thelerner

Working out I can drop my heart rate by 3 or 4 beats by visualizing I'm lying in a hammock watching the moon rise. If I look at the heart monitor it usually goes up a notch, as if just looking at it 'worries' me. I'll do the 'secret smile' technique where you visualize being relaxed, a confident moment, feeling humor, love, and sexual rush and send them through the MCO. I think it activates some positive hormonal responses. Look what happens to your body when watching an intense movie. You get physical responses. I've heard it said there's a part of your brain that can't tell the difference between what you imagine and what you see, ie takes everything literally. Which goes to hypnosis territory. Perhaps we go from one state of trance to another, in deeper states our control over so called autonomous body functions is amazing.

KAP, Kundalini Awakening Process online, is based on Glenn Morris's eclectic energy work. Its taught through Skype by 2 pretty advanced teachers, Santiago (who used to be an active TTB member) and Tao Semko. Are you guaranteed to wake up your K from it. No, but if you're diligent it will put you on the right path. Here is a link: http://www.kundaliniawakeningprocess.com/ Joe Blast has written about his experience in KAP in his personal section. Reading through Pathnotes of a Ninja Master (bad tittle good book) by Glenn Morris gives a good idea of what is in the courses, plus Tao Semko has done many excellent videos on aspects of Kundalini. Susan Carlson is a KAP graduate/teacher who's done quite a bit of work in terms of Kundalini. I quote a very revealing piece she wrote about K. in my Personal Practice section under Best of Tao Bums. Today I was listening to one of the most experienced bums on the subject of MCO. Teacher Lin Aiwei http://timemonkradio.com/threads/expedient-means.269/#post-1799 Great podcast from an experienced teacher. Time Monk Radio is a great resource to listen to Lin's Wisdom.

Lots of that taught in the KAP skype classes.

I don't like to many pinned topics. They take away from the meat of the board which is easily seeing discussions. Still if an unused pinned topic was knocked out or a place could be found for it that wouldn't hurt the # of discussions on the home screen it would be a good to experiment with. Until then I notice Articles section moves slowly. It's a bit of a subterfuge but a Kundalini article written there could spark long discussions while keeping to the top of the page.

Such a concept is still an intellectual abstraction for me. But one I should play with.

I haven't read Anatole, but the gay, Jew, gypsy, critic of the Nazi party would probably end up first in a concentration camp. In that situation being a political and social activist would mean death. Similarly a Taoist critic of Mao would be first in a Re-education camp, others who were not critical along w/ millions of others would follow. Sometimes the way to win is to leave, survive and thrive. Evil tends to be self destructive. It may take years or decades. Its not a path for everyone or every time, but such wu wei style action, leave, survive and thrive; ain't a bad route. There is always a place for heroes, but they die and can have there visions corrupted. To stand in the way of an avalanche is brave, but won't accomplish much. I'm not saying one is better then the other. The world needs both. We also need the wisdom not to paint everything we oppose as Nazi'ish.

Its popular spiritual/newage(?) authors, like Tolle, Pema Chodron, Kornfield, Advashanti etc., but if you want a short 30 minute introduction to there work its available for a buck. http://www.soundstrue.com/news/one-dollar/version-b.html?dispop=0&utm_source=Sounds_True&utm_medium=email&utm_content=postcard&utm_campaign=PRLS13-b&_bta_tid=3.RM0.AmdITA.Ayee.IZVy..a3z4.s.L58.l.ATe6.a.UfIPNA.UfIPNA.djWPaQ&_bta_c=7tgal5splcyoyye9pqy0l4j9bpbba

The ability to keep an open mind and experiment in life is an awesome power.

The Man burns in 37 days. I'll be at the Whiskey & Dust camp this year, any bums heading down should look me up.

Still not working . I've been getting a too many users in the room error message. If only.

Nice piece, lots to digest.

Cynical, yes, but hopefully for some the generalizations will find a home, like #6. We're victims of the Outrage Machine. is particularly good and ties in to the danger of monovision, only reading and researching for things that will exactly agree with your point of view. And the damn faux rage I see so many places. Where people don't DO anything about the crime they bellow about, its all about: THIS IS HORRIBLE AND CRIMINAL, but if asked if they do anything to help the situation, the answer is usually 'No, my ranting on various blogs is enough' then its moving on the next subject to rant on.

