You may have noticed, gentle reader, how many times I refer to having drowned once. You may get the idea that this was some kind of major event in my life. I'm not really all that certain that it was.
I really did experience my life passing by in an instant, but I honestly don't think I would have remembered it if I hadn't remarked on it at the time. Rather like a dream, which if you try to make yourself recall it in that liminal zone just as you are waking up, all you have left upon actual waking is the frustrating sense that there was something worth remembering. The reality of the dream becomes impossible to recapture.
By now, my memory of my life passing before mind's eye is but a conviction that it really did happen; what philosophers call a memory of a memory. It's not as if I can recall the actual event, which if you think about it would be pretty weird. That would be like dying again all over again, and then I'd be in some state of suspended super-animation or something. Like Chuang-tzu's butterfly dreaming.
You can already tell where I'm going with this, right? It's plenty embarrassing to me, who has made all sorts of fun of religionists, and who can almost not abide anyone who takes their religion all that seriously.
But you know, supposing that there actually was a Christ, everyone pretty much agrees that he wasn't all that much at the time. Sane and rational people have to agree that all sorts of traditional stories were piled on to that small life to true it according to what we wanted to believe.
Our Jesus joined all sorts of prior saints supposedly born on December 25 - or perhaps the winter solstice - of a virgin mother. Our Jesus fulfilled prophecies in the sense that Monday quarterbacking fulfills your genius calling plays. The words get trued to fit the expectations.
But over time, the conviction that there was an actual event, even though it overpowers the event itself, can also serve to heighten the actual event's reality.
My own drowning is important to me mostly as a metaphor. It reminds me that there are no real endings, although there are important boundaries. It reminds me that the boundaries are what make feelings possible. And that ultimately there is no distinction between the tenor and the vehicle in proper metaphors.
There is absolutely nothing that we can know for certain, since at its most reductive, reality is always known metaphorically through some theoretical trueing. Our instruments become not so much lenses at their limits, as metaphorical reifying machines, and the Chinese couplet works better than our Western grounding in the physical.
This is not so much a pun as a statement of the limits to rational understanding. So God coming down to earth; the making real of what can only be abstraction, has at least as much sense in reality as it does as punny statement.
Which is the Christ story too. Almost as though the moment of our awakening to the cosmic joke is the moment of God's actual coming to earth. As if the real Jesus that we celebrate really couldn't be the one we're waiting for. Since the one we celebrate was an elaborated fiction. And the real one depends on our collective awakening to the fiction of extravagant ideas like that of God.
In whose mind's eye, humanity remains but a twinkle.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
White Out!
Since you know I now write from Buffalo, you must know what I'm talking about when I say "white out." Or maybe I mean that stuff we used to have on our desks way back when we used typewriters. There used to be jokes about blonds painting their computer screens with whiteout to fix typos. I guess blonds (and machines) don't do metaphors.
In a real whiteout - not the kind right now where there's an undifferentiated white fog blowing across the parked cars - your brain loses the ability to orient you and you can walk in circles getting nowhere just like some people did in our great blizzard of '77.
I've been moving from a house to a much smaller apartment these past many days, which has meant sorting lots of stuff and sending lots of stuff to the dumpster or the Goodwill (actually, AmVets, Salvation Army, St. Vincent dePaul, spreading things around a bit).
It surprises me somewhat that every little thing I grab elicits some familiar memory. Even the tiniest little oddball screws which I'd thrown into the oddball jar can sometimes remind me of the thing it came from, and the process I was involved in, getting it out. It makes an interesting trip down memory road to move. Like total recall at death, but a little more spaced out.
Some of the stuff is big, like the wetsuit and SCUBA regulator which I just tossed into the scrap heap. I'd actually squeezed myself into that wetsuit one last time not all that long ago, trying to rehabilitate my diving memories. My buddy and now business partner got me into it on a kind of dare. And it was really fun, until the regulator valve seat - which I'd repaired the way I do everything - blew. I actually did laugh all the way to the surface, but I didn't make a fool of myself since the water covered up the guffaw.
I must have long since gotten over any fear of drowning I should have (the time my life did flash before mind's eye). I seem pretty cool about making a fool of myself too, and that used to really paint me into a corner.
Throwing that stuff out was easier than you might think. Those memories aren't going anywhere - I mean they're pretty well fixed - and if I were to want to try SCUBA diving again, I think the equipment has evolved quite a bit since my day. Not to mention cracking rubber and flaky - literally - regulator valve seats.
Still, it's really hard for me to scrap the actual hardware, each piece of which was carefully machined. And the rubber wetsuit which I'd scrimped and saved for. Ordinarily, I keep these things around for those just-in-cases where I might be able to repurpose them. But there's no room anymore.
All through the house-move there have been things which pop into my head which I still have clear and present use for. And I can't place them. I've learned to stop searching because everything is so scattered around, so I tuck the item away in my head, metaphorically, feeling reasonably confident that the thing will turn up at some point where I least expect it. It usually does.
Like this morning, remembering a sweater which is definitely in my current ready-to-wear collection, and I have absolutely no idea where it could be. The piles have been reduced now, and there just aren't that many places. So suddenly, again, I'm thrown into a kind of paranoia that it must have gone out among the bags and bags of rags and clothes that I've repurposed to some other person or sadly, to the landfill.
Except that I'm pretty confident I was more careful than that, flailing through the stuff and making triage decisions. Scrap/recycle, donate, keep. It was easy when it was a matter of size, or utility, as with the SCUBA stuff. But lots of little things still only exist in mind's eye. Oh well, I'll get over it.
Some things I just can't get rid of. I tried to give my boat away, and lots of people fell in love or so they said. But at the end of the day, they all decided one by one that they just couldn't swing it, and so it's back to me. Puts me in mind of my yesterday's post about marriage - I guess there are some kinds of falling in love which just overcome common sense entirely, and some kinds which go too far in the direction of fantasy. I probably should have put a price-tag on it, which would at least have limited me to the folks who can afford to live out fantasies.
And there are some other things which I still need to buy. For me, the experience of walking the aisles at Target, say, is like walking in a snowstorm. If there's some particular thing you need, a spice rack say, or towel bars, there's almost no real way to know which of the bejillion aisles to start with. And there's no real way to know if the thing even exists anymore.
The apartment is small, and I have space along the cupboards above the sink for spice racks of the sort that you used to see all over the place. Now, should these be near the kitchen gadgets, the closet organizers, the bathroom equipment? You might think you know, but I can almost guarantee that if you do it's because you have become an expert shopper, which I'm not.
Each time I go to a place like Target, I have to reorient myself to what they mean by housewares, say, as opposed to home-improvement. Bathroom towel racks are in among the towels, but the kitchen ones aren't in among the blenders. In the end, I either buy something which has similar utility but only the vaguest family resemblance to what I was looking for, or I walk away in a state of dizziness.
I have a magnetic towel bar now, which sticks to the refrigerator instead of the simple swinging dowels which used to be so common at every corner hardware store.
And the magnetic towel bar got twisted beyond recognition in the process of liberating it from its packaging. Now the packaging was recylcable carboard, but a whole hell of a lot sturdier than the sheet-stainless which looked so thick when packaged. I know you're picturing me yanking and pulling, but really it was simple trompe d'oeil and my body was doing my thinking for me. It really looked like the balance was all in the other direction. It was meant to.
Now I do have to say that this really pissed me off. Not just the ruined stupid towel rack which cost way too much, but the time it took searching for it and then not finding anything even vaguely similar to what I'd wanted. And no people around to simply ask where they stock such things.
I think lots of people enjoy shopping. They don't mind wandering the aisles, and discovering things they never knew about. Impulse buying, maybe. I know I have to keep myself in check when I see something I'd like to have. "Stay focused Rick, you have no funds nor real need for that, just get what you came in for." And then I still end up with something not quite useful.
Anyhow, I should really just make free and ask my shopping-expert peers. Except they all seem to be loudly talking on their cellphones. "Grace is love and . . . " some formula I can't remember, though I really thought I would. The woman kept repeating it like a mantra to whomever she was talking with, and then pretty much held a worship service while shopping. It sounded like a kind of math lesson. Then the other likely prospect was negotiating the delivery of a CPAP machine for her husband, who seems to take it personally that he snores too loudly.
I hate the fact that there are stores I have to drive to, even though I live in the most walkable area of Buffalo. There are no local hardware stores, and some of the most basic basics are hard to find. I'd hazarded out to lay in some groceries before the whiteout storm which has been realized this morning.
Well, I suppose that back in the day we all had little dowel towel racks because some enterprising merchandiser put them in front of our faces at the local store, and we all thought we needed them. And then pretty soon we found them useful, until suddenly they weren't. Or they just started looking ugly and out of style.
I have all my books now in stackable legal bookshelves inherited from my Dad's law practice after they got water damaged during a fire. I think the legal booksellers provided these back in that day when the books were leather bound, and had to be oiled every year. Later on, pages would be added to looseleaf books as the laws would change at an accelerated pace and with proliferating words designed, I can only guess, to meet specific hostage requirements for specific representatives without naming specific names. Pretty soon no law office could possibly be large enough to have a complete set of books and it all went online.
Pretty soon my bookshelves will be for decoration only too. You know, after I get my e-reader for Christmas because it's so freaking obviously the gift of the season for folks like me who read a lot.
But these bookshelves do remind me somehow of those spice racks I couldn't find. I think they also must have been distributed right along with the spices. But these days it's like trying to find one of those cheap and simple Melitta coffee filter cones which are all you really need to make a perfect cup of coffee. You can find a million of them packaged up in some sort of gadgetry to heat the water and send it through. At almost any price you wish. But you can hardly ever find just the cone, especially when you really need it.
Well, and so what's this all about? Why do I keep writing like this? Why do I keep rambling about among all the things which pop into my head depending on where I am and what I'm doing and what's the state of the weather?
For one thing, I think that's what blogging is. It's somewhere between writing a letter and writing an article for publication. It's fun and rather low impact. But I also find that it clears my head. It makes some shape of my life.
Now I'm certain that for many of you, were you to try it out, you'd find that it would give you better direction, sense of purpose, clarity about your decisions. For me, as you can tell, it just puts me further up in the air.
I trimmed my life partly because I'd thought I was moving to Seattle. But even trimmed, I don't think I have anywhere near the funds to move the remainder that far. And pulling a trailer on a VW with 300,000 miles already on it doesn't seem the greatest idea in the world.
The boat was supposed to be trucked tomorrow, but the trucker tells me that with this wind and lake effect blowing snow, there's something like a snowball's chance in hell that it's going to move. The house was supposed to close this week, but I'm sure the weather now will provide cover for whatever the hell's really going on among the lawyers. It was supposed to be last week, and the week before that, and etcetera, and now I'm going to have to kite another month's mortgage for a cold and empty space I no longer occupy but still heat and insure!
I suppose I should get pissed off, but they say that in Buffalo if you don't like the weather you should just wait a minute and it will change. That's not exactly true, since I hardly think the sun is coming out today, but if you limit your expectations properly, it really can surprise you. Many's the time I've been in the middle of Lake Erie and been surprised by what the weather came up with contrary to the broadcast expectations. That plus its shallow depth explain the record-book number of shipwrecks. Which explains my one-time passion for SCUBA diving in case you wonder why anyone would dive in water you can't see through.
I'm pretty sure true midwesterners have a completely different mindset. They can see the weather coming at them for days and days. And those who live in sunny California. They must actually believe that there's nothing they can do wrong which putting a cap on taxes wouldn't fix.
We actually tried simple-minded here in Buffalo back when we were "Talking Proud." It doesn't really work so well California, and you should get a clue.
Hey, I'm pretty OK with where this went today. I know you think I shouldn't be. More rambling, heading noplace in particular. But I did get out what I mean to do by writing. These words are like the stuff I've been triaging. Each one resonates with its use and usage. Each one comes to me as though by random chance. And I slog my way through them as though swimming through dark polluted waters, or trudging through a snowstorm.
