Reading the World

Good writing gets celebrated a lot, and it should. Good writing can take readers to places they never could have reached alone.

Good reading, on the other hand [I had to insert that gratuitous phrase, because you might have thought I was still talking about writing] is almost never celebrated, any more than being part of an audience is ever anything all that special. We all know it's important, but it's nothing to celebrate.

I guess in the ethereal reaches of wine tasting, maybe, there's room to celebrate the truly discerning palatte, and maybe even the tasters, in this one case, get to tell the makers what of their production is really really good. So very unlike the work of critics in the world of literature or art. Which is often at so much odds with the reading public, who are the ones who really get to decide, right?

The critics need to be out front, and not just at some peak, like wine snobs can be. There is still a presumption of ever changingness toward progress, ahem, which would define an avante garde. Wine, on quite another hand, is presumed to reflect something permanent, something which would be great for any time, or at worst subject to the winds of fashion, with an undergirding of just plain quality.

One goes to art school to learn to paint, to writing school to learn to write, because one must learn the context; to be taken seriously, you must know what came before so you can find you spot along the trajectory toward what it might yet become. There is no great imitative art, they say, and none that doesn't imitate either. How tiresome when some hypertalented naif just makes the whole game, well, unnecessary. When the art just shows up on the street, before the gallery snobs ever even had a chance to notice, much less call it.

Reading, as an act, gets problematized so unnecessarily by schooling, though. Refined audiences for refined productions, sure, but I'm talking here simply about the act of using the written word.

I know that it gets needlessly problematized in as many ways since Sunday as there can be to know, but I'll tell you about a few of the ways that I do know this, and try really hard not to bore you with my real-life wine-tasting story.

Kids (and adults) can and do and will learn to read effortlessly and even joyfully if there's some simple connection between their reading and real life. And it almost goes without saying that they will have no problem writing either, so long as they're not trying for the refined sort. Mass literacy was the result of the printing press, plain and simple, and had almost absolutely nothing to do with school. School is there to keep the ignorant ignorant, duh. We'd have something dangerous like socialism without churches otherwise. Please! Heaven forfend!

It is the job and the purpose of schooling to problematize these things, pretty much in the same way that it is the job of wine tasters to elevate the really good stuff from the dross that you and I might be happy enough to drink if we didn't know any better. And we're glad when they do it, because it keeps the pricing somewhat honest too - as honest as it can be in a universe of naked emperors and so very many labels which can't possibly be remembered store to store and visit to visit.

Very helpfully now, the wine stores have started to score the labels, pretty much the way they do at Olympic competitions, or at Harvard, where it's just presumed that everyone's an A, and the real nuanced distinctions come in the smaller endzone decimal points. In a way that ordinary people can't even remotely make sense of. And also in a way that you can't really quite trust the judges about. Can you even imagine someone buying a bottle of wine for more than $10 which had a score below 80, which is still enough in school to make you president!? So, there's at least that much honesty in the scoring of wines.

Kids at school learn pretty early on that there must be something really tricky about reading, especially about reading aloud, and that they really shouldn't even bother to try to write. Special rules proliferate to guide the new learner toward understanding language in the way it gets used in the socially well capitalized households, which are usually pretty well aligned with the financially well capitalized households. And "aligned with" here isn't precisely the same as correleated with. Because you can be not-so-rich and pretty well aligned.

But let's say that language skills are between the youngster and something real. Then they learn pretty quickly, and pretty much in the manner of txting, even make up their own nongrammatical ways to get what they need across. To make the tools of reading and writing work for them.

School stands in the way of that just as much as it could ever facilitate it, just simply by disempowering the ones who don't score so highly, even though if you don't score the kids at all they know precisely where they stand vis-a-vis one another, and with regard to the teachers.

And even though the scoring just encourages gaming of the system, such that, especially with rules for objectivity, the kids know how to get high enough scores if they want to which still won't make any difference at all for getting into the really good next level school for instance, where all sorts of new tests meant to be non-proxies for social capitalization will purport to peer right into your very essence and tell how well you really know how to read and write.

And of course these tests are almost perfect proxies for social capitalization, once you control for intelligence, which was the chimerical object in the first place, or was it just belief that you had to start with? But kids know who's smart and who's not, so you could just start with asking them. A kind of peer review instead of instrumental peering, which is the only reliable test for truth in the first place, the peer review, but let's hold off on that a minute.

Believing that they are something other from what you can know from the outside - using IQ metrics, say - is a pretty good way to do something evil, and rank order the humanity of human beings. Which should never be done in the first place, or the last place either come to think of it. You could just control for social capitalization in the first place, going in, but then you'd be pretty much undermining the belief in the first place that you could measure intellectual energy without at the same time measuring want and need and drive and motivation, and the rest of it. Humans are so full of pre-judging! They can't be trusted . . . .

But there are groups of students who demonstrably do have a hard time learning to read and write. We used to call these kids dyslexic, but since that term sounds too much like a medical diagnosis for a condition which just has way too many factors - not all of them very well aligned either - underneath it, it's fallen out of favor in favor of the more generic term of "learning disabilities." If I were speaking, I'd use both hands, two fingers each, to demonstrate my contempt for the term by bracketing it in gesticulated quotation marks.

They (whoever they are) should really do the same thing with IQ that they did with dyslexia, because there are just simply too many underlying factors to call it - that single score - a read of anything at all like intelligence. At worst it's a proxy for all that social capitalization again, while at best it's a way to correct the improper scoring of teachers and other authority figures, which, if you just asked the kids directly, they could have done for you instantly and saved a lot of time and money and bother in the process. They know who's smart and who's not. Their lives depend on it most of the time.

But it's not always the ones the teacher thinks are smart, you know, and so it's not necessarily a bad idea to have these tests. And with the learning disabilities too, which at best are just an indication of some disparity among subtests against the overall score (which I'm pretty sure is a good working definition for what gets meant by "learning disability" in the first place) but at worst might be just another proxy for someone not doing as well as his social capitalization indicates he should be doing (it's usually he in these cases). And so if you're rich, or if you attend a well-capitalized school district, you can get some special schooling designed to remediate these difficulties. Smooth out the unevenness of the subtests. Wear down the jagged edginess.

I worked at one such private school for the very rich, or the well-funded by the Canadian government where they are more enlightened about these things, who had demonstrable problems with reading, at some odds with the evident intelligence of these kids. You could watch them struggling to make out even simple words, and the school, quite sensibly, and having built its longish tradition on the method, would drill these kids on phonics. Endlessly.

Every single faculty member, myself included, and I was supposed to be rather more exalted than that, but I did and had to endorse my own comeuppance, had to master this method of drilling and not question it all all, pretty much the way that you would never question your sergeant if you were stupid enough to sign your life away to the military, and then once there didn't want to be among the very first to die. Which was rough for me, because it was evident to me that there were huge disparities among the kids according to which of them really couldn't sound the words out, and which had no trouble at all with that, but couldn't sequence them, or couldn't organize them, the words.

And so we would be, some of the time, drilling-in a kind of cynicism; both in the kids and in the teachers, based ultimately on the difficulty really expensive private schools have, unless they have a waiting list, in saying no to parents with the cash and the desperate hope in their eyes.

But still it's interesting that this primitive kind of phonic drilling now, more recently than could have done any good for me, has been shown to encourage the flourishing and elaboration of the newly-recognized-as-critical white matter of the brain. It's as if these kids with the smarts without the reading ability were fully equipped with powerful CPUs, but lacked the networking to make them work togther [which is a really really lousy metaphor which I would hate it for you to latch onto, which I'll hope to demonstrate the why about later on]. And the phonic drilling elaborates and exercises the interconnections until, like training wheels on bicycles, the kids learn how to read on their own (some people would object that training wheels just enable dependence, and you should throw them in the pool, to mix a few more metaphors into the cocktail).

It really does work, I've seen it with my own eyes, and then you should see these kids - the ones who haven't been made cynical - take right off on the power of self-esteem and do things in other subjects they never thought they could do. And then they go off to college and the rest is history.

But of course, as a teacher of Chinese myself, where phonics has precisely no utility for the teaching of reading, it still was hard for me to credit this theorizing overly much, since first of all I knew that readers in English do rather more the same thing as readers in China do, than they do something elaborately different.

Readers in English, after a while, just see the words at a glance, and only "sound them out" if they're unfamiliar, and even that will only help if they're familiar with the word already, in its spoken form, or maybe if they recognize some roots, which we also drilled into those kids. But half the time the unfamiliar words are words that rarely do get spoken, and if you do dare to speak them you're pretty likely to embarrass yourself with the way that they come out, compared to educated listeners who might be listening.

Can you see where I'm going with this? I'd be really surprised if you could. I'd be shocked and awed and amazed, to tell you the truth, because I don't think I'm going where you're likely to think I'm going, about which I refer you back to my title.

In China absolutely everyone has to drill to learn to read, see, and it's not anything at all to do with phonics. If we didn't pretend in English - the least phonetic of the alphabetic languages, I'm pretty sure - that there was some arcane encoding whose mastery would provide the key to reading. If we were simply to drill the whole words as shapes, in other words, to everyone, then there wouldn't be any more dyslexia proper over here than there can be in China.

