Undernourished and Overfed

Something ain't right here.

2008-04-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

What if my backyard is in Greenland? What then, British Petroleum? WHAT THEN?

It Makes Me Sad...

2008-04-22T23:22:00.000-07:00

Is that... I mean... Seriously? How can this be real?

Aside from the fact that I was there and took the picture, I find it hard to believe anyone could intentionally name a park that...

*SIGH*

Mixing Work and Romance

2008-04-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

Every muscle in my body had to be stopped, because no less massive a systemic shutdown seems to rouse Benjamin from his fearsome driving trance. Some people talk about white-knuckled driving, and that description is certainly apt in the case of Benjamin. In addition, he is red-jawed, tense-eyed, flutter-kneed, pale-cheeked and cold-nosed. Like a hyperactive puppy, too long out of the sun and staring at the bone he cannot bare to relinquish.

Also, he is driving.

“What now, Jay?” he addressed me.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Bollocks,” he said, calling me out in British.

“It's nothing.”

“You know the penalty for lying.”

“You know the state of my wallet.”

“I know you're pretty quick in the aisles of a Safeway, too.”

“Benjamin.”

“What'd I do this time?”

“Nothing.”

“You're sure?” He wants to know if I'm sure. “Am I driving too fast?”

“You didn't do anything.”

“Remember the rule about lying, man.”

I remember, and I'm not prepared to accept the consequences. “I'm not lying. It's me.”

“Better.” He's satisfied, but it's fleeting. Benjamin's hard glare loses focus, and he seizes on the next inquiry that slaps his gray-lobed brain. ”What'd you do?”

“I'm dating your coworker.” The confession feels good. Like blowing a brick house down.

“It's just us in here, man.”

“I know, man.”

“Heavy.”

“It's really eating at me, you know?” We both think about it. Hard. “It's harrowing,” I say.

He thinks about what to say, taking his time. Mulling it over. Mixing work and romance is always complicated, and this is no different.

“Are you gonna let yourself down easy?”

“I was hoping to do it with a text message, but I'm just not that kind of guy.”

“No, you're better than that.”

“Completely.” I'm glad he knows that about me.

“Do you need a minute alone?”

“Would you mind? The rest stop up there? They'll have a payphone.”

“I understand, man.” He pulls in, white knuckles going flesh-toned. “I could use some Twix, anyway.”

“Can I have one?”

“Sure.”

“A Twick.”

“A Twick?”

“I'm guessing.”

“Good guess.” The car sings a one note song, upset at my premature seatbelt loosening. “Hey, Jay?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry to hear about Jay, man.”

“Yeah, me too.” I'd probably tear up, but the stimulants dry me out. “But it's easier this way.”

“I hear you.”

The Correct Direction

2008-04-14T21:07:00.001-07:00

It was time to go and Benjamin was on a serious bender. We had a date in Batesville with a gourd that blocked out the sun so bad, the local sheriff locked up six people for breaking curfew. The kind of shit you can get into in a town with a curfew makes the buttons pop off my vest just thinking about it.

“Benjamin. Let's go.”

“But I'm upset.” He was. The creases in his forehead were so tight I wanted to farm them for geothermal energy.

“What's up?”

“Why can't I just go wards?”

“Go what?”

“Wards.”

“Wards?”

“Yeah. I wanna go wards.”

I thought about it a bit, then spit out “I'm not stopping you man.” I had thought about it. And I wasn't.

“No, no, you're cool.” He paused, but his mouth was open Feed Me wide, and he had something else to say, for sure. “It's not you.”

I tried being encouraging, because when a man is flat on his back, sometimes that's what he needs. “So, go wards. It's your high.”

“What am I gonna do about grammar?”

“Grammar?” I was confused, because usually it was gravity he had trouble with. Lying there, totally prone, I had to wonder if he'd just gotten his "gr" words messed up.

“Yeah, it's bringing me down.” That I could agree with.

“Dude, I agree.” Grammar was always killing my high. Split infinitives and the pejorative tense and all that. For a writer, running into grammar is like finding a splinter when you're a termite. It sucks.

“See, I can go forwards.” He wriggled in the direction his feet had been facing, dragging the throw rug along with him as he went.

“Damn right you can.” I said, and gave him a little applause.

“I can go backwards.” He reversed the act, pushing with his heels and sliding
headfirst toward my chair.

“You can, but I don't recommend it.” Benjamin and I try to keep each other going forward whenever possible. “Remember what happened last time we did that.”

“Yes.” He then picked up his keister and shimmied out to the left. “Just as I suspected, I can go sidewards if I want to.”

“Actually, I think that one's not right.”

“I'm ignoring that.”

“Understood.”

“But there is no wards.” The world kind of blinked into the next day, and I think we both felt it. I held on to my drink tighter, because suddenly nothing made sense. I looked around, and he was right. There was no wards. “I've looked in every direction I can think of, and I'm convinced that no matter which way I go, it won't be wards.”

“You're right. Only one thing can be to blame.”

“I tried to tell you, man.”

“Fucking grammar, man.”

“Completely.”

A Triassic Lark

2008-03-20T22:41:00.001-07:00

As a youth I entertained many notions of possible future employment. Astronaut. Cowboy. Garbageman. All of these, of course, are rugged, manly professions destined to attract the tiny male brain in early stages of development. None were to be my true calling. None would even sustain a level of desire beyond facetious reference or “oh, sigh, if only” platitudes.
What I truly yearned for...
What I notched my belt with, each tenuous step of the way...

The Life Calling that haunts everything from dreams to social-networking-profile self-assessments is not a future culled from the collective unconscious of the alpha male zeitgeist of centuries past, but rather a life of dull inspection. Of rational examination of the remnants of an era past. Long past.

My obsession with paleontology is rooted in ancient memories. So the largely-apocryphal family story goes, in an easter basket in my third year of life were tucked several plastic dinosaurs. They became my instant obsession, birthed from that plastic hash and possibly even from brightly colored eggs. Animals, clearly, but with a legacy of being long gone, unknowable and trapped in purview of science only. Literally, they were afforded their own discipline fraught with powerful words even my all-knowing parents were not familiar with.

Some of these names—Tyrannosaurus, of course, because what collection of saurischians would be complete with him. Stegosaurus, because no grandfather can resist teasing a child about the “kookiness” of those plates and spines. Triceratops, because she is perhaps the most identifiable of these long extinct animals—sharing characteristics of the rhinoceros or the cow.

There is power in words. There is an echoing in my inmost desires that is only slaked by the proof that I have more words than a rival. Even than a friend. Maybe this comes from all the teachers, friends of parents and shocked passersby and their remarks. “I could never remember all those words.” “How can he pronounce all of those?” Maybe, conversely, I was already wired to be prideful at the mention of my great linguistic prowess, and the discovery of a science that offered a panoply of new words was too much to handle.

Clearly a five year old who knows the difference between Dromaeosaurus and Dilophosaurus (and can tell you which one he identifies with more) isn't your average five year old. But honestly, even now I'm somewhat tickled by it. Remembering how I failed to ever become more than a dabbler in that magic. I have the words, but I will never sit in the hot sun of Laiyang county, cracking rocks to their Cretaceous core and robbing their secrets. I won't get to lay these words out in front of lecture halls. Robert Bakker will never know my name.

The funniest thing, in retrospect, is how tame these words sound now. Diplodocus and Psittacosaurus, though not in the common lexicon, are stiff words with only one meaning, less rhythm and no poetry. The pangs of echolalia one suffers from too much time discussing our long-gone Terrible Lizards is also a little tedious. This is nerd knowledge. It's as useful as star wars trivia, or rote memorization of the first hundred digits of pi. It encourages knee-jerk criticism of movies in which Brachiosauridae are depicted dragging their tails, or which feature man-sized Velociraptors. There are probably entire message boards dedicated to a crusade to unmask and lambaste the purveyors of these cinematic tragedies.

But I just don't care anymore. Because these were the dreams of my youth, and they're as silly as dreaming of being a cowboy.

Of course, if I were a cowboy who got to ride a dinosaur, there would be nothing silly about that at all. Seriously.

Thin Boundaries

2008-03-09T23:44:00.000-07:00

There's nothing that causes quite the same mix of consternation and joy as finding evidence of the internet moving into realspace. Seeing a graffiti heart depicted on a wall in spray paint as a "<3" is disturbing in the way that it must have been for people to start receiving love letters in typeface. It has the kind of world-blending elements that the turn signals on Amish horse and buggies have.

As long as no one starts gluing captions to cats, I think we'll be ok.

A Brief Retrospecitve

2008-01-17T23:20:00.000-08:00

I dig into my old poetry between laundry and a cocktail, hoping to find some inspiration. Maybe a glimpse of the past will mask these grinding emotions with a little perspective. They always twinkle on the screen as though fresh off my mind. Still I expect them to be frayed or tattered. A bent corner. A forgotten line. A little age. They ought to embody the time that's passed and the moods that've come and gone. They stay fresh; blacks crisp and whites clean. The emotions get the treatment—watered down and softened in a spin cycle that never stops. Tumbled brilliant like stones until the image is all that remains. Until they're metaphors and not tirades. All my vitriol is gone and the art remains.

There are visions of a man who loved like a falling stone. No conviction, no remorse. Heedless of his own motion. The shape of things is a dog song—pain and joy so subtle and too strong to comprehend. The poetry screams out like madness at the sight of some dark god. Who was I? What did I see as I launched myself from every precipice, and did I even imagine the ground below?

Though with time there is a pattern. A clear one of glory-seeking and empty vessels. He becomes the rock. He is blind. He is thoughtless. He becomes the dog. He replies with barking and with sex. Then something magical happens. In those pages (the ones most yellowed and aged in my mind) he learns who he is. He blinds himself with a mask of imagery. He wears the poem, and puts it on. He erects straw-man gods to do his dirty work. It's beautiful, but maddening. A patchwork of prediction and delusion. A back seat driver in the verse.

I used to say I never journal. But it seems I may have done something even more explicit.

Boyfriend

2008-01-16T22:39:00.000-08:00

Rhythm went all to pieces some time during the tenth lap. It was a victim of poor choices and heavy thoughts. Nick let his stride break and came to a rest on the edge of the bleachers, too tired to sit. Poor choices because of the frozen breakfast burrito he'd clawed out of the plastic before dawn, and chewed into a flavorless mush, still half frozen. Heavy thoughts because of Allie. He panted and the feeling was like someone sucking the air from his lungs with a bellows.

Allie let herself more gracefully slow and drift out to the far lane, then stepped back toward him, eyes on something else. Her shoes matched the green starter's lines, and her shorts showed off the only thing he liked unambiguously about her. She spoke with misty breath.

“That it?”

Through a heavy pant, he managed a breathy “Yeah,” but couldn't contribute more usefully than that.

Stretching up and down onto the balls of her feet, Allie got a look like she was being put through the paces. Nick felt some composure coming back and said “Go ahead and keep going if you want.”

"It's okay. That was plenty.” She walked over and sat, every dark blond hair still in place, breathing like a quiet metronome.

Sitting down took forever, like he was instantly stiff. It wasn't so bad. The chill in the air was probably what did it. She grabbed his hand and held it in her lap while he rubbed his face with the other one. Even holding his nose in his palm didn't banish the cold, dead feeling in the flesh at the tip.

Allie squeezed his palm, and when he looked she was smiling and innocent. She pulled his hand up to her chest and held it like a kitten or a teddy bear, but she was still at arms length. The distance felt personal. Nick didn't know if he should cross it. There were a lot of things he didn't know.

“What the heck are we, anyway?”

Her eyebrows went out wide and the corners of her mouth dropped like curtains at the end of a show. She looked hurt. He hadn't meant to be so blunt. It had sounded friendly and cheerful in his head, kind of like a “how the heck are ya',” but after he'd said it he knew his resentment had gotten out with his honest curiosity.

“Sorry.”

“Fine.” She let go of his hand.

“I mean,” The landscape was suddenly unfamiliar. He was still at the track. Still being watched by all the pine trees and the thin veil of gray that covered a shamelessly cold blue sky. He could hear the same birds. But he'd painted himself into a corner somehow. “I think I'm nervous because this isn't what I was expecting.”

“And what?” Allie shuffled an inch or so farther away.

“I want to talk about it?”

“I don't.” Her eye contact at that moment became suddenly gentler. “I'm totally ok with the ambiguity right now.”

Ten kinds of compassion fought in Nick's mind over who would get to speak next. He barely managed to control them, absolutely sure that acting like he knew why would only agitate her. “Do you still think you're going to move?”

“I don't know.” She'd gone right past hurt and into ambivalent and annoyed. “I'm still thinking about it.

“I guess,” he paused for effect more than anything. “Maybe I just think if I knew what you were planning I might know what to do. I mean, what to think.”

A bird landed at the top of the bleachers and hunted around in a crumpled up Subway wrapper.

Miraculously she laughed, not quite at him, but not warmly. “You need me to hold your hand? Maybe I'm your mom.” She grabbed his hand and it was even less comfortable. “Maybe that's what the heck we are.”

“I kind of wish I had a word for it.”

“Do you want to be my boyfriend?” She was dead serious, switching off masks like a revolving door spitting out faces at the end of a long workday.

“I don't know.”

“Is it nineteen fifty seven? Gonna ship out to Korea and write me letters until I sober you up with a Dear John?”

Nick felt like she was making fun of him. “Listen, I'm sorry if we're stuck with a retarded vocabulary for describing relationships. I don't even have archetypes for this.” He might've overreacted.

“Maybe you can be my beau. It's less specific.” She was making fun of him now. “It's more French, too.”

“I shouldn't bring this stuff up.” She stopped her minor torment, and slid closer again. He felt immediately like he was pouting. It was kind of like the cold handshake of charity. “There just isn't anything like a normal relationship anymore, is there?”

“There wasn't ever.” She smiled at him. “I like you.”

“Do you know English doesn't even have any active verbs for sex that aren't taboo or euphemistic?”

They both thought about it for a minute. She looked almost read to say something, then mentally took it back.

“Fuck. Bang. Screw.” He put them on the line.

“Do?” Allie shrugged.

“My favorite has always been 'pork'.”

“Gross.”

“I like you too.” He kissed her, just a little bit. Enough to drive home the point. “Whatever you are.”

“Thanks,” she said, and then they were just holding on to each other while the birds fought over fast food.

“Don't move,” he said. And she didn't say anything.

Moon Yearning

2007-11-21T10:56:00.000-08:00

People are going to live on the moon because there is no stopping them. The limitations to human ingenuity, materials science and economic feasibility are massive, both staggeringly vast and blisteringly complex, but they’re no match for deep yearning inside our shared consciousness. The tribulations of negotiating a vacuum, settling on lifeless rock and producing or importing the necessary elements for human survival from a massive inorganic sphere are numerous and obvious. The cost of lifting even a single astronaut into orbit is vast; taking him to the moon more so. Supplying him with years worth of food, water and breathable air… I’m unequal to the task of describing the hubris involved. But that hubris we certainly do have, as a people. A moon colony—even if it must be bleak, boring and lonely—will be achieved because we want it that badly.

I could speculate as to the draw of the moon. I’d point out its prominent place in the heavens and our mythology and language. We’ve had goddesses of the moon, moon men and even men in the moon. We shoot the moon, cows jump over it, and we moon over things we desire. We’re moon mad. In English, we even use the word “lunatic” to describe someone who is mad; a word with the same root as lunar. There’s a fever about the moon. Crime rates, emergency room visitations and marital problems peak on the night of the full moon. The lunar cycle is built into the human physiology through estrous. The moon pulls on us as surely as it does on the tides. Though, truly, our desire to live on the moon doesn’t need any excuses. It’s there. It’s an obstacle which must be surmounted. A story which must be told.

Chuck Klosterman asks a point blank question in his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. Paraphrasing, would you rather spend a full year in Europe with a $2,000 a month stipend, or ten minutes on the moon. I answer unequivocally that I would take the moon. I have no hesitation in making that answer and no anxiety about the risk or complete lack of material benefit. It’s the moon. It’s the fucking moon. Europe is Europe. It’s exciting and beautiful and culturally significant and filled with people I know I’d love to meet. Someone who disagreed with me on this point made her argument that “You could do a lot on two thousand dollars.” This is absolutely true. But Europe will always be there, and I could conceivably find myself in a position to live in Europe, even have money in Europe. The obstacles between me and the moon are uncountable. Barring a major change in manufacturing worldwide, I don’t foresee the price of taking matter into orbit lowering enough for me to be able to afford that trip in the next 80 years.

Of course, there will likely be major changes in worldwide manufacturing between now and 2080. Science fiction and Popular Science notwithstanding, there are plenty of innovations going on which seem to promise a future of space exploration. Will I be able to afford to be a part of this when I’m aged and weaker and less skilled at manipulating the digital and physical tools of the age? Will anyone want to take me? Maybe. I might go to the moon. It’s too soon to call. Still, if given the opportunity now, I’d take it in a heartbeat.

There’s no good reason for it. Nothing that could be blamed on the evolution of my psychology or the presence of an all-knowing, all-loving God. It’s cultural and personal and silly. But for some reason, it’s powerful. It feels like fate. It feels like religion. For an occasionally solipsistic non-theist like myself, that’s a confusing feeling. Irrationality isn’t a normal part of my everyday thought process. The fact that I’m not alone in this lends poignancy to the spiritual argument. NASA scientists build the framework without blinking at the cost involved. Media gatekeepers grant time and airspace to the relentless march of moon science. Politicians immediately see it as a global quest and a national unifier. So I’m not alone in my unreasonable urge to bask in the Sea of Tranquility.