Wondering what shape will resolve itself from the whiteout, and hoping that it's not some scary form like that white cadaverous huge sheephead which nearly caused me to swallow or spit out my SCUBA regulator back when I was junior Diver Dan. Or the taillights suddenly flashing an impossible stop along the blizzardy highway.
There's nothing new to any of this except the 'me myself and I' which makes this writing so narcissistically lousy compared to the real thing. But, well, it's not as though I'm trying to get paid for it.
I'd thought I was going to write about "cronic," a term - I now gather - for hi-grade weed. About how difficult it is to look it up on the Internet, because the search engines all helpfully substitute chronic, whose meaning I already know, thank you very much. And then there are a lot of auto dealerships out there, for some reason, called "Cronic". I wonder if they're as embarrassed as we are at pikk.com by what pikk means in Nobel country. Oh hell, my name could have been Dick, so who really cares, eh? I mean the Pulitzer prize people should be embarrassed by their name, as should Nobel, Carnegie, and maybe even Bill Gates.
Just don't try contacting me at dick@pikk because computers, remember, are really literal, no matter how funny you think the combo is. I really should have been born a blond, don't you think? I mean, metaphorically speaking.
OK, so you're going to think I'm making this up, but out my window this very minute, I see blue sky. No shit, honest!
And our President is headed over to Norway now to pikk up the prize he says he doesn't really deserve. He's already insulted the King by suggesting that he might have more important things to do than dine with him. I suppose anybody could use a spare million dollars, but something tells me he doesn't quite have the degrees of freedom right now to do with it what you and I might like to. I'm sure that whatever he does will be whatever is required by public opinion.
And he'll be blamed for that, you know, as if he doesn't have a thought of his own.
The guy who clued me in to the meaning of cronic urges me to stay in the mainstream where I belong. Yeah, I'm pretty whitebread, and will likely get swamped when the real storm comes, or so he suggests. This fellow is one of the few I know who actually does transact business across the color divide, and friendships and no, I'm not talking about dealing cronic.
I've got a hell of a lot of learning to do. But at least I'm not obsessing about the weather. Well, not the way you do. I mean I'm plenty worried about global warming, and I don't need any jokes about how more hot air is not exactly the solution. I'm working on it. I mean, the solution really is in and through and by words.
The solution is as simple as a metaphorical reversal. Where God comes down to earth, in just the simplest sense that we stop making an abstraction real. Where we take all that unbelievable talent, skill and training which we deploy for the purposes of driving and of shopping and use it for something actually useful.
Of course that would mean end-runs around a system which elaborates laws for the purpose of rendering up all the veto power of every single senior representative. That would mean people letting go and breathing; getting in touch with qi, a nicely untranslatable Chinese term you all think you understand.
Those kung-fu movies which show the impossible skill [kung-fu] of martial artists attempt to depict the results of endless training which gets your mind out of the way of what your body has been trained for. And your body learns to move in ways as if by accident, out of the way of blows, or more absurdly, of speeding bullets.
That kind of kung-fu training is at least as difficult as are the moves for ever greater control which we in the West still try to master. Finally turning over the matter to some machine which can be calibrated to near perfection. And still the bullets find their way into innocent flesh.
OK, true confessions. I actually did just watch Terminator Salvation, where the Governator made a cameo appearance. I'm pretty sure it was just his likeness, a kind of avatar of virtual reality, for which he maybe donated his royalty to some PR-friendly cause. Then I watched Red Dawn, making good on an old promise to the right wing of the family.
Neither of these is very good in the highbrow sense of cinema. But they do just fine to express the plot I'm scripting. Ideological machine-think is the thing we should be fighting. And just as soon as we relax our grasping grip on all the things which we think will make our life better, or last a few hours longer, just that soon our collective efforts can turn, as though catalyzed, into something as much more human compared to how we act now, as is my pikk is from my thinking heart.
At the moment, we all have fallen for the silly and ideologically based notion that the more we consume, the more the economy grows and the more likely it is that we can have full employment again. And yet the number of our fellow citizens who remain in a state of "food insecurity" now numbers a percentage of us far larger than any conscionable profit margin. Some 30 million is what I hear.
Clearly, the pinnacles of success keep getting sharper and steeper, while the puddle at their bottom is over peoples' heads. What if, and this makes a really really big if, we actually did let everyone in to hospitals who needs them. What if food were as free and cheap as public education. What if death were not so scary when its time comes around, and so people would not grab after those last few months which cost such a huge part of what we spend on healthcare. What if the mega-profiteers were not controlling all the conversations?
Isn't it possible that we could find a better way to organize ourselves? Where each of us might have a chance at matching wits with things that interest and excite us? Utopian, perhaps, but this change requires no particular ideology. It just requires each of us to let go a little and to share. It requires each of us to sidestep the emotional quality of money, say, and let it flow in directions not dictated so much by want. Well, depending on how you use the term.
I'm guessing - it's really just a wild guess - that the economic system would look a lot like capitalism, written very small. That all the monopolies would be, by consent and decree, government monopolies. And that life would get a lot more interesting than it is now with us all interacting with and by and through all sorts of silly widgets.
P.S. Always the bigger fool, it took more lily-white snow for me to overcome my mental color divide and realize there actually is a hardware store within walking distance. Of course between shoveling, walking there and nearly losing my ears, and returning, the sidewalk needs shoveling again as if I'd never touched it. And there was this really nice, um, blond lady who evidently knows hardware who directed me to everything I've been looking for. Except the spice rack. She helpfully directed me to Target for that. I guess we all have our blind spots.
In a real whiteout - not the kind right now where there's an undifferentiated white fog blowing across the parked cars - your brain loses the ability to orient you and you can walk in circles getting nowhere just like some people did in our great blizzard of '77.
I've been moving from a house to a much smaller apartment these past many days, which has meant sorting lots of stuff and sending lots of stuff to the dumpster or the Goodwill (actually, AmVets, Salvation Army, St. Vincent dePaul, spreading things around a bit).
It surprises me somewhat that every little thing I grab elicits some familiar memory. Even the tiniest little oddball screws which I'd thrown into the oddball jar can sometimes remind me of the thing it came from, and the process I was involved in, getting it out. It makes an interesting trip down memory road to move. Like total recall at death, but a little more spaced out.
Some of the stuff is big, like the wetsuit and SCUBA regulator which I just tossed into the scrap heap. I'd actually squeezed myself into that wetsuit one last time not all that long ago, trying to rehabilitate my diving memories. My buddy and now business partner got me into it on a kind of dare. And it was really fun, until the regulator valve seat - which I'd repaired the way I do everything - blew. I actually did laugh all the way to the surface, but I didn't make a fool of myself since the water covered up the guffaw.
I must have long since gotten over any fear of drowning I should have (the time my life did flash before mind's eye). I seem pretty cool about making a fool of myself too, and that used to really paint me into a corner.
Throwing that stuff out was easier than you might think. Those memories aren't going anywhere - I mean they're pretty well fixed - and if I were to want to try SCUBA diving again, I think the equipment has evolved quite a bit since my day. Not to mention cracking rubber and flaky - literally - regulator valve seats.
Still, it's really hard for me to scrap the actual hardware, each piece of which was carefully machined. And the rubber wetsuit which I'd scrimped and saved for. Ordinarily, I keep these things around for those just-in-cases where I might be able to repurpose them. But there's no room anymore.
All through the house-move there have been things which pop into my head which I still have clear and present use for. And I can't place them. I've learned to stop searching because everything is so scattered around, so I tuck the item away in my head, metaphorically, feeling reasonably confident that the thing will turn up at some point where I least expect it. It usually does.
Like this morning, remembering a sweater which is definitely in my current ready-to-wear collection, and I have absolutely no idea where it could be. The piles have been reduced now, and there just aren't that many places. So suddenly, again, I'm thrown into a kind of paranoia that it must have gone out among the bags and bags of rags and clothes that I've repurposed to some other person or sadly, to the landfill.
Except that I'm pretty confident I was more careful than that, flailing through the stuff and making triage decisions. Scrap/recycle, donate, keep. It was easy when it was a matter of size, or utility, as with the SCUBA stuff. But lots of little things still only exist in mind's eye. Oh well, I'll get over it.
Some things I just can't get rid of. I tried to give my boat away, and lots of people fell in love or so they said. But at the end of the day, they all decided one by one that they just couldn't swing it, and so it's back to me. Puts me in mind of my yesterday's post about marriage - I guess there are some kinds of falling in love which just overcome common sense entirely, and some kinds which go too far in the direction of fantasy. I probably should have put a price-tag on it, which would at least have limited me to the folks who can afford to live out fantasies.
And there are some other things which I still need to buy. For me, the experience of walking the aisles at Target, say, is like walking in a snowstorm. If there's some particular thing you need, a spice rack say, or towel bars, there's almost no real way to know which of the bejillion aisles to start with. And there's no real way to know if the thing even exists anymore.
The apartment is small, and I have space along the cupboards above the sink for spice racks of the sort that you used to see all over the place. Now, should these be near the kitchen gadgets, the closet organizers, the bathroom equipment? You might think you know, but I can almost guarantee that if you do it's because you have become an expert shopper, which I'm not.
Each time I go to a place like Target, I have to reorient myself to what they mean by housewares, say, as opposed to home-improvement. Bathroom towel racks are in among the towels, but the kitchen ones aren't in among the blenders. In the end, I either buy something which has similar utility but only the vaguest family resemblance to what I was looking for, or I walk away in a state of dizziness.
I have a magnetic towel bar now, which sticks to the refrigerator instead of the simple swinging dowels which used to be so common at every corner hardware store.
And the magnetic towel bar got twisted beyond recognition in the process of liberating it from its packaging. Now the packaging was recylcable carboard, but a whole hell of a lot sturdier than the sheet-stainless which looked so thick when packaged. I know you're picturing me yanking and pulling, but really it was simple trompe d'oeil and my body was doing my thinking for me. It really looked like the balance was all in the other direction. It was meant to.
Now I do have to say that this really pissed me off. Not just the ruined stupid towel rack which cost way too much, but the time it took searching for it and then not finding anything even vaguely similar to what I'd wanted. And no people around to simply ask where they stock such things.
I think lots of people enjoy shopping. They don't mind wandering the aisles, and discovering things they never knew about. Impulse buying, maybe. I know I have to keep myself in check when I see something I'd like to have. "Stay focused Rick, you have no funds nor real need for that, just get what you came in for." And then I still end up with something not quite useful.
Anyhow, I should really just make free and ask my shopping-expert peers. Except they all seem to be loudly talking on their cellphones. "Grace is love and . . . " some formula I can't remember, though I really thought I would. The woman kept repeating it like a mantra to whomever she was talking with, and then pretty much held a worship service while shopping. It sounded like a kind of math lesson. Then the other likely prospect was negotiating the delivery of a CPAP machine for her husband, who seems to take it personally that he snores too loudly.
I hate the fact that there are stores I have to drive to, even though I live in the most walkable area of Buffalo. There are no local hardware stores, and some of the most basic basics are hard to find. I'd hazarded out to lay in some groceries before the whiteout storm which has been realized this morning.
Well, I suppose that back in the day we all had little dowel towel racks because some enterprising merchandiser put them in front of our faces at the local store, and we all thought we needed them. And then pretty soon we found them useful, until suddenly they weren't. Or they just started looking ugly and out of style.
I have all my books now in stackable legal bookshelves inherited from my Dad's law practice after they got water damaged during a fire. I think the legal booksellers provided these back in that day when the books were leather bound, and had to be oiled every year. Later on, pages would be added to looseleaf books as the laws would change at an accelerated pace and with proliferating words designed, I can only guess, to meet specific hostage requirements for specific representatives without naming specific names. Pretty soon no law office could possibly be large enough to have a complete set of books and it all went online.
