Windows 8 Hate or How I Learned to Love the Bomb

I just have to take a (long) moment here to comment on Microsoft's new operating system. Just like I finally did buy a new car (and still regret it) I'm going back to school and so I decided to buy a new computer.

Before abandoning my old laptop, I had to make one more attempt to convince myself that it really couldn't be salvaged. You see, I'm driven by abhorrence of waste, by frugality and by the mandate to be self-made. I mean really driven, like my car had 333,333 miles on it (I made up the number because it was easier to type, but it's true in round terms) and I seemed also to hold a rough estimate in my head of how many dollars that saved me and how much easier on the environment than to buy a new Prius too frequently - I tally the total of resources and energy used, including in the manufacture.

This is a dangerous compulsion. I have to fix what's broken and I feel nearly sick spending money on frivolous returns. This doesn't help my own bottom line, you can be sure of that, maybe since I'm equally frugal on demanding returns for my own investments in my work, but that's another story.

Combined with this brand of eco-frugality is just plain old frugality, and so when Microsoft was offering me a $40 upgrade to Windows 8, I thought I could do a test drive on my really old and really wimpy little laptop before making my decision to buy a new one. I wanted to be sure I was going to like the new OS which would come with the new PC. 

Plus, I surely didn't want to spend good money on something basically identical to what I had except shinier and newer and speedier. You can see how that goes for me with cars and boats and things - I get attached. New to me has to be new, like getting a computer after no computer. I spent $5,000 on that once. Or getting a color monitor, or moving from ascii command-line DOS to graphics and Windows. I wasn't going to buy a new laptop unless it was substantially different from the old one.

Like a lot of people without much cash or with a pathological trash-conservation mentality, I'd harbored some iPad envy rather than to indulge it. So I wasn't sure I shouldn't shift to a Mac plus iPad strategy. Say the lightweight Air - the one about the same size as my little old laptop. I like the form factor and the weight, but what I really like about my old one is that I'd only paid $333 for it maybe 4 years ago. And like my car it is still perfectly serviceable. (Also like my car, I'll probably foist it on my sister who's even more frugal than I am, once I do manage to pry it from my own grip).

I've had the chance to slake my iPad envy with a little Kindle Fire, which I justify because of my fairly voracious reading appetite (It's hard to keep at bay the nearly panicked knowledge that it cost fully half of my full-blown computer budget - but I carry an iPhone, which costs more and so there really is no accounting for one's predilections . . . except that work paid for the iPhone).

Well, much to my amazement and contrary to my jaded certainties, the new OS actually did give new life to the old laptop! I deployed some of my lingering techie muscle to trim things running in the background, and I also know that a new installation to replace a never-refreshed 4-year old OEM installation of Windows 7 didn't hurt. But I was frankly astounded that the old machine worked better and more smoothly with the new OS. That simply never happens.

Apart from the strange pricing of IT machinery these days, here's what confuses us all: Why does a tablet or even a smartphone seem to have so much more immediacy in response as compared to a full computer OS?

Sure there's the fact that the more compact form-factors are always on and don't seem to require that incessant mind-erasing updating. But even when the laptop is up and up-dated and running and even though it has a way more powerful processor, what gives? Why does the tablet seem to render things more quickly? Why is it so much less burdensome to go to when you don't want or need to get down to work?

Of course I get that there's more going on in the background and during startup and that the video expectations are richer and more elaborate, but still it's annoying.

So with my old laptop and without touch and after the cheap loss-leader upgrade, I learned to master the new Windows 8 keystrokes which - though they're almost Mac-like in their arcane resistance to remembering - can replace the gestures you could if you did have touch. and decided I really really did like Windows 8.

The thing that Apple did with its mini-devices is to foreground what you're doing, and effectively prevent things in the background from detracting from that. They weren't focused on the geeky elegance of their OS so much as on the styling experience of it.

So I like what Microsoft did with memory - during startup they pull a cached rendition now of all that time-consuming hardware abstraction which has to happen before the OS loads. You know, the boot-up; first you have to shim the BIOS between the physical hardware and the more uniform hardware model, and then you load drivers and so on until you finally get your "desktop." Well, indeed why not assume that the hardware across those two levels hasn't changed since the last time you booted. One wants to say duh! right?

(oddly, they reserve the full legacy startup for a "restart" which might seem odd, but it makes sense in the same way that the now gone cntl-alt-delete made sense)

And the other thing they did - with their new app model - is to allow a (once again iOS-like) background suspend, to forestall those mysterious goings-on which have always made the foreground in Windows frustratingly subject to mysterious trudging. (And so the relentless hardware arms-race to keep ahead of the terminal frustration - see there's the "bomb" in my title).

Anyhow, refreshing my old laptop both brought it back to life and made me lust for speed. I was too tantalized on the old hardware by what the new software could do on an up-to-date machine. I figured that the sometimes unconscionably slow slog-to-readiness of the new apps and the occasional dysfunctional background seeming-death of what I'd left running would be solved by new hardware. Mostly, I was right.

Of course I wanted it all, so I opted for big-time compromise. I wanted touch and I wanted compact and I wanted tablet all in one. I wanted something substantially different in more than just speed. So I got a marginally bigger-than-the-Air, marginally heavier, and marginally too-big-to-be-a-tablet Lenovo Twist. Cheap enough (at $750 -  sale-priced because maybe no-one else thinks like I do, gracefully) considering I got touch and a few other bells and whistles I'd been missing.

It feels durable, and you already know that's my number one requirement.

Mostly I'm pleased, but here follows the substance of my review of Windows 8, and I can preface it by saying that while writing this I had a kind of virtual hang. Upon restart I discovered that indeed there were latent Windows updates chomping against my work. Nothing's poifect!

I'd been treating my computer like a tablet, leaving it suspended for the sake of instant return to where I was and that seems to create a kind of metaphor for all the compromises. The thing is neither here not there, quite.

So, you don't really have to leave it suspended since a start from shutdown is nearly as fast as a wake-up from sleep. Plus, as bonus, many of the apps, including IE 10 go right back to where you left them, even though you shut-down in between! Anyhow, tablet or smartphone-style always-on doesn't quite work. Maybe shut down at the end of each work session, but you're back to that burdensome cost of entry.

As regards the good stuff Microsoft cooked in, there's always a flip-side, and in this case it's the evident fact that sometimes IE 10, for instance, goes into suspend in the background and you lose your authentication which might matter if you're doing banking or email or social networking (which I never do!). If you didn't lose your authentication, that would be cause for a bigger sort of worry.

Some of the apps are seamless, and the background suspend is transparent the way it is in iOS.

