Social Contract Awry

I was just mugged. A gun was pointed in my face and wallet was stolen. My cell phone as well. Thank every god that I didn't have my MP3 player, my laptop, jewelry or social security card with me. Thank. Fucking. God.

That's all I can do. I can thank God, or some other fatalistic all-controlling entity. The matter ends with the intangible fact that I wanted a beer at 11:30 on Thanksgiving. I had to go to a store a little further away than usual. My regular place was closed... I didn't think I'd be comfortable on the couch at Dustin's place. Didn't want to wake up there when I had plans the next day. What is there but God to blame when there were so many normal, unavoidable acts that could have been different. Luck. Random, asinine chance.

I don't think I'll ever forget it. I was on the phone with Blake, discussing some innocuous film or television production, and they were suddenly upon me. I never imagined it would be two. In all my survival fantasies, one man with a snub nosed, death-dealing chunk of metal asked for my wallet in the darkness...

They were suddenly present, and my reaction was violent. I started to fend them off, but the rise of the pistol was unprecedented. It was thinner; sleeker than expected. It was a threat that canceled all resistance. It was a power symbol as sure as presidency or kingship. I surrendered the wealth and expediency clustered around me without much thought. I fell to the floor under the one-eyed gaze of his hateful jurisdiction.

He had power over life and death.

In their wake I was shocked, but functional. I stood, I collected and walked home. I was only a block from where I now sit. A jaunt around a corner and a grim ascent of some dismissive stairs. Home. Or what resembles it. Blake and Corinne brought me a phone to carry out my debit-card cancellations. They comforted me. I'm much better now.

Somehow, though, the experience elucidates the currency of power. We are all
tacitly aware of a social contract which states that we will submit to a violent removal of our fiscal potency from time to time. We know that the constabulary is impotent to stop it. I imagine that—when the hungry maw of a waiting firearm looks at your own eyes—you will allow someone to take your money as well. You will skip home, enlightened: world enlarged. Details filled in.

At the bottom line... I'm okay.

My Sister

Some time in the nineties they started to line up. The fist fights and irritation campaigns faded away. They were comrades—siblings-in-arms. Counterculture shock troops bred to attack the establishment and undermine the zeitgeist of rap-rock and x-box. She an industrial punk (piercings and buckles), he a self-aware nerd (suit jackets and faded jeans). The brass tacks of civilization disintegrated around their sarcasm and public drunkenness. Girls fawned at his above-it-all snort. Boys dug their needy talons into her hung-over Sundays on the couch. Alpha without even trying. They boiled water and ate Ramen noodles from the pot together over holidays, wholly unaware that they had transcended their isolated roots. Their mother was a polymath, their father was a genius, but no one told them. A volatile specter of worthwhileness surveyed them from afar. They were unaware.

Brokedown Metaphors

If my psyche is a place, it is cold now. The harvest is in, all coins and bundled bills this year, with very little for the library, and even less the drying bamboo which would be used to prop up those egocentric statues of reapings past. The winter sets in, greedy evening gobbling up the clock earlier and earlier, and an axial tilt wringing the warm embrace from the air.

Summertimes, Oakland can feel like a lover. A body wrapped around my own, breathing through my clothes, tousling my hair; it all feels thicker and safer. A prophylactic blanket between me and worries.

This cold is so unnatural. It's nothing, in the grand scheme, hotter than the winters of my childhood; those of college. But I'm by myself. Cold in my head and in my heart—cold where it counts. It feels metaphoric. I shake. I cough and clear my throat, but my extremities don't go numb, and no fog hits the air as I breathe.

The amorous heat of the summer seems to make sense, then, surrounded by smiling faces. It's not kinetic energy, not an ambient movement in the twitching molecular sea. It's companionship and reaching out. It's the embrace of a mother, the touch of a playful evening's passion.

When I say I am cold within my psyche—that I've harvested my last lovely thought—I mean that I am reaching out. Cold is not the condition of lacking, it's the signal that it is time to seek improvement. Standing in the shower that extra few moments, or lingering at the desk of a coworker before you punch the clock: these are one in the same. To cocoon in my blankets is a sure sign of my bleak need for allies.

We can only warm one another.

