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!!

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?

Distributed Anomalies

I am struck by Google's announcement this morning  - or some reporter's discovery - that they will offer high-definition tours of various art galleries, mostly clustered for now on the East Coast. This promises to break down museum walls, and expose their collections to a vastly larger and more varied audience of viewers.

For certain pieces, the online viewer will be privileged to inspect the work from an extremely close-up vantage, perhaps taking time beyond what might be comfortable in the actual museum. One imagines students and art historians now having the chance to brush up their sense of that piece they might already know about. One imagines the viewing public enriched.

Over the weekend, result of the usual random confluences which determine any life's path, I traveled into downtown LA to immerse myself in the "Suprasensorial" exhibit at the Geffen Temporary Contemporary and now seemingly permanent extension of the MOCA. This installation featured flashback pieces brought north from the more Southerly and more Latin Americas. These represented by now historic attempts to break down the wall between appreciator and artist: to remove the object from its frame.

In what could only be called a literalistic rendition, museum visitors were even invited to immerse themselves in a swimming pool, bathed also in light and video. Right beyond this piece's wall, I tried to follow a gallery talk about the exhibit; above the din of swimming children splashing over the wall, and through the ever-dropping transmission of a portable wireless sound system, my head swam and promised to ache.

It could have been a useful talk, but the flashing catalog of images from the original installations at least gave me solid grounding in what I was about to experience. These were conceptual conjectures thrown to me, and nothing much of talent to them. Nothing much outside the heads of their creators and so I would be the artist, the actual creator. I would make of my own experience something other from everyday living.

For those my age, there was nothing new about these retro works. The term "contemporary" was bizarrely shifted, as I wandered among neon and schematic "rooms" filled with primary colors, in fashions once so favored through Plexiglas gels along 70's lines. Yellowing CRT screens would react to my presence or I could penetrate the rain storm of hanging vinyl strings. Just another day in the life. Even boring in its way, in contrast to a contemporary shopping complex.

What has happened to such art? Had it always been displaced to South America, and would the notion of releasing art from its framed containment now remain itself framed in a perpetuated state of coming into being?

All art is now performance art, right? And the audience has the right to remain passive, despite and because of all the interactive technologies, so called, deploying themselves across the planet. Participatory art will always remain stillborn. Or anonymous.

Time was that gonzo theater audiences might be dragged out into the street as part of the show. I even remember a literal net being cast over those of us in an "audience." Animal offal revealed by hatchet blows, blood dripping from A.I.R. loft's over-sheetrocked walls back when they themselves, these lofts, blurred the boundaries between art and work and life.

Down in New York's new SoHo, I remember visiting a video installation within which was the actual living object of the realtime display. I watched him languidly wiping his ass, glad that there was no smell which escaped the space-capsule-sized enclosure where he carried on his day-to-day.

And so Google now allows and even encourages us to stay as far from the fray as possible, and who would argue that this is not wondrous and grand. That we may appreciate those things once reserved for the higher classes, just as we may freely download classic music and displace the money-making back up onto the stage where it belongs. Disclosing only as much of our secret desires as might be repaid by  marketing placements on our screens.

Rupert Murdoch wants to place the stopper back into the online free download drain now to reserve his exclusive profits. You will pay to look under his tent for special morsels: salacious gossip or privileged news.

Even as the walls come down all around and about us, reminding us of what happened once so long ago when Chinese students spilled out from their academies. Following on the inspiration of that anonymous tank-boy way back on Tiananmen containment square,we thought all the walls would topple.

Tunisia, Egypt with Russia looking longingly on, but never here. Never where the performance art has now infected government and we wait to be administered to. While the action spills out into the streets elsewhere over the globe. Instigated by homebound tweets and Facebook outrage. Empowered.

And we wait. We want our entertainment now. We want our education free, along with libertarian unbound information. But what will we do with it? Will we only watch? Will we only arise when the radiation which knows no boundaries, the CAT scans which accumulate without record beyond our faulty recall, the endless ways that we can and must and will find to probe for to burn away to endlessly power and slap with the label green those things which derail all promises of eternity.

Snow storms blanket our sleeping recumbent receptive and ever reclusive minds. Unbound. Snowbound. Rebounding main. There would be an awakening, but that we are all so receptive to it.

More Mental Chaos

OK, so lately I've discovered things that you've known for some time now. I'm a little slow. But I read this article about how nobody can touch Apple selling "apps" because nobody else has iTunes. So I opened up my iTunes for the first time in maybe a zillion years, and wow is it overwhelming.

I mean you can listen to radio stations from all over the world, and you can buy TV episodes and movies, and of  course I already knew you could buy songs. But how the hell do you sort among it all? And what about cross-platform compatibility? And how do you know what's available on one platform or format which might not be available on another?

Chrome, the browser, has just introduced apps too - well, OK they might have done it years ago, but I just noticed. And the line between a browser-based application and a machine-based app now seems entirely blurred. It's confusing! I can read the New York Times via my browser, or I can read it with an app, and I can't even tell which one is more like the "real thing" or even what the real thing is like anymore.

Sometimes I see an article on the print version and can't find it online and vice-versa.

But get this! We - royally we - just bought a superannuated and thus discounted Blue-ray player. It plugs into the Internet. It has apps! OK, so not nearly so many apps as iTunes has, but way more than my Windows mobile phone. You can rent movies one-off from Blockbuster, or if you don't like their scant collection, you can find any number of other venues, each one claiming to have more than the others - newer and out faster and with higher definition.

You can buy it on your TV and watch it on your smartphone if you have the right smartphone which is almost always the iPhone and almost never the Windows mobile phone, but sometimes it is. Now if I only knew what I wanted to watch I would be able to find it, but you know I like to browse, and when I browse, I like to know that the list is reasonably comprehensive so that I'm not making my choice from among mediocrity.

Browsing the apps on this Blue-ray player I found one for USA Today and I thought "oh!" so I can get my print news right on the TV.Weird, but OK let's see - and I found articles from months and months ago. I'm thinking this is one delivery medium that never quite took off. I had a sad thought about that one person somewhere who actually is depending on this source for "news."