But some really do need to run on the legacy desktop. I think that's why my new Office 2013 or 365 or whatever they call it still runs on the desktop. You'll think I've totally bent over for M$, but I actually do like the subscription model. I'm all in - it's cheap enough and perpetually updated and even the install was seamless. I could start using it while all sorts of detail was happening in the background and rest relatively confident that it would all work out and it has! No disks, no clicks beyond the initial ones nor pause between my credit card and up and running.

But it has to run on the [legacy] desktop (meaning that it doesn't run as a Windows 8 App) for the same reason that you should do your banking and blogging from the desktop (even though I don't) because for critical work you really do want to know that it's actually still running in the background and not subject to some foregrounding pre-emption. You need to know it will still be there when you get back around to it, and not have to wonder which of the now many states of save you left it in. Suspend? Autosave? How many caches?

OK, so onto the touch side, I confess I do convert my little twisty laptop into a way-heavy tablet and I like it. I really do. But it's not quite as responsive overall as my little Kindle Fire. The combination among the position sensor and the multi-direction hinge on the screen and the sheer bulk of the OS destroys just a tad of the immediacy I'm looking for.

And really the bulk of the laptop at 3.5 pounds pretty much destroys the pleasant reading/browsing experience of the iPad. But I can put it behind my cereal bowl in the morning with the keyboard as either tent-back or reversed behind the screen, and it's better than a tablet. Honest! I don't have to fumble, I just eat and poke and read.

My bottom line is that I think they're on to something. In laptop mode, this machine is nearly perfect for me (I actually bought it for the keyboard, plus I've already memorized the many new keystroke combos so I do fine on Windows 8 without the touch* which would require awkward reaching over the keyboard - the reason I didn't buy a touch-enabled non-convertible laptop) The tablet mode is enough of a bonus that I find it far preferable for reading/browsing, even when I'm lounging in a chair. Having the keyboard out of the way makes it so much more like reading a book or a paper. and bending it under means you can get the angle right while the machine is sitting on your lap.

But mostly what I really love is the disappearing windows. Gone are the buttons and controls and taskbar. You get the whole screen! All on all the time.

(Granted, you have to know some keystrokes or gestures to find out what time it is [which has made me late on more than one occasion, and I haven't either looked for or found a transparent hovering clock which might or might not be possible with the new OS model . . .] )

The big question is whether this all promises something that's less of a compromise at some unknown future date. Whether the "desktop" can and will morph to the Google Earth kind of geographic metaphor or, say Prezi-style where you can keep in your head where things are floating and what to foreground and they come wheeling in from some definite direction so you can retrace it. I want to zoom in zoom out and have my foreground click into position with some satisfying detent.

Can't you guys just do that!!?? Hello! Apple? Microsoft?

Of course this is where the patent process has become so dysfunctional. Or is it just that Microsoft is too stodgy in precisely the way that they are locked into the slide-model of PowerPoint and so all the incredible bells and whistles just beg the question of how and why not just get rid of the basic metaphor so you don't need all those bells and whistles. Because PowerPoint destroys rather than enhances face-on presentations no matter how clever you make it. It's too linear.

And Windows 8 is still too boxy. I think I should be able to lay-out my apps in some virtual space. I don't miss the start button and the hierarchal list of programs, but I still need some way to find them. I think I want thesaurus.com style relational bubbles, and I want them more near or more far from my focal point according to how often I use them, with perhaps some automated and dynamic reconfiguration. And I want to be able to draw some kind of circle around the ones I need to stay awake and multitask with me without having to worry about them suspending in the background if I do too many other things.

But you will know that the metaphor I've now slid back into involves cars again.  It becomes political somehow, just in the sense that no-one knows how to solve our transportation issues. For me here in SoCal a car is an incredibly massive and expensive inconvenience because it's virtually impossible to get around with all the traffic and you spend all your time in the car instead of where you want to be.

No matter how incredibly comfortable and connected your car is it's just miserable. And I mean miserable, and scary to boot. How much more pleasant is Manhattan, and how much more pleasant would it be here if you really require the weather and the views and the now-mostly-clear air to breath if there were frequent fast trains and no traffic? How about monorails, if you need them both? Get on the train and then move to the car which will detach to your home destination and then relax. Hint: self-driving cars are the wrong metaphor too! They solve the traffic problem, maybe, but not so much the energy and cost problems.

Man, do I get distracted. But back to the main point, it's almost here, the perfect OS is. I think that Mac has been left behind unless they have the perfect machine I just described in the near-term works. Who knows whose patents I've been guessing at, or if someone will steal my idea and get rich off it because I'm too lazy to think it through myself.

I think I've described what I have going on in my own mind up against the reality of what Microsoft delivers. Name-based search is marginally better than hierarchal lists if the PC is quick enough. The tiles on the new start screen can approximate a mental geography. And the distinction between the legacy desktop and the new App model can draw a virtual line around those app(lication)s you want Windows to handle for you, and the ones you want control of.

And I can still hope that Microsoft will perpetually update what I have until it really does work. They only need to change the wrapper and expand the zoom metaphor for the start screen to something less boxy and more fluid. To where I have a near-bodily understanding of how distant I left that app - where the foreground is a zoom function and everything really does stay where I can find it easily and off is just a state of mind. We need to sleep and we need to be away from our devices, which is why I can't quite get into social networking . . . .

So I have a virtual machine in my mind against which the hardware reality falls slightly short. But it's not bad. I see the vision. It changes the way I use the machine. Let's see what Apple comes up with and when I get rich I'll think about it, but for now I'd say advantage Microsoft.

*  a side note on the keystroke combos - they are a massive kludge between preservation of legacy Windows keystrokes and new approximations of what you can do with the touch-screen. That, combined with a touchpad which wants to emulate touching the screen can lead to some mis-cues which can become almost terminally distracting. The touch-pad is infinitely configurable, so that you can do away with the touch-screen emulation, but that particular kind of infinite makes it a perfect toss-up as to whether you want to devote your time to practicing keystrokes and padstrokes the way you might practice the piano, or whether you want to invest the time in testing all the configuration options. For instance, I swipe in from the left a lot, and am annoyed, distracted and surprised by the scroll-through of running apps when all I wanted was to get the cursor back from over there. And scrolling does a back and forth kind of dance between pulling down the way you would touching the screen and mousing down to make the screen move up. You can actually do both or either depending on two fingers or one along the edge, and in almost precise analog with the control key versus the Windows key and the combinations to go with it - for my mind at least - there's a near guarantee of miscue. But I guess solving that problem is like getting rid of the QWERTY keyboard, or the automobile. There's nothing quite attractive enough as an alternative to let go of what works and satisfies well-enough and what the body remembers.