Pretty soon my bookshelves will be for decoration only too. You know, after I get my e-reader for Christmas because it's so freaking obviously the gift of the season for folks like me who read a lot.
But these bookshelves do remind me somehow of those spice racks I couldn't find. I think they also must have been distributed right along with the spices. But these days it's like trying to find one of those cheap and simple Melitta coffee filter cones which are all you really need to make a perfect cup of coffee. You can find a million of them packaged up in some sort of gadgetry to heat the water and send it through. At almost any price you wish. But you can hardly ever find just the cone, especially when you really need it.
Well, and so what's this all about? Why do I keep writing like this? Why do I keep rambling about among all the things which pop into my head depending on where I am and what I'm doing and what's the state of the weather?
For one thing, I think that's what blogging is. It's somewhere between writing a letter and writing an article for publication. It's fun and rather low impact. But I also find that it clears my head. It makes some shape of my life.
Now I'm certain that for many of you, were you to try it out, you'd find that it would give you better direction, sense of purpose, clarity about your decisions. For me, as you can tell, it just puts me further up in the air.
I trimmed my life partly because I'd thought I was moving to Seattle. But even trimmed, I don't think I have anywhere near the funds to move the remainder that far. And pulling a trailer on a VW with 300,000 miles already on it doesn't seem the greatest idea in the world.
The boat was supposed to be trucked tomorrow, but the trucker tells me that with this wind and lake effect blowing snow, there's something like a snowball's chance in hell that it's going to move. The house was supposed to close this week, but I'm sure the weather now will provide cover for whatever the hell's really going on among the lawyers. It was supposed to be last week, and the week before that, and etcetera, and now I'm going to have to kite another month's mortgage for a cold and empty space I no longer occupy but still heat and insure!
I suppose I should get pissed off, but they say that in Buffalo if you don't like the weather you should just wait a minute and it will change. That's not exactly true, since I hardly think the sun is coming out today, but if you limit your expectations properly, it really can surprise you. Many's the time I've been in the middle of Lake Erie and been surprised by what the weather came up with contrary to the broadcast expectations. That plus its shallow depth explain the record-book number of shipwrecks. Which explains my one-time passion for SCUBA diving in case you wonder why anyone would dive in water you can't see through.
I'm pretty sure true midwesterners have a completely different mindset. They can see the weather coming at them for days and days. And those who live in sunny California. They must actually believe that there's nothing they can do wrong which putting a cap on taxes wouldn't fix.
We actually tried simple-minded here in Buffalo back when we were "Talking Proud." It doesn't really work so well California, and you should get a clue.
Hey, I'm pretty OK with where this went today. I know you think I shouldn't be. More rambling, heading noplace in particular. But I did get out what I mean to do by writing. These words are like the stuff I've been triaging. Each one resonates with its use and usage. Each one comes to me as though by random chance. And I slog my way through them as though swimming through dark polluted waters, or trudging through a snowstorm.
Wondering what shape will resolve itself from the whiteout, and hoping that it's not some scary form like that white cadaverous huge sheephead which nearly caused me to swallow or spit out my SCUBA regulator back when I was junior Diver Dan. Or the taillights suddenly flashing an impossible stop along the blizzardy highway.
There's nothing new to any of this except the 'me myself and I' which makes this writing so narcissistically lousy compared to the real thing. But, well, it's not as though I'm trying to get paid for it.
I'd thought I was going to write about "cronic," a term - I now gather - for hi-grade weed. About how difficult it is to look it up on the Internet, because the search engines all helpfully substitute chronic, whose meaning I already know, thank you very much. And then there are a lot of auto dealerships out there, for some reason, called "Cronic". I wonder if they're as embarrassed as we are at pikk.com by what pikk means in Nobel country. Oh hell, my name could have been Dick, so who really cares, eh? I mean the Pulitzer prize people should be embarrassed by their name, as should Nobel, Carnegie, and maybe even Bill Gates.
Just don't try contacting me at dick@pikk because computers, remember, are really literal, no matter how funny you think the combo is. I really should have been born a blond, don't you think? I mean, metaphorically speaking.
OK, so you're going to think I'm making this up, but out my window this very minute, I see blue sky. No shit, honest!
And our President is headed over to Norway now to pikk up the prize he says he doesn't really deserve. He's already insulted the King by suggesting that he might have more important things to do than dine with him. I suppose anybody could use a spare million dollars, but something tells me he doesn't quite have the degrees of freedom right now to do with it what you and I might like to. I'm sure that whatever he does will be whatever is required by public opinion.
And he'll be blamed for that, you know, as if he doesn't have a thought of his own.
The guy who clued me in to the meaning of cronic urges me to stay in the mainstream where I belong. Yeah, I'm pretty whitebread, and will likely get swamped when the real storm comes, or so he suggests. This fellow is one of the few I know who actually does transact business across the color divide, and friendships and no, I'm not talking about dealing cronic.
I've got a hell of a lot of learning to do. But at least I'm not obsessing about the weather. Well, not the way you do. I mean I'm plenty worried about global warming, and I don't need any jokes about how more hot air is not exactly the solution. I'm working on it. I mean, the solution really is in and through and by words.
The solution is as simple as a metaphorical reversal. Where God comes down to earth, in just the simplest sense that we stop making an abstraction real. Where we take all that unbelievable talent, skill and training which we deploy for the purposes of driving and of shopping and use it for something actually useful.
Of course that would mean end-runs around a system which elaborates laws for the purpose of rendering up all the veto power of every single senior representative. That would mean people letting go and breathing; getting in touch with qi, a nicely untranslatable Chinese term you all think you understand.
Those kung-fu movies which show the impossible skill [kung-fu] of martial artists attempt to depict the results of endless training which gets your mind out of the way of what your body has been trained for. And your body learns to move in ways as if by accident, out of the way of blows, or more absurdly, of speeding bullets.
That kind of kung-fu training is at least as difficult as are the moves for ever greater control which we in the West still try to master. Finally turning over the matter to some machine which can be calibrated to near perfection. And still the bullets find their way into innocent flesh.
OK, true confessions. I actually did just watch Terminator Salvation, where the Governator made a cameo appearance. I'm pretty sure it was just his likeness, a kind of avatar of virtual reality, for which he maybe donated his royalty to some PR-friendly cause. Then I watched Red Dawn, making good on an old promise to the right wing of the family.
Neither of these is very good in the highbrow sense of cinema. But they do just fine to express the plot I'm scripting. Ideological machine-think is the thing we should be fighting. And just as soon as we relax our grasping grip on all the things which we think will make our life better, or last a few hours longer, just that soon our collective efforts can turn, as though catalyzed, into something as much more human compared to how we act now, as is my pikk is from my thinking heart.
At the moment, we all have fallen for the silly and ideologically based notion that the more we consume, the more the economy grows and the more likely it is that we can have full employment again. And yet the number of our fellow citizens who remain in a state of "food insecurity" now numbers a percentage of us far larger than any conscionable profit margin. Some 30 million is what I hear.
Clearly, the pinnacles of success keep getting sharper and steeper, while the puddle at their bottom is over peoples' heads. What if, and this makes a really really big if, we actually did let everyone in to hospitals who needs them. What if food were as free and cheap as public education. What if death were not so scary when its time comes around, and so people would not grab after those last few months which cost such a huge part of what we spend on healthcare. What if the mega-profiteers were not controlling all the conversations?
Isn't it possible that we could find a better way to organize ourselves? Where each of us might have a chance at matching wits with things that interest and excite us? Utopian, perhaps, but this change requires no particular ideology. It just requires each of us to let go a little and to share. It requires each of us to sidestep the emotional quality of money, say, and let it flow in directions not dictated so much by want. Well, depending on how you use the term.
I'm guessing - it's really just a wild guess - that the economic system would look a lot like capitalism, written very small. That all the monopolies would be, by consent and decree, government monopolies. And that life would get a lot more interesting than it is now with us all interacting with and by and through all sorts of silly widgets.
P.S. Always the bigger fool, it took more lily-white snow for me to overcome my mental color divide and realize there actually is a hardware store within walking distance. Of course between shoveling, walking there and nearly losing my ears, and returning, the sidewalk needs shoveling again as if I'd never touched it. And there was this really nice, um, blond lady who evidently knows hardware who directed me to everything I've been looking for. Except the spice rack. She helpfully directed me to Target for that. I guess we all have our blind spots.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
A Public Marriage Proposal
It's a wonderful life! Let's shoot the moon, hey? (watch out, this one will ramble you to numb, exhausted, worn-out actual reading death, by it's nearly ideal ending) I have to admit I'm having a hard time bringing this one home.
Don't get all excited, there's only one person the joke could possibly mean, and I'm not that stupid. But with people now twittering their vows, or posting on Facebook from the altar, there is a sudden new immensity to public protestations of "forever!"
Marriage too, when it's not part of the Big Business machine, has taken on new aspects of that Platonic Ideal it was always meant to be (you can know it by the hell reserved for those who fall short of this trivial requirement to keep a promise). Or was it just a chattel contract? Oh, who knows? I can never keep these things straight.
It could be just the media exaggeration, and I'm sure someone once somewhere proposed skywriting, say to Virginia Woolf (yeah, right), but it seems they do it now on billboards, and on the megatron at a football game, and people find this romantic!!??
It sure does seem as though good ol' Tiger Woods' marriage was more a contract than a bond, no? I guess everyone has to hedge his or her bets. Or maybe marriage only can be bondage, and enlightened people stay clear of it, or at least clarify the important, which is to say financial, implications.
Marriage is being whittled away now from the side of infidelity and divorce, which make the institution rather more harmful than good considering the financial and emotional ruin which often ensue from its dissolution.
And from the other side, gays, queers and lesbians seem no wiser about the pitfalls of "forever" (I'm pretty sure the "bi" folks have it figured out). But they face financial discrimination to some extreme by being left outside this sacred trust.
Oh, well, lots of people have pointed out that the sacred part should be left separate from the state where it belongs, leaving only the civil union to be concerned about in public.
And the kids. It's all and only about the kids anyhow, and the security they require from eternal bonds (plus the legal apparatus to mandate financial security when the bonds get broken - talk about bondage!). But the state has an interest in protecting the kids, right?
Marriage doesn't seem to be working for anyone these days, and all the extravagant expense and public fanfare some folks put on just serves to beg that question. Or could it be that it works just fine for lots of folks who aren't that public about it? Give me a coldcuts in the churchhall wedding and I'll give you better odds. Mmmmm. Maybe not so much.
Here's my capper: the more liberal and educated you are, the more you seem to treat your kids as property. You hover over them to be sure they don't make any mistakes. You monitor their intakes and outflows; their entertainments and their schooling. You even hire special agents to get them into the right schools.
Yeah, yeah, there I go generalizing again.
Leave the kids alone! You don't own them. Love means letting them figure some things out on their own. Well, except we don't allow for error. We love zero tolerance, as if we never had unprotected sex, tried drugs, or kissed the wrong person the wrong way. And as if science could tell religion when life starts, or was it vice-versa? I'm so confused.
I can't imagine anyone more prone to failure than the kid who gets coached for the Ivy league from age two.
Well, except for the evident fact that they don't fail. They actually succeed extravagantly, which then just feeds this vicious cycle. Until what? One of them walks on water? I sure would hate to be on the inside of that kind of perfection.
You have to wonder if there are any cases where the person subject to the powerplay of public proposal just says "hell no!" in simple response to the humiliation of being outed like that in public. I guess you'd never do it though - propose marriage publicly - unless you were that certain of the answer.
Evidently also, the more people spend the less really certain they are. It's as if the extravagance of the act can counteract it's fundamentally (Platonically, ironically, if you catch my drift) ideal and therefore fictional quality. But the "yes" answer must be readily enough gotten, given the number of people who pull it off. After the lawyers work out the codicils. I mean if you're rich enough to require lawyers in on the deal.