Days were when I would and could listen only to the local radio and watch the local TV. The boundaries around the possible were vaguely comforting although I couldn't have known it then. Now I might listen to any number of university stations, but without affinity why would I want to? I don't feel a whole lot of affinity to any of my various alma maters, although they all stalk me for it like a Google mediated ad for something I never did want but only wanted to look at and now it won't leave me alone.

What's really annoying is that there is no easy way - although my phone handles podcasts just as well as the next guy - to find a podcast via iTunes and then listen to it on my Windows phone. But yeah why would I want to? I can't even imagine sparing the time to listen to podcasts. When I'm in the car, which is as seldom as possible these days, I find the NPR station and feel reasonably reassured that I will at least know if the world has melted down and what are the main topics on everybody's mind.

But people do listen to podcasts, and I suppose they mostly follow the path of least resistance and get the Apple branded product because it just works. Although they don't seem to get Apple TV all that much. Other products are more highly rated. And free still has some draw to it. But who can sort out the copy protection schemes and the Digital Rights Management schemes, and since when did the US of A get all high and mighty about not copying someone else's copyrighted stuff? We invented the concept.

It's hard to know when the obstacles are a matter of law or a matter of manufacturers and publishers trying to maximize profits by opening or closing off various avenues to corral your interest or affinity. I mean, you just know that Microsoft doesn't want you to inter-operate with Apple all that much, or is it the other way around? And Google just wants to take over the world again now that a younger guy over at Facebook is the IT I.T. innovator.

I wonder what it feels like to even be a contender at that level, and why can't you just let it go and be on the top of your game. It must be that being the king of the hill that way is a special kind of drug whose high just keeps on giving.

But, since my thread these days is about consciousness, one thing I'm pretty sure of is that these top dogs - the Jobs and Gates and Pages and Zuckerbergs and the rest of 'em - aren't any more "conscious" than you and I are.

But what if I'm missing stuff that everyone else is aware of? Every time I turn on PBS I think Oh Yeah I really should pay more attention to all those wildlife shows. It would be as though I'd actually traveled the world, and I could understand that much more about how it works. Or the shows about how the brain works. I really should watch T.E.D. more often too.

I could be just a troglodyte mind in a thoroughly modern civilization, you know, but on the other hand I do typically spend a lot of time reading books. And when there's a really good movie out I've been known to buy a ticket. Live theater sometimes. You know, the good stuff. Yesterday's movies feel so yesterday, and you're all alone watching stuff that everyone else has already watched.

Driving around SoCal it seems the popular way to live now is in big desert-block condo developments which look for all the world like big hotel complexes. I paid a visit to OpryLand once with my daughter - you know that massive complex of stores and restaurants and rooms all overlooking what's inside the superdome-like enclosure. They're attractive, these housing complexes, and they seem squarely aimed at middle-class people who can't afford a house even with depressed real-estate pricing. It's gotta make you feel special though, living in a convention complex 24-7-365.

I imagine they get all these apps and video choices and consider them cheap compared to what they'd pay in an actual hotel room. I'm guessing they play video games and listen to what smart futurists say about how video gaming will actually save rather than destroy us. But you know I'm also guessing that if you do enough of this by the end of the day there's not really a thought in your head. You're as conscious as a drunk or a doper who can't summon the energy to organize all the raw data streaming into your head.

It must feel really good, but I guess it always feels good to kick back and stop all attempts to organize. Watching movies, getting drunk, blowing some dope (do people still talk about it that way?). It's no way to live an entire life.

But you don't have to do all the organizational work alone! You see, we're all conspiring to play an epic game together, and there's this really powerful narrative behind it -  the greatest story ever written, say - and if everyone plays his little part, blogging up the stuff they're good at and not knocking down stuff just because they don't understand it, then with the magic of the Internet, all this data will self-organize and resolve itself according to quality and depth metrics.

Consciousness expands!

There is a change afoot. How could there not be? When we are or can be, to various degrees, aware of what's going on in most if not almost all of the world. We can get images and we can get sounds and videos, and of course all of it is subject to the pre-ordering of the various editorial and profit-making processes which bring it to us.

Sure those processes are as likely to omit by virtue of motivated over-emphasis as they are to include by an abundance of generous spirit. Thinking that we're in touch with the whole world might leave us a little less well in-touch than to be certain that we're not. but who really wants to go back to being limited by our local paper anymore? Who wants only to be able to witness the local amateur opera?

What we get to see or virtually experience is powered by politics and marketability and our own disposition to oogle and satisfy various levels of curiosity, informed or not.

And still I prefer books. There are all sorts of assumptions about the power of the technology which brought us the printing press - that it brought down the institution of the church and replaced it with freer thinking autodidacts who could read the Word themselves.

And now there are analogies being drawn between those cataclysmic times and these, when Blogging and picture and video sharing technologies allow each of us to try his voice in the public square. Sure it's chaotic, but it seems we've - most of us - managed to remain reasonably coherent.

As always, we pick and choose among the stuff swirling around and about us. We form a narrative thread and make rhyming associations. We pick our way forward, and wonder how it is, eventually, that we will or won't manage to find a way collectively to keep our heads about us.

Some stuff we pay attention to and some stuff we ignore. We give over to the commons that part of our thoughts which we feel comfortable giving over, and we keep to and for ourselves that part we need to call ourself by name. And it's all good or not depending on how it all comes out. About which we can know almost precisely nothing - except that if we don't participate, it won't come out well at all.

Back to reading . . .

Television Everywhere

There are so many homeless in LA. As with the depth of snow when I was a little person, how am I to know how much of this is life as normal in the sunnier climes, and how much is the impact of our economic meltdown. They say I came of age during a mini Ice Age, and so the snow was likely really deeper then.

Some wheel around with impressive quantities of stuff. I wonder what's bundled up within the third-world-wrap improvised baggage. I wonder if it would be very easy to distinguish mental illness from hard luck, or if the distinction gets lost by the time a person is used to living on the street. By the time one gets to know the purple-shirted downtown security marshals by name.

I am barely holding my stuff together. Some's here in California, and some's in Buffalo. Some is among the contacts I keep going, grateful for the existence again of correspondence, of the sort I used to write before the days of email. There was that awful time when no-one was writing anymore, and before you could be very sure that everyone had email. Thank God that desert is in my past.

