911 My First Day on the Job

He looks good in relative terms now, but I never did like George W. Bush. The whole John Kerry, Bush pere et fil, all in Skull and Bones. Arrogant pricks therefore. Made men. For no reason that I'm aware of, I watched Netflix' Turning Point about the Cold War. Then I watched Katrina: Come Hell and High Water. I learned about the 911 documentary from my son-in-law.

I find myself imaging what if we ever had a President who actually knew and understood our history. Of course I realize that such a thing is not in the job description. But for sure, Jesus Christ could never become president. Imagine someone wondering out loud why these people hate us as much as they do. What had we done to them? Imagine trying to understand motive, and trying to find a way to bind the world together instead of blowing it apart.

There was, according to the first Front Line documentary I watched, an actual opening for Russia to join NATO back when the Soviet Union dissolved. But we couldn't let go of our enemy. And then we couldn't understand why Bin Laden conflated us with the Russia which had destroyed Afghanistan. They knew our motive was oil. But it wasn't possible to be straight with the oil-addicted American people about that. They bunches up the imperialists in the same way we bunched up the terrorists. 

Imagine how much more peaceful the world would now be if there weren't cocky and angry Rumsfeld and Cheney cackling into feckless Dubya's ear. He did know his role to channel the anger and confusion of the American people. To call them terrorists would be to dehumanize our attackers against a background of good and innocent Americans. That's precisely the medicine which power requires.

No wonder now all we get from politics is hatred. All we get are angry and disgusting people on all sides. There is no-one left to call out the good. We the people ape our feckless leaders. Imagine that!

And now as I write, in a virtual sense since it takes me so long, Charlie Kirk is assassinated. I wish life were so simple that we could just kill off the bad guys as our leadership is programmed to do. All that ever does is to compound the victory of the so-called terrorists against us. The mayhem we exacted against ourselves post-911 is utterly astounding. Except there is no us anymore. We've clearly turned against ourselves, with almost no agreement about what our as-yet aspirational polity really means. 

I was nervous on my first job as a contractor for the Catholic Church. But shortly after my entry to the rectory which housed computers in distress, the women - churchladies - who ran the place called me in to watch the attack on the World Trade Center towers as it was happening on their little black and white TV. I'm pretty sure I completed my work, checking in with family along the way. The hour-long ride home was filled with a desperate search along the airwaves for why there was a plume of smoke over Buffalo. 

Finally, the local NPR station announced that it was an accident confirmed to be unrelated to terrorism. That heroic announcer slept at the station for at least two weeks after 911, so bound were we all to NPR. Yes, the very same network the Administration now seeks to silence. 

Since when did Conservatism become conflated with authoritarianism? Since when did it become OK to silence your political adversaries by way of the government? How can that possibly be American? Is drill baby drill (guns and machines) all we know anymore?

I'm asking.

Hard Fail; Accident

Pondering Elon Musk's playful idiocy, as he expends the resources only he can have to realize childish SciFi fantasies, I must return to the ground of accident that is the only ground that counts. Just like the electrical ground that I struggle truly to understand before I undertake the tough stuff on This Old House on which I labor. Accident is the only safe constant.

Elon is Trump's twin as he leads us down the road away from accident. Those who suffer accident are, in Trump's terms "losers." He is, of course, quite correct in that. His mistake is to consider himself beyond the reach of accident. As do all of us who remain alive, his evidence is that he hasn't really suffered many. Accidents, that is. Or at least, apparently, he hasn't suffered enough of them. A winner like him can only be the Fool.

The accident ratio, of course, leaves a person far better off if he is white and rich, which is itself demonstrably goad to idiocy; the idiocy of self-congratulation for one's superior merit. Narcissism by any other name.

But the Trumpsters are onto something. They embrace accident, especially the sorts of accident most likely to emerge from the barrel of a gun or the carbureted or electronically fuel-injected barrel of an internal combustion explosion-containment chamber. 

Now Ol' Elon champions the electrical kind of motive power, just as he seems to imagine that the brain is a complexly wired container for our selfie-self. Perish the notion! The ground for all of us is accident, and the future is precisely that which we can neither project nor imagine because it always overtake us by surprise.

As we work to protect our selfie-selves, or to deny reality - take your pick - during this pandemic, our selfish genes are surely doing their own thing by managing to persist. The choices are among cucarachas, viruses, and perhaps still for just a moment longer whatever it is that could be meant by 'human.' 

If Trump suffers - heaven forfend - some unfortunate debilitating accident (prior to his ultimate demise, which can surprise nobody who hasn't internalized some fiction of immortality here on earth), that will cause no permanent harm to his ilk. Trump-alikes are apparently as numerous as Republicans now. They are the efficient causes - the 'engines' if you will - of our continued evolution. I suppose we should celebrate them for that. Pardon me while I puke out my guts.

The ground, remember, is accident. Life is an accidental direction away from entropy. It simply cannot be directed. No matter how much intelligence gets mustered, accident will prevail, and life will move the way that life has done for eons, which is, of course, in the direction of love. That's what love means. 

Intelligence is fine when it gets used properly in service to the comfort of our fellow humans. So often it gets used to engineer warfare and the death of those we deem to be on some 'other' team. As Dawkins so reliably demonstrates, those contests are at best only metaphorically related to what happens at the level of life's evolution. To treat them as contests between life and death is to make a categorical error. Genes are always grounded. Contests at any higher level can only cause sparks. Sparks are not alive, though heaven knows they may instigate life from time to time.

Intelligence cannot express love. Intelligence cannot channel love. Intelligence cannot in and of itself provide any basis for merit. Intelligence can only serve love, which it must do on the basis of exquisite balance. Our way of life demonstrates that beauty is the more reliable token for merit. Just ask Trump. 

We have surely crossed a tipping point in service to an excess of wealth that is more grotesque than whatever the First Emperor of the Chin Dynasty arrogated in attempt to obviate his mortality. Now there's a loser's game! 

Well over half of my stored energy for retirement is held on my behalf in hazardous bets - they call them equities - about the future of our economy as presently construed. Now that interest rates have descended to near zero, cash is a fool's reserve, though I can only try to enjoy the sport of my future being whipsawed by the stock market. 

Still, it's only half. Right? None of us is more than half right. But the amounts that evaporate in any given instant are stunningly beyond what I might need to live on during any given day. And I'm talking a mere multiple of three of my life-time's highest annual salary, which is right about at the median of income where I live, which is no place you'd aspire to. You do the math. I'm in the 50 percent, though - mostly by virtue of whiteness - I am immersed in the social capital of the one percenters.

I try really hardly to share my wealth in ways that don't lead to my being a burden on my progeny. For some reason, I just hate to work for the man, but I also have to admit that I hate that a little less than I would hate to be the man. It's a tough balance lots of the time. 

So, I give away my labor freely, now that I'm too old to work. Ironically enough, the labor I give away is precisely the sort that underlies the presumption of the need for a retirement battery. My donations are mostly physical, aided by tools. The logic is not linguistic logic. I make bad mistakes if and when my 'mind' is clouded by emotional charge. I have to love and to focus on the object that I'm fashioning. Mostly by hand. Without distraction.

How very ironic that labor with and by means of my body feels less painful than laboring with and by and through language! Both sorts deteriorate badly, though in some sense I am doing my very best work now. I am more motivated, apparently, to handle the more literal tools. My mind and my body have become one. Thanks God for that! I have some sense that I once did lack. I hope.

I do now actually prefer an electric bicycle. Go figure! I hope never to drive a Tesla, praying for streetcars in their place. Apple's so-called AI battery management really sucks. The batteries in my little mobile house are dying as we speak. I'm winding down myself. 

I labor for love, despite the evident fact that my motive undermines any and all appreciation for what it is that I provide. That is an unfortunate accidental side-effect of the sort of rampant unregulated capitalism that we still practice in these United States. Troglodytes!

What sort of fool am I? I am a fool for love. So is Trump, but his definition for love has a very low denominator. I think Biden may be my kind of fool. There are plenty of people whose work I admire that I can't really much agree with much of the time. That's OK. I love them anyhow. 

At my age, I'm less afraid to fail, and I guess that's how it should be. I must nurture my genes which are now contained in my progeny, right? They are my betters, though I wish they'd take more of my advice about what would be good for the planet. Electric better. Trolleys better. Cars bad. Diversity better. Race bad. Winning is not possible in love. Only losing. Love must be tested to be true. Intelligence is no foil. Alone and bitter in touch with truthiness and an audience of one. Time to get to work!

A Dream of the Good Old Days Before Juneteenth was a Holiday

Just now, like many of us, I'm holding my breath that Agent Orange won't carry on to drop his COVID nukes in Tulsa. The day after Juneteenth. We celebrate today, for tomorrow we may die. I wish all my black sibs the happiest of Juneteenths, the newest Federal holiday!

I'm also trying just now to restart my entire read-through in Chinese of the Dream of the Red Chamber. This is a book which many Chinese count as their North Star for what it means to be human on the planet. I remember thinking that as well. Like reading Tolstoy, I don't quite remember why. I only know that it changed me.

And I remember very well driving out to Madison, Wisconsin as a grad student of classical Chinese literature. I was going to attend the first-ever international conference on "Redology." That's the term for academic study of this singular Chinese novel. 

