My First Tarzan Coach, Tech & God, and Stepping into Yukio Mishima’s World

I'm in a bit of a standstill this week…a bit of paralysis or maybe purgatory. I hate feeling this way, with seemingly no action to absorb the anxiety. I know the source, as I’m sure many do. Politically, the bad news doesn’t appear to be ending, which must lend in some terrible way to this sense of staring down a very long hall with no door on the other end.

It’s ramping up, isn’t it? I feel like I’m watching the lit line of gasoline snake slowly towards a powder keg, a powder keg that will explode over the next four years on slo-mo, and any joy, any festivity, any inkling contentment will soon be brought down by the true burden of reality.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps I’ve been on social media too much and so deep in the trenches of the news cycle that it would be better for me to step away.

But then I ask myself, isn’t that what these powers want? To turn your back, throw up your hands, and say, what can I do? I’ve existed for years in that state of mind, yet I always end up back here, fighting in the only way I know through words to bring light onto the world's madness. And what’s even more absurd, I’m aware, so much like Dylan likely felt when he walked away from making protest songs, that rarely, if ever, do these creative expressions and products make an actual difference in the world. What did Dylan say…no one’s going to be changed, really changed, by a song. Imagine meaning that after everything. I wonder how Huxley would have felt at this moment. I wonder how George Orwell would have felt seeing what we see and believe is “normal” daily. Or what about Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as Trump and his administration get ready to completely gut and destroy the Department of Education?

On and on…through and through, I suppose. Back to this newsletter, which is about my work and keeping my friends, family, and like-minded creatives close. I hope whoever is reading this has that in their life somehow. We need each other more than ever. Never forget, this is your life. This is your time.

"I don't talk things.
I talk about the meaning of things.
I sit here and know I'm alive."

- Fahrenheit 451, spoken by the character Faber, a former professor

In this newsletter, I will cover:

The World’s First Tarzan Coach

San Francisco Techies and God

Stepping into Yukio Mishima’s World

The World’s First Tarzan Coach

I came across the Tarzan Movement, AKA this man “Victor,” from his YouTube profile through one of my many mindless scrolls via Instagram. You can find his IG page here. At first, I thought what I saw was a joke: a Spanish dude with short brown curly hair crawling slowly towards the camera with big white letters that read “TARZAN COACH: START YOUR JOURNEY.” He was wholly committed side by side, and loud booming drums and bass echoed as random waooooooos and yelps from real apes shook my phone. What the fuck is this? I wondered. What is going on here? I continued to watch as he dangled from tree branches, balanced on his tippy toes atop a boulder, and filmed himself crawling over a very wet bridge, bent, on his tiptoes and literal knuckles like a full-on ape offering as the words “GORILLA SKILLS (3 Levels)” flashed on the screen. I didn’t know what to make of it, especially when I considered that never in my wildest imagination thought people would pay someone else to get better at climbing and swinging from trees, not as a human being, but as an ape.

And don’t take what I’m saying as anything negative towards Victor, his work, and his channel. I imagine this takes a vast amount of strength and focus. On top of that, I’m jealous. This guy gets to make money and be in nature ALL DAY, and here I am, typing away on a keyboard as my body folds in and of itself. I may turn Victor’s whole story into an essay of some sort…maybe I can get an interview.

San Francisco Techies and God

Tech and religion have always been a topic of discussion for me to stew on, speculate, and maybe even unfairly judge now and again. If you’re offended by that, know that on the fronts of tech, especially in light of Trump recently getting elected (he’s planning on letting it all truly hang out come 2025), most directors, actors, cinematographers, editors, sound designers, etc., will likely soon be replaced in the coming years with generative AI. Seeing that I got my BFA in acting almost 15 years ago, witnessing art and its players die slowly to “advancements” for profit for the big studios and mass appeal will always rub me the wrong way. They’ll find a way, as all true art does via struggle, but still, fuck all that, which I’m sure the silent actors said when the talkies came around and changed everything.