Of course, some would catch on more quickly than others, and all of them would be inventing little private rules to remember how to distinguish this shape from that, and learning roots - root shapes which show up in lots of words -  would help, just as in Chinese, and learning the phonetic history of subcomponents of the overall written word would also provide clues to which word is which, according to familiar sounds from the spoken language, just like in Chinese. And some students would get it more quickly than others, but all of them would likely learn to read, especially if learning to manipulate these symbols could make an actual difference in actual life.

Which might be almost but not completely enough to convince you that all the elaboration of schooling can possibly do is to disempower the learner from making the important discoveries on his own in a way to make them memorable and perhaps permanently useful, which might also be enough, but likely not, to convince you that analytic approaches to understanding, in school, can only get in the way of real usages out in life, where, if you're me anyhow, it's really hard to reverse predict, according to how well they do, how well people did in school.

Yeah, sure, like with Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Einstein, it's easy to imagine that they could have done well if they'd had to, somehow, stick it out like the rest of us, or maybe if the schools were more enlightened about not alienating the geniuses, while still pretty much figuring that that whole equation doesn't count for the rest of us, except why not? Why doesn't it count for the rest of us?

The people I've worked with side by side can't be distinguished on the basis of their performance on the job according to how they might have done in school. In fact it's often the school-smart ones - and this can be evident not least because of the psychological chips they carry, which come off pretty much like a burden in the way of good performance - it's often the school-smart ones who sometimes get nearly nothing done at all in the way of "real world" production (I'm not being quite so hard on the term this time with my gesticulated quotes, although I probably should be).

So here's the other thing. The school I headed, which was a school for "gifted kids" (full on cynicism in the case of the finger gestures here, you might almost watch me flipping the bird toward and with and by those quotes) was probably the only properly vocational school on the planet; a planet where, I hardly need to elaborate, all schooling should and must and still could be if we were to give it half a chance, vocational. Which is simply another way to say that school should be more a part of life, and not so apart from life, if you catch my drift.

Because this school for the gifted was training kids who belonged in, and for the most part ended up in, the academy itself, which is bizarrely how we've let the rest of our schools get distorted almost beyond recognition, as if everyone should be going off to college in the first place. Or in the last place, come to think about it.

While we've meanwhile outsourced all non-academic jobs with dignity right out from under the kids and then expect them to want to go to school as if it could make a damned bit of difference for their non-intellectual work in some demeaning service-sector role, when what they're good at, manifestly, is working with their hands and making those connections between what is real and what is, until realized, something like "in the head" (another really bad metaphor I'm hoping to disabuse you of before eternity escapes us here).

I'm getting there, but I have a ways to go yet. Bear with me, if at all possible.

Now among the things that we pull out from under kids is that whatever they have been able to figure out for themselves is useless. That's the adult as authority, dessicated and sterile critic role of teachers in school. The wing-clipping, soul snuffing, grammarian bad-behavior chastising Miss Appropriate branch of schooling. Not to mention what they can do with their hands. Keep them where I can see them mutha fucka.

And, in school as in life, that action is justified because it's premised on a nice progressive pyramid of life and living, where middle school is higher than elementary (seems like by definition right there) and all the rest and then there are all sorts of gradations of quality. So, if kids are going to "get somewhere" pretty much on the model whereby art and science, unlike wine remember, have to keep moving from pre to post all the livelong time. Which is what graduation is all about, if you get the pun embedded there.

But there manifestly are some teachers who meet kids where they're at, and encourage them to build on what they already know for themselves in the first place, which is always at nearly the same level of elaboration, at each stage of development for each and every person who gets to be called a human no matter how elaborated you might want to make the distinctions between them. You know, in the range from 90, say, to 100.

There are only differences in nearness or distance from what gets sanctioned, and according to what needs to be unlearned, because it's naive, before the good stuff can fill it in. That's a powerful theory out there in the field of education, in case you didn't know, called something like, well, maybe "naive theory." No one's a blank slate, alas or hallelujah depending on your point of view.

Now sure some kids don't have a very elaborated world view, and some have crazy notions in their heads, just like some adults do, and I would mention Sarah Palin just for a good example, but we'll come back to her later, I promise, if not here then in some subsequent diatribe still to come.

Some just haven't been exposed to very much at all. Some might be limited, but I would say that if you can carry on a conversation at all, you get to count as having a world view of, almost by definition, approximately the same level of elaboration as the next guy's. No matter what the predictors might be of the next guys getting farther ahead than you will, and there's a whole range of predictors only a few of which are related to intellectual energy. Some of which are even related to such morally repugnant things as ability to believe a lie right to your very own face. The way politicians and lawyers and corporate shills seem so good at, but I don't want to digress in that particualar direction, and no I'm not saying Sarah Palin's a psychopath. Far from it.

But anyhow, let's say the schools were to do simpler things, like drilling, and posing interesting problems for the students to solve, together or in some groups, and didn't worry so very much at all about over-elaborating before the students literally asked for it. And let's say we made the workplace safe, as we should be able to do, and let the kids get real-world rewards and not just grades for what they were able to contribute to the world of work, even if it were only filing or sorting, or doing things with their hands or bodies which adults were maybe less good at.

And lets also say that the adults might be encouraged to get back to school, so to speak, whenever they want, for the elaboration which analysis in school might be able to provide, and that there weren't such incredibly lopsided rewards for the rare talents of showmanship, hoodwinking, gaming, tricking, and other psychopathologies so well rewarded in the marketplace right now. This might actually happen if kids were empowered to read critically and not just to assume that someone writing and talking at them knows more than they do, you know, if school were reintegrated with life just a little bit more.

OK, so now here comes the fun part. I studied Chinese poetry in college - no really! - classical Chinese poetry for which I received a score, as is mandatory now, somewhere above 90, just like the cheap wine I afford myself. So, I learned not just how to read, and about how to read, but I also learned a few things about what reading means in Chinese, where poetry was rather more central to what gets meant by not just intellectual energy, but also political energy and even philosophical energy, using poesis here in the same sense that virtual shares a root if not a route with virtuous. Frigging political appointments were made on the basis of poetical prowess, which is not exactly something we'd ever consider. Round these parts.

Which really meant you had to be able to demonstrate not just your ability to read and to write, but your mastery, largely by rote, of the entire canon of literature before you, which included history, philosophy and all the rectified - I'm being literal here - words which had come tumbling down across the years toward you. The ones which had survived, as it were, the test of not just time, but something more like what it is they score when they score the wine bottle.

And, in Chinese poetics, the ability to read is the ability to know, and therefore what a reader reads for, in a great writer, is that writer's ability, you know, actually to read the world, which is based on having read all the other great words which came before. The world is not apart from the word, would be another way to say it. That's why they're always, these Chinese, writing directly on the face of the earth, even to the point of damning (sic) the three gorges, which we would never do. We would just foul them with graffiti and big box stores.

Which doesn't mean something metaphorical the way that you and I might mean it. It means literally to learn to see, in a way without which it's all noise. Talk about problematizing the process of learning to read!!

They're almost saying almost no-one sub-elite really knows how to freaking even see, never mind how to decipher symbols. The symbols are the easy part in other words, and it's the making sense of reality that really counts, but not making sense the way we mean making sense, analytically, by tearing things down to their constituent senses, so that we can control them, manipulate them, bring them to submission, which come to think of it is what we want in our politicians too. Not to mention scientists, and well, even writers, intentional fallacy be damned. Authors are supposed to be authorities, whereas, and I'm pretty sure I still have this right, the authority in the case of China is the handed down tradition itself, vetted, almost peer-review style, by the arrived body of scholars who judge the supplicants' - during the course of grueling examinations - ability to read. Which gets demonstrated by ability to write.

Now here's the really fun part, where I'm going to lose you altogether, and you'll likely think that I'm just crazy, nuts, in loco non-mentis, but if you can learn to read, then the result is just like having actual authorial power over the world, the way you might if you're a hands-on engineer, descended from scientist descended from theorist, descended from God, which is a great chain of being so obvious that one shouldn't have to rehearse it so much all the time.

But, we're not so surprised, are we, when people who have deciphered the world can manipulate it also by what would seem magic were you not aware that there are actual principles according to which airplanes can fly, and coal can burn, and cars can go really really fast?

But we would be shocked and overwhelmed a bit if it were to turn out that the reality around us, once we learn to read, will actually afford us meaning as if it were conspiring, sort of, to make sense just for us, by virtue, poetic virtue if you will, or actual poesis, of what it is that we choose to attend to among all the noise.

Like, you know, it won't work at all for you to try to move a whole car with a two-by-four, nor to light a block of ice on fire. That would be just plain stupid. And it won't do, at all, to try to read numbers right off the face of things, and then add them up, which might make you a kind of numerologist charlatan, but isn't going to tell you a thing at all about how the world is ordered. And interpreting absolutely everything as though it were meant, by some sort of platonic-ideal-incarnate God, to mean something, just for you, perhaps in a world where nothing at all is just a plain co-incidence, well that would be just nuts.

