Drama King

King for a day!

So, I have this ghost story on my mind (I'm supposed to read it publicly tomorrow evening), boxed like a rose between these two thorny films, each of which proposes somehow to mark the beginnings of our modern history. The tales are each subject to endless interpretation and re-interpretation, foregrounding love or duty or what you will.

One is the story of China's unification under the first emperor of the Qin dynasty; China's first proper dynasty. I loved the movie Hero, testing out various narrative possibilities about what really happened to stay the assassin's sword. In that film, the Emperor is hero more than tyrant, having to shoulder the burden and deny himself for the sake of history.

More recently, I saw The Emperor and the Assassin, which focuses just a little bit more on the love story. The Emperor and his lover both might have longed for the days of their youth, when, without means for clothing or food, they at least shared honest love. Now the Emperor was in charge of killing hoards of people who had offended his office if not himself. All sorts of effrontery against the noble and historically necessary cause to unify "all under heaven."

The other story is of Tristan and Isolde, recently (well, by my timeline) made into a movie itself. It's almost spooky how similar these plot lines are; Tristan and Isolde are actually presented with the possibility for escape and must relinquish it, against the thrall of history. It's the same story in its way, but this time instead of 'all under heaven,' it's the warring tribes of England which must learn to work together under a single King.

(I'm still in the middle of V. for Vendetta, a kind of re-enlivening of the Guy Fawkes day tale, a hoiliday the students used to celebrate at that private school I nearly didn't endure for the year I worked there - the kids being that much more clever than the teachers to understand the symbolism of "tear down these walls.")

Then there is the ghost story, a tale I once translated from the Chinese of a time to parallel the so-called dark ages brought to life in that film version of Tristan and Isolde. The ghost story rehearses the power of love to bring back the ghost of a former lover from beyond the pale of death. This theme also saturates East and West.

It is my burden, right, to disentangle these traditions, hopefully in time to avert the seeming inevitable contest between, say, China and the U.S. as we butt heads over important things like freedom of speech and intellectual property law. But sometimes I wonder where's the difference among all this apparent similarity?

Well, for starters, the Chinese story depicted in the films I watched is purported to be actual history. It was written down as such, even though all scholars recognize the tension between narrative requirements and historical facticity. I guess academic historians these days discount quite out of hand even the radical possibility of truing to fact as regards our narratives of history. I think that's part of what post-modern means.

The story of Tristan and Isolde is regarded as outright legend, although you'd think, being that much more recent, that something about its "truth" might be discoverable. Have there never been any Kings in love? Henry?

One question which might get begged is what is the relative valence, East to West, of what it is we wish to regard as fiction, and what fact. It has long since become cliché that the West is obsessed with romance, while the East is, by comparison, practical. Here in the West, we need our beginnings and endings, and remedy eternity with the pleasant fiction of  "ever after" in story and in religulous belief.

Where China cycles, and the East more generally accepts the idea that personalities and types and narratives just keep coming back around; the reuniting of ghost with lover neither more of tragedy or comedy, but a kind of exquisite blending of both.

How many movies lately play with these themes; moving time backwards, letting go from beyond the grave, truest love existing beyond the bonds of marriage, duty, honor, whatever it is, right on up to Jesus himself, which must keep a person from his personal right, in the face of duty to all humanity. This tension seems universal.

No wonder we are so scandalized when our leaders betray true love. We are the ones who must turn it into lust, the way of all flesh, corrupted, scandalized, for the worms. They are allowed only our idealized version, and should know that true love is allowed only to Hollywood stars. Over and over and over again, until they get it right and then we'll elect them back into office, whee!!!

(Hmmmm, I wonder why Spitzer hasn't been talking to Hollywood. I think Palin may be onto something here)

So, I write, trying to evacuate each little blog snippet from any particular narrative trajectory, so that I can look back someday and find the one for my real life. Where will I end up? On the road? In Seattle? Duty bound to my own future? To that of all mankind? Although it seems clear now that I won't live to see the difference unless we really get a move on. I think I won't shut up yet. Well, I've made those kinds of lies before, in all sorts of different directions, so don't hold your breath. Damn, I think I got it backwards again, now who's Puck and who's Bottom?

The Blind Side

I'm still operating on West Coast time, I guess. I tried to muster the energy last night at least to watch a rented movie, since I certainly had no energy to write. And I have such a backlog of things I want to write about now, it's almost oppressive.

I started watching the Blind Side, the one with that lovely Sandra Bullock who was recently so blind sided herself.

I want to go on record, before I muster the energy to finish it, that I'd like to know how they salvage the dignity of that big black boy. Especially going up against Precious as the movie does. So far, it looks as though he'll owe it all to Sandra, which would not be what I would call dignified for the character of the big black kid.

Walking back from my welcome-home blood draw this morning, the woman walking in front of me was nearly blind sided by a Buffalo cop who'd sped out from his green light to make a left turn right into her sprightly step. She kept patting her chest in mock collapse and real shock.