There's an interesting play on words in English among resolve, resolution, vectors, pixels and, um give me a sec., yeah trust. Remember back in the last inevitable greed meltdown, when the 'Savings and Loans' were all decimated? They were caught building houses on speculation, down in Texas maybe, and lots of rich developers made it off to the Caymans or someplace while the taxpayers refunded the public coffers. (Remember "It's a Wonderful Life"?)
There were significant savings and loans up here in Buffalo which were wiped out by that fiasco. And as I recall, there was a new quasi-government entity called Resolution Trust which was called in to buy up all the toxic assets and complete an orderly dissolution of the bankrupted and newly so-called banks.
Who knows a person really when they first come into your life? Over time the deal changes, and the contract you thought you'd signed gets changed as the rules change.
Sure, those savings and loans used to just lend out your savings to other people needing money to build homes, say. And there was plenty of trust involved in the transaction. But then the rules changed, and the banks could package up their liabilities and assets and sell them to the highest bidder. And leverage them. And empty meaningless houses got built in Texas because they had paper value, even though nobody was around to live in them. And the banks could make do with cardboard frontage, since no-one was buying the fiction of stony permanence anyhow. As long as the paper was good.
I'm sure I've got most of the details wrong, and no one person was hurt in the end (um, except for shareholders and rich people, but they don't count). We all got dinged with the tax bill. And some people moved in to moldy plastic cardboard houses later on.
Outsourced trust can be a terrible thing.
So, the rules change in marriage too, effectively, as all around a person spouses are being traded up and down. And anyhow, the person you thought you could know and trust might come into sharper resolution - that's the wordplay part - under stress. Earnest fictions might develop cracks in the face of temptation, or reality.
Hence the pre-nuptials, which bring marriage contracts into contact with reality outside the fantasy of romance. Sure sure, I absolutely do trust that you love me. Now. But, you know, we all change, and well, I have to look out for number one. It kind of makes you wonder what would be worth dying for, no? If not family.
Which brings me back to the kids. No matter what might happen in the relationship between Mom and Dad, each of them must resolve to love the kids forever. But what if all these ego investments in the wonder-kids don't pay off? Are you allowed then to turn them in? Pay up or you can't see the kids seems to keep Dads away if that's your goal. And people do get away with murder, just as they can be put away for fictional murder that never happened.
Well, I'm certain they don't let over-parented kids into Yale, say, and that all those hyper-achievers did every single bit of it on their own. For Yale, it's all a matter of predicting success - it's a kind of vector math - so that if, for instance, your name is Bush, then you have pretty good prospects for success. And if you score highly on some standardized assessment of potential, trued over the years and against your peers. Success, as they say, does breed success. And vector graphics keep their resolution no matter how zoomed in they get. Cool, huh?
And if at first you don't succeed . . . well, you can always pay Kaplan, the idea for which was started by a subversive friend of a friend over at Princeton who was fed up by the silly propaganda that you can't game the testing system. Yeah, yeah, and why are so many Asians crowding the Ivys? Genetics, what? Um, I don't think so.
Now "they" have all sorts of compatibility measures for personal matchups too. Some of them are free on-line, and some probably cost lots of money, especially if there's lots of money at stake. I wonder if Tiger can sue the one who trued those two? His wife won't need to, hey!
I think I told you before that I got jilted by eHarmony. They said I couldn't be matched, which turned me off to them forever. I can't believe they're still in business, since public relations folks will tell you that bad PR goes around ten times times further and lasts ten times longer than positive PR. And since eHarmony tried to make me feel good by assuring me that there was nothing wrong with me - it's just that 20% of their applicants can't be matched and no hard feelings. They prove their integrity. But right there is a good clue why integrity never quite works in the real-world market place, or politics.
If you do the math, eHarmony pretty much shot themselves in the foot. Come to think of it, I haven't been hearing much from them lately. But hope does spring eternal, and maybe matchmaking isn't subject to the rules of the marketplace. Maybe, as with politics, there's no such thing as bad publicity, only publicity.
Now (I know, I know, when's it gonna end already!!) labor contracts sure are an anti-romantic aspect of real reality. Labor contracts put a person in mind of the good old marriage longed for by those who think that morals have all gone to hell. The power is all on the side of the employer (read "man", as in "the man") and the labor is all on the side of the worker (read "woman" as in ends in "ee", like manner and mannee, or bonder and bondee, or cooler and coolee how about).
Now right wingers these days seem all mixed up about sacred and profane arrangements for love. It's kind of as if they expect that a person can know all about himself, the world, and everything before even trying and screwing up a few times. There's no redress for mistakes, and no allowance for variation. And they tend to be father-knows-besters. And instead of hovering over their kids, they just let their kids know what they expect, and then, by God, they get it.
And some of the left wingers can't seem to figure out if they need to always include the baby with the bathwater, as in, sure it's OK who you lust after even when it's a different person every time. And they love their kids so much that they sometimes don't seem to have a life themselves.
Naturally, in the political arena, you find the right wing on the side of "the man" and the left wing on the side of the "ee", the one subjected. You know, you've got your screwer and screwee. Employer and employee.
The only thing conceivable to redress the imbalance of power is a labor union, right? I mean, left? Unions are able to approximate equivalence to the power of owners, and make the agreement a more equitable exchange between laborers and the profiters from that labor.
So, I guess here's the trouble with public protestations of love. They always still seem to come from men. What's up with that? And labor unions still always seem to wait for management to move and then they move only in defense.
What would be so wrong for the unions to stand up and say hey, since you aren't providing what we need to keep working, let's change the rules a bit? Let's say now that you've been outed as a cheater, and so now we might be able to set the field markers.
I mean, we've already got socialism; that bandied-about terrorizing term. The drug companies, in cahoots with the health insurance companies, own the elected officials who must keep in place the system which provides Prozac or like-minded post-modernisitic drugs so that our soldiers can keep up their sociopathic act. AND, supply the permanently unemployed underclass with both a new way to go to jail when they sell their prescriptions, PLUS, a way to endure the unemployment and sense of zero-worth. As I was told just yesterday by someone in a position to know - healthcare for the poor is incredibly expensive!
Someone's getting all that money, and I'm pretty sure it's not you and me. How the hell did we survive before, and fight actual bloody wars, and, well I suppose we did co-evolve with alcohol. Maybe that, like the hookworms which might cure auto-immune diseases, would be the cheaper way to go. No wonder we had to make it illegal once upon a time!
No no, I've seen firsthand how post-modern drugs can work. And post-modern capitalism, which isn't capitalism at all. More a sort of corporatism where size really does matter. But it's not all bad. On balance, I think we all turned out OK.
Which takes me back to the marriage bond. Best honored in the breech (sic)? Well, maybe, but can't a person have some privacy anymore? (Um, no, since Google already knows all your secrets) I think we ought to come down off our overheated rhetoric sometimes (yeah yeah) and try for a little humor among our aspirations. I mean, come on, tell me that sex with strangers is really all that great. No, wait. I don't wanna know. I've got my ears in my fingers and I'm singing nah nah nah nah. You do what you want, and it won't bother me. I'm going for the real thing.
Now, if I could just figure out what real is. I know you know I'm a little reality challenged. I get my hi-res porn all mixed up with my low res vector graphics gaming, which,however, moves!! I get the real woman all mixed up with the ideal one, and then I keep falling in love all over again. It's pathetic, really. But reality usually is. And I've never played a computer game. Honest!
Ah well, real life sure is a muddle. A nice muddle. Happy with the kids I've got. Happy with the man I'm not. Happy is as happy does. Happy with the man I was. Happy with the man I am. Well, for the moment, that's what I am. Now that ideal woman I'm looking for, she doesn't exist. But the real one, ooh la la.
Sheesh! What's a fellow to do when the world's all topsy-turvy? I'd say, go for the cosmic forgiveness, do your best to honor your promises and your promise, but let in a few screwups once in a while. We make the world a more interesting place. And, um, nobody's perfect.
Don't get all excited, there's only one person the joke could possibly mean, and I'm not that stupid. But with people now twittering their vows, or posting on Facebook from the altar, there is a sudden new immensity to public protestations of "forever!"
Marriage too, when it's not part of the Big Business machine, has taken on new aspects of that Platonic Ideal it was always meant to be (you can know it by the hell reserved for those who fall short of this trivial requirement to keep a promise). Or was it just a chattel contract? Oh, who knows? I can never keep these things straight.
It could be just the media exaggeration, and I'm sure someone once somewhere proposed skywriting, say to Virginia Woolf (yeah, right), but it seems they do it now on billboards, and on the megatron at a football game, and people find this romantic!!??
It sure does seem as though good ol' Tiger Woods' marriage was more a contract than a bond, no? I guess everyone has to hedge his or her bets. Or maybe marriage only can be bondage, and enlightened people stay clear of it, or at least clarify the important, which is to say financial, implications.
Marriage is being whittled away now from the side of infidelity and divorce, which make the institution rather more harmful than good considering the financial and emotional ruin which often ensue from its dissolution.
And from the other side, gays, queers and lesbians seem no wiser about the pitfalls of "forever" (I'm pretty sure the "bi" folks have it figured out). But they face financial discrimination to some extreme by being left outside this sacred trust.
Oh, well, lots of people have pointed out that the sacred part should be left separate from the state where it belongs, leaving only the civil union to be concerned about in public.
And the kids. It's all and only about the kids anyhow, and the security they require from eternal bonds (plus the legal apparatus to mandate financial security when the bonds get broken - talk about bondage!). But the state has an interest in protecting the kids, right?
Marriage doesn't seem to be working for anyone these days, and all the extravagant expense and public fanfare some folks put on just serves to beg that question. Or could it be that it works just fine for lots of folks who aren't that public about it? Give me a coldcuts in the churchhall wedding and I'll give you better odds. Mmmmm. Maybe not so much.
Here's my capper: the more liberal and educated you are, the more you seem to treat your kids as property. You hover over them to be sure they don't make any mistakes. You monitor their intakes and outflows; their entertainments and their schooling. You even hire special agents to get them into the right schools.
Yeah, yeah, there I go generalizing again.
Leave the kids alone! You don't own them. Love means letting them figure some things out on their own. Well, except we don't allow for error. We love zero tolerance, as if we never had unprotected sex, tried drugs, or kissed the wrong person the wrong way. And as if science could tell religion when life starts, or was it vice-versa? I'm so confused.
I can't imagine anyone more prone to failure than the kid who gets coached for the Ivy league from age two.
Well, except for the evident fact that they don't fail. They actually succeed extravagantly, which then just feeds this vicious cycle. Until what? One of them walks on water? I sure would hate to be on the inside of that kind of perfection.
You have to wonder if there are any cases where the person subject to the powerplay of public proposal just says "hell no!" in simple response to the humiliation of being outed like that in public. I guess you'd never do it though - propose marriage publicly - unless you were that certain of the answer.
Evidently also, the more people spend the less really certain they are. It's as if the extravagance of the act can counteract it's fundamentally (Platonically, ironically, if you catch my drift) ideal and therefore fictional quality. But the "yes" answer must be readily enough gotten, given the number of people who pull it off. After the lawyers work out the codicils. I mean if you're rich enough to require lawyers in on the deal.
There's an interesting play on words in English among resolve, resolution, vectors, pixels and, um give me a sec., yeah trust. Remember back in the last inevitable greed meltdown, when the 'Savings and Loans' were all decimated? They were caught building houses on speculation, down in Texas maybe, and lots of rich developers made it off to the Caymans or someplace while the taxpayers refunded the public coffers. (Remember "It's a Wonderful Life"?)
There were significant savings and loans up here in Buffalo which were wiped out by that fiasco. And as I recall, there was a new quasi-government entity called Resolution Trust which was called in to buy up all the toxic assets and complete an orderly dissolution of the bankrupted and newly so-called banks.