It's you, the reader, rather, who creates the sense. I'll try to show you a few examples now, of how one might read the world, and you can decide if this is truth or fiction. If I'm making things up outright, or maybe just foregrounding some stuff and backgrounding other stuff, which might be different from the way you would do it, but that's just precisely the point now, isn't it?

OK, so at about this point, it starts getting too hard. Beyond me. Out of my reach, even though my reach exceeds my grasp by a long shot (or what's a meta for?). So I have to start telling stories, but they're, you know, true stories. You can actually read about them in the News if you want.

Like the time that the local wine and food society, which was hosted by my little school for gifted kids, decided to have a scotch taste, somewhat in my honor, since I was young and powerful (for my age) and probably affected a taste for scotch, which is embarrassing even to think about now, no to mention, literally, distasteful, like the way I used to smoke a pipe when I looked like kids who I see now out on the street who you'd just want to almost beat up if they were to affect something so affected. I lucked out. As Dad says, "I'm still alive." (I ain't touching those quotes)

But anyhow, these wine-tasters had palates far too well educated to risk destroying with something so rude as scotch, and so I took home practically a whole case of really really expensive single-malt, which would probably get me put in jail these days for graft or something.

That's not the funny part. The funny part was when the presenter, who for this group gets a speaker's podium, and is really nervous about saying something uninformed in front of this critical group. And I do mean critical, as in they will call one another horse's asses right to each other's face if one says "hint of chocolate" where there is no such thing.

This presenter explained how scotch must be mellowed, by law, for something like 12 years, and so when the world was all behaving like me, affecting a taste for scotch as a way in to power, on wall street or wherever, the big scotch labels had to gear up way ahead of time, and then suddenly (well not that suddenly) everyone started drinking wine as the way to show discernment, probably influenced by Orson Welles who turned out to be a loser anyhow, ironically enough.

So they had an oversupply of the ingredients - the single-malts - long thought to be too crude to drink alone, which were carefully blended to make the smooth stuff which bore the label and the high price. You can do this experiment at home if you're filthy rich or just lucky enough to have a charitable organization at your disposal for the rich to dispose of their disposable income on at the expense of the taxpayer, but we did it right there in school at that, supposed, wine tasting. Phew! We mixed the single-malts and proved to our ample satisfaction that no one of them, alone, was near so good as they were when brought together. Right there on deck we were concocting fool's gold which should have, but couldn't, sell for way way way more than each ingredient separately.

Which, apart from being a pretty good truing of the Emperor's New Clothes closet story, also makes a pretty good tale out of school about what's wrong in it. 

You might not see it yet, but then you probably mixed up the vehicle and the tenor when you watched Avatar too. You probably thought it was the cliched and hackneyed story which mattered, the Christ story, the Pocahontas story, the step into your coffin to come fully alive story. When it was only the "special" (FUCK YOU!) effects which you really had to read in the first place.

You probably missed that even though it was literally pounded into your head (I didn't say drilled, because only an idiot author would dis his audience, and I didn't want you to think I was talking dirty either). The point of that story was that it made the impossible real-seeming, so that you could go on participating in Empire, even though in your heart now, leaving the movie, you're practically dead set against it, Empire. Joke's on us.

You have to be able to read to be able to see stuff, and I'm afraid I mean that literally.

Then there was the fact, last night at a church auction, that I ran into the guy who took over that school for dyslexics, now retired, who looked like a private school head from central casting, which I never did, which is why I failed, or maybe, who knows? Maybe I did look like central casting sent me, which is why I was promoted to that top spot at which I was so freaking fraudulent that it would make anyone want or need to drink if he were put in that position.

Drink being - and this is a near perfect analogy which I very much would like you to hang on to - the flywheel which gets us from one percussive realization that we are not quite vacant at our centers to the next (I could have that one just inside out and backwards). Just precisely as there are no "real" (fuckme stiletto quotes again) particles in the physics we now believe in (so desperately, if you want to know the truth), so there is no there there at our center, and if we didn't have the drink with which we've, and again I'm being literal here, genetically co-evolved, we really wouldn't be able to make it over the pain of being outed as nothing but an object in the first place. It can be very functional, alcohol.

Which distinguishes it from drugs, for instance, which are meant to disappear the pain altogether, which is not the same as bridging the gap now is it, or pot which makes the intervals (although how would I know?) just expand to near infinity, in imitation of that thing we need to close our eyes and take a stiff drink to get over, like marriage, for instance; that thing which diminishes infinitely or infinitesimally, depending on how you want to look at it, down to near but not quite exactly, zero. Zeno. Newton, but then he was outright daft.

Anyhow, after the auction, we moved over to a restaurant a few doors down, and I'm not making this up, but it was in the same vicinity as that hostage situation a few days ago in Buffalo which you might have heard about. Where a guy left his bulletproof vest behind so that he could be shot by the police who he would shoot if they didn't shoot him. And they shot him, for which he must have been grateful since he couldn't do it for himself.

But anyhow, this was also the restaurant where a very, apparently, nice dishwasher about my age but not my description pulled a gun on the sous-chef, whose father, who I guess also worked there, thus and likely without even thinking leapt between the shooter and his son, and then, far more tragically for the father than the son, lived through four bullets and still couldn't prevent one from going right through him and killing his son.

OK, and so here's the thing, quite apart from the fact that you quite evidently really can't ever quite protect your very own children, you should recognize that what terror really is. A nullifying of that nothing which is at your center. And once you recognize it, the thing to do is just get over it, alright? I mean, you're not all that special. We all have that nothing at our center, and falling for some guy - and it really is always a guy - trying to convince you that he can show you the way to salvation from that nothing, to some super uber ommmmmmm state of transcendance if only you get the rote recitations right, is just giving over truth to power, and you should just tell him as well to get over himself. I mean if he's not holding a gun at you, in which case, if you get a chance, kick him really hard in the nuts and he might start paying attention to something else for long enough that you can run like hell.

But anyhow, back to the restaurant, and I don't feel very good about saying this out loud an in public, but it's pretty much all in the news anyhow, but I know the people, glancingly, who run the place, or rather I know their parents, who are well enough off, and I'm pretty sure would do anything this side of hell to protect their four children, three of whom are now working in that same place where the shooting happened.

Where we lingered, my after church-auction crowd, to watch a comedian recruited, and likely paid, to provide the draw for a benefit for some non-profit called "Stop the Violence" I think, and so how could we leave, really, when we were the bulk of the audience.

So up on stage came these gang-bangers, is how they identified themselves, and here we were this gang of whitebreads, all except me with their proper molls (which that gang-banger wouldn't know what I'm talking about although he got on by me talking about running trains with his dad, and I was thinking Lionel in the basement), and there was plenty of laughter, and frankly gratitude that we were there, because otherwise this one poor and really actually quite good comic would have been talking pretty much to himself and to the wait staff, which was not literally true, since there were a few other tables of black folk (OK, like one, plus a friend of the performer, who the performer said didn't count), but we were making all the noise, which was almost embarrassing and almost threw the guy off his rhythm, which I could feel and was worrying about, and apparently so were a few other people, but it never did erupt into violence, which right there is a cause for something approaching hope. And I've really got to hand it to the guy, both hands clapping, that he was able to keep up a show in the face of this. This diminutive almost non-existent crowd of mostly white folk.

There's lots more to tell, and you can draw your own conclusions. I had to fake out my friends, pretending that I was going to my car, so that I could walk home through the terrifying night, but they did a drive-by in the big crossover SUV pickup combination, which by itself is not evil, and so I got a lift after all. In the end.

White Out!

Since you know I now write from Buffalo, you must know what I'm talking about when I say "white out." Or maybe I mean that stuff we used to have on our desks way back when we used typewriters. There used to be jokes about blonds painting their computer screens with whiteout to fix typos. I guess blonds (and machines) don't do metaphors.

In a real whiteout - not the kind right now where there's an undifferentiated white fog blowing across the parked cars - your brain loses the ability to orient you and you can walk in circles getting nowhere just like some people did in our great blizzard of '77.

I've been moving from a house to a much smaller apartment these past many days, which has meant sorting lots of stuff and sending lots of stuff to the dumpster or the Goodwill (actually, AmVets, Salvation Army, St. Vincent dePaul, spreading things around a bit).

It surprises me somewhat that every little thing I grab elicits some familiar memory. Even the tiniest little oddball screws which I'd thrown into the oddball jar can sometimes remind me of the thing it came from, and the process I was involved in, getting it out. It makes an interesting trip down memory road to move. Like total recall at death, but a little more spaced out.

Some of the stuff is big, like the wetsuit and SCUBA regulator which I just tossed into the scrap heap. I'd actually squeezed myself into that wetsuit one last time not all that long ago, trying to rehabilitate my diving memories. My buddy and now business partner got me into it on a kind of dare. And it was really fun, until the regulator valve seat - which I'd repaired the way I do everything - blew. I actually did laugh all the way to the surface, but I didn't make a fool of myself since the water covered up the guffaw.