I guess the cop was watching his on-board computer, having just come away from that massive conclave of police, fire, and rescue vehicles that I'd wanted to kibitz on along my return walk. No evidence by the time I got there, except for the remark of some other passers by that the  hot dog stand seems to be still open. I can only guess that it was the spot in danger.

We always need to worry around here about businesses disappearing for this or that good reason. On the other side of the spectrum, I was a little bit non-plussed to learn that one of my favorite breakfast haunts has now gone the way of all flesh - but in this case, I mean that they removed all the old kitschy comfortable Formica and Naugahyde to trend in the direction of the suburbanite cool-magnet my neighborhood aspires to. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the other trendy spot which suddenly looks closed. Or the seedy bar now looking like it's being transformed into a restaurant.



Then in the barber shop, right there on the front page of the local section of the News was the report of the grand opening of the new Confucius Institute, which I'd witnessed myself, right off the red-eye, curious to see what I was missing.

Down the page was a report of Wolf Blitzer, revisiting the high school from which he'd graduated where many of my friends and relatives attended. I either never knew that factoid, or I'd forgotten it. I think I knew that he was a UB grad.

Further back in the paper was a report of the death, apparently by pulmonary embolism, of a quite young man who was featured since he'd been the famous victim of a child kidnapping case way back when.

Blind sided then and again just now, by the very thing which might have killed yours truly. Which just goes to show you.

Tonight (in a few minutes actually) I'll attend the welcome back to Buffalo party of some really good friends of my parents' generation. I'm not the kind of guy who merits parties of any sort myself, the accomplishment of my Master's Degree being so much beneath expectation for instance, or my return from anywhere since I'm always gone.

I think you have to instigate these things somehow yourself, or have some significant other to do it for you, like I did for my Master's degreed ex wife. I'm not an instigator. I'm not feeling sorry for myself, I'm just saying. Maybe you have to be social to some significant degree, or moneyed. I should have a housewarming for this apartment before I leave it again.

Most of my time out West was spent messing around with cars, and to tell the truth, I'm kind of pleased with myself.  I pasted back together my daughter's old VW yet again. It wasn't much: fabricating a spring for the gas cap cover, finding a guy to weld the muffler, replacing the brakes for peanuts for my little peanut who'd worn them to naught on Seattle's artificially tamed hills. Just enough to keep the rustbucket moving, and by the time I left she (or is it Bob?) was driving really well. (I learned about Seattle's hills as if by magic when, on the way out of town, I discovered this really cool museum but a short walk from where I was staying!)

While out there I learned that the father of my other daughter's first semester roommate shot himself on Easter day. Talk about a blind side. Since the guy was retired from the NYC police force while still really young, you have to think that there was something in him that was really really hard to talk about. Something the rest of his family was blind to.

In the pile of mail I retrieved from the Post Office when I got back yesterday, along with the census notice and the census reminder notice, there was an entire new stack of notices from the various health insurance companies I'm involved with. Mostly new rejection notices, plus a mandatory notice that I might be eligible (NOT!) for a government subsidy in case I left my job involuntarily. I just don't qualify for much of anything these days. It makes me tired in advance to ponder the calls I'll have to make against all the new health insurance denials.

Some day soon, I promise, I'll write up my observations on this country's wonderful health care system, since I've apparently been on assignment to catch out its shortcomings. I feel like one of those test cases against the tax preparation or computer repair industry, where you purposefully hobble the computer, or pose a relatively complex tax question, just to see what the proportion is of  "correct" responses might be. In the case of tax preparation, you could add in the IRS just for comic relief, since they're not able actually to give you tax prep. advice. Just the facts and the information.

I discover that I have no writing style anymore. As if I ever did. Maybe this is a good thing. Nothing is better than something if the something is only in your imagination, right? It's all uphill from here. Or is it down? In any case, it can't get any worse!! I just hope I don't get blind sided by some new discovery of what it is I lack. Or have too much of. Can't wait to see this house right around the corner from me. It's in a really nice neighborhood. It's almost amazing what you can find right around the corner even though nobody ever told you about it.

Oh yeah, and I have this confession to make. I got myself a laptop out west. Like all laptops on the less expensive than Apple side of things, this one came pre-loaded with Windows as its OS. I'd thought that I was sworn off Windows in favor of Linux. But it seems I'm not. There's something nice about having things just work and not having to think about them, and about having all the details thought out and fully engineered. Even though copyright is only created for the Big Guys. I have to pick my battles anymore. And I got sick of the endless updates. I guess I told you that already. Welcome back!

Californification (sic)

I hate that term - Californication - I feel dirty just to type it, as if the only purpose of California were illicit pleasure. The first time I heard it was as used by the more authentic seeming (to themselves) folks up north on the West Coast; Oregon maybe, in the late '80s.

