Springtime in Buffalo

It's been beautifully sunny and chilly for a few days. Just in time for warmer days now, I've finally figured out how to purge the air out and get heat back into my old VW. My timing isn't always perfect. But I'm getting ready to leave town, and with 300,000 miles on her, I want to be sure that air in the cooling system isn't a sign of something worse.

The dealer thought the heater core must be clogged, but I found out that the dealers all think that. All on my own - with help from Samaritans on the Internet - I discovered that if I purged the air I would get heat. I struggled for just a minute with mistrust for the VW shop. You know, where you nurse the assumption that they were just trying to sell me the expensive procedure to put in a new heater core.

In the end, I opted for open questions. After all, they're the ones who helped me get the car this far. And "advisors" on the Internet are as often people taking advantage (although I couldn't tell how in this case). Anyhow, I did find out that this is one among several notorious weak points in the VW design when I chatted with the guy who runs the shop today. They're going to do the power purge for me tomorrow morning, no charge! I'm happy.

All the other manufacturers are benefiting from Toyota's woes now. They built their cars to perfect Consumer Reports specs, but it turns out that there are other things which can go wrong when you over-engineer. Do we just enjoy the fall of the too big? Not too long ago, I ran into a friend who owns my identical VW, and he considers his a lemon. He would never get another one!

I guess I overlook the weak points and find myself pleased with the overall package. I like VW's emphasis on sound basic materials engineering. Lots of little stuff might go wrong, and even cause a catastrophe with the big stuff, but if you keep it from going that far, the car is built to last forever. That just wasn't true of a Toyota I once owned.

But, to each her own. I know my car has a Nazi pedigree, but I don't root for anyone's downfall, no matter what their difference from me.

Everyone seems to know who they hate these days. I was lucky enough to watch the Sabres beat the Bruins at the Arena in their second-to-last game of the season. It was a thrill which spilled out onto the street beyond the last-minute rule-challenging glove-flying exclamation point fight on the ice. The thrill was marred only slightly by "let's go Buffalo" horn tooting drivers who yelled "where's a Bruins fan to run over?" out their windows. Hey, it's all in sport.

Before that, I'd tried to make a clever point when New Orleans won the Super Bowl, about how only sudden disasters get sympathy from the crowd. Although New Orleans, and the nation, had prepared for Katrina by neglect over many many years, the actual event defined our generosity as a nation. Just as it contributed to bringing down a presidency. Just as Haiti's earthquake brought out the best in us, even though we couldn't be bothered for so many years while the ramshackle disaster waiting to happen got put together.

I used the analogy of the frog in the slowly heating kettle. He likes the hot-tub, and by the time he realizes it's getting way too hot, his energy is sapped and he's cooked. Despite the wooden carvings I walk by each day on Elmwood, left over from our great October tree-smashing snow storm, Buffalo's emergencies are all slow motion. Nothing to bring out the best in the crowd of people making fun of us.

But still, the other day, riding my bicycle back from watching the big orange ball drop off the Peace Bridge (along with maybe half a dozen others) at the start of Boom Day festivities, I rode past that home-makeover house on Massachusetts Ave. There's a sign out front which looks like a for sale sign. I was slightly outraged until I realized it was just the builder exercising bragging rights. There was something to cheer for, wasn't it, even from the rest of the country. Extreme home makeover, Buffalo edition.

Boom Day, chicken wings, wide right, we make lemonade from the lemons handed us. But we have water and power and infrastructure and beautiful surroundings and are the very setting for the whole "if you build it they will come" idea. Nice thoughts while leaving town in search of a job.

Starting Up in Buffalo

There's this nutso notion out there that you can still make a killing with what is commonly called a "startup" on the Internet. The number of outfits attempting this on a daily basis now is rather astounding. There are even startups which serve other startups. In general it's a game of who has the most viewers/readers and then that person gets to be the market maker, in a food chain from top to bottom. They choose which startups to highlight and which to ignore. And seemingly everyone wants to "go viral."

I work here in Buffalo for a little non-startup called Hoover Blanket, Inc. It's a non-startup because, first of all, we've been at this for quite a long time. And second of all, we don't really believe in making a killing on or off or from the Internet. We actually believe in changing the world, pretty much in the way that people working on the so-called "smart grid" believe in changing the world.

We're like the people working on renewable energy sources. We know where the future has to be, and we know it's only a matter of time before we get there. Investments in oil are only sensible if you desperately want to get yours now, and could give a damn for what's coming down the pike. We think that's pretty sort sighted.

The name, Hoover Blanket, descends from the general derision Americans once felt toward our leader Herbert Hoover. During the great depression, President Hoover would habitually announce how well off we really were, and even make proclamations, all at such odds with reality that people started calling the hobo camps "Hoovervilles." A Hoover Blanket was how you kept warm in those Hoovervilles; you wrapped yourself in discarded newsprint! You go Herbie, rah rah us, and pass the revolution.

