Intelleclectic Podcast

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This episode contains spoilers for One Piece, specifically the Alabasta Arc. If you don’t want One Piece spoiled, don’t listen to this.

The last episode of this podcast was December 9th, 2025 and I had just finished episode 90 of One Piece.

As sometimes happens, time got away from me.(1) So anywayyys, time got away from me, 9 months of time to be specific! And in that time, I did a bunch of things - and also failed to do a bunch of other things - I changed - and also failed to change - all of which will I’m sure be fodder for future entries in this strange personal journal masquerading as a podcast.

But most relevant to this particular mini-series, I watched One Piece. A lot of One Piece. About 415 episodes of One Piece to be exact. And as a result, I now have a lot to say.

After 505 episodes, first and foremost I can now announce with certainty that many of my initial opinions of One Piece were well founded and remain true throughout - although with some caveats.

One Piece is a show predominantly about the human spirit. For the first 400 or so episodes, it’s about the limitlessness of that spirit - how clarity of personal vision and purpose can lead to untold capacities and overcome almost any adversity.

And then, for the next 100 episodes or so, One Piece explores the limits of the human spirit - how, at times, the human spirit must capitulate to unavoidable circumstance - how, in practical matters, sometimes the human spirit alone, no matter how clear and how glorious, simply cannot overcome the conditions it is presented with. And, having fallen short of its aspirations, how the human spirit reconciles with itself and its circumstances and, ultimately, either dies in despair or heals from them and grows.

One Piece is about as epic a delving into the human condition and the nature of human will as one could ask for and if the series really continues to bring that degree of soulful verismilitude into over 1100 episodes, its status as an epic achievement will be undeniable for all time.

The question, for me right now, is how the hell do I talk about it all and I’ve decided the best way is just to go one arc at a time.

Starting with Alabasta - episodes 90 to roughly 130. Our heroes find themselves in a desert kingdom suffering from extraordinary drought driving it inexorably toward a violent civil war, all masterminded by the evil Crocodile, a man made of sand with total control over all moisture.

To be sure, the Alabasta arc feels long at times - and yet it pays off really nicely. Each character gets to have a fight that leads to personal growth - but the central arc is Luffy’s two battles with Crocodile and the nature and horror of civil war itself.

But make no mistake, Alabasta continues to demand complete suspension of disbelief from the viewer and, in fact, by the time the arc is complete, I believe viewers will have either abandoned the show or capitulated to it so completely that they will become diehard fans - at least for several hundred more episodes.(2)

For instance, In the first battle with Crocodile, Luffy is soundly defeated. And by soundly defeated, I mean sucked dry of most of the water in his body, gored straight through the chest and out his back by a giant golden hook, and left to die in the blazing desert sun.

When you see this happen, it’s hard not to assume Luffy is dead. In fact, Luffy being dead is really the only thing a reasonable person could assume if they were in any way still tethered to the strictures of physical reality.

Frankly, it’s almost too much for even the most willing viewer to accept when Luffy, just a few episodes later, less than 24 hours as calculated by the in world clock, leaps back into action with a large barrel of water on his back, like some ersatz Ghostbuster, and with a barely bandaged hole in his chest. When Luffy fills himself up with said water like a balloon and bloodless h2o squirts out of his chest hole as if he were Daffy Duck, it becomes clear that reality has officially been given the middle finger.(3)

That second battle between Luffy and Crocodile culminates in an epic and famous sequence, set to Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, during which Luffy, covered in blood, still with a hole in his chest, and dosed with a fatal amount of paralytic poison, pummels Crocodile relentlessly, defeating him in epic fashion.

The sequence is beautiful and narratively satisfying - but it also makes exactly no logical sense whatsoever. How did Luffy survive the first fight? Why isn’t he bleeding to death? Why isn’t Crocodile just sucking the water out of him again? Why is Luffy immune to the paralytic poison? And even with the ability to hit Crocodile using the moisture of his own blood, what is supposed to be the physiological source of Luffy’s new found power and resilience?