NAJA, I think you'd prefer this article from above: 5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)By Jane Jones, David Wong February 17, 2009, around mid point of the first post, which outlines the problems with pursuing Wealth, power, Beauty, genius, etc. Sample: #4. Wealth "Let's not bullshit each other. You see those ads on the side of the screen? And at the top? And at the bottom? Go look at one of them. We just made $800, baby. Seriously, they're set up to detect the position of your eyeballs. If you actually click on one, we make enough to fill our SnoCone machine with Cristal. Most of us get out of bed everyday purely because it edges us one step closer to some kind of financial future we want. If we won the lottery, most of us would show up to the office the next day wearing an ankle-length fur coat and enough bling to make Mr. T look Amish, and only stay just long enough to take a dump in our boss's inbox. So What's the Problem? Hey, remember when we said earlier that most people wouldn't do the body-switching thing for fear they'd wake up in Nigeria? Well according to surveys, Nigerians are happier with their lives than the people of any other country. The USA came in 16th. Hey, did we mention that the average Nigerian makes $300 a year? That's less than a hundredth of what the average American makes. America being the country that hands out 120 million prescriptions for anti-depressants every year. China is turning into a great object lesson in this, as their economy explodes and incomes skyrocket, but levels of happiness and personal satisfaction are dropping at the same rapid rate. There's a couple of reasons for it. First, your brain adjusts feelings of happiness downward after you've reached some goal or other. It regulates the good feelings, presumably so that you have motivation to reach the next goal instead of just lounging by the pool for the rest of your days." Me. Ultimately he's looking for a system that works. While there are good things about the whole hippie movement, its mostly a nostalgic memory these days. The hippies are gone. They got jobs, family.. Beyond peace and love, you need a job.. You living in this reality whether you like it or not. You can make intelligent choices that are good for you and society. I don't follow your 'If desire is necessary then..' line. In your life can you honestly say you don't live with necessary evils? You're using a computer which some would say produces 100's of jobs, others would say 'that's 4 more people you're enslaving.' I don't think we could live in society without daily necessary evil at some level. Not that it shouldn't be minimized. But we shouldn't pass the buck either. If a person's feels pride he's not a 'cog' in the system, but he's sponging off a person who is, then whats the difference? Get a job, one that does good. Wang's point is: Bite the bullet, get the skills, become useful. When he was saying 'You are your job', he didn't necessarily mean your employment was your job. Let me quote: "Granted, your "job" and your means of employment might not be the same thing, but in both cases you are nothing more than the sum total of your useful skills. For instance, being a good mother is a job that requires a skill. It's something a person can do that is useful to other members of society." <I'd agree he's stretching w/ the 'nothing more than' comment, but its still pointing to an important truth> also "You don't have to like it. I don't like it when it rains on my birthday. It rains anyway. Clouds form and precipitation happens. People have needs and thus assign value to the people who meet them. These are simple mechanisms of the universe and they do not respond to our wishes. If you protest that you're not a shallow capitalist materialist and that you disagree that money is everything, I can only say: Who said anything about money? You're missing the larger point." NAJA, you may be coming from a philosophical and utopian viewpoint, but he's coming from a practical one. One informed by hundreds of letters he reads from 20 y.o's complaining about how there life is screwed up. His writing is supposed to be a slap. You're not supposed to agree with all of it. Near the bottom is his essay on how Not to be Brain Washed. I think his views are very valuable. Even the stuff I disagree with, is important to chew on. If you're reacting very strongly to it you should read his essays on being so highly partisan that shields are always up, guarding against any idea from the other side and slurping up any idea that backs up your own predisposition, even when its from shady sources. Such a diet is corrupting. Becoming hyper-partisan is literally unbalancing on both sides. Let me quote him: #6. We're victims of the Outrage Machine. and a sample: "A whole lot of the people still reading this are saying, "Of course I'm depressed! People are starving! America has turned into Nazi Germany! My parents watch retarded television shows and talk about them for hours afterward! People are dying in meaningless wars all over the world!" But how did we wind up with a more negative view of the world than our parents? Or grandparents? Back then, people didn't live as long and babies died more often. Diseases were more common. In those days, if your buddy moved away the only way to communicate was with pen and paper and a stamp. We have Iraq, but our parents had Vietnam (which killed 50 times more people) and their parents had World War 2 (which killed 1,000 times as many). Some of your grandparents grew up at a time when nobody had air conditioning. All of their parents grew up without it. We are physically better off today in every possible way in which such things can be measured ... but you sure as hell wouldn't know that if you're getting your news online. Why? Well, ask yourself: If some music site posts an article called, "Fall Out Boy is a Fine Band" and on the same day posts another one called, "Fall Out Boy is the Shittiest Fucking Band of the Last 100 Years, Say Experts," which do you think will get the most traffic? The second one wins in a blowout. Outrage manufactures word-of-mouth. The news blogs many of you read? The people running them know the same thing. Every site is in a dogfight for traffic (even if they don't run ads, they still measure their success by the size of their audience) and so they carefully pick through the wires for the most inflammatory story possible. The other blogs start echoing the same story from the same point of view. If you want, you can surf all day and never swim out of the warm, stagnant waters of the "aren't those bastards evil" pool. Only in that climate could those silly 9/11 conspiracy theories come about (saying the Bush administration and the FDNY blew up the towers, and that the planes were holograms). To hear these people talk, every opposing politician is Hitler, and every election is the freaking apocalypse. All because it keeps you reading. This wasn't as much a problem in the old days, of course. Some of us remember having only three channels on TV. That's right. Three. We're talking about the '80s here. So there was something unifying in the way we all sat down to watch the same news, all of it coming from the same point of view. Even if the point of view was retarded and wrong, even if some stories went criminally unreported, we at least all shared it. That's over. There effectively is no "mass media" any more so, where before we disagreed because we saw the same news and interpreted it differently, now we disagree because we're seeing completely different freaking news. When we can't even agree on the basic facts, the differences become irreconcilable. That constant feeling of being at bitter odds with the rest of the world brings with it a tension that just builds and builds."