These days, lots of people fret the disappearance of bona-fide newspapers; the so-called "fourth estate" of our civilization, without which government might oppress and overwhelm us. So cognizant of this danger were our founding fathers that they enshrined the freedom of the press in our Constitution. No one is certain whether the more recent forms taken by the new "fifth estate" - which must include the blogosphere - are up to the task of replacing what gets lost as newspapers increasingly get shuttered.

The hand wringers do tend to forget how often the professional press has served as a shill to government power and preference. The press has as often endorsed such insanity as the Japanese American Internment, the War in Iraq, the Red Scare and on and on, as they have exposed the lies of government. Newspapers have arguably had too much wealth and power, but there doesn't seem to be anything in line to replace them.

As with the culture of startups, the supposition that the blogosphere can provide a check to power also needs to be examined.

Hoover Blanket, Inc., your local hometown hero, was almost selected as a finalist for the great big Tech Crunch 50 back in September. Tech Crunch is one of the gatekeeper websites. One of the market makers. Getting covered by Tech Crunch pretty much guarantees viewership to your site. You get attention. You get the critical-mass seeding needed to go viral.

We can easily guess the many reasons Hoover Blanket just missed the cut (we know we weren't higher than number 60 out of thousands). We didn't have millions in backing for one. Plus, we are working out of Buffalo, which pretty much guarantees a derisive guffaw from the startup community.  We were invited to travel to San Francisco to join the competition in "the pit;" a consolation prize for the second 50.  We somehow thought that would be beneath our dignity. Imagine that! Dignity in Buffalo. What a concept!

We chose our corporate name pretty deliberately, if you can consider flashes in the middle of the night deliberate. But if fits these times. Lots of people are out of work again, and even though our government this time has taken steps to prevent calamity, it doesn't really feel like we're quite out of the woods. And then there's that pesky worry about the disappearing newspapers. How will we keep warm?

Later on, still trying to get noticed by Tech Crunch, we made the mistake of going by way of a young blogger on their site who had a track record of being sympathetic to new businesses like ours. Just our luck, he was later let go when it was discovered that he had been taking quiet bribes from folks like us. The temptation must be very difficult to resist when you have the power of make or break over so many hopeful entrepreneurs. Our gullibility still stings.

It really isn't clear that what goes viral is really the best of the information or the resources that are out there. Often it's the trainwreck stuff, or the stuff with clandestine funding, just like Lonely Girl who made such a splash in the early days of blogging. And then there are the elephants in the room, like Google, which seems able to print money now with their (proprietary and private) control of keyterm auctions. When the whole world is searching on Google, they pretty much own the territory of how much you won't be able to make without them.

So, what does Hoover Blanket, Inc. set out to do? And why are we in Buffalo? The second part is simple; it's where we live. But it also doesn't and shouldn't matter, unless you really want and need to do your networking face-to-face in the coffee shops of Silicon Valley or, marginally, Seattle. (I'm shortly off to Seattle, and San Francisco for both personal and business reasons, if you really want to know). The first part is a little bit trickier to explain.

Let's start with Google's business model. As you might know, they now spend far more for electrical power than they do for the equipment it powers. They index and cache the entire "content" of the live Internet quite a few times over, far more quickly than any other company could possibly afford to do. And this includes some really really big ones like Microsoft and Yahoo! just to name a couple. Google even caches the content of the Internet as it changes, so you just go ahead and try to expunge that blog post you later wish you hadn't made!

In addition, without your necessarily really knowing that you could have "opted out," they are probably storing lots of things about what you search for, each time you use their services. Those of us who use their "free" email know how spooky it can be when they target ads depending on what we're writing about, and it seems like they might be reading our minds, or our secret love notes. Especially when those ads actually alert us to something we're really interested in but didn't know about beforehand.

Now, we trust Google not to expose this information, even to themselves. They seem nice enough, and their corporate motto - a side-wise jab in a grudge match against arch-rival Microsoft - is "don't be evil." Which pretty much begs the question, but still, they seem nice enough. Until you do something wrong, at which point they've cheerfully announced that they will turn you over immediately upon presentation of official bona-fides, to whatever authority might be asking.

Which pretty much comes right back to that free speech freedom-of-the-press thing about our Constitution. Just in case what you're searching on has something to do with what the government might be doing wrong. Folks in South America or in China aren't always that happy to have their searches stored and cataloged. And at this particular moment, it's not at all clear where Google stands. The Chinese government is blaming over-eager students for the targeted hacking of Google's sites. And Google is claiming a foothold in China in the name of the forces of freedom of information.

Do you really think information is free? If it were, then where is Google getting all its income? Just an innocent question.