This is why the article, titled “Christians in tech drive a religious revival in SF,” caught my attention if only because I don’t think I’ve ever heard or seen San Francisco, techies, and Christianity uttered in the same sentence together.

From writer Priya Anand:

“San Francisco, one of America’s most irreligious cities, is experiencing a religious revival tied to the tech industry, led in part by a handful of prominent leaders like Tan, Founders Fund investor Trae Stephens, and his wife, Michelle. Techie-oriented churches in the city are expanding by homing in on a message that connects for spiritual skeptics grinding away in Big Tech or at a startup.”

Not knowing many “techies” nowadays, as it feels like San Francisco, for the most part, lost some of them to cities like Austin, New York, and others during COVID-19, the notion that techies were gravitating towards religion when it always felt like tech and the “progress” they were making (as well as the riches) was interesting to me. Being agnostic, finding the love of family, friends, literature, and writing as my “religion” (though that feels even a bit off writing that), Anand’s piece does a fantastic job breaking down what she details as Acts 17 Collective goals.

“The event organizer was a nonprofit called Acts 17 Collective, started by Michelle Stephens earlier this year to nurture a Christian community within tech. The name is a backronym for Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society. It is inspired by the biblical verse where the apostle Paul visits ancient Greece to preach to intellectuals and convert them into believers.

“Our goal is not necessarily conversion,” Stephens said, but instead encouraging the “high intellectuals of our time” to consider incorporating faith into their lives.”

High intellectuals…hmm. Anyway, it's worth reading and delving deeper if you are interested. I'm also wondering if I could sit with them.

Stepping into Yukio Mishima’s World

Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s greatest writers and novelists of the 20th century, is, and I’m embarrassed to say this, relatively unknown to me. I had never encountered his work at San Francisco University's graduate school, where I studied creative writing, or even before that. With that admittance out of the way, I believe I stumbled upon an interview with him in a Paris Review a few months back. Better late than never.

Digging in, I learned about his wide breadth of work from Confessions of a Mask, an autobiographical novel swirling around themes of identity and sexuality (Mishima was supposedly homosexual, frequenting gay bars in Japan and had relationships with men while also married with two children) to what I am now starting to read, book one of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. The series—Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel— explore themes of reincarnation and the changing Japanese society, which I know nothing about. These efforts are part challenge, part research, which I have needed more lately. Call it an effort to remind me why I love fiction, as so much of what I read and gravitate towards now - likely because I’m addicted to it in so many ways - are non-fiction and social media “articles.” This has gotten me nowhere in my mind, body, and soul. If anything, it’s only made my state of mind more depressed, which, given the state of things, is the price one pays to know present-day reality. What did Hemingway say? "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." I wouldn’t call myself intelligent because of my source of information, but I am curious, which eventually leads me to answers that I sometimes feel would have been better left alone.

I’m looking forward to getting into Mishima’s work. My first sitting with Spring Snow, published in Japan in 1969, immediately made me see and recall how much my reading habits have changed and how restless and needy I got. I needed instant gratification from the text, rather than being taken on the beginning of the masterful journey Mishima gave me in the book's first few pages of setting, scene, and backstory. It made me feel almost embarrassed at how hard and reluctant I was to view art like that, how much I had lost, and then worrying if I could get that original joy back. I know I can, but I realize it will take some work.

This for That, a Poem

It was this
for that
and nothing at all for the rest of us.

It was this
for the long bar, the deep drinks, and
the long walks in the sand,
uncaring and
uninterested in the ill conversations
that would be, of course, coming tomorrow.

It was us as a collective
simply not wanting it,
not involved, for we knew
the hate and the fear we had perfected,
the thing that got us here,
would only bring us further
into the flames we created.

It was this
for that and only that.

Damn the future,
the executioner muttered,
We’ll trim the fat.

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