Paying for the Times

Of course you knew it was coming. While all news organizations have been carefully calibrating their strategies to deal with the burgeoning Internet, no organization has been more deliberate and thorough than the New York Times. They have enough cash and clout to have nurtured their "brand" across these long and scary years of freebie access, and now seem confident that they will be able to charge top dollar for web access without losing their spot.

The news comes at the very moment that public broadcasting is being nixed. So recently after the fortunes of public radio were boosted by the need for all of us commuters to be in some kind of reliable touch after the events of 9/11.

Crises have a way of ratcheting up the power of the powerful, while winnowing out the small fry. How many local news outlets will be able to charge a fee for online access now that the news-reading public might have to make budget decisions about how much news they can afford? And who can afford to be without access to reliable and vetted sources of information?

It is possible that the Times has miscalculated, and that their move will boost the power of blogger aggregaters like HuffPo, on the Google model of keyterm auctions to game your profile and free or slave-wage content provision. It's also possible that everything will go the way of Rupert Murdoch, where no holds are ever barred to gain audience share. What you mock on the entertainment side, where the apparently liberal politics of the Simpsons or Glee merge with that strange libertarian Howard Stern schlock humor, is balanced by what makes you angry on the NewsCorp side if you digest the news at all.

As quickly as we have all forgotten how essential the reliable reporting of NPR was during our national disaster, we have also forgotten pandemic fears from SARS or H5N1 (or was it H1N1, or was it avian or was it swine flu)? It all has something to do with China and their horrid public health standards, right? Or is it the fact that they have dismantled their social health network in the same kind of thoughtless imitation of our wild capitalism which has them buying more Buicks now than we do?

It could be that public health requires society-wide approaches to healthcare now more than ever. It could be that flood and earthquake insurance should not be allowed brokerage on the open market, since those companies drag their feet or declare bankruptcy anyhow when the disaster is broad enough. Government political swings almost guarantee moral hazard, even as they insure that only those too big to fail will be protected against failure because the only safe bet is to go as big as you can as fast as you can.

* * *

Microsoft rolls out IE9. At first blush it hangs for me and so I'm back to Chrome. But their Windows Live services start to look and feel and behave with a little bit more slick compared to the hacker feel of Google. Bing has fit and finish, as the Internet turns away again from wildness. I'm having Bigness Blues.

Let's hope the Times will also flesh back out its news rooms and its international bureaus and that it will act in the public interest because that's what the lettered elite who form its main readership will demand. There are distinct advantages to not pandering to the unwashed masses the way that Fox does, albeit in the interests of the same economic ranks those Times elites belong to.

I for one would love for actual leadership to replace the purely moneyed definitions which now seem to have the monopoly on determination of who's elite and who's the hoi polloi. But leadership depends on trust and a servant mentality from the top. Our market structures presume that we should mistrust our leadership, especially now that our leadership is marketed too.

I'll pay for the Times sure, just like I'll pay for PBS. But I do have to say that I'd prefer that we all share the costs. For reasons of our public safety and our public health and our public rhetoric and the relative safety and peacefulness of our public squares, I certainly prefer that we work to decrease rather than to exacerbate the divide in means between the have-it-alls and the have-almost-nothings.

And it doesn't help that we export so much of our grey to China. I look forward to technologies which really do green the entire globe. Which instead of nuclear power-plants, make it attractive for us to mine our extravagant wattage waste in favor of less bloated bodies and homes. But that also will depend on public moneys being drawn away from subsidies to Big Oil and Big Corn and Soy.

It's a worrisome time right now. We're all going to end up paying for these times. That's the only certainty.

On Catholic Autopilot

Richard Dawkins was right that getting brought up Catholic constitutes a kind of child abuse. Rote gets substituted for understanding, so that men can use you for their purposes. Guilt is built up until it feels inborn. You deviate, you cringe. And here in Buffalo, the most Catholic city in the country, it is almost guaranteed that you can't start up something new. The certain response is mockery; a kind of sure, yeah, go ahead and give it a try, but you'll be back working for your dad soon enough. Buffalo is the place were dreams meet reality!

This is how abused people must respond. Free thinking is scary. Around here, good enough really is good enough, and maybe that's how it should be. The more we talk excellence, the more it seems another hail Mary pass for what at best is snow-bound and mediocre. Suicide in Buffalo, after all, is dramatically redundant.

And yet somehow there remain theatrical productions of almost every sort nearly every night of every week no matter what they do in the Big City. My very favorite is having a kind of NPR-style might-go-out-of-business fundraiser tonight, where I hope to see you. Live music and a reading from subversive Santa!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
A Colbert Christmas: Another Christmas Song
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor U.S. Speedskating

Urban farming takes root in Buffalo too - and I even heard about an urban fish farm, taking advantage of the fact of basements, no matter the condition of their wooden cover. Why not, right? Water holds incredible quantities of heat, and can be charged up when everyone else is driving. Sell the fish and pay for the heat! We sure have lots of water.

I'm writing on Catholic autopilot now too. I have a simple mantra, and I can't seem to find any way to say it better, so I just recite it over and over like counting my rosary beads. Eventually, my I is expendable even to myself. That's the trouble with having an agenda. Or the hope.