Along the way, I dropped off my friend at the University of Iowa where he was attending the renowned writing program. His father, Parker Po-fei Huang, a well-known poet among Chinese, and a low-ranked but highly esteemed "native informant" at Yale, where language instructors were not professors - his father had told my friend that he had no business writing; he hadn't truly lived. I could relate. My own father was stern that way too. 

But we all loved Professor Huang. I guess we all have our less good sides. 

I was allowed to sit in on a class. I don't remember the notorious tear-down masculine ethos that got the program so many celebrated and mostly male authors. I do remember wistfully feeling that I was not of that crowd.

How well I also remember driving north to arrive at the beautiful campus on Lake Mendota at Madison. It was summer, and the coeds (code for women in those days) were sunning themselves on the grass all over campus. A northern and wooded grassy California beach. I was somehow shocked. Never had I seen so much brazen skin. This was not my conception of what 'midwest' means. Not my crowd either, for sure!

The opening reception was held on the panoramic top floor of a circular tower. All the younger westerners were glued to the windows, gazing out over the beautiful campus to hide our social awkwardness. Very few of us were expected, after all, to have some bit of expressive performance queued up for presentation on demand, as all Chinese are. All the senior Chinese scholars were looking inward toward friends, and new acquaintances they had already mostly read. 

In the buffet line for dinner I chatted with David Hawkes, the premier English-language translator of The Dream of the Red Chamber, or as he properly called it, The Story of the Stone. All of us were waiting with 'bated breath for his completion of this life's work. I was a bit star-struck. I chatted up a different professor who was into using computer technology to analyze classical Chinese literature (he confessed that he couldn't really read it himself). That was according to the dictates of the structuralism which was then in vogue. The science of literature. Looking for stable patterns across works. 

But what I wish to write about today is our economy. I'm old enough to remember the 'good old days' when the local hardware store was manned by knowledgeable clerks who raised families on their salaries. Our store stocked everything from model airplane engines to lawnmowers, and all the parts and tools in between.

Milk was delivered in heavy refillable bottles then, and Grandma would sometimes send one of the kids down to the ice cream store with a crock, reminding us to have them pack it tightly so that it wouldn't melt along the walk home. 

Now I buy things from Amazon, and watch the prices creep up to cover the free shipping, while the quality seems increasingly indifferent. Caveat emptor and read the editorial reviews. That old hardware store would never tarnish its good name the way that Walmart always does, or Home Depot, or Amazon, by allowing shoddy goods along their shelves. They couldn't afford to. What happens when all the minimum-age hardware helpers age out?

My friend, a structuralist himself, and brilliant professor of Chinese met us at the conference. He took me - well, I took him since he didn't drive - to visit his old college friend who lived just north of Madison. This was a talented young man who'd forsaken an academic life to start a business. 

He had designed a refined set of mountain climbing chocks, and had set up a very high-tech and sophisticated manufacturing process which he explained to me in detail. The process ended up with nicely anodized pieces which were color-coded for size and usage. They felt wonderful in the hand, and apparently - by virtue of angles, metallic composition and surface treatment - held wonderfully in the field. 

Again, who knows what such a business was doing in Wisconsin, but he enjoyed showing me all the steps, partly because I understood them, and likely mostly because I was so googly-eyed. I especially appreciated the step where the nearly finished pieces were blasted with glass beads to provide golf-ballish micro-divots.

Speaking of which, I've only swung a golf club once in my life, and that time the ball went exactly where I was aiming it, to my absolute horror. It sailed right across the neighbor's long back yard, across the street and over the next lawn right into the "picture window" of the hardware store owner who lived around the corner. This is a sin from which I shall never recover. It taught me to always fess up (which I didn't do that time). I was a natural Zen archer, I guess, as I remember the magnetic pull of window to ball. 

It definitely wasn't my doing, although come to think of it I got three bulls eyes the first time I held a bow and arrow and the first time I fired a .22 rifle. I should have known better. But then I was never able to repeat those feats. Story of my life. 

Anyhow this wonderful climbing hardware manufactory was set to go out of business before it even sold its first chock (I received a bag of them as souvenirs). The poor fellow hadn't realized that even the niche sport of climbing was controlled by the one large manufacturer who determined which products could be stocked on pain of withholding all the others. This was just when even sporting goods stores were turning Big Box, and before distribution channels got disrupted. 

Just as is now the case with movie theaters, R.I.P., it doesn't matter how good the product is if you can't get it on the shelf at eyeball level. Money changes hands, as I learned later in the beer retailing business. Smaller brands have got to cheat to win: You have to brazenly follow the big boys and swap the shelves when no-one's looking.

I hadn't heard of WalMart or maybe it hadn't gotten started yet, but I did get an education from that young entrepreneur near Madison about how "Wall Street Money" will pay to overstock shelves with goods sold at a loss for the sole purpose of forcing competitors out of business. I also learned that such practices were illegal in Germany, say, among other countries. 

Some long time later, circumnavigating the continent in all innocence on my little Harley, I happened into Bentonville, Arkansas, where I took a break in front of what looked like the old five and dime hardware store I grew up with. 

Inside, a very nice old man who looked the part gave me a kind of personal tour. It was a museum disguised as a store. I knew something was amiss when I saw a photo of Gerald Ford shaking Sam Walton's hand. Sam would get the Presidential Medal of Freedom later from George H.W. The same medal that Rush Limbaugh just got.

So we give out medals to those who destroy the very fabric of our society now?? People on Wall Street - investors - make a bet on what will be the next blockbuster. But it's really not a bet. It's a sure deal that an entire industry will be disrupted, which means destroyed, by predatory marketing practices. Along with the industry go unions, local ownership, and knowledge of the sort built up over years of purchasing decisions and getting to know the people. 

Gone now as the cost of doing business is so much else that we once did value. Local eateries. Doctors who make house calls. Packaging that isn't killing the planet. Short hauls from farm to table. Local craft beer. You know, the stuff that's coming back, if you're white and well off. At least we got the wholesalers out of the way. Hmmmm. 

Frankly I think black lives have gotten more and more marginal during my lifetime. Our celebrated progress with civil rights hasn't translated into main street lives simply because those aren't the kinds of businesses that we value anymore. 

When things are created digitally - where there is no marginal cost for each additional widget - mountains of investment will be piled into whoever gets the most eyeballs. The losses equal the mountains upside down until the existing players are fully destroyed to leave a sole monopolist. The monopolist is never guilty of the syndicate-style behaviors which anti-trust regulations were designed for. 

These are all nice and mostly white and mostly male youngsters who want to hit it big. Well sure, sometimes they cut corners and act ruthless. Young blonde women beware. Anyhow, the consumers fall like flies in their belief in falling prices. Those falling prices are themselves a temporary illusion, but life is short. 

And it's not as though Google is providing their services for free! Read Surveillance Capitalism, please! We are not the product. Our behaviors are. We all work for the Man for free now. Click to agree, and Yahoo!!

Eyeballs or ears, it's an easy bet that Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern will get most of them. Pornography powered the Internet. Any hit to our most basic emotional plexus. And this is how we want to engineer our future? Well, I guess it is, now, isn't it?

Plastics, Benjamin, plastics.

You have to imagine a world without plastics to imagine a sustainable future. That's a fact. It's hard, but not impossible, to do. Wooden boats are more fun to own than the plastic sort. And they last longer. But you have to enjoy the actual work to own one. You don't need toxic paints - water based or oil - when you can use linseed oil and so forth.

Plastic bags were invented as a way to support the industry which would otherwise have been too expensive for the car companies. That's a fact. Black lives keep getting reinvented downward from slavery to jail (Watch 13th please!) so that we can have our capitalism and eat it too.

This is no way to live, people. We have to bring our economy back down to earth, and use the digital stuff to compute optimal infrastructures according to the data from our now fully instrumented planet. Sure, we need to have the entertainment side - the plastic baggies - to support that overhead, but it's already a done deal.  We just have it all upside down and backwards again is all.

Digital and plastics are fine in small quantities, so long as we pay up front for all their externalities. Short of that, bakelite is pretty good. Natural rubber and steel. Stuff that requires skilled workers to maintain. Writing on paper.

We will always require good writers. My apologies. I can fix a lot of things, but I don't seem to be able to fix my writing. Sorry!

More Virtuous Reality

I do remember as a young boy some friends who had some money and whose parents were more indulgent than mine had one of those itty bitty Sony TVs back when they first came out. Cute was the word which came to mind, that quality of animal life which must make young offspring easier to care for.

Actually the TV belonged to the MD Dad, who might actually have indulged himself more than he did the kids. It might have been a way to watch football without hogging the family resources, this when the VW beetle was new on the scene; markets were breaking across borders, and all of us were enthralled by mini.

I'm certain I was pre-pubescent, so my wanting of that cute little B&W TV was chaste in its way. More in the manner of wanting a stuffed animal than a racy automobile. Though I also remember fantasizing about how to get one. It might have been realistic to scrimp and save from the paper route and buy a small portable for my bedroom, but that would never have passed family muster. We weren't even allowed to watch TV except for certain hours; never after dinner.

