Avoiding My Mother and Leaning Backward Against So-called Progress

The other day some relatives visited, and I thought I should help Mom out with the socializing. As I arrived, she was in the course of explaining my next moves. Her story had a confidence about it. My ears perked up to hear the story, since I continue to have no idea myself what I'll be doing next.

Truth be told, it was mildly irritating to hear the construct. This is - obviously - disturbing to me - my being disturbed by Mom's - all Mom's - need for predictable narratives about their kids. It's my life, and you stay out of it. I'm tired of all the reassurances I have to give all the time (and by the way, could I borrow a few thou?). I should settle down already, so she can stop doing her job - you know, it's no fun to perpetuate that stupid narrative of sneaking around all the time.

Just now I was reading a seemingly well-researched article about why cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are an unmitigated disaster; how the epidemic of cholesterol was a manufactured and highly profitable artifact of  trends toward measurement and highly and perhaps dangerously incomplete models for how the body achieves various kinds of homeostasis. But this article itself veered strongly in the direction of authoritative in ways that must fall extremely short of authority if measured against developments into our futures by future science, right?!? Still, I'm proud of myself for eschewing fruit, just like the article said I should. For taking myself off Lipitor AMA (Against Medical Advice).

Like opposing walls of mrrors, my irritation is apparently endless. I came across humorist Joel Stein apologizing for making fun of the fussy parents of fussy kids who seem to be allergic to everything because  now his own son has had a miserable episode of nut allergies. But then you dig a little bit deeper and it does begin to look as though there is another narrative retreat, since it's really hard to tell the difference between an epidemic of allergies and an epidemic of looking for allergies. Mild reactions to things like nuts might, in other times, have gone unnoticed. How, well, interesting that his kid should be one of the authentic ones.

And then there's the plain fact of our increasingly mono-cultural food system which must be a pretty efficient way to engender all sorts of allergies, not to mention our antiseptic and quite apparently neurotic dirt-shunning lifestyle, coupled with lots of evidence that autoimmune and allergic reactions can be correlated with banishment of all the parasitic co-existing organisms all around us. Aren't we parasites too, on Earth, for instance? I wonder what we're good for, in the end.

We all desperately need narrative frames for our lives and even more desperately want something analogous to a steering wheel to guide them. We are hoist by our own intentional fallacy; the clearly idiotic belief that we can banish all happenstance to the side of our clear path, even as we throw our fate, willy nilly, in the face of every drunk-driving depressed neurotic hurtling toward us on the other side of the road. If we were to apply reader responses to our own narrative about ourselves, perhaps we could take advantage of some of the come-what-may of life, right?

Mostly, it works. The steering wheel, I mean. But sometimes it would be better to wander and meander and keep an open mind/heart/soul about what happens to come along.

What does one make of this famous and super-star Harvard academic whose career might be built almost purely on a narrative frame without a whole lot of evidentiary flesh to make it real? It would seem that the story alone is what has given him his pride of place. He's a good narrative spinner and perhaps not a whole lot more. Chinese, Jewish, pushy mothers, wanting their kids to study study to get and to take the advantage to be taught by the really really good narrative spinners at the top brainpower sanctioning institutions in the land.

What's this rebellious streak I can't avoid? This hurtling down roads on motorcyle into the face of storms in ancient wooden boat without a compass determination that I will meet my fate on my own terms without some superimposed fictitious scaffolding? Someone else's sanction for my fate.

What if the principal quality of human intellect has little to nothing to do with captaining ones own fate? What if luck really is the primary factor and no powerful drugs or gene therapies ever will divert that fact? I enjoy learning about - listening to confident narratives about - how nanotechnology and genetic science will be the things to determine our future. And I think, yeah, spin the wheel and take your choice and nano this! What determines our future is an awful lot more likely to have a moral content and context and be how well we resolve our collective fate, even as we all do continue to prefer the charlatans who tell us what we want to hear. We still think that we can beat the odds and master a nice life's narrative and too bad about the ones trudging alongside our highways.