They used it to describe the process of invasion by the moneyed boorish interlopers from their south. Just now, I was continuing my read of Melville's The Confidence Man on the way down here from Seattle (here is SoCal), which ought to be required reading for every American of whatever state. It puts the lie to anyone's notion of authenticity.

Californians are often envisioned by others to have an absence where culture belongs  - whatever it is that has lead to the big box anti-culture of sprawl which has now gripped us all. They used to make their way up north to stay a step ahead of the California real-estate boom, surfing the economic boom which accompanied it. They brought with them a kind of culture deadening. Some extreme case of the "ugly American" which so embarrassed our brand in Europe. Wiping out any vestige of local roots.

Even though the boom is bust, and Californians can no longer find so many bargains up north of them, it may be that the momentum from those days has shifted our leading edge northward. I'm not in any position to tell, but so far Seattle still seems the cooler spot.

I remember back in about 1975 or so, when I was a bicycle mechanic in New Haven Connecticut during one of my periods AWOL from higher education. There were these Jamaican cyclists showing up around town. They rode track bikes just like they did at home in Jamaica. I get the sense that their motivation was mostly economic, although there might have been a cool factor associated with that economizing drive. You make do with what you have and then you take it to some sort of limit; in this case speed and weight and stark simplicity.

There is something close to joy in tweaking things to their limits, or making something appreciably cool from what might otherwise have been trash. I spent much of my time in Seattle recently struggling for the umpteenth time beyond the point of logical death with "Bob" the 1988 VW rustbucket which my duaghter deploys as "wheels" to get around Seattle. And in the spaces, I was helping her boyfriend with his 1979 Dasher, which, annoyingly for me, had almost no rust at all, although the paint was mostly weathered away.

With my brother-in-law one morning we remarked on the new phenomena of gearless and brakeless bicycles among the avant-garde hipsters of Seattle. Unlike their Jamaican forebears, these bikes have things like yellow tires and radial spokes and radical minimal handlebars. Or maybe that is the authentic style. I can't quite remember. Beyond the edge of too much gear, these bikes make a kind of fashion sense.

These bikes make a kind of common sense on an indoor wooden track, or among Jamaicans without the wherewithal for powered wheels. (The boss at the bike shop used to tell us to watch them closely in case they might sport off with a few stray parts, which I think they often did.)

In Seattle, with all its steep hills, to be without gears or brakes is rather more like spitting into the face of reality. This is the kind of Seattle cool - that striving for authenticity I always make fun of - which is hard not to feel contemptuous toward. Do these guys even have a clue about the Jamaican roots of their strivings? And what is it with Seattle anyhow? Is there no limit so extreme that beyond it you can't find a new one?

I speculated that Seattle is the new West Coast terminus - the jump off point - for the American Protestant work-ethic, where to buckle down to hard work and to deny pleasure was a way to earn God's grace, which would be displayed ostentatiously by your outward signs of demure style. This is the New England recititude displayed by striving after Talbots style, which is so utterly non-Seattle. It descends, at worst, into a kind of peri-dinner drunkenness, even while it might still appreciate the true decadence of its artists.

On the Left coast, up North, this America falls off the cliff. There's a kind of confusion of escape from Protestant rectitude and Catholic guilt both, to where there is pride in grunge and shame about all that money. This inverts the core American value structure, even while it has defined the new economy, You know, the one just now so recently past.

But Seattle feels familiar to a Buffalo boy. Most people there are escaping something like Buffalo, where lots of people, if they can survive economically at all, are carrying on the family business, or shepherding the family legacy, abstracted to whatever it is that wealth can still accomplish in a city like Buffalo; something which would require actual talent elsewhere in the country. (This is not meant to be a slam at the Buffalo successful, although the city is pretty well sewn up among the people already in power. Buffalonians blame the political class, but that, I believe, is merely a synechodocal error, if I can be allowed to coin a term. They mistake the part as separate and distinct from the whole.)

California, on the other hand, feels almost entirely alien. This is where, I think, all those disruptive powers against culture, civilization, classic syle, and certainly rectitude, found their origins. There is familiarity in that, but only of a negative sort. Folks here found their success and then turned it back on the country just a half-beat earlier than did Seattle. This was back when authenticity meant riding a wave, literally, and style was breakthrough, not break-away. Hollywood decadence has morphed into web grease monkeys.

So here I sit, in Claremont, smelling the orange and eucalyptus trees and other unknown spring blossoms, and hardly even bothered by ubiquitous automobiles. Having wandered these pristine streets as their only stroller, nodding to the Mexicans perfecting lawns and ornamental plantings, I'm fatigued now.

I write on a new and very little laptop. It cost a small enough fraction of my travel expenses, and the trash-picked one I normally use finally got too wonky with it's display. Plus it weighs enough to equal all the rest of my luggage. In my laziness, and to my surprise, I've left the Windows this new one came with entirely alone. Linux had become too intrusive to my life. Too many updates, too much research to accomplish simple tweaks.