Re-membering Me on Easter, as always, anon

I do wish I knew how to tell a good story. I don't. I fail in its elements.

My own life's story seems interesting, apparently, sometimes to some people, but then I'm not much better at living it than I am at spinning a good yarn. Imagine a protagonist dogged by hard luck and no resolution beyond simple finality. There would be no moral to it, and no reason to turn the dull pages.

And what if the bulk of the actual narrative as trued to the normative history outside it consisted of the man turning pages in books? Or staring at screens?

In ways that show up in the life as lived, and beyond the simple aging which we still honor sometimes? Would that change him? I have a very hard time remember the books I've read, what they were and when I read them. I always have, but still it may or may not relate to age.

I have a hard time with history too, though at least that's out there to be reconstructed, improved with age sometimes as scholars sift through the predations of previous generations of motivated researchers privileging their local slant. Our time finally is without agendas other than for truth. And utter science-mediated technological annihilation. Ommmmmmm.

Yet I do live on. I know that my consciousness excludes most of the facts of my life, perhaps especially to myself. I know this first-hand from various near death or after death or return from death experiences (depending on ones point of view), but I also know it from glancing reads of  neurological studies. I know it sometimes from the way that others seem to see me.

Death is a catalytic happening. At once it collapses all the things you might have been and puts an end to all that you were. (drowning once I really was present in the replete presentation of all that I had lived until then, it's true!) To the extent that there remains consciousness, it becomes summative, and  present to the you that might yet be gone are seemingly all the memories; the facts about what had happened to the you which until that moment was still conjectural.

I know from travel into the geography of my own past, including collections I've made of things of words of petty accomplishments that my memories reside outside of myself, or at least of that self on which I can assert conscious control. Meaning that I can't remember these things until I quite literally find them, seemingly attached in my mind as triggered by the artifact, but as much therefore in the artifact as in my mind.

All that I can do is to direct not my attention which seems to have insufficient power, but my actual physical meanderings, even if and when these involve motions of my eyes only. I seem able to decide which way to turn, but as often in remembering of myself as in forgetting and moving on to something new.

There is a toward and from in love with oneself, and yet the pages, sorry, of my life do keep turning or have so far. The book randomly composed, although - more apologies - it does become me.

These memories must recompose themselves each time I sleep for there are also inward motions confirmed by direct readings of the brain, I hear. These are only as-if motions, what is now termed virtual. And don't we all worry about the self that we might have been or become once the tracings themselves require the as-if-alive energizing of some circuits. I mean electricity is all. In constant motion, or the facts stay dormant. Reassuring just to be there. Eventually waxy bloated and no different from a carved statue, cinnabar infused. Worship the baby, Jesus it's Easter and I forgot!

Who keeps albums of pictures anymore, themselves virtual enough from about the time of our civil war when war was first brought home to roost. The cost of their taking is so reduced that we compile indecipherable troves and neglect, perhaps forever, to organize them into albums. Indexed only by dates and more recently places if you use a phone which enables GPS meta-data. Isn't it all meta, really?

But the meaning captured therein or thereupon is buried in the noise of just too many un-culled images and so I don't really take pictures anymore.

I suppose I once did start memorializing them on Facebook, as I did my reads on Goodeads (which now returns to the jungle of Amazon, and perhaps darekest oblivion of another sort). And yet my attenuated-by-migration bookshelves by their actual presence provide more solace. Though as often as I scour them for that book I thought I'd remarked as valuable I find a gap and it troubles me the way that memory loss must. (I did find a book on memory - No, I mean the book is about memory - which was listed on Amazon for almost the price of this laptop, which I've been fretting about paying for. Hmmmmmmm. I don't always know how to balance those values.)

As money is evermore the scorecard, my worth, on balance, is depleting. I have nothing to show for myself, although I could now cash in some of that life-insurance which was required by children now grown. I hate to rob the grave that way though; the discount for actual life so severe!

When I said valuable, there above, I meant as books to me for reading. I was shocked to find a gap filled by a book worth actual money. Those collectibles I've had over the years seem always to disappear when they're worth money. Or I give them away in squander. Neglect. I forget about them.

There is no geography of virtual space yet, Neil Stephenson. There are file-names and computer names and archival excursions which would require more intrepid resolve than mounting Everest or travelling again to the South Pole. The landscape along the way would be as bleak.

But this is boring now.

What choice is there, really, about which way I might turn, which path I might take? And when I do make those choices now there is that much uncertainly to accomplish whatever objective I set for myself as there might be going backwards.

I cannot recover myself any longer, for I have been and the being was never so bright!

For me the turning forward proves the moral equivalent of turning back. Once again, my love, I would plant a tree though it be the end of the world because how would one know? Were planting a tree worthwhile in the first place.

No, I mean really, I'm heading back to school to complete a Ph.D. which can not possibly be worth anything to me at my highly advanced age if not accomplishement, and still I'm confident that the directed actual study will bring me - my boring un-narrative mind, doncha know - into some actual resolution. Some catalysis not yet death.

And I am sure, gentle reader, that you are just dying for that! Some conclusion, finally to endless ramblings on increasing nothingness without time, especially, to edit. Without narrative shape - a story - it is just random troves of meaningless words; the swirl of memories in my brain without likelihood of conscious retrieval. Of ordering into something worth following!

And so I wander and meander seeming random in the paths I take. Is there choice in them or remembering, because sometimes I do remember myself where I'd thought I might be breaking new ground. And if remembering can also lead toward the future then what is it or who? it I could remember but the one I love, or left in his true season?

There is a terrible discomfort with paradox, I discover, among almost everyone with a scientific bent. As though it is the burden of science to remove such things. I know for a fact that there is not room in my mind at once for even two competing thoughts, let alone two incommensurate ones, but that thing which I call my mind is never just one thing either. It scintillates, the way you can when gazing at some gestaltish shifting shape which might be a woman young or old, but never both at once. You hold them in your mind as it were as promise that the shifting can be accomplished near at will.

Each time I coalesce from the seeming swirling mass of facts competing for my attention (as if the facts themselves might have compulsion?!) I collapse the myriad other narratives which would construe them. Those might-have-beens move, rather, to my peripheral attention. Not gone, perhaps, but attenuated and eventually lost to a geography which may or may not persist beyond the geography of my own mind.

The world will end along with me surely if I don't do something about it. That would be the moral of any story well-writ.

