A Role Playing Game

I saw a little friend of mine the other day. A little boy. An only child. I was surprised to learn that he doesn't like to watch kids' movies. His Mom told me that he gets very upset when people turn out to be bad.

I think there are always roles in the kids' movies where good seeming people turn out bad, or bad seeming people turn out good for that matter. But he's OK with live actors on stage playing bad people. I speculated that he must be able to see that these are real people acting, and that they are not really bad.

But, you know, I also know that little kids - far less little than you might think - can be easily fooled into believing that a single real person is actually two different people depending on the act. You don't even need to make it obvious by using the classic cues for villain and hero, or even for cultural shifts.

I used to teach Chinese to little kids. I'd had no particular training for this when I started - I had been trained in teaching Chinese, but not in teaching little kids. But I did have a fair amount of experience with young children, from volunteer work during high school and in college. I'd done some baby-sitting. I wasn't good at wielding authority, but I was OK with getting some connection going. I even did a stint in college in a seminar on early childhood education. So I wasn't totally raw.

But on my very first day on the job, which happened to be the Kindergarten teacher's first day also, I came in, burnished by some kind of OK Yalie hotshot let's see what you've got reputation, and there was no way I could be prepared for what seemed dozens of noisy kindergärtners all piling up around me. Their teacher desperately needed a break by the time that I showed up, and so it was just me and them.

Spontaneously, I think, from a kind of panic, or maybe it was over the course of a few fiasco classes, I learned that I could get their attention by explaining about my Chinese friend who was waiting outside the classroom for them to quiet down. I would explain what he would be doing, what he would be talking about if they would just let him come in; what kind of words he would be using, and that I would go get him if they would just be quiet. We got a kind of conspiracy going, me and those kids.

I'd tell them also that I would be coming back afterward to find out what he'd taught them. What he'd done, and how he'd acted. (I'd also be asking him how they'd acted. I wasn't going to be around to be their guide. I wanted them to figure it out by themselves, and then tell me about it.)

And so, I'd go out of the room and change my sweater. I had some kind of "Chinaman sweater," which was a Mr. Rogers sweater I think,and nothing Chinese about it. But I'd come back into the room speaking only Chinese.

At first they'd try to yell at me that they "knew who I really was", or at least the smart ones did. But I didn't understand a word they said. And pretty soon they would drop that line.

It worked! Both as a way to keep control and as a way to teach a little bit of actual Chinese. I think I used it with the older kids too. But the younger ones would tell me later, after they'd grown up a bit, that they really did believe that there were two different people. One Mr. Harrington, and one Mr. He.

I guess they learned to believe the illusion, because I don't think I fooled anyone at the outset. They must have taken cues from each other, and eventually the center of gravity for certainty got shifted.

Now I don't want to be critical of anyone, but my little friend is an only child, and so naturally his parents do things like using a safety harness when they take him skiing. I have little girls - well not so little any more - but when I would watch the kids on the safety harnesses from up in the chairlift it would always make me sad, and I even told them so.

Maybe it made me sad because it depicted me, always striving to escape, always held back by loving fears for me. Maybe it just made me feel sad, and I can't begin to explain why. I took my girls down the hill between my legs, I think, and then at some point I just let them go, and it wasn't always pretty. I did lots of terrified body English up at the top, or speeding down to catch them up, but they did learn to turn and stop.

But those harnesses always made me sad, somehow. Maybe it was because it was a rehearsal of the impossibility to keep anybody safe from the truth that they never will be safe unless they learn discernment on their own? Maybe because the letdown will be that much harder, and I'm sadded by their attachment to some illusion?

Maybe it's sad to me that they will be so disappointed when they find out that Mommy and Daddy were only protecting themselves, and that the child was always on his own? Always doing what he should do because it makes Mommy and Daddy happy.

Somewhere there is a role reversal, and it just makes me sad. Kids shouldn't have to worry so much about their parents' happiness. Kids learn quickly who the harness is for. Some kids beg for it. Some beg to be out of it. Some do as they're told.

Caricatures up on the screen are always this or that. Cartoons are always, well cartoonish in their distinctions of good from bad. On stage, sometimes, it can help to wear a mask. The more sophisticated movies now keep you guessing, right up until the end, which is the villain and which the hero. As if the entire plot would fail if you were to guess it ahead of time. Or like on that great TV show House, where he plays the edge of mean and they, the co-actors, play the audience wondering also if mean is not secretly nice. We wonder if the most important lessons are always the toughest to deliver. Because you'd do anything to avoid being the one who has to deliver tough lessons. Better dress up as the bad guy and let them think they figured it out all on their own.

I think there must be no more jarring thing than to awaken to realize that the person you thought had loved you has betrayed you. That the person you'd thought was being mean was doing it for your own good. Finding the balance is tough, though, with so many of us just passing down abuse because we ourselves were yelled at more than loved. And so when our bosses just act mean, we don't know if this is a good way to kick us from our torpor or just some habitual power-play learned by heart in some church. You must do as I say or you can and likely will just go to hell.

Sometimes the fiction delivers more truth than what's real. Sometimes what's real is easier to take than the fiction, especially when it gets doled out painlessly, over time. Sometimes the difference is impossible to tell, and the only important thing is that the message gets delivered. That the learning happens. That the kids get what they want, which is to be listened to, as well as to be given lessons.