I've reconnected with people I haven't seen for years, thanks to Facebook, or thanks to profiles on various Internet sites. My world feels manageable again, as though I never did leave so much behind. My daughters will visit me in my new place, and I will settle my mind.

This self I am, nestled among stuff and correspondence. This self whose eternal existence I don't quite believe.

Then what is consciousness? From where does this conviction come that I am me and here and now and concerned about my persistence at least for a while longer?

My reflexes and behaviors are not so different from the dog I now befriend. We have - dogs and mankind - co-evolved over that same time span which created humanity floating atop of so much meat. We conspire with language to create something more than just a species of animal embedded in the holograph of life's matrix. Even our personal consciousness, that self we hold onto so closely, is conspiracy's merest end.

There was once so much talk of finding oneself, of being true to oneself, of the possibility to lose oneself sometimes for the good, and sometimes for the ill of it. Perhaps we've grown to realize that this fetishised self never did exist, and that the nirvana satori states which ancient exotic practice once promised us exist only at a metaphorical remove from real. Where our own true singular God resides.

Now we know there are no limits to what an individual will aggrandize to himself and for himself alone. In stunning competition with those grandiose rulers from the days of our inception as humanity, the Chin Shih-huang dis (Emperors) or however the hell you prefer to spell it (秦始皇）from back when the rest of us behaved ourselves as worker bees, individuated in terracotta,  with faces enough to mimic proper names.

Was he a psychopath, then, that despotic unifier of what China still claims for it's persistent identity? If you lose yourself in drink or beneath the kind of psychosis that either sends you to, or which develops as a result of, living on the street, are you then in that same remove from self-ness that those with the power of life, death, and personal pleasure from the backs of lowlier selves once had?

So many of those we admire now have that capacity to live as kings or princes or emperors. They do good works and give their money to programs for people in need. They would keep psychotic shooters away from crowds if they could, and, like the autocrats of old, they strive to be responsible and to resist the temptations to live as though there were nothing else in the cosmos but their personal self, and perhaps some comely other for a while.

They show up on TV.

Not too long ago, back when families would eat together, we would also sit together to watch network TV. These were somewhat communal moments, not too far removed from attending a live show or a concert. Television has since become fragmented to the point where it would be hard to understand how people know what they like to watch, and since the gradations are so fine, it seems unlikely that even family groupings might like to watch the same shows.

Our small screens have grown now, and they show things ranging from games to avatars moving in synch with our gestures to Internet redirected amateur-generated YouTubes to the movies we still like to watch in a group when they aren't too lurid.

People still gather up the news on television screens, although this also blends with computer screens, and it's almost impossible now to distinguish responsible news reporting from a packaged and hyped presentation calibrated to capture attention. And much of this descends into a strange kind of semi-hypnotic telling to folks who are frustrated by their own difficulty making sense of the world around them, things which will cause them to be assured that they are right in their lazy and unschooled assumptions about how things must be.

Even those of us who are demonstrably enlightened, at least by virtue of our schooling and our ability to read and to agree with peer-reviewed thinking from among the very best prepared among us, cannot seem to help but to live as though things which we know to be true aren't true.

We know that global warming is real. We know that temperatures in Antarctica are rising at a terrifying rate. We know in our very bones that the human species cannot keep on the way it is, and yet we keep on as though it really can and will. As though a real and tangible God will descend to rescue us. As though we can achieve technologic and satori of a sort which won't alienate us from that self we never want to leave, though we might wish to invent a new one.

This all generates a kind of extreme cognitive dissonance. We live in a perpetual state of waiting for the next shoe to drop. We wait for the final war of the worlds to erupt, and there might be a tiny part of each of us which would feel relief when it does. But there's absolutely nothing any of us can do to head it off.

We listen to the reasonable people up on TV who wag their heads because they also can't get any action even though they have voices that we don't. People carry on as though there's nothing to be done because there's nothing they can do themselves and we're scared about changing what's worked in the past. Indeed, as with the US Constitution, we valorize those things to the point almost of making them sacred. We need something to hold onto. We need something to behave as if forever.

Meanwhile, as we all stare at screens ranging in size from pocket-sized and hand held to wall-sized and almost theatrical, we keep in touch with one another and with the world, and the one thing that we must suppose is that there's something indelibly me about me and that can't change until something kills me. Even then some of us think that there's a way to carry on in the great beyond, whatever that could possibly mean.

Sometimes we worry about whether we have inherited DNA which is just a little bit off. That secret code, still inscrutable even to the one who owns it, which represents our right to exist according only to natural law, and as part of an environment from which we now diverge relentlessly and at an accelerated pace.

Will we be tripped up earlier than some of our cohort, perhaps because the environment has been shifted too far too fast? Or is it just that we may have outlived the span for which the code was optimized? Or are we just simply deserving, according to that natural law, to go away and good riddance. To what extent would you re-invent yourself if you could? How far would you transform from the one those who love you love?

I think we stare at screens for the same sort of fix. We want to know if we are sound in our thinking, in our environment, and we want to check ourselves out according to the widest possible sweep of what's out there.

It seems clear enough that warm homes, shelter from the weather, flush toilets and other such innovations are to be desired universally. We even want those around us to share the amenities, since otherwise we all might be drowning in shit and filth from those who live like animals. There is no-one short of Jesus who loves a smelly homeless person. A dog does better. And yet we must distance ourselves from the shooters and the thieves, and why not the shouters and the haters too?

Sometimes we just want to be entertained or amused, which must stimulate a process internal to our brains which can also be stimulated just by ingesting certain substances. Drugs. We used to entertain each other face to face. We used to watch entertainers live. Now they would look amateurish. We have become used to the best. Projections on a screen at ever heightened fidelity.

Or are the ones we watch the best? We watch them because their genes expressed themselves in bodily forms of exceeding beauty. Comic genius, maybe, or glibness with tongue. We watch them because their parents imbued them with a work ethic which made them climb and climb until they were at the very top, while the rest of us continued to play the lottery of when will someone notice me.

I don't wish for someone better than the ones I  love. I don't dream of perfect skin and form and intelligence. There is something better than that, and it's right here before me now. And still I am intrigued by all the new ways I can get "content" on my various screens. Quite soon now, it will all be mediated by the ubiquitous trade in packets of diminutive data. A kind of genetics of communication, which will render obsolete all investments in satellite infrastructure, or cable plant, or even fiber optics except for the backbones. Even these might get subsumed in some vibratory pulsation through the ether.