I do know that if I don't do it myself, there will be nothing left of me among the digital repositories of those words and pictures I have taken. Which matters not a whit but that they compose me and therefore I must be letting myself be subsumed into someone else's data whose prominence will render my presence, well, peripheral.

Unless I make connection, which is why the story counts.

And so it begins.

Memory and Memories

Do I have Barbara Streisand going in my head? I think it  was Sinatra in the shower, where my mind goes into fugue and I make all these brilliant connections I'm going to write about.

But the actual writing slows them down, or at least takes them over in a different direction, and so the seeming thoughts I had while showering are no more real than other phantasms; ghosts of thoughts I once thought I actually did have.

As you may have noticed, I've had blessed little time to write for quite a while. While I could and might and probably will blame it on my workload, it also represents a kind of choice. I have canned quite a few drafts, and never quite muster either the courage or the necessary editing time to move from draft to commit.

Then there has been the pure friction of the technology I've been stuck with. As you may have seen yesterday, I took a plunge to buy a new computer. I think I've also gotten a kind of courage infusion from a couple of different directions: the first is a bid to go back to graduate school. I'd previously written off that possibility, since there would be little benefit in it at my advanced age. The second has been a kind of muscling beyond my limit at work.

The work is plenty hard, but that's not the limit I'm writing about. As do many of you, I'm sure, I work in an environment characterized by bullying. In simple terms, this means that the workplace tolerates behaviors which couldn't and wouldn't be tolerated elsewhere. Oppression breeds oppression downward as Master Freire would tell you. Without enlightenment.

Since I'm not - by far - a member of any "protected class" there is no recourse in law for this condition. Certainly nobody's victim myself, the problem is that I'm surrounded by people who are victims. Many of them don't know it, and wouldn't admit it if they did, but plenty do. Some have power.

Sure, one has to follow the boss's dictates anywhere, and it's always less comfortable than you might wish. But there is also a point beyond which the organization as a whole suffers by the destruction or restriction of creative and productive capacities which are repressed beneath dysfunctional structures for bullying. Pushed beyond my edge, I must protest. If not me, who? If not now, when?

So here I am back in my little blogosphere, frequented largely by bots as far as I can tell. It's never been a comfortable realm for me, but just as I don't have the time to edit when I choose to be oppressed by work, I surely don't have the time to compose writing for publication, so this is a kind of liminal realm between.

(not that I would be capable of 'writing for publication' but I do know the work which would be required, and I simply don't have and haven't had the means)

What interests me here is whether there is any room for any kind of real "creativity" by which I think I mean that there should be the possibility for me myself to return to what I write and find there things to surprise me; evidence of a muse among the controlling impulses of my own bullying mind.

But here's the thing: How am I to tell the workings of a muse apart from the deterioration of my memory?

Quite often actually, I do run across something I've written and find that I need to invest nearly as much effort as you might to discern what it was I thought I was getting at. I have no clear or distinct memory of having written the thing and even sometimes it's pretty hard to discern myself in what I'd written.

To put it another way, if someone were to forge the provenance of what I'd written I might never claim it as my own. Plus there's that uncomfortable border between the self you cringe at and the one of which you might be proud. After all, reaching for something difficult to accomplish will surely expose foolishness faster than many other activities.

Among the things I haven't done for a while is to post the books I've read on Goodreads. Now I don't know where that compulsion ever came from, but somehow there is a mix of obligation to some phantasmagorical "public" and an obligation to myself.

You see, I am the type who rather embarrassingly often starts watching a movie only to realize I've actually seen it before. That can happen a distressing distance into the film, and even with films which I then remember I'd thought at the original time had had some significant impact on my soul.

Same thing with books. So Goodreads is a way to keep myself honest. I know I dropped off at some progressive rate as this job I do kept getting harder and more stressful (even as to the extent I don't show the stress at work, they seem to think I'm not working hard enough - I have no idea how 'never let them see you sweat' became a mantra of mine . . . well, I do , but I won't waste your time about that here just yet). But let's say I've left off for just a year - I have almost no confidence in my ability to reconstruct my reading across that time. And that's despite the fact that I've had blessed little time even to read, much less to write about it.

But I do know I've read a few things at least. One, ahem, memorable book has been Moonwalking with Einstein. You'd think I'd remember it because while I was reading it I kept talking about it as though it were the most important book I'd read.

It was about memory, and how we no longer teach the necessary techniques for remembering. It touched on the ways that various communications technologies, starting with writing and paper, mitigated the need to work on memory. Just now, for instance - and I'm pretty sure I've blogged about this - I depend utterly on some kind of smartphone (now just as likely to be the built-in web capacity of my up-capable Kindle) to make my references and definitions on the spot.

I even convince myself that this is improving my mind; and that the mitigation of my need to remember is minor compared against the vastly expanded scope in context for my reading. (I do remember the physical hassle of reading next to Websters, and then cataloguing mentally how many times I'd looked up that word I still couldn't quite place) But I'm not always so sure!

By the end of the Moonwalking book, I'd gotten jaded I must say. It was yet another callow Yalie presenting to the world his brilliance. He had provenance in parentage, worth at least the million dollar advance he'd gotten for the writing he would do.

Sure he presented and represented himself just the way I do, as someone challenged in the memory department. Making it all the more amazing that he became a champion in the memory Olympics. Or not. For sure, just as I lack confidence in my ability to craft publishable writing, I lack whatever work-ethic he must have to accomplish so much so early in life. Right?

But wait! I work damn hard. I guess I'm just not smart enough. But wait! I'm a Yalie too! OK, so I don't have the provenance. But wait! Among the books I've read is one I retrieved from Buffalo while there over Christmas depersonalizing the old space I'd lived in (It still looks like me, so I guess I'm not very good at that either). It's a genealogy compiled by my now severely memory-challenged Dad (he's housed in a "memory unit") about one branch of my illustrious family, twice-connected I remind myself, to those who came over on the Mayflower. Among those I descend from is the fellow who coined the term "Freeway" which somehow makes me feel more at home here in SoCal.

And he's by no means the most illustrious of the bunch. Lots of Harvard, lots of invention, lots of smart engineering, all things I claim - sometimes when I'm feeling feisty - as my heritage. But nobody giving me a boost when I need it. No current coat-tails. Well, plus a positive ethic against them.

Dad truly enjoyed telling about the $500 plus "good luck" he got when he turned 18 or so. A good academic record plus the bad eyesight to keep him away from frontlines in war and the GI bill got him through college and Harvard Law. Where he had the better record compared with famous classmates, dontchaknow?