Or, maybe it’s more like love. It’s the feeling of caring for another or wanting something badly enough to supersede the normal process of tacit cost-benefit analysis that drives my decision making. If I’m in love with the moon, I can be okay with that. Ever since that night she winked at me, a giant shadowy eyelid crawling across her bleached surface, I feel like we might have a connection. She’s always there for me, asks almost nothing of me, and lights my way in the dark. My lunar lover is a literalization all the tired metaphors for the guiding hand of a loving partner.

But she’s also a giant rock suspended in a slowly spiraling gravity well, doomed to one day—aeons after my death—crash into the world I call home. She’s not protected by a blanket of gasses, not crawling with organisms, not running fresh with drinkable water and not crawling with continents that dance on a bed of magma. In short, she is nearly without resources. A purely artistic object laden with a beauty unchanged since the dawn of mankind. To settle her surface with landing strip lights and monorail tracks would, for the first time, make our planet’s dance partner into a different being.

All across the world, as long as people have looked up, they’ve seen the same moon. Now we lay poised to plant a more permanent flag on her surface, and I worry that the spirit of this moon yearning might crumble away as her uninhabited surface becomes just another city. We may find ourselves like a child on Christmas afternoon, lying spread eagle in a miasma of wrapping paper and bows, the frenzy of gift opening leaving us cold and a little depressed after destroying the anticipation. I know we’ll settle the moon, despite these concerns. I know humans will live there, if not permanently. But if I could make an argument against this, it wouldn’t be economic or scientific or rational. It would be for love of that pristine object. For love of her as a symbol.

Leave the moon for love.

UFO Haunted World

2007-11-01T22:52:00.000-07:00

In the sixth grade I saw a UFO. It was shaped kind of like a blimp and flying what looked to be millions of feet in the air. It was broad daylight, but it stood out black against the bright blue sky above my elementary school, cruising by at a ridiculous speed. My friends looked at me with confusion or maybe even concern for my sanity, but they couldn't see the ship as it zipped across my arc of vision, no doubt carrying a handful of hapless abductees or perhaps refugees from some interstellar war. This was the last I heard of the great visitation of 1993, which suggests either a massive intergovernmental cover-up, a superpowerful technology able to erase the memories of hundreds of millions of earthling rubes, a benign flyby cut short by something like Jean Luc Picard's precious prime directive, or a simple case of an eleven year old with an active imagination and no intimate knowledge of the geometry of our great nation's various airplane fuselages.

I don't believe in UFOs. Into high school I was intrigued by the idea of visitors from other planets, lost civilizations and the Loch Ness Monster. I think it was more out of a desire for it to be true than for any kind of reasoned belief that it was possible. Ufological beliefs and their cryptozoological counterparts possess an enormous counter-culture cache; one that I burned for a piece of from about the time I realized I was defining my persona with every move I made. Even today, the internet breathes with this mythology—from Cory Doctorow's constant linking to cryptomundo to the train-wreck fascination with Raalians that pours out of message boards and news destinations with uncomfortable regularity.

It's an compelling fiction with a full-time cult of conspiracy-minded advocates looking in every shadow for picked over evidence. And the most believable of their tenets is the concept of a military/industrial cover up so powerful it supersedes the need-to-know of even the president. If our government were to recover an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its crew, I have no doubt that they would shy away from full disclosure. Their treatment of everyday issues is proof enough that they don't respect the blind propagation of information through unregulated mouths. The climate we live in requires a certain degree of secrecy to be bestowed on our elected leaders, and that regulatory regime is like dark moist soil for the fungus of paranormal whistle blowers.

They say that more Americans believe in angels today than did thirty years ago. We're inundated with vampire fiction and magical realism. Fantasy is on the rise, and it wasn't so long ago unwed mothers were claiming themselves the victims of a lusty incubus. Information is everywhere, but the deepness of the unknown is still too great for our soundings. Human minds reach out for explanations when the truth is out of reach. I recall that Carl Sagan calls science the “candle in the darkness,” a way to find our bearings; it's important that we have all the details before we decide what story to tell. UFOs and angels other “plausibly fantastic” stories are tempting catchalls for everyday unknowns. They fill so many gaps when proper truth can't be gained or isn't sought after.

I came across this map today and was fascinated by the disparity between US regions and the propensity of a given citizen to report a UFO sighting. The name says it all. Unidentified. Flying. Object. How many of these do you see every day? Do you know if that's a 747 a good distance away, or maybe a solo flight a little closer? Our eyes are affected painfully by distance when there are no objects for reference, as in the sky. Is it a comet or a satellite? Clearly these aren't issues everyone has, but our knowledge gap is generally galling when it comes to bodies in direct violation of the law of gravity. It's easy to make the leap to space aliens when you've been on a steady diet of X-Files or A Fire in the Sky. The same goes for those whose literary palette considers the bible a staple.

Mr. Hynek's map illustrates something poignant and scary. Out here in the Pagan west, UFO sightings are an over-common occurrence. As you move east, they seem to diminish. In the bible belt and south of it, they dwindle away into almost a non-occurrence. Am I the only one who looks at something like that and hears a little preacher preaching? It starts to imply issues a like a kind of locative paranormal insanity... I'm starting to feel a pique in my interest. A curiosity about the generalized explanations people use for the random or the inexplicable. I know I tread on people's toes when I demonize religion or astrology. I can't concern myself with that. I believe in science. I agree that it's the candle in the darkness. Knowledge is sacred, and anything without peer review and scientific method lacks the necessary power of persuasion.

It's strange to look back at your earlier shortcomings—especially those that are only shortcomings from the perspective of your current self. In a way it gives me hope that people can change. In another way it softens the blow. I know I'm not separate from people who see angels wherever they go. We're all in the dark. We all want answers.

The WiFi Life

2007-10-30T21:18:00.000-07:00

District headquarters in Denver is always shutting down. Mike Coleridge got a basically unprecedented deal on the land they built it on, but the snow gets so thick come February that the lines go down and the servers balk at the traffic. They choke on the error messages and flash tiny LED death rattles.

Someone has to fix that kind of stuff.

I yawn in position beside the other stiff-suits; Sherpas in loafers are the only ones taking the 9:17 from LAX to Denver on a Tuesday morning, ready to carry laptops and briefcases, the occasional paperback, to heights that shame the Himalayas. Many of them will do it in their sleep.

I think more intensely about shaving. The countdown to boarding eases by in no time. I board late, sitting near the front, carefully stowing and unfurling satchels and jackets. My seatmate runs even later, but he files in before long. There's a wool cap on his head and one of those four button black jackets, but he has the uniform: dress shoes and slacks. Even a tie.

He has straight teeth and rosy cheeks, but his eyes are glassy and vague. He doesn't have the charisma for sales, and none of the managerial swagger. Looked like a tech. Like me.

He smiles, but his eye contact barely glances off me, and he's into his seat and book before I can nod. I eye my coffee and take satisfaction out of knowing I won't need it. This guy isn't going to mutter so much as a phrase between now and touchdown. A nice caffeine sidearm is a good thing to tote around in case there's someone you actually want to talk to.

Once the ritual seatbelt check is underway an older stewardess approaches me. She smiles at rosy cheeks and grabs at my attention with a meaningless hand gesture.

“Sir, I'm sorry to bother you.” She's the senior attendant. You can tell because she's not doing any of the shit jobs right now. “Were you aware you were sitting in a courtesy aisle? Your neighbor is a special needs passenger.”

This is new, so I just kind of stare. Old habits. Don't move until you know what's going on. The guy doesn't look retarded or anything. Just kind of... nonplussed.

Her liquid plastic smile starts to seep off her face just a bit. Just before it can plunge headlong and away, she throws it back on to the potter's wheel, spinning up a helpful explanation.

“Mr. Davenport is a transmitting device,” she says, as if it makes sense. “He's going to have to turn off for the duration of the flight. We ask only that you be so kind as to activate his arrival beacon upon landing.” This she says while pointing to a button on his wristwatch.

I nod.

“I need you to verbally confirm that you are willing to assist Mr. Davenport, or the flight crew will be forced to find you a new seat.”

“Um. Yes,” I manage.

The smile spins up to a consistency so solid as to appear legitimate, and she turns on a practiced three inch heel.

Despite the strange interruption—and what must have been an intrusive invasion of his privacy—Mr. Davenport still barely looks at me. I try talking to him now:

“Transmitting device?”

His head turns slowly, and he shakes something off, as if I startled him. “I'm sorry. Were you talking to me?”

“Yeah, there's... uh... no one else here,” I say, and stare into these big brown eyes he has.

“Sorry, I was distracted. I'm telecommuting.” Rosy cheeks Davenport doesn't even has a book in his hand. I fidget in my seat.

“Flying from LA to Denver is more like a for-real commute for me.”

“Yeah, I'm sorry,” The sorrow looks genuine. A real flash of empathy and a half-formed memory of something awful crosses his features. “I remember how much that sucked for me”

I laugh. “Yeah.” Sarcasm is a vice, I know, but there are worse guilty pleasures. “I totally remember how much it sucked.”

Now he suddenly starts, “Oh crap. You're not sending a drone, too, are you?”

“Mr Davenport,” I say, trying to be gentle, “whatever you're talking about, I'm in the dark. You're slinging me a bunch of nonsense.”

“Oh,” he begins. He gets that look like someone just told you the number you dialed was wrong, long after you started talking about that new rash you got. “Oh, I'm sorry. I meant it literally. Telecommuting. This is a robot.”

“Mania suits you,” I say, hoping for a better reaction than I get.

“No, really. About a year ago I had this body commissioned. Now I get to stay home and pilot this thing from job to job while I watch daytime television.”

“I think I should've told the stewardess 'No'.”

“Everyone says that,” he says. “Listen, the captain's about to start talking. Nice to meet you. I have to get turned off.”

“You're serious aren't you?”

He reaches down to his ankle, pulling his foot up onto the seat. “Completely.”

“How expensive was it?” I'm curious at this point. Because, if he's joking, he's really jerking my chain. This sounds too good to be true, on top of sounding impossible.

“Oh, not that bad.” He rolls up his pantleg and reveals a thick, black, rubber ring with a display on it. “Here,” he says, casually flipping me a business card.

“Thanks,” is all I can muster.

“No, thank to you for helping me out.” He flips the switch on the band, places his foot on the ground and looks at me again. “It's against FAA regulation for me to broadcast back to myself while the plane's in the air.”

This is actually happening, I keep repeating to myself. Somehow it won't stick.

“But that's part of the fun,” he says. His smile is radiant for a robot. “Two more hours of Court TV, here I come. Have a good one.”

And with that he goes numb. Eyes closed, utterly still. I glance over the card and stow it. As we roll up into the clouds, once I'm good and sure he's serious about the whole thing, I poke him a few times.

Satisfied, I get some rest myself.

Nothing original

2007-10-15T23:19:00.003-07:00

I wish I had worked my way through a bad night before laying this out. I wish the day hadn't been so normal.

Actually, if what had happened tonight had been abnormal, it might have been good, instead of fleeting. Passing simplicity is the very heart of ennui. The entrenched hatred of self that radiates from sameness. The eroded, cold, stone face of routine. Those subdued oscillations in the imperfect walls of the daily grind.

It does grind, doesn't it? It sheers your horizons smooth. Traversing a commute. Having a shift. Repetitive stress injury for the animus.

I laugh as I sink my blurry edged persona into an ongoing story told in pictures and soundtrack. I dip my nose into a book like the shaft of an arrow becomes one with the deadly, razor sharp head. Complicit in the murder of my life—which should by all rights be soaring through unpredictable winds. I should be at the heads of hurricanes and the tails of tornadoes.

The portal of art is viable as egress only to those who exist already in a world of unknowns. This life is hive-like; where every moment is another mindless drone eating the same honey as the last. Moments speak through obscure dance, relaying banal truths with understood poetics. A metronomic precision that abuses expression and ossifies every opportunity for the fantastic.

I don't even know how to become a bohemian. Each simple feint at easy, inexpensive tragedy is seen through and countered by a riposte of legal or financial burden. All my outlaw inclinations eye exciting futures through a lens of privilege and possession. Iron chains might be lightened with gilded ones.

I need to winnow my desires away until only the true longing remains. The thing I really want. Do we actually learn what-it-is-we-want by losing all we have? Or is belly-want more alive and engaging than brain-want? That riverbottom trawl where silt and mire dredge at my eyes. The subterranean search for meaning that flings rocks in the face might be a boiling pot of wisdom.

Or it might be the sudden rush of next-best-alternatives drawing every possibility as divinely better than this. This moment. Does the end to desire represent a state of perfection, or is Nirvana the happiness of having nowhere lower to go?

Should I race to the bottom or grasp at the top? Is this repetition of the day a sleight-of-hand maneuver to hide the understanding those of no means possess, or would that sudden fall into fiscal martyrdom leave me gasping for air, seeing greener grass over every fence even one step away?

Regulations

2007-08-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

And we were backcountry regulators.
Slipping down hills and crossing ravines.
Drinking beer in off-course outcroppings.
Boots and cameras on trails we just made up.
Changing things by our passing,
taking nothing but the image.
Not far enough from civilization to take much pride,
but distant in aspect and attitude
as soon as the trees block the day.
Nothing to regulate, nowhere important to be.
And I hope it's always that way, now and again.

Some Kind of Paranoia

2007-08-28T20:01:00.000-07:00

There was definitely a bird in the car.

He'd sat down on the seat, closed the door, blasted the AC and turned up the music. Twice he'd hit send on a phone call that wasn't really important, and yet now—Now.—he was hearing the sound of it. Chirping. A pleading little chirp that meant a tiny, hungry little son of a bitch.

It repeated. He wasn't crazy.

Slightly applying pressure to the brake, he cocked his head and listened. It was quiet. Was it aware of his own awareness? Somehow had he acquired a prescient avian stowaway? Feeling the subtle vibrations of electron flow in the cortex of his brain and transliterating them into the demonic language of flying dinosaur descendants?

The car coasted to a stop as the light dangled, crimson above the intersection. Deep below the cushions of the passenger seat, the malevolence was thrumming. He moved his hand cautiously to the volume knob, dimming the little comfort he received from pretending it had been the music he had heard. Often enough auditory hallucination caused him to believe his phone was ringing, or his roommate had returned home.

The final inches between him and complete insanity might have been just that easily traversed. Now he was hearing birds. That was all.

Even with the music subsumed by the thrush of the air conditioner, he heard it again. He pulled the tenuous hand back from the volume knob. Why would such a stupid, unlikable, noisy creature—truly the vermin of the skies—crawl between the glass of his window and the rubber of his door frame? Hadn't he carefully eyed the gap he left as he entered the store? No man could have gotten a hand farther in than the elbow, but now he was playing host to wings and spidery, three-towed legs.

The fan needed to be silenced. The flick of a hand, jumping to the knob and back with a surge of adrenaline, accomplished the task handily. The road sounds were all that remained; white noise punctuated with rude horns and cell phone yammer. Sounds so unlike the greedy blip of hungry sparrow lungs that even his own addled mind could scarcely confuse the two.

Just as he was sure he was safe... just as the imposing sun had begun to cook the soft golden hairs on his forearms... just as he was reaching to reapply some greatly sought after temperature control, there was something. A sound.

It could have been anything. A slightly over-stressed shock. A different sort of traction causing one tire to slip. Someone having an orgasm, somewhere. The likely answers outnumbered the absurd, but still only the one had any purchase in the slippery footing of his mind.

Bird.

The one lucky stroke was the impending approach of home. With care and practiced grace, he slid the car into the spot, too tense to heave the sigh of relief that sang in his thoughts. Surely the bird had heard it anyway, though, master of mind reading that it was.

Would opening the door summon it from its hiding place? The thing about birds that kept him up most nights (and woke him with a start on all others) was the furious faceful of of feathers and hollow bones that would surely result from an encounter with one. The courage he sought to open the far door evaded him. Without a hooked implement to pull open the handle, he would need to reach fully across the passenger seat, grip and pull, exposing important internal organs to puncture, ravage and birdsong. He leaned farther away and trusted in his ability to duck and roll from the car.

If a stuntman could do it at speed, surely at a standstill it would be hardly a task at all.

It was brief, unpleasant and heartracingly intense, but resulted in no injuries—beak inflicted or otherwise. Peering up from cover in the wheelwell, he observed no interlopers. He reached up and tenderly rolled the window down, leaving a likely escape hatch for the creature. A dead bird in his Kia would be almost less pleasant that a live one.

His notebook, shopping bags and sunglasses he left in the seat across from him. They would remain unmolested without him, and would not be ruined by the bonechillingly cold blast of CO2 he planned to cleanse that compartment with in the morning. Something told him a fire extinguisher was the natural enemy of most suburban birds.

Finding Walls in the Dark

2007-08-21T07:33:00.001-07:00

I feel like the boundaries must be somewhat supple. The perimeter between thought and action might not be so narrow. In fact, I wonder some times if there are actually great banks of foggy unknowns. Exclaves and counter-exclaves. The syrupy delay between reflex and cognition muddles what seems a genuine distinction. Am I a Cartesian point in space with will and knowledge—the hand on the controls that rules an armada of cells, organs, systems? Or is this self just a coalescent phenomenon of parallel forces? It could be like an egosphere of swirling impulses, instincts and chemical complexity that protects the frail machinery which animates me.