This is not a betrayal of the Open Source ethos, just a recognition that the Operating System needs to recede farther into the background already. I don't care for it and I don't care about it. Fact is that Windows is what most of the stuff you can download runs best on, simply because that's what most people still run.

Google's ethos is all Open Source, but they must be pretty confident that the developers on their payroll will be the ones to carry the momentum forward. The difference between Open Source and proprietary is just a small matter of where the line gets drawn between the ones inside the tent and the ones on the outside.

What is it that allowed Windows to thrive when Apple languished in a ghetto of too-cool for business? There are lots of stories and theories out there, but the one which sticks with me is that windows drew the line at hardware. All sorts of garage artists could tweak their machines, and all sorts of tweaks got incorporated into the business products. There was no barrier at all to developing apps, the way that Apple still insists on.

The Linux guys are still too fascinated by the operating system and what it might facilitate. They've forgotten their own trivial core. Google gets this with their Chrome OS and its presumption that all the interesting apps will be developed for and delivered on the Internet. Things you do via computers will rely on a browser in almost precisely the same fashion that Windows apps once relied on an operating system.

Around here in Claremont where no-one walks, there are quite a few moving shrines to the automobile. How much easier must it be to preserve these cars in absence of road salt!! Just as the sidewalks are only heaved by tree roots and can look new forever. Just as the Mexicans feel privileged to be working on these lawns, small enough to hardly break a sweat. Just as the paint stays on forever.

Apple and Microsoft both must leave behind their fetishes just as these old cars are no longer any good for the newer sprawling lifestyles. The device will itself disappear, beneath an expectation that it will simply work, by touch and voice and intuitive feel, delivering whatever becomes available in ways to defy designer limitations.

But there is one prognostication I must differ with entirely. The word is that television is what will become ubiquitous. Projected images and perhaps voice, because we are too constrained by the lethargic written word. It's not fast enough, not rich enough, not somehow fully enough exploitative of the power of digital reality.

But images all require their contexts in order to remain meaningful. They are as fleeting as a friend's face to a stranger. While the written word is the permanent embodiment of that which makes us human. It informs. It translates over time.

So, I'm happy with my little laptop with full sized and responsive keyboard. Everything's moving in the right direction. Not there yet. But moving, surely, pleasantly, with aroma of spring blossoms mixed with car exhaust.

Will the Authentic Seattle Please Stand Up?

Puzzling authenticity is really fun and challenging in Seattle. Everything is all about authenticity here, and it can  be really really hard to tell the posers from the real. Having walked all over Buffalo recently, the city I grew up around, I understand that walking is the only way really to get to know a place. It also happens to be the only real side benefit to pulmonary emboli since it seems that one must do something to get ones breath back, and walking fits the bill.

So, if I can discover a new Buffalo just by walking through the city I know best, it would seem that I could also discover a new Seattle, a city I know reasonably well, but not so well as I do Buffalo. Still, who are the authentic ones? Is it the fine guitartist with a nice and mellow deep voice at the Public Market whose face and clothes and distended belly prove that he sleeps on the street although he has CDs of his music for sale? Is it the pair of Native Americans sitting on the dock down at water level, sharing a simple meal of bread and polished apples? Is it me gawking at the Tesla Roadster which runs faster on laptop batteries than a Ferrari can on elaborate fuel injection, welcomed warmly to a city where no-one can tell who's got the money?

It can seem as though everyone in Seattle is striving mightily to become that "it" self; the one you get by driving the vintage Mini Cooper instead of the new one everyone else drives. The one you get by unfurling the sails on your wooden boat just at the solstice while everyone else is strolling in the unaccustomed sunshine. The one perhaps who throws the fish instead of merely buying it or snapping its picture. The one who understands that the best fish cannot be had from that particular tourist market in the first place.

Yesterday happened to be the day when admissions letters would go out from the Northwest School, one of several to which anxious parents submit their child's application with far more raw desire invested than you or I might have for shiny new toys of either child or adult variety. I had discovered two things the evening before; that a former student of mine is the Upper School director there, and that my niece had applied. Or rather my sister had applied my niece.

I knew neither of these things ahead of time and so could invest no guilt to my dear sister's all-in-good-jest complaint about missed connections. But as my daughter's boyfriend would be subbing at the school that day, it seemed a reasonable thing to do to walk there just in case I might be able to scare up my former student who I'd last seen when he was well beneath adulthood.

As I arrived still near the beginning of my perhaps 10 mile cicumnavigation of the city, the students had all poured out into the streets for a fire drill, and there was Ben looking very much in charge. We eventually had lunch together and I got the very insiders look at the school, and a take on its history with which I was already acquainted, because we had, the school and I, shared some history about the wars of transition from founding to continuing energy way way back in the day. This can be a problem for schools, as for most anything about life.

Does this count to make me a kind of "it" Seattlelite?? I hardly think so. But it surely does count as authentically random, unpredictable and somehow raw. Maybe? I really don't know.

