On Being an Author

I tend to write on manic impulse. I guess that's obvious. By happenstance, I have avoided or eschewed any disciplinary home for my writing. I sometimes even focus on the negatives to becoming embedded in the discourse of some particular discipline. I'm a 'whole picture' kind of guy, no matter how much more precise the read might be through some particular lense. It's partly a matter of whether you see yourself as inside or outside some kind of fractal wall.

I also don't believe that one's position on the inside or outside of any particular container determines anything about subject versus object. Our subjective self must also be the object of our investigation if we are to be an author.

Whole picture doesn't mean super-accuracy, just as expert disciplined writing can turn out to be quite wrong. I read things and can almost never find a place to hang the specifics for future reference. I don't think my mind can handle that kind of detail when any author is trying to outline their big picture. Still, when I sometimes re-read things that I once did read, I can find them familiar. Even stuff I wrote myself. So it has become a part of me, perhaps beneath my conscious and constructed self.

I can get pretty far into reading writing that is quite arcane, though I rarely feel the comfort of being a native there. Even reading Chinese, I know I can read at a higher level than a native youngster, or less-educated adult who's native. I think the same might be true of physics or sociology or journalism or many other scientific or layperson disciplines.

I often use the analogy (analogy never a proper argument makes, so sorry) of holographic media, where chopping up the media leaves an "accurate" image intact, though not a precise one. And the image proliferates, as it were, in the breaking up.

I have formed a sort of conviction than human minds are rather more like holographic media than computational engines. Indeed, I would go so far as to insist that nothing digital can analogize actual lived life, and might even constitute a sort of evil (if you're into that sort of language).

Crossing over into evil is never a function of usage. After all, digital technology can be a great tool, and like all tools - including written language - can be very useful. Evil enters in when there is an unwarranted belief structure which surrounds anything based on manic rapture alone. I have myself certainly been enraptured by computers and especially by networks.

I can be and have been more technical with that assertion about the digital, but I'm declaring it here as a conviction, or even a belief. Horrors.

Someplace, somehow, some long time ago, I inserted a tagline in or to this blog: 'author of my own life, dammit.' When I notice it, I feel embarrassed. I generally cringe at contemporary usage of the term "authentic," which I sometimes associate with the drone-like wearing of blue jeans, and all the worker, cowboy, hottie associations blue jeans have gathered.

Then there's that term authority. Just now in these United States, there is no trustworthy authority. Not in the media, not in the government, not anywhere because none of us feels like we are in the right position to know enough with enough certainty. And we mostly feel that those who are in such a position can't be trusted. Not even the New Yawk Fucking times, according to the assholes now controlling our narrative.

Or in other words, everything's become politicized. Authors everywhere are wondering what they're allowed to say and in that process bobbling any authority they might have had. Maybe they're wondering what they need to say if they want to get anyone to pay attention. Even scientists move into CEO slots and become less trustworthy thereby.

No, this is not some sort of apology for my craving of obscurity, although there is that, based mostly on a kind of shy trending toward terrified. I would love to write in a way that people wanted to read. Or in other words, I would love to be a novelist, or maybe a screenwriter.

I am often uncertain about what makes fiction a less reliable guide to what is true; and on the obverse (sorry, I've never been trained in logic, so I likely have the wrong term) what makes truth so much stranger than fiction.

There is this term in discourse - deus ex machina - which gets used and abused in ways to make it mean opposite ends in an oscillating pairing. It seems generally to be used to indicate a foul play by an author, like a plot insertion made purely to keep the plot's momentum going. It is a contrived plot device.

Many religionists form such a conception of God; that He is the Author of the cosmos and the authority who will save us, just like a lazy author deploying deus ex machina in his thriller.

But really the term refers to the (mechanical) device in Greek drama whereby the god/ghost is removed from the stage. It's a god removal machine, just like digital technology, I suppose. (There is no yes/no either or in nature). But even the Britannica, which refers to the Greek, talks about the crane which introduced the god on stage; a god insertion device.

The soul is often referred to as a kind of ghost in the machine of our physical body, decried by philosophers all; but a word that's hard to avoid in English. We conceive of the soul as noumenon, in distinction to the phenomena which are the proper objects for scientific study.

Just like counting angels by pinheads,, people have worried the matter of whether animals have souls. Definitely not, in Christian terms, even though sentient lifeforms are almost certainly conscious and have feelings - emotions - just like we do.