Without any agenda, in my dreams, I was loved just for my being. That time so long ago now that I can't even project myself there, when I had no sense of shame and no need to perform on any level. Before the zits could make me insecure, such were our worries in the suburbs. Before there was any need for comparison shopping. Before even Mom had hopes for me. I've been beside myself for love, but never could do anyone quite proud enough. I've been oppressed by me.

So, as you know, I've fixated on a spice rack, my agenda for yesterday left over from the day before. I have no room now in my cupboards for all the junk I've mashed into this apartment. I'm too tired to throw any more away. I found some hooks to put coffee mugs outside the tiny cupboards. For those, I had to take a walk into my color-blind spot; the other way in my cognitive map of this post-modern urban landscape. Underneath the rainbow style of my own neighborhood, lurk cool divides which still tend black and white.

My ears were bitten from the driving snow, and I had to drive myself in any case to larger shops farther afield. My car's heater core is as old and clogged as my heart, and as expensive to replace. I became a Tibetan for a day then, on my Xanadu quest to find a spice-rack without resorting to the Internet. My excuse was that I had to stop by to fix my daughter's car, which was too far away to walk. And the subway - not quite on my cognitive map either - passes by no likely spots for spice racks.

Tibetan quests are always the goal they seek, where what you learn along the way provides relief for the vacancy of the goal once accomplished. The nothing after the layers of the onion get peeled. The fact that I could easily have assembled lumber, screws, and paint to build my spice rack before burning all that gas, in a fraction of the time it took to search.

I need more space for food in my cupboards, and I can't see cinnamon from pepper flakes up at eye level behind the rest. Cinnamon tastes really weird on pizza, trust me, and would never make it out of Buffalo like once-garbage chicken wings did.

Driving then, absurdly around cars sidelined by the inevitable bent fenders of first snow, my ears perked up when NPR Science Friday did a radio show on patenting genes. Genetic defectives who need to know whether to lop off their breasts must pay a company which owns that patent to find out if they've got the patented gene.

This is serious business, and people wonder out loud if there's any charity left in the world. Or if the only way there is to harness greed. Or if greed is just motive, and no trouble with that, except what ever happened to research motivated simply to true our understandings with reality? Is saving lives the same as selling widgets?

Like all such things, the point is reduced to minuscule punning differences among meanings. What is nature and what is artifice, what is science and what is art, what is discovery, what is invention? What is the difference anyhow between natural law and laws of nature? Perhaps the only difference is when a claim gets staked. Eureka! I've deciphered the code of nature, and now I claim it for my own.

There are elaborated sets of terms, and manuals of usage, to guard the way in to any advanced discussions. Citations which can and must be made to true these words and get at what essentially has already reached some point beyond absurdity. But you would never know it without a life's worth of study. So go, and be the first, and for a time you'll own it. You'll be filthy rich before the courts catch up. Before the side effects take hold. Before the Ponzi scheme that is life's perpetuation falls apart.

Still, I was compelled to listen since I've been following this discussion for quite a while. I moved Ira Flatow over to my internet-connected phone so I could continue listening even while connecting the battery charger to her car so that my daughter has some independence after I bring her home from college. I have no memory of what I did, and so when her mother called to wonder if it was I who hooked the car up, I could only conclude that it obviously must have been. Would someone else have done it?

Perhaps it is natural that Buffalo provides a center for Secular Humanism. We are among the most churchgoing and religious cities in the land - for some reason, I think we're at the very top. Perhaps it is inevitable that a scholar at the center of these debates about patenting genes should have gotten his start here, as my student at a school with Catholic roots; at a University with aspirations to aspire to greatness but where good enough is still good enough. And as executive director of that center for atheistic rationality. I also, did I mention, am not nor ever have been Catholic.

Apart from the snow, I know that driving during the shopping season is a dream here in Buffalo. I know that the traffic is infinitely more slight than wherever you live. And yet I had no patience at all to navigate and negotiate parking, to wonder from which side the hit might come; the slide; the crash. Walking across parking lots rather than to commit the absurdity to move my car from big box to big box, and realizing that once inside the car, the drivers no longer see those of us walking as real.

I had no patience, and so I entered a dream state myself, detached from the car, detached from my frozen feet and ears, marvelling that anyone could find anything they needed among the endless shelves overstocked with want. Spice racks galore, though most came intact with certified-sanitary jars full already. I could find nothing that I needed, and only things that I might want but have no room for. Bizarrely, some of these over-elaborations cost half the price I would ultimately spend for simple racks to hold the jars I already own for free when paying, supposedly, for their contents.

I finally found my spice rack at a local hardware chain store. This one's a holdout from just before national big-box, but just after the local stores got destroyed. They somehow cling to their niche by remaining small enough to navigate in a single bite, but large enough to overlap the really big box places. A sort of convenience store for between Home Despot forays.

Where people follow you and wonder what you're looking for in imitation of the old days. My old friend of a friend Danny Nevearth used to advertise them on TV. He was king of radio in Buffalo once, when radio was king. He turned out to be nearly as engaging on TV ads.