But even that delay—the jump your mind makes to explain actions done in haste and without planning—can be ruled by the slower forces. Practice. Almost as determinedly as the sharpening of a blade, you stand toes-to-the-line throwing ten thousand free throws until the flick of the wrist, the estimation of distance and the leap that drives all the precision and power of your body behind the ball becomes autonomic. You are the programmer of that machinery. It must be honed like that blade. Each slow hissing pull over the stone sets the grain of your muscle memory. Every gently flicker tightens the alignment. It guarantees appropriate reaction.

Exclaves and counter-exclaves. Supple boundaries. Am I the one who throws that jab around his guard in the split second his cover drops? The speed at which my mind reacts to such stimulus gives us a clear picture that it isn't so. I turn the flashbulb images of an ungentle memory into a likely story. But if it was the creeping, controlling programmer of my slower cognition that ordered the hours of practice and honed the blade of my reactions, then can I not take credit for it? Even if it happens outside of conscious prompting in that instant.

I say it falls within my egosphere. It is bound within the phenomena which make my body. My sphere of influence. Still, though, there are ripples in the surrounding forces. If the conditioned swing of the bat is me, as is the reflexive release of the arrow, then so to must the fluid leap of the thoroughbred over a barrier be within that sphere of the rider. Train a body. Master a tool. Control an animal. Teach a human.

You see the trend. The line has to be drawn. Drawn with fog banks and exclaves, perhaps. If you draw the lines right, you can increase the size of your “self” to the ends of the universe. Actions caused by solar flares and passing comets and birthing stars can be as integral to “me” as are my blood, flesh and thoughts. When I go out into the world to find myself, am I already and always there? Or is the flush of the tides, the hold of the earth's molten core and the constant bombardment of cosmic rays so overwhelming that this tiny seed of “me,” fighting to control a body of mud and light has no hope of causing anything?

I'm driving at a point of contending to change the world. I'm fluffing up my ego, and remembering there's nothing I cannot control if I possess a certain lofty sense of grandeur. Through actions properly ruled by thought, I can change your life and mine. Or I can worry in the late hours that I am slipping into sleep, and that maybe this time the illusion of control won't return. That these last dreams may tear asunder the egosphere I inhabit. I'm struggling to uhold the former, though the clutch of the latter is constant companion these days.

So good night and best wishes. And supple boundaries to you all.

Populace

2007-07-24T23:52:00.000-07:00

The first city draws breath whose residue will serve as a lexicon for climatologists. Her inhalations thicken the already moist air, dense and close. The out-breath leaves everything thin and cold—freezes the moisture from your lips. Seasons pass as respiration in city time. Skyscraper cilia and subterranean capillaries osmose the air from borough to borough as though driving snow and sticky sweat were blood cells and platelets to keep her avenues in repair. She lives. She breathes. We are symbionts on the lipid bilayer of her every cell, all trained by the passage of centuries, operating by the script of what it means to live here.

But here in the west, the largest animal seems dying in spite of her age: younger and fresher. Though less fettered by habit and inertia, she has become choked with cold metal. Her vessels are spilled open on the surface, not hidden below. The seasons wheeze and then crawl out to sea; a difference between torpid and mild. Unrestricted by a skeleton of rivers and estuaries as was the first, this city blossoms like cancer. She suffocates under her own weight. There is no clarity or purpose, and the organs of its function seem misshapen and borderless. Here we are viruses and parasites sucking whatever life remains for consumption.

Who do we blame?

2007-05-31T10:46:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else think that pregnancy is the creepiest thing in the world? I cannot freaking wrap my brain around it. There are two girls in my office who've gone and gotten themselves some embryonic parasites, and all I can think about is how they've made a decision to undergo 9 months of discomfort, climaxing in the worst pain a human can be asked to endure.

I remember reading multiple times in my liberal arts college experience that one of the major criticisms of the Aristotlean theory of dramatic structure (rising action followed by climax and denouement) is its similarity to the male sexual experience. The idea is that, somehow, men managed to impose their idea of structure onto the art world, and that because all men can think about is sex, that was the framework they used.

You can call it unconscious or intentional, depending on how militant a feminist you are.

Well, I’m turning all that around with my statement that all women can think about is having babies. This makes equal sense, as men are programmed to copulate, and women to procreate. This is our DNA-imposed biological imperative. The following two charts should create an interesting side-by-side comparison, and show us why the Aristotlean dramatic structure applies equally to both genders.

As one can see, the rising and falling action of the standard three act play in ancient Greek times, which continues to be used today, is nothing more than an artifact of our silly mammalian brains. So, when you’re casting about for a monolithic evil to assign all your various complaints to, look no farther than your very own genetic encoding.

Or God. You can always blame god, if you’re a creationist, and don’t believe in adenine, thymine, guanine or cytosine.

Big brother is flipping your burgers.

2007-05-24T16:07:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6683365.stm

You don’t really need to read the article. The gist is this: McDonalds UK is trying to convince the Oxford English Dictionary that it should change or eliminate the definition of “McJob.” Apparently it’s “insulting to the 67,000 people who work for” the company in Britain. Also, “82% of its workers would recommend working at the company to their friends.” Because, you know, they’d be fired if they answered differently.

The thing about the OED is that it’s descriptive, not proscriptive. It’s about how people do talk, not how they should talk. I can’t verify it right now, but I’m willing to bet that the good people at Oxford are publishing definitions for a great number of offensive and insulting words. This is what they do. It’s one of the vastest undertakings in the history of humanity to catalogue and continuously update the structure of the English language. These people take great pride in giving us a tool like that. Information

The intent, apparently, is to create democratically mandated language. Democracy, in this case, is a bad idea. That’s tyranny of the majority. If people invented the term McJob, it becomes a part of the language. No one can stop that. One day it may become a rarely used—or differently used—part of the language, but it never leaves the lexicon completely. And that’s what the OED is for.

Above and beyond that, the Oxford University Press is a private limited company, not beholden to any intrusion by the government, and regulated in a fashion similar to that of a charity. I can’t even begin to tell you how much that pleases me. They will suffer an absolute minimum from this kind of frivolity. No constituents to please, no shareholders to make wealthy.

I guess the point is something like “suck it, McDonalds.” Efforts to regulate the way people speak have been phenomenally unsuccessful in the past, George Orwell’s brilliant commentary on it aside. The true success stories are things like the queer movement and the immigrant culture of France, or the scholastic acceptance of Ebonics. Language has no interests. It’s the purest expression of memetics in action, and the best evidence that ideas do propagate in a viral, evolutionary process.

And in that way, I feel it would be a crime to suppress information in that fashion.

I don't know you yet

2007-05-23T00:14:00.000-07:00

Whoever you are, I want to take high speed pictures of your brain and learn to read your thoughts.

Also, regular pictures. Because you're beautiful today, and you'll be beautiful tomorrow, but maybe not in the same way.

You need to be ok when I start to bleed alarmist scenarios of a future gone wild. It'll all work out. I get that. You get that. But it's fun to imagine.

Hopefully you keep an eye on what's going on around you. In the world. In the country. Science and philosophy. You like to talk about these things—we'll erode each other's eyes into blindness, forgetting to blink. It never stops being fun to talk to you.

I want to give you names no one else gets to hear.

You climb. Mentally, of course. Spiritually, every day. Physically, if you have discovered that all three kinds are connected. (Social climbing is fine, but never to the detriment of the important kinds.)

I'm sure you realize that metaphors are not butterflies escaping from the brain pan, making the world beautiful and giving everyone something new to see. Your awareness of this probably doesn't stop you from picturing it, though.

Challenge me. If I ever turn you down I'm not worth your time—or my own.

Whoever you are, you're the moon. I want to ride the waves in your tide, sailing across the force of your gravity. Gliding across the landscape you create, never knowing what you'll send me next.

And you want to do the same.

How far we've come

2007-04-20T13:39:00.001-07:00

This is the official six day countdown until I get to stop talking to whiny, complaining customers on my office phone. No more “I ordered this and it doesn’t work,” or “I need to place an order, but I’m not really sure what company I work for.” No more convincing customers that it’s in their best interest to order directly from us, and that having distributors would only increase the prices they pay. No more “I know I have a lower price, but I don’t know how I get it, and can’t be bothered to look it up.” This is me, acknowledging that I am only six working days away from turning off the queue forever. You may call my company, if you like, but unless your business is with me, the Contract Administrator, we will have nothing to talk about. No, I cannot process your order. No, I do not have a return authorization number for you. I am not your bitch. I am not your errand boy. My title has the word Administrator in it. I am seriously fucking important. I have clawed my way out of the call center and onto the ground floor of middle management, where I will languish for eight hours per day like some kind of narcoleptic elephant seal, dreaming of punching the clock so I can go home and do something that matters. Build myself some dreams. But for all the ennui that remains to be traversed between these rocky badlands of soot and foundered futures, the most important has been crossed. Goodbye forever, customer service.

A Frame of Earth and Sidewalk

2007-04-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

I work in one of those large, box shaped buildings in an office park zone near the Oakland airport. I think if I were on the second floor, I could see the bay from here, but as it is, it’s just row after row of warehouses and an soft blue sky full of airplanes. You get a really dramatic contrast between the oppressive concrete and tame nature. Almost like manufacturing and deskwork could somehow wrangle the local trees and birds into something pretty. Like you could hang nature on the wall.

The tiny little birds mostly live off crumbs from the taco cart that visits the lunchroom every day. I have to imagine that the six years we’ve been in this location is enough to have fed two or three full generations of them from eggs to their little deathbeds. When you think about it, that means that they’re basically made of corn tortillas and list night’s leftovers. Kind of makes me like them all the more.

It’s a little grotesque. The endless cordoning off of these gardens, like accents. Afraid of anything more than a bush. Even Thoreau thought that people were afraid of the natural world, all those decades ago. Now the mention of natural things frightens the people into a panic and the media into a feeding frenzy. Brown recluse spiders biting. Mosquitoes bringing west Nile virus. A cougar might kill hundreds of children. Disappearing pets must be coyotes. Birds? Flu.

I almost think urban decay and turned over rubble would be more honest as a compliment to all these tinted windows and day use parking lots. I want to knock down a Wal-Mart and put in a marsh. Stretch my legs a little. Either admit defeat and let the sprawl take over, or make some concessions to the slimy and the earthy. Enough of this Thomas Kincaid meets the Hanging Gardens of Babylon stuff.

I Don't Actually Know What Kind of Jets We Use, Anymore.

2007-03-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

From the BBC (Well, mostly. People should know better than to give their kids names like that.)

"You can't fly missions over Afghanistan from the Gulf because you'd have to fly over Iran," explained Lieutenant-Commander Charlie Brown. "Every time I get anywhere near Afghanistan, that rat Iran jerks it away, and I wind up flying through the air and falling on my back!"

When further questioned, that blockhead admitted that he was hopeful about the current maneuvers. "Maybe this time I'll finally get to fly a mission into Afghanistan. Maybe this will be the day."

The F-15 Eating Tree refused to comment on the situation in Afghanistan.

And in the Darkness Bind Them?

2007-03-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

Watching a few re-runs of Bill Maher’s "Real Time" last night, I was inspired by a comment made by conservative think-tanker David Frum. He was pretty directly assaulted by the combination of self-proclaimed libertarian Maher, Democratic mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin and recording artist John Legend throughout the entire episode. To Maher’s credit, most of the childish yelling and booing from the audience was met with calls for quiet. The guy was putting himself out there by appearing on that show. Creating an interesting dialogue between people with harshly divided viewpoints is good for everyone, and shutting him up by calling out “Bush sucks” is just crude.

Frum was asked point blank what he believed about homosexuality, and given no alternative but to answer simply whether he believed in gay marriage. What he said—and keep in mind Frum worked for the American Enterprise Institute; (their record speaks for itself) was that he believed that (paraphrasing) we need to work on heterosexual marriage before we try experimenting. Experimenting was his word. He was cut off by reactions from all around him at that point, and the idea of "working on" it was not further explored.

The US divorce rate is the world's highest, and probably still climbing. A very large portion of children are born out of wedlock (almost forty percent, per the USA Today), and even more are raised by single parents or some variation of time-share custody. I won’t say that’s automatically a bad thing, and I won’t pretend to know how that feels (I’m one of those freaks with happily married fifty-something parents). But let’s talk about "working on heterosexual marriage," since so many people think it's important.

The old trope is that “the American family is our greatest strength.” Do we actual derive any benefit, as a country, from the idealized nuclear family unit? The perspective of evolutionary psychology would have us believe that families are an extension of our very important hard-coded genetic desire to exist in groups. Sensibly, of course. We have a number of adaptations for working in teams and organizing.

Standing in line at Trader Joe’s last night, I engaged in a conversation with the two people ahead of me. One of the two expressed what I thought was some pretty overwrought frustration with “shopping couples.” Have you seen this? It’s a smart tactic. The two gather the majority of their groceries together, then one gets in line with the cart while the other procures some of the hard-to-find or far-flung items.

I have my doubts that this is what Neoconservatives are getting at when they call families “our greatest strength,” but that illustrates the basic concept that teams can achieve more than individuals. For decades women stayed home and raised children while men earned money to support the group. There are disadvantages to this (Jesus Christ, are there ever disadvantages. If I ever have kids there’s no way I’m leaving them for ten hours a day every day. I can’t see any lifestyle more likely to cause both parents to resent the other), of course, but it does maximize the utility of both adults.

These days, most families find that both parents need to go out and work in order to earn enough money to support children. This is a fundamental breakdown of that so-called “tried and true” family unit. More than two parents are necessary to provide money, attention and love to children. I’m going to say that fundamentally and without exception, and I’ll accept the consequences. How many families rely on day care or grandparents to keep children safe during the day?

How do we work on marriage? Why don’t we find ways to make staying together beneficial? If you truly believe that marriages are important, and the law needs to be a part of that relationship, the law needs to create incentives to stay married. This isn’t Moral Decline, it’s basic economics. When both parents have the capacity to support themselves, and even together *do not* have the resources to support children in all the ways they'd like, the two don’t need each other. Overcoming the barbaric practice of enslaving one partner to the other in a gender-biased fashion has led us to a state of being where the dissolution of a union is a decision that only involves emotional concerns. Staying together “for the children” isn’t important when they’re already raised by a third party.

The American nuclear family unit is the biggest weakness our state faces. Innovation and freedom are more important to us than the nuclear unit. People's lives are more fluid. Commitments to companies and organizations are shoreter term. Cooperative theorists have proposed that larger units could function in today’s economy by allowing, for example, five out of seven adults to work, while the remaining two take care of children, maintain the home and fend off predators…

Ok, not that last one, but that's my direct allusion to tribal life in the survival environment. That's where all those instincts and behaviors for group living come from, after all. And, hell, in the modern workplace with the average length of employment decreasing, switching off responsibilities is a possibility. (Yes, I admit, one probably fraught with ugly domestic disputes, but a definite possibility.)

Our notion of the nuclear family is powerful, but everything can change. Either the underpinnings of our successful, mostly free, world-class economy will change, or the family will. Divorce will become more common. People will cling to whatever rock they can to avoid the crushing expense of childcare. Say what you will about the American people: they might not know a lot of facts or do very well on tests, but they figure out their own best interest eventually. Laws change, morals are discarded and life goes on. Is it an important use of national resources to protect and improve marriage in the United States? Probably not. Is it important to make sure that kids have loving, available, attentive parents? Of course.

Fight the sickness, not the symptoms.

In Betweens

2007-03-20T22:49:00.000-07:00

Darkest before dawn...
Further to fall...

Those of us living in the here and now mostly move from dusk to dawn, with nothing in between. Twilight lives of good and bad, gray areas in the photometaphoric sense. Morally questionable and generally on the middle-steps of the ladder. We never find the eye of a storm, nor the whirling, soul-killing precipice of the hurricane's teeth. If we're lucky, life is a kaleidoscope of tiny aches and brief victories. Brief lullabies and transient dirges. Those heights of ecstasy and depths of despair come only with vanishing regularity. We wake up one morning to find twenty dollars, but puncture a tire on the freeway. You get that tiny raise you wanted, but come home to an empty apartment.

In all likelihood, we will mostly dwell in the moderate and learn to appreciate little victories. And in a perfect world, we'll aspire to something greater, but find satisfaction with what we can find.

Also

2007-03-18T20:29:00.000-07:00

As a sort of addendum to my previous post, I think MySpace is trying to have sex with me.

The Dating Minefield

2007-03-17T01:04:00.000-07:00

There is something so incredibly damning about sending a message to a stranger through the aether of the Internet. The stripping down of masks and personae. That open, honest communication that people spoke of ten years ago in the dawn of the chatroom—the one that made online weddings so much purer and more intellectually honest—isn't entirely false. No one is truly surprised that we haven't seen the text-based dating world supplant nature's own, but neither do they have any reason to discount the very naked sharing that can happen in such a forum.

I won't lie about the fact that I respond to personals and pursue romantic interests through dating sites. I do. It's the more fruitful of the two ways I meet women at all. The second, dating friends of friends, has had a return of about two in two years. Once I met a girl in a public place and dated her, also unsuccessfully, but I'm beginning to regard that as a fluke, not a viable alternative. The fact remains that I'm usually drunk or otherwise impaired in public, and my decisions aren't realistic or wise. The pictures people provide of themselves on the Internet are enough to establish a modicum of physical attraction when your eye is seasoned to the tricks people play.

I just wrote an entreaty to a young woman in my area through a dating site that plays with the triumphs of social networking and the allure of user-created electronic “testing.” Surveys. These are something like Cosmopolitan's quizzes, injected with 100cc of anabolic steroids and the irreverent groupthink that is spawned by the odd wikismörgåsbord of ten-million-some lonely singles. I don't know yet if there will be any reply, despite my finely crafted missive.