Who knows a person really when they first come into your life? Over time the deal changes, and the contract you thought you'd signed gets changed as the rules change.
Sure, those savings and loans used to just lend out your savings to other people needing money to build homes, say. And there was plenty of trust involved in the transaction. But then the rules changed, and the banks could package up their liabilities and assets and sell them to the highest bidder. And leverage them. And empty meaningless houses got built in Texas because they had paper value, even though nobody was around to live in them. And the banks could make do with cardboard frontage, since no-one was buying the fiction of stony permanence anyhow. As long as the paper was good.
I'm sure I've got most of the details wrong, and no one person was hurt in the end (um, except for shareholders and rich people, but they don't count). We all got dinged with the tax bill. And some people moved in to moldy plastic cardboard houses later on.
Outsourced trust can be a terrible thing.
So, the rules change in marriage too, effectively, as all around a person spouses are being traded up and down. And anyhow, the person you thought you could know and trust might come into sharper resolution - that's the wordplay part - under stress. Earnest fictions might develop cracks in the face of temptation, or reality.
Hence the pre-nuptials, which bring marriage contracts into contact with reality outside the fantasy of romance. Sure sure, I absolutely do trust that you love me. Now. But, you know, we all change, and well, I have to look out for number one. It kind of makes you wonder what would be worth dying for, no? If not family.
Which brings me back to the kids. No matter what might happen in the relationship between Mom and Dad, each of them must resolve to love the kids forever. But what if all these ego investments in the wonder-kids don't pay off? Are you allowed then to turn them in? Pay up or you can't see the kids seems to keep Dads away if that's your goal. And people do get away with murder, just as they can be put away for fictional murder that never happened.
Well, I'm certain they don't let over-parented kids into Yale, say, and that all those hyper-achievers did every single bit of it on their own. For Yale, it's all a matter of predicting success - it's a kind of vector math - so that if, for instance, your name is Bush, then you have pretty good prospects for success. And if you score highly on some standardized assessment of potential, trued over the years and against your peers. Success, as they say, does breed success. And vector graphics keep their resolution no matter how zoomed in they get. Cool, huh?
And if at first you don't succeed . . . well, you can always pay Kaplan, the idea for which was started by a subversive friend of a friend over at Princeton who was fed up by the silly propaganda that you can't game the testing system. Yeah, yeah, and why are so many Asians crowding the Ivys? Genetics, what? Um, I don't think so.
Now "they" have all sorts of compatibility measures for personal matchups too. Some of them are free on-line, and some probably cost lots of money, especially if there's lots of money at stake. I wonder if Tiger can sue the one who trued those two? His wife won't need to, hey!
I think I told you before that I got jilted by eHarmony. They said I couldn't be matched, which turned me off to them forever. I can't believe they're still in business, since public relations folks will tell you that bad PR goes around ten times times further and lasts ten times longer than positive PR. And since eHarmony tried to make me feel good by assuring me that there was nothing wrong with me - it's just that 20% of their applicants can't be matched and no hard feelings. They prove their integrity. But right there is a good clue why integrity never quite works in the real-world market place, or politics.
If you do the math, eHarmony pretty much shot themselves in the foot. Come to think of it, I haven't been hearing much from them lately. But hope does spring eternal, and maybe matchmaking isn't subject to the rules of the marketplace. Maybe, as with politics, there's no such thing as bad publicity, only publicity.
Now (I know, I know, when's it gonna end already!!) labor contracts sure are an anti-romantic aspect of real reality. Labor contracts put a person in mind of the good old marriage longed for by those who think that morals have all gone to hell. The power is all on the side of the employer (read "man", as in "the man") and the labor is all on the side of the worker (read "woman" as in ends in "ee", like manner and mannee, or bonder and bondee, or cooler and coolee how about).
Now right wingers these days seem all mixed up about sacred and profane arrangements for love. It's kind of as if they expect that a person can know all about himself, the world, and everything before even trying and screwing up a few times. There's no redress for mistakes, and no allowance for variation. And they tend to be father-knows-besters. And instead of hovering over their kids, they just let their kids know what they expect, and then, by God, they get it.
And some of the left wingers can't seem to figure out if they need to always include the baby with the bathwater, as in, sure it's OK who you lust after even when it's a different person every time. And they love their kids so much that they sometimes don't seem to have a life themselves.
Naturally, in the political arena, you find the right wing on the side of "the man" and the left wing on the side of the "ee", the one subjected. You know, you've got your screwer and screwee. Employer and employee.
The only thing conceivable to redress the imbalance of power is a labor union, right? I mean, left? Unions are able to approximate equivalence to the power of owners, and make the agreement a more equitable exchange between laborers and the profiters from that labor.
So, I guess here's the trouble with public protestations of love. They always still seem to come from men. What's up with that? And labor unions still always seem to wait for management to move and then they move only in defense.
What would be so wrong for the unions to stand up and say hey, since you aren't providing what we need to keep working, let's change the rules a bit? Let's say now that you've been outed as a cheater, and so now we might be able to set the field markers.
I mean, we've already got socialism; that bandied-about terrorizing term. The drug companies, in cahoots with the health insurance companies, own the elected officials who must keep in place the system which provides Prozac or like-minded post-modernisitic drugs so that our soldiers can keep up their sociopathic act. AND, supply the permanently unemployed underclass with both a new way to go to jail when they sell their prescriptions, PLUS, a way to endure the unemployment and sense of zero-worth. As I was told just yesterday by someone in a position to know - healthcare for the poor is incredibly expensive!
Someone's getting all that money, and I'm pretty sure it's not you and me. How the hell did we survive before, and fight actual bloody wars, and, well I suppose we did co-evolve with alcohol. Maybe that, like the hookworms which might cure auto-immune diseases, would be the cheaper way to go. No wonder we had to make it illegal once upon a time!
No no, I've seen firsthand how post-modern drugs can work. And post-modern capitalism, which isn't capitalism at all. More a sort of corporatism where size really does matter. But it's not all bad. On balance, I think we all turned out OK.
Which takes me back to the marriage bond. Best honored in the breech (sic)? Well, maybe, but can't a person have some privacy anymore? (Um, no, since Google already knows all your secrets) I think we ought to come down off our overheated rhetoric sometimes (yeah yeah) and try for a little humor among our aspirations. I mean, come on, tell me that sex with strangers is really all that great. No, wait. I don't wanna know. I've got my ears in my fingers and I'm singing nah nah nah nah. You do what you want, and it won't bother me. I'm going for the real thing.
Now, if I could just figure out what real is. I know you know I'm a little reality challenged. I get my hi-res porn all mixed up with my low res vector graphics gaming, which,however, moves!! I get the real woman all mixed up with the ideal one, and then I keep falling in love all over again. It's pathetic, really. But reality usually is. And I've never played a computer game. Honest!
Ah well, real life sure is a muddle. A nice muddle. Happy with the kids I've got. Happy with the man I'm not. Happy is as happy does. Happy with the man I was. Happy with the man I am. Well, for the moment, that's what I am. Now that ideal woman I'm looking for, she doesn't exist. But the real one, ooh la la.
Sheesh! What's a fellow to do when the world's all topsy-turvy? I'd say, go for the cosmic forgiveness, do your best to honor your promises and your promise, but let in a few screwups once in a while. We make the world a more interesting place. And, um, nobody's perfect.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Editorial Control
I now have a new home - it's actually my old apartment, overstuffed with things from my former house. When I used to live here, somehow there was space for two daughters, a sleepover girlfriend, and room to work. Now it's just a mishmash of junk, and that's after I donated away or sold the bulk of what was in the house.
I'm not known for my decorating sense. Well, that might not be quite true. If I'm working on someone else's house, I can be pretty good at it. I can also be pretty good at sensing someone else's style, and offering editorial assistance. But I'm blind with me, always being taken aback when someone offers how ugly that tie is that I thought was pretty cool.
I tend in the direction of experimental is my excuse. I'm always conjectural about myself. So I end up walking the streets in teal chucks, say, or with a stupid looking hat. I know I write that way too.
Some folks are gifted with proprioception; with a solid sense of self. They can dance, for instance, or intuit just the right sense of style about themselves. I'm not gifted like that. So, blogging might be just the wrong pursuit.
I sit now among furniture poorly deployed, pictures hung at just the wrong height and in the wrong spot. I have no more energy to deal with the little piles of stuff which just simply can't find any place but isn't quite ready for the garbage sacks.
I've written myself into some alive sense of who I am, and so now what? I have two pretty good job prospects lined up, and I know that you, gentle reader, are urging me, please to take one. It would be the sensible thing, and two job prospects ain't bad the way the economy's going.
I actually think these prospects would not have materialized had I not taken it upon myself to exercise my voice in public. Or maybe it doesn't count as public if no-one's paying attention, like that famous tree falling in the woods which might not make a sound.
(lots of "I" at the begining of my paragraphs here, like Doris Lessing's famous machine gun, right?)
This must be the power of prayer then, which I must take the word of religionists actually does and can "work." Giving oneself over to the unknown, which is different from writing in a private journal, say, must have some power quite apart from whether you make an actual connection. Very much as if words themselves have power.
Like many of you (I would hazard a guess that anyone who reads this would fit the category of "many" here), I mourn the loss of books and newspapers. I feel very much as though they represent, on balance, a power for good. Sure, there are idiot screeds like "Going Rogue" which represent the foolishness of thinking there are still geographic-style frontiers. I guess that would be easy to believe up in Alaska. And Pulitzer-style newspaper power has caused its share of mischief.
But the best of us, well edited, is encapsulated in books. And a newspaper is such a brilliant "technology" for rapid orientation to the events going on around us. Professional writers become that well accomplished at giving us something we can both skate across and dive into, with headlines calling out their slant.
But we are different readers now. The books we buy often represent what we already know and believe in - bestsellers designed to push the envelope only of what we already think. With Rupert Murdoch in control, what do we expect of free and independent reporting?
Much though I will also mourn the loss of local independent booksellers, these could be replaced by coffee shops with readings, say. It isn't necessary that we do all our interacting on the web.
Our startup, pikk.com, will shortly be going regional. Like Craig's list, you'll be able to see what people in your neighborhood are thinking about. You might be interested to contrast and compare the voting between, say, Kansas and Buffalo, on stories of national interest. You might want to read only the stories of relevance to Buffalo.
We're hoping that there might be something there to recapture part of the energy of newspapers. Headlines to draw you in. Some localized ad revenue to pay for the editors behind the pikk links. We hope that the good bloggers will rise to the top too.
Everyone struggles now with boundaries. Some kid surfing porn accidentally downloads child pornography and must go to jail. He'll be labeled a sex offender now for the rest of his life. Protectors at Virginia Tech tell their own families before telling the ones they are paid to protect. And people were killed because they were allowed out of lockdown too soon. A sex and drug unbalanced preppy-style college student gets put away for thirty years because of proximity to risk-takers perhaps more familiar with murder.
These are judgments which assert our distance from those kinds of risks. But still the heartstrings thrum with a kind of terror that there but for the grace of some God . . . . And there are other kinds of risks which we are also terrified away from. We can't quit a lousy job because we see too many people bankrupted by illness. We can't criticize our leaders because we see too many extremists waving teabags in mockery of their freedom to speak. We won't speak out because we might sound as ridiculous as we do when listening to ourselves on tape. And we know what the flamers on the Internet sound like.
It really is hard to tell the gentle from the dangerous. It is nice to be affirmed by those around you, even when and if they're just taking advantage of your vulnerability.
We just found out that pikk in norwegian is a rude word for that famous male member which can be referred to only by such oblique references as dongle, say, when referring to something you plug into your computer. But just like those scrotal sacs you now see hanging from the trailer hitches of really big pickups, aren't we grown up enough to call a thing what it is? Waving teabags just makes you a fool when the cool folks know that it's homophobic balls you're swinging.