Now there's someone else who preserves his moves for those TV advertisements - I imagine Danny became too expensive? I wonder if he gets a royalty from those moves, or are there still things you can't patent? I saw a Julia Roberts look-alike on an Internet ad (you can see her too, just above, and see if you agree). Maybe it really was her? But, no you can't imagine she'd stoop to that. I wonder what the laws are for impersonation?

Well, I impersonate a real person most of the time. Or maybe all of us just simulate a time when something seemed more real. Maybe we're all just acting out by rote, behaviors which once were real. As in my writing, I just rehearse my stupid mantra. There's no one here anymore. There's only rote.

Or. Well, I've got to go now and see how the battery charged on my daughter's dormant car. I'm the energizer bunny. I'm on autopilot. There is a drug now which can be administered just as you are exciting memories, and which will selectively destroy them. It shows promise for traumatic stress syndromes. White-out for your disorders.

I also learned - on the radio of all places - that there is evidence that simple rote learning of phonics actually does build "white matter" in the brain for kids with trouble reading. I taught for a while at a school for dyslexic boys - I think that term's fallen out of favor - where we all learned to drill like that. That was when whole language was in and out of favor, and everyone was gifted.

Gosh, I remember trying to write a paper for a graduate course in Progressive Education, to qualify the certainties of "whole language". No wonder I always sound the fool - the science isn't there yet.

So, maybe rote will bring Jesus back down to earth after all. Maybe the very words will be made flesh, like white matter in the brain. Maybe if we just white out the guilty remains of magical thinking that if you break this chain of spam. And maybe with practice the brain can be reconstructed, and the sense will come back in to the words. Maybe we've just forgotten how to read. Maybe not.

Fly like a butterfy

That void of greed gets filled with love. It's fear that makes the difference.

I wrote that as "note to self" after inviting in schoolmarmish cold water to my blog. (I'm not complaining - I needed the wash, and often enjoy cold showers!!) Hell, there's no one else to encourage me, so I'll have to keep myself going. It's not like anyone's reading this without some invitation. Note to self: keep moving.

All my work day, I swim out against the surf, only to have ever larger waves roll over me, and still I swim. It's the nature of working with technology, and as I've said, I grow tired. The retirement goal has evaporated. I turn and surf.

I do believe that blogging is, as medium, the perfection and completion of narcissism. Oneself as authority. Oneself without correction. Oneself without earnings.  Oneself surprised with oneself. 

It accompanies the near complete destruction of prized media. My most recent Time Magazine is but a sliver of its former self.  Newspapers get destroyed daily, and they don't just disappear, but instead their hearts get carved out, until all that is left is the barest shell of medium for advertising. I think that's the proper definition for "googled".

Sure, when recently I made contact in the blogosphere - a first hello of sorts - I ventured out to look and see what's there, and of course, almost at the start, were young women snapping pictures of themselves. Stripping. Naked. I'm not exactly ashamed to say that I was turned on, and shockingly because they seemed in no way coerced or victims of some early life sick boundary crossings which drenches other such transgressions with furtive guilt on the part of the viewer. Or should. Simple truth or dare, it seemed.

I assure you I was not shocked by the sight. We technology guys even have to clean up after a very few priests sometimes, and you might say we've seen it all. I was shocked by my own reaction, and that's true narcissism right there. Like Nixon on TV, I wasn't ready.

I'm certain that these smiling happy girls are also victims, though. I think we all are. 

My sense of blogging when I first heard of it was young women writing public journals. There was some hoax, wasn't there, when it turned out that Lonely Girl was a network plant? Yet another commercial attempt to secure the prurient interest of the viewing public. And what tricks did they use to get her all the views? Production values? Notices in widely read publications? Is there even a chance for earnest bloggers without some inside track?

I know that for me, starting up a blog was very like entering a nudist camp, and I really didn't like it. I still don't, except that no-one wants to read my epistolary emails. All media for transcprited thought have been subsumed and destroyed except this one. Even the private ones. I need some place to surprise myself, and journalling alone is, well, onanistic. It doesn't do it for me. And I'm really really trying to be respectful, dear reader, of some proper bounds which still aren't clear. Indulge my excesses, only if you will.

The blogoshpere is free in every dimension and degree, and I suppose that that's its problem. My own blogs would be redundant to steal or copyright, because they're too purely me. That's the point. It doesn't make me proud (as you know, I think every naked body looks approximately the same, which is, I think, the mystery). But it's what I have to do. It might be all I have to do, though I'm working on that book.

I think I am a terrorist here. I don't mean the nasty image we have of determined killers wanting virgins in the sky. I'm rather thinking of those young and dispossessed, up against some wall who are so easy to lead astray. 

Except I'm hardly innocent or young, still planting written thought charges which might or might not go off at the right time in the right place, but it's all I've got left. To use the machinery of the beast to bring it down. There are more of me out there than you might think. 