We will all swim in that same electromagnetic vibrant soup beyond the sensory capacity of mere organism to detect. Perhaps the screen will turn into a pair of cheap 3D glasses, and we can tune in and out from reality, sight and sound, depending on where we want to be. We can expand its virtual size to all-encompass the drear reality round about us. We can inhabit filmic dystopias and they can become real and real is good.

Except that when the electromagnetic resonance drops, when the generators hiccup, we all fall down, we all fall down and then what of that vaunted selfness which was to be so elaborated? What of that then?

Yes, and it's true that we already condition reality at that remove from our animal selves. We have already touched the quantum fringes, and life on the edge is all that there ever has been. Our reality is already shared. But that we can still, for a moment longer, chose to shut it out by virtue of those historically extravagant riches that you and I, demonstrably by our ability to read and write across the ether, share.

This is the moment then, when all collapses and we face a collective future. Or not. As always.

Paying Attention to TV

In my former life, which I now inhabit temporarily, I'm a holdout for plain-old over-the-air pre-HD TV. Which means I petty much don't watch TV, except for rented movies. But when I do watch, I'm struck with the ads for upgrading your viewing experience. It's not just the 3D, which I witnessed over at Sears and which actually works about as well as at the movies, but it's the various ways to stream the Internet directly to your big screen, or to have the show follow you from room to room, or device to device even onto the diminutive screens we hold in our hands. 

Some of the ads show happy people chasing fight scenes room to room, or waiting in the doctor's office delighted by some romance in ones hand, or maybe waiting for the little woman to finish shopping and cheering for his favorite sports team. You can even leverage your purchase of copyrighted shows and have them boosted out across the Internet for your watching from somewhere else.

In among this noise, I'm reminded yet again of my uncle's memorial service up at SUNY Oneonta, where they now have an annual media summit named for him. I was at the first so-named summit, and remember the earnest pleas from panelists to students to please don't steal this content. There was almost a panic that once the genie was out of the bottle there would be no way to contain and charge for it. And that without pay, there would be no more good stuff to watch or read or listen to. 

Which might be true for all I know, but one does have to question how good any of it really is. And anyhow, the price for entry keeps going up and up, doesn't it? These big flat screens, especially the ones with 3D, aren't exactly free. We still pay for Internet. It doesn't seem a matter of protecting content so much as it does a matter of distribution of the profits. As always, it's not the authors getting the lion's share. Anyhow, the schlockier it is the more likely the distributor will pay you to watch it somehow, either by providing feeds free to the distribution channel, or by ads or whatnot, or just by making the content as lurid as Jerry Springer or Maury Povitch, who are just really really gross.

This all does a pretty decent job of burying the good stuff beneath the noise of commercial distribution. How many really good bands you might catch at a bar get known? How much good writing makes it beyond the Harry Potterish drivel (and they are so greedy they won't even let you read it on your Kindle!)? How many good TV shows? 

Well, I wouldn't know since I don't watch it. I guess there is some really really good TV out there. Mostly, it has a subversive theme, like living off pot sales, or maybe making fun of undertakers. I've heard of such things, but every time I try to watch it I get bored out of my skull since I might have written it myself. 

I like to watch stuff like Mongolian Ping-Pong, which is nothing like anything I could ever imagine all on my own. I don't really like to watch people like me anymore, or sports where you pretty much already know someone's going to win. It isn't that thrilling to laugh at someone who makes jokes like I would make if I could make jokes. Anyhow, being famous seems to make one rich just in and of itself, vis Kardashian (I've heard), and so I really don't see what all the fuss about copyright is. People should just want their stuff all out there all the time. And then they'd be famous and then they'd be rich. 

Well, what do I know?

Yes Massa!

I drove some distance to watch one of those "town hall" health care meetings which were going on all across the country this past summer into fall. I'm pretty sure I blogged about it. I wasn't in Eric Massa's district, but I was just across the line, and this was my nearest opportunity.

I remember being really really impressed by his skill at oration, to a crowd spilled out of doors and without a microphone. I was especially impressed with his patience, and with his ability actually to listen, even to those people - and there were plenty - who were planted there to provoke a fight; to heckle and to present absurdist distorted positions. I credit Massa himself with keeping the temperature cool. But maybe it was just the blue-blood of this particular ex-urban and very very Republican venue.

I've just learned that I have the opposite of blue blood (that hemophiliac disease remarked in the British royal lineage, which provoked some insights into genetic inheritance, and still gets used in high school to teach them), which is so often synecdoche for wealth and privilege. At least poetically, my blood's hyper-clotting factor is descended from the Mayflower, which sailed from that town in Holland - Leiden - where a clustering of this factor was found. For sure, these genes are now implicated in a surprising number of Americans' lives. If you do the math.

I never watch Glenn Beck - I only have rabbit ears for one thing, and for another, I find him incredibly distasteful. But when I've seen him, there's always something almost endearing. He speaks for that part in each of us which just basically knows the differences between right and wrong, and is tired of all the bullshit in the way of its clear presentation. He knows in his guts that the way "the system" works is corrupted to its core.

Which makes it at least a little bit ironic that here's this guy, willing to go on Beck's show, who is saying out loud and publicly that it's not exactly the corruption that made him crack. It's the incredible frustration of being locked into a system bent on deadlocking by invocation of party discipline. And Glenn Beck calls this a waste of time??!!!

That's really really confusing to me. It's as if Beck not only doesn't want to, but quite literally can't let go of his name calling. He must get precisely the same heroin rush to his ego by using the term "Progressive" as an epithet, that Bible readers get when they rote-recite without reading those passages which make them feel "saved."

This right there represents the depths of immorality. I don't give a fig what Massa's sexual proclivities might be, and it doesn't sound like he's ever coerced anyone into anything. If he made someone uncomfortable, then he should pay the price, which shouldn't be all that steep. But Beck's hanging on that tightly to his right to push buttons and make gobs of money off it - that should be punished handsomely. That's the core of sin.

Beck says he's sticking in the fight, knowing full well that he'll be taken down by the "establishment," mocking Massa for waving his white flag. While Massa confesses openly that he's "whipped." He can't do it any more.