I can tell right away that I've made some questionable choices. Like the pigeon in Skinner's box, I only have my previous examples to draw on, and the decisions made by the unsuspecting targets of my would-be affections may be completely random. Brevity seems to be a good way to open an exchange. Or, at least, the results of these previous successes imply this. So I've been brief. I've also tried to extract some kind of dream-like effluvia from the meager details this lovely young lady has lain out on her “profile.”

This is clearly stupid on my part. Would anyone who was actually interested in meeting a potential significant other actually lay out all the keys in their two hundred word essay? Wouldn't the most intelligent strategy be to wait for someone to come along who says the correct thing without prompting?

I feel this foreboding twist in my muscles immediately after releasing an inquiry like this into her waiting inbox every single time I do this. It leaves me unable to sleep, wracked with thoughts. Embarrassments. Would-have-beens. This is what was seen by those early pioneers of the e-relationship. My psyche is being stretched so thin that it hurts. My vulnerability is spread on the page like a mono-molecular layer of peanut butter on a pauper's sandwich. And this is all before any actual interaction has occurred!

Mind you, sometimes it works. And usually, after all the wall-building and self-effacing tosses and turns between the sheets, I'm no longer interested in the physical being who presents herself to me. Usually I can't wait to go home and laugh about it. But here, in the moment, I am a sheared lamb. All of my puff and valor gone the way of the sweater.

Every time I stand on the train, riding to work, and observe a young man or woman with an iPod turned up loud, earbuds assaulting their cochlear canals, I see the very root of human reproduction besieged. Constant public conversations on cell phones are a modern salvo against hook-ups or a thickly interlaced society of many cultures fucking and swapping memes in dark places. The conservative agenda has known no greater ally than digital hand-held technology in the fight against promiscuity.

All the classic avenues for breaching the thick sand-bag walls that surround my minuscule social circle have been barricaded and cut off.

So I try the electronic superhighway to love. And my inability to hide behind a smile or a carefully crafted appearance leave me the stepchild of the eighties and the naughts. No doubt my descendants will negotiate this javascript minefield in sashaying figure-eights, but I stumble like a half-blind eunuch at the senior prom.

(Thank you for reading as the stupid monkey complains about his inadequacies.)

The Worst Euphamism, Ever.

2007-03-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

Japan basically did something stupid and heartless this week.

During World War II a lot of repugnant acts were performed. I wouldn't feel out of line if I ventured to say that this is the expectation in war. But we live in an international culture of apology. Attrocities need to be recognized by the elites and bemoaned as tragedies. Reparations need to be made for the slate of a relationship to be wiped clean.

The Japanese government of WWII created brothels for it soldiers, allowing combatants behind the front lines to have companionship. (The news media is referring to these enslaved victims as "comfort women." No doubt that's a ragged translation of some official Japanese euphamism. Yuck.) There is, no doubt, some advantage to be gained by providing regular release from the tensions of battle. I can see why a brutal, expansionistic, top-down aristocracy suffering from a violent shift into a dehumanizing mechanistic infrastructure might err on the side of utility rather than compassion in this case.

But the institutionalized rape of two hundred thousand women is a crime that humanity itself cannot live down; apologies and reparations notwithstanding, that is a stain on our collective world culture.

US Representatives Michael Honda, Madeleine Bordallo, Phil Hare and Edward Royce show powerful resolve to give closure to those women still living, and show clear accountability for the acts. Their resolution HR 121, referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, asks the Japanese government to "Refute any claims that the sexual enslavement and trafficking... never occurred," and "accept historical responsibility." Should their bill pass, our government would ask the Japanese government to "educate current and future generations."

Big deal. Half-steps. The bill doesn't ask for reparations; the bill doesn't seek any countermeasure to the wrongdoings. Honda et al are merely posturing. They're playing the role of preening peacocks in nature preserve of the culture of apology. I'm tired of apologies. Human society doesn't get back any credibility by expressing regret. Someone recently said to me, speaking on parenting, that when a child misbehaves, "trust is regained slowly. [We] earn trust with positive actions." The Japanese government will earn the trust and respect of its voters with by setting out on a long journey of honesty and discourse. By talking about tragedies, but additionally by not denying any new ones.

Additionally, we're asking for this disavowal and education from a government which did not even exist at the time in question. It's not clear from the bill if we're asking for this apology from Japan's Diet or from it's Imperial House. The Imperial's could definitely apologize for this, as they are the hereditary bearers of internationally acknowledged guilt from Hirohito. But the civil government? Admittedly their actions since the time of these military brothels has been less than forthcoming at being honest about the reality of these actions, but they have set up private commissions to provide aid for the affected.

There's another government who could be held accountable if, indeed, the current Japanese leadership is deemed responsible. That's our own. The reconstruction of Japan after World War II was overseen by Douglas Macarthur and our own government. We didn't take any steps to provide our allies in Korea, China and the Phillipines with help for these abused women. As near as I can tell, no one in the US government has done anything before this house resolution to make ammends for that oversight.

And we have our own soldiers who had their own way with the women of Europe and the Pacific islands as well! The soldiers of the United States took regular forays into the European countryside to rape or seduce young girls throughout both world wars. This may be harder to lay a finger on than 200,000 imprisoned women, but it certainly shouldn't be immune to the culture of apology. Come out and show yourselves, anyone who has ever been violated by a soldier in a sexual manner. Let all governments, everywhere be forced to lay these gruesome truths on the table so that we can have our apologies.

Seriously, though, it's difficult to know where to draw these lines. Let's not let 200,000 women suffer quietly. Let's know that it is right to acknowledge suffering, but do not stoop to the level of the mob. Demanding apologies from bodies who have no traceable lineage to the parties who committed the act isn't rational, it's just going for blood. The Japanese government will earn or lose respect by how it helps those who suffered, not by hanging its head and acting remorseful.

Soar

2007-02-27T22:53:00.000-08:00

Ungainly form, that of wings and bony mouth parts.
She hovers unpredictably as the invisible currents sway and scours over painted lines for all our morsels. A crusted stone of deep fried batter, a gummy rubble of trampled nuts.
For all the glory and grace attributed to flight, an observer can't help smirking or scoffing. Flapping is ugly and the staggered descent of a hovering body reminds me of climbing down a ladder.
And from the earth, in the path of intersection, that approach is threatening.
Crazed, mindless glass eyes in that feathered head don't seem to absorb so much as project, stressing madness into the air around them.
Those looming wings...
Useless feet dangling in the transparent sky...
It's unearthly. There is nothing that grinds at the innate comprehension inside me as does that flight. Unpowered, unreal. Hanging like puppets. Staring like statues.
My jealousy and anger and fear form bitter condensation on my skin at the passing.
Hearts were not meant to soar like that.

A Pox on Both Your Tiny Cars

2007-02-21T09:43:00.000-08:00

The time has come.

Two circus clowns have been shot dead during a performance in the eastern Colombian city of Cucuta, police say.

Hah! Hahahahahah! Oh, that's god damned beautiful. Oh, this is the happiest day of my life.

The motive for the latest killing remains unclear... Local media reports suggest two attackers may have been involved.

Unclear? Jesus Christ, people, can't you see the War on Clowns has begun? Aren't you aware of the importance of this! This wasn't just a lone clownicide, this was two armed men showing their belief in truth, beauty and a world without overlarge shoes. I'll show you fucking unclear. Unclear is a world where wrong and right are muddled by excessive white makeup, and where your vision is obscured by coconut cream pie in your GOD DAMN EYES.

One clown was shot in the head as he performed on stage, about an hour into the Circo del Sol's evening show.

Oh yeah, and they didn't catch anyone. Exciting times, my friends. Exciting times.

On Forming a More Credulous Union

2007-02-15T15:55:00.000-08:00

From Gizmodo

“…Every single one of these consumer electronics companies should be approached as the enemy. They work for us. Hold their feet to the fire when they say their product is going to change even a small part of our lives.”
Joel Johnson, Gizmodo Editor Emeritus

Holy social conditioning, Batman. Sounds like crushing the Zeusworthy sense of superiority every single land owner had prior to the 18th century has also managed to liquefy our ability to control the people who work for us.

No, I’m not making some kind of management training course crib note statement here. I’m realizing from that little bit of wisdom that perhaps what our country has lost through the long and irreplaceable process of self-governmental socialization is the ability to control and dehumanize those who are truly meant to serve us. Yes, truly meant to serve us. Yes, dehumanize.

We need to strip the nice, shiny chrome coating that businesses have slathered on themselves to pretty up their outward image. Just scrape all that stuff off and reveal the little wooden boy beneath. Puppets. Tools. Objects. Possessions. Businesses, however massive, conglomerated, international or philanthropic they may be do not deserve the respect that the even most meager mendicant should be offered.

So how do we do that? Read everything Joel Johnson has said in that article. For all his use of hyperbole, mockery and freewheeling snarkiness, he has a lot to say about the underhanded trickery lies these businesses have been throwing our way for many decades. Just that one sentence, “They work for us,” throws me into an arm-pumping orgy of Hallelujahs and Amens. And I don’t even believe in God. That’s just how it ought to be. How it could be if we’d all quit listening to the hype.

There’s a clear cut conflict. You and I and everyone else have money. The very point of a business’ existence is to take it from us, by any means necessary. That’s how a business works for its owners. But: those sparkly little ducats in your pocket are yours to spend. You ultimately reward businesses with your money by purchasing the best made products from the most responsive companies. But you have to be vigilant! Just as much as your money is a privilege they have to earn, their compliance and innovation are a privilege you earn by being hard with them.

I see two root causes for the incremental gains that the supply side has taken.

First, advertising. Professionals in that arena might mince words or deny culpability, but adverts lie. They present the favorable and subvert the negative. There are laws requiring businesses to reveal a pretty staggering amount of information regarding their products—nutrition info, known side effects, safety ratings, gas mileage; the list goes on—but that doesn’t stop their presentation method from being 4pt. font, or an announcer who’s replay rate has been accelerated to level that would make Alvin and the Chipmunks accuse him of having no balls.

The medium is the message, right? The message that I get from that is that someone doesn’t want me to know that information. When someone doesn’t want me to know, I tend to start trying to find out. But not everyone has the time or sophomoric contradiction instinct that I do. I’m thinking about founding Iconoclasts Anonymous. What I mean is that advertising takes the average person’s busy schedule by the scruff of the neck and blasts a firehose full of pretty pictures at their eyes. We all fall victim to it once in a while.

So, the second thing is where the confrontational, sensationalist use of the word “dehumanize” comes in up on paragraph two. I think that tolerance and plurality and respect for others has become more and more open-minded and far-reaching with every year since probably the 1960s. This gives us things I would stake my life on, like racial, gender and sexual identity equality. It gives us things I’m ambivalent toward, like body-type tolerance, and it gives us things that make me scratch my head and go buy a burrito rather than think about it, like equal rights for animals, and tolerance for crazy religious beliefs. But really, the legwork for all that kind of stuff has been going on for centuries.

On May 10th, 1886, corporate entities became people in the eyes of the US court system.

Ok, switchback. I’m not saying that there have been any poor decisions made by lawmakers that need to be reversed (actually… I’m just not saying that now), but I do think that the social engineering that has gone on by our aggregate groupmind has led us to be so tolerant that we have a hard time treating businesses like they should be treated: as tools.

Push back against them however you can. Don’t buy without information, don’t keep buying things that break for no good reason, or don’t do what they’re supposed to. Listen again to what Joel Johnson says in that article. Consumers can only expect what the lowest common denominator is asking for—or failing that, if we don’t ask, whatever is easiest and quickest for them.

A lack of tolerance and a subjugated value for the lives of others is what makes slave holding and the violently oppressive aristocracies of the past and present possible. These days, even the uppermost echelons of consumers are settling for half-assed goods as often as not. I would posit a link between this behavior—civility—and what we get from our suppliers. You don’t need to be a dick to people to insist on better service, better products and advancements you can sink your teeth into. Vote with your wallet, as they say.

Make them work for us. This is a trick that seems to have been lost on the population at large. Perhaps to our overall detriment. The question of how to fix this, as always remains. But I think I have some ideas that I'd like to talk about later.

Conservative Primates

2007-02-14T09:15:00.000-08:00

Much of the time, I look at a quote like this, and I have something useful to say about religion, or tolerance or homosexual rights...

The head of the Anglican Church and Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams has said that he fears that the Church may split over the row sparked by the appointment of openly gay US bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003.

"We have a difficult meeting ahead of us with many challenges and many decisions to make," Dr Williams told reporters as he arrived in Dar es Salaam on Wednesday.

Conservative primates are angered that the recently-installed head of the American Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who has publicly backed Mr Robinson, is attending the meeting.

Today, though... Today I just want to make a joke about "Conservative Primates." (This is what happens when I don't consume anything but coffee until 1pm.)

The Fall of the Old World
[Monkeys]

Wendel Archibald IV slid out from under the satin sheets of his pillow-top king sized bed, slipping on a pair of doe-leather penny loafers and tightening the belt of his hand tailored robe. He smiled out the giant window of his master bedroom, overlooking the luxurious sprawl of Primate City.

What did I ever do to deserve this, he wondered to himself, watching the doves play in the early morning mist. Oh, that's right, he concluded, chuckling as he lit a cigar. He looked to the east, down at the massive factory his father had built, taking in bananas and sugar, chemicals by the truckload and pumping out black smoke, toxic river waste and Langur Brand Banana Chips. Not to mention it's other exports: carpal tunnel syndrome, broken families and wafer-thin paycheques. I was born! Wendel laughed, long and loud, his hearty chuckle echoing down the many corridors of his luxurious estate.

It was good to be a chimp.

***

Later, the bright blue sky slashed with thin white clouds, Wendel sat down with one of his top analysts, Barry Singleton, a cold-hearted baboon from the south side of the city. His head for numbers and his ruthless nature had brought him to the top of his graduating class and made him very wealthy through shrewd investment. Wendel appreciated his advice and didn't even worry about the fact that he was a baboon. Some people were bound to rise above their station, even if they'd never be the equals of Wendel and his family.

"Your factory is being eyed by an environmental group for its waste drainage into the Macaque river." Barry drank water and munched on an energy bar, even surrounded by the gorgeous dessert trays and the intoxicating aroma of coffees, teas and baking bread here at the café du singerie. There's just no accounting for the tastes of nouveau riche.

"What do you suggest, Barry?"

"Donald is working with Senator O'Reilley, thinks he can make some kind of delaying tactic, but you're best off actually doing something about the mess this time. You can't keep that pack of dogs off forever."

Wendel looked down at his quiche, suddenly feeling ill. "That kind of talk isn't what I like to hear during my repast."

Barry swallowed the last bit of his ugly brown granola and honey concoction, then slowly consumed an entire glass of Banyan Springs mineral water. Wendel fumed as he waited. "It's not like you can blame me. The New World party is getting the public on their side about environmental damage. Our side's been running interference for longer than either of us have been alive, but they're starting to see the soft spots in our peel, if you know what I mean."

Wendel ground his teeth together. He was about two seconds from going apeshit, but remembered his court-mandated anger management cases--god damned cops and there quotas weren't bad enough, he'd had to fall into the courtroom of some activist, commie judge from a college town--and held it in.

"Just get me results. The Archibald family name is synonymous with Primate City. We built this city and I will not see that legacy fall apart at the hands of some fleapicking termite-stickers."

Barry narrowed his gaze, looking down his snout through half-moon glasses. He straightened his tie and hesitated. For just a second, Wendel reveled in the sight of it.

Barry stood, glaring now, as if having reached a decision. "You need to think about your priorites. The Old World party is going nowhere, and even your allies are looking elsewhere for leaders. Stop flinging shit like this is fucking jungle and start learning what's what."

Wendel sat speechless and stunned as the baboon took a deep breath and walked toward the street. He swiveled in his chair, watching his analyst go, aghast. Barry stopped there, hands in his pockets and called out, "Oh, and you can pick up the check. That's all a rich, stodgy chimp like you is good for these days, anyway."

To be continued...
Only, probably not.

oh, and, yeah, I know that chimps aren't old world monkeys.
Shut up.

Holes in the theory

2007-02-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

Holes in the theory
Watching Lewis Black's "Red, White and Screwed" the other night, I got angry about facts. Not particular facts, but facts in general. He says (paraphrasing here) that we don't hear facts anymore. We hear spin and opinion. The Republican party says "This is how the situation in Iraq looks to us," and the Democratic party says "No, actually it looks more like this," and the commissions our dollars pay for try to report some actual facts and everyone waits for someone to summarize it and recommend a course of action.

Even policy makers can't be asked to actually read a piece of legislation. Consider the scene in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, wherein he asks a bevy of actual congressfolks what they thought when the read the Patriot Act. Well, the sick thing is, none of them had. Some of the laughed at the thought of reading it. Facts have to parceled out, interpreted, commented on and turned into a short animated film by Trey Parker and Matt Stone before anyone in the regular populace will pay attention.

Most people just change the channel when presented with actual data. They glance at graphs and presume that presentation is reality. Seeing is believing on a stupidly profound level.

I am a die-hard anti conspiracy theorist. I believe that collective action by millions of individuals causes things to happen, and I don't really believe that any small group of people has nearly the control over our populace as some would like you to think. (Mind, the notion of conspiracy theory may be a useful tool for prodding people to action... but it might also be encouragement for the nihilistic malaise so many people feel when confronted with actual opportunities for change. I'm not sure.) So, I don't want to imply that the lack of facts is some kind of horrific plot to control our minds, but I think that everyone with control over media, or the money to utilize it is definitely taking advantage of the situation.