After the fact, after we went skiing, after we left behind my tearful little friend who'd really really wanted to come along except that dark skiing is big people skiing which I probably shouldn't have said. After I re-realized some actual joy in the grace of dancing down the slopes which I never could do as a kid because then it was all about technique, and I was far from the greatest. But now I don't care so much anymore. The moves come from some memory which must be better than the truth, because, in truth, I was a pretty clutsy nerdy dancer too.

It's a body memory, I guess, of a bodily fiction which I won't be held accountable for anymore as an old guy. I can pretend I used to have the moves. But after the fact, when I was telling my doctor with some guilt how I'd driven over an hour and a half there, and still more again driving back; the guilt was because we were discussing my blood clotting factors, and the supposition when you get an embolism to the lungs is that it must have started from pooling in the legs which usually comes from sitting too long in cars or on planes.

But no, he wasn't bothered by that because I'm taking the rat poison which will prevent those clots. No, he was bothered by my skiing, which I'd felt so proud of, you know, like a kid, since it was such a good first step toward better health.

But the perverse thing about clotting problems is that they urge you to eat stuff which your high cholesterol warnings warn you against, and then you can't risk falling because your insides might bleed out. Of course I could slip on ice while walking, especially if and as I get still more out of shape. I could have a crash while driving. I did almost fall while skiing, but had enough strength and wit to recover. Could it really have been that disastrous?

I'm not really wanting to loose that harness from the good doctor's good advice. That's not my point. I'm not wanting anybody to stop using safety harnesses either. That's not my point.

I can't account for my reaction at seeing those kids on harnesses. It just doesn't look like love to me. It probably is love, but it doesn't look like it to me. And I really would like to know how it is that I'm going to be able to recapture that simple pleasure at dancing down the hill in perfect absence of any awareness that what I was doing could in any way be life threatening.

I think there's nothing wrong in trusting a role, well played. I think there is no unvarnished truth, no unmasked authentic self, no perfect being that is not at the same time acting. And yes, Virginia, I think there is no God either, other than the one who is used to trick us into paying attention. Abused by men, usually, into deployments of fear so that we will trust them as they abuse us. And I don't mean in all the obvious ways. Very very few of us do that.

But in that case, in the case of God, remove the mask and there is nothing there. Nothing at all but audience, still in rapt attention, but having to pay attention to one another now, co-creators of illusion. Is that so very bad then? There's not a person on the planet who doesn't love House. How could you not? Especially as he has the sense not to want or need your love at all. Especially as the plot disclaims the obvious in layer over layer replayings of the same story, microcosmed out. But that's the way it is now with art. You have to be pounded over the head with it to see anything at all. Or you won't even watch in the first place. Over and out.

(Oh, I'll be back tomorrow. That was just your cue to get a word in edgewise.)

What Should Microsoft Do?

I haven't read it yet, but this is meant to riff off "What Would Google Do?". Which is meant to riff off "What Would Jesus Do?" I'm thinking. Which is meant to be guidance for life.

I don't mind giving Microsoft advice, because, pretty much like giving Attila the Hun advice, he's just going to look at it, maybe with a kind of curiousity and then carry on raping and pillaging, because, like the scorpion on the frog's back, it's what monopolizing corporations do.

But clearly, it's all about rugged multi-touch. It's all about holding in one hand. It's all about free access to the Internet. It's all about easy reading and easy input. In other words, there's something to be made of a combination of the Kindle, the iPad, the iPhone, the netbook. I mean, think of the opportunity. The iPad has staked out a $600 slot for a $300, max, product (judging against the netbook market). The Kindle gives you internet access for free, slanting heavily in the direction of buying their reads. The Kindle is as easy as reading a book. The multi-touch is a no-brainer, because, well, it takes not brains, and no instruction, to make the machine do what you think it should do.

And the only thing in the way of Microsoft entering this market is their greed. Obviously, they can't let go of the revenue stream from Office and Windows, and that means that they will remain wedded to the absurd notion that people still have to or want to or can be tricked into getting that kind of functionality for a price when it can be had so trivially for free.

They want to retain the software hardware divide, when there is none anymore. It's all machine vs. human, with the software/hardware on the same side of the diff-e-q. The machine is a photo-reproduced schematic, plain and simple (what, you thought they engineered these things the way that they once did railroads and spaceships??). And you need a machine to design it, because it's too damned intricate for humans to draw. Expand out the schematic so you and I could see it and it would fill football fields now.

But no machine can, any more than can a corporation, do human. It's just not possible. Any more than a scorpion can refrain from killing when it has the opportunity. Even when the killing drowns itself. I'm standing by for your call, M$, whenever you want to know how to repair your fortunes. But, you'll have to cede control, power - the greed thing - and actually want and need to compete on a level playing field in the open market which has never, so far, existed. And with all your money, I am betting you're far far too chicken. You're afraid you can't win on your merits, because you know you never have. You're like all the rich people now, afraid that they will be exposed for having won the lottery instead of earning the slot by honest work.

Best wishes, though. Really. It's not like I'm rooting for Google. They're just plain evil.

Writing the God Removal Machine

As a reasonably overschooled individual, I know that "Deus ex machina" refers the the machine from which the gods might be introduced to a stage production. Literally, a crane for lowering in the plot fixer, the god, who intervenes to make things right. Figuratively, a clunky plot which just couldn't happen in real life.

As I am instructed repeatedly, faith is found at that intersection between fate - what just happens - and meaningful coincidence. It is a choice, in other words, about how to interpret. And there is meant to be no possibility to influence what has happened, because that would to be tempt fate or cheat God, depending on your choice of words.

