Saturday, October 25, 2008

All Praise the Great Web - Bail Me Out Scotty

Not the creatures who spun it, but the very matrix itself, which backgrounds any systems of operation (does OS rhyme with OZ), and provides - such a relief - this medium which entails no anxiety of sales or positioning or even preserving of paper and its order. I even hear there is a certain indelibility, to counter the obvious fact that I or anyone who hacks my password, can simply remove from the ether any trace of this messy drivel.

(I would have to remain the prime suspect, since it is so excruciatingly embarrassing to put myself, thinly veiled, so OUT THERE)

But who knows what "out there" really is, or for that matter "in here"? I think I am a bundle of language and relationship snippets which strives for the abstract quality of authenticity, and towards which I can measure progress by ingathering of commodity gratifications to my every desire. These too are abstracted from any hands that might once have touched them. And still there is that other handy (!!!) if elusive affirmation of purest authenticity - fame.

Where my very name becomes a brand, single word at best, and there remains quite literally no space for personal relations. What a strange thing to hope for! I know I am not alone in my disappointment that when Katie Couric (do I write about her too much?) asked him "why do so many presidents cheat on their wives?", Obama could only think to comment that he truly can't understand it since he has a hard time even picking his nose, so public has his life become (he must secretly want a white woman, don't you think?). I don't know why he missed the script so evidently embedded in the question, whereby he was supposed to highlight the importance therefore of his private life and his great good fortune in having been endowed so liberally with such a wonderful family.

And they truly are! And he's not threatening that way, which is only commented on in code, methinks. How truly bizarre that McCain is and has been such a threat to women, and remains able to speak without apparent irony of honor!! This man is noways honorable, nor ever has been, and even his suffering pales, surely in comparison, to the routine black - let's call it just for fun - lifestyle. I think these old white guys still suffer slave fetishism, bitches.

Enough!

And why they both failed to point out that presidential strayings actually seem rather fewer than those of, say, evangelical preachers. At least McCain knows he has no standing to pounce on Obama's omissions. But, as usual, I digress.

So, this medium - the web - pushes back just precisely the same as paper. It's not quite physical though, and perhaps therefore I don't have to risk the creative pit of silly assumptions about ideas leading to their artful expression. I should think it pushes back rather better than paper even, just simply because it is so immediately "out there", and there's even the nifty facility for near synchronous interaction with you, gentle reader (although to be sure, I'll probably drop dead of shock the first time I see a reader response, so be really really gentle, since you don't want that on your hands).

(So, is this like chainsaw sculpting at the fair?)

The only thing I haven't the patience (though I certainly have the skill) to figure out is how, efficiently, to intersperse American words with symbols like the one for infinity, underlines to indicate published titles, and alternate languages, really just for the purpose of showing off (it's an American guy thing).

So, I'm left with keyboard strokes, which is good since my "hand" is very difficult to read even by me, who is truly capable of losing my own sense. And simple straightforward words (laugh track) not adulterated by visual "style" or bookbinders art (betrayal there). These, then, are commodity words, available freely according to whatever physical bale you (I almost said "gentle reader" but that is becoming an old-age tik, almost as insufferable as McCain's "my friend" in place of the more natural "ummm") prefer to scoop them out in . ('out of,' more properly, or 'out into,' say. Not as in buckets or rescue, but more at misery, which is, apart from commodity naked women, the truly great thing about having internet on your phone while reading - the lookup function)

Oy!

I gather (reap) that there was (propositionally) this society (only in the abstract), which did truly grieve its loss not, to be clear (as mud) of commodity-fetish aspirations, whose accomplishment was so frantically desired that such extravagant debt was entered into (backing is perverse) that a mere spike in the global oil market (picture pins in balloons now) could bring this house of cards tumbling down (to really muddy up - read mix - the metaphors). It was not the loss of the commodities themselves, or their easy reach, or even the hope of someday bringing them to within reach. It was the loss of that kind of aspiration, for abstract free agency, which has been so tragically dashed.

What I mean is that we apparently grieve our necessary return to such unmediated (I'm talking hands-off now) pleasures as swimming in quarries, climbing trees, hitchhiking rides with strangers, taking food to neighbors houses to share, on foot I hardly need add, riding bicycles, playing hide and seek, baking mud on our bodies in the sun before and to enhance the joy of diving in, peeling off clothes in bowers, say, and making love mutually not to gratify the senses so much as, dare we say it, the hearts - as though this return was somehow a loss!!!????

What gets lost is commodity space littered with "product" (shit) which is now the stuff with which we smear our bodies, and litter our homes, and fill our stomachs, and even marry, always hoping and apparently even praying to replace with better and improved models and brand names.

In my will will be instructions to liquidate for maximum lucre the goods and paper and then to distribute said load among loved ones so that I may live eternally on in their abstracted love??? Not! There do remain one or two silly items which contain as much of me at least as a lock of hair or fingernail shavings. Burn them, please, but don't liquidate them. Well, that's a joke, since they have no value these cast-off second-hand products (I think I'll have to admit some honor in hanging on to this old, now drying out and nearly dessicated body, shell, cocoon, boat of mine, when for achievement of the sheerest pleasure in sailing, it would have been so much cheaper and better sanctioned to go plastic!). The body bloats and paradoxically shrivels, without inviting sadness for pleasures past but truly had!

This is all no great loss, people! This is the disappearance of vacuity into vacuum, or like that stoned Yellow Submarine tuba player, who sucks himself up the horn (bell). There wasn't anything there in the first place, duh.

And how incredibly silly of me to think that between the spaces of product advertisement, pitched to hormone-crazed perpetual adolescents willing to subject themselves to all sorts of voluntary immolation (sun baking again), even to the point of branding their very bodies (not a great big fan of piercings and tatoos, can you tell?) for sale or barter, there could be some actually to read and to tell the difference among what has heart and what is merest simulacrum of that bodily pleasure which pervades authentic human life.

I need to get out more! (but so do you! and without all the gear).

Today, I shall get a tatoo, by the way, to enter that punky funky rockandrolly earsplitting grungy mind-numb sexual moshpit rebellion which remains tamed, thanks God, by drug war chastity because otherwise it would morph into something very much like terrorism, donchaknow you betcha!

Well, NOT! But I'd really like to. Haven't the nerve or the jingle. I like my authenticity straight!

So, this did NOT go where I thought it would, which might be, precisely, the very sharp point. I wanted to say something about authentic media, and sensual culture, and rhythmic life in abundance which is now, finally, so available once again. But I got distracted by meltdown.

I know you'll indulge me.

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