I think part of the fascination for this particular little TV was that we might bring it along on canoe trips, which the boys of our families shared. I imagined laying on a sleeping bag in a dark canvas pup tent of the sort you might allow your kids now to erect in the backyard, if you live in a gated community. It may have been brought on one trip once, but either the battery was clumsy, or there was simply no reception up north that far in Canada.

Or my Dad exerted some moral authority about the disturbances which were acceptable in nature.

And now you know I can watch movies on my little iPhone, with a screen of such high definition, and a size and weight and battery life to make that boy I was wither with envy. But no, I imagine now some 3D goggles, and projections up on my field of vision. I would lust for such technology.

I just finished a Netflix film, made only in France, distinguishing virtue from reality - a fine exploration of the danger of lust when it invades the world of polite society. It was daylight behind me, I'm ashamed to say, and the light from the window made an annoying reflection on the tiny screen. My own face would intrude when the scenes were dark. I should have been in a darkened room, watching on a larger screen.

My future goggles will also annoy me when the projection is darker than the actual scene and I make the cardinal mistake to mistake virtue in broad daylight. (someday I would like to drive one of those cars whose instruments are projected onto the field of vision; and would they work so well at night or would you steer into the speed limit?)

Perhaps we do get locked ever more tightly into a world which diminishes, no longer cute, into all the time indoors. Which may also be why there is no Windows © which can secure the fortunes of Microsoft. Hell, even finding that copyright sign, unless you know the Mac-like arcane keystroke, is that much easier on my cellphone.

Because I am supersaturated now with possibilities for my entertainment. Though I don't understand how people cluster on-line. Why would you want to be known as a VW hobbyist by posting your exploits to virtual friends. How long can fascination with wooden boat repair and construction last, when you have to move across the continent for work?

Those who stay put, embedded in the craft of whatever-it-is so rarely now adopt the voice of wisdom online, that I actually do remember back when the Internet was new and generous spirits prevailed.

It is now again the case that you will do better to travel to some shop or seaport and start conversations and eventually find that generous spirit. If he will accept a cup of coffee or lunch he might even indulge your questions. Unless they are trivial enough to be answered while continuing to work, up against the deadline which is having enough to live on.

What is it we presume of one another? Where would I find the leisure, for instance, to try this voice in ways which could be worked into something you might like to read? Could I develop a character? Could I imagine interesting exploits, and explore them for you on the virtual page, and could I make them captivating enough for you to follow?

Perhaps, but I must feed myself and the chase after those wages leaves me just that tired that I am fortunate to take a walk and collapse in sleep, only to face another commute and having only enough time to dress and eat and depart on time if I get up at 5:30 in the freaking morning. Where is the leisure I can take advantage of, with so many options floating now around and about me?

It is simply too much effort even to look, and so I catch a random movie, perhaps on my iPhone, based on some selection process which transcends any sense I could ever make of it.

There are times, in other words, when I don't want to think that hard; when I want to be entertained. No wonder we pay to buy tickets at the movies. Which should make the movies like some sort of performance art. Soon  there will be no more worries about copyright. As with a fine comedian, you won't pay to hear him if the jokes are stale: the recorded version is worthless. Or to put it virtuously, the stale jokes need to be camouflaged with something to make them seem surprising. Is there anything new at the movies?

But for now folks unlike me remain unjaded, and skip lustily among the virtual daisies, certain that there can be some perfect flower among the weeds, and that she can be had for nearly nothing. Roll me another one, over and over and over again.

I cannot. I know that every time I search for the best deal and pay as little as I do to be entertained I'm ripping someone off. It's not the copyright infringement. It's the rights infringement of people whose labor is aggregated for the enrichment of someone with the right social capital to exploit it properly. I will sell your handicrafts for you where the buyers have real money. And you will get fair market value and I will find a way to live among the gringos on the hill.

Now I must return to searching for the cheapest shocks for my old Vee Dub. I guess I am looking to avoid paying money I don't have to. I guess I'm trying to stay away from people who would rip me off.

But wouldn't it be actually nice if each of us held on less tightly to what we have? We would have to want less, maybe, or want different things from those which cost us money. What if we were to want time with friends more, or time in the great out-of-doors. You know, without the gear. The gear always costs something north of a couple of grand  (in dollars), and then you're committed.

I know these things. SCUBA diving, skiing, biking, rock climbing, hell even just hiking and camping there is a price point which gets calibrated against our desire. I won't even talk about sailing, and certainly not in an old wooden sailboat. Mainly because it would make me very very sad.

So you know, unlike all my very clever friends, I didn't actually bargain very hard for my car. I had no particular resentment about the commission the salesperson might be making, and couldn't really justify whatever few hundreds I might save at purchase time against the lifetime of the car.

Sure, I've spent lots of money now across over 300,000 miles, but I never did have to replace the shocks. or even the muffler, not to mention the bigger stuff. I struggle now about putting any more money in, but I think there is no virtue in polluting the world with whatever it takes to build a new one. There must be junkyards full of engines for when this one bites the dust. The car itself, you know, feels solid. I should just bit the bullet and buy the shocks. No, I should have them put in by someone who knows how to do it.

Bite me.

Meanwhile what the hell does it really matter? We can't resolve ourselves to agree about these things. There seems to be no way to get trains built which would squander that much less money individually. We'd call it government waste and lament the cost overruns.

We could read, or watch our Netflix on our iPhones or get work done by finding new ways to take it home in Dropbox © (it was still on my clipboard!), and who really cares about full Windows interoperability anyhow? Isn't what I've got good enough finally?

I know, if you don't, that all this chasing after bargains can be resolved easily enough into chasing after our mechanized replacements, who can do so much so cheaply now and where is all that leisure that we all once were promised? It is not really fun to drive a car when the driving is on a California freeway.

And so we focus on the luxury appointments on the inside. Which afford that same faraway satisfaction upon purchase. Someday, perhaps, a trip along a winding country road, ending up in wine country to spend some time with friends in pretense that it wasn't frantically purloined from the rest of the daily grind?

All of those bits of time now render upward to those who have so much of it they really don't know what to do with it. There are cruises and exotic spots to conjur the way they were without you. It all of it enslaves and ensnares the ones who are stuck.

But we're all stuck. I in my language and culture where I become nothing but an annoyance among Chinese, because the social imbalance destroys my poise with language and I don't know whom to ask or whom to trust, to navigate the border crossings in my mind.

For sure there is no God but Ah Ha!

Well, back to home-work. Or maybe I'll go to the movies. The day is not sunny enough to feel any loss of virtue.

Holiday Themes

Time was I would post here nearly every day. Not so much anymore, now that I have a place in polite society again, gainfully employed doing something better than supporting the absurdly displaced lust for gadgetry to accelerate our lives.

It is true, though, that chasing after tail the way that IT guys do is good preparation for the insanely busy business of providing meaningful programming for export to Chinese educational tourists, which is what I do now. 24/7/365

It's my birthday though, and I feel positively hung over and wrecked from decompression on this my first day in many weeks with nothing on my schedule. I'm not going to clean the house, and I'm not going shopping unless I let loose some latent desire for new gadgetry. I sure don't want to blog! What a chore . . .

You know, I started my day with the LA Times, which is a new and healthy habit I have along with failing to each much meat and walking the dog for exercise. But there I was, distracted and working against that sense of guilt that I really should flip through the whole thing to find what's happening in the world.

Something about Harvey Milk in there, and I think I really should know if he's dead or alive - I saw the movie - and then glancing at the story there in the Times, I popped my forehead, duh! Of course, remember he was shot dead right there in the movie.

So I lay down the paper, but you know when you've had too much to do and suddenly you find yourself with nothing in particular that must be done right now, the entire mind, body and spirit continuum just lets loose or something and I feel like a really really old man. Or maybe it's just because it's my birthday? And I suddenly am a really old man?

Yesterday on their last day some very sweet Chinese students I'm hosting presented for their final project a look at Bill Gates as one among many "leaders" they could choose to analyze for the leadership qualities they'd come here to burnish. Since we in America now so evidently know so much about leadership the way that the Pied Piper leads little lemmings over the brink, maybe? Leadership! We'll sacrifice the globe for some idea, for chrissakes.

Bill Gates was quoted up on the screen. Stupid stuff like "find yourself on your own time, since no-one's going to pay you to do it." Or "there isn't any summer vacation in real life." He seemed to have a thing against school, you know, as though to listen to music or smell some roses were somehow a sin. And so maybe I sublimated that presentation from those sweet students and watched some music videos as represented by Time online as the best in history.

And you know, I watched a few and realized that everyone else was probably aware of these documents in their time, and I was just a dullard, like Bill Gates, assigning such stuff and nonsense no value. Certainly not enough to watch them through, either the first time or just now. But I think they were worth the investment, to those who invested in them just as Bonaroo might be or so my little-one tells me, though she herself was bored eventually, and hot and sticky and wanting a break.

But still I think I will do nothing. I don't know that Bill Gates has done anything worthwhile for the world, any more than Rupert Murdoch. I don't know why I feel somehow obligated to know the basic facts about what's going on in the world. There's no way to know that much detail and my brain deteriorates, which leaves not all that much for my mind to ride on. There's so much I can't remember, or at least can't call to mind with sufficient alacrity for it to matter if I could.