Then there's Toyota's Flaw:

This should come as no surprise to anyone. Toyota's error was to make an on/off button which uses the universal symbol for digital on/off. It used to be cool, exciting, new-age and wonderful. But we're jaded. Sometimes we just pull the plug because we're tired of the crashes and the mysteries of what the hell is going on inside the box. Has it been taken over by viral terrorists, or is it poor quality control or is it something I did that I shouldn't have done? Most likely it's just that good ol' profit motive, trumping decency of the sort we used to count on.

So, the same federal bureaucracy which can't regulate the oil drilling and which approves deadly new drugs on the sayso of the industry which stands to make billons of dollars off our trust, and which can't enforce the most basic consumer protections on health insurers (ask me about it sometime - I have reams to tell) now tells us that there is no fatal flaw in the design of the Toyotas in question. It's all user error. Yeah, and it's all Lyndy England's fault that we tortured gooks, right? We never meant any harm. Not us! Only deviants in our midst.

Who the hell should we believe? Well, what does it really matter? Did you think there was a car that would drive itself? Wouldn't you panic if your car takes off on you? If someone grim comes at you with a boxcutter? And then they get to control the narrative. And the narrative changes the world, and we think we're in control, what, just because we hold a steering wheel in our hands? Are we nuts??!!! A gun to the head trumps control any day of the week.

As if context doesn't matter? Can you think quickly enough to hold the button in for 10 seconds when you're hurtling down the highway with a car beyond your control? When your files are being eaten away? When the drug they told you you needed to take might be killing you softly? When the oil is gushing? And you haven't been given the chance to add value to the effluent stream by burning it off in your own personal death machine?

But you know, I love this story. The one which has Toyota now losing billions because they got the symbology wrong. The one which brings down the Church because their priests are as messed up as the rest of us. Hell, maybe even more-so. The one which realizes, even if a bit late in the day, that Google isn't any more cute than Bill Gates was. That they're just another behemoth trying to take over the world. Hey surprise!!! What did you expect, sheep in this Hun's clothing??

That other story - the Jesus story - look at what it's done. People guide their entire lives now as though it were a true story, as though it might really matter whether there was such a man. The story was worked out over many different traditions with many different actors and it's not even that great a story, but, well, except for the fact that it's changed the world. Not always for the better, but you can't deny that it's changed the world.

It might have been nice if the capitalist behemoth of these United States could have been brought to our knees by something more imaginative than terrorists killing themeselves and 3,000 innocents in a tower and in planes. It might have been nicer still if we didn't have to even the score on the backs of untold millions of gooks who do our dying for us because we don't think they count. I want my oil and I want it NOW! How hard is it really to bring down something hurtling into its future as fast as we are? Isn't it rather more amazing, considering how many national and cultural narratives we've wrecked, that the whole behemoth holds together at all? Especially in the face of so much rightful indignation. How hard is it to bring down such complexity?

But these are the stories we have. We like to have our heros and our villains and we really don't want to believe that there is some confederacy of dunces in charge, which, by the way, there might actually be. Just not the ones you elected. We don't pay them enough. But hey, there is and always has been a confederacy of psychopaths in charge. Toyota's flaw is our flaw. Not user error, but this insane notion that we should all be in charge of our own little narrative and take credit for what was granted us by fate. You get yours, I'll get mine and then this magical invisible Jesus-hand of fate will take care of all the details.

We should all get on the bus already, or walk or ride bikes slowly.

And that Jesus story, it's the same thing in reverse. As if there's someone ready to rescue, ready to take all our flaws off our backs, ready to blame the evildoers as though there weren't some of that in each of us all the time. I mean it's nice to have somebody to blame, but really, we should pay attention to what we wish for. This apocalyptic narrative is about to finish us all off.

Now, about that health insurance consumer protection I want. Just hold the experts accountable to get and make the payments. To tell us what we'll owe ahead of time for each transaction, and never, and I mean never, stick the patient with a denial or a bill if he's covered. Let the doctor tell you yes or no, and let his staff deal with the insurance companies. And throw in some genuine understanding of statistical odds, and not the ones the writers of advertising copy want you to buy.