I do think that there is something important to be discovered by hanging back from too much control. By staying open to what might come along in the course of simply being alert. I think that there may even be something to be said for hanging back from too much investment in authenticity. My own daughter never had as a choice a school so fine as the Northwest School, and yet I can find nothing deficient in her, or even in the potential she still might realize to change the world for the better. Or was it always and only about what she might accomplish for herself?

Among other things, I have been puzzling what to do about a chopstick my daughter's boyfriend and I managed to drop down into the oil pan of an engine whose blown head gasket we have been working to replace. I'd thought that the chopstick might do as a guide to place the cylinder head, but somehow it went down the wrong and bottomless hole. In the act of retrieval, I got to watch it disappear very much like the way in which cinematic drama might capture the feeling of losing your friend to the abyss when your grip on his hand fails.

This particular car - a VW of course - requires some significant disassembly before its oil pan can be removed. There are time constraints. There are tool and equipment constraints. Of course there are massive money constraints. The full drama has yet to unfold. I wonder - I really do - how it will end. I wonder if the chopstick also will force the proper cleaning out of the oilpan, the accomplishment of which will add that much new life to this old car. I wonder, honestly, how I can accomplish the blood draw which my doctor requires of me in a medical and insurance nightmare whose plot can only be the most absurdist comedy I have ever even imagined.

Stay tuned.

* * * 

So, OK, as if I'd willed it, March madness produces health care reform. I am as obscenely gleeful about this as are those basketball fans waving towels and shouting to break their vocal apparatus. If it wouldn't be unseemly, I would paint my face Obama warpaint colors, as someone along my walk did his garage door. I would shout it out on streets as so many were doing along the way to pick up our pizza at Fat Mama's up on Capital Hill. This is not an insignificant accomplishment.

This morning, I removed Bob's wheel - that's the other VW which belongs in the junk yard - and found that indeed his brake pads were down to the metal core, and tossing shiny flakes all over get-out. But the cost to replace these is still below the cost to rent a car for a day. Chris is rounding up the tools and parts to put the other VW back together. The sun is coming out.

No matter how much I feel akin to the folks out here, who are multicolored among their friends and even among the hypertalented children they adopt, I still find myself offended by the hyperachieving. It still feels an indictment on everyone else who isn't quite so great either in reality or aspiration. It still feels like a species of racism, although clearly it's not racism. But it is exclusivity, and even though these kids will likely be the ones to "save the world" which they actually are already doing by break-dancing for Haiti (you have to pause to parse that statement, consider what break dancing is, and where it got its start, and the fact that there are expensive schools here to teach it).

I still want somehow to howl, and scream and exclaim that we can do better than this. That it really isn't necessary to be that elaborate in the preparation of your mind or body. That there is something to be said for normalcy, for spaces filled with nothing more than absurd laughter.

Well, I'll keep you posted as and if I figure any of this stuff out. I'm sure your breath is 'bated. My daughter took me on the underground Seattle tour on Sunday. Her boss had given her a couple of tickets as a Christmas present, although the major domo of the tour still required that we sign our names, and give him our phone numbers, and those of my daughter's boss. He wouldn't say these gift cards had been forged. Something about being given away too freely. But I don't think her boss is that cheap.

The tour was great, in a touristy kind of way. There wasn't much to see, well, except for the genetic uderpinnings of Seattle. The building too fast in a sandy bottom, where incoming tide would cause the newly invented flush crappers to spout their contents which had been meant to go out to sea. Where a fire required rebuilding in stone what had gone up in wood, and where the merchants were too impatient to await the city fathers' plan to fill in the low ground. Where the architecture sits half submerged, and you must enter the spots where the whores used to await you, before the stone, before the fire, through an upstairs window, now at street level, now overcrowded by tourists. The Elliot Bay bookstore, anchor to the Pioneer Square district, will be moving up to Capital Hill. Perhaps Buffalo's fortunes and those of Seattle are more closely aligned than these folks could ever guess. The trajectory is trending down, just like my clotting factors.

Fallen ladies all, with fine aspirations for their offspring. Good day!

Go West Old Man

You won't recognize me. For one thing, I'm on borrowed computer, which has one of those updated curvy keyboards, which techies like me hate simply becuase we are trained to move from keyboard to keyboard and therefore different slows us down. (which also means, if you are a careful reader, that I am really quite indifferent to and about styles of device. I raise the level of generality to "pointing device" and could almost care less about mouse or trackpad or touchpad or ball, although keyboard is a bit more personal).

For another, I'm in Seattle, which I really shouldn't say, since my identity is all over the Internet now, and therefore like someone at a family funeral, I might be preyed upon by watchers of the press, who know an absentee resident when they see one. You know, those predators who read the obits and schedule their burglary during the bereavement making a double whammy for the sufferers.

Speaking of which, I have to resurrect this ancient VW, "Bob", which my duaghter out here has been driving, and which is way beyond her (sorry) last legs, just so's I have some wheels. I was going to drive out, but even I'm not quite that crazy, especially what with excess clotting factors, although for the moment I remain artificially blue-blooded. Speaking of [last] legs.