Comfort Zones

Aaron Sorkin has been a lot of things to a lot of people. He's been a lot of things to me. A mystery, a hero, a champion of the bare ideal of character-based storytelling on major network television. He brought me Sports Night, which still to this day is the only half hour comedy that can bring tears to my eyes. He has been painting the walls lately with stories about his newest offering, the hour long drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

I was in love with the whole conceit of it within ten minutes. I bit my teeth into the writing, the acting, the staging and the presentation before I knew what was going on, and it was over. I'm predisposed to a gut-punching love of this sort of television. Doomed to watch. Even now, as I gnash my teeth and feel the whirling dervish dance of violence loom over my restrained action, I am clamoring for more. Drooling. Wanting.

This is the problem. Sorkin wants dearly to be the trumpeter of the gap-bridging phenomenon we are all a part of. He would cut his fingers off to be a part of the coming together that we see between Red State and Blue State. He is a merger pariah. A shill for the new democracy. As such, it is his holy, faithful goal to show the beauty of the rural mentality, the truth and intelligence and wit within the conservative ideology. And in his most recently aired foray into this noble-but-dangerous mission, he painted himself into a corner.

I feel that there is an argument between the Republican ideals and their Democratic counterparts. Fiscal conservativism of the sort that ennobles the capitalist notion of fairness and equal opportunity is still very alive in this country. So despite my own liberal leanings, I would not point a finger at Sorkin for attempting this maneuver. Actually,I would applaud it, and often try to do it myself.

Where his goals grate against me in this newest pair of episodes (“Nevada Day” parts one and two) is with the constant repetition of the most classic non-confrontational position that so many moderates, conservatives and politicians take on the issue of gay marriage. He presents us with two characters—Matt Albie and Harriet Hayes, former lovers forced to work together for the good of a show they both love, constantly catty over the issue of their lingering mutual attraction, and opposing beliefs—put into conflict with the issue itself. Harriet states for a tabloid reporter that “The bible says it's wrong, but it also says 'judge not, lest ye be judged.'”

This trite response has been used in the past. Is the latter part supposed to soften the blow of the former? This sort of deferral is ridiculous. To my eye, the only sane point of view is vocal support of gay marriage. Vocal with action, vocal with conversation, and with your votes. Sorkin's mouthpiece, Albie, serves up a brutal attack to her continued support of this stance. Something to the effect that any way you slice it, she is saying that homosexual love is inferior or less pure than heterosexual love. And yet, we see Sorkin try to save her. She continues to speak in her defense—wounded, but her mind has not been changed. Albie does not go on.

I could go on, I could take it to new heights if I wanted to. I find “defense of marriage” to be a villainous, small-minded assault by fearful misanthropes, pandering to an imaginary system of “morality,” which holds them together, and holds our nation back from truly improving ourselves and the world around us. I can grant someone the distrust of new sciences—stem cell research—or even the sort of paranoid mindset that causes us to divert funds from education and into defense. These are arguable positions. Taking away the right to love and to do so publicly and with the consent of our government “by the people” is only a cold, cruel and pedantic desire to see nothing that is not familiar in the world.

When Hayes is defending herself, she remarks that it is unfair to compare the gay rights movement to the crusade of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She states that the difference is that black people have been living publicly as black people for hundreds of years. Disregarding the fact that genetic differences in pigmentation have been present for tens of thousands of years, and that our white skin is newer, chronologically, this is a ridiculous argument. Immigrants and former slaves were persecuted precisely because they could not hide, and you will not catch more than a handful of contemptible dunces claiming that the 14th Amendment was anything but good in this age.

She makes her case that conservative people, the rural or evangelical denizens of “red states,” need time to adjust to these things. That they just want small, cozy lives, and to raise their children. (I almost feel like the “children” comment was a stab at homosexuals, and a backhanded way of adding imaginary fuel to her dimming, hate-filled fire.) She states that because homosexuals have only lived openly for forty years or so, that her bigoted allies in Alabama and Oklahoma should be given time to get used to gay people. I may be putting words into her mouth, but I feel like she's saying that rights should be dished out on a first-come-first-served basis, and that oppression is okay in the short term, as long as it's squelched once the gentry have had their fun.