So when the honorable Mr. Black offers up that we're not seeing any facts, he hits me really close to home. I love facts. I fucking love facts. I can look at charts and graphs and maps and tables and dictionaries and thesauri and encyclopediae for days and days and days. I just want to learn things. The internet isn't just for porn, it IS porn. That is, in the sense that I am physically attracted to information, and there is no better place to get it.

But most people don't want all that information. Unlike me, it isn't in their current curriculum vitae to spend three hours on a weekday night oscillating between Wikipedia entries and non-fiction books. Most people don't want to do that. No one should have to do that. In fact, I understand that I'm pretty abnormal because I do.

But... and I'm not yelling at you, dear reader... THAT DOESNT FUCKING EXCUSE THE FACT THAT RAW, UNPOLISHED DATA IS DAMN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND!

You know, yelling never gets old. But seriously, research is a huge industry these days. Believe me, I sell tens of thousands of dollars of esoteric research equipment every day, to scientists in dozens of fields. Biology, chemistry, zoology, biochemistry, nano-manufacturing, criminology, primatology, weapons research, materials science... this country is locked down hard into a progress model. We want to create, understand and categorize, and as a result, people around the world are looking at data. They're collating facts into those little nuggets of wisdom you see on CNN and read in the NY Times.

But they're not sharing it with me. Or else I'm completely in the dark as to where I can find more of this information. I want to be involved in this process. I'm no research scientist, but I can read tables of data and draw useful conclusions. Problem is finding that data. Facts. Unrefined information. Where are the repositories?

Where do I find a chart of temperature data for the last sixty years organized by daily, weekly, monthly and yearly averages? Sorted by region, elevation and aggregate world temperature?

Who can give me Nation Park earnings figures from 1930 to the present? Not to mention expenditures, percentage of revenue from donation or from ticket sales? How much of their budget comes directly from taxes, and how much is from other sources?

What was Grover Cleveland's use of the Veto like? Specifically, how many times did he use it, and against what bills? When was he overturned? Who spearheaded those votes? What were the margins?

I've tried often to find this sort of information. It exists. It's chronicled. I know this, because researchers use it when they publish articles. I'm probably just advertising my ignorance. I know you can probably find it in books in libraries, but isn't that silly? Inefficient at least. The old hacker credo still stands that information wants to be free, and locking it in books doesn't help anyone.

Again, this isn't about conspiracy. It's just that no one has any incentive to put that information into the public sphere. Google is trying, with Google Books. Most reference publishers have to charge prohibitively for their works, just to afford to be able to collect information that way. Things are changing, but slowly. We need to find ways to give incentive to the people who have this information to make it public.

I suppose what I want to say is that until information is easy to find, even dataphiles like myself will run into walls at every turn. A staff of researchers has the experience, incentive and time to track down, consume and organize data into bite-sized chunks for mass consumption. I don't have those resources, but that doesn't invalidate any conclusions I may draw. Good search tools are a must for the rest of us. Transparency levels the playing field.

As we approach perfect access to data, we will likely see an increase in the validity of points that individuals raise. We'll see more theorizing as well and better competition and we'll have a way to settle disputes. I hope that the same forces breaking down copyright and intellectual property will some day break down the limited locus of information. Electronic data doesn't have to be treated like a commodity.

Astronauts

2007-02-07T12:24:00.001-08:00

Does anyone really think that one astronaut trying to kill another has lessened the reputation or the importance of astronauts? Does anyone think kids are going to want to stop going to space because one of these highly respected people did something stupid in fifty years of spaceflight? Seriously. That's a fucking good record. It's not like kids stop wanting to be the president because they turn out to be assholes. God.

"I'm sure it is shocking to find out that they have unhappy marriages, engage in affairs, have problems with their kids, act out in all sorts of inappropriate ways," I'll attribute that quote to some guy with a degree named Pat Santy at the University of Michigan. Is any adult in this country ever surprised by the fact that government agencies, businesses and other institutions try to keep their dirty business under wraps? Isn't this what hour-long dramas are supposed to reveal to us about our favorite workplaces?

I hope this forces a few more people to pull their heads out of their asses and start realizing we're all basically the same, when it comes to sex, violence and raging emotion.

The Unknown

2007-02-07T09:40:00.000-08:00

Let me start by saying that the key to writing pulp fiction--and I learned this just last night in a three hour, ferocious pounding of keys--is to tie someone to a chair. Shit just has to go down when someone is tied to a chair. It makes beautiful things happen. *Ahem* On to something more important.

***

I have to keep asking myself what I'm afraid of. I don't often find myself afraid. The cold body convolutions and desperate, grasping thoughts of a true fear state are thankfully uncommon. I can be brusque or stoic in the face of most things people balk at. Snakes. Spiders. Heights. Presentational speaking. Thoughts of death.

But then, do we really define "fear" that narrowly? Is the true panic state of thoughtless action and haunted dreams the only kind of fear? Or do I need to consider missed opportunities, reluctance and inaction to be fear as well?

It's just a word. A negative label to nail down certain kinds of action. A bitter pill to force reevaluation. A powerful goad to instigate or enliven action. Fear is a reviled emotion, and with little wonder. The gripping claw of terror in the gut, the nervous sweat, the constant prodding of paranoia; actual fear is never pleasant. Above and beyond that, the widespread cultural approval of valor, courage and even recklessness around the globe is so strong that to be stymied from action for any cause is reason enough to engender shame.

And I get that. I try very hard to accept my action--or inaction--and get by the moralistic wavering that comes from trying to explain my actions to myself. This is the human condition, telling stories in the past tense. Assigning cause and effect to the things we see and do. This is the power of the witness.

And that power is what makes us say that we are all afraid of the unknown. Such a stupid concept. And yet, so brilliant. To say that a body is restrained by excessive caution or contentment. It fills us with a desire to expand horizons, to build on experience. Not to stay small.

They Might Be Giants summed it up perfectly, as they have many things, in the song "Where Your Eyes Don't Go." Where your eyes don't go a filthy scarecrow waves its broomstick arms/And does a parody of each unconscious thing you do. Thinking about it now, I can raise that primal, caveman tickle on the back of my neck. Because seeing is believing. Because we are driven by sight.

So what is all of that? Why do these thoughts ring for me right now? I can imagine I have an instinct, a crawling phantom of formative events telling me to buck stagnation and grab at the first passing train. Maybe a biological imperative, passed down to me and as unavoidable as a falling building. Like all things (like fear itself) it's a blessing and a curse. I chide myself for not talking to that girl, or for sitting here at this desk and sucking at the teat of the service industry. I use that language prod, sharpened by constant use over millennia, to get what I want out of life.

Then I have to get up. I have to reach and strain. Push, grasp, strike. Then, when whatever I want is here in the palm of my hand, I have to hold. Fight to keep it. The legacy of fear is determination. It's a man standing up in front of his peers and bellowing out in rich baritone at the end of a movie, "I will not sit idly by!" Fear and Guilt and Action, all bundled together in the cycle of human triumph.

I suppose it's also in my nature to take the mundane and grant it a pressing urgency, or a universal importance, but I'm not going to let anyone fault me for that.

I'm an Artist, Goddammit.

2007-02-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

When I watch this most recent War on Movies production, I'm in love with it. Even after a full ten months without shoving ourselves in front of a camera, sitting in an editing chair or even writhing in the uncomfortable silence as someone watches my hard work, I feel like we've produced something with some really crisp moments. The introduction works so well for me, from the sound to the shots we used... the tension is great. The ending, also, is bloody wonderful. Even with only one camera, we managed to get a lot of mileage by filming things more than once from different angles. I can't wait until we actually have two cameras to make more use of this. (You can tell there are some shots where the lines being spoken are detached from what's happening on screen. Or maybe you can't, but I can.)

I'm not going to goo over it any more, but just put a link up and hope that someone gets a laugh out of this.

www.waronmovies.com/war/eleventh.html

Wartime Leaders

2007-01-25T23:09:00.000-08:00

((It's been almost a month. I just wasn't interested in writing this month... But now I've been drinking and reading and watching and... well, you be the judge.))

Just stop me if this has been done before...

I'm beginning to think that our decreasingly popular, kleptocratic president has been taking his cues from an ancient and powerful playbook. Briefly, Mr. Bush is the modern incarnation of a Constantine figure if ever I've seen one.

According the BBC documentary, The Rise and Fall of Rome, Constantine I used Christianity as his standard in war as he united the four squabbling partitions of a divided Rome. In the year 312 CE, as Constantine and his Western army descended on Rome, the emperor himself was not a follower of Christ. He lived in a world only recently willing to even accept the legality of that slave's religion. But something happened on the journey there. There is no historical proof of what he and his army witnessed—the common agreement is that it was a meteorite, though not large enough to leave a recognizable crater—but the interpretation that it was a sign from God is what is important. The Christian God, that is.

Now, his army bedecked in the symbology of Christ, Constantine attacked Emperor Maxientius, ruler of Rome, and won the battle of Milvian Bridge, taking it all as a sign of this new religion's glory. There is no proof of the emperor ever converting his faith, and there is no way anyone could argue that his policies or conqueror's stride were in any way consistent with the teachings of Christ, but he surely did bring this faith to the forefront of the empire. He dined with bishops. He built churches, some of which still stand today. He is as solely responsible for the popularity of European Christianity as any single person ever has been.

(Okay, you can argue with me and say that Jesus Christ was more important to the rise of this religion, but I would disagree with you. Admittedly, there would be no Christianity without him, or without the most famous four gospel writers, but Constantine made the Christian faith a very potent meme—something it would never have been without him.)

President Bush, oddly enough, is also a convert to Christianity. A born-again Christian. Studious readers of news and political happenings will remember the push in the Republican community to become dominate the Christian South of this nation—once a bastion for the Democratic party. The Neoconservative movement embraces the socially conservative aspects of modern American Christianity such as the nuclear family unit, homophobia and temperance (in the form of the war on drugs). It also embraces some old biblical philosophies: eye-for-an-eye punishment and the power of kings. (i.e. Tougher sentencing and strong military leadership from the federal seat.)

The president would like to paint himself as a military leader. He is fighting a war against heathens, leading his people under his Christian banner. Here, he and Constantine see eye to eye.

Religious decisions are quite often more political than rational or moral. Consider the separation of the Anglican church from the Catholic, motivated by Henry VIII's marital concerns in the popular consciousness, but saturated by deeply running divisiveness between the crown of England and the Holy See. I would posit that both George W. Bush and Emperor Constantine I made their religious decisions from motivations of politics. It is to gain allies, and not entrance to heaven for which they accept Christ into their hearts.

This all, of course, flies in the face of the spirit, letter and intent of Christ's teachings. Their wars demonstrate a profound ignorance for and disrespect of the very heart of those two millennia old sermons. To paraphrase twenty centuries of philosophical thought: All human life has value, and all God's people are equal in his eyes. Life is sacred, forgiveness is tantamount and the judgment of actions is the provenance of God only. These, to me, are the elements which remain constant and unchanging from schism to schism. They are the heart of every denomination which adheres to acceptance of holy trinity. These, in fact, are the single glorious part of that religion. All else that has come from it is, in my eyes at least, extraneous, deleterious and dangerous.

Leaders who invoke the name of God are missing the point. Religious society is a holdover from Judaism, crudely tacked on to the word of the man known as Jesus Christ. Christianity, at its aforementioned heart, does not seem to support a church, let alone a state. It encourages kindness, self-sacrifice, friendship, love, deference, respect and tolerance. Not war. Not imprisonment. Not the betrayal, slaughter and secret murder of allies, as in the case of Constantine. It does not condone asking the youth of this nation to sacrifice themselves, and certainly does not condone turning them into political pawns as an agent to keep a strangle hold on power. I won't tell you who did that part. You're smart enough to figure it out yourself.

Christianity's core elements do not seem like the appropriate set of ideas for a power hungry ruler to embrace in his quest for blood and glory. I can't imagine how this has happened, and more than twice, at that. I only offer a comparison.

((Holy shit... I sound like I actually believe in God or something. Whack, huh?))

Bread and taxes

2006-12-28T20:35:00.000-08:00

Every so often a great man dies. Then again, real motherfuckers die on occasion, too.

Saparmurat Niyazov, president-for-life of Turkmenistan, has passed on due to either a cardiac condition, or poisoning, depending on what you read. This is a man who weaseled away some 3 billion dollars from his country, put a gold statue of himself on top of the tallest building in his country, and named bread after his mother. No, I don't mean that he had a loaf of bread with his mother's name, I mean that because of Niyazov, the Turkmen word for “bread” is now “Gurbansoltanedzhe.”

Ok. Wow. That's authoritarianism. No one in this country is allowed to complain about George W. Bush for another day. Instead, spend your time and energy hoping that Turkmenistan gets to have free elections in the wake of this douchebag's departing.

Fireproof

2006-12-08T23:23:00.001-08:00

Rain covers the tile like sheets of cellophane. The streets are fireproof tonight. Even the muggers are cowering in their holes. The street sweepers from above have done a bang-up job with their sub-orbital hoses, knocking loose the wine stains and clots of chewing gum. The streets are free to flow again. Hoarfrosty winter, subtle autumn and the thick summer, bookended by gold and grime, had all come and gone. This is winter in Oakland. This is astral tears on a dark black night. Single guttural yawn of liquid throughout the year. This desert world, blooming under the downpour that we despise. Rain glues the earth together into something thicker than blood or water. The inorganic chokes on life tonight.

Edicts; Allies

2006-12-07T09:43:00.000-08:00

One thing organized religion has going for it--something disorganized spirituality will never have--is the issuing of edicts.

Recently the highest office in the Conservative Jewish faith (that is, neither Reform, nor Orthodox, in case you're taking notes) approved the ordaination of gay rabbis, and the practice of gay "commitment ceremonies." I'm not sure if that phrasing is just from the New York Times, or if it's going to be the accepted parlance in the future. There are two things I find pretty interesting about this, but first, I want to think about edicts for a moment.

"This is not like a papal edict," says Jonathan Sarna in the NY Times article, referring to the fact that individual synagogues will be allowed to make their own decisions as to whether they incorporate these changes into their daily practice. But isn't it? This is a powerful statement from a highly-respected body, giving their interpretation of the religion's most sacred documents. It's not something to be taken lightly. This has no less power to cause divisive rifts between members of the community than does the statement of a official with an ancient title.

I'm not an expert on the internal politics of the Jewish faith anymore than I am learned in their documents, history or canonical law, but one has to imagine that this is an important restructuring, and an event that will cause no small amount of change down the line. Sarna states that the change "has been widely expected," but that just means that there has been foresight, discussion and probably the religious equivalent of lobbying. The Reform movement has allowed both of these things for years. This is a change. This is a group agreeing to alter they way they see the world and changing their social contact. Essentially, this is politics.

Leaving that lie for one moment, the thing that most interests me about this is its effect on Politics. (Capital "P," Beltway politics and national elections.) Does this change the national debate on marriage? Isn't the major argument against homosexual marriage a religious one? Well, now we have a significant portion of one of America's major faiths saying that this isn't a bad thing; that their holy scriptures, in fact, do not forbid it. They will allow it in their temples. How is it any of our right to invade the sanctity of religion and refuse to recognize their collective action? They've changed their faith, and the government would pretend the power to refuse this change.

So how is a religious edict--particularly the infallible, far reaching papal kind--different from a new law, or (an even better comparison) a Supreme Court decision? This is meant to compare these two distinct social contracts; religion and government. Religion, many of us are born into. We do not leave the contract unless we are dissatisfied, and we do not tend to enter into a new religion without some strong compulsion (usually marraige). The government controls all within its sphere of influence by matter of geography more than birth, though citizenship is conferred upon all who are born within this influence.

When a religion or a political body changes a rule, or interprets an old one in a new way, all in the membership of that body must decide whether to follow along with this edict. We all have an inalenable right of disobedience, even more fundamental to our nature than any of the rights "protected" by constitutions around the world. Disobedience is curbed by incentives, but can never be completely eliminated. In a religious community, social pressures and learned guilt exert tremendous force over the faithful. Expected punishments in the afterlife may also be considered a negative incentive. Governments, through the power of a monarch, elected representatives or the collective will of the people, are empowered to locate and punish those who would choose not to heed an edict.

We are all disobedient on some level. Sinners sin. I can count the number of hours since I last broke the law on one hand. We all make calculations, weighing the negative consequences of our actions against the real or perceived benefits. When I listen to music which I "stole" from a record company, I understand that the likelihood of my being caught and punished is slim. Having a variety of music to listen to without paying what I perceive to be ridiculous costs outweighs that chance of punishment.

So, what will the costs be for ignoring this edict from the leaders of the Hebrew community? Probably very little, so long as the choice remains a local one. It may cause some hurt feelings or community scuffles, but it seems unlikely to have world-shaking implications. Although... perhaps these issues of deeply held conviction are stronger than I would guess: a collection of Canadian rabbis has already threatened a break with the Conservative movement as a result of this announcement (Again, according to the NY Times). These are the things schisms are made of.

(Though, in my interpretation, the Jewish faith has proven a great deal of solidarity in the face of schism in the past. Though their interpretations of scripture and law may differ, Reform and Orthodox Jews do seem to find much more common ground than, say, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, or Catholics and Protestants.)

