1. Practice Playing music one hour a day. Start by taking uke to work, practice downstairs during lunch hour instead of assing around reading the news. On arriving home, practice the Bass or work on recording with the DAW and synth set.

2. Set aside one hour a day to writing. Part of that time should be spent editing rough ideas into finished works. No more piles of lyrics on scrap paper, without progressions or choruses. Finish something, for God’s sake. You can do it!

3. Set aside one hour a day towards practical learning. At least one day a week spent on electronics and circuit building, one day on learning Hawaiian and Portuguese, or reviewing Japanese and Spanish. , one day on music theory, one day on extraneous topics unrelated to the major ones.

4. One hour on non-applied brain stimulation. This includes reading novels, or poetry, playing Go or Shogi, various forms of meditation/focusing/reflection.

5. Focus on varying workout routines, and avoiding injury, transition from 15 pound dumbells to 20 pounds, train for next years Hana Relay Race. Either join Y for pool use or District park for weight room.

Proper time management is necessary. For this reason, I will strive to:

1.Avoid all blogs dealing with matters of policy or public and political opinion. This includes links posted on Facebook. Reading them is far too much of a timesuck, and often doesn’t do me any good creatively.

2. Avoid Game blogs. I’m pretty much done with women. No further need to study this.

3. Avoid Civilization IV and other games I know will eat my brain and my time.

4. Avoid following the news at all. Because seriously, there’s nothing worth reading in there anymore. Like I need reasons to feel hopeless and disgusted?

5. Recognize I’m biting off a huge chunk and that failure to reach one of these goals is not an excuse to give up on all of them two or three weeks in.

6. First off, get my room in a state to get this done. Right now my room is a whirlwind of instruments, sheet music, drafts, letters, exercise equipment and books. This is the hardest part.

7. Stop pretending I can ween myself off Cracked, online comics and Facebook. It’s a timesuck, yes. But I need the fucking brainless amusement. There’s no way a person can live without some of that shit daily.

Sorry for the image quality. Note that this guy was working a town with a population of 45,000 at the time. Still, the peacocking, the trophy hunting, the platitudes. Not much has changed in a hundred years, has it? Looking at some of those pictures, some were Nines, and the one in the in the big frame over the door is a 10. Still, in a book overflowing with other white guys in turn of the century Hawaii, who have streets, businesses, social institutions and descendants with their names on them (though if often the target of current Hawaiian anger), what does Chester have for his endevours? A smarmily captioned page in a giant out-of-print book of photos. Here is the fate of all seduction artists not named Giacomo Casanova. One hopes Chester was okay with that.

Enjoy my first drunken post. I needed to get drunk to show my face and defeat my social anxiety.

Sorry it’s so bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgqjIisuHlA

Why?

Because today was a sunny day and I live a 20 minute walk from one of the top ten beaches in the nation. Same with last weekend and the weekend before that. Ever read that Steve Sailer VDARE post about his theory that Hawaii is a land of the Lotus Eaters where in order for someone to accomplish something they have to leave the sun-kissed laid-back land of “Ainokea” for the big cities of the mainland?

All fucking true. This is a place where at work “lunch break” is a state of mind rather than a set time in which you hurriedly eat food and get back to your desk. A place where you invite a total stranger on the beach to jam on the uke and have a couple beers (happened Memorial Day). A place where clocks go to waste. Hence, near everything I try to start gets pushed back to oblivion. As for blogging… dude… why would I do something that gets me pissed off at the world when I can go to the beach and see loads of scantily clad 20-somethings?

On that note, let me get to the damn point of this post, in which a mildly amusing story is shared. Anyways, Friday night for me is “pau hana Friday”, even though I work most Saturdays. Because I can’t really drink alcohol without wicked hangovers that make me shit useless, I drink kava, the traditional mind-altering beverage of the Pacific Islands. It’s an acquired taste, to say the least. Think of sucking down a gritty mud puddle with Novocaine mixed into it,  and you have the flavor of straight kava. The effects ain’t too impressive for most, since you retain complete mental clarity the whole time, you simply get very relaxed and mildly euphoric. All you want to do is sit someplace nice and quiet and either play a little music or engage in light chit-chat. Think the opposite of an energy drink. I can tell you, it’s one of the best things you can drink if you’re all sore after a day of work, all the tension just flies out of your muscles. Of course, I’ve gotten to the point where I can drink enough of it to get to that point, as I enjoy taste. For most people, they gag immediately.