What do you call a terrorist of love, without religion? A blogger? Careful now, there's plenty of hate there too. How about just someone who's had enough, needs and can take no more, and doesn't know what else to do. I've had all I can stands, I can't stands no more  - I'm Popeye the sailor man. Toot Toot! (that's an oldfart joke, right there, but I think Popeye got his start in porn)

I think I want back newspapers. Cities. Mother Nature. Neighborhoods where people venture out from wombs with view, because what's on TV turned, suddenly, boring. In absolutist terms, I refuse to plant actual bombs in subdivisions, or tie myself to trees. I don't necessarily begrudge those who do, so long as they play nice. I'm at least as desperate as they are. 

I also want back the schoolmarms and the editors and the research staffs, and even the reading public. The hardest thing to teach in school is how to tell when writing is poorly argued. At my school, for gifted kids, we struggled and struggled and still half the faculty could often not tell the difference. (the kids and staff were one in this effort, and I myself was judged as often as judging).

But as I said to my new young peer; "As Joseph Conrad noted, if you want to learn to swim, you must 'in the offensive element immerse' and not reach out for air. We’re a people of narcissism - it’s what the economy used to want."  There is nothing more narcissistic than to be a televised consumer. Having learned how to swim, I'm diving in after my image, to break it up more than to embrace it.

We won't get beyond by fighting narcissism head on. Community access programming is now quite out of control, and even beyond Al Gore, who thought he'd try that after he moved on from inventing the internet. (I love the man, don't get me wrong, but he's proven himself a good enough sport and therefore makes a better target than, say, Rush Limbaugh, who's a really really bad sport, and the very definition of Narcissus' evil twin.)

These matters are hard. I live in a small town where the attempt to build windmills did nothing so much as to reveal just how corrupt the town government is. It's the fruit of disinterest (by folks like me) right alongside too much interest. And as our leadership gets more abstracted from local ground, they become embedded and impossible to dislodge. Unless you come up with some absurd sex scandal.

Oppressed Native Americans get regal patents to enter cities and destroy them; by patchworking together new sovereign lands, they get to build gambling casinos regardless of what the people living there might want.

Suburban enclaves, now grown almost entirely above middle class and white, exist directly alongside the darker and poverty level median income of the city. You can't make this up; I'll name the names. Amherst New York, an entirely sprawled municipality without any there there, and "home" to the University (still addressing itself in Buffalo) which should have been downtown. Amherst now exceeds the city of Buffalo next door in assessed value tax base. Consistently, it's ranked among the safest cities in the land. Consistently, Buffalo is at the very bottom.

There was a plan to build a light rail to connect the University with the inner city. Guess where it still ends? Right at the city boundary. Right where I used to live (yet another narcissistic insertion, for which I can't possibly apologize enough, ho ho, ho hum).

I don't know what stimulus might bring, but I do know that there is no simple resolution. The suburbs want their local governance. Regardless of literate expressions, it would be impossible to change that vote without redrawing boundaries. And that, as we know, defines no small part of the overall conundrum.

Amherst also needs the cultural and off-the-tax-reservation infrastructure of the city, beyond just a name for its University. And yet to link the two, even with a rail line, gets likened, apparently in the collective minds of the suburbs, to using a dirty needle or something. 

As if it's infection that would spread, instead of richer life. The highways, by transiting only private cars, seem safer. Even the buses, which I guess are too damn much bother to ride, don't seem to excite the immune system. Or maybe they did, and it's hardened now against more commerce?

I guess it must be the difference between particles and waves again. It's constant touch which terrifies us. Touch risks merging boundaries. Let's just keep our thoughts, politely, to ourselves! Who do we even have to talk to any more, when strangers might so sharply differ in the fundamentals, and friends already know what we're going to say.

Why the hell not catch a spark off something I say here, make it your own, and publish the hell out of it. For chrissakes, I'm giving it away! I'm the guy flashing his soul in your face. You don't have to look if it's gross, but I've already decided it's yours to do with what you will. You won't want the words, but you might just be stirred.

This just ain't right!

I really don't have any particular ideas about what to do about all this. But I do have some very abstract ones. And none of them gain in value, even for me, by keeping them to myself. That's the magic of written words. Their power descends from reproduction. Gutenberg led directly to vulgar masses. Now this is vulgar publishing. It has its plusses and minuses. But you can't really stop it anymore.

I do know that as the blogosphere, so called, matures and grows, it is getting taken over by more sober interests. It's what's outed government crime, and perhaps enabled Obama (well, you'd have to think that W did that all by himself without all that much help) to make the final cut. It still represents the very selfsame force which brought down the Eastern bloc walls, catalyzed I think by cellphones and faxes against which the Chinese media controllers were never any match.

Sure, the irony is that China comes out from Tian-an Men more nationalistic than ever, with student protests turned to strident flag-waving. And East Germany goes all big box, because like wide open America, there's nothing already there to wreck. 

Despite or because of uptight Eastern propriety, the rigid Bible-belt's down South. Go figure. They're supposed to be gentile, polite, and comfortable with ambiguity. Damn carpet baggers all over again, I guess. I think they just don't read.