But, perhaps, even if this does prove divisive--as it surely will not endear Conservative to Orthodox--perhaps American politics can use this as a uniting experience. Perhaps the liberal left can find "conservative," religious allies. The red-state party line is "small government," and a lack of interference. It holds God in high esteem. To continue to forbid unions between homosexuals in the face of a religious ceremony which cements it in the eyes of a church is ridiculous.

Point, Counterpoint

2006-12-03T22:13:00.000-08:00

Point

I built this computer for a very specific purpose. I want to make that clear. We won't be flitting away our time on video games, spray painting gore and bullets over our irises like some kind of digital age Viet Nam veteran. This machine is highly calibrated. This machine is our child, and you want to fill its head full of an ever-thickening paste. I want to bring it literature, film and art. Your idea of literature seems to be the text-based, pornographic adventures of a thirty-something carpenter on a lesbian cruise. You're guiding this carefully balanced machine to a life of mass graves and eardrum damage. You pump the speakers full of dying moans and engine noises, while I try to compile a melange of modern hits with a cornucopia of classical and world music. You're a deviant, a pervert and a dilatory genius. I can't believe we've remained this close this long. Your horrific cacophony, your trivial attention span, your unseemly twitching and ever rising gluttony for the extremes of violence and perversion... Were I able to split us in twain, I would do so in a moment. I would leave you grieving, broken and utterly without revenue, resource or alternative. My contempt for you rises with each shameful keystroke. The growing stockpile of distracting programs within the confines of this hard drive begins to stink with the fetid odor of dwindling accomplishments. The words I complete, the music I catalogue, the knowledge I can consume—they all shrink beneath the weight of your unquenchable banality. I could be everything without you, but my fate is twined with your own.

Counterpoint

I constructed this machine to enjoy myself. I find its form pleasing, its speed enchanting and its power intoxicating. This is my surrogate for so many things. Communication, knowledge, entertainment... the things I cannot obtain for lack of funds or lack of companions, I retrieve through the computational divinity of this wire and Plexiglas enclosure. This machine extends my reach and grasp. But you see it only as a tool, typewriter and tablet. You see speakers and deem it a stereo. You see a keyboard and imagine it a writer's foil. I cannot imagine having the energy for creation and appreciation you would attribute to us. You believe we have some bottomless well from which to draw countless ballads, poems, songs and epics. I wonder if you're struck by some kind of vocative curse, a querulous logorrhea with no outlets. I could not possibly be party to the unending string of infantile prose you thrash about our domicile, or clutter these folders with. You think that new is good, and more is better, but cannot sit down and enjoy the things you see. You have to change them, or create more, always complicating, never simply allowing things to be. You are pretentious, callow and castrating. A harpy in men's clothes. A stream of caffeine so thick runs through you that you would choose mindlessly copying poems onto grains of rice over even a minute's sleep. I want to choke you into unconsciousness, if only so I can be entertained ever so briefly without your infernal guilt trips leeching their way into my every pore. If only I could be free of your incessant droning, I might be content.

Social Contract Awry

2006-11-24T01:32:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-23T23:55:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-20T22:28:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-16T23:04:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-13T23:41:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-05T16:39:00.000-08:00

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?

Noisy

2006-08-08T23:29:00.000-07:00

Music. White noise currents. “Sea goes out, sea comes in,” he used to say. The odd ring penetrates the huff and hiss of facsimile machines. A monkey's cry over the monotony of the rustling jungle. An uncalled for “boo” cutting through the filibuster.

The copy machine hits a high note as the final page is extruded into the lower tray. There was once a time, I remember, when men collated their own documents. When the ear would be treated to the rhythmic stomping and periodic bell of typists, rather than the cut-rate banshee wail of processors and scanner trays. The hushed moan of silicon brains.

Here in the center of the mess, the sounds become environmental. Paper cutters hack six sheets thick, a pedicure for your documents. Three ring binders snap their off-kilter applause—aluminum beatniks at an open mic for ringing phones and squeaky office chairs. A heavy file drawer rolls shut, its contents swaying inside with a protesting rumble. And amid all of it, the voices. Singsong greetings and the practiced cadence that has grown like ivy on the best rhetoric since Cicero himself turned a phrase. The same phrases, the alphanumeric hum of product codes and invoice discrepancies.

Cubicle walls offer a thinly padded maze for my thoughts to rumble through. Tension grates at the edges of the voice. Strips them off to reveal a lack of substance. Like taking the oven-bronzed crust off of white bread. These voices in the dim, syncopating light are revealed for the tired, imperfect humans behind them. We are painted a cheery blue by the phrases and scripts of managerial control, but under our enforced veneer, lives poke through.

They bleed through the bandage...

And they spill on the carpets...

The carpets you pay so much to keep clean.

Corner of Dawnfire and Starmist

2006-08-02T00:36:00.000-07:00

I slogged through all the questions I was supposed to ask Annabeth on our first date. Danielle said that a guy has to ask some questions, because it keeps him from talking about himself. She prattled on some metaphor about a teeter-totter. Kicking up a little. Whatever. From where I sit, if I want to learn about someone, they should write an essay. If we all had an essay, and we exchanged them before dates, everyone would do a little better. Like resumes, but with better prose.

Annabeth managed to put on a convincing facade of adulthood, with a job in urban planning, a wardrobe full of sensible heels and a tuned and washed Elantra parked outside her well-lit apartment, living happily in a field of sedans and SUVs at the Oxtail Creek apartment complex. I didn't even notice she was wearing makeup at first: the sign of correctly applied facial enhancements. She was this beautiful, fulfilled, happy young woman on her way up. The essay, of course would have taken a turn, somewhere around the fifth paragraph.

“I may look like the complete package, but after you talk to me for a half hour or so, you'll see that I'm just a painted marionette, propped up by two loving, parents and all the adulation they can churn out. They're the ones pulling these strings. They're the ones manufacturing my credit rating. You won't really fall in love with me, you'll fall in love with the shadow of what they wish someone had forced them to be, all those years ago... and when you take off the little costume I wear when I'm meeting men or naming streets in a new development, you'll find that I'm a struggling infant who still needs someone to wipe her nose, and tell her where to go when her dishwasher breaks.”

Also, she had this thing about unicorns.

Let me take that back. She didn't have a thing about unicorns, she was pulling a Walter Mitty about unicorns. There was this farm when she was a kid where she met one. Rode it. They told her about the best new restaurants in her dreams. A unicorn disguised as a drunk old man told her to put forty dollars on black in Vegas, and she got a hotel room comped.

About the time someone starts telling you they get advise on their drunken fiscal misadventures from cryptozoological good Samaritans in disguise, I think you're allowed to get off the see-saw. Of course, now I was interested. That's not interested like: “I wonder what this new Ethiopian place is like,” it's interested like: “how many ping pong balls can I fit in my roommate's mouth while he's asleep.” Interested at your expense.

The questions went out the window.

“Funny you mention that. I used to work for an advertising firm.”

She started laughing. “What's funny about that?”

I dunno, you tell me. “We used unicorns in a couple print adds.”

“Oh!” I don't know how she managed to make the gleeful sounds she did, but it chimed like little bells ringing. The dogs in the alley behind the restaurant started salivating. “Did you work for the Stolman company or something? I love crystal animals.”

The permafrost smiles of my grandmother's private collection made an icy little tickle at my forebrain. “Ah, no, actually, American Express. You remember?”

If I'd have said, no, you can't have a pony, I couldn't have dimmed princess Annabeth's veneer any faster.

Plodding onward: “Plane ticket to Scotland, $750. Bus ride out to the country, $60. Entrance fee, $35. Giving her the ride she'll never forget, priceless.”

Despite my fervent jazz hands, and attention grabbing announcer voice, she didn't soften in the least. “I guess there was some kind of cross promotion with a theme park near Glasgow... They dress up horses with horns...” The explanation felt weak, even if I didn't know what the problem was.

She finally parted those rosy lips, brow furrowed into a Gordian knot of consternation. “I've heard of that place. That's an exploitation of true miracles. And besides, every time you use a credit card, a unicorn dies.”

It wasn't that I expected gravity to affect her flights of fancy at this point, heavens no. I just don't think a jack-be-nimble could've made that kind of leap. The minotaur would've lost its way in the logical labyrinth she was constructing. The event horizon of her superdense illogic-matter black hole was pulling my lips and cheeks into all sorts of contortions. Unicorns... Credit Cards...

You may as well have said the Yeti was driven to extinction by New Coke, or that space aliens won't reveal themselves until men stop wearing sideburns.

“You know there have to be billions of credit card transactions every day, right?”

“What's your point?” Ah. There's the sort of witty retort one expects from a government bureaucrat.

“I don't remember. But are you really okay with the fact that being surrounded by a theoretical-cash phlogiston is causing a nuclear holocaust level extinction event in the single-horned quadruped population every single day?”

“Unicorns aren't native to our reality.”

“I'll admit it's probably less on Sundays, but I fail to see how that helps matters.”

“There are limitless unicorns, Robert. You can't cause an extinction.” Is condescension easier to take when it doesn't come from the logical high ground? I'm not sure.

“So, if there are limitless unicorns, in a scarcity based economy like ours, what possible value can a unicorn's life have?”

Deluge. Downpour. Lemon fresh. Her water glass certainly didn't upturn itself, and I don't think her parents' careful moment to moment construction of her life could be blamed, either. Clearly, that was the most poignant decision she would make all week. Score one for me.

Weeks later, long after killing another mythical ungulate by paying for dinner, I was taking a shortcut through a patch of new houses, and noticed I was at the intersection of Starmist Avenue and Dawnfire Way. I didn't laugh out loud, but rather smiled to myself, drove to the nearest 7 Eleven and bought a pack of smokes on my Mastercard. Sure, the clerk looked at me funny as I walked out the door, singing Another One Bites the Dust and strumming air guitar, but it's not every day that economic theory and magical flights of fantasy come together to provide me with a moral leg to stand on as I become a willing participant in multi-dimensional equine homicide.

Here's to you, Annabeth.

Quaking in One Form or Another

2006-07-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

On the BART platform today, I was knee deep in Rousseau again, trying to consider what's changed in the mind of the citizen since the eighteenth century when it comes to our expectations regarding tax structure. On my left, a strung out bum taking advantage of Spare the Air day, taking a free trip to another neighborhood. On my right, a woman whose face looked like a sudden loss of elasticity at turned it suddenly natural looking, maybe breaking free of a half dozen face lifts, finally at rest.

The thought of elasticity must have traveled to the earth's mantle, picked up by some half-liquid, psychic planetary consciousness. The platform shook a little. Soundlessly, but with a keen lateral vibration. We all looked up and at each other, afraid to venture a guess. It was pint-sized, hardly worthy of notice. A hiccough in the crust. Gas escaping, nothing more. But we all felt it. She said it was hurricane season somewhere else, and we should be worried about earthquakes here. I put the only rhetorical bandage I had onto the fresh psychological wound.

A few little ones are always better than one big one.

Later, I stumbled on this. (Thanks BoingBoing.) The End Times? You're serious? Another scuffle in the Holy Land and you think it's a Jerry Jenkins book all of a sudden? Are we thinking about how often this has happened? Did Jesus offer mass succor during the six days war? You may as well think that Spielberg directing Munich was a sign of the Apocalypse. Here come the four horsemen, buckle up and move to Idaho, kids, the ground's shaking, the streets are flooding and the senate hangs in the balance this year.

I admit I'm the wrong person to ask if you're looking for any kind of reassurance in the spirituality field. I know that these are fringe lunatics, and not an accurate representation of the Christian majority in my country, but still, the fact that anyone is glad that there's a war on makes me cold and angry. I can't accurately put into words the kind of fury I feel at these sentiments. A militarily, technologically superior state with mandatory military service for all adults is hunting down and killing members of a fringe, extremist group over the capture of two soldiers.

Mind you, they didn't kill those soldiers. (They may have since, I've not seen any information on that subject.) Bear in mind also, those weren't civilians or innocents, they were soldiers with an understanding that they were in harm's way. Israel has essentially declared war on all tangent nations by invading and holding land for “defensive purposes.” I won't speak to who is right or wrong on that count—afraid as I am that my bias shows through—but one has to realize that the attack by Hezballah was par for the course.

Earthquakes, then. A few small ones is always better than one big one. I really do mean it when I call that a “rhetorical bandage.” It's little better than sticking an adhesive medical strip to the arm of an uninjured by scared child. A few small tremors can signal the sudden release of a major event. They can also be aftershocks. For a long time now, I've been thinking that these sorts of events—a bombing here, a hijacked bus there—were just two pusillanimous peoples letting off steam, fully aware that the rest of the world wouldn't sit idly by as they quickly escalated against one another.

Or maybe they were tiny scratches. Mosquito bites at a gangrenous wound, building up slowly until the arm finally falls off. This could be the arm. Even the secular crazies are screaming about this. World War Three! World War Three, they cry. We organize emergency meetings of the highest powers in the world to decide what to do next. I hate throwing around clichés like “powder keg” and “fox in the henhouse,” (Mostly because I prefer phrases like “George W. Bush alone in North Beach,” or “Actual girl on a World of Warcraft Server”) but I can't help but think that the world never stops being one Archduke Ferdinand away from seven to ten years of trenches, tanks and racist, Disney-approved propaganda.

Do we worry, then? Me and all you other draft-worthy young men? Do we hope that, yes, Jesus is calling us home and it's time to repent and open our hearts to the man with the holes in his wrists? Or will this all blow over? The earth's mantle is a tricky beast. Thermodynamics on a scale most people's arithmetical expertise can't quite describe. Claustrophobia doesn't begin to describe what it must be like for a stone, under so much pressure it's melted, spending twenty million years rising to the surface of the earth again. Imagine the orgasmic release of the volcano, or the shuddering, sulfurous fart of a fault line moving. Try to feel what the Israeli soldier feels, twenty million tons of anger and jealously grinding down on him from every side. The constant upward motion of training and learning and hereditary hatred, being tooled into a killing machine. Now just let that thin thread of civility and propriety be washed aside for a second by some succession of factors...

Volcanic is a very small word that only shines light on the inability of language to express some concepts. Nuclear war is a better term, but so much less metaphorical that I prefer to imagine Oakland crumbling around me than to let my thoughts wander toward Mecca. The human is not a violent creature by nature. He is, however, wired for self defense. Stressful situations make her likely to lash out. The tiny boxes we put ourselves in for the good of one another are fraying more than nerves. They're fraying the very social compact we agree to so that we can all have the boxes. Pluralism is showing its dark side in the Middle East, and we know that there is a dark side to it here. How far, how fast and how darkly can this shattered peace spread?

Like a wildfire? Like all the news that's fit to upload? Or like the earth itself shrugging us off its core? I leave you with that, and I leave you with hope.

A Plea for Occasional Boredom

2006-07-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

Editing has made life a long series of pauses. Empty gaps between the moments of action. PRESS the button, POUR the coffee, take a SIP. SLURP. Closeup on the smile, curving like a Muslim dagger. I imagine that the feeling I have waiting at the bus stop (or collating faxes, or walking to the store) is akin to the sudden jaw snapping slam that light feels sinking into the atmosphere, going from the endless grande jeté of travel through a vacuum to the rude deceleration of a seventy percent nitrogen chemical bath. Imagine sprinting into Jello. Falling through a succession of paper towels. Obeying the speed limit in a school zone.

And thanks to clever film editors, I feel this way all night and day. I shake off the curdled moments each time I find cause to run, to jump, to somersault. The pace of the music and the rumble in the tires buttress my high spirits, but soon enough there will be a line. Standing behind a woman with four neatly wrapped portobella mushrooms. “It's very simple, today,” she intones with a voice like icewater being stirred. Today, she says, implying that she and this cashier are intimately familiar, like she's just been here, but neglected to purchase fungus, or like she noticed they were on sale and had been meaning to stock up, but at $6.25 a pound, who can find the spare cash... four dollars, though, that's a fucking deal! Don't even get me started on how portobella mushrooms and simple don't belong in the same sentence. My mind squirms like a claustrophobic rubber band ball the entire time, but then I'm snapped free and almost trip over friction, my head moving before the thought can get to my feet.

Editors, though, like a high school karate competition, chopping bricks and boards and blocks of time into manageable moments. Chewing the visual image until it is nearly digested, and feeding it back like some fricassee a la mother penguin. Is it true what they say? That the youth raised on rapid fire images and seventy cuts a minute will have damage done to their eyes and minds? Is the heritage we share mental framework not dissimilar from attention deficit disorder? Tennis-match-eyes and Vietnam nerves. Reflexes trained to the heights of Halo and Half-life, while our parents strain to keep pace with Ms. Pac Man.

Even now, having exhausted my jokes and clever references, I feel like things have slowed too much. I'm going to stop writing now.

Worker, Consumer, Revolutionary.

2006-07-13T00:26:00.000-07:00

“We've been desensitized by the frequency of the attacks.”

Krys, going on a rarely seen soapbox. (And more power to you. It's sexy and exciting when you do that, you know?) Powerlessness isn't a simple matter of give-and-take or oppressor vs. oppressed. It's endemic to the system we live in. The powerful are so deeply ingrained, the lines of enforcement so ancient as to be instinctual. Rulers no longer rule, because their titles and positions do it for them.

What do we do but follow along? Wait for someone to fix the problems? As we know our places and playact these roles we're stuck in, all that we do is reduce our ability to act outside them. You cannot stop the bombings in India, the oppression in China, the occupation in Iraq or the rape and murder and starving children in your own fucking backyard because you are not the person who does those things.