I've been meaning for a while now to blog about this Chinese heartthrob adverted on the front page of the New York Times. A blogger and novelist and racecar driver, who is likely the most widely read author of all times, simply becuase he has three hundred million (!!!!) daily readers of his blog, nevermind his novels, which might get read for the same reason Angelina Jolie gets watched, regardless of her acting abilities, which, I am certain, are prodigious.

It seems this fellow has become a little cheeky with his commentary about the Chinese government, and he takes it in stride when they remove his more edgy blog postings without so much as a nevermind (we all know who "they" are). But there's a long tradition in China of writers outwitting censors, which, oddly, places this fellow right in the mainstream literary traditions of China and not quite off in some pulpy ghetto where you'd think he belonged (I'm actually enjoying enhanced speed now on this curvy keyboard, only ever having tried them while troubleshooting computers - which is only a pain - and never actually to write with).

Government censors, rather like IRS agents or the FBI agents who did Senator McCarthy's bidding back in the days of HUAC, are known to be rather humorless, which must mean literal, in the discharge of their duties. And so, there's an almost implied invitation to toy with their sensibilities.

Plus, the government now is between a rock star and a hard place, don't you think? As with Google's practice of alerting readers to the fact of redaction, folks - Chinese folks - are thereby alerted to what their government is doing on their behalf. For the moment they seem a little bit more peeved with Google for being American and un-Chinese, and are therefore offended in their patriotism, but be patient and they will come around.

Now this Chinese blogger probably has a habit, much as I do, of writing each and every day. So any lacunae (to make a veiled reference to this truly excellent novel I am now reading on my Kindle (tm)) would be obvious to his loyal readers, which just gives him that much more opportunity to toy in and with the stuff they won't delete because they will be witless to do so. Literalists are always looking to protect their own asses, which generally means to jump all over you when you deviate from the norm. Maybe you get the joke here?

I've already had a few check-up calls about my absense, so I know I'm cared for. We'll see what the burglar literalists think, although I can assure them that I own nothing of value, having given away all the good stuff (which I simply no longer fit into). My electronics are positvely primitive, so don't bother. (actually, I do intensely dislike this wireless mouse, because the pointer is simply too jumpy)

My doctor just called to tweak my rat poison dosage, feeling embarrassed that it was as early as it is here on the Left Coast, although I assured him I've already been up for hours, but see, I am actually well cared for, no matter what I say about the Military-industrial health care/insurance complex.

So, here are a couple of things about which I intensely disagree with our fearless leader. And, honest, I absolutely adore the guy, especially because he has a tendancy not to use fear as a tool for manipulation of the public. But sometimes he skates close, as in the case of healthcare and education.

He is dead wrong about education, but as of today, it does seem as though he might actually have a plan to co-opt Republicans at their own game. He's taking some of the negative momentum among educators toward No Child Left Behind, and using it to gain Republican support for real and meaningful reform. The guy just mgiht be a jiu-jitsu master.

On the healthcare front, I tend to be a bit more dubious. I just don't buy the idea that the insurance companies are precisely evil. After all, if life is "priceless" and you deserve the same extraordinary measures toward the end of your life that you do at its early stages, even someone as clueless as me about economics can see that there is a genuinely insoluble problem. Lots of people will be worth more to the medical complex near death, just in terms of transfers of wealth out of the insurance industry coffers and into the healtcare industry coffers, than they were ever worth over the course of their entire working lives. The math for this simply can't work.

We can throw up examples of dishonest doctors and profiteering insurers, but really they're just the same as the rest of us, afraid to lose their jobs. Doing the bidding therefore of The Man (whoever the hell the man is, although I think he might be anybody really really high up and therefore, by definition, detached from the reality of the rest of us). Doesn't anybody else see that these two forces are aligned against not only each other, but against the masses of us, harnessing as they can and must, our fear of death and dying?

That very same thing used against us so effectively by true believers in some Allah or other. Since they have none - no fear of dying.

I, for my part, intend to take reasonable precautions, so long as they don't feed The Beast (whoever the hell the Beast is, although I think he might have something to do with literalist thinking which is therefore detached from reality, by definition). I'm a little bit sketchy when it comes to the conflict between drugs which insult the liver, and alcohol, which does so also. Take Lipitor, for instance. No, you take Lipitor.

But I might be an actual and genuine case for it. Or I might not be. It's really hard to know. OK, gotta go back to reading that other great novel. This one, Melville's The Confidence Man I've managed to "download" onto my phone for free. I'm so freaking ethereal it's not even funny. Not to mention all the lacunae in my understandings . . .

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!

Paintball Justice

I'm drawing my line in the sand right here. I heard just now about how in Iran when the people come out to protest, the police are shooting them with paintguns - marking them to be dealt with later. How diabolically clever is that?