Oh that’s right - meat. Just heaping quantities of meat. Luffy, on the brink of death in the desert, hole in his chest, no water in his body, is dragged to a nearby village and fed meat and, like Popeye the Sailor Man, if Popeye derived his superpowers from canned ham, Luffy is magically healed and orders of magnitude more powerful than before.

These are the kinds of things that might be plaguing some viewers’ minds as they watch the Alabasta arc. However, these intentional breaks from reality serve a purpose. They variolate the viewer.(4) Like variolation, a certain percentage of viewers will no doubt never make it past Alabasta, but those that do are now primed to never again question the internal logic of the One Piece universe.

By the end of Alabasta, if you’re still watching, you will have come to understand that physical reality has no binding force in One Piece. It is merely a tool that Oda uses at will, however he pleases, to suit the story.

In order to drive this home with a final, unequivocal nail, Oda has a bird man named Pell the Falcon pick up what appears to be a nuclear bomb - a bomb that the show has explicitly said has enough power to destroy an entire city. Pell the flacon flies this nuke into the air, like Christopher Nolan’s Batman, and, all in the span of 1 second or so of flight time, Pell the falcon somehow gets the bomb far enough away from its intended target that only he is impacted by the nuclear fireball.

When this happens, you at first learn the wrong lesson. You say - “well I’ll be, I guess characters can die in One Piece” - but then, a few episodes later, who flies down from the heavens like he didn’t just get caught point blank next to a nuclear conflagration? Who appears on scene as if he got into a minor car accident while on his way back from 7/11 to get an Arizona ice tea? Why none other than Pell the Falcon, alive and well, spitting in the eye not only of death, but of physical reality itself.

This is One Piece - reality is subservient to story - and the story is only fundamentally interested in human will - what drives individuals - how do we define our purpose in this life of ours - and are there any limits to what we can accomplish when we understand well enough not only what we want, but why we want it? We’ll find out.

Next time, Skypiea - episodes 144-206.

* I mean, what even is Time? There is no such objective thing as time - I lose time, in part - I would say at my best - because I don’t fundamentally care about time, aside from my fear of running out of time which, from at least one vantage, is itself an illusion while also being, from a different more practical vantage, absolutely as real a concern as it gets.

But time itself, is, literally a mass illusion - one with agreed upon parameters. Same thing with birth and death, which you can ascertain on your own - when did this begin, really? - all this - that is to say, everything you, the listener, are which includes, definitionally, this strange aside you are now listening to, which includes, therefore, literally, me - when will all this end, actually - does it? And perhaps the larger question might be - can there even be anything other than this?

All pointless…

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One Piece Review: Episodes 50-90

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One Piece Review - Episodes 1-49

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Setting out to review One Piece!

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Links to some information referred to herein:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-are-hyperactivating-strategies.html

https://chicagoanalysis.org/blog/conditions-and-diagnoses/annihilation-anxiety-cpi/

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I just rewatched the end of a popular TV show. It was a fantastic ending, and one I enjoyed a lot when it first aired. But, as often happens, for no particular reason, I was suddenly struck by the impulse to rewatch it today and upon this second viewing it really bloomed, emotionally and metaphorically. I was struck, this time - struck and emotionally devastated - by the ending’s stark finality - something that, especially with long running TV narratives, tends to be hard to come by.

As my nose reddened and my collection of snot soiled tissues collected on the floor beside me, I recollected an unexpected memory from a long time ago - a memory I had not forgotten, so much as neglected - like a puzzle box one becomes so tired of trying to solve that its insolubility becomes a source of pain - and so you put it down in frustration on some desk or book shelf and move on with your life - maybe picking it up now and again, turning it to and fro in your hands with an air of resignation.

The memory in question concerns the tiniest baby bunny you can possibly imagine. I’ve found a picture of a small gray baby bunny and added it to this post as a rough illustration of just how terribly cute a tiny baby bunny looks - but, really, that picture does not do the beloved teensy bunny I’m thinking of any justice in terms of either the extent of its cuteness or the extent of its absolute tininess.

I don’t know how my family ended up in possession of this infinitesimal bunny rabbit. I mean, I know in purely causal terms - I can track the chain of custody of the bunny from disreputable 1990s pet store to my mother vis-a-vis some token payment. No, what I mean is that I have no idea why in the world my mother would purchase such a doomed creature.