So there's the underside of blogs. Simple and liberated-from-good-argumentation publishing is how the Bible thumpers perfect their formulas. It's how true believers in Ron Paul get their stories straight. It's how the Trade Towers get believed to be brought down by deliberate planting of  bombs, decreed by plausible denability straight from the top.

There's nothing left to true it all. The editorial staffs of newspapers are approximately as impotent as I am in local politics right where I live. They just don't have the time and manpower. And if they did, they don't seem to have the interest.

So, the solution is abstract, dear reader. It truly is. I've been in the appendix bursting position of mediating murderous disagreements, and the only tool that ever worked was abstraction. You have to take the argument up a notch. Above all heads. Right into the sky of just plain making sense.

And if you want to be believed at that level, you have to insert yourself into your argument. How you came to think this way. What happened to you that day. You have to release all claim to brilliance of pure invention, and lay out your shoddy evidence. Unretouched. The good argumentation still belongs in more carefully edited spaces. But here in the commons for ideas is where some creation happens.

So the windmill dispute in my little town could and should be handled by directly compensating not just the blasted farmers who get the lease for towers on their land, but those whose view gets destroyed. PILOT fees don't make the cut, since the government's corrupted.

Of course that changes the boundaries. View is not property, in our system of laws. But air rights and mineral rights get bought and sold, as abstracted species of "good will". Potential for earnings. Why not wind rights?

We must reclaim the commons.

So common schools could break down boundaries too. Out in the sticks again, there still remains astounding profusion of old one-room schoolhouses. They've been converted to homes and lodges, but they once did represent the distance a child could travel for a day's study. 

And very recently the State completed yet another in a long series of consolidation rounds. Bigger is better, the state seems to know for sure, but when I took my daughter to tour (maybe it was an object lesson in getting along better with her Mom in Buffalo, though I think we were both in earnest), there were true confessions of sex and drugs and gangs in the wilderness.

I've argued plenty about the need for smaller community engendering schools. They're cheaper and more productive and by the familiarity of each student with the others obviate the destruction of the sorting which is the main preoccupation of schools for capitalist production. 

There were Ivy leaguers and true artists too, coming out from that country school, right alongside the toothless bumpkins. My daughter recognized a viable choice, against the reality of her private city school. So did I, which was a comfort.

But the scale is still all wrong, and I guess, yet again, it's bussing defines the paradox and maybe even a way toward solution. Bussings which, all agree, propelled families to the suburbs. Which magnet schools have never quite redressed.

What if taxes actually were redistributed from the center, and no child was prevented from entering any school because of boundaries. We now fund our schools from local property taxes, guaranteeing disparities to funding, and barriers to foreigners. Like jealous siblings, the large municipalities carp about their relative subsidies from Albany. But city schools keep burning, while the suburbs go all Ivy, as if there's only that one bell to ring.

It's no mistake that one of the very best schools in the country, by many measures, is City Honors right here in Buffalo. It's got great leadership, I know. It has a strong internal cultural identity, despite having been uprooted from any geographic neighborhood. And it suffers the same identity crisis of the failed school I once ran. It's meant for the smart kids, and can easily be blamed for creaming off the best and leaving the other schools to the bumpkins. The second rate teachers. Burned out.

Why not like France, where the bread tastes great because the price is set?  The competition's all in the quality. So teachers get paid the same all over, and schools get funded the same. And families can choose any among them. Why not?

It's what central government is good for, and with this meltdown we have that opportunity. Because the central government is totally broke, and has nothing but power with which to broker.

Tepid efforts seem always to ensure the opposite of their intention. Bussing within city bounds ensures hardening of boundaries between city and suburb. Private schools, paradoxically, infect or stimulate some change, by sending their busses all over the region. 

Oh, I'm all mixed up for sure. I know. It's a mess. I keep striving for resolution when I only want to think out loud.

I have absolutely no question at all, none, that it's love must fill the void where greed once owned the territory. That when the cocoon does burst and makind spreads its wings, consciousness will have transformed from generator only of technologies for literal flight, to Slumdog transformations of mere accidents to destiny. 

Emotion is the sixth sense which provides, in effect, that trueing. Minds looking along all the accidents of life, and pulling from them sense. Not toward some abstract goal. It's not a sense of direction - all the other senses work for that. But rather, a felt attraction. To something also alive and free.

This blogging is no end, but means alone bare naked. It's messaging as the medium, and by sucking up its tail, might spell an end to capitalist excesses, toward something more down to earth and, well, less abstracted.

Tear down the walls, I say, and let's have a very very quiet revolution. I'd love to have you in for tea, my dear. Feeling is no grant you see, but an accomplishment I work on. 

Last year's man

 oooh, very very oooh. Mmmm. Not sure.

I just now for the first time reached out to the blogosphere and touched someone. Scary business, this. Very scary. I was very me, as in saying something so opaque that it could be rejected without implication. But then I wanted to know. I needed to know. I was suddenly really afraid that I'd crossed some line I didn't understand. That I'd get blocked and yuched. (The topic of the blog I came across, really quite excellent, was to relate sex to blogging. Very insightful and funny. And I learned this trick about titles for my links)

So this blogger got me, which is so way cool. As in I'm the shy one at some orgy. EEEEEeeee. cringe. Bolting for the door here. I still can't work up the courage to "friend" that person I still can't quite remember from highschool. It was so damn long ago . . . 