This is even better than smartbombs. Better than teargas by far. Better than surveillance cameras, against which people can wear disguises. No one is hurt, and it might almost be confused with fun if it were done in this country. Hell in 1984, the fictional version, they didn't even have to bother with real wars, when the pretend ones could have the same effect.

We all already knew that anonymity is impossible anymore, no matter what we used to think about how a dog can be a dog on the Internet. But if our government condones this as a crowd control method, then we're fucked, and I use that term advisedly. Or unadvisedly, so take your choice.

We already know that they can make us standout by searching our phone calls and emails for particular words or patterns of speech. But we also know that speech doesn't prove anything.

We know that they might selectively arrest people according to their background checks, putting away activists for twittering crowd avoidance methods, say, but we hope they won't shut off twitter the way they did in Iran.

Put all these things together, though, and now you've got real problems with civil liberties. And it could be the teaparty activists as readily as the antiwar activists (if there were any anymore, or is that just a media preference? Or a venue preference - try imagining anti-war protesters at Opryland.). But one hopes that if the police in this country were to be ordered to shoot with paintguns, there would be a suit and they would lose. But who can tell with this supreme court?

And you do have to wonder what's the difference between picking, based on speech, who to follow at the protests, and picking them out in your paintball sights. The intimidation factor is about identical.

So, why, exactly, aren't the teabaggers concerned? And why is everyone else staying home?

I guess the teabaggers are the ones feeling screwed while the rest of us, frogs in a slowly heating pot, are rationalizing away all the little things. Or maybe it's a media spotlight thing. Or maybe they've already made it clear how outraged they would be, and so shooting them with paintballs would just prove their point. That they're the victims and everyone in the government is out to get them. I guess they might want to be shot with paintballs. Do you?

Maybe they're just more used to guns. Oh hell, I don't know, maybe they're just too stupid to think about civil liberties, but I do know that if we assume that and act like we think they're stupid, then they've won because, well, that's what they were complaining about in the first place.

Something to think about . . .

The One That Got Away

So this morning on the way in to Buffalo, I stopped at this ridiculously popular five and dime - even still so called. I wanted some birthday baubles for my daughter who will become an adult (!!) tomorrow.  There was the owner, namesake of the store, gamely cashing people out. He must be several generations on. The floors are still oiled wood, which creaks and slopes and smells right.

This is also the town where another five and dime family got its start, long since moved on to more imperial wealth I think. One son was a classmate of mine in college - I met him once and was too put off by the class divide to act other than an idiot. It would have been different if he weren't from my hometown, having his name all over it.

Of course this store reminded me today of that visit on my motorcycle to WalMart's home town, and a similar old man there who charmed me with his old-timer's wit. These days most shoppers visit old time stores with ironical intent, or to entertain the kids. And the store well knows its niche, stocking old-style shelves with toys we baby boomers might have played with as kids when to grandmother's house we went, plus all the goofy stuff you might buy on a whim when you see it. That's why I was there.

I had already found a Sponge-Bob lunchbox, when I went to check out a birthday card. A quick repartee ensued about taking my lunch to work, the economy, who knows where we're going, then sudden agreement that of course we all know where we're going (down the drain). But then all talking has to stop, because you're not quite sure that you'll agree about the causes. The elderly clerk offered "greed". 

I could readily agree with that and countered about the size of the void some people have to fill, and how it might be approximately the size of the growing bailout (well, I think that might be tautology, right there).

And we chatted about how stores should go back to what they used to be - grocery stores selling groceries, and drug stores selling drugs, and clothing stores on the corner with what you really need (she'd gone to four stores before finding a simple raincoat - it's thaw time hereabouts). 

Talk inevitably turned to Walmart, but both of us instantly knew a hot topic when we hit one. This small town is unique for having successfully turned them away. But she talked up the place, and was proud that she goes there all the time. It's the only place she finds things. And of course, it's cheap. (I might have looked like one of those metro types who used her old town as a suburb, but she stayed friendly enough)

The irony of it all was right on the counter between us, so we smiled broadly at each other, and laughed to turn some heads. I was so happy, the postman greeted me as we passed each other on the sidewalk! (They must train them around these still cobbled streets to recall some better days - "Hello Sir!" he said. Sir??) Well, I took it, as they say, in good stride.

I'd had in mind all the drive here (it's a good two hours) a theme I wanted to tackle now. It seems that over most of my adult life, often while driving, I have these brilliant thoughts for a novel, say, or an angle to something I've been trying to figure out how to say. I take copious mental notes, often having considered buying some recording device, so that I can take thoughts down without crashing. 

Some times I can hold the idea for a few days. Never do I have the time or energy to write. And then it disappears. So you, gentle reader, will never have the opportunity to read the one that got away, though, I'm serious now, it was really awesome! I'm talking freaking brilliant!

