly victorious.

“Newly victorious, Future?” you ask.

Yes.

“But why?”

I’m glad you asked. Because this November, I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo” as the cool kids have been known to call it. For those of you who haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, it’s pretty simple: one month, 50,000 words. I’ve toyed with the idea of spending an entire November huddled around a pot of coffee for eight hours a day while ranting about gerunds and fireballs since I first heard about NaNoWriMo in 2007, but this time I’m going to put my money where my dreams and delusions of grandeur are.

I’ve set up a contest with some of my friends to make the entire event a little more interesting. Everyone contributes $300 before NaNoWriMo begins. Everyone participates in NaNoWriMo. Those who get to 50,000 words get their $300 back. If you get to 49,999 words or less, you are assed out $300 bucks this Christmas shopping seasons. Money left behind is split by the participants who can now finally call themselves novelists when they look in the mirror each morning.

If you live in the New York area and would like to join me in this little adventure/competition, leave a comment (because I’m vain and like comments on my blog entries) and contact me at future@lovesystems.com (because you need to know where and when to drop off your $300 as well as to participate in whatever weird support group this thing will probably end up being). To prevent your message from being lost in the shuffle of my daily e-mail deluge, please include the word NANOWRIMO in your subject if you’re going to make 2009 the year you finally wrote your novel, and you’re willing to put a new iPhone/new PS3 on it. We’re putting the money together this week, so time is of the essence.

* YOUR FOOD IS POISONED! RUN FOR THE HILLS! If you eat meat made from cows, you should watch this video. It’s not a PETA video. I love me some steak. It’s about the extremely limited testing for pathogens in your food. Oh, and you probably won’t sleep tonight.

* Katie Couric interviews Glenn Beck – Glenn Beck is an idiot. This much is plain from his talk show and his radio show. Watching him squirm before Katie Couric’s terrible and kind grin was a special kind of schaudenfreude for me.

* Lara Logan could kick my ass! – I have been in love with Lara Logan since I saw her on the Daily Show on 17 June 2008. Periodically she shows up on the air and reminds Americans that we have men and women on the ground in war zones. Here she is on The Daily Show:

She was on The Colbert Report on Tuesday where she again made me want to marry her:

Besides that where she did her thing where she made me want to marry her and brought my attention to her amazing new segment on CBS News, Afghanistan: The Road Ahead. I’m linking to the site, since there’s no specific video you should watch. Besides, if you had the same reaction to Lara Logan’s interviews that I did—excepting the boner—I don’t need to encourage you to find out what the situation on the ground is like in Afghanistan.

I’d recommend you add an RSS feed to whatever reader you use so you can keep up-to-date with her work, which is what I do with Michael Ware’s reporting, but that will only lead to despair and spam in your RSS reader. Every other video search for her is cheesecake footage because she’s so frigging hot.

* There’s a special camaraderie between people who list “etymology” among their turn-ons. Marina Orlova’s Hot for Words is pretty much what would result if someone asked me what the ideal PG-13 Internet entertainment would look like. I can barely believe her show even exists. She’s a hot European who explains word origins in every episode. In my dreams Orlova and Lara Logan jello wrestle for my affections before calling it a wash and drawing up a plan for a menage a trois.

* I don’t own a television, but that doesn’t mean much in the world of Hulu and Netflix. Besides Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, I am watching Californication and East Bound and Down. The former is pretty much required watching if you are reading my blog for anything other than entertainment purposes, and the latter is probably the smartest satire of contemporary America I have ever seen. Oh, and I watch Glee every week and download all the songs. Because I’m gay.

I was minding my own business, hanging out at a karaoke bar with Soul and Big Business, when I received a text from an unknown San Francisco number:

“What u up to? U should come over! Xxo”

Moments before I had huddled over my beer with my colleagues and decried a woman who I had wanted right up until the moment when she threw herself at me. That said, this was something new and unknown, a number a.) I hadn’t bothered to copy or b.) I had deleted because the fuse was too long, and I refused to play any phone games. I generally give  about two or three phone calls, more if she’s exceptional or if we have a powerful connection, before I stop torturing myself by deleting the number.