Our consciousness is enhanced by words; by language. People who are concerned with the "real" to the point of obsession - people like Noam Chomsky and Benjamin H. Bratton - don't seem to find much to value in the truths of creative fiction.

I admire Chomsky and Bratton - especially Bratton just now, as he refuses to see anything evil in the tools and instrumentation which has co-evolved with humans to the point where we are an existential threat to the living planet. He cautions against trying to go backward, and to unwind all of our technologies. He focuses on how we should be using it. He is right!

But I do value creative fiction, and I wish that I could write it. In the place of precise scholarly referents for my reading history, I would like to bring in my experience building and fixing things, and the insights of people I've known from all walks of life. Name dropping is fun, but it's not the famous people I've learned the most from.

Even though "social distancing" seems built into my DNA - my life plan - I seem able to get along with a wide variety of people and to enjoy them very much. It doesn't seem to bother me so much when people take an intuitive dislike to me; even when they turn from like to dislike. I don't really like myself all that much, much of the time. Even though I maintain good relations with several exes, it's clear that I have some trouble with long-term intimacy. Tant pis and quel dommage!

So, I'm joking about the usage of deus ex machina. I have to accept the conventional usage. I'm not quite so adept at truth telling as my heros are.

Still, it seems that we have generated a kind of god removal machine on the planet now. I'm talking about the whole hot mess of humans as we now live. At the head of the pack, as far as I can tell, are still the true believers in God the Author. God the Authority.That seems to still be de rigueur if you want to get elected. That's really too bad.

A god removal machine can't be a bad thing. It returns the narrative to something real. Educated audiences can only be disappointed when the author takes the cop out of this clunky literary device. It feels lazy, which is just the way I feel about myself as an author. Why, I said that about myself just the other day!

From the perspective of its explanatory value, one of the very best theses I've ever read was The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. For me, reading that was more exciting than reading any novel. I've had that experience with more than a few fiction and non-fiction books. I feel that my mind is changing when that happens, and that things come into focus.

Some of the time when I have that nearly euphoric feeling - I have to let myself down when I discover that what I've just read is "fake." I think I felt that way about Carlos Castaneda and his writing about the Yaqui warrior Don Juan. I guess I just wanted too badly to believe. I was less taken in by the Celestine Prophecy. And while Dan Brown's novels can make a fun read, I'm not sure I see much truth value there, beyond the Hollywood industrial-grade thrill.

Whatever.

I guess I'll never make it as an author. I still think that Julian Jaynes and Noam Chomsky and Benjamin H. Bratton are way less wrong than most people, and certainly way less wrong than me.

The trouble is that none of those three (and many other fine thinkers and writers) will write a better world into being. Hardly anybody bothers to read them. Their dazzling brilliance never rises to something that would sweep the world the way Star Wars does, or did. Censorship is never so brilliant as in a capitalist democracy.

Not even Faulkner. Not even Hemingway. Certainly not James Joyce or Quentin Tarantino, who are the soulless Paganini's of their media. Sublime, yes, but not in that way.

The Bible once did grip the world. Making that kind of fiction into Truth is getting really old now. Science was exciting until it got overrun by rampant unregulated capitalism. We need a better guiding narrative. In simple terms, that has been my life's work. I am just grandiose enough to keep trying, while humble enough to think that my prospects for success are about equal to my prospects to become president. I'm not really sure I want either "successes." Well, I'm nearly certain that I don't.

I just wish that someone would take over the burden. I keep looking and reading and listening and all I hear are crickets.

So, I'll keep trying. It isn't hurting anyone, and it makes a kind of sanity therapy for me.

Jaynes can't be completely correct, but in his terms, human consciousness now feels like it is "recameralizing." We are reverting to our pre-Biblical nature, with a feckless alpha male in charge, just because he channels the voices we wish were telling us what to do. And he has that hair-as-crown thing going on. It's all so weird.

I have to work to make my own consciousness story go beyond words; beyond language. Consciousness is a channeling of more than words. Consciousness channels a pervasive love-filled life-force that encompasses all of evolution. We are each a chip from a hologram that stretches across the medium of the cosmos.

I suspect, but can't be certain, that oracles like the I Ching or the Tarot or just the random of lived life where I am my own author are way more important than the choices we'd like to take credit for when they work out. I am no Paganini with my words. I am too earnest. I have poor command of even the English language.