Google might have located their data center right around here, just because of the Falls. Maybe all that cheap electrical power's already spoken for? Well, never mind, because we have seen the future and it's not about caching all your search behaviors, nor about storing all the "content" from the entire World Wide Web. It's not about reading your mind either.

Credit scoring companies and market research companies already know more about you than you might know about yourself. Buy a house and you can get that spooky feeling that they even knew about that place where you were hiding your mail from you wife before you divorced. They make mistakes, like sending me a solicitation from the NRA, but not often enough to have an impact on their bottom line. Of course, their mistakes can have a huge impact on your bottom line, but that's another story.

In general, what Google - and this is true for most Internet startups - what Google is all about falls into the overall category of artificial intelligence. In general, the economics of the Internet work by targeting information as accurately as possible, and then somehow getting your attention. The very best way to do this is by harnessing your friends and family, via something like Facebook, now one of the largest membership communities on the planet. Ever.

Somehow, it's become too expensive to do this sort of thing in person, so the holy grail is to get the machines to do it faster, more accurately and more efficiently than people ever could. Which might make you wonder why they all want in to Facebook, where there intrusion would clearly collapse that community in an instant. Well, except for the games. And those little annoying dating ads as if every old guy wanted someone looking younger targeted at the "mature set."

Sometimes we're willing and happy participants in these charades, and sometimes we get the sense that they're pretty skeezy. There are a few laws about it all, but in general Internet business makers move a lot more quickly than our government does. And, unless they're selling porn, Internet geeks just don't tend to look and feel all that scary.

Sometimes, like navigating the auto-attendants now de-rigeur for all the big companies, these automated processes do seem to beg some question themselves. Like maybe they really don't want you to be able to get through, while thinking that there's something wrong with the way you're paying attention.

At Hoover Blanket, Inc., pretty much as in the black community, pretty much as in the GLBT community, pretty much as in any community on the fringes of "mainstream," which is pretty much a definition of what it means to live in Buffalo compared to almost anywhere else in the nation, we think people should be able to be whatever they want to be, even if they're faking it, without worry that whatever they once were might become some kind of indelible stigma for all time. We don't think your searches, your deletions, or anything else for that matter, should be stored for examination either on your behalf or against you.

You might think that we are really "not evil," and we'd love for you to think that because we're not. But that's not even close to why we believe what we believe. We actually have enough sense to understand that "artificial intelligence" cannot, by definition (I love to say that - I'll try to explain in a minute) ever even come close to "real" intelligence. That's because intelligence is a human quality, and therefore includes the whole battery of emotive responses.

OK, so now in addition to thinking we'd like to be considered "not evil" you think we want to be loved too, right? Well, sure, but no, the point here is that while a sophisticated robot might be more "hot" than your wife, you're not about to make an emotional commitment to a robot, right? (I know you love your '65 mustang convertible, but let's not get distracted here) But even more than feelings, the point is that actual humans can distinguish what they want and what they don't far more trivially, quickly, accurately, and - most important - satisfactorily than any machine will ever duplicate. Try getting a machine to identify a friend at a hundred paces from the behind in Beijing, just for a quick example.

Half your searches on Google are really frustrating right now because you really don't want what everyone else is looking for by that name. You know what I'm talking about if you simply try to search on "avatar" say, or "beck" or "bolt" just after the Olympics, or "cronic" when they think you misspelled "chronic." Humans are metaphorical and subtle. Machines just aren't.

The reason that we know this stuff is that my business partner, Kevin Chugh, Ph.D. (yeah, I give him the business for that set of letters too) is pretty advanced in his understanding of these matters. Kevin has a bit of local fame for his invention of the V-Frog, which is a computer-based virtual dissection lab. Behind that is his Ph.D. research into ways for modelling complex structures like living tissues, so that a machine can return a tactile response just like the "real thing." It's pretty exciting stuff. I'm sure the pornographers are all over it!

In order to model structures more complex than a bridge or a skyscraper, engineers have to give up deterministic modelling in favor of something which works more at the level of cellular automata. That's the way, not incidentally, that the terrorists can provide actual real-life challenges to all of our military's technical sophistication. But it's also the way that complex structures can be accurately modeled by machines. You program the interactions among the pieces, depending on their relative properties, and you program their location. You can get something pretty lifelike.

Now you don't have to be too clever to notice that this same technique can be used to power Internet searching. It's actually analogous to the technique by which the micro packets which compose all the information on the internet get routed to their destination. Each host along the way only needs to know the next closer-to-the-destination host to send each packet on its way. It doesn't need the entire route. Designed for the military, it doesn't even want to know the whole route; in case a part of that pathway gets blown up, there will be a virtually infinite number of alternate routes.