The writing means to be edgie and provocative(least you got past the mf sentences ), and he prefaces it saying if you're happy where you're at, disregard that part. He has a lot of points, some may resonate with you. If you're working 40 hours or more at a job, there is a benefit in making it part of you. Taking responsibility to master it, not just show up and collect a paycheck. It shouldn't be all you are, that'd be a huge mistake, but you shouldn't spend that much of a slice of your life, mentally dead. If its truly worthless, move on to something you can identify with. I think the thrust of his message, get the skills to do something meaningful and worthwhile. Its worth the effort to do something you can be proud of.

or move to tea, its mellower and will give you a healthy but lighter caffeine hit.

here's a little more for those w/ long attention spans. & FWIW more Wisdom of the Wong http://www.cracked.com/members/David+Wong/ 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable By David Wong September 09, 2007 Scientists call it the Naked Photo Test, and it works like this: say a photo turns up of you nakedly doing something that would shame you and your family for generations. Bestiality, perhaps. Ask yourself how many people in your life you would trust with that photo. If you're like the rest of us, you probably have at most two. Even more depressing, studies show that about one out of four people have no one they can confide in. The average number of close friends we say we have is dropping fast, down dramatically in just the last 20 years. Why? #1. We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives. That's not sarcasm. Annoyance is something you build up a tolerance to, like alcohol or a bad smell. The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it. The problem is we've built an awesome, sprawling web of technology meant purely to let us avoid annoying people. Do all your Christmas shopping online and avoid the fat lady ramming her cart into you at Target. Spend $5,000 on a home theater system so you can see movies on a big screen without a toddler kicking the back of your seat. Hell, rent the DVD's from Netflix and you don't even have to spend the 30 seconds with the confused kid working the register at Blockbuster. Get stuck in the waiting room at the doctor? No way we're striking up a conversation with the smelly old man in the next seat. We'll plug the iPod into our ears and have a text conversation with a friend or play our DS. Filter that annoyance right out of our world. Now that would be awesome if it were actually possible to keep all of the irritating shit out of your life. But, it's not. It never will be. As long as you have needs, you'll have to deal with people you can't stand from time to time. We're losing that skill, the one that lets us deal with strangers and tolerate their shrill voices and clunky senses of humor and body odor and squeaky shoes. So, what encounters you do have with the outside world, the world you can't control, make you want to go on a screaming crotch-punching spree. #2. We don't have enough annoying friends, either. Lots of us were born into towns full of people we couldn't stand. As a kid, maybe you found yourself in an elementary school classroom, packed in with two dozen kids you did not choose and who shared none of your tastes or interests. Maybe you got beat up a lot. But, you've grown up. And if you're, say, a huge DragonForce fan, you can go find their forum and meet a dozen people just like you. Or even better, start a private room with your favorite few and lock everybody else out. Say goodbye to the tedious, awkward, painful process of dealing with somebody who's truly different. That's another Old World inconvenience, like having to wash your clothes in a creek or wait for a raccoon to wander by the outhouse so you can wipe your ass with it. The problem is that peacefully dealing with incompatible people is crucial to living in a society. In fact, if you think about it, peacefully dealing with people you can't stand is society. Just people with opposite tastes and conflicting personalities sharing space and cooperating, often through gritted teeth. Fifty years ago, you had to sit in a crowded room to see a movie. You didn't get to choose; you either did that or you missed the movie. When you got a new car, everyone on the block came and stood in your yard to look it over. You can bet that some of those people were assholes. 