It must be that my mind does extend into all these little facts which my various smart devices allow me to check. Yes I know the date of Harvey Milk's death as soon as I can type or say the name and pause for facts' return to that little screen.

No doubt now, that Microsoft will soon re-dominate since they have their arsenal of patents and those patents' attorneys to force protection money from the competition, notoriously to the tune of $15 for each Android device. Which is more than Google makes. Which is zilch.

I wonder who's kidding whom? The Grand Narrative of the non-leadership classes would have us believe that government money spent goes down a rat-hole, though it buys us roads and clean water and safety regs. While the money spent on extortion rackets in the name of intellectual property law or real-estate bubble blowing for the sake of even further concentrations of wealth somehow gets to be thought productive!!!???

Yeah, so why bother, right? Why even pay attention at all? Certainly, why pick up the paper with any desire other than to flip to page 3, or where was that sexy music video among the brainy ones?

I know what I need to know, which oughta be enough. But I'm taking a break anyhow, and I don't really feel like going back to edit. So there. Peace out!

Biding Time - Happy Independence Day!

This is really strange. I have more work piled up than I can possibly accomplish, but it's July 4, and there is some sort of mandate to take the holiday. Plus I live in this cool California version of small town USA, and they do up July 4th like nobody's business. I've gotta partake. I can do a compare and contrast with my former digs in the New York State version of Dogpatch where they showed similar devotions from a wildly different context.

So I checked up here on my blog-space, biding time from working, and I found this entry languishing. It had been sitting there for well over a month, waiting for me to have a chance to look it over. I just launched the sucker, and what the hell!?

I never do manage to get things written the way they would be written if I had the right ability. Like I have this new friend who knows how to bend those spaghetti balloons into shapes which are almost too amazing to describe. The results are like what Chinese calligraphic painters can do with their brushes, to where a few practiced strokes might channel the particular qi of a cicada, say or a horse, and then even to a Western viewer, they have a kind of verisimilitude, which is nothing in the direction of photographic. That's what these balloons are like. Evocative of a rose, or a sub-machine gun or an elaborate hair-style.

That's the way I'd like to write.

Sometimes I wonder, what would happen if we named things not according to their phenotype or genotype, but according to the ecological niche they occupy. Hiking up the mountains yesterday, I was transformed and transfixed by the flowers along the path, regretting mildly that I did not know their names. But I wanted a name for the place they grow in, some demarker for the qi which allows their engenderment there.

Would language then deteriorate, or would we ourselves become that much less insistent that the function of our lives is to assemble as much experience to our Proper Name as we can muster. And then still expire disappointed at what we failed to achieve. Like novelistic mastery of the sort Frantzen credits Wallace with whose ex-post-mortem writings now are the subject of some embalmers art.

What if not to succeed that way were still to leave one rights as an instance of that energy which sometimes erupts in florid recognition, and sometimes simply makes the attempt, which some more idealized instance of the type gets picked for (ho ho)?

You know, I muse now that political rhetoric seems only to target those most susceptible to being sold on a slogan. WalMart shoppers, each of whom now has that precious one-person, one-vote and is feeling kind-of uppity about the privilege. We don't need no stinkin' interpretation!

We just bought an antique lamp, with the confidence to know that simply based on its construction and materials, its value was more than we paid for it. It isn't likely to go down, so why not put money there instead of in a bank account which won't even keep pace with inflation?

Most purchases solve problems; whether decorator problems or shelter problems or transportation problems, they lose their value instantly upon the act of purchase. Not so antiques, especially in the ever-new state of California where only aging gays and lovers of old houses and the WalMart flea-market types seem to be patrolling the aisles. Which is my type? What's my context,. what's my niche?

I think I'd like to see a political rhetoric targeted at thought leaders. Something removed from marketing hype enough so that people recognized their own incompetence to judge, the way we might with antique roadshow questions. We might be amazed, were we to have no reason to mistrust the judgments, at the value revealed.

Something we thought we understood well might be revealed to be a pig in a poke, manipulating our certainties the way that a practiced Chinese peasant does with tourists climbing along the Great Wall.

But I suppose my hope is hopeless. Rhetoric has gone the way of all flesh, toward meaningless and useless exercise of reflex desires. If it moves it must be edible.

Remember when libido was channeled into something like a Corvette? Now I see countless ads which have been reduced to the analog of flesh-shots which subliminally once channeled my desire for goods to enhance my style of life. Typically, they show four different flat-screens, one mobile, one tablet, one desktop size and one big screen.

These are the anything contexts. They can display text or flesh or moving pictures or put you in touch with a friend. You can read a book there, and you can let it flow across the screens, and you can let your mind flow, even, if you were to wish it, while walking in the mountains among wildflowers. There is no signal there. Thank God!

Consider the movement of the word, "technology." It has surpassed words like biology where the ". . . ology" denotes 'the study of.' Techniques for getting things done transmute from the study or even the enactment of those techniques to something which indicates some thing itself. Some item meant to embody something universal about techniques.

It's a thinging or reification like that long since done to "Science" as though that were some disembodied thought process which could be invoked in terms like "Science has long since discovered . . ." Long before that it happened, though from the other direction, to God which represented a striving for a Name for that which cannot and probably should not be named.

Technology is an empty construct, working almost the way that entrepreneurship does, which once quite properly referred to the process by which someone not quite scrupulous would work to relieve you of your hard-earned cash and to provide you instead with something rather more like a pig in a poke. As though technology solves any problems. As though it can be any more than an end in itself, to fascinate endlessly, to distract, to name in place of proper naming.

Rhetoric also once referred to verbal maneuvers apart from their earnest truth value. These were techniques for persuasion, apart from the rightness of the speaker's cause. Our politicians now, need it be said out loud, are the personality equivalents of technology, embodying nothing. There is no distinction among the wax figures, Mormon or lipsticked poker faces, one step from Scientological (properly so-called) batshit.

And this is that which I celebrate, blowing up July 4. Sound and fury signifying nothing. Hooray!!

Swirl of Cacaphony

I owe it to my punster bro that this is the name of a new Ben and Jerry's flavor. Artificially sweetened chocolate - fake cacao, get it? Cacao phoney?? With a twist.

I don't do puns. There's something wrong or right with my language black-box. I am back working though, this time using Chinese on a daily basis.

Since the Chinese has lain dormant for at least 15 years, and since this is a new job in a new state (of mind - California) and since I'm doing things which are somewhat new to me, I do sometimes feel as though I'm navigating a cacaphonic swirl.

I've been issued an iPhone. It works enough better than the Windows Mobile phone (the one I've been trying to talk myself into loving for so long now), that I almost can't credit it. I don't want to like a smartphone that much, but it handles Chinese natively, which is still a little better than I do, and moves seamlessly among tasks. I think they were smart enough to close off "multi-tasking" since you can only look at one thing at a time on a phone, and it keeps its state way better than Windows did, which was always trying to give me my cake and let me eat it too.

The Windows phone would try "intelligently" to decide how much memory I needed, but to a human there was no predicting when a backgrounded app would be closed according to some kind of better judgement, and its state might or might not be kept depending on the talents of the programming staff. At least Apple exercises some control over what will be allowed on their platform.

The one thing I do miss, however, is that Swype way of entering text. It's quicker, and I haven't learned to thumb on a virtual keyboard. But even still, there are limits to the turn of phrase one will attempt on such a tiny platform. I wonder when they'll make one I can dictate to reliably (ouch, turns out there's an app for that!)? Or something which can monitor my nerve endings maybe the way Kinect does my body movements. So I could just waggle my typing fingers, and the phone would take the cue.

'Till then, there can be no question that the language that we use is being lowest-common-denominatored. I've found that when I'm speaking English to someone I've spoken Chinese with, my English has become that kind of simplified that I often wish they'd use with me in Chinese. It's not that hard for a speaker to bring his language to within what can be followed with certainty, and not to do so would be some kind of rude.

And then if I email the same person, I find that I can't even access my native English stylistics, such as they are. I seem only to have a kind of pidgin - clear enough and precise, but lacking in the nuance which I do so enjoy while writing an email to someone I know well enough to skate the edge of sense with. Gentle Reader.

There's lots of celebration of the Twitter now, for the discipline imposed by such a compact package. No possibility to build any context from which the Tweet can be removed.

Once upon a time, we all learned to be careful with our emails since something about the medium prevented the careful tone with which paper letters once were invested. And bosses and colleagues and would-be lovers would take or give offense meaninglessly, because of a context wrongly inferred.

This defines our political discourse now, no?

Discourse is, of course, far too lofty as a description of what passes for it. Grand notions are reduced now to advertising slogans, obliterating all and any hope that opposing sides might be brought toward some kind of respect for the opposing position. At least I find that some familiarity with the origins of a position, and with the experiences of the people that hold it changes a lot about how you regard those people and that position.

Ad hominem becomes the order of the day, and so you match opposing viewpoints against what amount to cartoon caricatures as offered up by what passes for journalism. Photo and video mediated of course.