I did actually travel Back East over the holidays in some conscious appreciation of that Einstein book, which recalls the techniques once taught alongside rhetoric to keep things precisely in mind. In brief, these involve a mental architecture and landscape which you populate with memorable things relating according to some code to the words you must remember.

My older daughter's now at Yale law (see, I can't really help myself) and I hadn't been back there since leaving in ignominy well longer ago than she is old (as Dad would always let people know upon his presentation of me, I did leave in ignominy rather more than once). So we took a little time, and she gave me well more than a little indulgence, to review and revisit those places I'd once inhabited.

Some tiny details were out of place, and some places were now shut off by the ubiquitous electronic barriers of our age, but it all came back. The boatyard where I'd rebuilt my now departed sailboat. Bits of carpentry miraculously still intact (I'm plenty proud of that piece!). We even got ourselves into the stacks at Sterling, by a kind of persistence I'm known for, after being rejected by the first officious minder (there I was only a little bit distressed by how many of my secret precious finds had been removed to offsite storage, perhaps for their preservation).

We rode this memory lane all the way back to Buffalo, where I continued across the much-delayed process of cleaning out files and bookshelves (I haven't the means in either time or money to travel back there, and so these things just sat). I've been through this all a distressing number of times, and feel as though I've written about it (you tell ME - I'm guessing it's sitting in some unpublished "draft" here in the blogosphere). I've moved rather a lot as I try to recalibrate my life without children to keep me focused.

But each little piece - some persist across serial and increasingly frequent cullings - does retain its memory. These provide some reassurance that I still persist to some greater extent than Dad does. I finally did have to enlist my younger daughter to throw stuff out, looking the other way and only butting in when the pain became too great. Little things, like the clay pipe issued when I finally did graduate from Yale. In a box somewhere in Mom's attic now while she still has one.

Now I'm reassured by an old friend who came to visit - the place I live in among old-folks because it's all I can afford - manages to "look like me." Yeah, well, I sometimes try to change and sometimes not. I have neither attic nor basement, and so the cullings have been as severe as the Southwest Airlines two-free-bag limit, which is a different blessing of sorts (cheaper to ship me than my stuff, haven't I already told you?).

So back to the point, assuming I still have one. I'm never sure if the writing I do is to keep my mind or to lose it. To build it or recall it.

I do know that without some sort of constructive thinking, most of the reading I do won't "go" anywhere. In the end, that's why I want to go back to school. And if I do write, maybe I can bring something to it that must go wanting when younger and more callow minds do their thing.

I mean it could be true that there is such a thing as just so very much brilliance that it's worth Zuckerberg-sized amounts of money. But it could also be that the rewards we give reflect a kind of compulsive systemic need to hold onto the structural components of our lives that we need most strongly to believe in. And who can tell the charlatans from the real deal? Better have some provenance.

(At some point one might hope that Zuckerberg would look in the mirror and gasp 'my god am I worth that much' and know the absurdity and injustice of it. But I guess he's no more likely than a prince is, or a Mafia chief or some one of China's politburo. I mean who elected you, right?)

Pay me and I can do good work too, if we could just get dumb luck out of the way. And so could you.

But well, here's the thing. My words are not the sum of me. They also cut me off from things that are or were. And those things which can be preserved digitally would never even instigate any recollection of myself.

You know, just now this morning I do ponder what I should and must do to move over the profile from my old PC. It carries in its belly those files that I had retrieved from computers which had held other living archives, and I never could muster the energy to go through them. It's not the same as the shoeboxes full of photos. Hell, now that my digital camera is long-stolen and I can rely on the work iPhone, every damn time I synchronize it, I get a different and differently redundant set of photos than the ones I got some other time across some other OS or iOS update, and who could possibly have the time to de-duplicate (or trust the software that I once investigated?)?

What parts of me are floating around Facebook or Goodreads or in some file-cabinet I forgot about or neglected or trashed? Does it matter? Will it go up in the smoke of my various passwords as I forget those? Does it matter?

See I cannot finish. It's more work than I can afford. But I can tell you that love is the secret (not to my password!). It's the only thing which gives me any coherence, and you know without my daughter there, I might never have paid a visit to myself either.

And so I will muster the courage to resist what they would have me do for money, or against the pain to live without it. I will recall my mission in life, and be glad I have one. And I will do my very best to be sure you here (???) about it. And I will do my very even better to be sure that it's worth hearing about and not some self-aggrandizement for the sake of my private castle in the sky or elsewhere.

I do declare . . . . what a mess!

What Hath God Wrought

I think it may be true that the only times I've found to post for quite a while have been holidays. I might have thought that I was inspired by the holiday, but more likely it was simply that I had the time.

This time I'm posting because I took a rare day off from work due to illness. Not the dread flu, which was all over the airwaves, if not in the air, but an ordinary cold which was compounded by the peculiar overwork I suffer.

It's not that I'm taking sick time to write. What I actually did was to take time at the end of being unable to move this past Friday to buy a new computer. And hence the occasion to write, maybe just a little bit like a holiday. Whee, a computer which actually works!

I'm more than a little bit embarrassed about how much time I've spent on this purchase. It started with a desperate attempt to find a way to keep using the old and even originally very cheap little laptop which has been my only such tool for maybe four years. You may recall, gentle reader, that I did hang on to my old VW until it had at least 330 thousand American miles (and my sister still drives it). I still regret letting go, although praise be to the gods of technology, the new one was cheaper and slicker and had all the bells and whistles (plus bluetooth!!) for no extra trim-package!

Bizarrely, since Microsoft was offering an upgrade for a price I couldn't resist, an installation of Windows 8 gave the old machine a new-ish lease on life. This is perverse in the arena of technology, but true for reasons I could but won't bore you about just now. Anyhow, something about the attractive nuisance of a touch screen, combined with inevitable thrashing-hangups on the old one and the fact that I have new plans to return to school rationalized a new computer. Passive voice.

And of course I want excuse to try it out! [sic]

Meantime, being sick, I also started reading What Hath God Wrought as recommended by a friend. Typically for me I have a few books open (virtually, since they are largely on Kindles these days) at the same time; the other one being Visions of Technology (come to think of it, this is a paper book, literally open) which is a great reminder that all the things technological that we obsess about these days have been obsessed about throughout most of the previous - that's the twentieth - century.

So I'm just beginning the book about the period between the Spanish-American war and the Civil War, which focuses on the communications revolution which characterizes that time-frame. Together with the other book, it makes a pretty good reminder that as excited as we might be about the supposed technological revolutions we currently enjoy or suffer - depending on point of view - there isn't much very revolutionary about them. At least not on the scale of the truly revolutionary new technologies of the nineteenth century.