If you'd watched the man in front of this manipulated and largely hostile crowd, you'd realize that he's not lying. He had truly taken on the hardest job on the planet only to discover that all the hard work is rendered as if for naught by a system bent on gridlock. Why would anyone want to do it unless they were making the millions Glenn Beck makes?

I celebrate the man for refusing to be our slave anymore. For placing himself in the jaws of Glenn Beck, where only a fool would think he might actually come through alive. This man's my hero for a day, perhaps for longer. Fuck you Beck, and the horse you rode in on. This is my country too, and I've got the bloodline to prove it. I'm an immigrant like nearly every single soul among this nation of interlopers. Not a single one of us has any right to judge another. Certainly not you with your lily-white tongue flapping.

New Tech, Open Source, Innovation, Absurdity

This is one of those days when I'm really glad I haven't succumbed to any technolust for a while. Not just because I didn't have the money, which makes me grateful, of course, not to have spent any. But because there are so many things happening. Google released its first hardware device, apparently for the purpose of parading an ideal type for competing manufacturers to surpass. They win either way, if their OS takes off. God knows my Windows phone looks and feels primitive against what's new!

Apple will be releasing some new "tablet" device which might sit somewhere between my Kindle and their iPhone. And Microsoft is working on a bi-fold multi-touch device which will probably make the rest of the pack look like they're performing kindergarten exercises; once the M$ marketing machine takes over.

Microsoft has the ecology for massive API distribution and driver development which can release the entire pent up energy of hardware designers across the planet. While Apple remains stuck on super-secret dark glasses "crazy, man" cool.

And my brand new Kindle looks primitive already up against the competition its appearance on the market has engendered. There are readers with color, and one which can be flexed. Some will let you read in bed - if you're sleep-cycle foolish enough to read in bed - without a reading light, and who knows, some might even be willing to let you buy books from someone else's store.

I doubt anyone will replace my keyboard very soon though. Like a lot of speedy typists, I've resisted learning the demonstrably better DVORAK-style input device because, well, you can't get it easily on a borrowed laptop, and if you get stuck on it there will just be a new point of friction every time you move among devices.

The real problem is the same as all real problems, you can't move until everybody moves and since everybody isn't going to move, you're stuck in the same old boat.

Kind of like how you have to own a car these days although doing so makes you way more guilty than just eating meat which burns down the rainforests thus releasing even more global warming disasters than the cars do. Breathe! It all costs oil, big Mac! I wish everyone would stop wanting cars so I could too. There really oughta be a law, you know!

But someday, and maybe someday soon, there will be a radically new input device which will enable me to type in the air, maybe by wearing a glove, and looking a little bit stoned, like walking down the street last night with earmuffs talking to my bluetoothed-in daughter. I might have been gesturing with my hands. How would I know?

I fit in among the crazies who patrol the streets near here, since there's a former YWCA rooming house once meant for young innocents in the big city prior to marriage. Young innocents don't even exist anymore, except in the big box churches. The rooming house is now turned into transitional housing for de-institutionalized crazies.

Playing air guitar in public that's not a rave, whatever a rave is, is what I'd like to do without my keyboard. I'll just bet you can play air guitar at a rave without being thought crazy, like I did once at a Dead concert. One day soon, you'll be able to keyboard discreetly, under your coat or in your pocket, and no one will think any less of you, James Joyce.

Then I won't care if the device for reading is disconnected from the device for inputting. I'll be like Scientology nutjob Tom Cruise in Minority report, flying along in touchy interaction with screens which are nearly transparent. I watched his co-faux-religionist John Travolta in Phenomenon the other night. Way cool, except for the part about psychokinesis, which is just plain nuts. But otherwise, they don't seem any crazier than the big box churchies.

Or maybe I'll just wear glasses and interact virtually, like at 3D Avatar swatting flies the other day, and people will have an even harder time distinguishing me from the crazies. Brother can you paradigm shift? I'm sorry, there are too many of you along my walk, and I'm still out of work. Happy New Year, fellow human! At least I'll give you that! The crazies all have their hands out, which is how you might distinguish them from me.

My good and very literate friend, to whose house I walked last night, will relinquish paper books that he can touch and smell only when they are pried from his cold dead fingers.

A stroke deadened one side, and he discovered, hilariously to me, but then I'm easily amused, that he couldn't stroke himself off anymore with that hand, and so he switched to the  other. It wasn't the transmitter, it was the receiver (or vice versa?), and the doctor was embarrassed when he should have been interested. This insight could replace lots of Viagra, but then again, where would the motive be?

I'm not sure I care anymore how the word gets inscribed or published or transmitted. I do care about its cost, and how much is intercepted by the carriers. Verizon now blatantly suggests that I put my 900 numbers on the friends and family list, I guess so that I don't have to worry about minutes when performing clandestine phone sex!

Are you shocked? You should be. At least they're up front about the critical importance of porn to their bottom line. Sort of. They make no judgements about your habits, and that should be a good thing, except when they're intercepting your conversations on behalf of the government if you're a subversive. Huh? Are you worried? You should be.

I had to up my minutes to get the friends and family discount, which relieves some pressure from worry about overage even as they continue to game my tendency toward it. Charging exorbitant penalties in ways that used to be thought unconscionable, but giving me exquisite control so that, really, I have no reason to complain. My mistake, I passed my limit, now how much do I owe, corporate officer, to balance your bottom line? To please your shareholders. To bolster your monopoly position.

Shouldn't monopolists all be public officers? I think so, but then you'll tar me "socialist." A Christian by any other name would smell so sweet.

I would like to know why paper books went up in price so sharply, during my own lifetime as a student. I don't really believe that it was the cost of paper, especially now that you can print out your own vanity-press copy of your personal diatribe far more cheaply than you can buy pulp fiction. And it's on better quality paper, with a far more durable cover.

And why then, at the same time costs skyrocketed, did all the little bookstores go out of business. At the same time the little hardware stores did? This is not about efficiency, it's about monopoly corporatism, which has about as much to do with capitalism as locking up workers to their employers by health insurance protectionism. No capitalist on the planet would go along with that, unless he were a plantation owner.

