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 . . .

Settling

That's the thing I'm very not. Or very un. Settled. Nor do I settle. Which makes me a problem, to myself mostly. I'm one of those prosecute to the finish kind of guys. Which is an odd thing for a mild mannered person to be. Although I do laugh in the face of adversity, not to mention wild storms on Lake Erie, which are reputedly that much worse than on the seas. How would I know?

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, there is medication to turn me from a thick blooded survivor of slings and arrows of outrageous fortune [really really sic] to a blue blooded bleeder. I shall remain on it for a sentence nearly as long as the ones I write. At least life is terminable, and that's a blessing.

I remain amazed, as the crocuses rear their blooms, and as I am reminded that love stirs even among those looking back on themselves rather than forward, at how few people do seem amazed at the conspiracy screens large and small, to put us all in the same mind at the same time, and who still believe that nothing but harm will come of this. Nothing but the Glenn Beck show of impotence and hurt and rage against the machine.

I am amazed that people still do seem to fear Sarah Palin as Adolf Hitler redux, as though nothing else has changed in this so recently passed meantime. That so few of us realize our potency as one. Among a million talking heads. Blogging fools.

This was always to be the end of the long Greek tragedy, where the audience is the mind of the playwright, and the stage is its enactment. The audience now as large and as unified as ever could be, possibly, imagined. Metaphor also must end someday, although more's the pity in the mind. That was and has been the Christian promise.

Saint Patrick's Day, then Easter, if I have my calendar straight. Too bad I won't be drinking. Sing God Damn! I'll be out of town for the good parts, and that's the better part of valor right there. Following a nice send-off party just ahead of the Big Day (St. Patty's silly! It's not for me, I'm just taking advantage, as always, of the bachelor excuse against pot luck) having a cast of hundreds, none aware of my presence. Not the me with name who has plenty of good and close friends, the me up here, talking with you, the non-existent one.

Send in the clowns, the replacement figure, for comic relief, borrowed this time from Chinese, where the stage never did stand in as focal point for mind's attention. Where the meaning never was displaced, metaphorically, outside its embodiment. Where poetry remained imminent, at the heart of the matter, with surface writings all that ever could be noticed or remarked. This kind allows for perpetual something; life lived beyond the local settlements.

Such a busy day ahead of me today. I'm off!

Back in the Hermitage, making my move . . .

It's taken me a couple of days to recover from the aloneness I felt after wandering over, Sunday, to the St. Patrick's day parade. It smelled as though they had washed the streets in beer! Everyone was jolly and happy in the Sunny chill. I hear it's one of the largest - It took me a full two hours to walk against its grain.

Now, I'm back alone, calmer and happier. Considering next moves. I have no doubt about this moment in history, writ large, but I do have to accept that it's really only a moment in my own personal history. I get no more traction that I did 26 years ago with what I write. I guess it's what those sandwich board guys must have felt along the parade route. "For God so Loved the World . . . " I wonder if even the born-agains walk up and chat the Word with them, or if they are like that political guy on the corner whose eye you can't even catch?

You're not sure if he's bonkers, and his survival technique is all soap-box removed. The Jesus guys are earnest in their reachings out, but who really cares what they have to say? What would be the spark to make it new, other than something that happened, inwardly, to you?

It must be a game of odds. In any crowd, there must be those on the brink of awful revelation. You just want to be there in their face when it comes along, to provide the miracle of awakening. I think it must be a common enough occurrence. It must be how people get saved.

Like falling in love, whose odds can be improved by "going on" Match.com. I wonder where the magic could be, though, when you force it along so. Likely, it was just watching people grabbing each others asses which made me so alone in the crowd. Evicted from that garden, as a superannuated Leonard Cohen might say. Does say.

(They told me on eHarmony that I could not be matched. So it's all just sour grapes from me!)