Science chases down this nexus, trying to the extent possible to find that final intersection between what can be known (and manipulated) and what is only random. And, by definition, what gets left out as random is meaningless. God's province, if you will, or the Fates'.

Now you know I like to play with metaphors from science. You know I can't write - good writing tells a story, and it has to be a story that's not my own. Good journalism starts with interviews. Good story telling starts with characters. I don't know what the hell I'm doing here, but I'm pretty sure it's not good writing.

But I do have something to say, which can be a plain old burden a lot of the time. And I don't really wish to expose the fact, any more than I have to, that I am just a plain old lousy and flawed human being without a hell of a lot to recommend me in the virtue, talent, and accomplishment departments. But let's not kid ourselves here, I obviously think I'm pretty smart, whatever the hell you might mean by that. (I can't even keep my grammatical "persons" straight! You, me, I, us, we, whatever)

Anyhow, my main big metaphors from science have to do with the fringy stuff. The quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity, the big bang and the chaos theories, with all of which I have some glancing acquaintance. As much as a journalist might have, say, with those he interviews for a story. Instead of just thinking and writing all by myself about what the Saints' win at the SuperBowl might mean to Buffalonians who were "cheated" out of our win, I could have and probably should have asked a few.

But I was wanting to stuff people's heads, like a bad teacher wants to do. I wanted to fill your head with stuff I've already worked out in mine, across the ages to the extent that I can, by reading. Sometimes even across the cultures.

And you know, in addition to not knowing how to write, I never do bother to do the math. Just like the beginning of A Serious Man - yet another Coen Brothers grim fairy tale so far (it takes almost as much longer than you might be willing to spend for me to watch a movie as it does to read a book) if you don't know the math, you don't know the physics.

But you know, just like the Coen Brothers, I think, or Avatar for that matter, I'd like to turn that problem on its head. If you don't do metaphor, you just can't get physics. Nevermind the math.

I did finally see Precious - I had to wait until I could sit next to someone, since I was a bit timid about seeing it alone, plus I didn't want to have a rewind/reset button at my disposal. The novel it's based on is called "Push" and I'm going to have to say that this term refers to the same thing I've been wanting to do in my writing. It's a kind of abuse of you, for which I'm truly sorry.

Precious is so abused that she can barely make out letters. She's illiterate not just because she's been abused both at home and in school by feedback clearly telling her she's stupid, she's illiterate because the very leastmost modicum of energy required to make sense of any symbol has been, well, pushed right out of her.

And so the turning point in the film, and I'm sorry but I don't really quite care if it's a spoiler, is when the teacher persists, pushes if you will, and Precious realizes she can learn to read. And later, she tells her social worker, "I like you, I really do, but you don't have the strength to handle me." Talk about a Turning Point. You couldn't deal with my life, educated boy.

So, you know, I'm feeling humbled just about all over the place now, but I'm still going to try to tell you something. It's that old E=MC² thing again. Where Mass gets equated to Energy, according to the speed of light. Where the speed of light becomes the Universal Constant, and the Energy and Mass become all shifty depending on point of view.

We're all familiar in real life with how time is the same as distance, or money depending on what interests you most. It takes time to get there from here. It takes money to save time. You can mix and match these around as much as you like, but you can't deny you know what I'm talking about. Machines to collapse these distinctions are the fruits of our sciences, embodied now by engineered technologies and techniques.

Sure, you're going to say it's not all about cars and planes and Information Technologies. What about Biology and genetics? Well, what about them? There's still that matter of getting down inside the machine-like parts to find that originating impulse, or what went wrong, or what could go wrong. As in, it would be aweful to die just before "they" come up with the cure for what ails you. That time and money and distance issue again.,

At the center, where moral choice resides, at the heart of the matter, we just have to leave a question mark or maybe God, depending on your choice of words. But, see, here's the thing, God, the word (thankfully at the beginning of the sentence this time, so I can hedge), is like "green numbers," it has no "content". There's no there there, and so the question might become what harm is caused by putting a word in the place of the question mark. For which the answer is a quick scan of history, or current events for that matter. So, I'll leave that Word (whoops!) alone for a moment longer.

But no-one really thinks science, as a process, is going to reveal that mechanism for choice. Well, except for the Geek Rapture folks, but you know what I think of them, right? (if you do, then tell me, because I can't figure it out) There are lots of proposals, but in the end, everyone's pretty sure it will end up, like in quantum mechanics, at the fringes where mechanism meets probability. Kind of like that Coen brothers movie. Hmmm I wonder how it ends?

So, choice might be right about at that spot where chance meets implication. That faith thing again, except that in this case, you're having a kind of faith in yourself. Your choices, over time, might even define your character. If your life is not some kind of big act, then you might even deserve some honor. That kind of thing.

And if you give God (whoops, sorry, there He is again) all the credit, it's pretty much like cheating, don't you think? Shouldn't you just give Him all the blame too? But I'm OK with that formula I overheard now while waiting to give blood to check my viscosity so I can keep on breathing and stuff; "the way I see it is every time you resist those temptations, you know for steak or wine or ice-cream you shouldn't be eating, you're resisting the devil, you know, and moving more toward God".

I might quibble with the moral content of choice at that level, but I at least get the idea. Faith means choice means a push, of yourself, in a certain direction, and you couldn't always do it yourself without some guidance about the right direction. And lots of times, you really don't understand all the reasons, but you have a sense of which would be the right direction, and if you have character, you take it. That kind of thing.