Back to work!

Embarrassing imature twaddle

sorry, but I've yet to grow up that way . . . 

I haven't really worked out what a blog is or should be. I think when I first heard of them, I simply wondered why anyone would be interested at all - so, you can publish your daily thoughts? You could already do that. HTML isn't very hard. Then I kind of got how it was being made so very trivial. How young girls at the age of narcissism just wanted the whole world to know what they were thinking. 

Then, seemingly overnight since I almost always have my head too far into whatever I'm doing to notice, blogs became serious, and covered what serious writers want you to know on a minute by minute basis, apparently in a way to deepen the published and editorial coverage of what's new but not new enough. 

In any case, I am finding the process transformative in a way which interests and intrigues me. I take it as given that letter writing is dead and gone and never will return. As with all transformations, I find this more than a trifle sad. Letter writing, when practiced, aspired to a kind of elegance and turn of phrase which was lovely in its compact precision. 

I'm certain that there have been people who write their letters starting with a rough draft, leading ultimately to a clean copy, but I certainly never did. Almost precisely as when I used to dictate letters into a tape machine for my secretary to transcribe, I developed a simple discipline which made it possible to contain the structure whole in my mind, and in the dictating - or in the letter writing - get it out.

I somewhat mourn - and it is a guilty mourning - that my daughter does not get letters from me the way I used to from my parents. And I don't get any from her. We are really no less in touch than before she went to college, since her cell phone number is the same; and the need to know precisely where one is and what one is doing is long attenuated. 

So I get calls for advice on rare occasion, and we exchange emails on occasions still more rare. But it surely is not the same, any more than neighborhoods full of children playing outdoors among neighbors who actually knew one another can still survive our sprawling wombs with views. 

Sure, I do try to write emails as though they were letters, but truth to tell, as rare as truth telling is, they don't get read. Email is far too hoppy for someone to tuck into quite. Emails have to be almost bite sized. 

I had long distance when I was in college, but it was costly, and entailed some permission or trade for beer money (when beer cost a quarter). So, I think I was energized by simple heartstrings, whether of loneliness or fond familiarity, there was simply a desire to let my folks know what was going on and what was new and what was on my mind. I surely didn't tell them everything, but it was pleasant enough and almost entirely without guilty pressure that I would sit at my desk to compose my thoughts.

And in almost the same manner did I devour the letters from home.

I do remember a transition to typed letters. This must have been some while after college note-taking destroyed my script, and college paper writing trained my fingers to fly across the manually hammered keyboard.  It was after my handwritten letters from my backpacking spring and summer across Europe had been transcribed by my Dad's secretary, probably so that they were legible. But I knew there was some pride in the compilation.

Much of our history is recovered from letters, when they aren't destroyed from too fine a sense of what is private. When discovered - these very private letters not destroyed - we get a sense of in to some truth beyond the scripted and edited version of history.   Though surely many epistolary writers wrote in full consciousness of private now and eventual public archival significance then.

So, for me for now, that is where the bloggers' art comes in, if art it can become. Maybe just beyond the verge of embarrassing if your friends or workmates were to know what you're up to. More like what you might disclose to a benchmate in the train station (if there were train stations anymore), but of course don't anymore in the airport, so anxiously nervous lest you be delayed and bumped or can't find some space to relax amid the noise and too much informality of dress and of behavior.

I wonder where is the space for those truly private thoughts which should get burned. What can happen to the art of making love long distance? Never mind. 

So, for me, this practice, while far removed from keeping in touch, might yet provide some energy back to a mind itself grown jumpy and disconnected and distracted and oh so very abstracted. It is distressing not to be able to coax a thread where once there was actual correspondence. 

I still do have, on my actual desk at which I seldom sit (laptops actually work better on the lap I find) a series of now ancient letters which I myself never could respond to. From China, say, or from a very close friend who moved away, and whom I actually did try to visit motorcycling through Little Rock. Something had happened to me. I was too busy for sure, but also inwardly there was nothing left with which to press a write. Only a vague sense of guilt and want. I think it was simply that the leisure space in my life, and perhaps in all of ours, had been squeezed away. There was too much on my mind and too much to take care of. 

Or maybe it was simply the fuss to set up the typewriter? The awkwardness to tame my hand? A simple habit lost? I was fooling around with how to compose Chinese on a computerized word processor, well before the GUI. My Chinese hand is well beyond execrable, though that can hardly be the whole excuse.

I think rather, and this is quite extravagant be warned, that in the very way that holographic films contain the entire image across their whole - such that when broken in half each part contains an attenuated version of the whole - so we humans, as conscious beings, but even were we not, are in microcosm the entire cosmos.

This is hardly radical in itself, though I do mean it in the most radical possible way. And as we whittle away our planet earth, which for my very own purposes is the only living cosmos in our way, our souls are attenuated too. This earth is cosmos whole, and there is no other. In complexity it more than comprehends all else "out there". It is, in very precise sense, cosmos' heart. Copernicus be damned along with all those concupiscent Piarists who so befriended Galileo.