Anyways, I was little short on powder for the night, and there’s really only one place you can get the stuff in my town, a health food store run by some weird splinter group of the Hare Krishnas. Anyways, it’s always reasonably well stocked, but I don’t go there much, I’m not the sort of person who goes to stores that not only have a “no smoking” sign outside their door but a “no meat on the premises” sign.

So I go in and attempt to find the kava, and I notice that the store manager is shadowing me as I walk around the store. I think it’s a bit odd since I’m dressed in fairly respectable work clothes. As I walk down the aisle, two elderly hippie ladies stop their conversation and watch me as I go by, silent. I round the corner and nearly bump into an underfed and overtattooed Asian girl who jumps out of my way like I’m a leper.

By this point I’m slightly weirded out, so I go and fill a bag with kava and make my way out of the store (the clerk who rang me up at least was polite). As I’m pulling out of the parking lot, I look in the rear view mirror and realize what hat I’m wearing that day; my rusticated leather bushranger.

Hah, I can be a massive asshole without even realizing it!

P.S. Their kava was shitty and weak bulk Fijian powder, so I guess they had some revenge on me.

P.S.S. Plastic Beach sounds awesome when you’re zonked on kava.

P.S.S.S. I do believe that this is the first time that Steve Sailer and the Gorillaz have been invoked in a single post.

Probably the biggest thing is that I just don’t have time. Between playing, practicing and composing music, working out, reading books and working one full time job and a weekend side job, I just really don’t have time to spend crafting posts and responding to them. Add to that when I do read and reply on other’s blogs now, I’m often dismayed by the level of the commentariat. Stupid, misinformed, tasteless and dull, and, worst of all, prone to rhetorical hysteria (I should like to kick anyone in the balls who says “that’s shaming language”). Before a person could talk about Hobbes and Origen and many would understand you, now the biggest metaphors in the sphere are caged from a crappy 90s cyberpunk movie with dollar store Gnostic themes and plot holes you could drive a truck through. For God’s sake, couldn’t we have at least used “Jacob’s Ladder” as our rallying point? That one at least wasn’t an ineffably stupid CGI-driven blockbuster.

I digress.

The other big thing is that what I really want to write is creative. I’ve tried pretty recently to craft a series of installments for an eventual short novel for submission to In Mala Fide, but have been stymied by my lack of time, and endless rewrites. I’m not much of a churner, and blogging is more akin to journalism and pulp fiction than the style of writing I’m most accustomed to. I’m an anal perfectionist with an overfull plate.

Lastly, I’m not anonymous. That’s a pretty big thing. While my close friends and family know I’m some strange flavor of reactionary, I’d rather not let employers, potential employers and the general public know. Given that I’m a disdainful, touchy, arrogant and often verbally abusive poster with a tendency for personal grudges (see the above), it’s really risky to try to build a significant online profile. Sooner or later I’ll piss someone off enough they’ll spend the time finding out who I work for, and will cause me real life grief. As for going anonymous, it’s too late now, the cows have already left that particular barn.

Despite all that, I’m not leaving, I’m not closing shop. I’d love to post more, but until I can think of a way to talk about HBD stuff safely or decide what direction to go with the fiction, or win the lottery and no longer have to spend 50 hours a week working at something, I’m probably not going to be here much, and sad to say, there are probably more people who think “Good riddence!” rather than “Aw shucks.” (note, that isn’t a plea for sympathy, just a notation that I’ve annoyed more people than entertained in the alt-right sphere),

Yes, the hipsters are dead *again*.

Helpfully explained in a nearly unreadable pomo/lit crit hash by someone whose thesaurus clearly has cum stains on it. Adapted from a longer, probably more unreadable article in the journal “n+1″, which is only purchased by grad students in the liberal arts, and confused math majors who wonder what a journal using a mathmatical expression as it’s title contains 30 page essays on Adorno accompanied by bleak unrelated abstract art. A selfsame magazine that has also proclaimed the hipster dead at least once before (more if you count independent articles by the editorial staff).

Seems to me like hipsters, especially the pompous, over-educated, yet still utterly clueless intellectual grandstanders are still very healthy and alive.