So, oddly enough, I find myself rooting for Microsoft now. As the ones to practice actual open sourcing for implementations of their software. But Google is fighting for net neutrality and keeping the phone carriers honest. And somewhere in each of those corporate giants' warrens of dronish workers there must lurk actual hearts and minds aligned with mine against the forces of darkness. I mean, the people I talk to at Verizon are always super nice.

My literary friend indulged way more free loving during his life than I ever would have felt comfortable about. He seems to get more of a charge out of pornographic lurkings than I would require in ten thousand lifetimes. But then he wasn't brought up Protestant, nor descended from Cotton Mather. Consider the pent up energy I must represent! Oh, well, you're right, I'm no energizer playboy bunny.

And so of course, apart from wondering what lusty gene is lacking in me, it seems obvious that he isn't going to want to let go of the hard paper copy of the books he wants to read. He isn't going to let go of his pecker any time soon either. Which is inspirational in a guy past 70! No, really, Walter Mathau made this funny to talk about, so why should I be embarrassed?

But still, I want to know what's the next big thing. If you see someone walking down the street making jackoff gestures the way you do when someone is showing off - and wearing dark glasses - you really should cross the street. Out of an abundance of caution. You never do know where those feedback loops are wired.

Damn, I'm disgusting. I've crossed some line now, and this particular post is no longer PG. But, you know, I'd say that Verizon crossed the line first, and those TV ads for Viagra, and that show I watched last night falling to sleep, with all these fat people losing weight in public, which is just a tad bit unseemly, if you ask me, up against what's real in the world. I'm not talking about their weight. I'm talking about making a spectacle of it. Side shows have all become the main show, and the world is still burning.

But anyhow, I'm hoping for a pair of glasses and a glove which I can wire or bluetooth in to some device I hang on my belt about the size of my ever-crashing Windows phone. The one I look at porn on simply because I can, now and again, the way I watch TV, now and again, as long as I don't have to pay for it. Mine is free, well, except for the carrier charges. There are some things I'd rather not be aware of.

I'm hoping that pair of glasses and gloves are really cheap - like netbook cheap - and that I can flip a switch to see or not to see the world around me. And that I can do my blogging while walking around, making lunch, say, and my reading at intervals among the sports and reality extravaganzas on TV.

And I'll be praying, in among all that hoping, that humanity can survive the technology deployed against us. The written word is all that stands between us and our beastly nature. The written word should and must be free. The written word has never been so endangered as by its global dissemination and inundation in inane valuations of "information", whatever that is.

Knowledge can never measured in bytes or pixels. What's exploding is our own metaphorical capacity for earnest irony. And thinking in public is nearly banished from the square. And God knows, there's no such thing as to think in private. No matter what you're doing with your hands. All thought is dialogic, but there I go getting redundant all over again.

Sheesh!

Sex, Lies, and Transhumanism

You know, sometimes from the outside, glimpsing in only now and then via the mass media, it's really hard to credit the existence of disciplines in the Academy such as "queer studies" or "transhumanism." I guess that makes me a stodgy old fart, even though I've long considered disciplinary boundaries to be a pretty good way to guarantee nothing really new under the sun.

We're all in an endless loop now anyhow, wanting always new all the time. Kids electronic games are only good until the next newer cooler one displaces them, just like it used to be with computers-as-toys. Now, the "computer" is mainly a gadget to jack onto the ever changing 'net, if you're not a gamer. So netbook prices have dropped to what a telephone would have cost back when they were delivered "free" as part of your commodity-regulated telephone network. Back in the day when I was a kid. Remember the "Princess" phone, which ushered in the era of choice and new and libidinous tech?

Lots of people predict that Internet devices will soon all be free, and maybe even the connectivity too, for so long as you're willing to accept the branding and have the credit score to promise good transactions.

So yesterday, I was waiting to get my blood drawn among grampas and kids and moms and dads, and there on the big flatscreen was Doctor Phil talking about transactional oral sex in our schools. Now, I hardly ever watch TV, and so Doctor Phil to me is just another phony with a Texas accent who follows the inevitable downslide to sensationalism so that he can be rich and famous.

He's talking about how young girls can be arm-twisted into using oral sex for clothes, favors, money and a kind of fame. He's warning you that this can also happen to your own daughter, no matter how good a job you think you might be doing. I'm looking up to see the sky falling, especially when he's interviewing some dance-chaperon Mom who talked about the freak dancing at the prom and a circle of cell phone wielding freakers surrounding a couple engaged in the actual act itself. Full-on intercourse on the dance floor with the girls hands on the floor like a dog.

Now everyone else in the waiting room is treating this like background noise, since maybe they're more used to it than I am. Or maybe they just look away quickly when I check out who else is paying attention, but I'm pretty much reeling from the whole scene, flashing back to that other time when I emerged from some kind of academic television-less cave to find Saturday Night Live and Televangelism at the same moment in my personal history. I - honest - couldn't tell which one was satire and which one meant to be taken seriously.

The part of the Doctor Phil story which I had to credit was that these young girls, if and when they ever emerge from this abusive transactional sex scheme, show the symptoms common to sexual abuse everywhere. There are permanent scars and lifelong issues. But it has to depend, doesn't it?, on whether you're really a hottie or if the guys are just using you to get off.

Does it? This stuff is so confusing to me, since I just see Doctor Phil himself as his own victim, needing to be that "hot" on television and getting there on the back of everyone else's fears. I mean, there's nothing new about the abuse we heap on gullible peoples' aspirations. A good blow job among equals in hotness can't hurt anyone now can it?

Which is the trouble with "Transhumanism" if you ask me. We have all internalized scales of humanity according to which the really fortunate ones with the high IQs and incomes and bionically arranged perpetual airbrushed bodies seem actually more human than the rest of us. We actually think that evolution will proceed in the direction of those traits which we value the most, in our locust infestation of planet earth. You know, these would be the ones who can abuse the earth the fastest and with the most impunity. And if they choose not to, we almost worship them.

So, I got my bill for the dumpster I had sitting out in front of my recently sold house. I had it there for a full month, and they charged me just the $125 delivery charge plus $30 for the ton of contents gotten rid of. No friend I asked to guess could even come close to that cost. I'll miss that kind of trailer-trash earnest, let me tell you, considering the literal boatload of guilt they hauled away for me. Computers, monitors, artificially fabriced upholstered furniture, TVs, SCUBA wetsuits, hardware and software of all sorts.