Caveat Emptor?? Bullshit! I'm pretty smart, but I'm nowise near smart enough to understand what goes on in the black boxes which control our lives. Why should I have to? User error indeed!!! I want the possibility for honest work, that's all. Not bullshit participation in some scam which pits me against the rubes who buy the shit I'm selling to make somebody else filthy rich. And I don't want to want a car anymore. Well, I don't want one already. I just don't want to need one. Can we at least get that one straight, people? That's a bandwagon worth getting on.

Well, enough soap boxing for a lifetime right there. You know, I'm tired of everyone's marvel that they'd love to see how the world will look in another dozen or hundred years. People actually seem to think this "progress" juggernaut has a chance to keep on keeping on. Twinned with that are the disaster scenarios. Thanks a lot Jonathan Swifty Margaret Atwood and the rest!

I'm pretty confident looking forward to a future of stepping back. Our frontiers are gone, and we just simply don't need to keep up this level of energy consumption. It would be beyond miraculous to find a way to replace the cheapness we get from oil's incredibly dense packaging of power. But we've been turned back at the Left Coast. And we would do better to slow down, rebuild the train infrastructure, live in smaller houses, spend more time in public places.

Was a time you could call the local grocery and they'd come around with your purchases. You could stop by the tailor and he'd already have your measurements - that personal knowledge we're all so excited now to be able to replicate via computer indexes and databases. Each day I get new piles of personalized stuff that I feel I should shred in case someone wants to steal me.  As if I were in cahoots with the Huns against the little local scammer who might go through my trash. We give our initiative away so cheaply, don't you think?

Now that we've abstracted away all the local and dignified talent and skill and lore embodied in the butcher the baker and the candlestick maker. Now that everything can be and is first constructed virtually, on some stinking computer screen, and then put out to bid among idiotized masses of people who are taught that they need an education to get ahead. After they've already been robbed of every possibility for dignity internalized from handiwork and experience and matches to local life.

I look forward to a return of sanity and local knowledge embodied by the ones who understand that IQ is as fictitious as Lipitor's benefits and that it's not mastery of our fates which makes us human, but moral understanding about how to share them.

That's what narrative is for. That's what I'm trying to do here. But I'm running out of gas. I'm in real danger of heading off to China to pander my native abilities with English. Which would be a shame and a waste, but, well, I could, at least, brush up my Chinese. Yeah, I guess that's what I'll do.

Meantime, as to what we're good for, we humans, we beastly species who are so proud as if we were the culmination of Evolution's blind destiny. Well, try on this for size. The soul is a metaphor, rooted best in how it is that a word means. It can't mean a thing standing by itself. It can only mean in context. Which pretty much means that we are as nothing without our entire ecosystem. Not the one we might construct, but the one which could stand to be without us right about now.

So, the problem is not "what does it all mean?" which might imply that each of us is endowed, as if it were a granted soul, by something indelible and personal and about which me need do nothing. The problem is how do we make meaning, and we've been doing that only a very brief while with and by the written word. Now as we proliferate so many words, it might be worth making a few of them mean something, and then along the way we might find a way to mean something ourselves other from destruction of everything about us *except* that supposed soul we'd thought was granted.

lalalalalalalalall

I Went to See the Mother . . .

But I never saw the play. Instead, I participated in it; a couple of times as a cop, once as a strike breaker, and for a few scenes as a coat rack. I didn't want to seem over eager, but the audience was of similar size to the cast, and they needed extras.

The Mother is written as a didactic play, a Lehrstücke according to Wikipedia. Brecht meant to break down barriers between audience and actor as between worker and consumer, or so I learned. And I had been all ready here to give plaudits galore to Kurt Schneiderman and his Subversive Theatre for something completely new and different! Hesitation always being the better part of valor . . .

But really, what a great way to get the audience's attention. You mill about the space, sometimes part of the action, sometimes sitting on the floor, sometimes getting pelted with (fake) rocks. As I like to brag here, I witnessed lots of experimental theatre Off Broadway back when that meant something, and in London; all back in my youth. Of course I remember no particulars, and it didn't change my life, apparently. I mean I'm not a theatre person and being a witness in the audience gives me no more authority than to claim that I know the law because my father is a lawyer. But I've witnessed uncomfortable experimental theatre, let me tell you. It was plenty unsettling, you know, just like the absence of a happy ending from a Hollywood movie. About as pointless?