But distance from moral content gives a kind of deniability of implication. I didn't exactly feel responsible for the condition of Precious up on screen; girls like her I mean. I would never treat my kids the way she was treated. And frankly, the movie was kind to me that way. It wasn't pushing anything down my throat, or into my head, it led me to form my own conclusions, and decide for myself just where my implication is. But it never did let me just turn away. It didn't hide the truth either. I didn't make me turn away the way Tarantino does, for instance. I don't ever want to be that practiced in my reading, er, viewing.

Physical distance, cultural distance, neighborhood distance, school distance, these can all be ways to disimplicate ourselves from moral choices we must and by omission all the time, do make. And who would ever see the need to live outside and be cold all the time to be moral? That's not the point.

The point is that there really is a different non-mathematical equation which must always also be kept in mind. That's the one where disimplication by distance - that point of view thing - squared, if you will, times the gravity of the situation (um, not quite punning, but I'm not sure yet) equals your character. Your moral content. If you will. Your meaning-making energy potential. Your worthiness for love.

And in the case, the Universal constant, which not quite co-incidentally is the same one the Bible uses, is that each human is decreed at the outset to have the identical same character value. (see what I mean about not being able to write?)

The universal constant, in other words is humanity, which doesn't get to be assigned a weight in this equation. It's a constant. That's what constant means, dummie. Sorry, talking to myself again, but I think we all already agree about that, even though we hardly ever act that way. Because, well, it's kind of scary. We don't know how to behave across the boundaries. But we would never want to live in a world where human lives were differentially valued.

Even though, ahem, that's how insurance rates get calculated. Even though that's what grades in school come to mean. Even though that's what gets meant by money. But, to be fair, we are having a really really hard time figuring out how else to do it.

My radical proposal (I'm such a radical! That's my only saving grace in the how strong are you really contest) is so trivial. Just write God out of the equation. It's not that big a deal. Really. It's, well, trivial (I never quite know if I'm punning).

It goes like this. Written words are what connects us, as humans, across time and space and sometimes even cultures. Written words guide us toward good moves, even when we're alone in private. Written words inform that part of us which so often gets mistakenly labelled too, as soul or the ghost in the machine fallacy or the intentional fallacy or the pathetic fallacy, you know, where you project human qualities onto animals and other, um, things .

God, the Word now, is a cop-out. It lets us off the hook. It's too easy anymore, and I'm not saying it always was, I'm just saying now it is. Now, at this point in the history of science, the compilation of too many words for just one, ahem, soul to master, to where the most sensible way to navigate the choices is just by random. It's how I do it. Almost. Sort of.

If we just netFlix up everything so that only the good stuff rises to the top, in just the way that they stock the shelves in stores now such that you never can find the oddball stuff, then we will have lost the ability to read the world at all.

Our economy now is quite literally organized such that each of us, the least of us, is made to feel responsible for what in the end has been a setup by those in power. That's what Marx meant by the internal contradictions of Capitalism. We're at or beyond the endtimes for that kind of logic. And that's because the markets have been so perfected - made so friction-free to crib a few of Bill Gate's words - that the fatal flaw in the logic can no longer be avoided.

If we're all responsible, then no-one's responsible, and at the core of corporations, which are now just massive structures for moral disimplication because everyone needs a paycheck, there's only someone getting paid a whole lot of money to set you up. The good news is that you have to pay an incredible amount for someone to do the devil's act.

But you know, the crane, that god removal machine, is right in our hands, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with writing, and something to do with our real human hearts (which in Chinese now, remember, is the same word as mind, but sorry, I didn't mean to talk down to you again). Why not use it to remove the devil(s)? We can run our own damn stories without your Logos all over them.

And the word which can't be spoken but is the real word, can have a space to come back in. The everything is nothing paradox of God. Without all the religious stuffing which is just a way for men to keep control. But there I go getting carried away again . . . . (and where does the punctuation belong in my title?)

Paintball Justice

I'm drawing my line in the sand right here. I heard just now about how in Iran when the people come out to protest, the police are shooting them with paintguns - marking them to be dealt with later. How diabolically clever is that?

This is even better than smartbombs. Better than teargas by far. Better than surveillance cameras, against which people can wear disguises. No one is hurt, and it might almost be confused with fun if it were done in this country. Hell in 1984, the fictional version, they didn't even have to bother with real wars, when the pretend ones could have the same effect.

We all already knew that anonymity is impossible anymore, no matter what we used to think about how a dog can be a dog on the Internet. But if our government condones this as a crowd control method, then we're fucked, and I use that term advisedly. Or unadvisedly, so take your choice.

We already know that they can make us standout by searching our phone calls and emails for particular words or patterns of speech. But we also know that speech doesn't prove anything.

We know that they might selectively arrest people according to their background checks, putting away activists for twittering crowd avoidance methods, say, but we hope they won't shut off twitter the way they did in Iran.

Put all these things together, though, and now you've got real problems with civil liberties. And it could be the teaparty activists as readily as the antiwar activists (if there were any anymore, or is that just a media preference? Or a venue preference - try imagining anti-war protesters at Opryland.). But one hopes that if the police in this country were to be ordered to shoot with paintguns, there would be a suit and they would lose. But who can tell with this supreme court?