It is always possible to be quite wrong while being right. While correcting one strain, as in the Inquisition, torturing out another which might itself have guided the way toward salvation, if that is what you want.

It just may be that in our throes of certainty about the physical cosmos, as though that is all that is there, we are in process to destroy our emotional heart, which also does pervade creation. 

And so, dear heart, I blog in desperation, perhaps, to kindle back some kindred connection, heart to heart, that consciousness can be raised to its proper estate, co-creator of a world never ever quite created in the first place. Because that sort of Creationism is become a very very dangerous fiction. God has come to earth, and he is in us. Unborn still. In grave peril of abortive loss. And you know where I stand on that issue . . . 

Damn!  Off to work, hi ho hi ho . . . or what's a meta for????

The Difference Between Blogging and Emailing: Reflecting on a Sad Sad Sad Obituary

I'm sure I've got this just wrong, but on the occasion of my sharing this URL with a few friends and family, I want to clear up a couple of things. The first is that I'm not trying to accomplish some feat of literary or journalistic accomplishment. If I thought I were actually any good at that stuff, I think I'd have tried my hand at it by now (although I'm not entirely certain of that, since I, as do all of us, suffer from plenty of self-destructive bad habits and blind spots).

I'm simply trying to figure out how to say something clearly, which I feel very strongly is extremely important to say. As far as I can tell, anything philosophical of quality which I read tends in the same direction toward this kind of summary statement. Right now, for example, I'm reading Everything and More: A Compact History of , written by David Foster Wallace who very distressingly recently hung himself.

I find that I can read only small chunks, in spare time say before work or just after dinner, because - and you'll find yourself rightly skeptical at this claim - it spins my head out of control, sort of like one of those little whirring sirens you blow into and they amazingly sing. Or maybe just like a top or Chinese diabolo which gets going to incredible orbital velocity with seemingly tiny inputs. Quite beyond being an excellent philosophical mind, Wallace was, I gather, an accomplished artist - I look forward to reading his novels, of which I had been unaware.

The trouble with this book is that it places my little quest in historic context, and reminds me, alarmingly, that I'm attempting something in the company of folks (don't you love that Bushism?) back to Plato and beyond. And then, bringing things up to date, that I'm just another dilettante, say, watching Star Wars, or even better, The Matrix, who wants to find in it some ultimate truth, which it would be absurd to think even its director would understand other than by means of his production.

Sure, it is pretty cool to come floating out of the Star Wars big screen to find your car transformed into a spaceship for a little moment, just as your mind has been expanded beyond its petty preoccupations by some artistic outlining which - and this quite simply is what makes it art - draws the mind beyond itself. Art is in touch with ultimate truths, and by its creation avoids the necessity to describe them more mundanely. Proper authors always refuse interviews or any privileged "insight" to their own work. Only hackers know exactly what they "meant" to say.

I might long to be an artist, at least because the project could be more literally in hand, but I think I'm something more like a craftsman, and very much less than a scientist. I am not attempting art. I think the blog - as a medium - is supposed to be free of aspirations toward journalistic excellence. And I include within the spaces of my thick verbiage "chapters" from my youthful writing, not because I think there was anything great there, nor certainly well written, but because it is the very thing itself. The documentary evidence of a discovery, actually embodied, so to speak, in the document itself. That is to say that the writing of the document was the occasion for the discovery of something which I found ever-so-slightly to be ahead of its or my time at the time, and which for whatever reason it is now my burden to reify virtually, as it were and is.

My god I hope there is another soul in the world who finds these words even remotely funny.

I wrote this thing in a single sitting - I'm not even sure that I took breaks to piss and eat and sleep, but I must have. And then I word-processed it out, at the dawn of such infernal machines, having developed that profane skill so far from piano playing, but ever so much more utilitarian - keyboarding. There was something magical in the word processor, just simply in that I didn't have to white out or literally cut and paste. Then there was the magic of double justified margins - whooey!

The occasion of my typing it out confirmed to me the "truth" of what I'd written, and then I proceeded to make a near complete ass of myself trying to explain the thing around town. I did, however, eventually make my way in the world, and almost completely shelved the document in my mind as well as in reality, as some youthful strange obsession, not unpleasant in recall, but certainly not worth near so much as I'd thought it to be at the time.

But things happen. Just as with this book I'm reading, I find that this fellow so recently self-hung, seems to grasp almost completely the nature of abstraction along with its history and the fact that attempts to understand such things before their time can and has lead to actual concrete insanity in this temporal world. I am incredibly saddened by his death, as I would imagine the accomplishment of great art to leave one other than alone. But apparently history belies this imagining.

So, at least I haven't completely lost my mind yet. I find it an actual marvel that I can manage to live all alone and by myself and still be shaved and almost completely dressed every day (the almost has to do with a certain cluelessness, as you might imagine, with regard to style). This very morning I did indeed install a new mailbox with my very own name lettered thereon, since the old one, along these New York salt encrusted roads, had finally almost entirely melted away and the much patched-again door was no longer responding to the mailman's flap. I imagined him angry with me - even in the outback, there are civil requirements!

