1993
● 5-7-1993: On funding for a new business: A business is like a rocket ship; if the rocket ship has enough fuel to go high enough to escape Earth’s gravitational field, it can get to a point, in outer space, where it can maneuver more or less freely for an indefinite period of time. But it requires that minimum amount of fuel to get into space. Any less, and it will fall back to Earth and crash; it might just as well have had no fuel, and never left the launch pad (actually, it would be better not to have left the launch pad—then at least you’d still have the rocket ship).
So, too, if a business has insufficient funds to get to a point where it’s making a profit, it will lose money and eventually fail. The amount of money needed to take the business to the point of profitability is like the amount of fuel required to take the rocket ship beyond Earth’s gravitational field. In both cases, anything less is futile.
● 8-31-1993: A person can have no better relationship with others than he has with himself.
● I’m typing this on my computer at home. This is the first time ever that I’ve had a computer at home! I’ve had them at my office, but it hasn’t been convenient to go and use the office computer whenever I’d want to write something, even though I live right across the street from my office.
I simply took one of the unused computers from my office. I don’t know why I didn’t think of bringing home a computer long ago.
This feels to me like a very important development: a whole new phase of my life; the added convenience of having a word processor at home may, and I hope will, encourage me to do more non-legal writing, even if it’s just to make more notes in my “diary,” to start with.
● 9-4-1993: Have been long overdue for a vacation; but have not seemed to work hard for some time, especially over the last few weeks. Maybe I’ve taken a vacation of sorts, in bits and pieces. Feel need to get to work.
● It’s not easy to find a good (interpersonal) relationship.
● 9-6-1993: Seems the Spring/Summer season was very short; the last Fall and Winter, so long . . ..
● 9-9-1993: Why is it that both men and women smoke cigarettes, but only men smoke cigars and pipes?
● 9-14-1993: That the number thirteen is somehow “unlucky” doesn’t make sense, because everything is thirteenth is some series . . ..
● It seems amazing that, though we humans come in endless varieties, yet, in terms of those attributes which make us distinctly human, our mental and emotional capacities and propensities, we’re essentially the same. (That is, no race is demonstrably more or less intelligent, etc., than other ones . . .) . . . especially amazing, given the probable geographical isolation of some human groups.
● 9-24-1993: I wear suspenders. They’re very stylish. They’re also very functional: they keep my pants from falling down.
● 10-6-1993: Fall and Winter are to the yearly cycle what dusk and night are to the daily cycle.
● 10-12-1993: “Slavery is economically efficient.” . . . Not for the slaves.
● 10-14-1993: We think it’s worth working hard for years and years to make money and become rich; but if you were rich and ten years older than you are right now, and were given the choice between keeping the money or going back ten years in your life (that is, becoming ten years younger); would you not choose to be ten years younger?
[Later note (2020): I suppose that may depend in part on how rich you were ten years ago . . . and how old you are now.]
● 10-15-1993: Try writing at the computer with the monitor off. That can be an amusing game: to see if you can remember the beginning of your sentence by the time you’re ending it, without looking at what you’ve written. This perhaps mimics a blind person’s experience in writing.
[Later note (2021): Don’t the blind write with Braille?]
● I haven’t driven at night, or even been out at night at all, for a very long time, it seems to me; and this idea has occurred to me a lot lately. It’s a very quiet night. There’s a wonderful feeling of calm. It’s probably a combination of various factors: environmental, situational, physiological, emotional, that produce this rare but wonderful feeling of calmness.
● 10-16-1993: . . . A distinct impression I was left with by last Spring’s coming, was the chattering of innumerable birds in the trees. Like a refreshing aural breeze.
● I’m listening (or trying to listen) to the radio. It’s on, but I can’t concentrate on the program. Your handwriting is affected somewhat by the writing instrument you use, no?
● 10-18-1993: It’s a beautiful evening outside.
● 10-25-1993: Can one bail out of a helicopter? Or would the attempt risk contact with the spinning blades?
[Later note (2021): If that (hitting the blades) could happen, it might depend on how the helicopter was moving: straight down, or forward.]
[Later note (4-2-2023): No. Even if the helicopter was moving straight down, it would depend on what you were wearing, whether your clothes caused the air resistance of your body to increase, making your downward travel slower than that of the falling helicopter; absent friction (air resistance), you would fall at the same speed as the helicopter, precluding your coming in contact with it . . . until you hit the ground.]
● We move, in time, through the seasons, as a wave moves through the water.
● One way to assess whether something is too late, is whether there’s still time to make up for lost time.