Anyway, it’s a high quality problem. Some girl booty-called me, and I have no idea who she is.  Son of a bitch.

I’ve been using Google Wave, by which I mean I’ve been starting waves with people and we’ve talked about how dumb the application is. This is what all that sound and fury were about? What a waste of clever coders’ time.

One of the students in my Breakthrough Comfort course this weekend asked me how to find his passion. It’s a tough question to answer, but I feel like it comes from looking your fear dead in the eye and marching or sprinting toward it. But that’s not quite right, because then you would walk down dark alleyways in Compton for no reason at all. It’s more like your passion is usually where your desires are occluded in your mind’s eye by fear. I don’t think it’s possible to be passionate something over the long term if that something doesn’t promote change, and change is bed buddies with fear.

Apprehending your personal destiny seems to be about the unflinching and unapologetic pursuit of passion while bowing before the caprice of the universe. A lot of people like to puff their chests and crow, “I control my own destiny!” but they are fools to a man. No one truly controls the path of his own life. From the beginning, you did not choose your family or the circumstances into which you were born, and unless you make very specific decisions, most of which involve suicide, you don’t get to choose when you stand before St. Peter and/or headbang with GG Allin and Hitler.* Real humility in the face of the universe’s caprice, then, is living in the full light of the knowledge that your time here is limited, your specific existence is thus rare and precious. Every minute we take for granted is a kind of idolatry of the self. In those moments where we allow ourselves boredom or ennui or lethargy of the spirit, we stretch our lives past infinity, unburdened with grateful responsibility because as long as we are healthy and well and comfortable surely we cannot die.

This is living religiously. The metaphor of Christ or Allah or Yahweh is powerful, and there are clues to aid in good living in every religious text. Far be it from me to declare anyone’s path to the divine wrong. But the main point of religion seems to be our attempt as a species to wrestle with the notion of our consciousness as meaningful in the face of its inevitable termination. We have power and agency, the ability to generate well-being and love for others, the ability to fuck and fight… and then a plane obliterates a building on a perfect Tuesday morning or that IED goes off or a 60 foot wave reminds you that Mama Nature always has the last word or we’re sorry sir, it’s malignant and inoperable or you just talked to her this morning how can she be dead? Living to the fullest is supposed to be hard, although we tend to overcomplicate it, which makes it harder. We must accept our full impact and agency, the mighty extent of our abilities, even as we bow our heads to the impossible plan of the universe. Somewhere in there is what we call worship. For some people, it’s easier to name it and give it a face and call it God, but it’s always a name for that thing that is greater than any one of us or all of us and yet is a part of us, even if certain nomenclatures make you think of red states or social contagions or suicide bombers or Glenn Beck.

I’m not saying, by the way, that if you kneel before the might of the universe you will get girls, even though this is my Love Systems blog. The part that will be alluring the fairer sex is the part where you accept the full impact of your agency and kick the doors of life wide open. The deeper element of that, though, is that I’m not sure it’s possible to do said kicking without appreciating, even on a subconscious level, how tenuous our position on this rock really is. So the part that makes you appealing to women is the part where you answer the question, “What would you do with your life if you only had one shot. Because you do.”

*—Fun fact: St. Peter’s cross is an inverted Latin cross. Contemporary culture attributes this symbol to Satanism or the anti-Christ, but the original meaning was a reference to Peter’s denial of Jesus and his sense that he was unfit to be crucified like Jesus. This begs the question as to whether anyone should get to choose the ornamentation of their execution method. If I die from lethal injection, for instance, can I request a mixture of UV-reactive compound be added to the poison so my funeral can be a bitchin’ rave where I leave a glowing corpse? I mean, presumably the people crucifying (remember: this is where you pound metal into someone’s arms and legs so they are nailed to pieces of wood) did not like Peter. If they were feeling so charitable, and I were Peter, I would probably say, “You know, never mind inverting the cross. Let’s talk about not putting me on it to begin with, nowhatI’msayin’?” Come to think of it, he was probably just punking whatever newbie Roman soldier was on cross detail. Crucifixion is ugly business, and I imagine the effects of gravity on blood in a post-mortem victim of crucifixion are unpleasant in the extreme. Think head engorged with fluid, eyes popping out, tongue lolling, also filled with blood. And God knows what would happen to brain or ears or neck. The newbie probably arrived at Peter’s corpse, expecting something normal only to find Ashton Kutcher and friends pointing and laughing.**