Here is what I'm certain of, enumerated for your simple and brief perusal:

• That my conscious self is microcosm, near if not precisely identical in complexity to the entire physical unliving cosmos, and very dim in relation to the living one I'm embedded in.
• That my own human brightness dims along with every disappeared species, when richness is lost and not, by evolutionary magic, restored in the direction all life has always moved.
• That consciousness incorporates emotion as a sense of something actually real and not "just" subjective. Call it our sixth sense, a very small part of which is what we know as human feeling. 
• That writing develops human consciousness, as much as it can mask and destroy that "sixth sense" which once actually did "know" God in person. Rigid Words present a false replacement for God, very like sex for love ironically enough. Earnest writing develops consciousness by binding minds together.
• That a unitary God presented us, in history, with a direction toward systematic understanding, paradoxically both to banish direct sixth sense direct knowledge, and to approach conscious understanding, as demonstrated by mastery of our environment.
• That this challenge to God is only as inevitable as our technological "advances", no more and no less. There might be infinitely many other possible stories, but, just like planet earth, this is the one we've got.
• That technological advances have reached their absolute limit in their contribution toward expanded consciousness (it's the body aspsect of mind alone which gains strength, as virtual reality dims the mind for writing).
• That there have been only a few signal transitions in our history on the planet, and that these few are the only genuine, so called, Paradigm Shifts.
• First was the written word, with Christ and other spiritually awakened persons showing up early, at the crossroads out from dim story telling in contact with spiritual reality.
• Next was the development of the printing press, and movable type in China and in the West. This dethroned the priests (well, at least that process got started), and signalled the start of narrative production as the main form of vulgar literature.
• Finally, there has been an encounter with the elemental power of our understanding of the physical universe. We have only unleashed its destructive power, in the form of Atomic Bombs, and killer waste.
• Part and parcel of this past century's bloody advancement has been the next phase of the Gutenberg expansion of consciousness - but this time it's vulgar publishing and not just reading that's been loosed upon the world.
• Getting here has cost the gift of oil, life's legacy to Consciousness on Earth.
• Nuclear fusion energy, which I guess is quite possible to harness, will spell our end in plastic Disney incarnation upon a man-formed planet, which our consciouness as microcosm can represent only by a single syllable.
• Ommmmm

OK, so you've figured out that I'm not a big meditation as a way toward enlightenment freak. I've started down that road too, and like all talented people, it doesn't take that long to recognize a road to nowhere. I'm not a big Jesus-is-the-answer freak. I'm certainly not a big technology will explode shortly and solve all of our problems freak.

I am a freak, for sure. But Hello! Wake Up! It's not all about who has access to how to build a bomb. There is a next step to those equations, when we recognize - I think it is a simple recognition - that the boundary between our mind and what's "out there" is no more firm and solid than the one between species. It's fluid and evolving, always and only in the liminal regions. Along the boundaries. In the muck between ocean and land. Along the equator, up in the trees, on the slender surface of earth mixed with air.

In the mind, skating along the boundaries of sense, informed by what's been written, and by what's happening right here before me, womb with a view. I guess I'm about to turn it off, the view part into my womb. This medium here I'm typing on, shows films which talk back. I'm not sure when I've ever preferred the film version. It doesn't quicken right.

They can be ugly, these vulgar internet vids, like the ones, extremely well produced, which skewer Obama for not being enough different from Bush. Talk about back-handed compliments, as though the world could be turned on a dime, you complain when it hasn't been? Reminds me of the dreary life of a techie. Yes, we do have magic wands, but that's not how they work. The interactions are not even, in principle, understandable beyond a certain complexity. Gut instinct is as valuable as to RTFM. (Read the Fucking Manual).

I think right now, there are far too many words. Most of them, the Lonely Girl, searching for sponsorship by the Networks. I drown among them. It's not worth the effort. This game too has been rigged. Fuck you, you can't even read. Or won't.

(disclaimer - I'll probably be back tomorrow)

Happy St. Patty's Day!

A day or two early, and before the parade, but I did make it out to a nice party last night. Ah Guinness! These are people I only see this once a year, so it makes a nice reality check. I had no chance to tell them all where I was last year and why I didn't make it. But it surely is good to come down to earth and check in with what people more real than me are thinking about these days.

I was truly amazed to hear that houses in the funkier part of Buffalo are being bid up in an economy where real estate value's meltdown is what started this scary tumble. We're all praising God now that we never did take part in that orgy then. Rusted out and the opposite of buff, most all of us.

Folks at the party still talked the same about their kids and projects and excitements with their work. No change as far as I could tell even in this cataclysmic eonomy, among these people that I have known since I was an infant.

Sure, there was one fellow still hanging on at the Ford plant. His tales of HR with boxes, accompanied by security personnel without warning coming at you, and memos from Central Office about "how to deal with difficult social situations (hide under your desk!)" made me think of Nazi death camps. I just can't imagine it has to be this way. So little humanity in the letting go. I guess, as with individuals going off everywhere, there's just too much at risk.