It was, no joke, barely even bunny shaped - more like a little sphere of living, black/gray down. It had been, presumably, both the runt of its litter and ripped away from its mother far too early. When we came upon it in the store it was barely moving. Nonetheless, my siblings and I were instantly drawn to it - it was, after all, the cutest ball of gentle warm fur you could ever imagine. It emanated an aura of perfect, innocent beauty. It embodied life’s aborning potential, and engendered in everyone who laid eyes upon it a poignant mixture of affection, pity, and joyful hope.

I remember that my mother was told, explicitly, by the pet store that the bunny would almost certainly die. I remember also that she told this to the three of us - my siblings and I. Beyond that, I can’t speak to how the purchase itself went down. Presumably, us three, to varying degrees, small children assured our ostensibly more mature mother that we understood the risk and were willing to move forward anyway. Suffice it to say, howsoever it was legitimized, the bunny was ultimately purchased.

Now, DISSOLVE TO about half an hour later - setting: my childhood home - ancient, peeling, and cramped - my whole family huddled around the kitchen table staring longingly at the physical embodiment of both the word “cute” and the turn of phrase “failure to thrive.” I remember all of us watching the bunny in my mother’s cupped hands, captivated, taking turns petting it with trepidatious care, as though it were a soap bubble that might pop under even the slightest pressure.

I know my mother tried to feed the bunny, but I don’t remember how. I would guess that the correct way to feed the bunny involved a very specific formula, possibly administered by a plastic syringe, but I really have no idea. She had some thick milky concoction - I don’t know what it was or where she got it but I will give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that it, and the means to administer it, were provided to her by the pet shop. In any event, I think her efforts may have been somewhat successful, at least insofar as I remember having the impression that the bunny had eaten and, as a result, I felt a little more confident as I went to sleep that night that the bunny might survive.

I believe it was the next morning when someone found it. It must have been somewhat hard to tell whether or not it had died - it was so small and its fur held so much warmth - but at some point death was confirmed and announced.

What followed was the only instance of truly open, unabashed, and shared emotional expression I can remember in the entirety of our time as a family unit. The five of us in the car, driving to my grandmother’s house, passing over the Verrazano bridge, sobbing uncontrollably. Even in the throes of enormous emotional intensity, a part of me could not help but take stock of the sheer uniqueness of that moment. Moreover, another part of me was saliently aware that we were all crying over more than just a bunny - that the bunny was a symbol of some kind, though I could not at the time, or for many years afterwards, say for what.

It was only watching the ending of the TV show today that, suddenly, 30+ years later, the bunny bloomed for me. The bunny was the perfect physical embodiment of life’s unremitting, unfeeling finality. In the bunny we saw ourselves. The bunny pronounced to each of us, child and adult, the inexorability of our march toward death. We endowed the bunny with our dreams and our dreams were irrevocably lost. The bunny was our dashed hopes and the certain promise of future dashed hopes. The death of the bunny was, in a real sense, the death of our joint innocence - and, for a moment, formlessly, we mourned that loss together.

Unfortunately, since everyone in that car was, to some degree or another, a confused child, the inflection point of the bunny’s death, with all its clarifying potential, was squandered. As a result, at least two things which ought to have been discussed and capitalized upon, were not.

The first thing was the extraordinariness and significance of this moment for us as a family - for maybe the first and only time, we were all on the same page - something earnest and real and undeniable had passed between us. For a few hours, the bunny made us into a community - its demise temporarily pierced our discomfitures and unified us. Of course, the onus was on my parents to seize the day and try to ride the momentum of the moment into a larger change in the narrative arc of our time together - but they were not, I’m afraid, up to the task and, left to my own devices, just as swiftly as I recognized the uniqueness of our familial communion right then, so to returned my ever present companions of shame and fear to ruthlessly deride my tears.

The second, and perhaps the more significant, thing was the failure to utilize a profound teachable moment - that is, having the wherewithal to discern, extract, and communicate what might be called the central lesson of the bunny - which is, in hindsight, that one can either accept life on its own terms or reject those terms and suffer needlessly.