Your parents, circa 1982 Yet, on the whole, people back then were apparently happier in their jobs and more satisfied with their lives. And get this: They had more friends.  That's right. Even though they had almost no ability to filter their peers according to common interests (hell, often you were just friends with the guy who happened to live next door), they still came up with more close friends than we have now-people they could trust. It turns out, apparently, that after you get over that first irritation, after you shed your shell of "they listen to different music because they wouldn't understand mine" superiority, there's a sort of comfort in needing other people and being needed on a level beyond common interests. It turns out humans are social animals after all. And that ability to suffer fools, to tolerate annoyance, that's literally the one single thing that allows you to function in a world populated by other people who aren't you. Otherwise, you turn emo. Science has proven it. #3. Texting is a shitty way to communicate. I have this friend who uses the expression "No, thank you," in a sarcastic way. It means, "I'd rather be shot in the face." He puts a little ironic lilt on the last two words that lets you know. You ask, "Want to go see that new Rob Schneider movie?" And, he'll say, "No, thank you." So one day we had this exchange via text: Me: "Hey, do you want me to bring over that leftover chili I made?" Him: "No, thank you" That pissed me off. I'm proud of my chili. It takes four days to make it. I grind up the dried peppers myself; the meat is expensive, hand-tortured veal. And, now my offer to give him some is dismissed with his bitchy catchphrase? I didn't speak to him for six months. He sent me a letter, I mailed it back, unread, with a dead rat packed inside. It was my wife who finally ran into him and realized that the "No, thank you" he replied with was not meant to be sarcastic, but was a literal, "No, but thank you for offering." He had no room in his freezer, it turns out. So did we really need a study to tell us that more than 40 percent of what you say in an e-mail is misunderstood? Well, they did one anyway. How many of your friends have you only spoken with online? If 40 percent of your personality has gotten lost in the text transition, do these people even really know you? The people who dislike you via text, on message boards or chatrooms or whatever, is it because you're really incompatible? Or, is it because of the misunderstood 40 percent? And, what about the ones who like you? Many of us try to make up that difference in sheer numbers, piling up six dozen friends on MySpace. But here's the problem ... #4. Online company only makes us lonelier. When someone speaks to you face-to-face, what percentage of the meaning is actually in the words, as opposed to the body language and tone of voice? Take a guess. It's 7 percent. The other 93 percent is nonverbal, according to studies. No, I don't know how they arrived at that exact number. They have a machine or something. But we didn't need it. I mean, come on. Most of our humor is sarcasm, and sarcasm is just mismatching the words with the tone. Like my friend's "No, thank you." You don't wait for a girl to verbally tell you she likes you. It's the sparkle in her eyes, her posture, the way she grabs your head and shoves your face into her boobs.  That's the crux of the problem. That human ability to absorb the moods of others through that kind of subconscious osmosis is crucial. Kids born without it are considered mentally handicapped. People who have lots of it are called "charismatic" and become movie stars and politicians. It's not what they say; it's this energy they put off that makes us feel good about ourselves. When we're living in Text World, all that is stripped away. There's a weird side effect to it, too: absent a sense of the other person's mood, every line we read gets filtered through our own mood instead. The reason I read my friend's chili message as sarcastic was because I was in an irritable mood. In that state of mind, I was eager to be offended. And worse, if I do enough of my communicating this way, my mood never changes. After all, people keep saying nasty things to me! Of course I'm depressed! It's me against the world! No, what I need is somebody to shake me by the shoulders and snap me out of it. Which leads us to No. 5 ... #5. We don't get criticized enough. Most of what sucks about not having close friends isn't the missed birthday parties or the sad, single-player games of ping pong with the wall. No, what sucks is the lack of real criticism. In my time online I've been called "fag" approximately 104,165 times. I keep an Excel spreadsheet. I've also been called "asshole" and "cockweasel" and "fuckcamel" and "cuntwaffle" and "shitglutton" and "porksword" and "wangbasket" and "shitwhistle" and "thundercunt" and "fartminge" and "shitflannel" and "knobgoblin" and "boring."  