Our likes and dislikes are generated in the instant, upon first vocal and visual impression. How absurd to accuse the Obama haters of racism, when whatever happened happened in the same instant that we all formed our opinions of Sarah Palin. And I do try and I have to confess that, well, when I really try I can find Glenn Beck likable. I understand where he's coming from. I get Palin. I know they each connect with people who aren't making connections otherwise. Who feel excluded.

But to like someone is not to evaluate their job performance, right? And when someone else makes that mistake, then we hate them too. We generalize. We fill in all the context because the language we use simply isn't rich enough to provide for context.

And I guess that will have to be enough for this re-entry to my little private blogosphere, after a different kind f re-entry to the world of work. I'll end with a visual pun. I came across it during the course of my new work, where it behooves me to stay abreast of developments in Higher Ed.

I've been aware of modern logistics and warehousing operations for a while now, because of my work in IT. Big box distribution stores now use scan codes and robotics to store and retrieve pallets from their precise slots in massive warrens.

The California desert is dense with such places, each one employing very few humans, while the goods are moved from semi-trailer to shelf and back again using artificial intelligence to minimize latency on the shelf where money can't be made. But the shelves are valuable when they can facilitate volume purchase or taking advantage of price fluctuations. It must be a beautiful thing.

And now the University of Chicago, short of space, has built its new library underground, where books are bar-coded and stacked in crates. Robotic retrieval systems can move the crate to where a human can retrieve his written quarry. And it must be a beautiful thing.

But I have to wonder, and don't you? If the word is the thing, then why does it even matter that the physical object be brought to hand? This feels to me like some sort of bizarre and obsolete gold standard, and I feel my context-building prejudice machines resenting all the money spent to fetishize rare objects.

Shouldn't all this robotic intelligence be used to digitize the books before they're lent? Maybe it is and will be, but shouldn't it also and at the same time be made available to anyone anywhere, and not only to the folks at the University of Chicago with library privileges?

I remember when CD jukeboxes were state of the art, because so much data could be made accessible so cheaply. And now they just seem silly up against data stores so massive that the capacity is given away just for the asking. This library would seem the same kind of future obsolete, as new-age and high tech as it is.

I wonder if they will take my advice to call this travesty what it is - the Dead Letters Office from the long gone age of the missive. When people who wrote took upon themselves also the burden to create a context, and when readers were similarly obligated in return.

There is a design field of which I'm newly aware. It's called Ux or usability experience. It's masters design the interfaces between man and machine, and when you think about it, this is a very important business. One wishes that they would go to work someday real soon on the interface sported by the office copier/network printer/scanner/fax machine, but meanwhile these designers have become the analog to what teachers used to do.

They frame your interactions, as on my new iPhone now I'm constantly amazed at the generous gestures built in for my more fluid interactions. It's wordless, this framing, and therefore multi-cultural. Certainly, there's no need for translation, or, um, has it already occurred by the time the user interface is useful? Is the inter-language translation radically redundant by the time a "user" gets the interface?

Let me think here. Is the instrumentation on the user interface really somehow analogous to the role of the teacher? Some kind of formalization and channeling of the moves which might be made. And what of notions of active learning, or engaging the students with one another. Does that just go right out with the Windows?

There must be a difference between digital reality and real reality.

an iPhone for Your Thoughts

I have gone over now to the dark side. I'm working and I've been issued an iPhone, a thing I never would have bought myself. I'm distressed at how much techo-lust remains in me.

I find that it does Chinese in ways that Microsoft's stuff automagically drops out in their striving to rob everyone else's feature set, and skipping effort on the stuff which stays on most peoples' shelves. Or is that what Apple does, with their sweating of all the details of look and feel and I'm just suckered in with all the rest. What do they not want me to be able to do?

I feel a touch of sadness now to be retiring my old Windows smartphone, but I just can't imagine that I'll be using it anymore. Though its "push" email was a tad more alacritous than the iPhone's. I could customize in ways the iPhone won't allow. But I'm afraid it's the Apps. The pinch to zoom and the slick way the parts all integrate.

I suppose I should be worried about the tracking, but, well you know I just learned this fascinating little tidbit I've been puzzling about since I moved to California and have to navigate these massive Mighty Niagara (nostalgic nod to canoeing in Buffalo) traffic flows. Doesn't everybody wonder? You know, how does Google maps get "realtime" traffic information?

I feel embarrassed. I'd been imagining hoards of recruits who call in their observations, and maybe money changing hands to pay for some company which has a service to monitor roadways with cameras or traffic detectors (it's true, there are such things! Which travel to your TomTom over FM channels or some such malarkey). Maybe the government makes a little money off its police reports?

But no, it turns out that this is a really cool form of crowd sourcing, where all these drivers with their location-aware phones are sending up their movements to the mother-processor, and rest assured, we're all anonomized in the cloud because, as usual, they only care about us in aggregate.

So now while I'm fighting off my urge to get an Android in my hands so's I can see how Google's anti-style stacks up against my iPhone, I ponder this: why does it feel so dangerous to question the morality of offing Osama Bin-laden without so much as a nod to a military tribunal? Is it just simply that safe now for our Commander in Chief to read our minds?

In a court of law, would there be mitigating circumstances for the radicalization of a man who'd once thought he was our friend? If he ordered the killings, then surely he must die, but what about specialist Manning now rotting in his cell for aiding and abetting the enemy? Shall we just not bother to hold our leaders accountable to the higher standards of law, since they know what we would want anyhow?

What really worries me though, is that everything has been turned into a kind of digital on-off to where you're either Republican in your thinking or Democrat and these trends tend to polarize us even internally. What happened to leadership whose job it was to raise the level of discourse to where each side could see the reasoning of the other? Isn't that what Obama promised in and by and during his campaign?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not terribly bothered that Obama's been dispatched, but I am bothered that the reason for his dispatch is about the same as the so-called birthers' reason for hating Obama. They just do. But now isn't Obama guilty of extra-judicial killing? What's the statute of distance between a man and his exalted position and the actions committed in his name or by his order? Policemen aren't allowed to shoot someone even though they might have directly witnessed a capital offence. What should we allow secretly to be done in our collective Name?

How do we feel assured that the narrative about the events as they occurred wasn't being tweaked according to our reaction, and facts trickled out or altered according to the traffic flows. There sure are a lot of stories about our enhanced investigative and other special ops techniques. We crow, we crow!

Oh yeah, and I heard this (on NPR, of course, or no, maybe it's in that podcast I refer to above): there is this new virtual french-kissing device that someone's rolled out for fun. You put a virtual tongue in your mouth and then while you're face-timing with someone you'd like to kiss and they have the same device in theirs you can feel each others' wiggles in your respective mouths. Ew!

I know the guy who has a patent on that. I'd better alert him, as though intellectual property could actually belong to someone anymore (I'm of mixed mind!). Meanwhile, you know where this is going, right? While we're all distracted by making virtual love to some Candy-2000 model hot body, the government will already know what we think we want, and then they'll give it to us without our even asking. Click to sign-off, and hey, you can't complain.

Like the other day when I got my free credit report DOT COM and then I stupidly signed up to get my free score because I could cancel at any time. But it took holding for over an hour before someone finally  answered and the scumbags still have my credit card information. Which was a pristine new number since I'd had to cancel the old one for apparent fraud.

Oh yes, I am so thrilled now with my new iPhone!!!

What a world!!

Camera Front and Back

As with the true depth of the snow when I was little, I have no way to know how my memory is being distorted by age. I am more engaged with the news than I used to be, but I'm also having a hard time remembering my state of mind as recently as when we all turned the Y2K corner.

I love having a smartphone which I can use for instant references: Names and historical data; definitions and showtimes - and I'm certain that it's making me a kind of 'as-if' smarter. But what's it doing to my consciousness? What does it mean when I can and will and must check in about every little question and curiosity?

Driving past bus stops now or walking along the road, it seems that everyone with an idle minute is looking downward toward something in their hand. Fiddling with it. But strolling through the glorious Balboa Park in SanDiego there was a lone man slouched backwards like some iconic take of John Muir, engaged with the landscape and looking homeless. I could repose in mind with him.

Through txting now, there will be video chat, perhaps, though you can't do that under your desk in class. I want my 4G phone and I want it now. I want all my screens united and I want the biggest one to envelope me. (the "I" will disappear in the end through and by and with this process)

So, two things happened recently: One, I finally shlepped my phone into Verizon for a replacement since my touchscreen has  been referring touches to random other parts of the screen from those I intend. I could fix it by "coloring" in the screen until it re-established sync, but it was getting worse and worse, and this was my way to defer wanting something cooler and newer. It's always better to wait a while, and no-time more so than now. Two, I randomly remembered Superman the movie and then there it was on Dish. I'd forgotten the part at the beginning where the Kryptonite criminals are exiled onto a 2D screen. I'd thought it made nice symbolism at the time.

The funny thing is that now that I have a brand new replacement obsolete phone on its way, the one I have started working again. I feel guilty for burdening the globe with more junk, although it's hard to trust it just because I worked it over good trying one last time to fix it. And the movies now are poised to go 3D, and that's being touted as the "new color." As though we'll all look back on 2D the way we do on black and white or silent.

I'm not so sure.