Well, I have to exercise some editorial control on my apartment now. Rearrange the pictures. Sweep up the debris. I hope I get a kindle for Christmas, since I can hardly bear to move all these books again. And I'm practically dying to find some time for reading. Santa?
I'm not known for my decorating sense. Well, that might not be quite true. If I'm working on someone else's house, I can be pretty good at it. I can also be pretty good at sensing someone else's style, and offering editorial assistance. But I'm blind with me, always being taken aback when someone offers how ugly that tie is that I thought was pretty cool.
I tend in the direction of experimental is my excuse. I'm always conjectural about myself. So I end up walking the streets in teal chucks, say, or with a stupid looking hat. I know I write that way too.
Some folks are gifted with proprioception; with a solid sense of self. They can dance, for instance, or intuit just the right sense of style about themselves. I'm not gifted like that. So, blogging might be just the wrong pursuit.
I sit now among furniture poorly deployed, pictures hung at just the wrong height and in the wrong spot. I have no more energy to deal with the little piles of stuff which just simply can't find any place but isn't quite ready for the garbage sacks.
I've written myself into some alive sense of who I am, and so now what? I have two pretty good job prospects lined up, and I know that you, gentle reader, are urging me, please to take one. It would be the sensible thing, and two job prospects ain't bad the way the economy's going.
I actually think these prospects would not have materialized had I not taken it upon myself to exercise my voice in public. Or maybe it doesn't count as public if no-one's paying attention, like that famous tree falling in the woods which might not make a sound.
(lots of "I" at the begining of my paragraphs here, like Doris Lessing's famous machine gun, right?)
This must be the power of prayer then, which I must take the word of religionists actually does and can "work." Giving oneself over to the unknown, which is different from writing in a private journal, say, must have some power quite apart from whether you make an actual connection. Very much as if words themselves have power.
Like many of you (I would hazard a guess that anyone who reads this would fit the category of "many" here), I mourn the loss of books and newspapers. I feel very much as though they represent, on balance, a power for good. Sure, there are idiot screeds like "Going Rogue" which represent the foolishness of thinking there are still geographic-style frontiers. I guess that would be easy to believe up in Alaska. And Pulitzer-style newspaper power has caused its share of mischief.
But the best of us, well edited, is encapsulated in books. And a newspaper is such a brilliant "technology" for rapid orientation to the events going on around us. Professional writers become that well accomplished at giving us something we can both skate across and dive into, with headlines calling out their slant.
But we are different readers now. The books we buy often represent what we already know and believe in - bestsellers designed to push the envelope only of what we already think. With Rupert Murdoch in control, what do we expect of free and independent reporting?
Much though I will also mourn the loss of local independent booksellers, these could be replaced by coffee shops with readings, say. It isn't necessary that we do all our interacting on the web.
Our startup, pikk.com, will shortly be going regional. Like Craig's list, you'll be able to see what people in your neighborhood are thinking about. You might be interested to contrast and compare the voting between, say, Kansas and Buffalo, on stories of national interest. You might want to read only the stories of relevance to Buffalo.
We're hoping that there might be something there to recapture part of the energy of newspapers. Headlines to draw you in. Some localized ad revenue to pay for the editors behind the pikk links. We hope that the good bloggers will rise to the top too.
Everyone struggles now with boundaries. Some kid surfing porn accidentally downloads child pornography and must go to jail. He'll be labeled a sex offender now for the rest of his life. Protectors at Virginia Tech tell their own families before telling the ones they are paid to protect. And people were killed because they were allowed out of lockdown too soon. A sex and drug unbalanced preppy-style college student gets put away for thirty years because of proximity to risk-takers perhaps more familiar with murder.
These are judgments which assert our distance from those kinds of risks. But still the heartstrings thrum with a kind of terror that there but for the grace of some God . . . . And there are other kinds of risks which we are also terrified away from. We can't quit a lousy job because we see too many people bankrupted by illness. We can't criticize our leaders because we see too many extremists waving teabags in mockery of their freedom to speak. We won't speak out because we might sound as ridiculous as we do when listening to ourselves on tape. And we know what the flamers on the Internet sound like.
It really is hard to tell the gentle from the dangerous. It is nice to be affirmed by those around you, even when and if they're just taking advantage of your vulnerability.
We just found out that pikk in norwegian is a rude word for that famous male member which can be referred to only by such oblique references as dongle, say, when referring to something you plug into your computer. But just like those scrotal sacs you now see hanging from the trailer hitches of really big pickups, aren't we grown up enough to call a thing what it is? Waving teabags just makes you a fool when the cool folks know that it's homophobic balls you're swinging.
Well, I have to exercise some editorial control on my apartment now. Rearrange the pictures. Sweep up the debris. I hope I get a kindle for Christmas, since I can hardly bear to move all these books again. And I'm practically dying to find some time for reading. Santa?
Saturday, December 5, 2009
New Man!
I fit right in among the blasted working class at JJ's House of Breakfast, where the special just went up from $.99 to $1.55. Where everyone looks a bit worn down, and propped up by canes and walkers and artificial joints they make fun of right out loud.
Yeah, right, just like I used to fit in with the biker crowd when I rode my Harley. But still, the food is great, and I learned a thing or two about how real people use their iPhones (people there don't worry about who is overhearing, plus the guy had a hearing aid and just naturally spoke up).
And I sure did look as though I need some medical appliance too; barely able to get up from the table to pay my bill for "four thousand and ninety five, and how did you like your aches and breakin?". Maybe it was "broken and aches?". Some kind of East Indian humor translated effectively enough into English.
That was after arriving late to the dentist. They weren't happy with me, who is also late with payment on my crown-tooth appliance. My rent, my health insurance, my . . . well the list does go on. But my smile is clean, and I got to hear all sorts of new and updated stories.
Maybe like my favorite pair of chimney sweeps, the one seeing his partner's face all black who goes to wash it, and the other not bothering to, since his partner's face looks clean. I can't remember the moral of the story, unless it was something about look in the mirror before you start judging others, but everyone there at JJ's looked as though they had just gotten out of bed, which made me self-conscious about my unkempt halo of tendrils just this side of bald.
My favorite Italian barber, whose memory is gone, but who still remembers how to cut hair and give a really good head massage, is closed on Wednesday, so I went a few doors down the map of Sicily to discover that Vito comes in a pretty close second. Hence New Man!
Well, except I can't move.
I listened to a little bit of NPR's take on the American Dream, which makes a guy feel pretty OK with all the mess-ups of the second half of the twentieth century. Regan cleaning up after LBJ's overreaching. Now Obama can clean up after Reagan's. It's all good.
Well, OK, it's not all good. But there's plenty of reason to believe one way or the other, you know left-right, red-blue. Sometimes I just wish people wouldn't get all exercised about it. Then we could find some way down the middle which wasn't just a useless compromise. Political compromise doesn't end up in the middle so much as in the muddle of pleasing no-one except the ones already in power, who wield protectionist threats against the ones already in office.
OK, now where was I? I started this the other day, and have moved many miles in the meantime. Good thing I got my hair cut, because I got called in for an interview. My back is calmer. The house has yet to close, but the boat also has yet to move.
Here in Buffalo they issued dire Lake Effect snow warnings just as I was headed out of town to my favorite tire shop back near my house to replace my baldys. You really shouldn't drive in Buffalo on bald tires when the snow is wetly flying. But I circled the neighborhood, and decided that they were doing OK. Heart in throat, I made it beyond the city limits, where, of course, the sun was shining and the roads were dry. We do live under a cloud here.
Under deadline of the tireshop, I did manage to clean out the house entirely about 2 hours East of here - now only the garage and boat remain. My apartment is piled with debris, and no place to put it, but I've gotten pretty good now at letting go of stuff.
I'm getting better at detaching myself also from any emotional relation to money, and just imagine some skinnier person excited with my nice clothes from yesteryear. Or surplus kitchen gadgets. Or electronics. Shoes, coats, furniture galore.
And with a little time to muse, I'm struck with how all money, just like the corn sweetened food we're killing ourselves with, has become primarily a token for emotions. We eat, it seems, to fill an emotional gap. And money stands in for other kinds of insecurity. We're afraid to leave lousy jobs, because we might not be able to afford getting sick. Talk about a vicious cycle! Eat sick work eat.
There's no such thing as enough money, because we could easily be without a job. The "system" seems to like it that way, because it leaves us willing to do most anything. I think sex trafficing makes a pretty good metaphor for how we're treated; there should be no real surprise that slavery is still alive and well in these United States. We demonize and dehumanize so many categories of people now as "illegals". Especially, come to think of it, the sex offenders. Go figure.
And it does seem to me that profit margins now are all - I'm being metaphorical - just reflections of gaming the system. When prices relative to value keep dropping - whether because of outsourced labor to China or the relentless pace of Information Tech's zipping ever faster - it's really hard to know what a fair price really is.
You end up being stuck trusting the brand names, but even there - Dell being the best example - there is no such thing as a model designation which sticks. The parts can change almost literally from minute to minute, and they have so many categories of target market, that it becomes utterly impossible to make apples to apples comparisons among the various flavors of warranty and bundling.
Insurance companies are "forced" now to deny claims or hit you with incredibly rising premiums. The only need test now being your literal ability to roll over and take it. How far up against the wall are you? They have plenty of ways to find out and wear you down along the way.
U-haul very cheerfully refunded their overcharge, by the way. It was a fair arrangement, but took a lot of effort and diligence on my part, not to mention electronic savvy and equipment. I happen to have solicited the labor of a solicitor friend of mine (that's "lawyer" in American, but it was fun to pun) to help with the move, and he suggested I take a picture of the gas gauge. Of course I have a camera on my phone. It shouldn't be this hard and take this many good connections!
But while U-Haul's arrangement with me was logical and fair, they still got the difference between their calculation of their truck's mileage (which you know isn't going to be in my favor) and the way I drive (my car has 300,000 miles on it and I just got new tires after having gotten 90,000 miles on the last set, no kidding!) and the fact that I had to overfill the tank to prevent them exercising fiat against my credit card.
Profit used to mean genuine value added, by the manufacturer, the marketer, the wholesaler, the person who brings it to your door. Now it means almost entirely the value of the logo, which you should really read Naomi Klein about if you want to understand it. But you can verify this yourself easily enough by tracing the price compared to the value of, say, Nike shoes.
Those assembly lines in China provide the same product often enough for the branch which gets the logo and the sky high price, and the one which goes to the pirates. I mean, they're not stupid over there.
But mainly, it's the gaming gap between your ability to gauge value and theirs, which is that much more powerful. Stock market manipulation by any other name?
We're happy enough when things are moving in our favor - on the up and up - but just like with my recent house sale and move, if I were to have to pay for this move instead of being able to recruit friends and family and abuse my still (barely) moving body, I would have lost plenty in the sale. I've already lost enough up against the house's value, never mind its replacement cost. Incredibly falling prices indeed!
Now my Cadillac insurance would have paid replacement cost if the house burned down. Well, at least that's what they say, but who knows what Katrina exemption they'd come up with?
There's just something wrong with this picture. The honest wage for honest work for honest price equation is messed up beyond recognition. And if I did have to invoke insurance, that would be the last insurance I'd ever be able to afford. What?
Oddly enough, Information Technology, which is in one sense at the root of all these issues, can also provide the solution. Ain't it ever the case? Like my two chimney sweeps, it all depends on how you look at things.
IT made just-in-time manufacturing possible. It created the miracle of dropping prices, and in its own manufacture by the magic of photorealism in the fab plants, there is no real incremental cost to power once you get the design right. So everyone always wants the newer, especially when it's cheaper.
Which pretty much becomes the way we go about everything. Cars, TVs, clothes-with-logos, and a lot of the time those things keep getting better and better too, because their design is improved by the IT behind their quality control and manufacturing processes.