But you aren't doing the same thing when you participate that you are when you are sitting in an audience. It's really hard to know whether to smile knowingly or appreciatively the way you might in solidarity or competition with your seatmates, or whether someone is watching you, and you should put on a show of trying to act.

A couple of times I was meant to act like a cop; a nasty. But I felt that if I was going to act like a cop I should at least show my own fear and ambivalence about what I was being ordered to do. There was no director, exactly, to tell me how to behave. But I did feel exposed and vulnerable, hoping mine wasn't the live bullet, that no-one's eyes were on me. I shot into the air over the protesters' heads. For real?

Sure, we got quickie instruction in what would happen and rough general indications of our roles. These were offered by fellow actors with whom we'd bonded by a bean-bag toss game before the show began. Or had it already begun?

These same actors had invited us in by including us in their foul language and general tired and jaded camaraderie as they got ready for the show. They weren't being paid to do this either, and maybe it wasn't all acting to feel tired and jaded. But they hadn't paid to get in, and presumably this was something they really really want to do. Act, um, on stage? Well, act anyhow.

But they acted grateful to us, and slightly pissed toward everyone absent, just as we "audience" members might have felt toward our absent crowd-mates. I was a little taken aback when someone asked me if I was OK after being pelted by fake rocks. Were they serious? Do I look that frail? Or was that person more properly still  in character than I was? I'd already sat down again to watch. I answered sincerely "I'm fine" as though the thought that I wasn't fine was a ridiculous thought. Oh!

And why weren't they just jumping at the chance to recruit me when I made eye contact after no-one was raising his hand to volunteer for missing roles? Do I look that old? That far from being able to act? Or you know, maybe it takes one to know one, like it's OK to say out loud on NPR that gay men might like Real Housewives, because of the implicit role-playing of those, um, real actual (NOT) housewives, but that no real man could stand the show. So, yeah, like women are all role-playing all the time, and can't not watch, so they said, like a trainwreck, other women making fools of themselves, but only gay men would do that? Well, it's an interesting concept, but a little politically incorrect if you ask me.

Affirmed in my manhood, still it's hard to know how to behave as an audience member thrust into the act. The play was about "the Mother," an illiterate woman who was worried about what would happen to her son if he continued to buck "the Man." It was about a teacher who couldn't see the good of literacy for people destined to remain denizens only ever of the working class. It was about co-opting workers of one stripe - a butcher, say - against workers of another and making them think that they were special for a day or a minute or the duration of a confrontation. At least you've got a job. We're rewarding you handsomely to take our side against the ruffians.

Take orders. Take direction. Or just do what comes to you or what comes naturally. The play's the thing. The mother gradually did learn to read. Unwittingly, she became the de-facto rallying point for the cause. She was that out of place, and who would attack a mother protective of her son? The teacher learned to value reading himself, and wanted to be called comrade in the end. I wished I'd had a role.

Well, I did have a role of sorts. I ran the elevator for the night, and I needn't have bought a ticket, but, well  I felt responsible to contribute, even though I'm unemployed, and don't always give handouts, but after the show there were, indeed, a few people who would have been quite challenged to take the two flights of long stairs back down. It felt like it should have been a part of the play, you know, a huge freight elevator with signs all over saying that other than the operator and his freight, people were not allowed. I tried for a paranoid joke as I crashed the gates down. You won't be getting out of here. It went over OK.

And then I brought the cage back up, in case there was someone left behind. And sure enough there was one of the actors, grateful for the lift. Er, I mean the descent. On the way down, he proceeded to tell me about how he had just had back surgery, and had gotten himself out of the hospital early because the show needed him. He'd done the earlier performances in the face of excruciating sciatica. This one nearly rigid with post-operative pain. And I'd thought that the cop complaining of his recent back surgery during the show was speaking a memorized line. A cop too lazy to work in the face of hurting striking workers. Making excuses.