And none of it mattered, because none of those people knew me well enough to really hit the target. I've been insulted lots, but I've been criticized very little. And don't ever confuse the two. An insult is just someone who hates you making a noise to indicate their hatred. A barking dog. Criticism is someone trying to help you, by telling you something about yourself that you were a little too comfortable not knowing. Tragically, there are now a whole lot of people who never have those conversations. The interventions, the brutal honesty, the, "you know, everybody's pissed off because of what you said last night, but nobody wants to say anything because they're afraid of you," sort of conversations. Those horrible, awkward, wrenchingly uncomfortable sessions that you can only have with someone who sees right to the center of you.  E-mail and texting are awesome tools for avoiding that level of honesty. With text, you can respond when you feel like it. You can measure your words. You can pick and choose which questions to answer. The person on the other end can't see your face, can't see you get nervous, can't detect when you're lying. You have almost total control and as a result that other person never sees past your armor, never sees you at your worst, never knows the embarrassing little things about yourself that you can't control. Gone are the common quirks, humiliations and vulnerabilities that real friendships are built on. Browse around people's MySpace pages, look at the characters they create for themselves. If you've built a pool of friends via a blog, building yourself up as a misunderstood, mysterious Master of the Night, it's kind of hard to log on and talk about how you went to prom and got diarrhea out on the dance floor. You never get to really be yourself, and that's a very lonely feeling. And, on top of all that ... #6. We're victims of the Outrage Machine. A whole lot of the people still reading this are saying, "Of course I'm depressed! People are starving! America has turned into Nazi Germany! My parents watch retarded television shows and talk about them for hours afterward! People are dying in meaningless wars all over the world!" But how did we wind up with a more negative view of the world than our parents? Or grandparents? Back then, people didn't live as long and babies died more often. Diseases were more common. In those days, if your buddy moved away the only way to communicate was with pen and paper and a stamp. We have Iraq, but our parents had Vietnam (which killed 50 times more people) and their parents had World War 2 (which killed 1,000 times as many). Some of your grandparents grew up at a time when nobody had air conditioning. All of their parents grew up without it. We are physically better off today in every possible way in which such things can be measured ... but you sure as hell wouldn't know that if you're getting your news online. Why? Well, ask yourself: If some music site posts an article called, "Fall Out Boy is a Fine Band" and on the same day posts another one called, "Fall Out Boy is the Shittiest Fucking Band of the Last 100 Years, Say Experts," which do you think will get the most traffic? The second one wins in a blowout. Outrage manufactures word-of-mouth. The news blogs many of you read? The people running them know the same thing. Every site is in a dogfight for traffic (even if they don't run ads, they still measure their success by the size of their audience) and so they carefully pick through the wires for the most inflammatory story possible. The other blogs start echoing the same story from the same point of view. If you want, you can surf all day and never swim out of the warm, stagnant waters of the "aren't those bastards evil" pool.
Actually, if you count the guy holding the camera, this man
statistically has more friends than most of us do. Only in that climate could those silly 9/11 conspiracy theories come about (saying the Bush administration and the FDNY blew up the towers, and that the planes were holograms). To hear these people talk, every opposing politician is Hitler, and every election is the freaking apocalypse. All because it keeps you reading. This wasn't as much a problem in the old days, of course. Some of us remember having only three channels on TV. That's right. Three. We're talking about the '80s here. So there was something unifying in the way we all sat down to watch the same news, all of it coming from the same point of view. Even if the point of view was retarded and wrong, even if some stories went criminally unreported, we at least all shared it. That's over. There effectively is no "mass media" any more so, where before we disagreed because we saw the same news and interpreted it differently, now we disagree because we're seeing completely different freaking news. When we can't even agree on the basic facts, the differences become irreconcilable. That constant feeling of being at bitter odds