Not No Good

Not No Good

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@bestofstarwar

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@iAmMarcoMurillo

[可愛くノ一 🇯🇵🌸 @hokkori_buzz]

USA. I went to a Texas BBQ restaurant.

The man at the counter asked: brisket or ribs?

I stood very still.

In my country, this question has another name.
It is called choosing a clan.

Brisket: slow. Patient. It has waited 14 hours for this moment.
Fourteen hours of smoke and silence.
This is the way of discipline. This is the way of my teachers.

Ribs: bold. Immediate. They arrive already holding their weapon.
They do not wait. They do not explain themselves.
This is the way of instinct. This is the way of warriors who do not return.

I asked the man which was better.

He said: "Depends on the person."

I stared at him for a long time.
This was not an answer.
This was a test.
Perhaps the most important test of my life.

I chose brisket. I sat down. I prepared myself.

The ribs arrived at the next table.

They smelled of smoke and oak and something I cannot name in any language.
The man eating them did not look at his food.
He looked at nothing.
He had already transcended.

I went back to the counter.
"I made an error," I said. "Ribs."

I sat down again.

The brisket at the next table glistened quietly.
Fourteen hours of patience. Fourteen hours of waiting.
Looking at me.
Not with anger. With something worse.
With understanding.

I went back.
"Brisket," I said. "I have returned."

The man at the counter said nothing.
He had seen this before.

Brisket. Ribs. Brisket. Ribs.

On my fourth approach, he placed both on the counter without speaking.

I understood then: there is no choosing.
There is only the truth of what you already are.
And what I am, apparently, is someone who cannot leave a BBQ restaurant.

I ate. I could not finish.
I sat with the remains for a very long time.
The other customers left. New customers arrived. I was still there.

The man came to my table at closing time.
"You doing okay?"

I told him I was conducting a funeral.
He nodded like this was a reasonable thing to say.

A ninja does not choose between brisket and ribs.
A ninja orders both and sits with the consequences until the restaurant closes.

Is this normal in Texas?
And which one was right?
I need to know. I am going back tomorrow.

[PMT Stats @PmtStats]

Imagine drafting both of them in the same draft

Deciding you want neither of them

Only getting one 1st rounder, 29 games of Anthony Davis, and Max Christie in return

[World of Warcraft @Warcraft]

🗝️ 👑 ❤️

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@clickdann Carrom / Karom

[Dan Vasc @danvasc2]

Watching Batman The Animated Series on a CRT, running on a classic Xbox with the official Xbox DVD player remote.

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@erebus56

[びーも @beeeemooooo]

Me running an endurance stint with twice the legally allowed blood alcohol level crashing through 30 drivers

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@TheCinesthetic

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@lippyent Pulled an old church pew out of dumpster. Best patio furniture ever.

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@NjTank99

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@Brewers_Kitchen

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@erebus56 😆

[Nick Perkins @NickyPerkss]

You can save on the Apple TV subscription by just watching the Miami Grand Prix on a turnpike traffic cam

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@thedailymemes_

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@TheLadySam1 Three Musketeers

[Affinity for Anime @affinity4anime]

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[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@Austen

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

"Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride."

-Anthony Bourdain

[Not No Good @NotNogood]

@VinnysCorner1

[SiriusB @SiriusBShaman]

They did not take cursive from the schools because children no longer needed it. They took it because of what it was quietly building in them.

Consider what the exercise actually is. A child, six years old, is handed a pen and asked to draw a single unbroken line that becomes a word. The wrist must float. The fingers must hold a living pressure, never quite the same twice, always correcting. The eye must follow the ink forward and trust the hand to finish what it has begun. There is no lifting, no stopping, no starting over mid-word. The loop must close. The ascender must rise and return. The sentence must travel from one margin to the other as a single continuous gesture, and at the end of it the hand must still be steady.

Twelve years of this. Every day. Ten thousand small acts of sustained, self-correcting attention, carried out below the level of conscious thought, until the motion belongs to the body and the body belongs to the motion.

This is not penmanship. It is the slow construction of an interior form.

The hand that has learned to carry a line without breaking it is the hand of a mind that has learned to carry a thought without breaking it. The two are not metaphors for one another. They are the same faculty, trained in the same child, by the same daily discipline. Continuity of the stroke becomes continuity of the reasoning. The patience of the loop becomes the patience of the argument. The commitment to finish a word one has started becomes the commitment to finish a sentence, a paragraph, a life's idea, without reaching for the nearest distraction halfway through.

Print is a different creature entirely. Print lifts. Print stops. Print assembles a word out of separate, stamped, interchangeable pieces, each one beginning and ending in isolation. A mind raised only on print learns to think the way print is made, in discrete tokens, in replaceable units, in fragments that can be recombined by any outside hand without the owner noticing the substitution. It is precisely the shape of thought a language model produces. It is precisely the shape of thought a language model can steer.

Cursive is kata. This is the whole of it. A form repeated daily, for years, not for the sake of the form but for what the repetition lays down in the practitioner beneath the form. The swordsman does not train kata so that one day he may fight in kata. He trains it so that when the moment comes and there is no time to think, the movement is already inside him, older and deeper than thought, and it rises on its own. Cursive was the kata of the literate mind, the daily quiet drilling of continuity, of patience, of a line held steady under the long pressure of its own length. And the signature it produced at the end, that small flourished mark unique to a single human being on earth, was only the outward proof of an inward form no machine and no other hand could ever reproduce.

Take the kata away and the practitioner is left with vocabulary in place of faculty. He can recognise a whole thought when he encounters one. He cannot carry one himself. He can admire a finished argument. He cannot sustain one long enough to close its loop. He begins books he does not finish, sentences he does not end, ideas he abandons the moment the screen in his palm offers him a brighter one. And when the machine begins feeding him tokens in the exact shape his schooling taught him to receive, he meets it with no interior resistance at all, because no interior form was ever built in him to push back with.

They removed it quietly, across a generation, and they removed it in the last years before the machines arrived. Twelve years of daily practice in unbroken, embodied, self-authored thought, gone from the curriculum of almost every child in the Western world, just as the instruments designed to complete their sentences for them came online.

The hand forgets. The mind, having never been taught the kata, forgets a thing it never knew it had.

That is what cursive was. That is what was taken. And that is why the thought of anyone who still writes by hand, in long unlifted lines, remains, quietly, stubbornly, and without their ever needing to announce it, their own.

Now the question stands open. What else has been banned, phased out, quietly retired from the curriculum and from common life over these same decades, under the same soft excuses? Mental arithmetic. Memorisation of poetry. Latin. Logic as a formal subject. Map reading. Knot work. The keeping of a commonplace book. The reading aloud of long passages in class. Singing in parts.

What was each of those actually building in the child, beneath the surface of the lesson, and whose interest was served by its disappearance?