**—$10 to anyone who gets laid using that footnote as an attraction routine.

I’m still in Las Vegas, at least physically. This city is not meant for ordinary people but is instead designed for some other species, one uncursed with livers. It took about seventeen minutes before my sobriety became a fuzzy memory, a fact I came to regret with the full force of my being all weekend, as my drinking lapse soon became a behavioral leitmotif. If you’ve never attempted to give a compelling speech to a room full of grown-ups while fighting off the effects of a three day bender, I strongly recommend you take my advice and forego the alcohol. As I swam through my hangovers, plural, I took solace in the fact I was surrounded by similarly afflicted scoundrels.

The last hour of the last day of the conference proper I was sitting with my fellow instructors when Savoy’s words of acknowledgement and acclaim pierced the blear of my semi-traumatized, sleepless state. I am sure pictures from that moments immediately preceding the announcement will show me for the husk of a man I was at the time. I cannot express enough gratitude to the students who declared me the favorite instructor in Las Vegas this weekend. For me, the entire weekend was a learning experience. Through narrowed eyes under a furrowed brow I watched my colleagues and felt my jaw dropping lower and lower with every feat of romantic or sexual derring do. Were it  not for the distinct danger to my internal organs, I might wish the Super Conference could go on forever. Were it so I would probably understand human beings as if I had the mind of the Creator in the moments immediately before I succumbed to my toxic blood alcohol level. I love this company. I love working in a job where I get to change people’s lives as a matter of course. Thanks again to the students and instructors who made this weekend a legend before the sun came up on Monday.

Oh, Onion News Network, you are a constant source of amusement.

All my creative attention has turned to my novel, a fantasy piece set in the modern day I plan to officially start for National Novel Writing Month. I’m 28, and I’ve had a book lingering in my brain for as long as I can remember. Time to put up or shut up.

It’s been a strange week in the world of skin and whispers. In two cases, Breakthrough Comfort did its thing, and even though I was explicit about the terms of the respective relationships, it did not assuage the angst these girls felt. An LJBF converted (again, BTC) and another reverted (she found a boyfriend). Some old flames returned, and some insanely beautiful women arbitrarily started qualifying themselves to me in a context outside stand-up comedy. Also, some very special drama manifested regarding two ex-girlfriends. Fuck, I am exhausted.

Braddock and I talked about same-night seduction when he was leading his seventy-two workshops in New York recently. If this year’s been any indication, I’ve found a way to generate the same intense results in a night—in an hour sometimes—but Braddock predicted the complication of girls getting too attached too quickly, i.e. the difficulty in modulating the Destiny/Golden Mirror switches in the Breakthrough Comfort model. He and Helicase and dahunter strongly favor a Shock and Awe model, with heavy teasing and strong logistical control mixed with unrelenting escalation. I bristle at the notion of walking into a venue as a wrecking ball of sexuality—it feels very Night at the Roxbury to me– but I don’t see an alternative if I don’t want girls crying over my behavior and raging about their senses of entitlement* when it comes to potential relationships.