But there might be some waking up - I said might be - to the reality that these really big corporations actually now do stifle innovation more than stimulate it. I'm thinking Microsoft, of course, as an IT guy, but also General Motors, Ford, surely Verizon, Google, and Amazon.com.  I know those last few might surprise you. But these are hidebound massive organizations whose addiction to ever fatter profit, at that scale, just kills us all.

With the car companies, it's easy to see how the logic of short term gain required that they sell more Hummers and light trucks for so long as people craved them, and thus seal their own fate when viewed from the brilliant remove of retrospection. GM killed off it's electric car research, run right near me, where cute little silent cars would stream out at the end of the work day. Even oil companies can't seem to spare any margins for real innovation.

With Microsoft, the editorial Internet is overfull of how many great startups were subsumed into what at best was Microsoft's ecology, but at worst was a giant beast of ownership control and bloat to encourage a bubble of hardware development on the prodding of endless software complexity. Power to the desktop powered most the holder of the patent. As at the beginning with Pennsylvania, it'll take another Franklin to usher in the right rebellion, with publishing still the key.

Now one might expect that this bubble is, like the real estate market, nearly popped. It's easy enough for me to imagine appliances, like Google's Chrome, riding simply on a hypervisor shim. I don't need no stinking OS! And the hardware is just a slight expansion of my smartphone, relegating all the power to data centers "in the cloud". But there's the rub, you'll see!

I suppose that Microsoft can own this back end "cloud", but they seem to be overtaken there by Amazon and Google. Very much like the car companies left with exploding inventories of trucks, Microsoft couldn't help themselves, though their cash position remains infinitely better for now. Still, I'm guessing people are hanging on to their old hardware, in the same way that they are hanging on to their old cars. And clinging to XP for every last ounce that they can get, despite threats to force all Vista and new hardware.

But what then of these cloud companies? Why isn't Google "not evil" and simply just the best? Why shouldn't Verizon reap rewards for its sowing of towers, for so long as I want to talk? What could possibly be wrong with frictionless capitalism on the 'Net?

Folks at the Green (in the other sense) party were  mostly management types, or owners of their own businesses. But many of their parents were union. Almost all were born Catholic, although it was extremely safe there to make fun of nuns and priests.

I do grow tired of complaints as if the unions are even in any slight way to blame for, say, the auto industry's collapse. You get that from the Republican side where there is almost glee for Chapter umteen restructuring, not least to blow away the union contracts and return, say, GM to more supposed efficiency in competition with the Asians. It's that kind of efficiency which is killing off all margins for innovation. Any thought from any worker not in on the take.

I'm pretty sure that the labor component of each new car is nowhere near large enough to define the problem. It's management that's constipated - the union guys will build whatever you tell them to, as efficiently as you like, but you have to be more strategically aligned with what's up in the larger economy.

Like John Stewart who landed so many solid punches, complaining to Jim Cramer about how we were all advised to get into the stock market for the long term, while it now seems that we were only funding the massive orgy of the unregulated short term traders. Their goal might have been to maximize returns for their investors, or did it shift to gaming the system for themselves? In any case, the business of derived derivatives went *pop*, and so much for we trusting schmucks and our planned retirements.

John Stewart's anger was that of his audience too, in this strange inversion where the finance guy, no comic, hams up his show, gonzo style, to keep his audience amused I guess. John Stewart, whose comedy is based on looking staid in the first place (Steven Colbert takes this to its pinnacle accomplishment), and who therefore gets laughs by changing only the shape of his mouth or other simple gestures just slightly out of place for his all knowing and by definition "in on it" audience - John Stewart was the one enraged. He'd become a livid political cartoon, where the best skewering is always accompanied by good laughs.

The inversion was beautiful, as were the landed punches - my own pleasure, as in a boxing arena audience. This sad sack Cramer was simply not going to be allowed into the club of people who actually get the joke, and was forced to remain the fool. With whom no-one could or would identify.

But it wasn't stoning. It wasn't fundamentalist barbaric, at least. It was Madoff going off to jail a little, and being given what every sociopath deserves, finally, to match the absence of any fellow feeling in his soul. Bars and dry stark noisy aloneness. Forever, amen.