It is my contention that what we call humanity does not inhere in our hardware at all. Consciousness is the result of dialogic connections among individuals with recognizable faces which can have a kind of stickiness for love. There have to be hands for deliberate touch, and the proper black box for grammer to our voice box. There has to be a frontal cortex for abstraction and metaphor, and to the extent that we drop the ones beneath our level we drop out of the human race. That's my contention.

So, I'm gonna have to say that Doctor Phil himself is a little bit less than human. He's given in to the logic of the marketplace, and been taken over by transactional humanism. He's giving himself blowjobs, and I find it gross to watch. But hey, I'm sure he's a nice enough guy. I just get confused among Tammy Faye and the one who imitates Sarah Palin. I know which one I like, and which one needed a lot of help. I'm no good with names, though.

Gene Patents, Healthcare Debates, and Information Technology

I just watched David Koepsell up on Grit TV do an excellent interview about the important questions which must be posed before we continue to allow existing patent practices to govern incentives for genetic research. New technologies may require new laws, as we so lately learned about our financial economy! Laws conspire for our common good, and we really wouldn't want to live without them.

Genes continue to be isolated and their "purposes" catalogued, even as the science of genetics poses new questions about any strict code-to-expression correspondence between genotypes and their phenotypic expression. So at least one of my problems is that the thing getting patented already has a problematical relation to its potential uses.

I think if you patent a light bulb, and I want to use it in my Easy-Bake Oven, then I owe you a royalty, if I don't have to buy the light bulbs from you. But if I use the light bulb's glass bulb, say, to make my mini-terrarium, then I think I can go ahead and patent that terrarium and owe you absolutely nothing in return.

Patents on genes are based on a temporary theoretical construct which would have them actually relate-able, directly, to their uses in possible treatments. Now these treatments, perhaps, ought to be patentable, but not each and every ingredient in them surely.

My instincts are with Dr. Koepsell that there is something fundamentally wrong, and against both the spirit and the letter of patent law, with granting monopolies on all products which can be created based on something each of us contains naturally, in our genetic encodings. Not only is it like patenting gravity, but it's like patenting gravity for the purpose of doing hopscotch.

What scintillates in my overtaxed brain though, is that it may also be wrong to parade "victims" of patent monopolies when the very thing these victims seem barricaded away from might not have existed if the owner of the patent wasn't allowed to claim exclusivity in its development. I think that might be the core of the defense argument in favor of patenting genes.

We're talking life and death here, but just because you die in the first days of a stupid war, is your death any more just if they turn it into a good war after your fact? If you get polio before the vaccine, then is there more tragedy because you could have avoided it if only you'd come in contact later? I guess it feels that way, but we shouldn't make too much of emotional appeals against the facts, right?

I can be as hard headed as the next guy about tough breaks. But I think Dr. Koepsell is on the right track that we really need to look beyond the surface of these debates, beyond the application of the law as it currently exists, to the assumptions underneath these laws.

There should be no question that if money is available in one direction, then people won't be looking in some other direction.  That's the gold rush mentality referred to in Koepsell's book. If the money weren't there, there might be a rush in some other direction.

In the public interest, we might want to guide things in directions other from the ones which have the most profit potential. Or we might want certain things to remain protected within our commons, even though there is no natural law which puts them there. Things like highways, parks, the view.

Especially if and when it becomes the case that private profits come along with free rides on publicly born "externalities", we might have to make public adjustments to how patents are granted. Such things as mining public lands, or bringing carbon dioxide out to breath along with the fossil fuel you mine need to be brought inside the price the public charges for the franchise.

We know that there are plenty of diseases which just will never make the corporate top ten because there is either too little incidence or the people affected are beyond some safety barrier of race or geography or, yes, poverty.

Patent monopolies are comfortable when they are granted over widgets of want - things we really don't need, but which would make our lives nice if we could afford them. Granting patents over needs feels a lot like enclosing our commons, and too bad for the peasants which used to graze their cattle there.

Well, so what if we could step ahead in time a beat, to where either all the basic miseries of life have been remedied, and the only tragic deaths are the ones where someone wasn't looking when the train was coming. Up against this fictional time we'd have to pose, for certain, a dystopian alternative where the miseries have been remedied only for those who can afford them, and everyone else is left out in the cold.

From either of these futures, we should be able to look back at the current arrangements for healthcare, say, and find in them something as medieval and grotesque as the insane asylums where we used to "care" for the deranged among us. We will see extravagant and medieval-seeming procedures offered against theoretic certainties of happy endings.

Where once those endings were up in heaven, and therefore we could concern ourselves only with the souls we preserved whatever their screaming present, we now have brought those pleasures seeming down to earth. With strategic silicone implants or chemical pumps for erectile blood, we can even give you the simulation of perpetual youth.

When nothing in the end can really protect us from the certainty of life's ultimate, well, ending.

The dystopian only looks that way because of problems with distribution. And these problems in turn only exist because we hold out the promise of something better. And that something better is only available to the very wealthy. Who, in turn, eat away more of the commons in resources and expertise and, well, care.

I would say that we have already passed that point where it can be demonstrated that most of the impact to collective longevity can and should and must be attributed to nutrition and education and lifestyle and environment. That no matter how much more we spend, we will not change the overall statistics any appreciable amount, and in fact the more we've been spending the more we might be moving in the wrong direction.

In America, we already slip from top spots in longevity, infant mortality, life-style morbidity; and our intense mis-schooling drops the bottom out from educational outcomes. Might it be that in that many aspects of our arrangements the whole is now being destroyed in the interests of a very few?

I'd say there's pretty good evidence.

I don't doubt that there are and will continue to be wonderful and massive paybacks for medical breakthroughs which save lives. These will have no statistical relevance to the overall longevity of the population, unless by funding them, we ignore the less profitable but more impactful changes we should and must make for the good of the whole.

That is to say that fixing the few who suffer from trainwreck diseases, or imagine that they do when old age gets likened to a trainwreck, will not have much impact on the statistics of the whole, and also that fixing these few cannot be done at the cost of the wellbeing of the many who are otherwise healthy.