I bristle because I go out of my way, perhaps too far out of my way, to practice empathy. One of the more insidious aspects of dating so much is a forced nonchalance to any eventuality. This girl will do this in this amount of time, this girl will do that. It’s true that people will always surprise you on a long enough timeline, but they are also predictable within a certain model. It takes a lot of contortion and comfort and peeling away layers of vulnerability before you can see any individual’s special snowflake, and with a lot of people all you find is the ORE that will eventually allow for such a unique design. Young girls especially are unrefined potential, usually, and it’s rare to find a fully-formed, fully-conscious 21-year-old (of either sex, really). Constantly seeing the same behaviors over and over again can make a man jaded and start to believe the SUISC truism that makes me bite through my tongue with anger: she’s not special. Ugh. Every time I see it or hear it or think it or—God help me—believe it, I want to stab the nearest baby. The world is a cold, ugly place if you don’t endeavor to find each individual’s specific human dignity. Shit, even if I eventually discover that I despise a given person, I hope I can do so after unraveling the real person beneath the persona he or she wears when facing the world at large.

Big Business pointed out that thus to really connect, you have to maintain a perfect dichotomy of opposite feelings: you have to believe in your gut that She is not special, this girl you’re talking to, because she won’t be attracted to someone who rewards her for that which she has not earned… yet you must be ready to connect at the soul-level when the chance presents itself if you’re going to have a romantic/sexual/intimate experience with any meaning.

For all the pain of separation in this past week, I have had much joy in connection; I have ridden a sine curve. The drama has been hard on my heart but educational. I am blessed to have this perspective.

Also, there is no love in the world. Only pain:

In case I didn’t make the case in my last update, you should attend the Love Systems Super Conference this weekend in Las Vegas. All our instructors will be out there with a few additions, e.g. Brad P, and it’s going to be heaps upon layers crammed into tunnels made entirely of fun. And vagina.

Lose time:

- Tons of sampling from Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, clever implementation of a video game styled HUD, and the only good use of first person perspective I’ve seen so far in live action. One question remains unanswered, though: what’s in the box?

- I’m reading Niall Ferguson’s Ascent of Money. It’s a dramatic departure from the fantasy series I’ve been reading since July, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. Dr. Ferguson is smart and a very good writer, but reading Ascent of Money makes me feel like I tested well and should be in the slow class. That said, the farther in the book I read, the more prescient Dr. Ferguson appears. Perhaps he can get a fourth PhD in Cassandraism. After that will be, in this order, A Whole New Mind, Why Women Should Rule the World, Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie, The Artist’s Way, and then back to fiction with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and House of Leaves. I’m sad because except for the first one, NONE of those books are available for my Kindle.

- Get a Kindle. Girls (and guys and homeless people) will start conversations with you to talk about it. As with any situational opener, it then falls on you the Romantic Philosopher (RS)* to continue the conversation. I could go on and on about this amazing device. If you’re scrunching your face and muttering something about how much you miss the feel of books, I would point to the weight of the device and its note-taking abilities and its nearly infinite battery life. And then I would kick you in the shins and call you a Luddite.

- This is a video of a goat that screams like a person. (Thanks, Shanna)

-  I read Gretchen Rubin’s blog every day, and I am never more than a few inches from her 12 commandments of happiness. They are the first thing I scrawl in any notebook. Her book is coming out soon, but the blog is filled with thoughtful ideas about individual, familial, and societal happiness.

- Tuesday, 6 October 2009. With the exception of an errant shot of tequila at the Atlanta boot camp, a shot of tequila shoved in my hand by an excited Marine last weekend, and a glass of red wine foisted on me by a girl this recent Sunday, this is day 39 of a Future without Alcohol.

*—On this new term. I hate the terminology of the SUISC, and I love how my company has strived to bridge the gap between the Mystery-led herd of blind children to the rest of the mortal population. I eschew terminology like “PUA” or “player” or “pimp” because they wreak of a disingenuousness based on the faux excellence they imply. When I first taught at a boot camp, a student asked me how long it took me to become a “PUA”, and although I probably should have restrained myself, I looked at him like he was crazy. I have had success with women, and I have had failure. I can repeat my successes consistently, and I can talk meaningfully about the times I achieved or fell short of my goals. Any wisdom regarding my relationships with women I have attained by grasping it from the crucible of failure/awkwardness/embarrassment with bare hands. When I fight approach anxiety or have to use my knowledge to explain away a rejection, I carry the same frame of mind I did when I first discovered the SUISC. In those moments, I am no guru, just another student of human nature with a lofty heart.