And you do have to wonder what's the difference between picking, based on speech, who to follow at the protests, and picking them out in your paintball sights. The intimidation factor is about identical.

So, why, exactly, aren't the teabaggers concerned? And why is everyone else staying home?

I guess the teabaggers are the ones feeling screwed while the rest of us, frogs in a slowly heating pot, are rationalizing away all the little things. Or maybe it's a media spotlight thing. Or maybe they've already made it clear how outraged they would be, and so shooting them with paintballs would just prove their point. That they're the victims and everyone in the government is out to get them. I guess they might want to be shot with paintballs. Do you?

Maybe they're just more used to guns. Oh hell, I don't know, maybe they're just too stupid to think about civil liberties, but I do know that if we assume that and act like we think they're stupid, then they've won because, well, that's what they were complaining about in the first place.

Something to think about . . .

Who Owns Me? Google does!

Google owns me, and I don't really mind. Yet. Once they fully team up with the NSA, I might have something else to say on the topic. But up against Verizon gaming me, I discovered rather lately  - as a techie it's embarrassing - that the once-free tool which Verizon had provided doesn't hold a candle to what Google allows me for free now.

OK, it's not all Google. It's Microsoft ActiveSync, but Google has opened up their email in ways that used to require an enterprise Exchange server, and it works better - much better - than Verizon imitating Blackberry. Which they now charge for??!!! It makes no sense. I save $15 bucks a month for something better that Verizon never told me about, and used to charge nothing for. Right, and I guess I should expect them to lower my rate, automatically, every time they lower it on to the general public! So what am I, you loyal customer, chopped liver??!!

And looking at my Google dashboard, I see that they store more information about me than even the credit-scoring services do. Well, not more, but it would make a scary complement to what the credit scoring services have on me. They track my youtube visits. They track whose blogs I follow. They cache my searching, but that part I'm not allowed to see, and I trust that they won't identify me with it either.

Except that they've already said that they will comply with the law if requested. Just like Verizon did when they tapped into the net on the request of the government, even though the request wasn't legal???

One has to wonder now if the law and the government are at odds again. The way they were when blacks and women coudn't vote, for instance. The way they are when corporations are declared to have the inalienable right to pursue your happiness; to drown out your voice and make your freedom of speech irrelevant.

I don't really care even if the NSA already had access to my searchings, which they probably already do even without Google's help. It's all noise, right? Until you say something edgy, which will just stick right out from the noise, and provoke someone to look a little bit more closely. And Google, happy lapdog, will just hand you right over in an instant, if the request is bona-fide and legal. Or at least if it's government sponsored.

But I am not the content of what can be known about me. And if I were a too-tightly wound nutjob ready to pop, they quite manifestly now, wouldn't know that either. Even if I were a radical Muslim high-ranking in the military. Even if I seemed nice to those around me, like that shooter recently here in Buffalo.

So, the excuse to keep our searches is just that. An excuse. We'd like to think it can and will help responsible people to know who's out to get us, but in the end it can't and won't. Unless, of course, someone goes the extra step to actually get to know someone, which can't really be done, in the end, virtually. Now can it?

And it can't be done just one on one. Someone would have to get to know your whole story, from lots of points of view, not just the on-line or phone conversation one, which will always be taken out of context. Always be dangerously unfair and untrue.

But you know if Google does succeed now with their experiment to bring ultra-high-speed Internet right into your living room, so that you can have the same telepresence "enjoyed" by corporate enterprises within their pecincts, then we might almost only exist online.

Which used to be thought a pretty terrifying prospect. Minority report. The Matrix. That Max Headroom old TV show. I could go on and on. I do go on and on, but I'll stop here today.

There is a clear trend here, and we should stop it before it's too late. The issue is word for word identical to the patenting of our genes. And just as important. If we allow ourselves to be considered identical to our "content" then we have already ceased to exist, and our suicide would indeed, just like life in Buffalo, be redundant.

Caveat Excellence

There must be no term in the English language more likely to elicit general agreement than Excellence. We all wish and hope for excellence, surely. Well, unless it's the Wayne's World kind.

And yet our economy is organized now such that the only profit margins left are from gaming. You are being gamed each time that you agree to terms which cause draconian overcharges when you pass some limit. You agree that it will be your fault, and that is why and how, supposedly, these companies can keep their doors open now. They make their profits on the late fees, the over-the-limit penalties, the minutes you talk beyond your predictions or your rollovers, the number of people who don't know how to deny the denial of their health insurance payments, and then there's the porn which provides the profit margin for our various information "carriers."

What? What the hell am I doing talking about porn again? Hang on, I'll get to that. But I want to talk about slack. As in, how come the local banks can give you your banking for free, and yet we still flock to the mega-sized ones?

How come a local and marginally excellent carpenter can build your kitchen cabinets for less and better than the factory mass-produced ones - even at the top end, er, bottom end - and we still spend the endless amounts for the brand names? How come we drive by the local Mom and Pop restaurant and go to Denny's? How come we think it's worth our effort to let them give us a "free" grand slam, saving us the cost of the gallon of gas we likely spent to get there?

I guess we're scared. We're scared that we may not become our best self. We know that we cannot and never will be excellent ourselves, at least never to the extent of that super-star projected onto our various big and flat and palm-held screens. We want to know what everybody else means by excellence, and then we don't want to be left behind. I guess. But you know as well as I do that it doesn't make any sense.

They can make their profits without gaming you and me, but I guess they can't make as much as the next guy if he's gaming you, and so there is a race to the bottom, which ought to be considered the opposite of excellence.