I belive that we are capable of changing the world through group action, but even in my most upright and conscientious moments I feel myself weighted down by the fetters of my role. Worker. Consumer. Producer. Police officer? Hero? Revolutionary? The change is so hard to make. The factors piled so high against us all. And even if you were to break free of the damning, all-powerful fates of the status quo, you'd be alone. What would you do?

In this way, we all exercise power on one another. We deliver an ataxic energy with expectations and reward repetition of behaviors with aplomb. Some of us have children. Some have fragile dreams. Presupposing parents. Consuming naivetés. There is always a reason to lay back and take the ride that everyone is offering. Our aggregate concern for the right and proper way of things creates a force that damns progress and retards cohesive effort to alter the course of history. I'm certain these bombings, the ironhanded law of the Taliban, and even the inhuman determination and pitiless cruelties of every genocide were buoyed along by each and every mind present.

What we expect is often what we get, and as more and more expect the same outcomes, they begin to be nearly assured.

Phoenix Business

2006-07-10T23:22:00.000-07:00

This is the first time I have gone a full week without smoking in as long as I can remember. Not to imply that I track my smoking, or that I tend to have perfect recall about these things, but just merely that I tried not to smoke for a week and successfully kept from doing so. I smoked last Monday night after drinking myself silly with Nat and Dave. I remember we were discussing a breadth of personal topics, our evening drunk extending into the giddy hours—the choppy ones where nothing of substance is said, but everything swells with importance. These nights have been ripe on the vine, lately, even among the friends who don't drink; tiredness and being lonesome together pinch-hitting for aqua vitae.

The cigarette recalls itself to me with a green sky seen through my personal haze and the blinding cityglow that permeates The Bay. The choking vapors had become more noxious of late. Maybe some lost fetal care in my breast awakened... a catalyst or reagent of self-preservation and the long view suddenly introduced. The taste was wrong, and a blighted feeling swept my brain, dismembering the usual feeling of rightness that comes from that intoxication.

And maybe that's what I get from the substances I bestow selfward. It feels just like that. Correct. Cool, even. Cigarettes, alcohol and the more mind-altering chemical pastiches I imbibe. The memory of them leaves me haunted by a longing spirit with transparent designs. A couple of beers and the blur is present, all creation at peace. One tall drink of coffee inspires the next until fingertips rattle, and the effect is oddly calming. Nesbitt's Paradox.

The alcohol I can deal with. The consequences, the missing time, the hurt feelings. They're rarities. Lashing predators, who, caged in sobriety, will always find an escape. The alcohol acts as a steam vent, and as the blackness and bile are dealt with on my own time, we see that those incidents move away. No matter how powerful the drug, your head will still rear. Thus, similarly, the fungus, the weeds.

The cigarettes, though, they have to go. An experiment. Sacrificial bull for the open maw of addiction. Real strength is seen in the men who stand before the vortex, urging a little more out of every muscle; straining for purchase. Those who spot the whorl on the horizon and juke left until it fades from sight... we envy their foresight, but we do not commend them on their accomplishments. Now and forever that little black curse will be there, smirking. I'm a part of it.

Sacrificial bull. Lay the head upon marble, and take the bronze knife in hand. The haft is bone, just like this trussed brute. Slice carefully, a semicircle from vein to vein, loosing a double fountain of scarlet. He moans his last, and you stroke him on the neck. There's a powerful muscle there: strength and honesty. This is your innocence. His heat fades in the cold morning, steam rising from the blood. He shudders. That strength is going somewhere else. It would have died, with or without your hand. This is transfer. This is phoenix business. The brawn of innocence can only be used so many ways. Some of us give it up to carnality. Others violence. But those who let it fester and die, I maintain that they never truly join the rest of us. Never grow up like people who give in to temptation.

Now that I've sucked a thousand tiny fires and dripped ash like a volcano god... Now that I've tread upon the shores of Oligartha and vomited through the night... Now I can take from that strength. Stronger than the desire because I gave it a ride. I can learn, I can change, I can move by steps and stumbles in a direction of my choosing. Phoenix business measured in millimeters. A pinch of ash, a dash of flame, and all the world is within reach of something that's within reach of right now.

Cimmerians Come and Gone

2006-07-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

“But when I observe [free people] sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power, and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages that despise European pleasures braving hunger, fire, the sword and death to preserve their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.”

--Jean Jacques Rousseau, discussing his fellow theorists on the development of society from a theoretical “state of nature.”

Rousseau strikes me as a bit of a firebrand, probably a dangerous man. He was respected around Europe—his “Social Contract” was the recipient of prestigious awards from as far as Geneva—but his writings were precursor to the French revolution. He is still highly respected as one of the political thinkers instrumental in the creation of the United States constitution, but he was iconoclastic enough to denounce art and science as the pursuits of vanity and the idleness of the rich.

I will not deny that this man was a dangerous thinker. One can scarcely fault a dangerous thinker for having some ideas that look quaint, or downright foolish after two hundred and fifty years of history and learning. It's the nature of powerful, historical presences like his to act as double edged swords. What truly strikes me about his writing is how scant a distance I feel we've come in that time.

He says, “it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.” He applies this term, slaves, to his fellow authors, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Richard Filmer, to name a few. Men of culture, men of letters. These are property owners, men of noble birth and education in their homelands, and Rousseau calls them slaves. He may as well be alive today and calling senators, tenured professors and corporate officers by the same. We're all nothing but slaves to a system. To Rousseau, the death of man's natural state is the end of innocence. It is a black pock mark that cannot be removed. Whatever station we may rise to in this artificial ladder of bodies and names, we'll never have the freedom afforded to the once noble savages.

Leaving aside how it is for Rousseau to argue about liberty, I'm inclined to agree with him on some level. We have all given up freedom. I advocate giving as much of it as possible to everyone. But this is where Rousseau truly confounds me. Despite his meandering, poorly thought through ramblings about the birth of social structures, he is saying exactly what we are learning: the more people there are, the more we need these binding, restricting social agreements to keep us all alive and fed and clothed. If there were seven people on the planet, they could each have a continent, do with it as they pleased and never be concerned with the welfare of another man. They could pump as much secondhand smoke into the sky as they liked, and shoot their guns off in any direction without thinking. Thousands of people could live on the planet. Millions. Tens of millions. But there is a limit.

Despite Rousseau's vitriol and his philosophical agreement with Robert E. Howard's Conan, I do find that he is simply wrong in seeking so hard for each of us to have that kind of liberty. He can want it. We all want it. He can try to live his life in such a way as to emulate it, but so long as we all must be careful not to tread on one another's toes, there will always have to be a government. There will always be assigned roles and specialized labor. I will be forced to sit at a desk somewhere and move numbers around on a screen so that someone else can move prokaryotes from tube to tube with accuracy and precision.

Conan (or Howard, at least) and Rousseau have a great deal in common, with their belief in the superiority and strength of ancient barbaric man. Both say that civilized living makes men soft and week. It "enervates" them. Feminizes. They both hold sacred northern lands-Rousseau wishes he could live among the people of Geneva, and even when he is king, Conan longs for his time in Asgard. They see the confines of walls and parliaments as chains, and that all are bonded to these places as slaves to masters.

Slavery is a relative term, though. As much as I see the beauty and the good in the philosophy they preach, I must disagree. If we were to abandon the structures we have in place, billions would die. I don't know if Rousseau would would approve of the systems we have in place, though clearly his social contract acknowledges that we cannot go without these arrangements. And then he is like Conan upon the throne, all his anger misdirected and misplaced. And so must my own be, I suppose. The anger of every thinking woman or man at what has been lost must be misplaced. We learn to give up total liberty that we might each retain some measure at all.

Play Me to My Grave

2006-07-06T20:54:00.000-07:00

I always meant to play the harmonica. I really did. Somehow the thought of a tiny musical world tucked into a pocket, made ready at a moment's notice excites a profound awakening in me. I am a whistler by nature, genetically and by training, I would say. The simplicity of being able carry a tune on my lips, no need for words—or even vocal chords—is the consummate difference between humming along to the tune and being the mind behind the music. People hum because they don't know the words. Whistlers are unconcerned with words and phrases, brashly showing the world what their bodies can do: it is an act of creation.

But the harmonica? Another step entirely. A ratio of range to portability unrivaled by anything else. Surely a piano outstrips it in versatility. Surely. But who can take a piano on the rails? Or to jail? Jail, my friends. The harmonica is the official instrument of jailbirds the world around, soulful and yet carefree, able to join in a blues improvisation or a drunken riverside revelry with equal ease. Hobos travel, whipping down the shipping corridors in style and grace, belting out tunes on an instrument whose sound is almost synonymous with the lonely whistle of the steam engine. This is like a natural enhancement to the whistling organ: the mouth.

That tiny universe of sound should be mine, but again I run afoul and afraid of that same callous contravention, the baldly diminishing former necessity of mortality. The previous evolutionary necessity, an unavoidable end to life, has become an anchor to a species which proves more and more its ability to have a life outside the physical body. But for all the wants and desires and the art, philosophy and the search for truth, we are still tacked to this temporal limitation. The painted spandrels, thus, give us the search for permanence, the decision of one life over another, specialization and nostalgia.

Indeed, without my fear of a mortal's comeuppance, why wouldn't I take hours out of my day to practice such a thing? It's my understanding of my limitations that makes me put down some dreams in favor of others. This essay, the words in it and the skill of combining them into something that communicates an emotion... that's what I want to do with my time. “My Time.” How horrific is that? The tacit way our language condones this degradation and eventual, abrupt corruption of our bodies, I mean. So inimical and profound a part of the way we live our lives that most wouldn't even think to fight back.

I've said often that the one thing that I will always regret the things I haven't done, no matter how many things I do. I regret all the lives I could not live. I want to hold within me the knowledge of every human life, all separate and self-contained. The accumulated understanding of every human life.

But that's only the perfection. Each extra second, each little memento and moment of prescience is worth paying for. Worth owning. This is why the choice between music and martial arts and poetry is so painful. I want to feel what the musicians feel, and yet my mind does not work quickly enough to do all this at once. I'm bogged down now for reasons of mental acuity, in itself a physical defect. Genetic. Hereditary. A function of the kinds of experiences I had as a child. The way my Jell-O brain settled into its mold, now unshakable. It can wiggle and stretch a little, but it can only be shaped so much before it will break. So I'm stuck being a slow learner.

I feel though, that it has not kept me from an ability of mastery. Perfection. Of course, this only magnifies the injury I feel at my brief time here. Were I to live several centuries, of course I could put down the typepad one day and pick up that harmonica. I could nod at my sweet whistling and fill the trainyards and cages with that sad melody. All the time in the world to perfect the skills that escape me, slowly crafting my physical and mental coordination until all that is left is that perspicacity, a laser width focus on a skill.

Regarding Last Night

2006-06-29T01:01:00.000-07:00

This piece here was written when I was really feeling the sorts of things I was talking about last night. I wrote it six or ten months ago, but it really hits the nail on the head in terms of complacency, and easy solutions. I think I'm doing better than this now.

*******
Corageous Dalliance

I can regard this as a dalliance. I can pretend this is a pit stop. It’s a deific sign rising out of the mists on the highway that leads to singing castles and just reputation. I’ve been driving all night without hope of rest and have been uncautious. I drift down the well-worn off ramp and settle into the parking lot for a meal and a warm bed.

And I don’t leave.

I dream a dram of whiskey and drive in my sleep, somnambulating closer and closer to the destination, waking up damned. Stacks of paper rise like colonnades on my desk. Staple removers mouth foul curses and latch their clever jaws on the warm flesh of my gut. I measure time in the inches of my waistline, not the loss of rubber on my tires. I run straighter and faster than those around me, but the sedentary sirens sing me slowly into their soft supports as surely as any around me.

We get married on a verdant hillside in the shadow of a well-pruned ash. It’s as comforting as any storybook wedding for my bride and I. Scolding my indulgences vow after vow, I am but eager hands and a greedy wallet, pulling back the veil to lay lips upon that steady paycheck.

Courageous men would not twine their fingers around hers. They would fuck her and leave her, never tempted by the accumulation of goods and the status symbols bought with this lifestyle. Truer hearts would leave flowers on her bed table and start their cars. Thinking of this as a momentary thing—a footnote in my book—would be easy if I were such a man.

I can’t paint my bitter, tear-stained laughter with mere words. You have to hear me when I’m alone, almost coughing from the exertion. I know that each time I say I’ll move on, I’m saying what I want to hear.

That old car rusts in the driveway. The slick shine of the steering wheel fades in the sun. The rims blacken from grime. All things are soluble in the flow of the years. All things atrophy.

Mouths, Money and the Senate.

2006-06-27T22:53:00.000-07:00

*Quoting Brahm*

"Is anything really worth fighting for? Or perhaps is it that all of our nobility and our virtues are just stories we tell ourselves to feel good when times are easy. Is expediency really the only rule?"

Fighting? Violence? Or is it just striving that you mean. Not giving up, in or out? The only one I think worth fighting is myself. Parts of me at any rate. To shove that brat of an attention span into a corner; hold him there with force and ignore his constant distractions and alternatives. To berate that stolid, aging complacency with profanity and insults--anyting to catch it off guard and start working again. I have to break objects and private morals just to get the attention of my increasingly egotistical sense of entitlement. I have to cut myself down, shove my nose in my own shit and work harder than I think is healthy, just to keep myself moving. Isn't that fighting? Just to put one foot in front of the other some days. To soar, rather than merely drift on others.

But I know what you're saying. It's that complacency that you have to fight against before you can even begin to fight someone or something else. It's so easy to sink into a rhythm of one day after another, and to see all the trees, but never worry about the forest. Never to even realize that you can change the forest. It's two battles at once, and a thousand excuses come to mind before you can get to the second. When your morals, obligations and virtues ever even come into play, the shock can be enough to paralyze.

There are things we'd all do. Fight for our lives, and probably those of people we care for, but would we defend an innocent stranger? Speak up when something is wrong? Until you know how to win the battle against your internal enemy, the external battle is a wet dream.

**

Today I wrote to both of California's senators, voicing my opinion on our President's desire to gain the line-item veto. That was a big step for me. I want to justify myself when I rant and rage about government. I want to feel like I've done more than earn my degree, I want to put it to use. To be political. To be able to more than talk about checks and balances, and jurisprudence, but to put my hard earned knowleged to bear, and to be a functioning useful part of the world.

Thanks for giving me a little bit of reason to revolt, Brahm. You're hitting a nail on the head for me, and waking me up to the idea that others are thinking about this too. Growing up is about more than just getting a job. Really growing up is being what you thought being an adult was before it snuck up on you. For me, that's changing things. That's becoming this person who's able to go from thought to action.

Maybe now I can publish something. That'd be putting my money where my mouth is, huh?

I quit

2006-06-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

A thick, milky ocean laps against me; these dreams like cliffs, eroding away. I dream about prison and about searching in a deep hole. I wake up with my eyes closed and feel around me. Please tell me I'm safe. Please tell me I'm not doing something stupid. Am I alone? Am I clothed? What's going on? How did I get here? What time is it? What day? It's whack-a-mole, and the questions pop up and down faster than I can swing the hammer. It gets heavier every time. A tickle in my throat. Did I vomit? How hung over will I be? Am I supposed to look cool, mixing things together like a chemist without an education? No one holds me back, and no one chastises, but I feel like an idiot. Baseless. Adrift. Twitching and wired. Trying to decide if knowing is better than wondering. The drink gets me here, and I worry about where here is.

I quit.

Captain's Log.

2006-06-22T23:27:00.000-07:00

To whit: Becoming an adult might be about learning to love things that were took for granted as a youth. My microwave and vacuum cleaner make me disgustingly excited. I'm become more domestic, and it's no one's fault but my own. I dream about end tables. (I also dreamed I was gettig high with my mom and dad, though, so let's not get carried away. This isn't Leave it to Beaver, and I'm not Ward.)

Stefanie came to visit over the weekend, and we partied, walked too much and observed the world of animals.

It was a derelict time. Polar bears look so dumb, all by themselves in crafted environments. There is something so much more compelling about a naked cat that wants to eat your soul.

This is nature's way of telling us not to fuck with the relative traits of animals. Dangerous predators raised in captivity lose their nature at a disgusting rate, while the small, manageable ones keep their attitudes, and probably even increase them, foul tempers fed by constant reinforcement. This is why the cat hates you, and the polar bear doesn't know you are food. It's creeping me out just thinking about it.

Warren

2006-06-16T00:21:00.000-07:00

"Regina, we don't say things like that in the house of God."

It was funny the way the reverend could capitalize a word like that. Just by saying it, you could see the letters butting up against you eyeballs, even if you kept them shut tight. Warren held on to Regina's shoulder and nudged a lock of black hair away from his eyes. The back patio at the Church of Our Savior on Elm and Sutter had never been so crammed full of little girls, all parading their pink and purple dresses. If Easter was about revival and rebirth and all that, Warren could only wish that the pink his daughter was wearing could croak and die, or maybe hibernate a couple months out of the year. He sipped his beer when people were looking. Took long, comforting gulps when they turned away.

"Rev, she's just a little girl. Go easy."

"Warren, we've known each other a long time, and I love your family, but where would your daughter learn those words? And about her mother? You should be ashamed."

Ashamed wasn't really in Warren's repetoir. Goaded into compliance, maybe, at best. Shrugging indifference, ususally.

"Well you don't have to take away her candy, rev. It's Easter, for cryin' out loud."

"I'll be the judge of who receives and who does not in this church."