(well, I tried once and got quickly shot down by a schoomarmish friend, who noticed things lacking in my writing which you too will likely find)

Today, though, I had in mind this equation - and it must have conditioned my chat - between the mysterious black hole in the financial economy and the gap I've written about between the cost of, say, a Nike shoe and its actual labor content. I don't know enough to be a Marxist, so I'm not claiming that the labor content is all that should count, but I still do think it's fair to claim that the gap consists of want. It's what get called, perversely, "good will" on the books of larger companies when they get valued so much more than their capital equipment and inventory. 

I guess it's what General Motors lacks right now, and can even go negative to where the company magically is valued less than even the firesale value of its equipment and inventory. (Don't you just wish some Silicon Valley whiz would buy it all up and start making smart cars and trains? We retooled fast enough during the real war. Why not during one of these metaphorical wars we keep having???)

Brand value. Logo meaning. I think it's what this old time store clerk meant by greed. It's what gets collected to make some people grotesquely rich. The beauty factor in a movie star? The steroidal prowess of an athlete. But also the shared meaning of "refresh" when you're drinking Pepsi (or is it Coke?). 

She meant of course the shysters, still politically incorrectly so called. The ones on Wall Street and in the banks who simply cannot get enough. Whose hearts are cold and broadcloth fine. But why not all the rest? I guess there's valid wealth and then there's greed. But how come no-one makes the WalMart connection?

She pointed out how well WalMart's doing in this crashing stock market, as have I. I started the line about "yeah, like a cancer which is about to die from killing off its host . . . " but she wasn't following, thank goodness. 

I'm pretty sure we can all agree that it's "goodwill" which up and vanished. And then beyond, even durable goods no longer have any certain value. Not even counting the stuff from China which never did have any.

I'm not sure what the route can be back to some better ecology. Where jobs pay livings and goods are made, cleanly, nearby. I do remember the local hardware store of my youth, still somehow hanging on, where I could bicycle to get everything I ever needed for my projects. Those clerks had families, and wives who stayed at home, and knew us all by name.

Well, OK, I do know the route, but I don't quite know for sure how to get enough people moving in that direction. This right here might be the best that I can do.

Now on the way in to the store, while parking, I was listening to Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, who seem almost always to get me to crack a smile and laugh, which is tough to do when I'm all alone. They were talking with some charming girl named "Leah", who'd escaped back to Seattle from college down East. This girl was youthfully full of all the proper stereotypes about uptight Easterners, where everything has to be done just so, as it has been for hundreds of years.

I guess she meant the traditions at Mt. Holyoke, the college she'd escaped. But to call anything in these United States full set might seem just a bit silly to someone from almost anywhere else in the world. Still the Left Coast is laid back and open, and willing to experiment. Click and Clack were the perfect shills for her ravings, happy to make fun of themselves right along with the fruitcakes out West.

I think she missed the Puritan connection, and Congregational propriety. It's not old age makes us this way, so much as early upbringing.

I've been thinking of moving to Seattle after my daughter's graduation. Everyone I know in Buffalo, it seems, works for his father, and has a pretty beer-oriented sense of what's new and possible. A newage silicon valley type scheme back here gets hit pretty quickly with a lot of cold water.  There's rapid fire recitation of why it can't work - it's finding myself doing it that makes me want to get away.

Though I do guess that Seattle, like everywhere else, is just chock full of refugees from here. That all that's laid back and open is just so much failure to launch at home, and a refusal to grow up. (Sour grapes have never tasted so sweet)

But still and all Buffalo has this perfect setting. There's water and plenty of power from the Falls. We're the continent's natural transportation hub, and once had the world's largest railroad switchyard, just after the Canal opened the West. Until the fateful Interstates got built, and the St. Lawrence Seaway bypassed our fine port.  Now there are only a few left of those unique cement grain elevators, which once crowded the harbor. Dad and I canoed through them down the Buffalo River a while back. Like a table set in the house of a dead person, they look as though they were in use only yesterday, though it was so much longer ago than that.

Buffalo too is the one that got away, and, like perhaps every Buffalonian, I've puzzled about what to do with the regret. That the University got built in a flatland swamp, instead of becoming the vitalizer of downtown. That the highway got built right into town, dividing color and class and neighborhood, seemingly forever. That political gridlock seems to guarantee only mediocre eyesores get funded. That backward looking bluebloods lock up all innovation.

But hey, I think I've found it! I'm writing now, at age oh-my-God, and it doesn't seem too late to start. When sprawl retracts, as it surely must, our infrastructure is all ready. There's power, and for trains, still, a natural transit hub. There's wind and water, and all four seasons, and an arts community that will not die.

OK, I still may move to Seattle. I need some people to encourage me too. But I may not. This town has got some promise!

Skillful or not, this writing provides some outlet now for whatever'd been pent up. I think that defined some dullness. Some depression. Some schoolmarmish scolding not to try that. I doubt I'll be able to bring the West back East, but I'd say don't count us out quite yet. After all, we're more grown up than you (though way more politically ingrown). 

Aw, throw the bums out. Let's roll out a barrell and change the system. I don't think there will be a better chance.