Like Michelangelo using a chisel to find what's latent in a block of marble, a good writer doesn't start with some idea he wants to express. At least that's my conviction. The page has to be talking back. I mostly write to the void, and that's a problem. But that's because, though I like to play guitar and sing, I would rather die than to do that in front of an audience.

I guess artists can hear themselves, read themselves, do it in public and somehow know that it's good. That's a kind of proprioception that I apparently don't have and probably can't get. So I doubt I'll ever be able to be an artist. Well, except in the reductive sense that I am the author of my own life, and so far I've found it really interesting.

If that makes me a narcissist then I really do deserve to be president. The bar is that low, and honestly I can't even imagine how dull the life of a boor like Trump could even possibly be. No regrets here!

Money is Not a Novel Virus

Most of us, and some of the most intelligent among us, share the flaw of mistaking the individual for the collective; the local cause for the environmental factor. We think in terms of what I should do to protect myself. It's hard to think about how we should behave for the whole.

This is true with cancer where the trouble with identifying cigarettes as a cause is that the environmental factors which affect everyone equally are downplayed. China smokes and has lousy air both. Shame on China, or shame on us? Or is it native America's revenge?

So we all know that the density and mobility of humanity on the planet provide the perfect medium for the thriving of COVID 19, and we are reasonably trying to put a pause on the speed and direction of global development; our historical vector.

But these fears and the reality of this current infestation are not exactly novel. Popular history in literature and cinema is full of examples, as is actual history. When I was much younger and in proximity to AIDS researchers on the forefront, there was doubt that there was any specific virus-like agent. It was suddenly reassuring when we found one.

Last night, I was flipping back and forth between the Bernie/Joe debate and the rerun of the President's now daily presser. It was a very frustrating exercise.

While Trump is interjecting how great the companies are that he has been strong-arming into joining his cause - the bigger they were, the more likely he would be to put in a good word - Bernie is talking about the evil fossil fuel industry. Joe, meanwhile, is trying to stay on the side of the powers that be; the system that once did seem to work.

I felt bad for Joe getting beaten up for his votes back when compromise was actually a way forward. I felt worse for how strident Bernie was made to seem for continuing to harp on the need for systemic change. But Bernie is right, and thank God he's succeeded to push Biden to the Left.

I'm not sure that Bernie is doing enough explaining, however. Perhaps he thinks we all might agree about which corporations are evil. What about the workers in those industries? What about the consumers of their products? The cost of solutions is being deployed like weaponry. Toting them up is meaningless if the system actually does change.

The externalities of doing nothing have to be brought into the equation, fer chrissakes! Toting costs for the system as it now is becomes meaningless in a transformed economy.

The one thing we should certainly agree on instantly is the need for an actual national healthcare system. We can't let money continue to talk on that one.

If we, who are addicted to automobiles - still, in this late age - demonize the fossil fuel industry as though they were somehow evil, we too are mistaking the individual (company, CEO, politician) for the collective. The automobile is baked into our economy. It is baked in to our economy that each will fight to be on top. Do we expect the CEO's of our largest corporations to be interested in the collective good? That would be insanity.

Bill de Blasio now calls for nationalizing certain industries, as we are in a state of war. Trump seems pretty sure that unleashing Daddy Warbucks will do the trick.

Nobody would suggest - not even or especially not China - that the market doesn't work. Up to a certain scale. Beyond that scale, we need a working government. Even though Rumsfeld and Cheney tried it, does anyone really think we should replace our military with a private army? We should long since have moved our military preparedness in the direction of preparedness for pandemic.

It does seem clear that the human species as a collective has yet to become fully conscious. We now know, globally, that something approaching half of humanity will become docile - comforted - when hearing the voice of authority sounding certain of itself. For that half of humanity, it would seem that the most important qualification for leadership is pathological narcissism; a Trumpean certainty that one belongs on top and that nobody need fret about changing anything. Go backward, even, to a past that never existed.

It has taken Trump this long to surround himself with simpering sycophants, but now that he has he can finally depart the stage and allow them to speak for him, all credit fawning his way.

Some short time ago, Julian Jaynes thought that he had discovered an historical basis for understanding how human consciousness arose. He detailed that discovery in a briefly popular book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

The idea was that in pre-conscious society - perhaps tribal society while it remained geographically stable - the collective will was heard by individuals in the form of voices. Jaynes located these voices in the right hemisphere of our brains. They might be related to what Freud called the superego, and the sensation might have been like the hallucinated voices of a schizophrenic.

