Don’t.

Seriously. It’s my own “agenda” to defend, my own mountain Everest to climb, my own life pursuit. It’s also a nondescript umbrella term whose meaning I’ve been and probably will be shaping implicitly in my writing.

Sure, you could hypothetically try to infer a cloudy idea from what I’ve been saying and try to follow it. But hey, trying to shape oneself into a dayvan cowboy is not something a dayvan cowboy would do. It’s not just the chutzpah, the deleuze-ish ultraphenomenology of crashing down the plane of imannence, or even the zen idea implied by the very idea of “don’t try, just do” implied in this paragraph.

It’s not like there’s a crowd to worship the idea either. But I worry about myself, about being blinded by the idea that I have some big secret to share. Something like Being alive: a primer needs to be fueled by a sense of self-assurance that is both positive in that a dayvan cowboy should just dive into things as if they’re liquid — they always are — and negative in that begins to convey a sense of closure. As if I had it solved, or at least knew I was heading into the solution.

I registered this domain like, what, 2 months ago? and my PageRank with Google implies an exposure I don’t see reflected in my viewer stats. So I started comparing it along blogs. As a measure of comparison, Wikipedia and the New York Times are a 9. The scale maxes out at 10. Jason Kottke and Nick Carr are a 7, Waiter Rant is a 6 and The Last Psychiatrist is a 5; I’m a 4 and annoyingly, Violent Acres is below me at 3. PageRank is bunk, dude. V. from Violent Acres has been at it for years, consistently kicks ass and is guaranteed to have controversy in her comments. She’s in a way someone I admire, as she’s been living out her life pursuit in her very own way — she’s far, far from being a dayvan cowgirl — and what’s more, consistently avoided letting herself indulge in her own identity. This is the girl who went (voluntarily and with a plan) homeless to pay off debt.

Being alive: a primer has more of indulging myself in my own identity than I’d like. A dayvan cowboy shouldn’t attempt to become a dayvan cowboy, he should dive into it and what I had done there, although the text itself is useful as self-help/life-coaching for people in fucked up pain), was basically indulge myself in my own identity of someone who is striving to become a dayvan cowboy.

Have I gone too meta, too higher-order-than-thou? Well, that’s because I can’t write worth chitlins. And while I maintain that V. is not going the dayvan cowgirl way, she has this to say.

Dear Bloggers, there’s no such thing as fans on the Internet. You’re only popular as long as you display yourself as a mirror image of those you’re writing for. I think I’ve proven my point pretty well in that regard. Love, V.

Let me take this paragraph and run with it. This is interestingly contemporary with the latest and most daring strike in The Last Psychiatrist’s crusade against narcissism. Alone’s other program, that of diagnosis as semiotics ironically turns against itself: narcissism is whatever Alone implies it is, and his recent deconstruction of islamofascistic misoginy as an instance of narcissism (even though it’s a repeat of the white pumps wife story, only with an the entire culture of islamofascism as enabler) shows how far he’s able to flex it. The fickle bunch audience V. rants about is a bunch of narcissists, and in all her bile she’s playing the role of an enabler. Only she’s gotten onto it, and she’s not anymore — not only not gonna be anymore, but ipso facto never was.

Despite overstating his crusades sometimes, Alone (the Last Psychiatrist) gives the good stuff in small doses. Take his brilliant foray into monetary economics — and I’m a professional, graduate-schooled economist, so let me throw some weight of authority into the adjective “brilliant”, for brilliant his foray is. Of course, he arrives at about the same conclusion an austrian like Lew Rockwell would, or in general anyone with a working grasp of wicksellian-pigovian (i.e. pre-keynesian) monetary economics. Having never been exposed to marshallian doctrine, Alone goes for the praxeological approach and gets it right.

This is not to say that as a professional economist I endorse or condemn the pigovian, keynesian or praxeological approach tout court, but that there’s something deeper in the fact that he arrived at the same convergence point these pre-keynesian monetary theories go (I’m not throwing Friedman in not to muddle things further), and I don’t mean something deeper about economics, but something deeper about Alone’s general program and about V from Violent Acres’ general punch-and-judy routine.

Alone was forced to blurt it out as he miscalculated the impact of the narcisissm-islamomisoginy link in the comments for that post

If you want to break free of the shackles of psychiatric labels– whether you are a patient or not– if you want to “get rich,” stop being tethered to concrete ideas about money, you have to accept this: no one can tell you who you are, what it’s worth; and not everyone values you the same, prices things the same. Money and psychiatry is always, always, always, a description of a transaction between two human beings. Never is it objective. God doesn’t see it. The blog is really, after all, about communism.

Whew. He inadvertently gave out his entire program.

And involuntarily illuminated how un-dayvan cowboy-ish is the idea that I can help people because I have an interpretation of them. The problem is not that by interpretation is “just one interpretation” — set aside the problem that people can’t be interpreted at all for a while. The problem is that helping is a transaction, and while people will have five hours-long oral conversations (IM conversation time can’t really be gauged) with me can be handed Being alive: a primer brand of “break free from the shackles” kit, I should  shut down the analytical mind and listen, as fun as the game of trying to guess-ahead is and as often I win it.

I was even cynical about it chatting with my work associate, saying I was involuntarily arriving at a deleuzian brand of motivational speaking and self-help writing. But it only struck me how un-dayvan cowboy-ish the entire thing is now.

A dayvan cowboy can only help someone else by diving into them and pulling them along — and letting go, falling from the sky facing each other, screaming not in pain but in freedom.

Maybe I’m finally learning how to love.

Or maybe that’s something to take in account tonight, when I skateboard down that hill again. Physics is concrete, the rush of fear when you hit a speed you’re uncomfortable with is just your subjective relation towards the physics — the irregular concrete in your feet, the wind in your face. Whether you fall down and break a bone is a function of how you respond to the fear.

More often than not, carving (balancing left and right) in a controlled fashion will both give you control over the speed and allow you to experience it to its fullest, diving into the concrete as a dayvan cowboy would if faced with a longboard skate and a hill like that.

But, hey, this blog isn’t really “about” finding out that being reckless and bold is the way to live and attempting to go for it. Just being reckless and bold does not a dayvan cowboy make, not even with a “plane of imannence” slant to it. Actually, being reckless is a bad thing, really, and I take meds for it. And the blog ain’t “about” anything.

So if the hypothetical reader that wants to be “something” and decides to check out what being a dayvan cowboy is all about is real and got this far, hey, I’ve made a lot of references to blogs and schools of thought in economics and threads of conversations in those blogs — go scoop the whole background story. I really have nothing to say about how to lead a meaningful life. Just go for it all. Everything counts in large amounts.