Still, read the article, then read the comments, which are as insightful as the article is long-winded and full of facile nothings. Do note that the author completely avoids mentioning the one truly bad thing that hipsterism has wrecked on the world (the rest, despite my own strongly worded opinions, are either matters of taste and politics, or indirectly harmful) namely the gentrification of old ethnic blue collar urban neighborhoods and the marginalizing and pushing out of the older, poorer inhabitants from the neighborhoods they built. The average hipster will rhapsodize endlessly about how tragic it was that the Native Americans lost their land, yet won’t give a shit that the retired Polish-American welder can no longer afford the rent on the apartment he’s lived in for years, or that the bodega down on the corner being turned into a vegan restaurant, means that the Puerto Rican mother has to take the train 30 minutes to shop for dinner now. If anything, fuck those Hasids for being pissed off that we got bike lane in front of where their kid’s school bus zone used to be!

Anyways, I digress. The hipster is still here. Just as there are still punks, neo-hippies, or surfer culture, it seems that the archtype spawned from the flowering of the indie aesthetic will be with us for a good long time, denying it’s own existence and proclaiming itself dead all the while. Here I reproduce in full the comment that best summarizes the article:

This article is a retread of various strands of hipster anthropology, which may be found in other magazines, Urban Dictionary, and even Wikipedia.

Yet, it is near brilliant on the meta-level. The title says it all. Specifically, that:

1) hipsterism will be approached in a faux academic manner–so hipster;
2) you are late to the lifestyle–so contemporary hipster since any movement of elitist early adopters/revivers will eventually run out of oxygen;
3) hipsterism is the all-in-all and definitely worth interrogating–because hipsters are nothing if not self-important; and
4) the greatness of hipsters can only be appreciated in retrospect, which befits a Movement* of conservative liberals. To be clear, while they may be liberal in outlook and politics, they are conservative in ideas, originality, and modus operandi.

The whole thing is nested hipster irony. A hipster-in-denial comments on hipsterdom, in full hipster fashion.
I would venture that Mr. ARGOT007 is himself a hipster as well. As am I. As am I.

Okay, so you’ve undergone the first, most difficult step; namely admitting you’re a hipster. What now? Do you burn your skinny jeans, Grizzly Bear albums, and Jonathon Safran Foer novels on a pyre? As much as I would *like* to recommend that, it’s not really necessary. If you truly enjoy those things, continue to do so. You will perhaps find that with time your tastes will change, particularly on the issue of skinny jeans past the age of 30. Admitting you’re hipster makes that process much easier. Some things will stick with you. I still get slightly misty listening to “An Aeroplane Over the Sea”, despite the hardening of my heart and mind over the years.

What happens now isn’t a rejection of anything previous at all. You’re broadening, because you’re getting out of a ghetto mentality. You don’t have to like what your peers like, and you can like things they’d find horrific and label “mainstream”, “conformist”, or any other epithet of choice. They’re the fucking conformists, so concerned with appearing cool and liking and disliking all the same damn things. So hence number one:

1. Stop giving a fuck about what others think.

Granted, this is dangerous advice to give any random person. Taken directly, it means your should stop caring about the results of your behavior, and to most people, that just leads to being a gigantic asshole at best and sociopathy at worst. But wait! You’re a hipster, which means that despite all your flaws, you’re most likely got some brains and soul in you. It’s just right now it’s so wrapped up in peer approval and fear of outsider perception, that you can’t see the forest for the trees. The world will not end if someone you know patronizingly talks down to you when you mentioned how you actually enjoyed what was perceived to be a “tourist” street fair. Fuck them, you like fresh mini-donuts and root beer! And marching band music is kinda cool once you sit down and listen to it with an open mind!

In the past, I got pissed off when that kind of stuff happened and would carry that weight with me for months after. Now, I don’t give a fuck what they think, anymore than what some douchebag who mocks my seersucker suit thinks. They’re the ones missing out on the wider world.  They got everything so codified in their head that a tourist street fair is uncool and boring, that they don’t see the similarity between that sort of mentality and the guy who calls me a faggot because I’m wearing a powder blue suit and straw hat. You’re free now, my friend! Which brings me to the flipside of that coin.