Now, of course, in the background of everything is endless oil. It transports the parts which are created where the labor is cheapest. It provides the raw material for the plastics which are, not incidentally, always cheaper by the piece the more of it gets manufactured. That's what plastic bags were meant for back in the beginning when plastic was way too expensive for car parts. Never mind it poisons us and never goes away. The price equation has always been way too compelling. If plastic is ubiquitous, it's cheap! Not because it's ubiquitous, like water used to be . . .
OK, let's leave the oil alone for a minute, because you know how easily side-tracked I can get. Still talking about IT now, how can it be the solution to the problem it created? Well, it can be used to get the price right. If we bring in all the externalities, so called, including the true future cost of oil, of parking, of global warming, and all the rest, then we'd all probably drive our cars at least forever and wear our clothes longer than I can. Maybe we'd all even lose weight so we could keep our clothes longer.
Now that's never going to happen for so long as we allow ourselves to be gamed. But in the meantime, we could develop an emotional connection to something other than food or money, if you can imagine that.
I know that the huge bags of rags I've had to throw out with the trash make me feel really really bad. I actually do wish there were some place that could or would use them to make something, anything, of value.
Maybe there is, but I couldn't find it on the Internet, so it might just as well not exist. Hey, the Yellow Pages. Hang on. Nope, just like the Internet, I can only buy or rent new ones for my shop. And I just learned we somehow waste 1/3 of the food we produce, somewhere along the line from harvest to manufacture to serving to trash. What indeed is wrong with this picture?
I still feel sickly guilty if I throw food away. I feel still worse if I throw plastic away, like I had to do when moving. An entire cupboard stuffed only with plastic bags I'd figured I'd find a use for. At least I was able to give away my little 14 year old fishies, or I'd have had to flush myself down with them. And the cats go with the house, thank God.
OK, I don't feel all that guilty. If I did I would always carry reusable bags and not drive so darn much. And guilt is part of the problem anyhow. I feel just plain lucky. I delivered beer kegs as a youngster, which gives me a strong and resilient back now although I have a plastic front tooth which can't be cleaned as the result of throwing a keg into it. Long story, but I'm kind of glad it lasts forever.
I ate dirt as a kid, so I don't have allergies or asthma. Or maybe I picked up hookworms somewhere. And the money parts? Well, I don't think those who love me will let me starve. I'm a lot more worried about stir crazy and loss of degrees of freedom.
I sure would like to see a system where you don't have to be as lucky as I am to have a shot at that whose pursuit was supposed to be a declared right of all mankind. Happiness.
I guess I'm on a sit-down strike against being gamed. I don't mind if you take insurance as a metaphor for socialism (horrors!) or if you take capitalism as a metaphor for solicitation of love (sorry, had to get that in there), what I'd really like to see would be the implementation of an actual system where trued facts would rise to the top of everyone's attention (think science), where gaming would be instantly exposed (think religion) as such, and where American values could be lived in reality instead of fiction.
I'll try for better sense tomorrow. But I've fallen way behind here. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and not so much keyboarding. Too bad for you my body needed a break. Or lucky, depending on how you look at it. Time for breakfast.
Yeah, right, just like I used to fit in with the biker crowd when I rode my Harley. But still, the food is great, and I learned a thing or two about how real people use their iPhones (people there don't worry about who is overhearing, plus the guy had a hearing aid and just naturally spoke up).
And I sure did look as though I need some medical appliance too; barely able to get up from the table to pay my bill for "four thousand and ninety five, and how did you like your aches and breakin?". Maybe it was "broken and aches?". Some kind of East Indian humor translated effectively enough into English.
That was after arriving late to the dentist. They weren't happy with me, who is also late with payment on my crown-tooth appliance. My rent, my health insurance, my . . . well the list does go on. But my smile is clean, and I got to hear all sorts of new and updated stories.
Maybe like my favorite pair of chimney sweeps, the one seeing his partner's face all black who goes to wash it, and the other not bothering to, since his partner's face looks clean. I can't remember the moral of the story, unless it was something about look in the mirror before you start judging others, but everyone there at JJ's looked as though they had just gotten out of bed, which made me self-conscious about my unkempt halo of tendrils just this side of bald.
My favorite Italian barber, whose memory is gone, but who still remembers how to cut hair and give a really good head massage, is closed on Wednesday, so I went a few doors down the map of Sicily to discover that Vito comes in a pretty close second. Hence New Man!
Well, except I can't move.
I listened to a little bit of NPR's take on the American Dream, which makes a guy feel pretty OK with all the mess-ups of the second half of the twentieth century. Regan cleaning up after LBJ's overreaching. Now Obama can clean up after Reagan's. It's all good.
Well, OK, it's not all good. But there's plenty of reason to believe one way or the other, you know left-right, red-blue. Sometimes I just wish people wouldn't get all exercised about it. Then we could find some way down the middle which wasn't just a useless compromise. Political compromise doesn't end up in the middle so much as in the muddle of pleasing no-one except the ones already in power, who wield protectionist threats against the ones already in office.
OK, now where was I? I started this the other day, and have moved many miles in the meantime. Good thing I got my hair cut, because I got called in for an interview. My back is calmer. The house has yet to close, but the boat also has yet to move.
Here in Buffalo they issued dire Lake Effect snow warnings just as I was headed out of town to my favorite tire shop back near my house to replace my baldys. You really shouldn't drive in Buffalo on bald tires when the snow is wetly flying. But I circled the neighborhood, and decided that they were doing OK. Heart in throat, I made it beyond the city limits, where, of course, the sun was shining and the roads were dry. We do live under a cloud here.
Under deadline of the tireshop, I did manage to clean out the house entirely about 2 hours East of here - now only the garage and boat remain. My apartment is piled with debris, and no place to put it, but I've gotten pretty good now at letting go of stuff.
I'm getting better at detaching myself also from any emotional relation to money, and just imagine some skinnier person excited with my nice clothes from yesteryear. Or surplus kitchen gadgets. Or electronics. Shoes, coats, furniture galore.
And with a little time to muse, I'm struck with how all money, just like the corn sweetened food we're killing ourselves with, has become primarily a token for emotions. We eat, it seems, to fill an emotional gap. And money stands in for other kinds of insecurity. We're afraid to leave lousy jobs, because we might not be able to afford getting sick. Talk about a vicious cycle! Eat sick work eat.
There's no such thing as enough money, because we could easily be without a job. The "system" seems to like it that way, because it leaves us willing to do most anything. I think sex trafficing makes a pretty good metaphor for how we're treated; there should be no real surprise that slavery is still alive and well in these United States. We demonize and dehumanize so many categories of people now as "illegals". Especially, come to think of it, the sex offenders. Go figure.
And it does seem to me that profit margins now are all - I'm being metaphorical - just reflections of gaming the system. When prices relative to value keep dropping - whether because of outsourced labor to China or the relentless pace of Information Tech's zipping ever faster - it's really hard to know what a fair price really is.
You end up being stuck trusting the brand names, but even there - Dell being the best example - there is no such thing as a model designation which sticks. The parts can change almost literally from minute to minute, and they have so many categories of target market, that it becomes utterly impossible to make apples to apples comparisons among the various flavors of warranty and bundling.
Insurance companies are "forced" now to deny claims or hit you with incredibly rising premiums. The only need test now being your literal ability to roll over and take it. How far up against the wall are you? They have plenty of ways to find out and wear you down along the way.
U-haul very cheerfully refunded their overcharge, by the way. It was a fair arrangement, but took a lot of effort and diligence on my part, not to mention electronic savvy and equipment. I happen to have solicited the labor of a solicitor friend of mine (that's "lawyer" in American, but it was fun to pun) to help with the move, and he suggested I take a picture of the gas gauge. Of course I have a camera on my phone. It shouldn't be this hard and take this many good connections!
But while U-Haul's arrangement with me was logical and fair, they still got the difference between their calculation of their truck's mileage (which you know isn't going to be in my favor) and the way I drive (my car has 300,000 miles on it and I just got new tires after having gotten 90,000 miles on the last set, no kidding!) and the fact that I had to overfill the tank to prevent them exercising fiat against my credit card.
Profit used to mean genuine value added, by the manufacturer, the marketer, the wholesaler, the person who brings it to your door. Now it means almost entirely the value of the logo, which you should really read Naomi Klein about if you want to understand it. But you can verify this yourself easily enough by tracing the price compared to the value of, say, Nike shoes.
Those assembly lines in China provide the same product often enough for the branch which gets the logo and the sky high price, and the one which goes to the pirates. I mean, they're not stupid over there.
But mainly, it's the gaming gap between your ability to gauge value and theirs, which is that much more powerful. Stock market manipulation by any other name?
We're happy enough when things are moving in our favor - on the up and up - but just like with my recent house sale and move, if I were to have to pay for this move instead of being able to recruit friends and family and abuse my still (barely) moving body, I would have lost plenty in the sale. I've already lost enough up against the house's value, never mind its replacement cost. Incredibly falling prices indeed!
Now my Cadillac insurance would have paid replacement cost if the house burned down. Well, at least that's what they say, but who knows what Katrina exemption they'd come up with?
There's just something wrong with this picture. The honest wage for honest work for honest price equation is messed up beyond recognition. And if I did have to invoke insurance, that would be the last insurance I'd ever be able to afford. What?
Oddly enough, Information Technology, which is in one sense at the root of all these issues, can also provide the solution. Ain't it ever the case? Like my two chimney sweeps, it all depends on how you look at things.
IT made just-in-time manufacturing possible. It created the miracle of dropping prices, and in its own manufacture by the magic of photorealism in the fab plants, there is no real incremental cost to power once you get the design right. So everyone always wants the newer, especially when it's cheaper.
Which pretty much becomes the way we go about everything. Cars, TVs, clothes-with-logos, and a lot of the time those things keep getting better and better too, because their design is improved by the IT behind their quality control and manufacturing processes.
Now, of course, in the background of everything is endless oil. It transports the parts which are created where the labor is cheapest. It provides the raw material for the plastics which are, not incidentally, always cheaper by the piece the more of it gets manufactured. That's what plastic bags were meant for back in the beginning when plastic was way too expensive for car parts. Never mind it poisons us and never goes away. The price equation has always been way too compelling. If plastic is ubiquitous, it's cheap! Not because it's ubiquitous, like water used to be . . .
OK, let's leave the oil alone for a minute, because you know how easily side-tracked I can get. Still talking about IT now, how can it be the solution to the problem it created? Well, it can be used to get the price right. If we bring in all the externalities, so called, including the true future cost of oil, of parking, of global warming, and all the rest, then we'd all probably drive our cars at least forever and wear our clothes longer than I can. Maybe we'd all even lose weight so we could keep our clothes longer.
Now that's never going to happen for so long as we allow ourselves to be gamed. But in the meantime, we could develop an emotional connection to something other than food or money, if you can imagine that.
I know that the huge bags of rags I've had to throw out with the trash make me feel really really bad. I actually do wish there were some place that could or would use them to make something, anything, of value.
Maybe there is, but I couldn't find it on the Internet, so it might just as well not exist. Hey, the Yellow Pages. Hang on. Nope, just like the Internet, I can only buy or rent new ones for my shop. And I just learned we somehow waste 1/3 of the food we produce, somewhere along the line from harvest to manufacture to serving to trash. What indeed is wrong with this picture?
I still feel sickly guilty if I throw food away. I feel still worse if I throw plastic away, like I had to do when moving. An entire cupboard stuffed only with plastic bags I'd figured I'd find a use for. At least I was able to give away my little 14 year old fishies, or I'd have had to flush myself down with them. And the cats go with the house, thank God.
OK, I don't feel all that guilty. If I did I would always carry reusable bags and not drive so darn much. And guilt is part of the problem anyhow. I feel just plain lucky. I delivered beer kegs as a youngster, which gives me a strong and resilient back now although I have a plastic front tooth which can't be cleaned as the result of throwing a keg into it. Long story, but I'm kind of glad it lasts forever.