There's a lot of double-talk and smokescreening that goes on in the gay marriage debate. People on the opposition side have to take a lot more steps to come out looking like anything but hate-mongers. The morality argument died a long time ago. When ninety some percent of the corporations in America specifically enumerate protections against discrimination based on sexual preference, and when nations on three continents are legalizing the right of a man to marry a man and a woman to marry a woman, to call the gay lifestyle prurient, unnatural, unclean or an affront to God's plan is to equate American morality as mired in a stone age sensibility. We are saying that we can legislate decreased rights for minorities based on the comfort zones of the rapidly shrinking majority.

Harriet is arguing that she is deserving of special treatment because she is straight and Christian. Fuck Harriet Hayes. You are not granted the right of an insular, unchallenged life.

And that, I believe, is the core of this issue. This is about the battle between what is fair and what is comfortable. It is not the job of government to cater to the majority. It is the job of government to give people the freedom to live their lives as they choose, and to protect us from one another. Remind me some day to talk on the state referendum system and tyranny of the majority.

Freeze-Dried

I had to download some porn today. Pulled it off the internet. I'm picky. I look at pictures and thumbnails, scrutinizing position and facial expression. What kind of kinky shit is she going to say? or Is he going to get that whole thing in there? These are important questions. I don't watch porn to see day-to-day menial fucking. I'm looking for the exotic. Creativity. These people are like graphic designers for coitus. They ought to surprise me.

Like, for example, this one time I downloaded a bunch of porn with some attractive, if not spellbinding ladies, and found myself not exactly looking forward to it. I can do that in my head, and I have better hand control when I'm scoring the flesh pounding on my own. But what did I find? They were all Canadian. Damn, I thought, I never would have thought of that. Somehow, just the bare notion that they were Maple Leaf Hotties, and not plain old LA bleach-blonds somehow made each stroke a little more enthusiastic. A little more furtive.

Surprise is the essence of of the orgasm. Show the glands what they expect, and release will come, assuredly, but with all the savoir faire of a UN Peacekeeping force. The twist, the thing that someone shouts at just the right time, like, “I think you hit my liver,” or “I'm your cousin,” can turn that into the thundering advance of a Mongolian horde.

So I download this video, and the girl is a ho-hum, Aaron-Spelling-platinum teenage advertisement. An Abercrombie and Fitch catalog getting flogged by someone who might as well be her dad. “Ooh, you have a tattoo,” was about the height of dialogue here. And you know what? The orgasm was an orgasm, alright—and I never complain about those—but it was unflattering. I know I can do better. This was like frozen chicken wings. Like someone seasoned up a pretty good orgasm, cooked it in an industrial oven, then froze it solid for seven weeks. I pretty much took this orgasm out of the freezer, microwaved it for four minutes, turned it over and then ate it alone in the dark watching reruns of The X-Files.

I don't know why I thought this was relevant, but I did.

I just wanted to say that I think Harry Reid is afraid of George W. Bush. I mean, I know we're all afraid of him in the abstract, but it kind of looks like the respected senator from Nevada is afraid Dubya's going to reach deep inside him and extract some of his glands. Well... actually... that's the face I make when I worry about that. Harry might be wondering about something else entirely. Like tax cuts. Or chainsaws.

In Defense of Reductionism

Yesterday I turned on my new computer for the first time. The distinction between nervous anticipation and elated, heart-soaring euphoria had never seemed so subtle. This sensation sums up a month or more of learning, growth and triumph.

Of course I've purchased my own computer and booted it up before. My parents gifted me with my first personal PC when I graduated from high school. The Dell delivery was something like a 486 Celeron, back when people were still excited about MMX. It finally gave me the excuse to cloister myself away from family and friends, gouging my eyes with Diablo II and Red Alert.

That box and I went through a lot. I learned to install RAM. I bought my first CD Burner and installed it myself. I pirated every conceivable piece of software; upgraded to an illicit copy of Windows XP as soon as I could. It was mine. I've never owned a car, even at twenty five, and I think that the computer took the place of that. No one, not even my parents, could tell me how to decorate it, what to fill it with, or how to organize it. As an adult (of a sort), this seems pretty commonplace now, but it was an experiment that made the potpourri of responsibility, ownership and absolute license gel into something concrete.