A race of wall street money to find the enterprise best able to maximize the return. The gamers quickly learn how to overwhelm profit margins from sales almost instantly by profit margins from market share, and so that capital just floods the shelves even if they have to sell below cost to drive the little guy out of business to steal his market share, so that the big gamers of the system back on wall street will bet - and it's not a risky bet until the bubble pops and you know what happens then - that they will eventually get it all, especially as more capital becomes available for the predations.

This is not what should be called a virtuous feedback loop. And it's not the rich guys, it's you and me, by proxy from our retirement funds which we were hoodwinked into putting on the market. And then we can refund by tax payments what got ripped off by too much risk taking?? No wonder people are pissed off, but sure, yeah, it was our own damn fault for thinking that we could get as rich as the next guy who made a killing selling off his property. Investing in the market. Money in return for no work at all.

There is nothing which can't or won't be done to harness your guilty fear about overages. But really they're taking advantage of your terror at being left behind. At being reduced to less than nothing because you have nothing to show for what everyone else so evidently is. Nobody wants to be made an object of ridicule. Nobody wants to be made an object at all, unless you get told that you are really really excellent, and then, what? You don't have a rubber soul?

I think we can't help ourselves to want to eat just exactly what we see up on the screen, I think it gets our appetite going, and we just can't help, maybe a bit furtively, maybe with a touch of guilt, being lured in by that logo-subliminal message of sublime.

We can't help ourselves either, and statistics say that includes you, wanting to see what that superstar might look like undressed. And here's the really bizarre part, and I never did inhale, but still, there's no question that the young girls who do undress before the cameras are that much more alluring than ever the superstarlets could be, who probably have perfect titted body-doubles anyhow, most of the time, or airbrushing and tit-trainer workout specialists plus implants, but still people will pay the good money to see what they think might actually be the real thing caught on camera. By accident, theft or omission. Do you find this bizarre?

We treat each other also as though we must be psychopaths, out to take advantage, out to best you at some transaction. You know, I've worked the other side of that sales counter as a bicycle mechanic, a tech support guy, a salesperson, and sometimes you really do have to make up stories so that the buyer - the emptor if you will - will trust you and let you do your work. These might be lies depending on what your motive is, right? But if you bore them with the real story, they'll almost always walk right out the door and go get their bike preemptively at WalMart, which is just outrageous in every sense.

I guess you build trust over time, and every single person that you don't know is a psychopath by default, pretty much the way you should learn to ride a motorcycle if you want to stay alive. They would screw you if they could do it without your knowing about it. That's the story and you're meant to buy it.

No, I mean you're really meant to buy it, because that's where the profit margins are. You're meant to believe that any tiniest bit of excess price above whatever used to be called wholesale constitutes a kind of theft and so you'll troll the highways or the information superhighway to get that last penny of difference now.

And the joke is that almost every time by walking to the corner hardware store you can find something that does the same trick for maybe sometimes only half. Just like the local diner, if you even have local diners where you live, will cost less than the big box fast food eats. And might even come highly recommended by real people, if you can muster the nerve to trust their judgment. The way you do on the highway each and every day.

They gave me a game ticket when I picked up my prescription at the drug store the other day, and I wondered idly to myself if I should open it up and check up on the Internet. Which is the missing piece which will make up the million dollar prize in this Rite-Aid "game of life"? You know, there's always an oversupply of certain game pieces, and then the rare ones like Park Place or the Boardwalk (as I vaguely recall from Monopoly, or the MacDonalds version we played once driving across the country and then found out that it was rigged).

There's always the capstone piece, and knowing that I would never have the patience actually to set out the game board, assuming they are paying for my attention which I just refuse to grant them, I thought maybe I should just peek up on line to see what's the going price for the capstone piece. You know, there's a market for everything if you want to cash in now instead of waiting until you might have nothing left of interest, might have died while playing the game, might end up with someone no longer hot to look at.

But I don't even have that much energy to game them gaming me. Or Toyota now, you know, pundits wondering what's the connection among all these seemingly unrelatable failures; what could be the holistic issue which relates brakes to acceleration. Maybe it's the whole "drive-by-wire" concept, except how the hell does that relate to issues with the steering. Surely that part has not lost its literal connection to the wheels?!

That plane came down in Buffalo, they're determined now, because of "pilot error" despite the fact that the steering column was literally shaking in his hands, announcing an issue which just simply couldn't be ignored, where the idiot lights or warning buzzers or flashers just couldn't be counted on, and so what does he do but pull a deer in headlights move, and bolts in the wrong direction.

And so then it's the industry's fault, for hiring such an under-tried and trued guy in the first place? But why isn't it our fault for demanding no slack in the way that the prices get set. One only hopes that those teabaggers are happy in their caveat emptor nirvana (apologies bro). Let's whittle down our government now, which didn't even have enough regulators to be aware, much less to do anything about what was going on. Until after the fact and then bring on the multi-millions to investigate the obvious.

That there was a general systems failure, despite the need to assign blame. That Toyota, not the hot wheels label, the "good old reliable" label rather, just simply made the wrong decision at lots of little places along their line. No one of them seemed to merit coming clean, until they were forced to come clean and then suddenly a whole lot of little retrospectively wrong decisions are getting swept up into their mess, and so the holistic problem is what is it now about Toyota culture which has them protecting the brand at all costs so that, in the end, the brand might get, well, not destroyed exactly, but tarnished surely? What culture of deniability, exactly? Or who now will fall on his sword the way that they were traditionally meant to do in Japan?