I was struck that this actor's speech was halting - not what you'd think of as an actor's smooth diction. But he'd just delivered - led, really - this almost perfectly pitched and timed high speed projectile dialog. An argument. A staccato performance worthy of something David Mamet would produce. How does this work? The pivotal moment of the play, the catapulting into heightened consciousness of the importance of standing firm in protest, delivered by a man who couldn't strain his back?

Am I changed? Is my consciousness lifted? Could I have something to say if I were offered a stage on which to say it? Would I ever stand up against the Man? Well, I wouldn't pull the trigger if ordered. Not unless it was an act for the greater good and the director was shouting at me exactly what he needed me to do. This director, young Bob Van Valin, was so disarming, though. Really nice, like a tour director. So polite, when he wasn't being foul-mouthed and drawing imagineary lines we weren't to cross.

But in the end, good show old man!! Jolly good! (I'm affecting a little accent there, and, um, pretending Kurt's an old man)

The Good News and the Bad News

Well, I'm about disgusted with Leo. Leo Leo Leo, why must you do the same movies over and over again (I saw Shutter Island after seeing Inception. How could I help myself?)? But they released some meant-to-be definitive numbers for the oil leak in the bottom of the gulf. The good news is that this nearly hundred day total of nearly five million barrels is but a small fraction of the daily consumption of the US, not to mention that of the world. And just where do we think all that oil is going if not into the environment?

So, the good news is that the disaster really doesn't matter. It doesn't add up to much. The bad news is that this will then become an excuse to continue doing nothing about the real problem.

Inception

Hello World!

It wasn't all that long ago that I was willing to pay the cost of an economy car to purchase a home-built clone PC. I probably wasn't willing to pay enough to buy the brand-named item, just as I will probably never be interested to spend more than economy car prices for wheels. But it was a chunk of change - over $5K -  to have something without graphics or mouse on which to calculate complicated spreadsheets. Eventually some statistics. Mostly for word-processing.

Think of it! Nowadays, when cars are still more essential than they were even back at the beginnings for PCs, what would it take for you to be willing to spend, say, fifteen thousand dollars, to do something you can already do, but in new ways? Seemingly better ways? How much more of your world is there left to mediate, digitally. Remember the thrill of graphics? Of color? But do you remember that the price had already dropped, and that's what made your desire harden into purchase.

Can you even imagine such a thing? A fifteen thousand dollar digital device? There's very little difference among various flavors of wheels so far as what they're good for, and  yet the price differential can be intense. But less intense, really, than it used to be. There is a standard car price, just as there is a standard PC price, and the spread from luxury to abject suffering is as if from all to nothing. Cars generally work better than they used to and so the only reason to spend more is likely for comfort or luxury. If you can't pay for reliability, buy a used car. But used laptops cost more than the newer cheaper ones. And cars are really digital devices now too. A big giant brain on wheels, is how I think I heard the Ford Focus touted. The most economical car around.

These days if you see someone engaged in extreme physical maneuvers, you will almost certainly see someone nearby with a video cam. What's it called? Parkour? The Guggenheim is soliciting You-tubes for a major show of "the new" and movies have become about what a movie is about. The world has ended and we are driving on fumes. Momentum carries us as though things were still as they ever have been, word without end, amen.

It is my turn now, to get the job I really love. Now, where will I be applying? The only amazing thing about this film, Inception, is that its protagonists, the dream invaders, are still doing someone else's bidding. They have no independent source of income. They have a boss. These dream invasions are done for the purposes of corporate espionage. Victory means staving off world domination. Mac beats PC. Google rules. The movie maker mocks himself mocking his audience; the roobs who will pay to be hyped and think they can think as fast as the film can move.

I watched this one, as I once did the Lord of the Rings, right up close at neckbreaking vantage. It sucked nearly as badly. In a mall full of unselfconscious mallrats and never a one of them with video cams, since why would they need them? There is nothing apart from self-disclosure in the mall.These people all look like they want to be a porn video. Personally. Just for you, my love. Or, safely, can I pay for some private anonymous session across the 'net. You show me yours and I'll show you mine, but only one of us picks up the tab? Weird.