The tribal chief was the chief imitator or channeller of that voice. Democracy was unthinkable, quite literally.

Certain science fiction writers, most notably, perhaps, Neil Stephenson, have retained an understanding of how radio and then television may re-cameralize our minds. Marshall McLuhan was also onto something. But apart from Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion there is almost no mainstream scientific voice which gives Jayne's theory much credence. And Richard Dawkins was only giving a nod to the obscure possibility that Jaynes has not been proven entirely wrong. Yet.

Well, what if collective humanity is also reforming itself into a bicameral mass? We won't even need to confuse the terms right and left in that case. The Right apparently cleaves to God and country, and the capitalist economy. The Left to cognition.

But it would be a mistake to allow - or especially to provoke - warfare between the sides. Consciousness arose historically, if Jaynes is even partly right (sinister refers to handedness, the opposite to brain hemispherical designations), by the connecting of the two sides.

When environmental changes forced stable tribes to move and to encounter other tribes, the voices became less useful. The cortex had to be united, to reason-out survival tactics. The voices had become undependable. Individual consciousness was the successful resolution.

I am reasonably literate in Chinese. Some long time ago, I wrote an essay for inclusion in materials shared for a conference on teaching of Chinese in high schools. Such programs were innovative at the time.

I hadn't read Jaynes yet, but I wrote my essay using the metaphor of stereoscopic vision, which provides depth to our vision. At least one of the conference organizers took note. I myself had taken note of how little crossover there has been historically between the grand literary traditions of the greater sphere (hemisphere?) of Chinese writing and the West. What crossover there had been was largely caricatured and mistaken.

There is some truth to how the Chinese literary tradition created a different mind-set from ours. The larger truth is that the advent of agriculture and then writing began the geometric acceleration of humanity's seeming domination of the planet. The seeming part is that - at least sub-consciously - we seem to have hit the explosive part of the asymptotic rise.

Perhaps, as a species now, we resist full consciousness. We still think that it might be our place to turn the evolutionary processes into a triumph of cognition. If so, we will have to cure ourselves of the money virus. At the level of government now, money has destroyed all hope for democracy all over again.

But isn't democracy obsolete anyhow? Only if you are a believer in the necessity for the willful evolution of humanity on the planet. Only if you are a believer that it is rational cognition which is destined to be the capstone of billions (is it trillions?) of years of evolution.

As Mark Solms, among others, has made clear, rational cognition - the province of computing technologies - is not the seat for consciousness. Consciousness is destroyed when the affective centers of the brain are destroyed. These are toward the brain stem, the brain's most primitive structure, whose roots in DNA are shared most broadly and most primitively. These reticular structures are not bicameral.

Human consciousness partakes of and extends to all consciousness on the planet, of course, which is demonstrably not limited to humanity alone. Our skin is not likely the boundary for our mind. Consider language.

Jesus Christ lived at or near a crossroads in Jaynes' timeline. Ditto the living Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius and never forget Homer. By Jaynes reading, Homer's tales were still being dictated by the voice of God within. He provides the literary evidence.

We are now at a different crossroads. Believers in God know His presence. Believers in Gaia know their presence. Followers of the Dao know that random is not meaningless.

Our collective cognition has been hijacked by money. We can no longer reason. Language fails us. The earth shrugs.

Humanity is not destined to dominate. Such domination will clearly spell our end. The forces of evolution are "guided" by happenstance. If God is a delusion, Richard Dawkins, I would like to know what kind of a delusion mankind as a whole suffers to think that the powers that be will somehow engineer us out of this or the next crisis. The frog in the heating water is all too accurate an analogy for how we deal with existential threats.

Neither global warming nor COVID 19 are a hoax, people. The president is. Fox news is. Our healthcare industrial complex is. Now, for the moment, the entire Republican party seems to be.

There is no winning if we take sides. It is not humanity versus COVID 19. Nature, ultimately, prevails. We are simply not equal to billions of years of evolution.

Let us pray for a soul. Let us pray for soul. Let us pray for something like the tears from that tobacco company executive on the stand back in the day, when the attorney redirected the trouble to the executive's own family. Let us dissolve our differences, Left and Right. It is not our nation at stake. It is planetary survival. And I don't mean human survival. As far as I can tell, humanity - in the good sense of that term - has yet to appear on the planet in the form of a proper social contract.

