Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Here, then, are the Parameters (prelude)

I started watching the Oscar-winning O.J. story, feeling a connection to it by way of Buffalo. I heard Sarah Koenig of Serial podcast fame on that stupid NPR Sunday chuckle-fest Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, and she was asked when she does the next one and answers "when I feel like it," and then the next day or the one after that I become aware of S-town. Which is today, and I'm put in mind of those suck-you-in medical quackery videos strewn around the 'net. Who, really, has time for narrative long-form? No matter how well produced it is. Well, me, really, once I'm on the road again. Something to look forward to.

Yesterday at The College, I enjoyed the treat of listening to beautiful, articulate and celebrated Moxie Maven Alexia Vernon, and I did walk away just as confused as I was the moment I fell asleep trying to stick with the O.J. story. I mean he had made it into white society by virtue of stardom, and the Moxie Maven had to slog through lots of hard shit on her way to improbable entrepreneurial success, which winning a beauty contest by rights should have nixed. She married this silver haired stud, and who knows who's richer, but I'm just confused.

I heard Sarah Koenig after learning about Vince Staples, I think, same ride maybe, and I don't know about you, but I am really really bothered by the women's voices on NPR, because they just sound all yogacized and edumacated and like you'd want to do sex with them, except that they all sound, like, maybe fifteen with that vocal fry which no fifteen year old should have yet, since they shouldn't have had a hangover yet.

I don't do recreational sex, OK? I mean that I just don't get that level of intimacy with someone you might not like very much since you just don't know them no matter how pretty they look and since I haven't had much luck with serial intimacy I just simply don't do sex, which puts me in the most unspeakable category of all, maybe, not a-gender, but actually asexual.

So we all know our economy is denominated in oil or should be, to bring in all the externalities, which Bratton demarcates according to a new and compelling geography - which he clarifies as writing on the world - and I work at a College which includes "world-building" in its curriculum and now wants to include - by student petition! - game narrative among its professional writing offerings, and the faculty is quite enthusiastic.

Of course my gig at the College will end shortly, since they don't really do intercourse with China any more, and the person who brought me here feels concerned about the search for the person to replace me which she is leading, in that how can we ethically invite someone to the College to leave a position somewhere else to take on something so precarious here.

And so I come in yesterday ready to let her know why people move away from her since she claims all their work as her own and they want to claim their own work, thank you very much, and she asks me nicely if the College has offered me a job, and I say 'no' and I'm fine with that, and she says "this has never happened to me before," meaning apparently hiring someone who can't stay and who left a job behind, which just simply shut down my entire line of discourse with her and she had a meeting to attend. To. I guess her ethics would be violated if someone didn't trust her. It's confusing to me.

It wasn't until afterword that I thought fuck you this isn't happening to you, it's happening to me and don't fucking take that away from me too! Don't patronize me. I didn't come here to be a part of your matriarchy which is just patriarchy in drag. I mean I know patriarchy when I see it, which is taking credit for the work of someone subservient to your empire. Slaves, robots, intellectual property, it's all part of the same structure, and I don't want anything to do with it.

So what denominations are there apart from oil? Well, there's Roman Catholic and Protestant and you know Islam, but not really Buddhism or Taoism, which don't dominate anything apparently, because they aren't organized which means that they aren't quite so patriarchal as the rest of them.

But still, if you're Just Kidding Rowling, you can get rich on narrative, and if you once were O.J. your name can fly across all the day-long binge fests, and then it dawns on me the day that I and probably you learned that Bernie Sanders TV is breaking all the cable-news stats for watchers, that we need an economy denominated in God again, just not the personal white-male variety.

Right? I mean can't we all agree that Greed is the problem, and that all our tech-accelerated economics just accelerates that? It's our micro-greed pushing price to the bottom which renders advantage-taking upward and who do you trust, now that cost is never factored in. Profit margins rise exponentially as price moves toward zero. That's what loss of privacy means, fer chissakes. Not to mention dongles and packaging which is otherwise free.

Well, that's what I'm setting out to discover in my own serialized fashion, the denomination of godism, which is not about to get me rich since I apparently can't be bothered to take a great deal of care with what I write. But I will be straight with you, and I won't try to suck you in to some interminable cliff-hanger. I'll be talking real-time, and try to let you know what I encounter each day, and I'm not going to do it up on Youtube, since I don't really like to be watched all that much, and really do doubt that I'll ever be Moxie enough to do stand-up comedy, which I think I would probably be really good at, but neither of us will ever know, and I'm OK with that.

So, I'm not about to steal the Word from someone else and attribute it to God because that gives me power. That's my only ground rule. I mean if you send it through "turnitin.com" you might discover that I'm lying to myself, but I highly doubt it. I know my own signature when I see it.

I mean what the fuck do those of us who can't even think about buying a house else have to do with ourselves? Else. Hit the road, Jack, and see what happens because it has to be a lot more interesting than the alternative, which is to follow the China Dream or the American Dream which are all just in our rear-view anymore. I'm looking forward (although I do have a rear view camera to get past the obstruction I'm dragging along with me)!


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