Warren cold cocked the reverend with the butt of a forty ounce Miller High Life and wrenched the wicker basket out of his limp grip with his left hand. Green plastic grass fluttered out of it in a parody lawnmower clippings. The plastic eggs all stuffed with jelly beans and those little crispy chocolates jostled around like suntanning elephant seals, but didn't move far. He handed the basket to Regina, smiling loose and honest for the first time all day. The little girl practically vibrated between joy and shame. He stood erect again, and looked the reverend straight in the eyes, looking for just the right line. A smoking gun.

“Bite me, reverend.”

If the rest of the assembly was going to give Warren and his girl those kinds of looks, at least he could have the decency to deserve them. He took Regina's hand carefully, and squeezed all the reassurance he could muster out of the gesture. She felt safer, too. They left together, and they laughed, and feasted on marshmallow, gelatin, nougat and chocolate. When they were drunk with power and glucose, they both said nasty things about her mom. And that was about the happiest they'd ever be.

King Oscar

2006-06-15T00:20:00.000-07:00

In another life I was King Oscar. My robes were silver scale, my crown a spire of coral more fanciful than the noblest narwhal. Moon bright pearls dangled and bedecked the ceilings of my underwave castle. Mighty vents coughed and sulfurred up energy. Sardine subjects went this way and thosewards—a convoy driving right, a caravan left—shining and soft on the eyes like chain link curtains. They cast rainbows on the kelp beds. And all the while I was chortle-satiated. Belly laughs. I sucked down shrimp and poured prawns down my grizzled gullet. I drank mulled wine and spoke nonverbal in grunts and glees. The pressure of the deep, heat the earth spun up molten, the heavy crown; they could not dim the rose in my cheeks.
My bastion broke. And only today I saw the hole.

Stop Calling Me a Terrorist.

2006-06-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

God Bless America. And Max. Also bless Max.

Comic Books

2006-06-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

After thirteen months at my current job, I've finally been convinced that the people I work with are geeks. Big ol' geeks. Damn. (Not that I'm not. No, no. Just that I think the “these are some cool folks” meter just topped out. Wow.) We had an email conversation between five folks over the course of the entire day, debating the merits of comic books and their filmic translations. People are so good at hiding their inner geek, but you can always smell it. You're just never sure enough to force a confession.

Sick

2006-06-01T20:18:00.001-07:00

I'm making a quick sidestep here. Like, why am I sick all the time? I always like to blame acquaintances and California germs, but that sort of thing shouldn't slow me down this long. I conqured Oregon diseases, standing on top of the mossy pile, bejacketed in lichen and mist, but sunny, pleasant Oakland bests me? I should be putting the screws to the industry and riding a chariot built of guns and drugs from the hills to the bay.
I think it's more insidious than that. Corporate tidings bring a graceful excuse to treat your employees like thieves. Each hour of medical leave a tiny razor strike at the wallet of the shareholders. These disease-ridden, filthy employees are a swarm of cutpurse piranhas.
They swat around their knees and make up policy walls to keep us from climbing too high. They count our movements, in sickness and wealth, by the second. The second. They cleave the day at its joints, then break the filet knife out and slowly grind it into mince. And this isn't enough to make me sick?
Well, not quite. These walls that so irk and stifle me (they keep me down, really, they do) seem only to convince those around me that the solution is to enter the building brandishing an arsenal of microbes that would turn a the whole of Monsanto on its ear. They cast aspersions about their paychecks and cast lesions about their deskpace. Like primitive witchdoctors, owing their health to miracles and poultices rather than rest and solitude. I can rattle against this cage all I like, but I'm barred in by ignorance and violent apathy. And by mucus. A cage of mucus that makes my sinuses heavy and my sleep fitful.
Swear vengeance with me one and all! A bill of health! An ammendment for the oppressed to strike a blow against the diseasedist!

Seven Dollars Worth

2006-05-08T22:20:00.000-07:00

I guess it's kind of like marketing. Definitely banishing box-thoughts with his schemes. The man in the tiny ponytail reeks of Chinese food and tobacco, and swaggers like a Texas politician. He makes a picket fence of teddy bears on the counter at the diner. Seven bucks for all five. A number he pulls out of thin air. I try my best to ignore him, and sweat over a sandwich griller while what's left of daylight whispers dirty secrets on the back of my neck.

I turn around and he's pulling at the creases of his chocolate colored jacket. Seven bucks. The customers don't have to pay attention. They settle deeper into their chairs and drive home their eye contact like tent stakes. Anything to avoid his gaze—those shiny white teeth and the way he pulls his top lip up over his teeth.

Is this a scam? Did he steal those bears? Why seven dollars? I find myself asking all the questions as I politely decline. He gestures, this Vanna White lateral slide, the back of his hand addressing their plush contours. These bears are classics. Mint condition. But why is he here? Is this a drug deal I'm too dense to notice? So many times every day I wonder why I came all the way to this city.

The money in the register isn't mine. I plead with him. He ignores my cues: tone, gesture, emphatic eyebrows. Surely the pile of toys in the corner is ready for an embellishment, he insists. He actually says that. “Embellishment.” I feel like he's calling me a liar. He's a transient, isn't he? A vagrant? Homeless? This is survival, not a business model. The more cool and suave he becomes, the more I feel like paying him would just cut deeper into his act. Buying the whole swath of them, scooping them up into my arms like a giant, loving hero, I could shatter this reality he's creating. Show the patrons that he's no businessman.

He's trying to level with me. His elbows are on the counter, little puddles of his curious odor spreading outward. One businessman to another. Our scents mingle. Grilled cheese and General Tso's, fair trade Peruvian and Virgina loose-leaf.

This is a deal. There's a lot of kids in this neighborhood. Kids need something to do. Parents need to just sit back and pretend for a while. I don't have cash, and it can't come out of the register. And still they're all ignorant. Customers just turn a blind eye as we get louder and louder. He's emphatic. I've never really seen someone who was emphatic before this. This. Is. The. Best. Deal. It's a steal. Steal. He's practically telling me he lifted these. His buddy at Goodwill left the back door open, maybe. Or he could've run off while the old lady had her back turned at the garage sale.

Seven dollars, man. That's nothing. Every one of these people is spending that on dinner alone. An uncomfortable rustle through the patrons and I wish I wasn't alone back here. This counter is defining us. A fortress tower. I imagine pouring hot coffee down from the battlements.

As he finally realizes his time is better spent another place, the smoke and steam curl in his wake. It's like he's so massive he can bend the light. I feel like he knew he'd lost a long time ago. He kept up his assault. If he couldn't win, at least he could make mine feel like choking. A grown man walking away with his arms full of children's toys. It's so fucking stupid. I'm left standing here, and who would side with me? Was it worth seven dollars? All this pride I've got? Or would seven dollars be a fair price so we could both have a little dignity? Embellish a bit.

Redefine

2006-05-07T21:17:00.000-07:00

I spent the day doing laundry and languishing near the light. Sunshine threatens to bring bubbles to the surface of my skin, as though I were a liquid with a low boiling point. I can become pink and tender just shaking hands with a nice day. Why did I move to California? Am I some daredevil action star, drawn to the things which harm me? The drugs that make me crazy, the deep seated emotional need to sit on a motorcycle again, being pulled quickly and mercilessly into conversations with the people who hurt me the most... And now the sun. I'm wishing it wasn't gone. I think my northern European skin tone is more robust in natural light. Photographs are so much easier. A trip to the store is a sightseeing expedition. Have the rain and darkness been coloring my mood so long? Do I only speak on their virtues to sound tough? Aside from the more palatable temperatures, there is no reason to live in the swampy mire of the Willamette valley. Sunshine... We have a relationship to redefine.

Sprinting

2005-12-04T15:46:00.000-08:00

I think I could be fast. Like I’m born to run. I could explode outward at a full run, and I could leave craters in my footsteps. The writhing sensation of claustrophobia is snakes in my guts. I’m contained. Pressing at the bars of this cage. I want to run. Snap the tether of this friction binding me to the smooth, caramel and chocolate patterned tiles. On this spot I’m feeling something inside me ready to break loose.

The signs say don’t run. The security guard—his face all loose and slack, having finally cracked after years of scowling—looks at me and I know that running is forbidden. The signs around me root my feet to the ground. They are the nails in my shoes, the binds on my hands and the walls of my cell. Grounded by convention, laden with conformity, I can only shuffle along, another body in the line.

Spirits bright and lovely, cold ghosts of the hard walls and streets, what place within myself must I see to move with that freedom? The noise within cries out to fly and not stop. Is there something I can train, a muscle to flex and trust in that will crush the clinging, maggoty vestiges of similarity to the others? These urges won’t be silenced. Grant me a muse for movement, some idle ethereal hands to aid me in my leaps and rolls. Guide my legs, make true my steps and show me the way. Feed me the perseverance to let convention lie and run.

Run through the crowds like an arrow. Dash over the tiled floor. Thumb my nose at safety and respect and be the relentless diving presence my instincts scream for me to become.

Prematurely Mothballed

2005-11-29T22:14:00.000-08:00

An old west African witticism claims that “when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the translation. The English here sounds like literal truth. This is a boldly stated metaphor that cares little for poetry. It implies, to me, a curdling desperation—a dark pressure to convince. No time for rhyme or rhythm, no juxtaposition. The aged are libraries. Repositories. Knowledge in a precious form. Vulnerable to life’s ravages. Just as bricks crack and fall apart, the most sage of scholars and the shrewdest of gossips will one day fall apart.

Standing outside the library as its rafters lit up like halogen tubes and its windows roared like lions, manes of citrus-hued fire curling over their shoulders, I couldn’t help but feel the screams of each book, their full lives and all that experience melting away. Words trundling off the page in rivulets of black… Smoky appendages lovingly brushing each spine one last time before the consuming red would cut through the shelves like a gash… The spray of the water, a cascade meant to save the world around this mess by ending everything inside…

If I cried, the heat of it all vaporized my tears before I felt them. The secrets within a library—books out of print a half dozen decades, secret scrawls on the underside of shelves, local newspapers dating back to before the civil war—they’re precious. We don’t have many to lose, and we can’t focus every time a secret is lost. Listen to what is being said. Knowledge collects on people like dust in the corners of rooms. It piles up, but it is there for the taking if you know where to seek it.

Companions

2005-11-24T13:05:00.000-08:00

There is a slow burn of loathing toward the indigenous pigeon in metropolitan areas . The majority regard them as filthy, indiscriminate in their production of feces and generally disease ridden. They’re noisy, dauntless underfoot and completely, maliciously ubiquitous throughout the urban landscape. I offer up my humble advocacy for the turnabout of this unfair mindset. I say it is time to put a stop to this foolishness and learn to share our city spaces with these exemplary survivors. The pigeon is a pillar of the modern ecosystem; its body is that of a finely tuned, well honed generalist and scavenger, capable of surviving in a multiplicity of environments and temperatures. Our avian neighbors are fast breeding, compact, able to survive on a meager amount of food, and confident in their nesting in the crevices of our creation.

To limit one’s perception of this companion species to a handful of negative traits is simply blindness. It ignores the friendly persona, the simple needs and the beauty of the creature’s sudden transition from terrestrial seeking to effortless flight. Most importantly, it ignores the fact that this creature, among so many, is able to coexist with us. We do not see herds of antelope subsisting on discarded pizza crust and carelessly spilt cereal. Wolves do not camp in the eaves of the public library. Isn’t there a healthy implication of optimism in learning to love what we can have, rather than pining over the lost causes?

We kill everything with our constant excretion of asphalt and rebar. We drive away the other beasts and doom ourselves to this solitary wandering. Be glad that evolution crafts us this great companion, something to live off our detritus and handouts. There will be precious few as time mourns our expansion.

Surroundings

2005-11-16T23:54:00.000-08:00

Variety is the spice of life, surely, but we so seldom revel in the heart-stoppingly profound multiplicity of everyday objects. Our engines of production spill our a conglomeration of goods so widely ranging as to mimic a slap in the face. Night and day they spin turbines and pour molds, drinking up resources and piling up the things we take for granted.

You see, words like “common,” “everyday” and “mundane” fill me to the brim with an irate, foamy bile. Don’t people take the time to see this unconquerable miscellany around themselves? A stew of ideas is constantly boiling over with the creativity of our billion disparate minds.

Let us take pens as an example. The humble inkpen, always at hand and always ready to serve, taken for granted and trodden underfoot. I searched long and hard this afternoon through a gasp-inducing array of ink pens. Colors, thicknesses, grip enhancements and ergonomic correctors. There is an ever-growing range of pocket clips and lids. Push-button, spring-loaded tips show an unforeseen assortment of devious incongruity. And this is all to say nothing of the very ink these ubiquitous tools are meant to dispense!

The semiliquid bound within is a rainbow of choices, dark, light, sparkling, thick, thin and vibrant. Each stroke of some pens runs ruin across all but the most stalwart of pages, ink like a brushfire that won’t set for minutes. Others weakly fade in and out, not quite committed to true statement—one foot in the grave of ghost writing. Black ink like a shadow on white marble. Definitive. Bold. Red ink cursing your failures and cutting you down without a moment’s thought.

I urge each and every one of you to dig deep into the well of physical objects around you. We cannot be whole without appreciating the things around us. As ancient botanists observed the plants and flowers, faces full of pollen, we must become students of the cell phone model and the breakfast cereal box. It is deep within us to conquer by appreciation and knowledge, not mere classification. Let the world rain down with a gross mélange of sundries, clattering and splintering against the asphalt. Let the engines of production bury to my knees that I may sort and collect and be a part of every one.

In the Stream

2005-11-12T13:46:00.000-08:00

My friend cancelled our meeting this weekend, but I couldn’t see any reason to cancel the tickets. I just find the opportunity to sit in an airport too much to pass up.

I find that the insides of airports are intricate communities. Like malls and themeparks, they’re populated by small armies of loyal employees, each with their own jobs and responsibilities, held together by the bare thread of prolonged physical closeness, if not community. The janitor in his converse and navy jumpsuit--accustomed to the rhythms of the candy girl’s workday—wheels his cart past her as egress and homecoming ebb and flow. She’s porcelain and velvet, clothed so carefully to match the black and white boxes around her. She gleams as positively as the floor her admirer will polish when she goes home.

The pizza shop dispenses nourishment by the slice, a hot, bustling mitochondria in the center of the concourse. The ticket counter is flush with impassive faces and joyless refrains learned by rote. The scales tipped toward efficiency over comfort. Pilots come and go, walking like rock stars, and garnering smiles from their earthbound coworkers. They represent purpose so singularly, that they are familiar, even when foreign. There is a uniformity to these places, but a differentiation (a specialization?) as well.

Magazine racks teem with generic periodicals, but bold faced newspapers and kitschy souvenirs tell you where you are. Geography and culture are only set dressing here. Imperfections that leak through the cell membrane. Windows look out on tarmac that could be anywhere, but information sinks in nonetheless. Signage is customized. The employees share an accent, a style, a home.

Airports around the world are united by purpose. Like cells throughout the body graciously hosting blood from the capillaries as it makes the rounds. The pilots, the attendants, the airlines, they unite these points with their glowing network of jet-fueled beasts. Each airport—as each cell—possesses its own identity, but owes its continuance to a constant flow of sameness from place to place.

Heavy Praise

2005-11-08T20:35:00.000-08:00

My recent thoughts, I felt, put me onto an emotional entanglement with the weather. Today’s stifling sky, thick with soft pillows of granite, put me in a heavy, reflective mood, dragging myself through a riptide of old memories; loss and heartache are most prevalent. I think its our universal connection to the grit and pieces of the world that binds us together. As our emotions are a pond of chemicals on our minds, so too are they affected by the ripples around them—tides and winds, falling stones. I sat near the window to observe the autumnal migration of thermometer, barometer and slick falling leaves.

This state, predictably, brought me to Johnny Cash. The man in black slays my every woe with his guitar. The music crashes like waves, and his voice rolls on unstoppable like a diesel engine. It isn’t like a shoulder to cry on—I don’t cry at all. It’s not moping along to the sound of someone else’s depression. You can feel the hardships he’s faced and relive them. I find myself killing a man, surviving a war or losing everyone I love.

This is what it is to have a savior: the man who died, singing through the pain so I could live without it. He cleanses me with his words, holds open the door for me, gives a glimpse of those things we may never, and should never see. It all gives me pause, makes me wonder about what’s inside me, born and living as I have. Wonder if I could have that strength and thank him that he can loan some to me.

The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars/Restless by day and by night/rants and rages at the stars/God help the beast in me.

Skies Above

2005-11-04T18:45:00.000-08:00

Today, I just took pictures of clouds. It kind of hit me all of a sudden how big they are; almost like floating mountain ranges—their gargantuan bulk capable of undergoing moment-to-moment changes that would occupy their terrestrial counterparts for hundreds of millennia, and all of this silently, crawling over a faded blue mantle without a whisper.

I stressed my telephoto lens, trying to capture the bestial precipices and all their danger: the milk-white cliff faces no climber would ever ascend. At one point I just lay on my back, letting vertigo crawl into my head. My whole body seemed to implode at the suggestion of scale. Imagining my tiny body in proximity to those sky hooks begs innumerable questions. Where else could the throne of Thor be found? What less marvelous thing could bear the name “cumulonimbus”? Is there any other eruption of natural forces that could possibly (nay, that could deserve to) be the genesis of that life-giving lightning that splits the iron gray sky?

Today I shouted those questions toward the shrinking horizon. Today I fell in love again, and my new love is the multitudinous, hulking Vapor Queen of the sky. We all stand trapped between the grassy carpet of our sphere and the ever-changing shell of her cottony cloth.