So my big celebration, apart from the symbolic space which St. Patrick's day occupies for me (as one bookend, St. Valentine the other, to my youthful de-cocooning), was that my brother in law just had, the day before, been paraded off to prison. His daughter had the clarity of heart to write for the prosecutor a strong narrative of what he'd done to her upon and forever after the occasion of his being ousted from his small fundy pulpit. We all have our excuses.

My sister still must look into his eyes from Lazik magic bionic ones borrowed from God (she really does have such eyes) to see his child-like soul. She stands by him still, but carries on in stoic fashion, to raise his children while Daddy's off in jail. 

There is almost beauty to that, as there is in earnest seeking after remorse from Madoff. How much could he be required to give? And how must those who'd chummed with him, and then given him all their money, now feel about their own true hearts? It's their restraint that's touching.

I will always stive, but hardly ever succeed, to cast no stones. But I am not saddened by some imprisonings. I rejoice in God's grace when it comes, but hope never to make the mistake of seeking soul in emptiness. Finding truth in hollow words.

There is something human in loving your daughter before your Man. And something therefore even above God, who can be left to love those other souls, forsaken, lost and gone to humanity. His Love is something any longer not to strive for in ourselves, because it is that much too far above.

But here, on earth, right now, there is some quickening afoot. Could be in time for Easter? Where consciousness comes alive to its "sixth sense". That knowledge of some continuum as if from light to dark, between romantic manic love at the one extreme and stoic cold clear knowledge at the other that what appears so wrong in public might actually be right. Some inner conviction, of the same stuff as that in-love crap which, thankfully, I'm immune to anymore.

There were things known before written words did crowd them out. Yoruba truths. Local truths. These Chinese mappings of accupuncture points along the body which haven't much changed across the history of man's enlightenment. Some herbal medicines, whose choosing is the result more of seeing - illiterate ways of knowing - than of scientific trial and error.

And now we've reached the very Christian extreme of romantic loving, in whose manic thrall we might do anything (oh, how well I know this truth). Or if you're generation Y and above, you might not even be bothered to fall in love for sex, since those boundaries have lost all meaning.It is a loss. But you still do have the rockstar aspirations as proof of your authentic soul's true meaning. It's the same tale, told with different characters is all. There is not fullness at the top, but that you share it out!

Follow your dream. Lance Armstrong your victory, and beat back the sour grapes suspectors of secret doping. True your Cher voice with bionic tone, and stick it to the unplugged unwashed masses who will love and crave you all the more. Beyonce your face to chocolate perfection. But believe, above all, in yourself. Then Google yourself to death.

Well, that right there is my protest. It's not so shrill, and it sure gets very little attention. I'm Last Year's Man. My complaint with Google and Amazon and Verizon and all of them is that no-one should own the "cloud". No one should own the commons. No one should profit from my words, likely not even me. Though I hardly mind if they profit from building it, this commons on which I depend. And I might try for a living from words yet, some day.

Who Owns You, is the title of a book one of my illustrious former students just triumphantly published. I truly can't wait to read it, but I think I might not even have to (there is a copy with my name on it sitting in his Mom's house, I hope and pray). It's about the patenting of DNA. I do trust it's not on the side of the industrialists of soul. That there is some educated horror expressed (this fellow is, unlike me, extremely well credentialled) that life, too, might become an intellectual production, invented as if by God!

Another fellow at the party last night speculated that the true "class wars" will be between the public sector and the private. He had in mind the assault on private wealth that is one take on Stimulation. But mostly the nasty brutish fact that public employees will own all the pensions at the expense of the rest of us without defined benefits. What an amazing realignment! That taking a job as a civil servant could ever be construed as winning some lottery. That these grey souls who never did dare to dream of rockstar heights should be looked on as the winners! That losers might be winners after all.

Sure, the unions need to change. So do blacks need to stop being all angry. So do screwed people everywhere need to search their hearts for forgiveness.  So could our Constitution stand some rewriting.

But after our Common Wealth is secured. After that.

I swear I will be signing off real soon. I know that I promised I would. But I have only this one brief moment before the Commons gets enclosed for good and evermore, and I become net neutered, because the risk to the true Beast is simply far too great.

Here's a toast to the possibility that I'm dead wrong! Happiest of St. Patrick's Day to you, dear reader, and you!