A doctor palpating a virtual body can sense an occult tumor. A searcher can sense the right direction for what she's looking for in the same sense, if only we can get the machines out of our way and be presented with some human discernible clues. You get the idea.

So at Hoover Blanket, Inc., we not only don't want to store any of the content of the Internet, we don't need to. Hell, we're from Buffalo, we could never afford it even if we did want to. We certainly have no interest in storing anything about your behavior. It would only get in the way of what you're trying to find today, which might have very little to do with what you were looking for yesterday, when your wife was watching, say.

Our catalog of the Internet looks more like a multidimensional map. We don't care what you call it or what you want to do with it. We just show you where to find it, based on the discoveries of others looking for the same thing. Works every time. Of course we have to believe that most people are genuinely looking and that what they find is genuinely meant to be found.

Right now the Internet works pretty much as if most of us were skeezy sociopaths trying to get you to believe something you never would believe if you knew the truth about what they were really trying to do, or to get you to do. And that's because, right now, the Internet actually favors the gamers of your enthusiasms. Sometimes these same folks even make it into highest office, but that would be another story too, you know the old one about George and the Constitution.

Anyhow, we don't care who you are or what your motives are. We only care that you are human and not a machine, and so, naturally, among our products are sophisticated means to tell the difference. Like CAPTCHAS if you've seen those hard-to-read squiggled-up text boxes that you have to get past. Ours are way more fun, and trivially easy for humans to get past. Impossible for machines. That's because, unlike CAPTCHAS, ours are human-generated. We call them Bafflebots, and if anybody else tries for that name we will sue them with all the firepower of Buffalo's underpaid attorney class (well, not the ones on billboards, the ones used by the stars, you know who I'm talking about).

Where does free speech and the fourth estate - the newspapers - come back in? Simple. By its location in our multidimensional geography of Internet "location" you can see immediately the context for anything and everything. So, if some teapartier, angry at the government because there's no one else ready to hand to be angry at, makes some outrageous claim about, say, black welfare moms, you can see right where they're coming from based on where people go to find such things. Local news can be re-localized, even when it's coming from the New York Times, and speakers out against authority can establish their credentials on the spot, so to speak.

OK, that's enough about our company. Obviously the underpinnings are a little more complicated than what I'm letting on. Just as obviously, Google  knows all this stuff too. They have whole armies of engineers working on these problems. But, as you might be able to see, they would have an awful lot to lose if the obvious got out. Pretty much the way that lots of people don't want you to know where they're really coming from (hint: money is a pretty good way to get a clue).

What about Buffalo? At the SuperBowl, the Stanley Cup, even the Olympics now, we're always almost there. Just missed. Wide right. No Goal! Heck, I've always been almost there myself. I was in a bar near the stadium when the audience started filing out from the game that made the history books; Frank Reich's record-breaking comeback. I wasn't nearly so disappointed as they all were - heck the game was going exactly the way I continued to hope it would.

I very nearly scored prime seats for the Ryan Miller homecoming the other day. I was down at Niagara Square for the Scotty Norwood homecoming, even though I didn't see the game. Well, those tickets were already getting beyond the reach of the normal folks from Buffalo anyhow. But how many times are we doomed to almost, but not quite, win the championship? Hoover Blanket's right there with you.

When New Orleans won this season's SuperBowl, how many in Buffalo wondered if catastrophes have to be considered acts of God before the country will pay attention and root for you? Our states of emergency are the cause for late-night jokes by those stellar wife-cheating hot-car driving multimillionaire hosts (At least we don't get the "act of God" exclusion from our insurance coverages).

Everyone knows the story of the frog who passes the point of no return as he basks in the kettle while it's heating. New Orleans got hit hard and fast, which upped the probability for outpourings of sympathy. They hopped right out of their kettle (there might have been gatekeepers for the way back in). In Buffalo, we're like the v-frog (tm) in the kettle, who stayed just a bit beyond the point where we should have thought about doing something different. Our catastrophes are slow and deliberate, and seem very much as though they're our own darned fault.

And we regret all those things we could have done differently, like where we built our University, where the highways went, where the subway doesn't go to or come from, leaving us a ghost town where there used to be a downtown.


I remember getting a new red winter cap with ear-flaps back when I was a little kid, back when
Naugahyde was cool. We used to stick our heads out the car windows in those days, riding over the
Skyway. I looked like a dork with the earflaps turned down.

Regret for me is watching my new red hat float down and away from the skyway bridge; my caught
heart plummeting with it. It didn't soar like a red balloon let go.

But hey, maybe it's really not our fault. Maybe we're not the dorks they all think we are.

I wonder where our hearts are tending, here at home in Buffalo. We have had some superstars around here lately, and they seem to like us well enough. The famous home makeover folks were impressed enough by our stone soup magic that they've changed the way they do business all over the country. They seem interested in manufacturing hope to almost the same extent as other more powerful forces seem interested in manufacturing fear.