It's a game now of find the least and fall on him.

How, then, can we protect against human error? How re-invite in the governors, who we now mistrust the most? How when at that pinnacle falling for any slightest temptation now can be more than enough to bring you down hard on usually your metaphorical sword, but you know what I mean, right? Dirk?

Some lowest common denominator always has the veto power now, and so Sarah Palin can say "retard" when she means it satirically, but not when she means it seriously, but seriously now, who can tell the difference from Tina Fey? There is no difference now between earnest and satire except in point of view. But nobody's really laughing. They're just fighting mad and desperate for an object. Even the satire is just biting as in "yeah, take that you bitch" and glad that I got mine. Got my dig in. Even when it's word for word identical, there's something wrong in it for the audience of people who won't stand up and say it themselves, out loud, in public.

Protect brand America, I guess, and when they market handguns and cigarettes to children - and you know "they" really do this - and our congressional representatives protect that right under some really stretchy constitutionality thingie, who really are you supposed to trust? Where should the outrage be, as though we can't ourselves decide where that boundary ought to be, and which way we should turn.

Will we make stone soup then, the way they did here in Buffalo when the superstars came to town? Or will we just grab for the bowl to see who gets it first and fastest, and then let the tears come flowing out when we watch the story get retold up on TV or at the movies? Huh, which way, Precious, which way?

Excellence is what you've always had, inside, if you were but to nurture it. Choosing not to take responsibility for someone else's claim to excellence. That pilot could have used to read "The Message to Garcia". There's room for personal responsibility. There's also room for corporate responsibility. And you know, unions which protect incompetence ought to be ashamed of themselves too, but not quite so much as should their bosses for letting them get away with it. Which they're always happy to do so long as we the people are willing to believe that there's excellence only in comparison to life, the universe and everything. There's also excellence in comparison to you.

I only know that as General Motors goes, so goes the nation, and General Motors is dead and gone now, for all intents and purposes. Shouldn't we be looking for a different set of metaphors? They drive three-wheeled homebuilt electric cars in China now, put together from generic parts in tiny factories. These things drive right below the regulatory radar, and still if you need to get around and aren't yet part of the newly rich, what else would you do?

Why, really, do we have to go so fast? Why must we suffer sprawl and traffic jamming? Why not walk and trust our neighbors not to jump us, the way that we trust the other guy coming at us at something over 55 MPH? Why not, horrors, hook our cars together into trains where the failure of any one of them isn't the failure of them all, and the check on intervals is, well, mechanically obvious. Where the only real danger is going off the rails, and even that will be exaggerated to keep you afraid. Keep you very afraid.

I spent much of the day yesterday, and I'm not proud of this at all, trying to understand how I might take advantage of Verizon's newly discounted calling plans. Yes, I feel like naming names here. Just for shits and giggles, I asked the very nice lady on the phone, "so, um, like, why didn't I automatically get the newly discounted rate for my um,[gamed predictor of] my minutes?"

It wasn't fair at all on my part, because they'd already given me the answer by not giving me the new discount automatically, but still I had to ask, and the certainly highly scripted answer just got me laughing and I couldn't help myself. I really didn't want to hurt her feelings, and it must have taken a lot of practice and effort to be ready for every question, but the response was precisely as confusing as their website, where somewhere along the way terms had changed. I mean literally, the terms had come to mean something else, and the terms that I'd signed on to were no longer available, and they made it out to where I had been getting something for nothing which they now charged for, while raising the rate for something I never got, but if I did I'd have to pay double for it, so that I might be content to just stay right where I was, if I was even able to understand the terms.

Which is exactly what the nice lady was trying to tell me, very articulately and standing at my ready to do whatever it is that I wished for her to do. But I caught myself just in time, and realized that I would lose all 1200 contacts "in" my phone if I weren't careful. Which I would have if I had accepted the terms of the removal of what I didn't ever need in the first place, but which was free and now I'd have to pay for, was paying for actually, but hadn't realized they'd changed the meaning of the terms.

And if I'm not the only one to have figured this all out, I'm in a tiny minority, I'm certain of that, because I'm actually pretty good at this stuff, the tech support, guessing where the flaw may be learning how to game the system (and here I'm talking about the literal Operating System!) gaming me, and still you can't avoid the inevitable thing which isn't quite working the way that it should be but you just don't have the patience for yet another hard reset.

And I know it would be just paranoid to think that a company as large as Verizon would be deliberately slowing down their website to make it frustrating almost beyond endurance to research these questions, but it would be just as weird if a company that big did not have the wherewithal to make their website fast. And you know, you just figure it's something on your end, because when you do get to the part you were waiting for it's all cheery and helpful and complete with full disclosure.

And I've decided it's worth the $10 bucks extra for them not to game me gaming them so that they can charge me $.40 per minute which these days really is highway robbery considering how cheap talk has become, as they recently did at Christmas time, when they must know that everyone's going to go over their minutes, especially if they land in the hospital, which is kind of like, you know, a tax on happiness or a tax on misery, depending on how you might want to look at it.

However you want to look at it, it's unconscionable, and I don't even want to think about how much they make, indirectly and deniably of course, on porn.

And then I got another denial from the health insurance company, and here I really don't want to name names because they've been so nice about it, but I've faced them down three times already for three different categories of don't-land-in-the-hospital-on-Christmas-especially-when-you're-moving charges. Guilty!