We are, you know, still stuck in the old metaphors of speed and action at a distance and bulk transfer of text. Only the speed and volume have changed, which is a very bad thing if you are, as I am, concerned about global warming.

Somewhere recently I was reminded - I truly don't think I'd learned if for the first time, though there was apparently something new about it - that insects and birds and even cats find their way across the globe in unfamiliar territory by means of the stars and the earth's magnetic field-profile. So that this is programmed in, as we like to say, to the DNA.

Well sure, right? Somehow these critters must learn to migrate with the seasons, and there are enough of them and they breed quickly enough that they can internalize the patterns of survival right into their collective being, given that the patterns in the world about don't fluctuate too awfully fast. (One must wonder, for the stars, what happens with light and other forms of pollution, and with the magnetic field, about the grid)

We once were better wired-in to the environment ourselves, I'm sure. But that the written word detached us. Downloaded into consciousness those things we once knew with certainty because we didn't have to - nay (!!) couldn't - think of them.

There is nothing now we can't (and won't) think of!

Which is precisely how we're blinded. The revolution taking place now, beneath our consciousness as it were, is the dawning realization that we are not discreet thinking entities at all, but rather participants in a global consciousness of written records. We will, we shall, submerge, and once again align ourselves with stars and magnetic fields. Collectively, you know?

 . . . because the barriers of identity between us will and must and have already started to dissolve. We have forgotten how to remember, we have no need to calculate, we can consult our smartphones to keep our dates and revive our references.

But these technologies upon which we so very much depend are the last gasp of the nineteenth century revolution. The one about to envelop us (I almost said 'descend upon us!') is about identity or its absence. We are as one, no matter how hard we try to distinguish ourselves. No matter how hard we try to preserve that sense of freedom embodied by the automobile (or absurdly in California, the lane-splitting motorcycle) and that sense of individual isolation. It's gone.

I do declare!

Well, back to my reading. It looks as though this new communications device is a keeper.

Proof Positive that Angels Dance on Pin Heads

Happy Independence Day!

The Pope is resurgent against populism, and the grand old U.S. of A. will not be able to resolve agreement on any of the important questions, preferring to argue over women or children first while rearranging the deck chairs so they don't have to worry their pretty heads.

And in the meantime there are quiet announcements (like a press release late Friday, who cares on July 4?) that the standard model for physics has been reaffirmed by the ever so nuanced thinking that perhaps we've actually discovered something which to some high degree of probability resembles the predicted Higgs Boson.

What else might it resemble, one wonders. Hasn't it already been proven that everything depends on what the meaning of is is? It's not as though we're actually looking for other explanations, and anyhow they would all be metaphoric? There is only one fundamental law of nature and it's that we will expend no limit of energy to avoid metaphoric meaning. Which is pretty ironic if you think about it. Or even if you don't.

I am easily excited by metaphors of above and below, fallen and risen, and especially of semblances toward ideal. But I'm not quite willing to raise a horse thief to the level of prophet the way Mitt does nor use such knowledge of absolutes to absolve myself of outright lies which aren't such because they serve some higher truth. I mean that's just horseshit!

I do actually think it's clear enough that humanity occurred within a more Biblical than geologic time-frame. I don't even get why that's controversial. No civilization, no humanity. And we didn't start writing all that long ago. Writing counts, my friends.

The whole designer argument falls flat with me. The bigger mystery is the same old one: what quickened the soup, or in this case the social stirrings? I can hardly exclude the possibility for God. But only as a linguistic placeholder for a motive we can't possibly fathom.

Of course there must be particles down to whatever degree of minimalism to explain the forces of the cosmos. We've established that. There will be no end to instrumentation to find them though because we still can't stand the notion that we are ourselves accountable for our own motives. The final explanation will always rest on non-objective objects. Elusive particles. Reflections of our desperation to find them.

We thought maybe we would find nothing after looking so hardly? I think therefore I Spam.

The other is willed into being by my quickened wanting. QED. I want no more. Quantum Electro Dynamism. I'll trade you my particle for a bit of your energy, hey?

And Then Suddenly . . .

Look, we can just start over. I did. I've done it, several times at least. These things we think define us, they are so trivial to replace, one paycheck from losing them anyhow. Always. There are garage sales and in almost every case they won't get their price since the world is so stuck on new. Give them what you want and you'll both be grateful.

What would you say defines you that you must hold onto it so tightly? That boat which was my carapace, and I shed it. Like clipping toenails down to the quick, maybe, but it wasn't really that hard. Sure I'd invested myself, my blood even and near death more times than I can say, into every cranny, with whatever intelligence I had to hold out sea and rain and take the wind and go with it.

These structures have their beauty, no? Lines bespeaking something eternal seeming, gathering lust or what is it that compels so much energy. But for an instant why would we gather in so many things and build a legacy of stuff which will  be just that annoying for our children to dispose of?

I say start over every single day, why not? If you can do it. Not one of us really knows the Way of time. I knew, you know, that those lakes on which I grew had been carved by glaciers, and that these had come at some time of prehistory, which even now I think must be at the time of dinosaurs.

But it's not. There wasn't even time for any evolution except for the sudden kind. The killing kind, the culling kind, since we were left with furry creatures - those are the only ones which matter to us - which had to have been there in substantially the same form beforehand. There wasn't nearly enough time, and so I've been swindled. In my mind, at least, which is a theoretical construct at best.

So those lakes which seemed so ancient, and down through which I dove on wrecked boats, tit for tat exchanges, were only puddles after the rain, scraped and filled and overgrown the way that tadpoles come from the sky. I would inhabit.

It's almost Biblical, if you want to think of it that way, how these repositories of melted polar ice remain for us to suck on. How much really could it possibly matter that we piss in them and they grow fetid since it's only been a day or so. It took so much longer for the oil and gas to form on dinosaur remains. Or so they say, and why should I believe it? Why not?

What I mean is that it hasn't really been that long since humans with consciousness or of consciousness or by consciousness or however that grammar can be worked out have peopled the earth. Written history, you know, almost jumps out at you from the ice-age, incubated in darkest heart, but proved against the cold. Or was it?

It couldn't possibly matter, but we know that the written record on top of which consciousness floats, your boat and mine, goes back maybe a few thousand years at most. I don't want to be precise, since I'm not much on history and I've been hoodwinked before. About the glaciers. But I think it's approximately Biblical time and then suddenly.

What, a quickening don't they call it? And now these words they float all over in the ether, but still as always they do try to make some sense, some narrative which would be my story and not yours although we share so many genes. As for Noah, it's hard not to get drunk and slur the words, but still they strive for narrative sense even without our participation sometimes. Stuff happens.