You know, here in California, they've had some success bringing city centers back to life by enticing in the mall brands. I'm thinking of Pasadena and San Diego, but I also saw the same thing in Spokane Washington. (one has to wonder why Buffalo can't do it?)

But then you find these cute little specialty stores, located in architecturally interesting little retro establishments, all going out of business because you'd have to know they are there and frequent the place enough to go there when you think of wanting something they sell. Which brings me right back to the consciousness changes happening with all the mass mediation of what we ponder and think we know.

There's only so much room in the brain, you know? Keep us distracted by too much information, keep us daily tied to news about the Middle East or world-threatening disasters, and we'll only have room for the mall, or the mall-like downtown, and its limited brands. Familiars.

And we don't even know our neighbors, and wouldn't want their low skilled artisanal outputs which are what national branding and interchangeable parts (right down to the food we eat) were all about in the first place.

The bats are dying and so are the bees, and we weren't really thinking of them when we thought we could go it alone on the planet. But we can't. It's so easy for me to envision mass transit on rails for getting to work each day, but much harder to imagine the political shifts which would have to happen first.

The disastrous outcome of nuclear energy proliferation seems inevitable in retro, in particular because if even the Japanese can't work it out on the corruption front, how do the rest of us expect to do so?

Well, you won't likely get the answer from me, since I go back to work on Wednesday (insert Hooray track!). Just like the rest of us, I wish there were actually a way to direct my efforts which did good for the planet.

I would be happy with a better political arrangement, so that at least I might be assured that the actual leaders made it into leadership positions, and that the thoughtless classes weren't so much in charge. Without reverting to some sort of aristocracy.

Maybe I'm asking too much? I don't really think so. It's all about trust and education and finding ways to put the two together. Maybe the smartphone and other devices can help with that. Maybe it will be the wearable computers. For sure, we need to get back our commuting time and not spend so much energy on the virtual but highly stressful reality of the freeways.

That would be my vote anyhow. But you know, before I get a chance to vote, we the people will ourselves have been turned into interchangeable parts. Hooked on "authenticity" as on a drug. And isn't that simply the most poignant irony of all?

In Praise of Tinkering

I absolutely love, as in desperately, to tinker with machines. Motors, computers, ideas, the works. Right now I'm tinkering with language and consciousness, but I'm happy as a clam working on a car or woodworking my old and now departed wooden boat. These are things which, ultimately, make some sense and pose a challenge to me that I can resolve.

What I really enjoy is to be faced with an insoluble like, say your girlfriend runs your car dry of oil when you're in China and the camshaft gear disintegrates. You have no money for either the complicated repair or a different car or even for the parts. Or if something breaks inside your laptop. Or like when the canvas sunshade over the glider rots out.

What I really really hate is giving in. I hate going to the store to solve the problem with money. I hate having to look for the official solution, especially now that there isn't a store on the planet any longer which stocks stuff to fix things. Almost. What I really hate is buying a new one since it's always schlockier and WalMarty no matter how hard I try to resist. But I'd hate it even if there were good stuff around. Honest.

Last time the generator (that's how old it was - I do mean generator and not alternator) on my boat stopped generating I was able to find a shop that would rewind it and which still had ample stock of the Bendix (maybe?) parts which once were standard. Farmers still used these on their aging tractors. Old farmers.

I knew the shop would die with the old guy I was dealing with, who charged me the reasonable fraction of the cost of a new part which is what he grew up with. Maybe $50, but I know it was something I was thrilled to pay. Especially faced as I would be with a very expensive 12 volt alternator conversion for my 6 volt system, which at one time was all the rage. I'd held out! I'm so virtuous!

The coolest things was when I saw my exact engine, even painted with the same paint which I'd scrounged from the boatyard dustbin, on display at the Adirondack museum as an artifact from days gone by. Sure, I suppose there's some likelihood that somewhere in China they're now running a plant from the tooling they bought lock stock and barrel (a merism for replaceable, manufactured, interchangeable parts stuff, if you ask me), from the shuttered plant on this side of the great East/West divide.

Or maybe there are still enough farmers to create a demand for what I need. Well, except TSC, catering to ex-urban wannabees will take care of that along with the agribusiness folks. (do they really count as folks? I guess if Al Qaeda does then they do, eh GWB?). We tinkerers are being driven out of business, even as we get catered to.

Yeah yeah, Harbor Freight is like a walking wet-dream to me, but it makes me feel really really guilty. Like I don't want to be caught in there. Still, I can't help myself, buying shitty Chinese tools just because they price them below the threshold of impulse. Even knowing that I'm contributing to the destruction of Western Civilization.

These are guerrilla tactics now, being deployed against us all to keep us on the grid. State-sponsored terrorism to keep us all down on the farm as consumers. No really, I mean we all live on a consumer farm, as in we're the crops and it's worse than the Matrix. Way worse, because in our case we don't even have a prayer to come awake now.

Well, don't ask, don't tell because at the end of the day I'm not about to give up drinking coffee. And you can always find some comforting pabulum to sooth your mental agitation. It's all good, right? Things will work out in the end.

But that frame of mind which requires abject openness to the stuff around you, whether confined in the space of a garage or a boat at sea, or the space of your bank account, that's when human energy comes alive. There's nothing like the satisfaction of fixing the doo-hickie with a whatchamajigger. Especially when it feels as though the fix came from the sky.

There's even a New Thought theory about that called the Law of Attraction, which just simply has to be so much bullshit like Scientology of something. But to me, whatever you want to call it - call it Jesus for all I care - it's a lot nicer than that new car feeling the globe's all still so crazy about.

Maybe I'm math challenged, but a new car to me just feels like a big huge burden of indentured servitude to pay for it. Or maybe I'm just discipline-challenged and never did save up enough so that I could pay from ready cash.

Or you know, maybe this really is the money driving us all out of business. I think there are maybe no more new gadgets that I need. I think that lots of people are bored with Facebook anymore, and wouldn't trust a Chris Lee style blond bimbo as far as he could throw her. How do you even really know what sex you're dealing with? Everything's been shrink wrapped!

So, whatever. I consider the tinkerers impluse to be noble, in effect. It's a resistance against the machine, by taming it and making it human. It's a way out from the helter-skelter of needing always more and newer. It's the opposite of sublimated eroticism.

But it doesn't get you hired, nor make your ideas into bona-fides. For that you need a tenured position. Oh, wait, those are being done away with too. Darn!

Anyhow I can tell you this for certain: It's not humanity which is winning the survival of the fittest race. We've consistently misconstrued that as a contest. It's not a contest. It's the context and so far our lusts are being used for the survival of the machine memes. It's our inhumanity that's winning.

No mistaking that it's the basics which ensnare us. The same stuff which powers evolution by tricking us into reproduction for the sake of our selfish genes. Our tool-making has allowed it to run amok and now we're all in service to our tools, um, yeah, just like we always have been.

OK, gotta go back to practicing my iron crotch kung fu. Inside joke. Sorry.

Anger Making Machinery

The proper response to an Internet search which turns up nothing is anger. The field of expectation has been created that it is worthwhile to go looking for things, without any countervailing road-map about what sorts of things won't be found.

I know it would be silly to go searching for plumbing insights, but it seems more plausible to seek out ways to use Chinese on my smartphone. There are ads, but there are also shortcomings in addition to cost for using fat and cleverly created bits of software. I pay the plumber, though the instructions are trivial to find by searching. The smell is too costly in reality.

I shall persist, but this dissonance between the field created by technologies, and the confusion one faces in attempts to occupy that field, is as old as the written word. It's not just that post-modern defenestration impulse. It's the overall illusion that the word once written can provide the way to ultimate revelation of The Word as handed down from God.

This is precisely the same mistaking of identity for comprehension which informs political anger or the anger of love's betrayal. There is no answer to it other than to depart the field and look for ultimates elsewhere. And investigate only dispassionately those things which reward investigation.

Like, for instance, the written word itself, whose modality for production now is universalized as a keyboard. Gone are styluses and pencils, brushes and ink. Interactions now are all mediated by those same twitching fingers which pull triggers or caress or which shape a ball of clay. But allowing nothing of character through other than by elements of style.

A crumb falls into my keyboard, and the "R" key is disabled. I blow, it moves, and now I can't work the shift key. Crumble. The stylus offered a more certain connection to its output. The calligraphic character I once would have been required to cultivate before I could claim literacy in Chinese is as remote as in my facility with English handwriting. A relic. Quaint.

Once upon a time, in imitation of my older brother whom I idolized in all things, my handwriting was neat, but slanted in the manner of a lefty. A southpaw. Rectification meant the end of neat, and so my character is scrawled and lacking. There was a time.

What happens, though, when Chinese written characters lose their kinetic inform-ation of our consciousness? Will we then become trapped as it seems we are now already believing in some form of human consciousness which is, in fact, as remote as that final Word? That thing for which the absence of interpretation and translation does not denote the actual Word of God, but in fact denotes absolute and ultimate solipsism. An absence, a private without its public.

Enter Watson, the Jeopardy confounding machine. Anger is the proper response. We have already become unconscious. There is no more possibility for human consciousness any more than there is for God's Word unvarnished. I wax poetical, and wane with the keystroke of finality. And yet I cheer him, it, us.