I've had a few other computers, including the laptop I'm writing this on, the computer a friend assembled for me in college, and the awkward, out of body experience of controlling, but not owning the machine that serves me at work. This is different, though. This one I built myself. I selected, purchased, assembled and lovingly caressed each and every part from the case to the graphics card and motherboard. I connected each and every one of LEDs on the front panel, hooked up extra USB ports and applied thermal paste to the CPU fan.

Aside from a few simple upgrades in the past, this has been a growth process. It's been about research, learning, nervous sweat and staying up late into the night with an anti-static strap dangling off my wrist like some kind of umbilical tether. I remarked to a friend: this is the closest I may ever come to building a person.

Hyperbole aside, this is important. I have what you might describe as an incorporeal skill set. I deal in ideas, words, concepts and lines of best fit. I don't do well with detail. Concentration isn't my strong suit until I'm ingrained in a process. Rote memorization of the steps. I spent this last week having dreams of collapsing buildings, tornado-struck circuit boards and wires snapping under undue strain. I was so sure I was going to wind up with a cat's cradle of connectors that wouldn't even make a good birds nest. Electric shocks striking forth like a testy Tesla coil, or a jumpy Jacob's ladder.

But, yeah, I was willing to drop a half month's salary and go into hermitage to do this. It's more than just a learning experience; it's demystifying. It takes the magic out of the machine.

It's reductionist.

I've run into that word a little bit lately, so it's worth dwelling on. Reductionist philosophy begins with Descartes as near as I can tell. The idea that the everything can be broken down into processes metaphorical gears. All things are machines, in the sense that machines which we make are merely clumsy, macroscopic devices when compared to, say, the machine that is a duck. The real controversy—one which Cartesian thought squarely rejects—is whether the human mind (or soul) can be reduced to automata. Turing machines and Darwinian science have heated up this debate quite a bit.

I have been confronted with reductionism lately for this reason. People have had a variety of responses to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, and toss around labels like Reductionist or Darwinian Fundamentalist. They believe that trying to reduce the human condition to a robotic, predictable one is to insult, or even deny God's plan. It invalidates our uniqueness. This is a subject that has riled me up on more than one occasion, but I want no more than to mention it as a touchstone right now.

The reason I bring it up is that there is a positive side of reductionist thought. One I think we can all agree on: it breaks down boundaries to comprehension. Especially in the case of physical things.

When I look at a car, for example, I see a car. Although I could draw a clumsy picture of a combustion engine, and explain its fundamental workings, I'm not really sure what all the parts are, nor could I look at them and identify them. To me, a car is one thing, not a system of separate, functioning objects. To someone who works those pieces, and can diagnose problems within that system, a car must be a very different thing. It has a scale that I can't speak about with confidence or knowledge. While I'm aware that there are specialists for this sort of thing, and that the cash economy means I never need to learn these skills, I perceive a personal flaw that I am unable to explain to you what a catalytic converter is, or where the spark plugs are. I can barely change the oil on a car.

Knowledge, to me, is about reducing. Deconstructing the thought-object of a car into its parts. Surgeons have done this with the heart. Psychiatrists are doing this with the brain. Biochemists with DNA. Science struggles to ask “Why?” rather than accepting the unknown, or explaining with magic.

And this week I took a major step toward a more microscopic computer understanding. I know infinitely more about the workings of my computer than I did. I think I'm a better person for that reason. More rounded. I have another merit badge to add to my private, mental collection.

Metaphorically, imagine a book you haven't read. I'm going to use Lee Smith's The Last Girls, because it's been on my shelf a few weeks, but I haven't gotten to it. I know some things about it. I know who the author is, I've read at least one review, I read the back panel and the “About the Author” text. But I couldn't name a character. I couldn't tell you the details or chronology of the plot. In short, all it is to me now is a thought object. A summation of a few details, rather than a system of intricate parts that all link together.

And that is what comprehension is to me. It is, to be a little gauche and referential, to grok something. So, I will continue to fight magical understanding. I will reduce. I will understand elementally. If this deterministic, unfeeling universe of molecules and forces is willing, some day I'll build a person.


1. Yes, I know how to change a car's oil. No, I've never owned a car. I've worked in support jobs for the automotive industry, however, and I know a lot of car fanatics. This is what I'm getting at. Deal for a minute.
2. Holy crap, “grok” is in the Open Office .dic file. Does anyone else think that's weird?