I picked that one up listening to Gary Shteyngart just now. How can he know about these things and I can't? He seems to think he's the last reader on the earth, the last writer, likening himself to some Jap shooter still hiding out in some cave on some Pacific island, not having heard the news that the unthinkable has happened and the sacred emperor has been defeated. No one reads anymore. But I read Absurdistan, and this guy is as far from a writer as you can get and still be published. His text is digitally mediated; all satire, no earnest sense. There is no irony left in the world anymore. No sense of irony, since it's all ironic all the time.

So Inception, the movie, insults its audience almost beyond the point of endurance. It mocks all chase scenes, all shootemups, all secret agent movies, and the only thing I don't get is why the protagonists still have to have employers. I mean if you can dig into people's dreams, shouldn't you be self-employed at the very least? Shouldn't you be the master of the universe instead of minioning for some other master? Or is that how they work out the bad guys' bullets never landing?

But really, the moment of Inception is when you are up against it. When you return from Seattle, say, to Buffalo and you just can't help noticing that the people in the commuter airline ghetto out of JFK have last years' model of laptop, smartphone, clothes, looks on their faces. You can't help but wonder if the genepool has been drained by the cooler places, or is it just a matter like those vanity photoshoots you used to be able to do for your boyfriend, where you get all made up like a whore or like a bride and that's what they do in cooler more moneyed venues. Some combination of both by each?

But really, when you want that kind of beauty then you are a rapist as were these mind-fuckers in the movie as they were doing to you in the audience, and it isn't art or literature or even satire. It's rude and deadly to your soul. Don't watch it. It really really sucks. I don't even know what I'm saying, but I know the message has been implanted. Don't watch it if you value your soul.

Fluid Dynamics

Extreme heat, then cold, then coffee, then a/c, having something to do with salt, I think my body can't calibrate properly. On a hybrid car, a Prius, say, not to name any corporate names, there is a pump to send coolant over the inverter, which is an electronic contraption to convert Alternating to Direct Current, and there is no fully lossless way. So there is waste heat, I'm thinking each time you put on the brakes, which means regenerate, and each time you draw from the battery.

And when the pump fails - I happen to know this - the entire car basically shuts down with error codes as if a fundamental connection were loosed. But there is also the possibility of a vapor lock, as happened on my P-P-Passat, when they were p-p-pretty sure that it was the heater core clogged, but it was bubbles and my logic was unassailable.  Because loosing the bubbles made heat, and so the clog theory didn't hold water, but, well, maybe there is something about changed balance, as when the inverter cooling pump decides to fail in extreme heat. Was it only losing power over time?

My body fluids - the blood in this case - were obstructed by a clot, a clog, in the lungs near the heart pump which might have shut down in response but didn't. But the inner view was a lot like the kind of crazy which I am apparently susceptible to when the correspondences in the world play games up against the ones I might think about and talk about and eventually maybe even write about. I'm like the guy who counts the cracks in the sidewalk, looking for signs then? I hope not.

My words are going. I spend time - not quite so bad as my Dad - snapping my fingers or making spin ahead motions with my hands trying to come up with words or with connections among memories, and a lot of the time they never do come, and so I am left with the connections which do come, of themselves as it were, in the events impinging on me. Radiator, heater, coolant, pump, bubbles continuum kind of stuff.

Which, at the end of the day is why I am so curious to explore the blogging genre, if it can be called a genre yet. Because of its immediacy, it has to be about impingements just beyond one's control. As in, you cannot really make them happen. You can't be the editor in charge of what is going on around you. At best you can choose to pay attention, but then eventually you yourself might get weirded out by the consiliencies among the stuff you notice which also seems beyond your power just to pick and choose. The world seems to focus. Not only your attention.

Let's say you have a plan. An idea in someone's canonical sense of how this works. And you set out intentionally to marshal your words, using skill and planning and malice aforethought, you make some sense for some reader somewhere. But if the sense is coming at you, like numbers from your landscape, then you have to wonder about the integrity of the one doing the noticing. That would be a little bit like planning to win the lottery.