These words so full mostly of lust and true detective facts which make your blood curdle pleasantly so long as you are not out-of-doors or alone. But you and I have only each other, so why not start over? I am as is my home, as was my carapace when I needed it, but a substrate on which my narrative floats. In which I reside. Capsized.

There are but two of us, really, these narrative lines, and I can feel no stirrings for the Chinese kind. No matter how hard I will try and have tried or even might try, I cannot go native inside that narrative tradition. It is, you know, without a God, as I remain, having talked myself right out of it since as I was saying, why not start over? But it is not any narrative at all, as confounding as a female, really, recumbent and seemingly without creative urge at all. Relentless and enduring like the good earth. Is all.

Poetics, confound it! The stuff of which stuff is made, which is what it means in the first place. It wasn't ever a narrative urge, certainly not toward conclusion, but it was a shape and it had rhythm and rhyme and meaning which seemed to happen by itself. There was no-one at its tiller, scraping long lines in the earth, for us to sow and blow away its chaff. Stirring, floating, idly by. Merrily.

Were we ever in that much control? Really? Yes we can cultivate our minds as well as the earth but toward what end? Just to grow and overgrow and finally to run out of tillage or over earth's edge and on . . . . ? And on? It can be sometimes hard to cleave unto practical matters. I like that word. It's very precise here.

Pounding then through our ways and into recumbent receptivity for it, what are we about if not destruction? Creatively, we are but a glaciated mass of liquid language held but for a moment in crystalline shapes upon some page, but that it evaporates into some ether. But not before the gouging has been completed. Without copyright at all, it would descend down through what ages are left us. There is no pencil with which to plow, nor prow, nor bowsprit anymore though I long I do long for it.

As once I did for swimming as far as I would through cool waters and sunning bottoms up grinding into warm sand. That is no more, and no regrets. I still remember.

Land ho! Ahoy! I see you there. And so why not, really why not just forget about all that stuff I left behind and gather new stuff in a new world and cultivate the wildness of it. Their terrible need to be rid of it will match my desire to have it as if it were new. I understand they really were pre-literate Chinese across the frozen straights. How could it possibly matter, since the words in either case have still come down to us, whoever it was discovered it first, which is just a pissing match into a puddle now, though we would Dam it all to hell and over.

I am but substrate not for my own story, but for the one imposed on me by my station. On the crossroads, or at them or of them or even sometimes through them. That substrate will be shed and I am I. The story only. And if that is the case, and ever will be, then these words might as well endure for longer than the I that wrote them can or even might, since endurance of that nature is just a pain. In the end. I'd rather thrust. I had rather.

It's just that I don't really care anymore. There might be a castle on a hill, or a beacon, but it's just simply too expensive and not worth its upkeep unless it be turned to the public trust for gawkers to imagine. There are these remains now everywhere and most of them more recent than you think. Than you would think, not germanic sounding schlossen so much as temples to the sacred Mary in one form or another of her. Underneath they're all the same to us.

Why would anyone do it? But if, you know, I do remain conscious and interesting and whatever words I started with have been educated out of me, or do I mean educted? Drawn from memory, and they have some energy of their own for sure. Some semblance. But if there is a me there at their center, then why not God? Actually, suddenly.

I would ask His Holiness since he's in town about now, but he's deep down just a chump like me, though in a different place at a different crossroads just by happenstance which shouldn't be so voided of sense if we were able to help it. But we aren't. I know a man who knows him. And a woman. Several, actually, on a first-name basis, or so it seems to me. Or so they almost say, though  they hang back and simply mouth it. His Holiness.

Ah but he came and went I see and I was strapped to the plow. To save enough for furnishings. I didn't even notice or pay attention. We only are negotiating price, right? He was just a man, and there are more than enough who take him seriously which after a while is just provocative. I am afraid of large forces. San Onofre set afire, but it was an outbuilding only and nothing nuclear. I spirited past in the night, last night, having lain aside my plow while others labored still to till 'til after-hours. On a Friday! Of all things.

Drink up please, it's time. I come by those words honestly, I really do, for I called them out in my youth, tending bar down under in Victoria Station, the Whistle Stop, and that should be a lesson to you. These were once the crossroads of the globe. Then  it was Freddy Laker and now it's likely some student service or maybe just a convenience store. I owe you nothing.

But if I this bag of blood and bones can still support a narrative, then why not God for earth? The quickening is that sudden. It rises like a Mayfly, and into the sand again to be washed away by unsalted tears. If we would only shut up and listen. It is not nice to shout Him down or call His name so chantlike. It makes us less than human. As we were and ever shall be.

Fanaticos at some arena, lusting for blood if we were to admit it. 'sblood. Machine-like staccato, methinks and it's time for silence. Really, would you ever with someone you don't even know on a first-name basis? I didn't think so. Those are but loose words, worth but the penny that they sell for. Mardi-gras beads to excite something which at its basis really isn't very nice. Who owns you anyhow?

Anon

Post Post

How will I hold myself together? Once again inhabiting too many places, and my memory wasn't very good to begin with. So how shall I know which of me is where? Is it true that people with prosthetic limbs eventually inhabit them? Is it also true that some have body parts which are dead weight, and they want them removed? Where are the actual boundaries of myself?

I take a train now some days into work. It skirts the beach well down below Laguna (I could have said Dana or Capistrano but Laguna sounds better) and I can watch improbable surfers in the January dawn, and realize that inhabiting my metaphor though they do, they are more at home by far than I am. They are in their element, where they want to be and willing to undergo a fair amount of discomfort to be there. (I want only my womb with a view; warmth and an easy chair) Although surfing in January does not represent a whole lot of discomfort to a Buffalo boy who scoffs at what passes today for stormy weather.

They float like seals, clustering usually, although sometimes you see one all by himself off where there probably won't be any waves. The train shakes some. I leave behind the house-sit, bedeviled by a dog which is nothing but a nightly anchor and annoying for that. It's not my dog. Or do I need an anchor?

There remains my ghost in Buffalo still, inhabiting empty furnished space. And now I sit in another other person's house, holding down that fort while my being dissipates, embedded in the same toxic work environment as you are. Where emotions get the better of team work and discussion and everyone's under so much stress that the only thing they can do about it is to pass it along to whomever's convenient underneath who doesn't seem to be holding up his end. You have let me down, or I fear that you shall. It is very important that you be afraid so that we're all in this together.

Emotions like this, you know, are the automatic response to being out of control with pressure to make some particular way when the better choice would be to surf still. It just makes you mad, and someone must be called to task.