Who knows? Maybe we have the real thing here, in our city of no illusions. Reality City. We ain't got no artificial nothing. No artificial hope. No artificial fear.  And certainly no artificial intelligence, as I learned the other other night listening to our Canadian false friend Margaret Atwood. I call her a false friend because, while she made a point to let us know that there is a real Buffalo in her past, passing through from Toronto, she also spent most of her "talk" giving us examples of questions she gets a bit exasperated with from admirers.

So, naturally, we provided a few more reasons for her to roll her eyeballs. It's what we do, well, especially when the talk we paid for turns out to be more of a definition of the distance between us and her exalted heights. It came off like an attempt to get us on her side; to commiserate with her about silly folks who couldn't, could they?, be anything like this audience.

Atwood makes her living extrapolating the thinking and behaviors of those who are like our American teapartiers. You can just imagine what those Bully Canadian Hockey Moms think of those folks. Oh, I think I'm getting mixed up again.  As if there's not a thinking soul in Buffalo who would accept her challenges if offered them dead on. As if we're not all wishing we were Canadian right about now.

Atwood remembered Buffalo from back when we were "sin city." When the drinking age was lower here, when the bars were open later and the girlie joints were more explicit than the ones now over there. I know, it's hard to imagine now, but we had our glory days.

How about let's overlook the Buffalo that everyone else thinks of. How about we look either farther back or farther forward, skipping over the embarrassing stuff.

I have no illusions. Starting up in Buffalo is really really hard compared to starting up almost anywhere else. But we do have plenty of real people here. We have real intelligence. We have products which are not premised only on being cool. And that's not even to mention the art, the music, the theater, the dance, the ethnic identities, and the food, the glorious food. Even the New York Times gives us credit now for that!

Katrina, Katrina

Everyone in Buffalo must have been rooting for The Saints. And everyone in Buffalo must have felt cheated when New Orleans got to win its Super Bowl. We couldn't ever do it even with four chances almost in a row. We saw our projection; the underdog. But the one who played us up on the big screen was so much better looking. Which might be flattering, except that you have to live with yourself in real life.

Our politics are just as corrupt! Our schools are just as bad! We suffer natural disasters too, except that ours are laughable. Something to make contemptuous jokes about. And although we don't generally show our tits, we get just as drunk in public on St. Patrick's day, say, or at the Bills games.

What we lack is cool, and so, although we were once as big, and came on our falling short the old fashioned way - we earned it over time - we don't even deserve anything other than contempt for our bombed out condition. Hell, we never got it together enough to put a roof over our stadium in the first place, and it would make a lot more sense here than there. And our roofs hardly ever blow off, although they might from the blasting of our crowds.

Everyone knows the story of the frog in the kettle who never knows enough to jump out until it's just too late. Until it's too late, it just feels nice, and sunny, and like a hot-tub, maybe, and then somewhere along the line your energy's been robbed, and still it gets hotter and hotter, and somewhere in there you lose all sense at all.

I guess, looking at that frog, you can just feel contempt that he didn't have the sense to jump out when he could, just like most of the talented people who grew up in Buffalo have always done. And then you just wanna say something like die, sucka, die. So you can eat the frog's legs? Shouldn't you have killed him off ahead of time? Or is Buffalo like a lobster, without an advanced enough nervous system to register pain. Yeah, that's it. We're just too stupid.

And everybody down in Haiti now is looking for that silver lining, like all those people had to die before the centuries-long tragedy could be turned about. As though it will be now? As though somehow if you get the chance to know what being made an object feels like, then at least you will never do it to some other? Or never do it again? Or will you just write a check and be on your way?

If you are raped, you have been made an object. If you are a slave. If you are taken for your beauty only. Or for your intelligence. Or your money. If your life is not worth paying any attention, then you have been made an object. And if you live, then all that you have left is your humanity. And right there, as David Foster Wallace reminds us that Victor Frankel reminded us, is the only choice you've ever had in your life. To be human or not to be. It's a choice and not a grant.

But so much of the time we only know how to do back unto others as they have done to us. Not because we're mean, but because we never really did understand that we were being made into an object ourselves. So, we celebrate getting ours back even before the Mardi Gras, even to something more extreme than the party that will happen the day before we must begin our pretense of mourning. Because today we are alive, even though tomorrow that asteroid might hit, as they made such good fun of in those SuperBowl ads.

Well, we're still here in Buffalo. We're still human, what's left of us. We're not looking forward to some disaster larger than the laughable ones, which still kill lots of people if you want to really know. Walking around in circles snowblind, or maybe dropping from the sky because we won't stand for unions, or just on the streets from guns since all the money has skittered out to the suburbs where they eat each others' children just to get their own into the most Ivys.