I must have long since gotten over any fear of drowning I should have (the time my life did flash before mind's eye). I seem pretty cool about making a fool of myself too, and that used to really paint me into a corner.

Throwing that stuff out was easier than you might think. Those memories aren't going anywhere - I mean they're pretty well fixed - and if I were to want to try SCUBA diving again, I think the equipment has evolved quite a bit since my day. Not to mention cracking rubber and flaky - literally - regulator valve seats.

Still, it's really hard for me to scrap the actual hardware, each piece of which was carefully machined. And the rubber wetsuit which I'd scrimped and saved for. Ordinarily, I keep these things around for those just-in-cases where I might be able to repurpose them. But there's no room anymore.

All through the house-move there have been things which pop into my head which I still have clear and present use for. And I can't place them. I've learned to stop searching because everything is so scattered around, so I tuck the item away in my head, metaphorically, feeling reasonably confident that the thing will turn up at some point where I least expect it. It usually does.

Like this morning, remembering a sweater which is definitely in my current ready-to-wear collection, and I have absolutely no idea where it could be. The piles have been reduced now, and there just aren't that many places. So suddenly, again, I'm thrown into a kind of paranoia that it must have gone out among the bags and bags of rags and clothes that I've repurposed to some other person or sadly, to the landfill.

Except that I'm pretty confident I was more careful than that, flailing through the stuff and making triage decisions. Scrap/recycle, donate, keep. It was easy when it was a matter of size, or utility, as with the SCUBA stuff. But lots of little things still only exist in mind's eye. Oh well, I'll get over it.

Some things I just can't get rid of. I tried to give my boat away, and lots of people fell in love or so they said. But at the end of the day, they all decided one by one that they just couldn't swing it, and so it's back to me. Puts me in mind of my yesterday's post about marriage - I guess there are some kinds of falling in love which just overcome common sense entirely, and some kinds which go too far in the direction of fantasy. I probably should have put a price-tag on it, which would at least have limited me to the folks who can afford to live out fantasies.

And there are some other things which I still need to buy. For me, the experience of walking the aisles at Target, say, is like walking in a snowstorm. If there's some particular thing you need, a spice rack say, or towel bars, there's almost no real way to know which of the bejillion aisles to start with. And there's no real way to know if the thing even exists anymore.

The apartment is small, and I have space along the cupboards above the sink for spice racks of the sort that you used to see all over the place. Now, should these be near the kitchen gadgets, the closet organizers, the bathroom equipment? You might think you know, but I can almost guarantee that if you do it's because you have become an expert shopper, which I'm not.

Each time I go to a place like Target, I have to reorient myself to what they mean by housewares, say, as opposed to home-improvement. Bathroom towel racks are in among the towels, but the kitchen ones aren't in among the blenders. In the end, I either buy something which has similar utility but only the vaguest family resemblance to what I was looking for, or I walk away in a state of dizziness.

I have a magnetic towel bar now, which sticks to the refrigerator instead of the simple swinging dowels which used to be so common at every corner hardware store.

And the magnetic towel bar got twisted beyond recognition in the process of liberating it from its packaging. Now the packaging was recylcable carboard, but a whole hell of a lot sturdier than the sheet-stainless which looked so thick when packaged. I know you're picturing me yanking and pulling, but really it was simple trompe d'oeil and my body was doing my thinking for me. It really looked like the balance was all in the other direction. It was meant to.

Now I do have to say that this really pissed me off. Not just the ruined stupid towel rack which cost way too much, but the time it took searching for it and then not finding anything even vaguely similar to what I'd wanted. And no people around to simply ask where they stock such things.

I think lots of people enjoy shopping. They don't mind wandering the aisles, and discovering things they never knew about. Impulse buying, maybe. I know I have to keep myself in check when I see something I'd like to have. "Stay focused Rick, you have no funds nor real need for that, just get what you came in for." And then I still end up with something not quite useful.

Anyhow, I should really just make free and ask my shopping-expert peers. Except they all seem to be loudly talking on their cellphones. "Grace is love and . . . " some formula I can't remember, though I really thought I would. The woman kept repeating it like a mantra to whomever she was talking with, and then pretty much held a worship service while shopping. It sounded like a kind of math lesson. Then the other likely prospect was negotiating the delivery of a CPAP machine for her husband, who seems to take it personally that he snores too loudly.

I hate the fact that there are stores I have to drive to, even though I live in the most walkable area of Buffalo. There are no local hardware stores, and some of the most basic basics are hard to find. I'd hazarded out to lay in some groceries before the whiteout storm which has been realized this morning.

Well, I suppose that back in the day we all had little dowel towel racks because some enterprising merchandiser put them in front of our faces at the local store, and we all thought we needed them. And then pretty soon we found them useful, until suddenly they weren't. Or they just started looking ugly and out of style.

I have all my books now in stackable legal bookshelves inherited from my Dad's law practice after they got water damaged during a fire. I think the legal booksellers provided these back in that day when the books were leather bound, and had to be oiled every year. Later on, pages would be added to looseleaf books as the laws would change at an accelerated pace and with proliferating words designed, I can only guess, to meet specific hostage requirements for specific representatives without naming specific names. Pretty soon no law office could possibly be large enough to have a complete set of books and it all went online.

Pretty soon my bookshelves will be for decoration only too. You know, after I get my e-reader for Christmas because it's so freaking obviously the gift of the season for folks like me who read a lot.

But these bookshelves do remind me somehow of those spice racks I couldn't find. I think they also must have been distributed right along with the spices. But these days it's like trying to find one of those cheap and simple Melitta coffee filter cones which are all you really need to make a perfect cup of coffee. You can find a million of them packaged up in some sort of gadgetry to heat the water and send it through. At almost any price you wish. But you can hardly ever find just the cone, especially when you really need it.

Well, and so what's this all about? Why do I keep writing like this? Why do I keep rambling about among all the things which pop into my head depending on where I am and what I'm doing and what's the state of the weather?

For one thing, I think that's what blogging is. It's somewhere between writing a letter and writing an article for publication. It's fun and rather low impact. But I also find that it clears my head. It makes some shape of my life.

Now I'm certain that for many of you, were you to try it out, you'd find that it would give you better direction, sense of purpose, clarity about your decisions. For me, as you can tell, it just puts me further up in the air.

I trimmed my life partly because I'd thought I was moving to Seattle. But even trimmed, I don't think I have anywhere near the funds to move the remainder that far. And pulling a trailer on a VW with 300,000 miles already on it doesn't seem the greatest idea in the world.

The boat was supposed to be trucked tomorrow, but the trucker tells me that with this wind and lake effect blowing snow, there's something like a snowball's chance in hell that it's going to move. The house was supposed to close this week, but I'm sure the weather now will provide cover for whatever the hell's really going on among the lawyers. It was supposed to be last week, and the week before that, and etcetera, and now I'm going to have to kite another month's mortgage for a cold and empty space I no longer occupy but still heat and insure!

I suppose I should get pissed off, but they say that in Buffalo if you don't like the weather you should just wait a minute and it will change. That's not exactly true, since I hardly think the sun is coming out today, but if you limit your expectations properly, it really can surprise you. Many's the time I've been in the middle of Lake Erie and been surprised by what the weather came up with contrary to the broadcast expectations. That plus its shallow depth explain the record-book number of shipwrecks. Which explains my one-time passion for SCUBA diving in case you wonder why anyone would dive in water you can't see through.

I'm pretty sure true midwesterners have a completely different mindset. They can see the weather coming at them for days and days. And those who live in sunny California. They must actually believe that there's nothing they can do wrong which putting a cap on taxes wouldn't fix.

We actually tried simple-minded here in Buffalo back when we were "Talking Proud." It doesn't really work so well California, and you should get a clue.

Hey, I'm pretty OK with where this went today. I know you think I shouldn't be. More rambling, heading noplace in particular. But I did get out what I mean to do by writing. These words are like the stuff I've been triaging. Each one resonates with its use and usage. Each one comes to me as though by random chance. And I slog my way through them as though swimming through dark polluted waters, or trudging through a snowstorm.

Wondering what shape will resolve itself from the whiteout, and hoping that it's not some scary form like that white cadaverous huge sheephead which nearly caused me to swallow or spit out my SCUBA regulator back when I was junior Diver Dan. Or the taillights suddenly flashing an impossible stop along the blizzardy highway.

There's nothing new to any of this except the 'me myself and I' which makes this writing so narcissistically lousy compared to the real thing. But, well, it's not as though I'm trying to get paid for it.

I'd thought I was going to write about "cronic," a term - I now gather - for hi-grade weed. About how difficult it is to look it up on the Internet, because the search engines all helpfully substitute chronic, whose meaning I already know, thank you very much. And then there are a lot of auto dealerships out there, for some reason, called "Cronic". I wonder if they're as embarrassed as we are at pikk.com by what pikk means in Nobel country. Oh hell, my name could have been Dick, so who really cares, eh? I mean the Pulitzer prize people should be embarrassed by their name, as should Nobel, Carnegie, and maybe even Bill Gates.

Just don't try contacting me at dick@pikk because computers, remember, are really literal, no matter how funny you think the combo is. I really should have been born a blond, don't you think?  I mean, metaphorically speaking.