Who are those people who can surf the age and feel in control not only of themselves, but of the audiences they command. How does that get done, or is it a confidence trick merely, where maybe if you look the part in the first place, you will be assumed to know things you don't really have to know at all. Maybe - has it always been so - if you are nice to look at then the sound of your singing voice is just better too.

I read, now, David Foster Wallace after death, though I have scant time to read. It will be a long weekend, so nicely scheduled to boost the faltering rhythm of work after the long winter holiday break. I fear or I know that I will squander this time on self-indulgence of various flavors. I know that I won't read much. A shame.

But he can't be conscious, right, dead DFW? His words are artificially animated. Though I live now somteimes right down the street from the address he gave right there on the page, or would he have actually had he lived? He must have known that he couldn't actually publish this and that's why he had to hang himself, if that's how he did it. Was it existential suicide or was it an escape from pain. Or is that the same as escape from the imperative for pleasure? I wouldn't have been able to knock him up in life, so what difference can it possibly make that I can't do that in death either. His consciousness only meant to me when it was active on the page. How would I know the difference? He's a classic now. Larger than life.

There is surely no god but Allah, and yet he is no more there. Can I ring him up or out or over? There is a book for these things too, I hear. By why would anyone read what is already obvious before you open its covers? I guess some pleasures do reward return.

Do I still insist that I am conscious? I think that means that I can tell my story in response to yours, but look how poorly I write. There will be no book and yet then what am I for if I can be gone that easily. You know, my memory does deteriorate and I can't come up with words most of the time even while speaking. Maybe my consciousness is not really something for me to decide all by myself.  And why do I care anyhow about these scattered references to myself, those things of value I leave about? Why should I feel responsible since they aren't exactly hurting anyone, those pieces of me floating around in other peoples' spaces. Do I also exist only in other peoples' minds, then? Or only in my own, where I am legend?

I think it would be my own regret is all, you know, to have a part of me lopped off that still means something to me in my mind; in my imagination there is something there. Or is it only the money? Or shall I just scatter myself so far and wide and without memorable connection that I am no more there than a lone surfer in languid motion waiting for a wave which never will come because if it would there would be others there as well. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's all there is.

I do love, though, and that's not something a machine can ever do, although I don't doubt that there are lots of substrates on top of which narratives might ride. It's just that my own narrative is so scattered now. I don't know how much I care to keep it going. It takes so much effort and did I say that there is such a toxic environment now at work.

All of us live now in our effluent because we would like to remain that separate, to ride our cars and surf to authenticity on buff bodies and more buff minds. So no wonder work is that way too, since we are that convinced of bankruptcy though, you know, the sum total valuation of wealth by any measure has never been higher. It's just that so much gets discarded, and so many people too now, because they don't look so appetizing. If they would only cull themselves and then I wouldn't feel so guilty. Cut me some slack.

But you will determine when I'm gone for good, since that's no job of mine. As far as I can tell I'm still here and now. Or I can't remember. But you know I don't have the words now any more than Dad does. It's all relative, and I'm not sure we think he's really there anymore. But he must still think so. Or is there no there there, as with California sprawl. The background can repeat itself so long as there is something foregrounded, and the illusion of motion. Pictures.

So consciousness is aspirational. I desire that you think that I know something, am somebody, have something to say and yet I cannot get you to listen to me because I haven't the words. My words are not beautiful by analog to what makes beautiful people so powerful, and so the desire I have is leading to nowhere and nothing. I don't care enough, is that right?

So I am lazy. So I am decrepit. But here I am in SoCal and I can't get warm. Were it this indoor temperature in Buffalo now I would be very cozy and nice and warm. These words that people use now just keep getting better and better and so why would anyone want to listen to mine; to believe that I have something to say.

DFW has no aspiration anymore is all. Take him or leave him he has already said all that he has to say, and for the most part he remains that attractive compared, say, to someone like me, although I think you might like me better as a pal. I would never betray you that way, nor be quite that alone and therefore apart. From you. The trouble is not that he died. The trouble is that he never did publish this book that I'm now reading, and it's good enough that you feel betrayed. Like he copped out,

There are too many words already scattered about the planet, and I cannot align mine with them. There are too many things we know are true, and yet I know none of them. And so Zizek, for instance, since I'm watching him on video at the moment, is a freak as comfortable aligning himself with brilliant words as were those abstraticians described by DFW in his history of [the sign of] infinity, which means why bother for the rest of us. Our minds are simply never that present. Never that abstractable. There is so much power in that kind of mental focus. You can, for instance, propose an atomic bomb and get it built. To what end, you ask? Well, power is a foil to fear, am I right? Am I right?

Although I won't applaud him, Zizek, because who does he connect with anyhow except for people who congratulate themselves for having understood him. Another naked emperor, because how would we know, apart from the level of their applause and adulation, that they have, in fact and in deed understood Zizek. Are they doing what he would have them do? He seems nice enough and would never insult someone to his face, I don't think. Therefore am I?

The thing with Zizek, obviously enough, is that he grew up where one wasn't allowed to read openly and write openly and think openly and so what we feel guilty about not doing because we're too busy with what he calls the imperative to enjoy, to indulge ourselves, to spend money, he found illicit pleasure in reading and thinking and writing. Imagine philosophy as sex and you might almost be as much a Stalin champion as Zizek sometimes claims to be.

But yes, that would be back to the toxic workplace; execution of someone else's demands. Is he doing what he would have them do? What would be the act which would erase the need for philosophy then? But first I must regulate the money which means that I am regulated by the machine which means that my aspirational consciousness is but a fraud since, I think, I wouldn't do it if I didn't have the space to do it which means if I didn't have the money.

We are the most regulated people in history, which hardly makes us free. The calibrations enter to our most nether reaches. Even the pennies there. We cannot share. We are digitally consumed by thises or thats which cannot be their opposites. Which is much the pity. We will surely pay for all this pleasure.

Can one talk oneself to freedom? Or is there something one must do? And once done would I be there anymore, or would it be annihilation without absence a kind of AWOL of the mind. Would the body follow? Does it ever?

And so, dear heart, I go back to reading DFW, Zizek, leMonde, laLune. There was once, I am certain of it, a moment when I was conscious. And so can you. But if I read them to sense, these words will connect me in ways beyond mere livlihood. The lowest common denominator is to be, authentically, you. About as unique as being naked. About as authentic. Original.

Desire anticipates consciousness. Consciousness anticipates destruction in dreams of immortality. Abstraction is a ruse. There is always a magic screen. There is always something uglier in reality.