Grim? Even the Bills are probably not about to stay around these parts. Our stadium looks like the WalMart edition, and Toronto has one with a flip top right around the corner. In the same dense market, only cooler. Way cooler.

The real test is what you do for the one who's losing consciousness slowly. The real test is what you do to your neighbor, even though he stinks. The real test is how much looting you're already doing, in slow motion, from the wide open stores of the once great now dying cities, happy that you can win by airconditioned wild west absence of civic anything, and nevermind virtue, bringing in the outsourced quality, and paying something under half of the wages of dignity. Because people are willing, at least, to have something rather than nothing.

Well, shame on you America, shame on you. You never pay attention until it can make you look good. And you know, I do feel a bit of pity for the ones who are loved only for their wealth and beauty and intelligence. But more sorry that you have to take it out on the rest of the world, as if there were no other choice.

to Dream, perchance . . .

What do you suppose a dream is? Whatever the neurologists will eventually say - about cataloging and housecleaning and random constructs - memory is always a part of it. I'll never be certain that the literary takes on the mind will not prevail, in the end, over the hardware metaphors. Go Freud (misogynist pig)! Go Shakespeare (rehabilitated neologist)! Go Bills (yeah, right)! Go revisionism!

Dreams are hard to remember on waking, sure, but inside of them there is also a continual lag between whatever the problem was that your mind was working out and the working out of it which makes the dreams, when remembered, so surprising for their structure. As if you were some kind of genius beyond your own ability to know. Who makes this shit up when you're asleep? You know you could never do it waking.

The problem is trivialized, I'm saying, if you just suppose that your mind threw up structures based on what has been on it, your mind, and then promptly forgot them so that you could watch the construct of your brain, having suspended judgment for that time. As if you are outside the mind of its creator. Like being able to watch your own movie and be taken in by it even though you're its producer. Looking past the seams which you yourself stitched.

My dream, which I do remember because of unusual full bladder issues, likely related to staying up past my bedtime to watch some football game on TV; my dream was disturbing. I won't bore you with its details, but it did remind me to steel myself against harm to myself that I must bear in preference to harm to my children. That thing which George Orwell in his 1984 supposed can be tortured out of us by finding the one terror we can never, willingly, face. The one we would betray anyone to avoid. It would seem to be a good idea to face them all ahead of time, rather than to be caught in a lie, no? At least face them in your (waking?) dreams.

I must have had manonpause (sorry "andropause" more properly) on my mind, and resurrection, having read of Mel Gibson's rehabilitation all over again for playing roles of a father's rage at his child's injury. Reading of his certainty that the living Christ did resurrect, and him citing counts of eyewitnesses. As if he was there. His movie version doesn't convince me of anything other than of man's inhumanity to man. He seems addicted to violence.

So I was distracted the entire evening; one screen showing the football game - cheering for New Orleans since I don't know football but it seemed like a resurrection of sorts. After Katrina, as if there's such a thing as home team anymore. And one screen showing Extreme Home Makeover Buffalo Edition. Which, even excepting the excuse that I just moved back here, I should really know about. It's right around the corner from me. And just because I don't watch TV . . .

Well, the truth is I'm just plain cynical about such lottery celebrations. Like Slumdog and all the Hollywood movies, they just make you focus on your dreams (sic) and not on reality. As if there will be some sky ranger who drops into your life to take care of all your worries, and send you to Disney Land when he does it.

But there was Buffalo, turning out in volunteer hoards, to help a black community activist who wasn't even born here. Who has an accent still. And the show couldn't contain their project - with so many volunteers - to just that one house, so they spruced up the entire neighborhood.

Sure, I was in transition when all this was happening, and then I was in the hospital, being informed about the West Side by my roommate, one of 13 or 14 Puerto Ricans who grew up in one family there. I learned from his wife how to improve my take on beans and rice. But it's still a blind spot, the West Side on whose border's this side I barely live. It's still like a dream I can't recall. That blind spot I have to remind myself to include in my breath-restoring peregrinations. I generally walk the other way, where all the cool people stroll. Coming in from the suburbs.

Over there beyond Urban Roots. Where they make gardens of the empty lots, and where our white-speaking black mayor invests a lot of hope. I should get over myself already and cheer right along with the crowds.

And yet I hope, instead, to take point for the city as interpreter of China. That place which my daughter calmly points out, to her world which I can glimpse from Facebook, steamrollers Tibet. Bringing civilization to the world, pretty much the way that we have always done under the banner of Christ, or maybe just by Yankee ingenuity. We steamroller anything in the way of what we mean by progress. But we do it by corporate proxy, and with a winning smile.