For lack of a better metaphor, humanity is not channeling God's love. I know this. I consulted the I Ching. The hoax is to think that we actually know very much at all. But we do know enough to do better, and to tell the difference between huckster religion and something better; between huckster science for profit and something better.

Anger gets us nowhere.

Rain Man

Someone has to make this observation, so it might as well be me. Rain Man - in real life Kim Peek - was lacking the corpus callosum, which is the neural tissue which connects the hemispheres of the brain. As you, gentle reader, already know, I find Julian Jaynes' thesis compelling: that it was the "breakdown" of inherent divisions between the hemispheres of the brain which occasioned consciousness.

This trivial seeming thesis has yet to make the main stream, and perhaps as with all things scientific, I am making only a metaphorical read of what more disciplined minds read with more disciplinary understanding. The thesis may add nothing new to research and advancement in our collective understanding of consciousness; of how the brain works.

But the metaphorical read is compelling too; that as with Kim Peek who has been called a "walking Google,", we each "store" much more knowledge than we are, consciously, aware of. Rain Man's savantism was not evidence of some excess capacity. It was, rather, evidence of an utter absence of any inhibition.

There was no organizing principle to Kim Peek's collection of words and facts and snippets from that stuff which he could read - each eye taking its own page - at whatever rate his hands could crawl them.

Now the literal Google seeks to make the idea of "real time" search more actual; better embodied. And we will be able, therefore, to understand less. Just as Rain Man had no useful intelligence. All noise without a signal.

The missing link in Kim Peek's intelligence, of course, was that "me" filter, composed largely of emotion, which enables us - those of us both less idiotic, and less savant - to make intelligent statements about what we read. It enables us to button our shirts and make reasonable decisions. It keeps from us, thank God, most of what we already "know".

There is no mistaking the fact that poor Tom Cruise was so taken with this notion that he found a religion to embody it. For religions, being invented out of whole cloth by a science fiction writer must be one step up from having the deed done by a horse thief, although it doesn't seem to make you more adherents than those Mormons get.

If the film which I just re-watched, starring another savant actor from the Church of Scientology - John Travolta in "Phenomenon" - truly is a Scientology-style Christ-like story, which I'm pretty sure it is, then they, at least, are onto this idea that most of what we know is inhibited. Although they seem to target emotion as the thing which blocks it out.

You can grab a pair of tin cans to get started along the Scientology path, and learn from the feedback loop of some dial on some meter how to remove the blocks which prevent you from becoming "clear."

This must be particularly valuable for actors who must inhabit personae other than their own. Get your "me" filter shut down, and you can be anyone you'd like. Which works pretty well to get you roles, up to and including that of President of the United States, just in case you were wondering how GWB pulled it off. Or the great one himself, Ronnie Raygun. Thank God Sarah Palin will only be a talking right wing head as the freshest new face on Foxy News, which is pretty much where she belongs. I thought she was gunning for the role of female Hitler.

People without inhibitions in the way of the roles they play can get right into your comfort zone through a kind of border invasion which leaves you helpless to respond. An expert salesman, selling you a car by daring you to call the bluff and suggest back to him the obvious; that he truly is a sociopath in this context, without any care at all for what is best for you. The more he believes it himself, the more dangerous he becomes.

He seems so nice and so earnest, that expert salesman. These transactions are always a one-way street. You are far too earnest to challenge his seeming decency.

By definition, there are no such abusers among the downtrodden in the context of the streets who don't belong in jail. But if you're on the other end of the spectrum, there's no limit to how high you might arise.

I am your friend, I care about you, I agree with everything you feel, and won't ever ask you to break it down, to analyze it, to true it against any facts. You are right, have always been right, and I am here to give your rights their voice. Huzzah and tear down the castle walls! (disclaimer, I value the role of salesman more than you do, and don't tend to be a do-it-yourself shopper. I was killer once, at selling bicycles. And yes, I believed myself what I was saying. And yes, I was fooled sometimes)

Most of us slow down and retreat when we feel that mob that we are part of moving into action. We blush to think that we would take advantage that blatantly as the oily womanizer does. We feel a sense of fraud directly proportional to the scope of the stage we climb up on to.

Those who have no such inhibitions are rewarded with corporate leadership roles, super starring someone who actually does believe himself better than what the lottery rules of random picked out of the hat of humanity. (True disclaimer: I actually do believe that many of our corporate titans are better at what they do than is their blasted competition. Some of them also hide better what they're truly good at. Marketing is not the same as invention. The better mousetrap hardly ever prevails.)