I ate dirt as a kid, so I don't have allergies or asthma. Or maybe I picked up hookworms somewhere. And the money parts? Well, I don't think those who love me will let me starve. I'm a lot more worried about stir crazy and loss of degrees of freedom.
I sure would like to see a system where you don't have to be as lucky as I am to have a shot at that whose pursuit was supposed to be a declared right of all mankind. Happiness.
I guess I'm on a sit-down strike against being gamed. I don't mind if you take insurance as a metaphor for socialism (horrors!) or if you take capitalism as a metaphor for solicitation of love (sorry, had to get that in there), what I'd really like to see would be the implementation of an actual system where trued facts would rise to the top of everyone's attention (think science), where gaming would be instantly exposed (think religion) as such, and where American values could be lived in reality instead of fiction.
I'll try for better sense tomorrow. But I've fallen way behind here. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and not so much keyboarding. Too bad for you my body needed a break. Or lucky, depending on how you look at it. Time for breakfast.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
From not moving to barely moving from the move
I'm certain you neither want nor need to hear about this, gentle reader. But there really ought to be a statute of limitations on bodily exertions and requirements to move premises without the funds to do so. I should really have simply executed a sit-down strike, which is all I've got since I'm not a violent person no matter how outraged I become.
But it's easy enough to score some Vicodin (r) from among the oversupplied. (I'd thrown mine out years ago, after taking one course so that I could work through some broken leg pain) It's easy enough to rally. And I'm not dead yet, although I wasn't sure there for a while, with endless shelves of books remaining in the U-Haul (r) and zippo (r) energy remaining in my sore and beaten body.
So, now begins the endless process of unpacking and more winnowings. Meantime, I discover that a few words of mine have stirred up a hornets nest among the right wing of the family. Remaining silent and being thought a fool is ever the better part of valor, but I'm the genuine article - a fool - and couldn't keep my yap shut. Good thing I was absent to defend myself this time, since I'd a stuck it in deeper.
But really, I don't think the right wingers should be both fanning the flames of fear of "death panels" at the same time that they are preaching personal responsibility. It's not rationing we need. Just simple rationality, which, like the smart grid, would allow good decisions to be made on the basis of good information devolving to the point of decision. The doctor and the patient. Who should not be adversaries in this match, the way that I am with U-Haul, say, or the drug companies, or the purveyors of death however striped.
You know at U-Haul they warn you that it's easy to reverse the F and E on the fuel gauge, so that you don't get dinged for thinking you've sent it back 3/4 full when you really sent it back 3/4 empty. And then they give you the contract saying it's 3/4 full and you believe them, until you discover they've made the mistake they warned you about. And you feel like you've just been flim-flammed.
Shouldn't they really send the truck out with a full tank so you don't have to be gamed on the return anyhow? Where they reserve the right to ding you if it's under, such that you have no choice but to overfill as some kind of insurance against what they could do to you? Not to mention the insurance they sell you in some very vague distinction from the kinds of protection rackets which have been illegal for quite a while now. The implication being that you might just be bankrupted without it, so you pay the carefully calibrated fee. They've got you over the barrel.
I remember loving my windproof Zippo back when I was young and immortal and thought that smoking was a nice way to spite the world. I don't remember any drugs working for me though, except the kind that are really cheap and therefore must be controlled. Once when my appendix burst on its way out. Everybody I know wants to push drugs on me though. And they get angry when I suggest that they might be subject to the advertisers' placebo effect of oversupply. Well, I'd get angry too, but I still demand my liberty to just say no.
And I'm too tired now to think. Too tired to write, but I have this obligation going. Today I received maybe five gentle emails about how after much careful consideration, no, in the end, they won't be able to take the old sailboat I'd offered up for free. Still, I feel mildly abused, to be the object of dreaming battled out with sensible spouses back at home across some dining room table.
My friends offer now to subsidize the boat's move, since they have fond memories too, but I think that what's on offer is a kind of shared ownership, which - as in the case of love too come to think of it - can never work with an old wooden sailboat. The awareness while under way requires an intimacy, a familarity with each of the particulars, which is at the very least unlikely when the work is delegated.
You can't sail a wooden boat the way that most people drive now; almost as if the airbags were part of the calculations, in just the way that legal transgressions are part of the calculations of most successful businesses. It's the profit margin for insurance companies, and credit card companies, not to mention the porn which provides the profit margins for online dealings. Right wingers should get a clue about such things. They make their money denying claims they're obligated to pay, just because they get away with it from a significant number of us. They make their money on late fees. They're gaming us. I'm tired.
Lots of people make scant consideration for bounding deer when they crowd you on country roads; for saturated traffic, and things which weren't repaired right. But here I am repeating myself - I'm pretty certain I've made that identical observation before, now buried beneath my energy to search for it.
And I cannot even cook my dinner until I unearth the things still buried in boxes around the small apartment. So, I've gotta go, but I'll be back. Well, unless the bald tires don't make it to the credit-card shop, since we've had our first real snow this morning. Let's see, together with my still unpaid dental crown which comes due tomorrow or they won't clean my teeth, that makes a dollar three eigthty left after the house closes at the end of the week, plus there's the cost to move the boat . . . well the happiness I feel. As they say on that credit card ad, Priceless!
But it's easy enough to score some Vicodin (r) from among the oversupplied. (I'd thrown mine out years ago, after taking one course so that I could work through some broken leg pain) It's easy enough to rally. And I'm not dead yet, although I wasn't sure there for a while, with endless shelves of books remaining in the U-Haul (r) and zippo (r) energy remaining in my sore and beaten body.
So, now begins the endless process of unpacking and more winnowings. Meantime, I discover that a few words of mine have stirred up a hornets nest among the right wing of the family. Remaining silent and being thought a fool is ever the better part of valor, but I'm the genuine article - a fool - and couldn't keep my yap shut. Good thing I was absent to defend myself this time, since I'd a stuck it in deeper.
But really, I don't think the right wingers should be both fanning the flames of fear of "death panels" at the same time that they are preaching personal responsibility. It's not rationing we need. Just simple rationality, which, like the smart grid, would allow good decisions to be made on the basis of good information devolving to the point of decision. The doctor and the patient. Who should not be adversaries in this match, the way that I am with U-Haul, say, or the drug companies, or the purveyors of death however striped.
You know at U-Haul they warn you that it's easy to reverse the F and E on the fuel gauge, so that you don't get dinged for thinking you've sent it back 3/4 full when you really sent it back 3/4 empty. And then they give you the contract saying it's 3/4 full and you believe them, until you discover they've made the mistake they warned you about. And you feel like you've just been flim-flammed.
Shouldn't they really send the truck out with a full tank so you don't have to be gamed on the return anyhow? Where they reserve the right to ding you if it's under, such that you have no choice but to overfill as some kind of insurance against what they could do to you? Not to mention the insurance they sell you in some very vague distinction from the kinds of protection rackets which have been illegal for quite a while now. The implication being that you might just be bankrupted without it, so you pay the carefully calibrated fee. They've got you over the barrel.
I remember loving my windproof Zippo back when I was young and immortal and thought that smoking was a nice way to spite the world. I don't remember any drugs working for me though, except the kind that are really cheap and therefore must be controlled. Once when my appendix burst on its way out. Everybody I know wants to push drugs on me though. And they get angry when I suggest that they might be subject to the advertisers' placebo effect of oversupply. Well, I'd get angry too, but I still demand my liberty to just say no.
And I'm too tired now to think. Too tired to write, but I have this obligation going. Today I received maybe five gentle emails about how after much careful consideration, no, in the end, they won't be able to take the old sailboat I'd offered up for free. Still, I feel mildly abused, to be the object of dreaming battled out with sensible spouses back at home across some dining room table.
My friends offer now to subsidize the boat's move, since they have fond memories too, but I think that what's on offer is a kind of shared ownership, which - as in the case of love too come to think of it - can never work with an old wooden sailboat. The awareness while under way requires an intimacy, a familarity with each of the particulars, which is at the very least unlikely when the work is delegated.
You can't sail a wooden boat the way that most people drive now; almost as if the airbags were part of the calculations, in just the way that legal transgressions are part of the calculations of most successful businesses. It's the profit margin for insurance companies, and credit card companies, not to mention the porn which provides the profit margins for online dealings. Right wingers should get a clue about such things. They make their money denying claims they're obligated to pay, just because they get away with it from a significant number of us. They make their money on late fees. They're gaming us. I'm tired.
Lots of people make scant consideration for bounding deer when they crowd you on country roads; for saturated traffic, and things which weren't repaired right. But here I am repeating myself - I'm pretty certain I've made that identical observation before, now buried beneath my energy to search for it.
And I cannot even cook my dinner until I unearth the things still buried in boxes around the small apartment. So, I've gotta go, but I'll be back. Well, unless the bald tires don't make it to the credit-card shop, since we've had our first real snow this morning. Let's see, together with my still unpaid dental crown which comes due tomorrow or they won't clean my teeth, that makes a dollar three eigthty left after the house closes at the end of the week, plus there's the cost to move the boat . . . well the happiness I feel. As they say on that credit card ad, Priceless!
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Moving
When I drowned; when the canoe filled and then dragged me with it to the bottom in response to me thinking that a slight tug would bring it back to the surface. When the whirlpool made me topsy turvy, and my sneakers had no bite even if I did know which way was up. My entire life really did take static shape (I know no time could have passed, since I'm still alive). Each event, each person, each season was there in an eternal present before I took my last gasp.
And now my children's lives, stowed in the dumpster, have passed me by too. The toys, the birthday cards, the things I'd forgotten that I'd given them, the things I never knew they saved. Plays written on paper, computer stories, games we'd played, trainsets, dolls, marbles, clothes. Each one a pinpoint. Each one eternal. Each one now departed.
I am not a story corps kind of guy, I don't think. That framing of a voice, which has so much power to reveal its surprising truth, succumbs too much to temptations of immortality. As though if the medium were perfected, the truth also could endure.
On my bedroom door now, a print from a former student, attributed to Zhao Lihong. I remove it now for you, dear reader, and store it with my other books, and a few precious things of my childrens' childhood:
PLEDGE
Those engraved on rocks
May not last forever;
Those printed words
May not be immortal
Yet, that which flits by like cloud or smoke
Does not necessarily vanish;
That which falls like a meteor
Does not necessarily depart.
And there among the dress-up clothes was my daughters infant outfit, sized for a small doll. She is grown now and enjoying the challenges of hard work. And a card celebrating my birthday, from her sister, to the man who is old enough to "make shit up" and that was many years ago before I had an excuse. She's off to college.
I was stopped.
I carry on.
It needn't be perfect. The love is plenty.
And now my children's lives, stowed in the dumpster, have passed me by too. The toys, the birthday cards, the things I'd forgotten that I'd given them, the things I never knew they saved. Plays written on paper, computer stories, games we'd played, trainsets, dolls, marbles, clothes. Each one a pinpoint. Each one eternal. Each one now departed.
I am not a story corps kind of guy, I don't think. That framing of a voice, which has so much power to reveal its surprising truth, succumbs too much to temptations of immortality. As though if the medium were perfected, the truth also could endure.
On my bedroom door now, a print from a former student, attributed to Zhao Lihong. I remove it now for you, dear reader, and store it with my other books, and a few precious things of my childrens' childhood:
PLEDGE
Those engraved on rocks
May not last forever;
Those printed words
May not be immortal
Yet, that which flits by like cloud or smoke
Does not necessarily vanish;
That which falls like a meteor
Does not necessarily depart.
And there among the dress-up clothes was my daughters infant outfit, sized for a small doll. She is grown now and enjoying the challenges of hard work. And a card celebrating my birthday, from her sister, to the man who is old enough to "make shit up" and that was many years ago before I had an excuse. She's off to college.
I was stopped.
I carry on.
It needn't be perfect. The love is plenty.
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