with the rest of the world brings with it a tension that just builds and builds. We humans used to have lots of natural ways to release that kind of angst. But these days... #7. We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less. There's one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it's one that nobody ever talks about: They demand less from you. Sure, you emotionally support them, comfort them after a breakup, maybe even talk them out of a suicide. But knowing someone in meatspace adds a whole, long list of annoying demands. Wasting your whole afternoon helping them fix their computer. Going to funerals with them. Toting them around in your car every day after theirs gets repossessed by the bank. Having them show up unannounced when you were just settling in to watch the Dirty Jobs marathon on the Discovery channel, then mentioning how hungry they are until you finally give them half your sandwich. You have so much more control in Instant Messenger, or on a forum, or in World of Warcraft. The problem is you are hard-wired by evolution to need to do things for people. Everybody for the last five thousand years seemed to realize this and then we suddenly forgot it in the last few decades. We get suicidal teens and scramble to teach them self-esteem. Well, unfortunately, self-esteem and the ability to like yourself only come after you've done something that makes you likable. You can't bullshit yourself. If I think Todd over here is worthless for sitting in his room all day, drinking Pabst and playing video games one-handed because he's masturbating with the other one, what will I think of myself if I do the same thing? You want to break out of that black tar pit of self-hatred? Brush the black hair out of your eyes, step away from the computer and buy a nice gift for someone you loathe. Send a card to your worst enemy. Make dinner for your mom and dad. Or just do something simple, with an tangible result. Go clean the leaves out of the gutter. Grow a damn plant. It ain't rocket science; you are a social animal and thus you are born with little happiness hormones that are released into your bloodstream when you see a physical benefit to your actions. Think about all those teenagers in their dark rooms, glued to their PC's, turning every life problem into ridiculous melodrama. Why do they make those cuts on their arms? It's because making the pain-and subsequent healing-tangible releases endorphins they don't get otherwise. It's pain, but at least it's real. That form of stress relief via mild discomfort used to be part of our daily lives, via our routine of hunting gazelles and gathering berries and climbing rocks and fighting bears. No more. This is why office jobs make so many of us miserable; we don't get any physical, tangible result from our work. But do construction out in the hot sun for two months, and for the rest of your life you can drive past a certain house and say, "Holy shit, I built that." Maybe that's why mass shootings are more common in offices than construction sites. It's the kind of physical, dirt-under-your-nails satisfaction that you can only get by turning off the computer, going outdoors and re-connecting with the real world. That feeling, that "I built that" or "I grew that" or "I fed that guy" or "I made these pants" feeling, can't be matched by anything the internet has to offer.

Heading to Live Chat. See if anyone else shows up. Feel free to join me.

an upgrade must have knocked it out.

Hmnn, there is a way to win consistently. Be the house not the player. that is the trick.

Never mind, at the moment I'm getting the message: "Oops! Something went wrong! [#CSTART-6] The IP.Chat room limit has been reached. You will not be able to join the chat room until some users first leave." in Safari, Firefox and Chrome browsers on my Mac mini. To bad, people online it would be nice to chat with. Can anybody else connect or is it just me?

Paraphrased poorly. sh sh sh sh sh sh shhh I must be silent

My 16 y.o loves Daft Punk. Burning Man events are filled with its electric rhythm. Not my cup of soup though. Give me folk or classic rock.

For those who are vegetarian or mostly vegetarian, how does milk and eggs fit into your picture? Do you think of it as meat and does it weigh you down in a similar fashion? Thanks.

I like Heifer.org . Giving a flock of chickens each month creates food, maybe some income for a family long term. Plus at its best if they are honor bound to pass the gift on when they have enough, ie when there 10 become 20, to give away a flock to another needy family. As an investor I like the idea of a gift that compounds.

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk. Not a song, it's a audio book by the author of Fight Club. It's strange and fearlessly written.