OK, so you're going to think I'm making this up, but out my window this very minute, I see blue sky. No shit, honest!

And our President is headed over to Norway now to pikk up the prize he says he doesn't really deserve. He's already insulted the King by suggesting that he might have more important things to do than dine with him. I suppose anybody could use a spare million dollars, but something tells me he doesn't quite have the degrees of freedom right now to do with it what you and I might like to. I'm sure that whatever he does will be whatever is required by public opinion.

And he'll be blamed for that, you know, as if he doesn't have a thought of his own.

The guy who clued me in to the meaning of cronic urges me to stay in the mainstream where I belong. Yeah, I'm pretty whitebread, and will likely get swamped when the real storm comes, or so he suggests. This fellow is one of the few I know who actually does transact business across the color divide, and friendships and no, I'm not talking about dealing cronic.

I've got a hell of a lot of learning to do. But at least I'm not obsessing about the weather. Well, not the way you do. I mean I'm plenty worried about global warming, and I don't need any jokes about how more hot air is not exactly the solution. I'm working on it. I mean, the solution really is in and through and by words.

The solution is as simple as a metaphorical reversal. Where God comes down to earth, in just the simplest sense that we stop making an abstraction real. Where we take all that unbelievable talent, skill and training which we deploy for the purposes of driving and of shopping and use it for something actually useful.

Of course that would mean end-runs around a system which elaborates laws for the purpose of rendering up all the veto power of every single senior representative. That would mean people letting go and breathing; getting in touch with qi, a nicely untranslatable Chinese term you all think you understand.

Those kung-fu movies which show the impossible skill [kung-fu] of martial artists attempt to depict the results of endless training which gets your mind out of the way of what your body has been trained for. And your body learns to move in ways as if by accident, out of the way of blows, or more absurdly, of speeding bullets.

That kind of kung-fu training is at least as difficult as are the moves for ever greater control which we in the West still try to master. Finally turning over the matter to some machine which can be calibrated to near perfection. And still the bullets find their way into innocent flesh.

OK, true confessions. I actually did just watch Terminator Salvation, where the Governator made a cameo appearance. I'm pretty sure it was just his likeness, a kind of avatar of virtual reality, for which he maybe donated his royalty to some PR-friendly cause. Then I watched Red Dawn, making good on an old promise to the right wing of the family.

Neither of these is very good in the highbrow sense of cinema. But they do just fine to express the plot I'm scripting. Ideological machine-think is the thing we should be fighting. And just as soon as we relax our grasping grip on all the things which we think will make our life better, or last a few hours longer, just that soon our collective efforts can turn, as though catalyzed, into something as much more human compared to how we act now, as is my pikk is from my thinking heart.

At the moment, we all have fallen for the silly and ideologically based notion that the more we consume, the more the economy grows and the more likely it is that we can have full employment again. And yet the number of our fellow citizens who remain in a state of "food insecurity" now numbers a percentage of us far larger than any conscionable profit margin. Some 30 million is what I hear.

Clearly, the pinnacles of success keep getting sharper and steeper, while the puddle at their bottom is over peoples' heads. What if, and this makes a really really big if, we actually did let everyone in to hospitals who needs them. What if food were as free and cheap as public education. What if death were not so scary when its time comes around, and so people would not grab after those last few months which cost such a huge part of what we spend on healthcare. What if the mega-profiteers were not controlling all the conversations?

Isn't it possible that we could find a better way to organize ourselves? Where each of us might have a chance at matching wits with things that interest and excite us? Utopian, perhaps, but this change requires no particular ideology. It just requires each of us to let go a little and to share. It requires each of us to sidestep the emotional quality of money, say, and let it flow in directions not dictated so much by want. Well, depending on how you use the term.

I'm guessing - it's really just a wild guess - that the economic system would look a lot like capitalism, written very small. That all the monopolies would be, by consent and decree, government monopolies. And that life would get a lot more interesting than it is now with us all interacting with and by and through all sorts of silly widgets.



P.S.   Always the bigger fool, it took more lily-white snow for me to overcome my mental color divide and realize there actually is a hardware store within walking distance. Of course between shoveling, walking there and nearly losing my ears, and returning, the sidewalk needs shoveling again as if I'd never touched it. And there was this really nice, um, blond lady who evidently knows hardware who directed me to everything I've been looking for. Except the spice rack. She helpfully directed me to Target for that. I guess we all have our blind spots.

Editorial Control

I now have a new home - it's actually my old apartment, overstuffed with things from my former house. When I used to live here, somehow there was space for two daughters, a sleepover girlfriend, and room to work. Now it's just a mishmash of junk, and that's after I donated away or sold the bulk of what was in the house.

I'm not known for my decorating sense. Well, that might not be quite true. If I'm working on someone else's house, I can be pretty good at it. I can also be pretty good at sensing someone else's style, and offering editorial assistance. But I'm blind with me, always being taken aback when someone offers how ugly that tie is that I thought was pretty cool.

I tend in the direction of experimental is my excuse. I'm always conjectural about myself. So I end up walking the streets in teal chucks, say, or with a stupid looking hat. I know I write that way too.

Some folks are gifted with proprioception; with a solid sense of self. They can dance, for instance, or intuit just the right sense of style about themselves. I'm not gifted like that. So, blogging might be just the wrong pursuit.

I sit now among furniture poorly deployed, pictures hung at just the wrong height and in the wrong spot. I have no more energy to deal with the little piles of stuff which just simply can't find any place but isn't quite ready for the garbage sacks.

I've written myself into some alive sense of who I am, and so now what? I have two pretty good job prospects lined up, and I know that you, gentle reader, are urging me, please to take one. It would be the sensible thing, and two job prospects ain't bad the way the economy's going.

I actually think these prospects would not have materialized had I not taken it upon myself to exercise my voice in public. Or maybe it doesn't count as public if no-one's paying attention, like that famous tree falling in the woods which might not make a sound.

(lots of "I" at the begining of my paragraphs here, like Doris Lessing's famous machine gun, right?)

This must be the power of prayer then, which I must take the word of religionists actually does and can "work." Giving oneself over to the unknown, which is different from writing in a private journal, say, must have some power quite apart from whether you make an actual connection. Very much as if words themselves have power.

Like many of you (I would hazard a guess that anyone who reads this would fit the category of "many" here), I mourn the loss of books and newspapers. I feel very much as though they represent, on balance, a power for good. Sure, there are idiot screeds like "Going Rogue" which represent the foolishness of thinking there are still geographic-style frontiers. I guess that would be easy to believe up in Alaska. And Pulitzer-style newspaper power has caused its share of mischief.

But the best of us, well edited, is encapsulated in books. And a newspaper is such a brilliant "technology" for rapid orientation to the events going on around us. Professional writers become that well accomplished at giving us something we can both skate across and dive into, with headlines calling out their slant.

But we are different readers now. The books we buy often represent what we already know and believe in - bestsellers designed to push the envelope only of what we already think. With Rupert Murdoch in control, what do we expect of free and independent reporting?

Much though I will also mourn the loss of local independent booksellers, these could be replaced by coffee shops with readings, say. It isn't necessary that we do all our interacting on the web.

Our startup, pikk.com, will shortly be going regional. Like Craig's list, you'll be able to see what people in your neighborhood are thinking about. You might be interested to contrast and compare the voting between, say, Kansas and Buffalo, on stories of national interest. You might want to read only the stories of relevance to Buffalo.

We're hoping that there might be something there to recapture part of the energy of newspapers. Headlines to draw you in. Some localized ad revenue to pay for the editors behind the pikk links. We hope that the good bloggers will rise to the top too.

Everyone struggles now with boundaries. Some kid surfing porn accidentally downloads child pornography and must go to jail. He'll be labeled a sex offender now for the rest of his life. Protectors at Virginia Tech tell their own families before telling the ones they are paid to protect. And people were killed because they were allowed out of lockdown too soon. A sex and drug unbalanced preppy-style college student gets put away for thirty years because of proximity to risk-takers perhaps more familiar with murder.

These are judgments which assert our distance from those kinds of risks. But still the heartstrings thrum with a kind of terror that there but for the grace of some God . . . . And there are other kinds of risks which we are also terrified away from. We can't quit a lousy job because we see too many people bankrupted by illness. We can't criticize our leaders because we see too many extremists waving teabags in mockery of their freedom to speak. We won't speak out because we might sound as ridiculous as we do when listening to ourselves on tape. And we know what the flamers on the Internet sound like.

It really is hard to tell the gentle from the dangerous. It is nice to be affirmed by those around you, even when and if they're just taking advantage of your vulnerability.

We just found out that pikk in norwegian is a rude word for that famous male member which can be referred to only by such oblique references as dongle, say, when referring to something you plug into your computer. But just like those scrotal sacs you now see hanging from the trailer hitches of really big pickups, aren't we grown up enough to call a thing what it is? Waving teabags just makes you a fool when the cool folks know that it's homophobic balls you're swinging.