Our emotional filter works on the stuff in our brain way before we can put our decisions into words. Before we can rationalize them and give them voice. That's how our character gets informed. That's how our words become us.

Last night I was at dinner with three other people each of whom brought to the table direct knowledge of life in Central America. Central America is where our United States threw its weight behind oppressive regimes which outsourced violence and murder; to the extent that our politicians could smugly feel that they truly were only protecting the rights of US corporations properly to exploit the riches of the earth which would otherwise not make their way to market. Aluminum, Copper, bananas, coffee, and inevitably the drugs.

There are murders still, in the name of our self-indulgent desires, whose chain of payoff is so many links long that the local thug who would ingratiate himself with the local boss really does have nothing to do with your tiny decision at the supermarket. Or on the dark streetcorner scoring dope.

I was plenty embarrassed to realize last night at dinner that I myself once knew that much more about Central America than I now do. Because my very own left-wing angst, no matter how much I read nor how hard I try to inform my actions, is all focused where the main stream media shines its light.

I know all sorts of relevant facts about Iraq and Afghanistan, and al Qaeda in Pakistan. My opinions are very well informed and even better formed in their certainty, even while I give our president a pass on the assumption that he must be that much better informed still. And meanwhile, I don't even bother to sort the facts from Central America. Neither does the Church, which still disavows, I'm told, the socially uplifting work of the "liberation theologists" left behind there.

There is tremendous hope in this revelation, no? That the spotlight of public attention is both what inhibits understanding, as well as what makes it likely.

There is a pearl of wisdom, which has by now become as smooth and enlarged as an old chestnut, contained in George Lakoff's work about how the right wing has succeeded in "framing" all political debate by choice of words and contexts.

In the largest sense, if you can manage to get nearly the entire reading and thinking public focused on the Middle East, you can do anything you'd like, say, in Central America. A sucker punch by any other name. You win the debate by simple repetition. Too bad Chomsky and Lakoff don't see eye to eye.

No matter how nutty the Scientologists really are, there might be more fact than the rest of us would credit, to the power inherent from the process of getting "clear." Facts beyond imagining, standing at the ready behind the Hoover Dam of metaphoric inhibition. Or was the dam the metaphor?

We do know that for the purpose of our Internet searching, the once powerful notion that we could find our needle in the haystack by resolving all the linked choices made by the "mob" is tired and old beyond belief. No matter how quickly Google renders up the millions of "hits" against your clever wording, they will never be able to program in the metaphoric categorization which enables even the stupidest among us to "get" what's right, before we ourselves quite know it.

So, search engines will figure out, as we at Hoover Blanket, Inc. already have, how to give you, the searcher, sufficient clues that you can find your own way in among the thicket of noise so far beyond even Rain Man's capacity to digest.

Even if he could read it, there's no computer in the world which could click through those millions of "relevant" hits, arranged in descending order of their relevance to everyone else on the planet. As if the beauty of your lover would cause her to arise to the top for the mob. Well, I suppose that it might if you are a Hollywood celebrity, but I hardly think that's a position from which generalizations can, nor certainly should be made.

And your brain too can adopt new framing metaphors. And suddenly the world is new.

It very much does seem as if the mob still rules the day, and we are sports fans out of context. We act in public the way the hooligans do in the stadium. "They" tell me our sports fan shere in Buffalo - as with all such measures of quality - are at the very bottom of the heap; for war-painted drunken brawling ending in arrest. I'm pretty sure we're not so low as Eurotrash following their style of football, but then I'd be way too scared to find out. I know you're certain that suicide in Buffalo is redundant, but not for me, dear reader, not for me.

I start with love, a feeling my body still manages to teach me, as my own personal root metaphor. I start with your ear, wet kisses there still cause the rest of me to melt, and then I take that knowledge and apply it to the world. Where women such as Sarah Palin, no matter how good she is in bed - and believe me I'm nowhere near man enough to want to find out - seem to operate from a root metaphor of power. There is the muscle and there is the siren call of the body imagined naked. Power still corrupts. Especially when deployed in seeming earnest.

The facts I choose from my own personal imaginarium get trued against my own root metaphor, as do all facts. If you're a Christian, then my root metaphor is the same as yours. Not the strict father. The feminine in ascendant, against Him in a trajectory toward female earth. Christ was, after all,  a wimp too. We only celebrate who we would be in his place. An angry Titan. Bolstered by a mob.