Smart Devices

What an incredibly exciting time to be alive! Well, OK so I'm especially excited because my daughter just learned that she can go to Yale Law School if she wants, or she can accept a scholarship to the University of Chicago, or a few other not-so-shabby choices. It's also nice to think that maybe she was accepted at least in part because of her evident devotion - proven by track record - to public service and not just self-promotion.

But that's all just backdrop to my effusive mood for the day. Among my hobbies is to follow the developments of Information Technologies. Careful readers will understand that I consider the term "information" highly problematic in this construction. Having occasion to read a bit of Marshall McLuhan again, I'm struck by how much more expansive his rhetoric is than would be possible now these few short decades later. And he was the guru then about what's happening now!

As much as we can be better informed, we can also be distracted by the sheer volume of what's out there. Here in the vicinity of LA now, I am awash each day with movie news leading up to the Oscars (how many more contests along the way?) The coverage is dense enough that I can also learn of the small-audience indie movies being produced, some on incredibly important and interesting subjects.

But it's hard to avoid the imperative to catch the drift about the blockbusters. And with only so much time in any given day to read or watch or otherwise digest the news from the global village, it would be hard not to conclude that the blockbusterish information pretty much crowds out almost everything else.

My mind simply can't either catalog or remember which of those indie movies I'd wanted to see, and they're not really all that likely to be offered on pay-per-view or at the local theater.

Ditto re reading material, although in that case at least the "mass market" is a bit more refined, and so I worry less that the Big Books will crowd out the interesting stuff. While I might waste my time watching good entertainment in the theater, I'm not all that likely to waste reading time on something Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck wrote, regardless of whether I agree with them or not. Plus, I have to spend real time re-learning to read Chinese now that I might be employed again. And overall there's so much good stuff so easy to find.

I confess I do enjoy having a "smartphone." Truthfully, I can't even imagine being without it now. Remember when the answering machine solved a big problem with staying in touch, but then each day coming home from work you'd have to be sure to check it? And then there's that call screening function. Or planning ahead and leaving phone numbers, and having to apologize for being stuck in traffic after the fact. Now I have a traffic monitoring GPS. Or Internet in the park!

Sure, it commands my attention in ways that could be annoying socially if I were to let it (sometimes, I confess, I do). And it probably keeps me from paying attention to those complicated thoughts I really have to get to work on.

But, you know, that problem will be solved by having a job, or could be solved by having a discipline within which to work. Except for my sense that these darned over-elaborated disciplines are part of the problem. Each one now has its technical vocabulary and cultural norms which envelope an entire professional life-time and pretty much rule out the kind of overarching thinking accomplished by the likes of McLuhan. No wonder we still don't know what to do with what he wrote.

Sure there are public geniuses, people we like to read or watch up on TED, but I sense that they all elaborate on one big overarching metaphor, drawn from a discipline where they have established cred. There's no room for unauthorized new thinking from the bleachers. We have spotlights. We have superstars. The world is trivialized thereby.

But that's life in the village, global or local, and it's the overarching galaxy which is the most important. The shape of things. Here, I think, microcosm is as elaborated as macrocosm, and the superstars as shallow, ulitmately, as that guy with a toupee who MCs at your local high-school when the road show comes to town.

Now back down to that micro-ecology where the smartphone sits. I find it incredibly exciting, really!, that there remains quite a variety of Operating Systems for the hardware on which they float. There's Google's Android and Apple's iOS of course, but there's also Windows Phone 7, and the new WebOS from HP, and Blackberry and the fading Symbian and Palm and that nameless one I've still got.

Their competition drives the hardware now, to where the screens are rich and readable in any light. They respond with alacrity to touch, and inside these tiny boxes are two-way radios for voice and data, including WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and in the case of my phone even FM for music and NPR!!

Where's the satellite radio? What about TV? Well, you know, eventually, it will all come down to packet data, and whatever ways there are to get it. As news outlets now rediscover ways to charge for their mediation of "information," I suspect that access to the web will approach a cost of something like nil. Which could mean that we start paying full price for hardware as well as content. Which could get interesting.

No question Apple has the lock on hot hardware, but so far the cost differential hasn't reached Maserati vs. Volkswagen proportions. Or wait, maybe it has? VWs cost a pretty penny nowadays, and the outrageously priced cars somehow don't seem so utterly out of reach when ordinary folks have to pay at least a quarter of a $K to get a family car.

I like a keyboard, as you can see, and I don't much care about the rest of it. Sure if I would interact more by talking to people instead of writing to myself, I'd have a less cranky approach on things, but I have to say that it's only by interacting this way with what I read that I can make any sense of it. And for that I'm really really glad for cheap access to the Internet. For me, it's a two-way street, though yeah as you can tell I'm not much paying attention to who might care to pay attention to me.

Anyhow, HPs apparent strategy is to develop a software/hardware mixed infrastructure on which can ride all sorts of apps and devices which they sell. Their stable includes an incredible variety of medical instruments as well as enterprise-grade PC servers and consumer-grade entertainment PCs. On top of any of these there can  now be a WebOS sandbox in which to run their apps. Or for their apps to run their hardware. It's all a two-way street!

I can buy Google apps now which will run in Chrome, the browser. Shortly, I'll be able to buy an even cheaper but more alacritous laptop loaded with the Chrome OS! And presumably these apps will run across all their devices, or in their sandbox running on other devices. And of course, there's iTunes though it's still more of a store than a platform for the moment.

I'm still waiting for the day when I could conveniently use iTunes in sync with non-Apple hardware. Or I'd almost accept Microsoft getting a clue with Media Player and the way it integrates with my phone (not so well, sadly). I mean, I don't really care all that much about music, truthfully, mainly because it's too damned hard to drill down through the payola on the air and over the 'net and so for the moment I'm perfectly happy with Pandora's read of my genome. I can't retrieve my audiophile roots enough to care about fidelity, and I figured out how to trick my phone into accepting an ill-fitting version of Pandora's software which they officially don't make,

Sure, yeah, I'd like to be able to read my books on any and all devices, and not to have to care about which outlet I get them from. I come pretty close with my Kindle, but it won't handle Chinese without a hack. Maybe I'd like to have a bit more flexibility with movie watching, and maybe I'd like to be able to ignore the wide pricing swings from free-with-ads to $5 bucks per view to full ownership.

Ultimately, I'd like to "own" media, the way I do books on my Kindle, but retain the rights to lend them out. It seems DVD rental places might not have to pay royalties back to the content owners once they own the physical disks. Surely this will be a thing of the past? And maybe artists will retain rights to their physical works after they get sold if they get resold?

Or, you know, maybe I could "rent" new books on demand the way that I can borrow old books (the new ones always have an impenetrable queue) from the library, without having to pay so much up front. These things can all be worked out by IT.

But of course, the ecology of money would have to change in ways to upset the current monopoly plays orchestrated by the financial institutions.

We all learned from the recent sale of the New York Stock Exchange, that nobody trades in stocks anymore. Instead, it's all nano-microsecond trading in complex futures and derivatives, whatever those are. (I'm pretty sure it's all a conspiracy among newly conscious machines to preserve the advantage among those who already have it, who provide the luscious host for the viral growth of anti-human dangerous memes - out-of-control wealth provides the machines' and the machine-thought which they embody with their nutrient bath, in strange mockery of that movie Matrix.)

I'm warned that the cost of law school will inexorably whittle down my daughter's resolve not to go for the gold. That must be how the price is set. Some sort of guarantee for the ultimate triumph of machine-thought, now defined here as that thinking which rationalizes greed as though it were good for humanity.

But you know, there's hope. And for today, at least, I find it in the palm of my hand, among devices which have now brought down a dictator in Egypt and might yet defeat machine-memes a few more times. Life as it ever was. Down and dirty and difficult and uncertain, but humanity will prevail. If we care to.

Hello! Watson, Can You Hear Me?

Our computer overlords indeed! Jeopardy mocks humanity by making a contest of the freakish ability to read quickly and recall meaningless bits of information. It's like watching sports contests in a way, but at least so far there doesn't seem to be a way to dope and get an unfair advantage.

Unfair advantage would mean being able to tap into the Internet, or maybe to have some signal from a team of smart buddies that their answer will be forthcoming by the time you have to answer it. "We're pretty sure you can click yes, and we'll pay if we're wrong." Having a computer on the game hardly changes the sport of watching it. Good show old man!

Of course, that's what the computer did. It calculated the likelihood of getting the right answer, and then pushed the buzzer before the words were necessarily pulled together. Before the voice was modulated. The human champions must do the same thing, just like I do when I know that I know what I'm about to say, but haven't quite strung the words together. How else can we even start talking?

There's this interesting guy, now emeritus at Cornell, who's devised a very careful experiment to test the possibility that there is a way backward from the future which allows certain kinds of highly charged stimuli to pre-cause a response. The way the experiment is constructed, it isn't just the lag between the brain's excitation and one's consciousness of that response. Even the computer hasn't determined its selection to be presented to the human before the human subject hits his buzzer.

Let's suppose this experiment is valid. Granted that I learned of this watching Stephen Colbert and granted that professors can't really do this kind of research until they're pretty much retired, but I actually do suppose that there is some structure to the cosmos which allows for violations of Einstein's universal limits.