Well, I have to exercise some editorial control on my apartment now. Rearrange the pictures. Sweep up the debris. I hope I get a kindle for Christmas, since I can hardly bear to move all these books again. And I'm practically dying to find some time for reading. Santa?

I Won!

OK, so, that was obvious, right? This one must have been already in the can before that previous one got written where I played the "mega millions". It's all an elaborate hoax, just like scientists are conspiring to keep down the anti-global warming truths,



Isn't this just good science, or is it conspiracy among the scientists?

or in the way that we now can put a lawyer in jail for taking the criminal's side.




Honestly, I did buy a lottery ticket, for which I'm embarrassed as hell. I'm not about to check its number, since it might have been the most insane and crazy thing I've done in my life, and I'm not very proud of it. But well, hell, even I can afford a buck for a simple experiment, right?

The experiment was about how I would feel, and I have to say I didn't do very well. I started thinking about how I could gain lots of recognition for my crazy theories, and then maybe the world would start moving in a different direction.

That's pretty darned grandiose of me, and so I also started worrying about my sanity if I actually did win, which puts me right there in that same camp as all the crazies who buy lottery tickets.

I know you think I need an editor, and I'm not going to disagree with you, but as embarrassing to me as you think my writings sometimes are, I swear to you nothing comes close to how silly this one makes me feel.

But I mean, I really did win - and you can call it the lottery if you like. My sweetheart arrived safely in Paris and thought enough about me to let me know. I arrived safely back from NYC with my daughter. Oh sure, these are really relatively safe roads compared to the ones you drive, since only losers live in Buffalo where there isn't any traffic.

But it could be bumper cars down on Manhattan, and well, sure I'm one of those strange types who actually likes to drive there. There's a flow to it which seems so much saner than L.A., say, where OK, I've never actually driven. And with all those people and buildings you actually do feel like you're going somewhere. Even though it makes no sense to have a car in Manhattan, well except for, you know, sneaking in to pick up your daughter.

And last night I got to see Ha Jin along with maybe a couple thousand other people at a packed house down the street. My good friend won a ticket (I actually don't have even that $35 until my house sells, so I wasn't about to go on my own) and so there we went! He said it wasn't quite like the lottery, since all you had to do is know the names of one of this author's works. Well, I wouldn't have won - oh sure I could have looked it up on the Internet, which would have been like cheating, where my friend actually had the book right on the desk next to him, so he won legit!

And I was blessed. I mean truly blessed. OK, so it was a little bit spooky how people I knew didn't recognize me. I mean, in a way I'm Mr. Tiananmen here in backwater Buffalo (which is nowhere near as backwater as where I really live), and here's this writer, Ha Jin, whose prominence descends in some sense from his refusal to re-enter his homeland after those horrific events back in 1989. And I saw at least three people I'd led on trips to China, and it was as if I didn't exist.

Sure, I look a lot different now than I did way back then. I'm older, heavier and have no hair. And the fact is, I'm plenty embarrassed to say, that I'm too shy to walk up and say hi to important people even when I know them pretty well. I really am, which is a little bit strange coming from a guy who lets his ass hang out all over the Internet. But they say the actors who get up on stage - a lot of them - are shy too. Although I couldn't really imagine myself in Ha Jin's place in front of all those people.

And then there's the fact that Ha Jin not only can write, but really works at it, and seems to have mastered absolutely everything his audience has mastered, and can make funny jokes right in front of that huge crowd, even speaking a language which was never native for him. 

So, in that sense, I'm glad that my crazy grandiose fantasies of winning the actual lottery have about as much chance of panning out as that Large Hadron Collider now has of running.



So, is it gonna actually fire up and get the experiments done?

I should leave things right there, which with my sick sense of humor, would be a pretty funny place to leave things, but I still feel kind of funny about this whole thing. I mean, I have no business acting as if people didn't recognize me. I've been hiding out for what, maybe 18 years now? I mean how would anyone who thought they knew me even open up a conversation? And how would I respond? (that's my excuse for being Mr. Shy).

"Um, well, yeah, see, I don't really know what I'm doing or where I'm going or where I'm going to live." Even the bartender at the really cool and openminded place right around the corner from where I live was taken aback by that comment. I mean he really seemed stunned and thrown for a loop, and you'd think bartenders, almost by definition, are pretty laid back about such things. Living by their wits and watching lots of crazy people do lots of crazy things. My friend and I left when things were starting to hop. Around here, the bars don't really come to life until well after midnight, since they stay open until 4 AM, and, well, we're pretty lightweight . . .

So, that's my idea of winning the lottery. I wonder what yours is? Are you living on today's page, or some fantasy page you just can't wait to arrive at? What corners would you cut to get there? If you're a scientist and some crazy creationist steals your files and finds the smoking gun that you called him crazy, does that make you guilty of conspiracy? We're only negotiating price here folks.

Disconnect

There is, of course, a lovely lightness now, to have liberated myself from any particular machine. I do all my writing ethereally, up in the cloud as they say, and have no worries about lost sectors on some spinning disk, or before that, lost, shuffled or wind-strewn pieces of paper.

The machines are all interchangeable, and apart from the time it takes to boot them up, and sometimes a vicious cycle thrashing from an older computing unit which can't outrace saves to the slowly spinning disk, they're all one to me. So long as the keyboards work, then I truly am indifferent now to operating system or if the machine sits on my lap or under my desk, or even if it's borrowed from someone else.

Even the loading up of a new machine, or newer, meaning if I am granted one from someone else's garbage, is trivially quick and dirty. And all this freedom is granted free, I suppose by the grace of some other gang of fools which will actually pay attention to the advertising which supports this evil monopoly empire.

I pay rather a lot for access on a monthly basis, though the reason I pay more is also so that I might be liberated from plugs or securitized wireless, or coffee shops or more borrowing. I prefer the Macs and Linux machines, because they accept my cellular device without any need to search for the metering software which Windows must deploy, presumably for the same reason - market share - that they are targeted by so much malware.

So, I take my Internet with me too, in the form of a tiny piece of hardware, whose usage costs me more than I can afford, but such is the cost of freedom. Truth be told, I think Internet should be ubiquitous and free, and perhaps it will be, all on the backs of those other foolish people who pay attention to ads. Commercial interest should almost demand it, especially when you consider the unsupportable costs to ship catalogs and mass-mailed come-ons, still, into so many peoples' literal mailboxes.

And I want to know why, given all this freedom, there are still people who want anything. Why would anyone, after the instant of making love to some vision of beauty which comes in to one's life, would one ever want or need or ask or complain about or for anything more, ever, again?

But you know it's not about the machine or the access or the writing. It's also about the place in which you do it, and now here in the lovely fall Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, I am sitting opposite a cheery fire, lit against the rapidly encroaching autumn so that I can remain comfortable, although it isn't cold. The fall which will bring bold colors and tourists to this place I am about to leave.

There are small enough margins for choice in our lives now, once the marketplace has perfected the distance between what we might be worth and what we need to buy, filling the gap with seemingly insatiable desires, each one of which, like my internet access, is calibrated to match the scale of desire in each one of us. Just against our possible illness, we must keep a full-time job, and then the cost of the other baubles is trivial enough to keep it below the decision threshold.

But I do wonder when someone other than myself will notice that in this way, all distinction between software and hardware has gone away. It's just a connection, rather, between what is stored in a kind of frozen-hard state, and what is gotten at in more liquid fashion. These words I can manipulate until I want to fix them. And I really don't care anymore at all about the machinery which makes that possible, until it stops functioning.

But software - a set of instructions - which depends on hardware to be set in motion is itself that hard because it never changes. And the hardware is a perfect analog for imprinted media, with fixed code as represented by the circuits and transistors initially mapped in such fashion that the schematic and the final product resemble one another almost interchangeably. So all that really matters is the change of state, happening now on this machine maybe a million times per second, but happening overall for the meaning of my transcriptions, who could possibly know or even care, since it's all so distributed about the cloud.

So we do still think of transmissions and storage and instructions stepping through and by. But that makes no more sense than to think of Walmart actually selling me a bicycle. They sell a form of crystallized misery is all. Its form, the bicycle's, exists somewhere now in software, as a set of specs. Machines realize these specs, almost apart from human intervention, and in the end there is always slave labor in China to do what hands are still required for.

So first of all, the hardware bicycle can be gotten so cheaply for almost the same reason a computer chip can. Once the design is set, it's like printing books almost. The marginal cost of each additional copy becomes almost nil. Actually, what our market economy now means is that it must be pushed as close to nil as possible, with all margins left for the creator alone. The designer. The one in the room with a view.

The funny thing is that the actual designer doesn't get a whole lot. He's just some middle class slob eager to sell his soul for the company boxer shorts. The one really on the take is the one gaming the logo, managed in trust for the hoards who own its equity. And these equity corporations act just like sociopathic machines, destroying anything small and beautiful on their way to world domination.

What a terrible thing has been accomplished to give these machines the rights of man. They resolve our collective aspirations, just like the gleam in the eye of my daughter, say, when she got her new Walmart bicycle which was all I could afford. We just want our money to grow, just like the value in our houses, so that we can turn it into interchangeable space to be bought and sold.

