blog.eater.org

I had a skateboard when I was a little kid. It was a generic Walmart edition, with a picture of a ninja on the bottom. I remember feeling grateful for the gift—it was a Christmas or birthday gift from my parents, if I recall correctly—but I remember feeling sad that it wasn’t a Vision Gator like my more popular schoolmates had, and I felt embarrassed that I wasn’t very good at riding it; I didn’t have many friends to practice with or to learn tricks from. Feelings of inadequacy aside, I loved riding my skateboard. Even though I was never very good at it, I loved it nevertheless.

Eventually I put my skateboard aside and grew up. When I was 35 years old, I decided to buy another skateboard. It’s funny how some things do not change; I still have feelings of inadequacy about riding a skateboard. This time I can afford the exact skateboard I want, but now I feel self conscious for other reasons, not least of which is that I’m a man in his thirties riding a skateboard. At some point in my life I decided that I had been taking myself way too seriously. Buying and learning to ride a skateboard again was a way of dealing with that.

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Six months ago, I decided to take a break from the social Internet. This weekend marks the end of that experiment. Here’s what I learned.

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Selections from Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens.

Alain, in Martin du Gard’s Lieutenant Colonel Maumort says that the first rule — he calls it the rule of rules — is the art of challenging what is appealing.

On discourse:

It is very seldom … that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or “converting” the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end up holding exactly the same position as that with which he began.

On humanity:

We still inhabit the prehistory of our race, and have not caught up with the immense discoveries about our own nature and about the nature of the universe. The unspooling of the skein of the genome has effectively abolished racism and creationism, and the amazing finding of Hubble and Hawking have allowed us to guess at the origins of the cosmos. But how much more addictive is the familiar old garbage about tribe and nation and faith.

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Marx was right when he stated in 1844 that ‘the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.’

Speaking truth:

Noam Chomsky, a most distinguished intellectual and moral dissident, once wrote that the old motto about “speaking truth to power” is overrated. Power, as he points out, quite probably knows the truth already, and is mainly interested in suppressing or limiting or distorting it. We would therefore do better to try to instruct the powerless.

However, Hitchens continues:

I am not sure that there is a real difference in this distinction. Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity.

Sound advice in any election season:

… don’t allow your thinking to be done for you by any party of faction, however high-minded. Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we,” or speaks in the name of “us.” Distrust yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style.

From The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon:

As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.

Selections from Black Boy.

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“If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.” — Hazel Motes

The wife and I went to beautiful Tulum, Mexico for our “Babymoon” a while back. Here’s a round-up of what I read while we were there.

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Rangers conduct live-fire training on a regular basis. That means assaulting a fake objective using real ammunition, carefully coordinating fire and troop movement in a way that’s both aggressive and safe for friendly forces. Live ammo brings a realism that other forms of training just can’t match.

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Remembering Ranger School is strange for me. So many of the other stories from my military days come back to me as logically complete narratives, but Ranger School feels more like a prolonged fog through which several distinct experiences emerge, independent and with ambiguous context. This is partially because it was so long ago, but it also really felt that way at the time: a prolonged daze punctuated by periods of intensity.

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Previously, I wrote critically about how social networking has turned Internet content creators into simple filtration units. (I’m certainly not the only person to make a similar observation.)

Since writing that post, I made some changes to my life. I wrote a few stories. I (mostly) stopped checking Twitter. I had long since ditched Facebook. I trimmed my hundreds of Google Reader subscriptions down to a dozen or so.

Alas, it wasn’t enough. The social networking monster is patient, and it will slowly creep into your daily life like kudzu to choke out all your productive impulses. Before I realized what had happened, the little personal time I had reclaimed for creativity had been replaced by Reddit, Hacker News, and fruitless complulsive trawling of Google+.

It’s time for a new experiment.

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I wrote previously about what Ranger School means within the Ranger Regiment. It’s a mandatory gut check for the leaders; a simple but reasonably difficult rite of passage. During my time there, Rangers weren’t given the opportunity to go to Ranger School until they had proven themselves worthy of it. Only after I had earned the chance and returned triumphant would I move into a leadership position as a non-commissioned officer in the 75th Ranger Regiment.

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I had completed Army Basic and Infantry Training, Airborne School, and with the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP) behind me I now had a home: 3rd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. This was where I would spend the next four years, preparing for the literal front lines of a fresh war zone. At my new home I would learn the tactics for securing a hostile airfield by way of an airborne assault. I would become proficient with a large array of weapons. I would learn unusual skills, like how to hot-wire cars and tractors. I would absorb everything I could about high-explosives, fashioning charges that would blast my way into buildings or through otherwise impassable walls of concertina wire. I would be taught to see in the dark, descend from helicopters, kick in doors, and saves the lives of the wounded and dying. But before any of that, I had to be a bottom-rung private in one of the world’s more intimidating social settings. Passing through the main gate of the tall brown fence that surrounded 3rd Bat was my coming of age, or at least the beginning of it.

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There are two kinds of Army Ranger. Graduates of U. S. Army Ranger School wear the Ranger Tab on their shoulder and are referred to as Rangers, regardless of what unit they serve in. They are informally referred to as “tab wearers”.

There is only one Ranger combat regiment in the Army, and that is the 75th Ranger Regiment. Personnel serving in one of the 75th’s battalions wear a scroll insignia on their shoulder. In contrast to the tab wearers, these Rangers are known as “scroll bearers”. This distinction is one of the many things I learned in the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP), where I was taken immediately following Airborne School. RIP is a training and selection course for the 75th Ranger Regiment.

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Compared to Basic Training, Airborne School felt like paradise.

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