And then, get this! It's really funny and you can try it at home, I mistyped verizonwireless.com as verizonwireless.cm (missing a letter there, you see?) and I was instantly on AT&T's website, so then you wonder, hmmm, maybe this big Goliath is on his way down, if they can't even keep on top of AT&T gaming them. Who's number one now? And why is their website so slow? Isn't their gaming working for them any more? Or were they left behind in the big iPhone rollover minutes get it faster NOW sweepstakes, gobble gobble gobble?

So, what would be so wrong if, the way they used to do in France by fixing the price of bread, these companies were forced to compete on the actual terms of service? What if a per-minute rate were set, say, and what if over-the-limit blame-the-consumer predations were made illegal across the board, and what if logo value got collapsed by exposure of the vacuity and sweatshop cruelty underneath it - you know the assembly lines over in China were one stream gets the logo stamp and the other is for the local market, and sometimes for illicit boundary crossings to that undercover seller in the Queens, maybe?

What if the hardware vendors were forced to split from the carriers, what if the TV medium couldn't both charge for advertising and for the line in, what if the newspapers . . .STOP! We'd never be willing to pay the full price if we were to see it, right? You know, the maybe one buck that those Nike shoes actually cost? The nothing that it costs to get the signal right off the air? And the book companies complain that they won't be able to make any money on eBooks because what, you can't lend them to your friends anymore? Huh?

What if we just stopped gaming one another, then, huh? What about that?

Oh, sorry, just another rant and I can't seem to help myself, but this shit keeps happening in real life, and what else do I have to talk about?

Katrina, Katrina

Everyone in Buffalo must have been rooting for The Saints. And everyone in Buffalo must have felt cheated when New Orleans got to win its Super Bowl. We couldn't ever do it even with four chances almost in a row. We saw our projection; the underdog. But the one who played us up on the big screen was so much better looking. Which might be flattering, except that you have to live with yourself in real life.

Our politics are just as corrupt! Our schools are just as bad! We suffer natural disasters too, except that ours are laughable. Something to make contemptuous jokes about. And although we don't generally show our tits, we get just as drunk in public on St. Patrick's day, say, or at the Bills games.

What we lack is cool, and so, although we were once as big, and came on our falling short the old fashioned way - we earned it over time - we don't even deserve anything other than contempt for our bombed out condition. Hell, we never got it together enough to put a roof over our stadium in the first place, and it would make a lot more sense here than there. And our roofs hardly ever blow off, although they might from the blasting of our crowds.

Everyone knows the story of the frog in the kettle who never knows enough to jump out until it's just too late. Until it's too late, it just feels nice, and sunny, and like a hot-tub, maybe, and then somewhere along the line your energy's been robbed, and still it gets hotter and hotter, and somewhere in there you lose all sense at all.

I guess, looking at that frog, you can just feel contempt that he didn't have the sense to jump out when he could, just like most of the talented people who grew up in Buffalo have always done. And then you just wanna say something like die, sucka, die. So you can eat the frog's legs? Shouldn't you have killed him off ahead of time? Or is Buffalo like a lobster, without an advanced enough nervous system to register pain. Yeah, that's it. We're just too stupid.

And everybody down in Haiti now is looking for that silver lining, like all those people had to die before the centuries-long tragedy could be turned about. As though it will be now? As though somehow if you get the chance to know what being made an object feels like, then at least you will never do it to some other? Or never do it again? Or will you just write a check and be on your way?

If you are raped, you have been made an object. If you are a slave. If you are taken for your beauty only. Or for your intelligence. Or your money. If your life is not worth paying any attention, then you have been made an object. And if you live, then all that you have left is your humanity. And right there, as David Foster Wallace reminds us that Victor Frankel reminded us, is the only choice you've ever had in your life. To be human or not to be. It's a choice and not a grant.

But so much of the time we only know how to do back unto others as they have done to us. Not because we're mean, but because we never really did understand that we were being made into an object ourselves. So, we celebrate getting ours back even before the Mardi Gras, even to something more extreme than the party that will happen the day before we must begin our pretense of mourning. Because today we are alive, even though tomorrow that asteroid might hit, as they made such good fun of in those SuperBowl ads.

Well, we're still here in Buffalo. We're still human, what's left of us. We're not looking forward to some disaster larger than the laughable ones, which still kill lots of people if you want to really know. Walking around in circles snowblind, or maybe dropping from the sky because we won't stand for unions, or just on the streets from guns since all the money has skittered out to the suburbs where they eat each others' children just to get their own into the most Ivys.

Grim? Even the Bills are probably not about to stay around these parts. Our stadium looks like the WalMart edition, and Toronto has one with a flip top right around the corner. In the same dense market, only cooler. Way cooler.

The real test is what you do for the one who's losing consciousness slowly. The real test is what you do to your neighbor, even though he stinks. The real test is how much looting you're already doing, in slow motion, from the wide open stores of the once great now dying cities, happy that you can win by airconditioned wild west absence of civic anything, and nevermind virtue, bringing in the outsourced quality, and paying something under half of the wages of dignity. Because people are willing, at least, to have something rather than nothing.

Well, shame on you America, shame on you. You never pay attention until it can make you look good. And you know, I do feel a bit of pity for the ones who are loved only for their wealth and beauty and intelligence. But more sorry that you have to take it out on the rest of the world, as if there were no other choice.