Do I digress? Well, gentle reader, what follows is the actual letter I didn't have the nerve to send said friends and family because, I guess, I didn't want to be the cause of worry. So, now I put it here, even knowing that these self-same friends and family may - are even likely to - read the thing I didn't want to show them.

Everyone knows that great accomplishments are least recognized by those closest to the accomplished. My family in particular is made up of people doing pretty well for ourselves, thank-you-very-much, but almost literally surrounded by the in-your-face accomplishments of all those we grew up with. In many cases, we are demonstrably smarter and more capable than these avatars of success. So there must be something very intrafamilialy wrong. Hell, I've already described a very very extreme example, in conscious abuse of my very ex brother-in-law.

Among the family, I'm often supposed to be the one with the promise - no surprise there I imagine. I do alright, and keep myself manifestly sane, because I have a knack for the practical arts, now specifically computer networks and related technologies. Consistently, I don't pretend to any professionalism, so shortly I will have to move along as this field (also) proceeds to marginalize us talented amateurs. You might even observe that I patently eschew moves toward professionalism, nursing, such is my archetype, this truly silly notion that I sort-of "have" something of worth beyond whatever I might devote to and thus contribute via some developed profession.

My disease is nothing if not thoroughgoing and consistent.

In any case, you, gentle reader, will not worry very much about my sanity or safety, although a blog is a very live production, so that you might. A book is presumed to be finished, though almost the very opposite of dead. Its currency is a function of how well read it is. The blog is not exactly a live email , which ought to be to someone (explaining the apparent sin of even the best joke-spams which get sent around in such a way that the persons to approach almost the entire cosmos of readers, and in the case of really juicy stuff like an email about your neighbor Sarah Palin actually does get read by almost the entire cosmos.)

(I have a terrible fondness for parenthetical digressions)

So the blog pretends to something like a journal, but gets to be more immediate. And I pretend to something near eternal, but want to work it out in public, as it were, maybe partly because it seems that important (and I want it to be discoverable when I wander away from sensible reality), but also precisely because I don't think I have it in me actually professionally to write. You will have noticed that by now.

Here's the email to three closest friends and family, which I had provisionally titled:

fear and trepidation, but with a good natured laugh (here's letting the cat out of the bag)

Hello fine treo.

For some silly reason, reading this morning with the fire warmly glowing, a very disturbing book lent me by my friend Wayne over the weekend (Everything and More, A Compact History of , where infinity is the symbol I don't have time to figure out how to keyboard), I find myself compelled to "publish" the location of my little blog.

This is not some great big deal. There is nothing terribly embarrassing there (I hope, although I am not really certain). I'm just simply not sure where I will end up in the near future, especially as I feel myself descending, with the prologue to this book, into something which feels very much like coming unhinged.

Very disturbingly, this David Foster Wallace, who is undoubtedly one of the great intellects of our time, hung himself recently, and I assure you I do never want to find myself in such despair. ( I want you to know I'm sending this in the middle of the work day, and am doing so in good humor feeling very strong, especially as I mowed my lawn yesterday and watched the debate with only mild amusement rather than anxiety last night)

The opening of his book defines and describes "abstraction" in a way that is excruciating in its familiarity to me. In a very comical way, he explains why dealing with abstraction can and does, apparently often, lead to madness. That's this thing I feel.

I am, of course, re-entering the very abstract world of my Eureka epiphany moment on the boat-womb-cocoon, the anniversary of which, along with cat piss in the bed, time-zone crossings, and the oddly unfamiliar experience of sybaritic bliss did recently send me howling to the hospital. I assure you I will do everything possible in my power to avoid that fate a second time, including putting down this book for the moment, and possibly forever.

Meanwhile, I'm trusting you not to find in my blog rantings any cause or sign of insanity. I'm trusting you, in other words, with my secret. I'm also NOT trusting that you will understand what I write about, since I'm not nearly intelligent enough, nor a good enough writer (honestly, I'm not being modest, but what I'm attempting is really really difficult) - the burden is purely mine to make this intelligible and I haven't even gotten close. Wallace has such lucidity that I can only still marvel at my pretense.

Well, pretender or not, I remain convinced, especially as we watch this world tumbling down into something frankly terrifying (I'm not getting overheated here - I think I simply have my eyes open) that I am "on to" something.

I guess it, this thing I hit on when my mind was sharper, is the very essence of abstraction, properly so defined, and I am getting rather desperate to find someone to share these thoughts.

The blog thing seems to work better than private writing in journals, simply as a kind of discipline.

If I thought I were asking you to read what I've written, I would consider that to be an unforgivable abuse of friendship.

I'm just asking you to take note of the address, in case I hit on something there, and in the process wander off beyond the pale of sensible existence (you are meant to laugh here). A kind of mild paranoia, if you will. which I only sense as a kind of shadow in the darkness, off to the edge of my vision . . .

I do have hope that I'm not quite alone in this whole business, and so it is with some mild hope also that I share what I'm up to as the best way to stay sane.

Well, so with fear and trepidation, here you go . . . . .