As an adult and a realist, I understand that if these two great world superpowers posture themselves against one another, each holier than thou, then we're all screwed; and never mind the native riches that are being destroyed along with species on a daily basis, east and west. The Moslem v. Christians sideshow will fall into the backdrop. Foregrounded will be where the real money's at. Oil, after all, is limited. After a while the earth is just skin and bones. We're gearing up for that, right?

Sincerity meets formalism is how I see it. We Americans disingenuous in our insistence that here we enable the freest possible flow of information. Never mind that Verizon can divert that flow for government snooping, on illegal orders, and then get a pass for following them. Never mind that it can prove nearly impossible to get beneath various conspiracy theories to find some actual sincere speech underneath them. Nevermind that you would be a fool to trust even your spouse these days. Especially your spouse.

The Chinese put an especially formal face on things, keeping their own multi-part disputes under wraps until they settle on a public posture. House-imprisoning anyone high up who exposes the inner debates to the outer crowd. Chopping off heads unceremoniously, from those not high enough up to make any difference, but loud enough to be noticed. Harvesting their organs for the public good, or so some conspiracy theories say. Or have they already sunk beneath the noise, and I'm just out of touch?

They eat dogs over there (and the reason we find our dogs so lovable is because we ate all the ugly ones in our past, breeding the kind of irresistible quality which assures their survival as man's best friend). The Chinese were the ones who bred the really exotic ones for our approval.

My niece casually informs me, along with an audience of mostly elderly and extremely well-educated church goers, that in Ghana, where she'd spent two years with the Peace Corps, they don't name their children until a week has passed. In accommodation to the ravages of infant mortality, at least historically.

And my little Peanut was named instantly on violent exit from her wombspace. Two months early, as if there was no chance that the technology avialable wouldn't save her. (It wasn't the technology so much as the doctor's missed diagnosis which shocked the surfactin into informing her lungs while nearly killing her mother).

But we would charge murder against abortionists who understand that a child unloved is a far worse tragedy than one stopped in its gestation. I watched my daughter speaking reasonably up on YouTube about Tibet, as gangs of Chinese intellectuals marched out in protest against this affront to what they knew for certain. Much like fundamentalist capitalists do if I suggest that we don't have real freedom of real information either.

We take an opposite tack with our intellectuals. We suffuse them with left-wing pedagogy, confident that they will always prefer the pretty things after they graduate. Whose is the greater disinformation mill? I truly don't and can't know. I can only know that these two great powers must learn to understand and respect one another, and that only by doing so will the native life of the planet have any chance at all. We won't survive another cold war. The great firewall dividing the Huns from civilization is all made of cultural miscues. And the Huns were really really violent and nasty and brutish.

China sounds dreadful until you consider our prisonhouses full of despair, overrepresented by blacks and others who required drugs more powerful than those on prescription insurance subsidy to feel that their days are worthwhile. Until you consider how we destroy the Lindy Englands of our world, and give the powerful a pass too.

I'm no big fan of the NPR style assumption that if you simply air the left and the right, the balance will be found in the middle. Sometimes there really isn't any truth at all on one side or the other. Sometimes you have to catch Democracy Now! to be reassured the world hasn't all gone crazy (I'm sure Fox TV has a point or two, now and then).

Well, the Saints won in overtime. I liked that. Favre was inspiring too, for taking all those hits just like Mel Gibson would, and even going so far as to congratulate his opposition. And the folks of Buffalo showed the world once again that we will turn your cynicism right into activism, the same way we championed Scotty Norwood for his wide right. Although we're pretty beaten down. We seem to get up again. This City of no Illusions.

And the Chinese have good reason to be nervous about messianic cults resulting from contact with the West. They're pretty sure they don't want another cult of personality. They've suffered a few too many. As with any good marriage, by learning from each other, we can become our better selves. Bring it on.

My, how time flies . . .

Even as I thought I knew that I wouldn't really maintain any commitment to this silly business, I do get little ideas while tracing the mandala of the roadways on my daily rounds - my own special and personal version of the rat race. And having the blog in the background, as it were, is an excuse to organize the thinking, even if it never leaves that impossible referent: the mind.

So, way over here, beyond every pale that ever gets mentioned, in upstate has-been Empire-land, where I have managed 230,000 miles on my car even before it was paid for - an accomplishment which should at least get me a discount on my next VW if no particular honor - I think I may have standing to comment about driving etiquette. We're all familiar with the internal battles of road-rage, hormones against brains, reason against outrage, and ride that little wagon veering between self righteous pride in our own nobility and terrible shame when we manage, carelessly, genuinely to earn the flipped bird in our own right. The searing honk of correction that you too are guilty and low.