The resolution of our collective will, betokened only by money which is as interchangeable, precisely, as an identity-less subatomic particle, assures that whoever is custodian of that capital must labor to maximize its value, quite regardless of what gets harmed along the way.

This is the truest law of the jungle. This is the opposite of civilization.

Resurrection

Resurrection is the hardest part of the Christ story to get one's head around. Why so extravagant? Why so inconceivable? It's paired, quite magically, with the virgin birth as those things which are at once perfectly beyond the reach of science to touch, and which present such great taboos when science does approach.

There's cloning on the one end. Frankenstein monstering. And at the other a kind of fever dream of robots or zombies or uploaded souls. Still with the full knowledge that these could never approach the absurdity of Christ's resurrection, and before that His virgin birth. 

And people do aspire to believe these things, quite "literally," or so that term does get abused. These, of course, are people who by definition can't read, and so you're left to wonder what literal could possibly mean here. You can find it in the Left Behind series, which does earnestly and without apparent effort that which Saturday Night Live can only accomplish with heroic labor. You find it in Ray Kurzweil's absurd celebrations of man's dominion; a scientist overcome with himself and the manic dream of creating the one thing nature never will endure - a geometric expansion which sustains rather than destroys life. 

I say, imperiously, that they can't read, so we'll have to wonder just what reading is along the way toward resurrection and creation out of nothing. Let's just say, for now, that to read is reliably to place a set of words in their proper context. A joke occurs along with the jarring of words quite out of context. A joke on oneself when words are misread and contexts traded. People lounging on chaise, say, or when liberal education is thought to relate to books and liberaries (sic). We all do this, and manage to endure, despite the ridicule of our betters. 

But when you extrapolate full out, you gain a sense of just how difficult reading really is, and how absurd such phrases are as "absolute truth" or "faith".  And how unlikely, at the fringes, that anyone really can read another soul. Or in my case, that I can even read myself. 

So "Left Behind" and the "Singularity is Near" are cosmic pratfalls among people who simply don't know how to read. They are those roobs who fall for the magic trick and then want to buy it for use at home. "Disappear your wife" in five simple steps. 

But I guess the Jesus story endures because it does provide, somehow, that limit. That end beyond which there must and can only be God. A cosmic joke for sure, but also a true endpoint to what we can and should and will ever read and true against what can only be very personal and limited experience.

Science provides a trueing along the way, of readings we must share. I mean this ever so simply, as to describe those things, like knowing that the ground underneath our feet will support us, on which we must agree. By abstractions to the max in our mathematical descriptions, and reductions to the very most economical structures, we seem able to arrive at many many understandings (English is so punny - but not, I assure you, as much as is Chinese) which have that wondrous quality to be universal.

These understandings describe the same reality in any cultural setting, and presumably across the cosmos, though we may not be quite ever finally confident in our ability to translate these to technological controls. There's so much confusion between these two pursuits, especially now that we have become so overcome by our own technological prowess, that we have almost forgotten the science. Scientifically now, our wonder at ourselves will ecologically if not by geometric release of nuclear fissions or fusions (same thing monkey boy) only destroy us.

There can be no question now that the scientific enterprise not only did not but could not have developed in some other culture from that of the Christian European West. Post modernists can and do go fuck themselves, but this trivial observation (that science is culturally grounded) takes nothing from the universality of scientific conclusions, properly made. (It's the "properly made" part which makes those post modernists right almost all the time, but their language is just so damned annoying, and itself always a parody of what they rail against).

So faith starts there, with feet on ground, and finally gets rendered up to what it is we confront in contact with another human being. How much can or do we know that person? Or a book. Or perhaps an entire ideology (what a word, that one!). God?  I think not! (therefore I am)

It's never so trivial to trust that to which we're attracted in another soul. They might turn out robotic, like that sociopath next door. Or we might discover that we're turned off by their feet when we do finally get in bed together, and then the thrall is done for. There's divorce and much worse utter foolishness to pay for these mistakings.

But hanging back from ultimates, many many friends if not lovers do prove true. I guess because the expectation is so much less. The navigations and negotiations so intermittent; the in and out from other's lives so much less quickened. And friendship is capped by that fine taboo at end of day that you never ever will or would get in bed with one another.  Sure, in a pinch, you might for survival, or even intimately resuscitate, mouth to mouth. But if there were a quickening there in bed, I think the friendship must end, don't you? Or blossom. 

But it is that impossibility in principle which defines friendship at its limits, and enables a kind of constancy. Don't worry chum, I'll never stop at your home for more than a few weeks at a time, along the road to somewhere else. But we'll share better times than you will ever have with your wife - that much is certain. And our souls will come much closer and merge more fully simply because there is that boundary to define, contain, and shape our perfect pairing. Nothing lost, but geometric expansions and progressions gained in that most true conspiring. There need never be any subordination at all. There is perfect parity, and no struggle between and among, say justice and relating, the male and female roles, however sexed.

But the ultimate faith, of love, of marriage, in God, just for a few examples. That one is a leap so long that only fools attempt it. The rest of us find ourselves pinnacled and without place to go but down down down, and still along the way there has never been worse terror than to lose oneself that way. It would be so utterly foolish. So like the man who would dive right through the ground. Buckaroo Bonzai!!!! And away. . . . 

I must and do confess that I am terrorized by the act of sex. Not quite in the sense you think. I am not nerdy sexless, nor timid in the act, and would some safely aloof former partner quite allow it, there are no limits to what I wouldn't like to try (hohohaha!). None. But it's the implications terrify me. They are so much forever. Not just disease, but possibility for hurt and misunderstanding, and fallings out, no matter what the interval. That moment is sheer terror. That aloof moment where you realize that yes, it was only physical. Or chemical. Or instinctual, and in any case not forever or even a day. Or far worse, that the deal you'd meant for a moment won't ever stop. Ever. The deal does not get any simpler, young friends, as you grow older.

***

In that interval right there, gentle reader, in service to writing's worst enemy (necessity for taking a dump) and on the toilet reading the New York Times while I still can (yes, it was on my phone, OK?? So, put me in jail already! Throw away the key, I both read on the toilet, and don't pay any attention to internet ads. At all!) before its also necessary demise, I am saddened almost beyond reason to learn of the death by suicide of Sylvia Plath's son sweet Nick sweet son. I know nothing of either of them, yet enough to understand the dimensions of this tragedy. And I must apologize to you that I have been diverted from this writing in and by the act of writing species of love letters toward human contact of the sort which terrifies me more, apparently, than to be alone forever and anon. You just aren't there, you see. I have not yet, and despair I ever will, that kind of faith. That there is a reader.

But I still do make this pledge: That my writing and living and direction will never tend in that particular direction. I will never make that secret pact to end on some high note because I fear my ability to endure the lower lows. It is to life and love and light alone that I direct myself. Alone. All one.

***

Now where was I? That faith which is so hard to conjure. I do actually believe, you know? That in extremis, when finally I must leave my job because there is no more room for me there. Up against that wall where, let me now enumerate, love is not possible across the taboo of workplace, though that's the least of it. Where faith is superstructured by the only living remnant of medieval monarchy to outlast enlightenment (though I actually have no problem with that, it's just that this particular institution's perversions remind me much too much of the Sadean version). I cannot live in public any longer what I mock so hard in private. 

And I will surely never trust myself in love again, after once tripping over my own feet on the way toward what became a lifetime of indentured servitude, and another time in pursuit of what never was in the first place attainable. These twinned poles represent for me all that is possible in the falling out from sense and good friendship's underpinnings. I retreat now and again for long intervals into some sort of mild cocooning, and I'm not even sure that it's time yet to molt again and again and again. 

But I do trust - have faith even - that it's the right time now to refuse any more work or love in which I am not quite myself. Extravagant though that is, and I'm not after "authenticity." I want only to be just one me, cliched and ordinary dull though my character might prove to be.  I must strap myself to whatever mast I have (it's rotting) or can find, to resist temptations for comfort and repose and six figure rescue from the necessity to disburse a lifetime's debris of bicycles, boats, books and papers papers papers, though these I can and do and have uploaded to that proprietary cloud whose stewardship I perversely trust so much more than tangibles in my possession. 

I refuse, I do, any further servitude in maintenance of my slack body and it's sprawling messy dishevelled extensions. (The real estate lady demurred a bit when she came for a visit, that perhaps we can start showing "next week" after I manage to dispose of a few more things which make it difficult to navigate the space. Not so bad, please, as those left behind houses of demented souls having pathways through piles of newsprint and garbage to some inside nest you can't conceive.) Just the look of a house vacant all weekends because in the end, my remaining at-home daughter just cannot endure teenage occupancy alone with Dad in the wilderness. That is not a sentiment I care to contest. At all. And so I write only weekends, apartmented in the city. Wondering where and when and how I'll find either the time or energy to wash the windows and overall brighten up my latest silly womb with but dim view. My house in the country I now must leave, in preservation of what time I've left to write my way out of this ethereal paper bag.