In the arena of energy, we are slowly coming to realize that cheap oil is subsidized by the potentially catastrophic externalities of global warming, perpetual warfare, and good old fashioned pollution, all of which must be born on the back of the general public.

There is some reason for hope that Information Technology will be both capable to and get deployed for the purpose of bringing some of these externalities into the cost of energy at the point of its purchase. So, you will pay less at night to keep excess capacity humming, and way more for things which carry massive public costs on their backs. And you will be glad to do so because if the price is accurate, then the overall cost to each is brought way down in line with reality.

The derivatives gurus won't get filthy rich anymore at the cost of overall collapse. The owners of the mines won't get filthy rich at the cost of everyone's environment. The sick rich people won't make plastic surgeons filthy rich at the cost of everyone's healthcare expertise, and the plastic surgeons can be re-deployed to help the burn victims and sufferers of genetic disease who really need them.

Simply because the primary care physicians earn the most of all. As do the schoolteachers. In my dreams, of course.

We become jaded by now that there are any economic arrangements which can assure these outcomes. Liberal youth reliably become conservative codgers after we wake up to the fact that grand schemes never work. A bit of greed is fine, I'll agree, so long as the entire house of cards doesn't collapse. Until it does.

Unlike many of my wealthy compeers, I feel pretty optimistic. I think there's actually less corruption in government than there used to be. I think business people tend in the direction of wanting to do good as well. I do think we have a problem with size, as I've indicated plenty of times elsewhere. But I hardly think it's hopeless.

Obama is the first master of the television age. I think he's given the lie to the inevitability of actors becoming presidents, though we still have to work on the beautiful people part which got its start with JFK. These morality plays get writ too large, with Mr. Nixon looking his ghoulish part against the Howdy Doody of Reagan-Bush.

Information Technology will play its part, just as soon as we liberate it from dreams of artificial intelligence. The computer has never been a very good metaphor for the emotive mind. Real minds make all sorts of choices among background noise, and pay attention according to felt tendencies. This is what determines our collective plotlines too, and so we have, right now, the final chance to become authors of our own lives.

So, imagine this: The meter at your house will help you to set the time to warm your heatsink. You can do it yourself with windmill or solar panels, and pump some back into the grid when you're feeling flush.  The closer you are to the point of generation, the cheaper the price can be, since that much less gets lost along the heated transmission lines. And ultimately the entire grid will rearrange and reorganize itself according to what makes the most sense.

The same can and will happen with medical technologies. Some people will always want to make frankenstein monsters of themselves, for fear of losing love. Most people, when provided the right information, will understand that love is not transmitted that way, and that its simulation is pretty short lived too. Expensive treatments can be put in some context, and provided always to the train-wreck victims among us. It will incrementally cost almost nil to each of us.

This, I think, is a future worth aiming for. I have no doubt that one day soon we'll all collectively realize that so-called "single payer" healthcare is the only way to go. We will get over the ridiculous notion that healthcare can be construed as a "good" just like other widgety things. And we'll stop altogether granting patents over what is common. No doubt at all.

That day will come when Google, Inc., has been reabsorbed back into our commons where it belongs. Meantime, they're on the right track, with cloud technologies for medical records, investments in the smart grid, and plays to de-anonymize you. It's almost like what government should be doing.

Womb with a View, and other cliches

Likely, I won't have time, because a server has gone down. No surprise there, since it's about ten years old, and they've been warned repeatedly, but the responsible person, who works for me, is on an impromptu break in anticipation of my departure, and so it fails on my watch. I guess that's how it should work, no?

So, away from Easter, after writing this really long dense blog about resurrection and thinking about cracks in eggs and peeps and peepers and spring and rebirth and stuff, and after watching What the Bleep because I was too tired to drive back home from my city apartment Easter night, I'm driving across my cosmos (which is really way too big) listening to the radio for more clues, and they are talking about brain stuff, as they often seem to do these days.

So they make some pronouncements about how brain scans show that thinking about something excites the very same patterns as does actually experiencing it. Or was that the Bleeping movie?Not really important, since in either case the proper response is, well, duh! They make it sound as if there's no inside/outside difference. Hello! Have you heard about dreaming? Did you remember your skin? And then they get all excited as though this were some great revelation. What did they think "mind" meant?

I think it was on the radio that I heard some talk about empathetic reactions, and how our brain gets excited the same way whether something happens to us or to someone else. The cringe reaction, I think. Or how my balls scrunch up just watching a football fly from camera perspective.  Isn't that just another big duh? Do we really need instrumental readings to tell us these things? I think that's what's meant by heart and mind; innering of patterns out there.

I don't know, but these things are not all that exciting to me. Of course there's more goes on than my lame brain can process. Of course I sort and sift and stir, just so I can be amazed at what only seems to be some powerful coincidence. Of course I move to rhythms beyond my ken. So what? Isn't that what living is? Or did I really plan myself. The idiocy of Intelligent Design will never stop appalling me.

Isn't it more amazing that we all still choose to keep that television on? The one which numbs us to all cringe reflex, and drives us sociopathically away from any fellow feeling? That some among us actually do enjoy watching angry talking heads which construct perfect fundamentalist squared reality to hold against almost everybody else out there? That young near naked girls are more of a turn on than actual touch? That killing can be a game?

I'm not saying "ain't it aweful", because I really don't think it is. These wombs with view are comfortable, and I like my showers hot. But if only we would step out a bit, we might find that our neighbors don't stink any worse than we do ourselves. We might even let our kids outside so that we can take those furtive breaks we need (some other spot on the radio talked about how Moms have a website where they can share their ridiculous secret tricks and habits for some time off from dealing with kids - hell, when I was little, Mom opened the door and didn't expect to see me back until dinner time. We all knew who the perverts were.).

Crescendo pop, I do wonder if there might be an end to all this projected reality. A good end, I mean. Something to make the death of networks and newspapers OK, because these were not necessarily all entirely good things. Concocted wars. Impacted hearts. Stoppered outrage.

I don't know that it's this newer Inter-network. I don't know that its not. I do know that removes from touch are too dangerous to be as safe as they feel. 

Where's Marshall McLuhan when you need him? If the medium is the message, then this one's all about what's not there. Ether.