Which leads me (isn't this the point of blogs) to comment on another leftie apostate (hadn't I once expressed dismay at the heterodoxy of Alexander Cockburn - I hardly remember), recently reminded of; Christopher Hitchens. At least he isn't off his rocker wacko with the religionists, but I have this feeling that he abandoned the Nation for lucre and selfish calming of angst. Anyhow, I was alerted to his damn-the-main-currents upstream observations about our culture of self-improvement in Vanity Fair following upon (maybe preceding, but not in the order of my awareness) a genuinely moving piece about a noble young soldier dying, still in my eyes, for a brand name more than an honorable nation, and apparently moved to accept the risk in part by Hitchens' writings. I know it is cruel of me, and reflective more of my own passivity than the truth of our nation's relation to its mythology, but I cannot find any death for this cause in Iraq to be other than wasted. But if I could come close, it would be thanks to Hitchens' take on this particular young man, who might actually, in the manner of his commitment and by that very act, have managed to bring the United States closer to its promise than whole armies of passive objectors such as myself. Admitted. Guilty.

Though that is not why I thought of Hitchens. It had more to do with the similarity of our lifestyles and body types, and the levels of our vigor in correcting them (nil). I know this is a stretch upon a meander, but what I was thinking of is how very Buffalo is the condition of our bodies. There is some perfected self-knowledge here about how buff, beautiful and fit belong in some other place, and here is rusty and has-been, but loving our families, when not convinced that we are somehow doomed by subtle childhood abuse of our never quite budded self-esteem to languish here forever awaiting the never forthcoming but somehow always identified with its only canonical source - familial - approval.

So, here's what happens in these parts when there is construction on the highway. Two lanes combine to one, with advanced warning, and so, innocent of traffic jams, which happen in more prosperous parts, we dutifully move to the open lane way before it becomes necessary. Precisely, in fact, when the traffic starts thickening. This leaves the asshole lane wide open, for the more savvy drivers - we assume they are from Long Island, taking advantage of our superior educational resources at reduced upstate rates - who whiz by and merge at the last minute. Always the expensive cars. Buffalo is all about Chevy Impalas, and anything more is embarrassing grandstanding. Just ask Tim Russert.

It takes no particular mathematical understanding to see that the polite drivers, wanting no advantage for themselves, and in a civilized way knowing how to queue (a sign, I believe, among denizens that other has-been Empire, of true civilization) are screwed forever by these advantage-takers, and so the line slows to a potentially permanent stop.

Sometimes truckers, never from Ontario, genteelly block the asshole lane and generate this shower of positive ions (negative?) among the thereby more relaxed and no longer conflicted obediant. Hmmm, I never have checked to see if these are the Jesus drivers, perhaps since it's hard, for me, to associate that bent with gentility. But these must be truckers from around here.

So, it is after all clear that the overall best thing to do would be for everyone to drive right up to the merge and then zipper together in polite alternating fashion. I understand that this is what happens in the rest of the world, though I have had no occasion to witness it myself, being an undocumented wage-slave (yes, these are primitive parts) without papers to travel beyond my ancestral esteem valley.

I don't know if this self-tortuous behavior is connected to our globally high concentration of church-attending Catholics, but I suspect so. Non-Catholic myself, I have always been outside that particular familiar, and therefore free at least, if not to leave, to raise ridiculous questions.

So the net angst is raised, and we get what we always wanted, our own validating traffic jams. And incredible heart-risking self-righteous glares at those in the asshole lane, where sometimes we must sneak by ourselves, beyond all endurance with fatigue and frustration and somehow concocting an inner story to keep our outward impassivity (if only you knew my story you'd call a police escort). But the ones who know better and drive flashier cars either have the validating experience of real traffic jams or at least know how to get out and improve their lives.

So, this is precisely what happens in the minds of all the Buffalo Bills fans (I'm not one, and can't even begin to understand the fanaticism) when on a recent Monday night the Bills are blessed with an incredible run of good fortune and defensive out-of-place offense. All the plot elements are there. The rookie quarterback moving with poise and precision. The exteme underdog position of the team against the league stars. And every single fan, this time including me, knew with certainty that we were watching a slow moving train wreck. That we could not possibly keep this enormous lead and inevitable victory. We knew even after that really clever dodge which revoked the last-minute field goal that there would have to be another last minute, and that the wide right was reserved only for Buffalo. Huzzah and goddamn! We must love it this way. Even the television announcers were too abashed to ply the obvious, though the 'only in Buffalo' undertone was clear enough.

It might be like the leftie bind, which Hitchens broke free of. It might be like staying home to rescue Dad's old business instead of taking that Harvard degree off to the big times. It might actually be a nicer cut of human being. It might just be patsie-land. But it is at least clear that there is a lot of unnecessary agonizing going on and angst that we, around here, are likely not good enough. By not politely filling the asshole lane, it is certain that we cut ourselves off. I'm an asshole, yodeloo yodeleee, yipee! But I'm still not going to engage in any self-improvement, profit-oriented religion, or flag-waving.