● 10-31-1993: Daylight saving time ended today. I used to mourn it getting dark earlier. But now I’m thinking that it doesn’t make that much difference in the Winter because it’s relatively dreary weather as it is. And the coming again of the later light makes the return of Spring even sweeter!
● I’ve noticed that men have Sr., Jr., and so forth, after their names, but women don’t. Why?
● 11-6-1993: Twickatweet!
● Bink, bank, boinklum!
● 11-7-1993: One basic difference between plants and animals is that animals are conscious, but plants aren’t . . . which goes with animals’ greater mobility.
● 11-8-1993: I don’t know! But I used to know. Why did I stop knowing? I don’t know.
● 11-10-1993: A rule for my new secretary: if she’s going to make changes of her own discretion in documents she’s given to type, the changes must improve the original, not make it worse.
● 11-16-1993: Man, you’d better do whatever it is you want to do, pretty soon: you don’t have that much time left!
● 11-17-1993: Don’t feel guilty about being in a bad mood: You’re supposed to feel bad when your situation is in dire jeopardy!—or you wouldn’t fix it.
● As someone told me, and I think it’s true, one way for a person who’s not familiar with those languages, to tell if writing is Chinese or Korean is that Korean writing uses circles, but Chinese doesn’t . . ..
● 11-19-1993: . . . At this moment I’m burning with anger! But I must use my intellect. Wait! No, don’t suppress it; let it run its course in your attention, and feel the rage. Often you really need to feel the pain in a situation to do anything about it: If it’s true that “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”; in order for you to get going in response to the tough-going, you really must feel the toughness of your situation—to be emotionally and intellectually super-charged, galvanized, by it.
So, you can’t deny your emotions: you can’t get happiness by focusing directly on the feeling, as by taking mood-altering drugs; rather, you have to focus on what objectively, in your outward situation, has caused, or is causing, your bad feeling.
Once you feel your anger, and find what’s causing it, then determine if the anger is “reasonable”; if not, you needn’t do anything to “solve” it, perhaps merely adjust your attitude. But if you find it’s reasonable, then try to direct the force of your anger toward finding a solution to the actual situation, and not into self-destructive or counter-productive, or even just wasteful, motion. Determine what you need to do to solve the difficulty in question. (Constructive action.)
. . . All right, my friend. Today’s the day we take off the gloves! I’ll use myself as a tool: lean and mean. I’ll develop a sense of urgency, and act accordingly; that is, act as if the need for action is in fact urgent.
● Thursday, 11-25-1993/Thanksgiving Day. Thanks for freakin’ nothing!
I need to work harder, to shift the focus from feeling good to getting things done. (If I get things done more efficiently and effectively, feeling good will take care of itself; it will come.)
● Yesterday, I was at the Los Angeles offices of the State Bar Association for another interview on my case. At one point, I went down in the elevator; there were a few other people in the elevator car. As the doors closed, someone outside asked the one or two people in the car: “Are you going up to fish?” The people in the elevator didn’t have a chance to answer because the doors closed. A few seconds later, I said out loud: “No, we’re going down to cut bait,” and some of the people in the car laughed.
● 11-26-1993: It’s good to fucus on and work toward the long run, but not to the exclusion of the short run: if you don’t survive the short run, there won’t be a long run.
● 11-27-1993: A sunny Winter’s day is better than a cloudy Summer’s day.
● 12-12-1993: One feature that the ultimate luxury car should have, I believe, is a device for selecting just one of its (two) headlights to turn on and off so as to be able to signal another driver, not only that his lights are off altogether (when his lights should be on, such as at night), but also to let a driver know that just one of his lights is out, by flashing on and off the particular light that’s out.
● I’d like to see a bullfight in which a rhinoceros is used instead of a bull.
● With a little more of the same kind of luck (as we’ve had this week), and a lot more money, this rickety little airplane (that is my business and career) will turn into a jet!
[Later note (2020): With a lot more money, you don’t need luck . . . or, for that matter, the business.]
● 12-16-1993: An irony inherent in the relationship between the lawyer and his client is that the worse the client’s problem is that brings him to the lawyer, the better it is for the lawyer; the greater the client’s pain, the greater the lawyer’s pleasure.
● 12-18-1993: Generally, the person most important to think you look good, is you.
● How about developing a “seeing eye” cat (for guidance of the blind), like the seeing-eye dog.
● 12-24-1993: We often appreciate a good alternative better when we get used to it a little, and, at least momentarily, go back to the inferior one; then we see the value of the preferential option more clearly.