At the subatomic level, physicists have demonstrated that this must be so. There is no meaning at that range to such concepts as simultaneity since there is no meaning to such things as points in time or space.

There are only (relative) clouds of probability, to be determined by acts of perception. Perception (and forces) gets defined at that scale by the impingement of particulate probability clouds on one another to the extent that the probabilities re-calculate until the threshold of collapse into what we normally call determinate reality. Perception quite literally realizes things.

I have been arguing for most of my adult life now that we have language from the macro world which could also be deployed at the subatomic level to describe interactions which aren't "physical" or "perceptual." These relations are, properly, conceptual, and the interactions emotional. Calling them that way doesn't change the math or the reality one iota, but it does have implications for the way we understand the macro world.

If, for instance it is conceptually impossible fully to distinguish an individual from its context, then by analog to the way that subatomic particles are determined by their futures (connections not yet perceptual, but destined by trajectory as held in mind to be so), it would be reasonable to assume that future shifts in context might be prefigured in ways to destroy conventional notions of cause and effect, by the "individual" whose existence will be profoundly impacted by those shifts.

My brain reacts to stimuli prior to my consciousness. Why not connect my brain to things outside it with which it's implicated? If the connection is mechanical - perceptual - then the direction of time's arrow is inexorable. But if it's a conceptual connection - like the one between twinned sub-atomic particles distant in space and time, but the perception of one of which determines characteristics of the other - then no directionality for time need be inferred.

But of course, this is difficult to get ones mind around, just as quantum physics is more generally. But experimental evidence demonstrates that it's neither adequate nor appropriate to fill in the blanks with metaphors for "transmission" or field-like arrays for the simultaneous and faster-than-light communication of information.

In simple terms, "mind" must be inferred to make much sense of these things. Mind, not as a characteristic of human beings, but of the cosmos even without us. Perhaps especially without us, since we're so utterly enslaved by the notion of our individuality and authorial originality. If mind is a function of cosmic reality as that necessary thing to "explain" the coincidence of meaningful but perceptually distinct events, then it is also that in which our local and mis-conceptually individual mind partakes. We are conscious only insofar as we are not distinctly individuated from the mind-stuff of the cosmos.

Of course this leaves machine-mind out of any proper description of reality, but really now, that should be evident to anyone with the capacity to think. Not even interesting.

But it does make it even more interesting that the experiment I referred to above, which finds a statistically very significant tendency toward pre-cognition when the image to be displayed is pornographic. This stimulus, evidently, relates to that which individuals actually are important for. We carry around particular genes, which are usefully - for the species - perpetuated or not depending on how likely they are to last.

So that which is truly individual about us - the genetic makeup of our physical body - is the thing which must be, for the sake of our evolved species - most connected to that part of our mind which is not confined by the body's skin. Prescience is what best determines pro-creative durability. Or in common language, luck. Evolution combines the good or bad luck of myriad individuals and  by the ever-shifting context winnows out the winners who just happened on the right stuff.

Here's a proposed continuum: start with the common, the fleshy form, and then progress through the behavioral expression of our genes' expression which forms a personality or a character, which often competes on equal terms with the relative perfection of our body's form to consummate a mating. So far nothing approximating consciousness is required in any sense - any old dog has a bit of personality, um, so to speak.

And it would certainly be a mistake to consider degrees of perfection of the physical form to relate to some pre-formed "ideal" form, since, well, the ideal form which might be thus pre-formed itself pre-supposes consciousness (that there is a progression). Prior to that, there are simply degrees of attraction, which can only be defined in relative terms. Following this cognitive science fellow, Daniel C. Dennett, beauty, in the sense lampooned by pornography, is by definition simply that which attracts and has no intrinsic cosmic quality. It's quality inheres in the conceptual and thus emotional direction for attraction between gene-carrying individuals.

Consciousness is a second-guesser. It rides on top of more fundamental  moves. It cautions, as it were, about acting too rashly. It represents a society-wide constraint against individual action which, while avidly promting that individual's subset of the collective gene-pool, might run afoul of such facts of life as that the babe bending down across the way is the daughter of the alpha male whose violation would entail instant termination of your particular genetic bag were you to follow its dictates, um, so to speak again.

Consciousness is not even conceivable as the quality of an individual, man or machine. Consciousness partakes of mind which is prior to any particular individual manifestation of it. But not ideal mind, as in mind of God. Rather, cosmic mind as in that which allows of conceptual connections among otherwise unconnectible discreet objects.

Individual consciousness aspires, in precise analog to what lust lusts after. Most of the time we are either asleep or reciting mindless cliches and other language circles, filling in the blanks as does color-phi which infers solid happenings where only elision exists. Like the smooth motion inferred by viewers of celluloid or digital flip-books. The mind fills all lacunae as though something were there. That's its definition.

Now what picture might you flip in front of a computer to test its pre-cognition? Even in principle, it's not an interesting question . . .

Keyboarding

As I have by now restarted or failed to start so many distinct careers, likening myself - as I must to remain American - to those careers, and thus finding myself a wreck sunken before it was ever launched, I also find occasion to re-read that essay I wrote by virtue of which I was awarded a Bachelor's Degree.

By the evenness of the type's impression on the page, I can tell the machine whose keyboard I pounded was electrified. My own powers of recall would have told me as much. But by the unevenness of the type's line, I can tell that it was the more primitive and by then worn hammer-type machine and not the IBM Selectric I would later use.

There would be daisy wheels and there would be electrostatic machines, but now they're all subsumed beneath virtualized page drawing languages which can be rendered in any number of ways onto literal or virtual sheets of blank approximate whiteness.

They keyboard remains. Sort of. As happens often, I got my hands on a newer smartphone from Google, and right there on its keyboard is an icon for a microphone, and sure enough it will replace your keystrokes with a typographic rendering of your voice. And I watched a friend capturing his notes and a lectures soundtrack electronically by his pen. I don't really know what it is I want anymore.

I know I don't want videos of myself giving lectures. For one thing, I'd have to write them first. And even though I'm still working on a writer's 'voice' I wouldn't trade it - elusive though the writing voice may be - for my literal droning voice (cross-genre resemblance you say?).

Even when I wash a floor, I like to get down on my hands and knees once in a while so that I can see what it is I'm interacting with. When I write English, the letters are near enough to the keyboard, but when I write Chinese they're not. I lose touch with the written forms which are replaced by my ability to recognize them quickly which is not the same as to be able to form them.

To type Chinese is to lose touch with the forms as they are formed, and so, of course, many scholars note that it should be as it must be. And good riddance to needless complexity.

Alongside the typescript of the essay I've just re-read are my handwritten Chinese characters, and they are lame. To protect myself, had it been possible, I would have used a word-processor to hide my handwriting disability, just as I had to render written English.

I'm just now reading a book written by one of my oldest friends. I believe that I would be accurate to say that it treats the history of the introduction of industrial printing to China as synecdoche for a variety of technological and organizational changes in China which occurred as the result of the overall confluence of Chinese and Western traditions, starting from some time after the Gutenberg revolution in the West and still ongoing with the globalization of technologies to reproduce the written word.

I am astounded at the extent to which the machinery of printing in both its development and its form is part and parcel of the machinery of industrialization more generally. But the really interesting part is how, in the case of printing, the output of that production was the actual means for dissemination and ideological persuasion about the process by which it was created; printing machines could seed the globe with schematics to describe the building of more such machines. Printed words could persuade readers of the utility in doing so. And along the way this same technique for the broad-casting of written tracts would expose and transform the social arrangements which had been transformed because of its arrival on the scene; industrial capitalism brutalized workers, and nowhere more markedly than for the workers of printing presses.

There is a kind of ironic feedback loop to the technology for mass producing words. At one and the same time that it accelerates the penetration and acceptance of the underlying print-making technologies, it also accelerates ideological transformations which might and sometimes do counter those very trends.

And no wonder that governments quake now in the face of Facebook or WikiLeaks. Widely dispersed and replicated agencies, microbe style, have always had the collectivized agency to topple centralized institutions of power.

One effective antidote to this kind of threatening infection of the body politic is to flood the field with sound and fury. Captivate attention and signify nothing. A less effective antidote is to try to contain, privatize and control access to what gets published.

But as with plans for nuclear devices, it's not so much the actual material as its context which makes widely disseminated writing so powerful and dangerous. I know from small and insignificant examples that it is mostly the knowledge that it can be done which most often empowers me to do it, whatever the "it" is. I don't always need to be shown the precise means, if I can but know with some assurance that what I might attempt has actually once been done.

But such knowledge can be a demotivator too.  Why would you bother if it's already been done by someone else somewhere else? Why, if you can master only a small part of what the masters have mastered would you essay a long shot on your own? And so we all lose touch with the written word because we no longer even try to write it. We only speak it. We give T.E.D-sized renditions for our friends' consumption in company and let the world take care of itself. We have confidence that someone somewhere will know how to and will have done the work.

What then will be my work? What will I do with hands-on that is not merely to keep the machines humming? Which language is left to be informed once words have proliferated to such an extent that there is no principle which will or can prevent our being lost among them? Or has it already all started its descent once again to nonsense, where the makers can no longer make without machine?