So, that's the faith I have. That at this post-half-century turning point, I have become proof against ever taking another day job act. Against ever again so energetically pursuing love that I shave my beard and trim my hair and my rhetoric too and wear other more presentable clothes, or God help me, endure the indignity of a younger babe so easily mistaken for my daughter. These things make me just cringe anymore. I cannot but be myself. It's less the finding of my authentic self, than the drooling paunch of no more choices, but I'll take it.

Sure, it does help that my hormones no longer rage. Not quite so old as "brother" Cohen, I still have no real regrets for leaving that garden I never did quite enter and therefore won't have to leave. It was only ever thorny for me. (Well, OK, so invite me in and we'll just test my resolve)

It helps also that my mind is aged by cigarettes and wine and never enough time nor energy to read the things I really should. Not near so much capacity in dissipation as say, that self-same Leonard Cohen, but I feel the same dimming he talks of but does not show. The structures for mind's youthful blooming recede, and I haven't the energy, even in principle, to elaborate just what I mean when I talk about particle physics or Chinese poetry or other pursuits on whose trail I once was hot.

I doubt I will ever have that energy again, though I guess it's not impossible. I mean, if someone were to pay me for it, I surely would re-systematize my knowledge. But the university is not open to my paltry accomplishments. I don't own those degrees of freedom, and even if I did I'm just not so sure that there wouldn't be still more constraint there than on my own; with political pathways up, and narrative trueings so much more constrictive and less open to surprise than even the most extreme cases of anti-global-warming-conspiracy-of-dunces-theorizing.

I must remain unbounded. Promethean in my reach if surely not my grasp. But I am so lost with torch burning down and noplace yet to alight my spark.

You see, these folks are quite right in at least one reductive sense. (I had dinner finally just the other day for the first time after almost seven years with my good friend and ultra conservative Catholic neighbor, and had to endure, though it cost me absolutely nothing in good humor, his fulminating rhetoric about the global warming hoax) Approaches to scientists will automatically fall flat and dead at that point where you wish to implicate them in their research.

I do believe that there is one most false branch to science; cosmology. It is there alone that science cannot go, but demands to still. It is there alone that science will and does and has, would it but wake up to that fact, find that it is measuring only the mind of the observer.

Oh, I hate these personifications, as though "science" were some "them." Science does not "say" anything, and scientists, surely at the limit of cosmology, are so unlikely to have read the stuff they really need to comprehend before they peer off into the readings out from instrumentation at least 17 miles in diameter (was it circumference???) and declare any findings.

I do know from hard experience, that it is equally difficult to talk to - just for example now - a disbeliever in global warming, about science, as it is to talk to a scientist about the end(s) of science. They are simply not prepared for that particular surprise, so invested must they be in towering edifices of accumulated understandings and trued arcane verbiage and degrees of distinction from everything and everyone here below in the muck of direct experience.

So I was and remain chastened now, this Easter morning, by last night's meeting with my former student. I'd tried to teach him Chinese once so long ago (though I was and am a fraud, I did have and could teach, at least, perfect pronunciation, and build a good foundation, demonstrably, for more native ministrations), and then as headmaster, by the skin of both our teeths, to get him some degree. 

He surprised me to tell that he never did earn any single degree. Not high school. Not college, though he often teaches theater there. And I am chastened, not just because I feel so lucky proud to have pulled what degrees I own back from the temptations, always, to chuck it all (it took three rough passages through Yale before they let me out. Sanctioned my outing, is more like it). I am chastened because he has become so fully my teacher now. And because my failure was not his.

I came to him for help to stage my "Womb with a View" (working title, please) monologue. And he, upon only the very briefest hearing, shot back authors and plays and readings so erudite that I had to beg him please to email the names, since I had no hope of recall. 

I held his door last night - the house was absolutely packed with only one last seat for me. I only snoozed a moment this second time to witness his terrific play. I think I snoozed because I felt the beginnings of some relaxation to my quest. There will be those who know so much more than I do, can help to true what words I have. There will be help along the way. 

And so I think it time for me to de-cocoon once more. I don't know about spreading any wings of Icarus or surfactin-stimulated butterfly, as was the manner for my little peanut daughter to survive her own way-too-early escape from her mother's womb; butterfly wings and kisses. It must be the same substance. For my daughter, at two pounds she was very lucky that her mother's doctor missed the textbook case, and left her and mom both traumatized in the womb so that when she finally was hacked out (it was that bad - I was there), her lungs would not stick together which is what is the worst for preemies.

Lucky for me, I should properly say, since she would be her no matter what had happened, but now she provides me such bright pride and joy and even company. She listens to my words and claims they make sense to her, which is way more than a father ever could deserve, since the obligation is so much the reverse. And she never did try me that way. Always so easy to understand. Such a joy.  So perfectly articulate.

So, it must be this same substance on butterflies' wings, which must get discharged in some precise quickening before the molt. Why cocoons must never be warmed. Why term is at all costs to be allowed before the labor is begun. Why sometimes, with luck, too early de-cocoonings, like even that one for me from boat so long ago, can still be survived provided further artificial incubation. 

For me, all artifice has ended (Well, lash me to some mast, we'll see). Perversely, I will endeavor to refuse all offers of comfort - at least those even where I only have to torque my soul a tiny bit (metaphorical, since I don't have faith now in the literal one) to represent someone else's brand. Not Church. Not government. Not China which does not know herself at all. Not startup internet business even, unless it wants me as I am. I'll whore for anyone, provided the deal is honest. Now there's the rub.

It is only you, gentle reader, that I can or will but also surely must have faith in. It is you must be resurrected here. Your context for some reading. Your willingness to make that effort (I do know that it is extreme, and beyond all reason what I ask) to read. To listen. To watch. To make some sense. Not of me and what I write (don't be a fool!), but of what is now so out there. You really have to be perverse, and bound to rigid stupid absolutist words - I guess simply because you're so afraid that you might be fooled? - not to read it. Right off the web, the wall, the street, the news. Just learn to read is all.

And you, gentle friends or daughters, who must trust that Howie or Dad has not now finally lost his mind for good and ever, and isn't marching off perversely into some chip-on-shoulder spiting of himself. That I will never refuse love when offered, nor to offer it to my full capacity, which might not be very much. But I'll try. I do try. I am very limited is all.

Let's hope it's true what says AARP, that there is life after 50. I sure do hope so. My younger daughter is my very best companion. And yet I want her so much to be free that I hang back criminally from enough guidance. I offer no discipline. She does far too much what she pleases.

But I do, I guess perversely, still have faith that it's the love that counts. Love expressed in seasons turning, a conspiracy of life entire, which guarantees that the moment for the peepers is just the right moment for decocooning. That there is more than just her father to mediate her growth. And that what she needs most from me is more gentle than those stern and fearsome words I got, which still did no good against my own transgressions and fallings short. Though I won't blame them for that. Nor their deliverers. The times were different, is all.

If Dad has lost his mind, he might yet be in good company. There are readings all around (I'll get them shortly by email) which move in the same direction. I guess there might be enough surfactin now that I can fly myself, alone, flittingly, for just a moment before the season turns again. 

I do believe, you see, that there is so much more to life than what can be accomplished alone. That mankind's flight is made of words, though words alone, whether those of science and its instrumental extensions, or the true distilled and very litterary great essence of our greatest minds, cannot describe the flight. For that there must be face to face and much more quickened turnings.

And as my young former student (and now my mentor) did so charmingly wonder, why is it that actual presentations must be lower on some scale than literary readings?  He had become somehow aware that in our past - and I think this is true - those who could read were regarded with suspicion. Those who could read silently to themselves were thought possessed. Out of commerce with where life actually quickened, and where profundity could be found first hand. Only priests were sanctioned to read, leaving witches, demons, perverts and other outlaws as the only other possibilties. More dangerous than revered for what they might know. 

And now this equation is so fully reversed. To where televised presentations cannot, and likely do not, even potentially possess anything near the power of the written word. But why not? Why not YouTube? Why not theater again? Why must it be contained in and by words, this truth we would approach, though never, because it would blind us and melt our wings, quite touch?

Well, because the metaphor is wrong is all. Truth is not a thing can be approached. There is no Omega endpoint to this questing. That's misplaced words. There is no absoluting truth. There is only trueing, and for that we need each other, alive and stimulating and responding and being and here. And there.  Which is neither here nor there, silly reader.

Do I leave you now, alone. Having fallen this far short? Were you expecting some great final revelation through these words? (If I did not doubt it, then I would not dare to write it, surely!) Well, if so, here it is. That punchline I never can remember, or even reconstruct. That final turn of phrase which captures, just right, that moment of apprehension you used to go to Church for. That apotheosis of the Word. Made flesh. Was God.

Well, here, then, it is. Here it is. You'll have to read it all again. And again and again and again and anon. 

There's really nothing more to say, though I will keep trying, poor gentle reader. For life. For love. For my daughters. I will make you pay me, too, since what choice do I have? What choice do you have?

Well, Happy Easter, and I do pray for your resurrection. I really do. Turn off that one-way television. Turn the projector on yourself, and YouTube it to infinite regress. But then please do go outside. It's a beautifuly day to be alive!

Happy Easter, you nonexistent fool you. Happy Easter!