● 12-25-1993: What I did just now was good. I felt uncomfortable last night after I went to bed, and couldn’t sleep, initially. So, I got up, I don’t know if I really planned it, and sat down at the computer and wrote about how I felt. By so doing, I not only helped my sleeplessness (at least I felt better as I was doing it); but, more important, I took some constructive action: I made a note in this Diary, which is part of the process of resuming my writing; even if it’s worthless material, it helps me psychologically to get back into the process of writing. I must start writing again.
More generally, it illustrates the rule that it’s desirable to act, to get things done, as opposed to focusing on how you feel, and on what you can do to change how you feel.
● Maybe when the refrigerator gets defrosted, I’ll buy ice cream and whole pies and have them on hand at home. I have an enormous sweet tooth, which is a topic I should write about here in my Diary sometime.
● I went to a movie today (Christmas Day!). First time I’ve done that in perhaps half a year [that is, it’s the first time in half a year that I went to a movie, not the first time in half a year that I went to one on Christmas day]. I actually had a very, very pleasant day. It’s perhaps not insignificant that I got a bit of quasi-creative work done, partly by writing in this Diary; and I revised, or added, a note, a footnote, to my composition, “For the Right to Abortion.”
● I’ve just discovered the meaning of the words shy and bashful. Yes, they describe me perfectly, and characterize a very significant aspect of my personality. They explain my social isolation.
[Later note (2021): Another explanation of my social isolation is that I prefer being by myself. Just what the relationship is between being shy and bashful and preferring to be by myself, I don’t know. Perhaps being shy was an element in causing me to prefer being a loner. My mother once told me something about this. She said that originally I had difficulty making friends or interacting with other children, so I didn’t do it, and I was unhappy about it. But after a while, I came to prefer being alone.]
● 12-27-1993: It’s true that, in general, there’s reason to favor tradition. It has “transactional efficiency”: there’s a cost in time and effort, and perhaps money, to changing our behavior: time and effort to learn the new procedures, and money for new equipment or the like, to help effectuate the changes. But to say that a particular element is enshrined in a group’s tradition, does not conclusively argue for its continuation, because that fact merely leads to the next inquiry, to wit: Is it now time to deviate from the tradition in the ways proposed?
Here’s an example of an argument involving such a question: In a recent debate on immigration, an immigration advocate argued that the United States has traditionally allowed in as many immigrants as desired to come.
But the question becomes: Is it time to change that? Consider our country as a well-equipped sailing ship. On it we have a certain number of people, and the immigration issue is: How many additional people should we allow aboard? Earlier in our history, there were many more resources, including space, relative to the number of people in the country. In other words, on our ship, we had only a limited crew, many fewer than needed to fill all the various workstations; with so few sailors to operate the ship, we (those of us aboard already) would be better off with more people.
With more and more people coming aboard, however, we pass first the point of diminishing returns, and eventually, if we continue to add people, the point of negative returns—not only do we not need more people, but any more people will diminish the well-being of those of us already here, making us uncomfortably, if not dangerously, overcrowded.
● I hate cloudy, overcast days!
●The skull is the only place in the human body where we have an exoskeleton of sorts.
● 12-29-1993: It seems that all the serial killers or mass murderers I’m aware of are male, none female. Why would that be (aside from a problem with my awareness)?
● The ends of me feel real good! (I’ve just had a manicure.)
● Friday, 31 December 1993 New Year’s Eve!!!!!! I feel as if I have reason for optimism, and I do feel optimistic: about my future, in the prosperity of my business (law practice), which I’ve concluded is what I should be working on primarily. If I have a lot of money, I’ll be able to spend the majority of my time and energy on what really interests me in life—writing, continuing to build and rebuild my body of creative works, written and otherwise. In fact, money will help me in a way besides just giving me leisure. I have hopes of hiring a private investigator to attempt to locate any of my lost material that may still exist. This can be done only with money. Or I can buy it, or buy cooperation in attempting to recover it.
[Later note (2020): “I feel as if I have reason for optimism” and “I do feel optimistic” strike me as redundant: they say the same thing. Does one ever feel optimistic and yet feel that one has reason for pessimism? But I suppose you could feel optimistic without analyzing it, without being aware of reasons for it. On the other hand, do you ever feel you have reason for optimism, and not feel optimistic? Maybe not. “I do feel optimism: about my future” . . . what else would you feel optimism about? I suppose you could feel optimism for mankind generally. Yet perhaps “I have reason for optimism” implies that the optimism is about the speaker’s own situation. In any event, though, the optimism would be about the future. Why didn’t I just revise the original entry? Because I thought this note was good material, perhaps more interesting than the original.]