2. Stop being so damn presumptuous about others.

There’s a reason there’s stereotypes. They tend to work very well in the general aggregate. They, however, are pretty crappy to apply on an individual level. Yet the people who most insist that stereotypes are incorrect are the ones who most zealously apply them at an individual level even if they would deny it up and down. In my younger days I would balk at long social interactions with people who at first it didn’t seem I didn’t share much in common with. Why would I spend time talking to a Mormon Tongan who spends most of his days digging holes for his job? The person I was in the past would never have found out that the smelly chubby guy was also an accomplished amateur classical guitarist after talking to him repeatedly and at length, and would have never gained some valuable tips on avoiding wrist strain from overpracticing. With time, I’ve found that it’s often the people who are most focused on playing up an persona of being a creative unique person usually have the most derivative and unimaginative work, while those who are unschooled and completely unassuming are the ones creating beauty, and they don’t even realize how great it is.

Get out of your social bubble, talk to strangers, respond when they talk to you. Just because someone is old, ugly and an evangelical Christian who dropped out of high school doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything from them, or them from you, for that matter. And just because you share a lot of things in common with someone, doesn’t mean they can’t be an utter turd of a human being as well.

Note, this particular thing really needs to be hammered in double with HBD types who have a Half Sigma mentality about people.

3. Take the path less traveled (for it will make all the difference)

I’m going to be honest here. I’m a bit hesitant because the main readers of this are probably also readers in the Roissy-sphere and the HBD-sphere, both places notorious for finding the smallest personal flaws in a blogger’s biography and eviscerating them publically. Then I realized I don’t comment much anymore, and no one really reads this blog. A few months ago, I had a bit of a mini-personal crisis, in which I had either cut off or alienated all my friends left on the island and realized that I wasn’t going to beg like a dog for years just to get a decent paying job indoctrinating youth at a college. I was depressed and angry, lost whatever desire I had for Game (and there really wasn’t much to begin with). I wanted to repudiate and reject everything about the lifestyle I had had before, but was running into the fact that I couldn’t hate the music and books that I loved. So I thought and thought. What would be the way I could actively reject it and it’s values, rather than passively and quietly on the internet?

One day, rather pissed at work, I started cleaning the bathrooms, because some dipshit had pissed all over the bowl. I couldn’t stop. I just cleaned until the entire place was sparkling. And afterward I felt much better. I slowly and steadily started taking on all the janitorial functions at the company. It was more enjoyable than being an accounting and filing clerk, and moreover our company is too cheap to spring for a custodial service. Here I was with my four years of graduate school, my degree, teaching experience, my languages, my time abroad, hands deep in trash and toilets at a for profit company, doing labor that the average hipster/SWPL/beigeist apparatchik would find disgraceful and distasteful. And I honestly enjoy doing it even if they didn’t feel that way about it. I’ve even started a side job on the weekends doing lawn servicing for retirees. I like that even better, being in the sun and working with plants. I’d do it full time, if I could. It just feels right, like I was meant to be out there rather than in front of a bunch of lazy, unwilling and willfully ignorant college students.

Not just satisfied with that, I started pumping iron and doing calisthenics and resistance exercises at night whenever I would start to feel regretful at my chosen solitude or lonely. Eventually I just got hooked to the feeling of running and lifting weights. Right now I can do more push-ups than I could in high school. While part of the reason I initially started doing these things (though it’s not the only or main reason) was because it offered a personal acceptance of two things not within that hipster culture bubble; namely doing dirty manual labor and getting fit and muscular, I found that by trying these things I began to enjoy them on their own merits, and found a sort of peace and happiness I haven’t had since I left Japan. Now if only I could find a way to turn it into better money. Sigh.

While you don’t have to start mowing lawns or body-building to start down your path to true individual expression, trying completely new and unexpected things constantly keeps life fresh and filled with new passion. It could be skeet shooting, it could be singing in a choir, it could be a career as a plumber, there are millions of things out there! Just because you’re educated and into the arts doesn’t mean you’ll find satisfaction working some “media” or “creative content” job while struggling in the evening to write some novel only other hipsters will read. You can work at anything, and express yourself in myriad ways yet unexplored. You don’t even have to move to some overpriced urban mecca to do it (please don’t move to an urban mecca even after getting over being a hipster, gentrifying sucks no matter who’s doing it.)

To sum it up, I’d like to return to the comment made by Argot007. While I have gone from “liberal in outlook and politics” to “fairly reactionary”, what’s important is changing the “conservative in ideas, originality and modus operandi” to “iconoclastic in ideas, inventive in originality, and open in modus operandi”. The politics and outlook are only the frosting.