But, well, what else is an individual, if not a noticer, a nexus, among happenstance? To be otherwise is to build, merely, on the stuff with which you've been didacted. That's what mastery of genre means, right? To increment along the way toward something authentically yours. But, well, what if you relinquish that claim right at the outset and make yourself Bartleby content only to reiterate what impinges, but finally without master, even without a self as master and without preference, finally, even to eat?

Surely it is a mind which notices the metaphoric crossings, yes? These are not in the things themselves. Surely. And if I notice things which do but seem to conspire because I notice them, I still may not have caused them. There are plenty of things I haven't noticed. Without the words, what would there be? Is there progress then beyond words, as there was Inception before them? Words must destroy as much as they create.

Words individuate, and divide which from t'other. Ultimately, this quest for individual authenticity ends with castellated aloneness, right? With some perfect physical comfort but without consilience because all has been brought within control. Order will all then be imposed. I shall not want.

Well and so my blog is clogged. Rats!

Out Flooded

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


By misrerable happenstance, I have found myself reading end-of-life-as-we-know-it books. Watching movies. I hate these things. Why must everyone show us ourselves in the funhouse mirror as if we don't already know these things. As if the oil does not still spew beneath the surfaces we do know. We can read. We can watch movies intelligently. Why does no-one offer something better. Something more like a way out?

I have read The Road now. I watched The Book of Eli. I hear of God and Word all around me as we all, collectively, hallucinate our demises. Gak. I don't need hapless romance. Christ!

Authors are smug, as though they see these things ahead of our time. I stole this book, I borrowed it with a click from my local library which offers it in e-form, and I am amazed that there is no line at whose end to wait as there is for The Year of the Flood which I might just have to purchase. It's not like dear Margaret Atwood can live enough longer to appreciate her royalties. I shouldn't feel so bad. Actually, I don't. She makes me mad now. Is a cautionary tale all that is on offer from our best minds?

I so want to offer hope, to see hope on offer, about how it is that humans are Earth's mouthpiece and not in voices, not in written words, in fulfillment of what was already always implicit. Still, those who cannot read will never know. Those who worship their own richness, their bodies, their foodist intake of ever more delightful essences. They can never see it coming anyhow. A writer wastes her breath.

But I know how to read. I can appreciate Atwood's prose which rehearses her project, to project consciousness of what it might mean to be human if only we could break free of venality, is that the word, or is it, also, extinct? As humans are as are all things natural, as Atwood has internalized, yes she has, masculine mankind and it does not leave her proud. Patriarch be gone!

These things will end, as has our entrancement by things perceptual which are all that we can control. It is our minds which conspire, through words, to make a thing conscious which has always been and ever. Relations in the mind alone and humans alone can run this thing - the mind - above the grey matter of their silly brains. Cocksure, I wish she would pay attention to what is going on among Mama Grizzlies! We men are slumbering still, living large and in charge of what is already that far beyond us.

In the beginning I really didn't think she was all that brilliant. As a writer. Now I know that she is, and I will read, with relish, the Year of the Flood. I will watch that story enacted all around me, understanding that not only human life, but all life can be snuffed out, to start again, by Mother Earth awakening and dancing careless of her methane farts alighted.

I understand, I undertake to understand that it is time we leaned to use our minds which would mean to loosen and not to assert control. To re-enter flood, the flow, the thing which makes its own road, path, Way. Lunatic undertow. Subversion. There is a way forward. Damn!

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Subversive Shorts Bee Lineup, AKA "A"

With a start, I realized that I should have been up in Toronto where all the real subversion was happening last night. Too late. I've been preoccupied with family matters, and numb to the world stage. Our own Seattle right around the corner, where acting up can make a difference. But then I watched a burning police car via over-the-Internets video and it looked so Canadian. Almost as if they have no interest in fanning flames of provocation. According to Michael Moore, they don't even lock their doors. And the cops with batons were equipped with bicycles, of all the crazy stuff. They were probably dialed in to the subversives' Twitter accounts. No-one looked very guilty. Not even the police. We're such hosers down below.