Instead, I vaguely remember some platitudes about the bunny going to heaven - which is to say, the exact opposite lesson was taught. Fuck life’s terms - the hell with reality - it wasn’t unfeeling natural law and capricious chance which dictated the bunny’s death - it was the will of God, whose wise and omniscient plans required the bunny to die - and anyway, who says the bunny’s dead at all? In fact, you know what not only isn’t the bunny dead, but you’ll see the bunny again one day, up in the clouds! And Lucy the dog will be there! And grandpa to! The bunny and grandpa and Lucy the dog and you and me, we’ll all ride eternal, shiny and chrome, awaited in Valhalla!

The 5 stages of grief were officially coined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death And Dying. Of cou…

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Learning the true meaning of forgiveness

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Venerable Shoushan picked up his “bamboo comb” and said to the assembly,  "You people of various ranks, if you call out ‘bamboo comb’ you butt your head into the norm. Not calling out ‘bamboo comb’ you turn your back to the norm. You various people, just say what do you call out?”

Free radicals are best known as those things that are often vilified in pop science media for causing all kinds of problems in your body and needing to be defended against by anti-oxidants and bright colored fruits and vegetables and resveratrol and stuff.

Here's a quick synopsis of what a free radical is in terms of chemistry:

> [A] radical, also known as a free radical, is an atom, molecule, or ion that has at least one unpaired valence electron. With some exceptions, these unpaired electrons make radicals highly chemically reactive. Many radicals spontaneously dimerize. Most organic radicals have short lifetimes.

Ripping "free radicals" out of chemistry and depositing them into the realm of ideas, it seems to me that the free-radicalization of meaning - that is the liberation of meaning from its normative constraints in order to maximize its creative reactivity - is critical to being able to freely express yourself appropriately under any and all circumstances.

Take the christian Bible, for instance. In terms of meaning repletion, it's got to be a top .01% document, no matter which edit you use. It's also a fantastic example of the way bound meaning constrains rather than liberates. If you hew to a particular interpretation of some portion or portions of the document - as defined by the dogma of a given church, or a given priest, or a given pastor - then you become bound to that singular interpretation. But if you don't hew to any particular dogma, the Bible is full of robust imagery and evocative language that can be put to all kinds of expressive uses, just as the need arises.

As a more down to earth (reverse pun intended) example, consider Apollo 13. A handful of astronauts stuck in space on a broken space ship slowly running out of breathable air suddenly find themselves in need of a carbon dioxide scrubber. If they don’t get one set up ASAP, their spacecraft will turn into the world’s most expensive and physically distant coffin. In order to solve this problem, NASA engineers famously had to come up with an ad hoc design to “fit a square peg into a round hole.” The picture at the top of this essay is what they came up with.

There’s no handbook design for this device. It is an amalgam of other objects intended for other uses in other places - an assortment of materials never intended for this specific purpose - materials which NASA engineers, driven by necessity, successfully liberated from their normative framework of meaning, thereby liberating their metaphorical power and allowing them to be reconfigured into something entirely new and perfectly adapted to conditions as they arose.

Zen Master Shoushan may not be presenting any judgment in his case above. It’s two true statements - normality is calling the comb a comb, and calling it anything else denies normality. But then, the “hard” part, he insists that people call it something.

The natural inclination is to search for the correct answer - as though there is one in particular Shoushan intends to elicit. But thinking about what the correct answer is doesn’t work - and in fact, it seems to me that “correct answer” thinking is exactly what the shackles of normative meaning consist of. It could even be said that “correct answer” thinking here, somewhat ironically, turns the comb into an impassable mountain. Perhaps giving up on the correct answer allows for the right answer? But then, what’s the difference and how would you know?

I think when you’re no longer bound in any way to the norm - but also not blind to the norm - that all meaning becomes free radicalized and reactions of the mind abound, and nuclear pulse explosions of meaning spontaneously erupt and propel you in all directions, just as circumstances demands.

The dilemma is that the “shackles” include all kinds of things we explicitly or implicitly prize.

But who ever said freedom was free?

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My thoughts on home and homelessness.

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