Subversion gets no satisfaction these days, and there are still unaccountably scant audiences down at the Theatre. Which only means that there's more room for YOU. These shorts are good!

I can't quite agree that this "A" or "Artaud" lineup is better than the one I saw last week. These short one-act plays were certainly engaging, but sometimes veered in the direction of a Saturday Night Live skit, which was what I fell asleep to last night, literally. Well, it was a re-run, so it wasn't technically "live", but it was live once! (Eat meat, it's what's for dinner, though you should eat stuff which was alive and not in industrial feedlot simulating life, as I learned the other time from the "B" lineup) It could just be the venue which keeps the crowds at bay - I'm pretty sure that if you threw these shorts up on a television screen, or a YouTube say, audiences would howl. Buffalo-born has made the world stage before!

Real theatre (sic) is face to face in a way, although I think if the actors were to make eye contact of the sort real people do they could never quite do the incredible job they did here last night. These actors were *in* to their roles. What a pleasure!

To run them down - not like police do, but like reviewers do - there were middle schoolers acting like adults negotiating gender politics as on the world stage of trade negotiations to our North (I might have my scale and venue mixed up). There was a traffic control disembodied voice posing as a very masculine God. There was celebration of the quiet choices of the abused women of the world, stood in for by an offstage silent smiling nun of ones imagination. The sister act-ed by a gay woman celebrant of absent judgement toward dronish subservients in a patriarchal structure of abuse which hardly becomes the Universal Church of Men. There really were bees composing Genesis, with some gender role reversals. Well, all you have to do is to imagine queens and drones and this was funny honey. Sweet. A Boorish banker opening an American do-gooder NGO-sponsored eco-tourism mecca down in South Africa with ironic twists. I mean, talk about ironic! You don't even know.

I don't know if life imitates art, or if the other way around, and how come it all coheres if only in this one mind, but each play plays on the others and on reality, so-called, and there's microcosmic shift which might be enough. It always has been. Did you think the world could change its mind all at once?

I'm not kidding, this was good stuff. The first short was acted out by students at the Performing Arts High School Magnet (another Buffalo invention), which is surely harboring some talent. Some good teaching. Some almost unbelievable presence on stage. The monologue by the gay sister of the sweetly innocent nun was performed so convincingly that I felt as though she stood for everyman, liberated, constrained, uncertain, freed, holding back from judgement herself, though she had every right to toss firebombs. On the model of silent women the world over who need honoring, but not, you know, worshipping.

And really, you should see actors channeling bees looking down on us humans-without-awareness. Divided as we are from the continuum of life. Genesis. Exodus. Who knows how the world will change? One awakening at a time? Person to person? The bees really are telling us something about our mono-culture, I mean the real bees, the ones we depend on for our pollination and our lives, and, um, I think we can't live without them, no matter the buzz down in South Africa which drowns out the thoughts of superstars. We didn't project our dreams on that screen this time, did we?

Right before the show I installed a new battery to the supposedly irreparable iPod my daughter's cat accidentally showered. People camped out all night to get the latest of these false presentations of seamlessness, interfaces without any way in. Willing to overlook flaws at the cost of a fatted service contract, as though they never crash. I will not refrain from opening smooth exteriors, you know, certainly not because I've been mesmerized by Word or words or acting.

The place where I bought the iPod battery represents a mission to protect landfills from poison superannuated electronic gear by demonstrating how easy it is to repair. Yeah, I know I'm being greenwashed, but, well, still I'd rather watch live theatre than participate in staged protest, and the "genius bar" just tells you they don't fix these things. I'm no sucker for guys in robes representing some mysterium.

Who knows how the world will change? The only thing that we do know is that it will, because the math doesn't work out the way we're going. Why not start here? Why not now? As my friend and I were walking out there was a full red moon just above the treetops, over the low buildings of this supposedly dying city. Now I just found out that I'd missed it's eclipse. The moon's, I mean, not the city's - for that I've been fully present. These menstrual pulls cannot be gainsaid by my manly artifice. My head was turned, as was God's, on stage, by flesh. Hey, I'm human. I'm implicated. She was hot!