And Then Suddenly . . .

Look, we can just start over. I did. I've done it, several times at least. These things we think define us, they are so trivial to replace, one paycheck from losing them anyhow. Always. There are garage sales and in almost every case they won't get their price since the world is so stuck on new. Give them what you want and you'll both be grateful.

What would you say defines you that you must hold onto it so tightly? That boat which was my carapace, and I shed it. Like clipping toenails down to the quick, maybe, but it wasn't really that hard. Sure I'd invested myself, my blood even and near death more times than I can say, into every cranny, with whatever intelligence I had to hold out sea and rain and take the wind and go with it.

These structures have their beauty, no? Lines bespeaking something eternal seeming, gathering lust or what is it that compels so much energy. But for an instant why would we gather in so many things and build a legacy of stuff which will  be just that annoying for our children to dispose of?

I say start over every single day, why not? If you can do it. Not one of us really knows the Way of time. I knew, you know, that those lakes on which I grew had been carved by glaciers, and that these had come at some time of prehistory, which even now I think must be at the time of dinosaurs.

But it's not. There wasn't even time for any evolution except for the sudden kind. The killing kind, the culling kind, since we were left with furry creatures - those are the only ones which matter to us - which had to have been there in substantially the same form beforehand. There wasn't nearly enough time, and so I've been swindled. In my mind, at least, which is a theoretical construct at best.

So those lakes which seemed so ancient, and down through which I dove on wrecked boats, tit for tat exchanges, were only puddles after the rain, scraped and filled and overgrown the way that tadpoles come from the sky. I would inhabit.

It's almost Biblical, if you want to think of it that way, how these repositories of melted polar ice remain for us to suck on. How much really could it possibly matter that we piss in them and they grow fetid since it's only been a day or so. It took so much longer for the oil and gas to form on dinosaur remains. Or so they say, and why should I believe it? Why not?

What I mean is that it hasn't really been that long since humans with consciousness or of consciousness or by consciousness or however that grammar can be worked out have peopled the earth. Written history, you know, almost jumps out at you from the ice-age, incubated in darkest heart, but proved against the cold. Or was it?

It couldn't possibly matter, but we know that the written record on top of which consciousness floats, your boat and mine, goes back maybe a few thousand years at most. I don't want to be precise, since I'm not much on history and I've been hoodwinked before. About the glaciers. But I think it's approximately Biblical time and then suddenly.

What, a quickening don't they call it? And now these words they float all over in the ether, but still as always they do try to make some sense, some narrative which would be my story and not yours although we share so many genes. As for Noah, it's hard not to get drunk and slur the words, but still they strive for narrative sense even without our participation sometimes. Stuff happens.

These words so full mostly of lust and true detective facts which make your blood curdle pleasantly so long as you are not out-of-doors or alone. But you and I have only each other, so why not start over? I am as is my home, as was my carapace when I needed it, but a substrate on which my narrative floats. In which I reside. Capsized.

There are but two of us, really, these narrative lines, and I can feel no stirrings for the Chinese kind. No matter how hard I will try and have tried or even might try, I cannot go native inside that narrative tradition. It is, you know, without a God, as I remain, having talked myself right out of it since as I was saying, why not start over? But it is not any narrative at all, as confounding as a female, really, recumbent and seemingly without creative urge at all. Relentless and enduring like the good earth. Is all.

Poetics, confound it! The stuff of which stuff is made, which is what it means in the first place. It wasn't ever a narrative urge, certainly not toward conclusion, but it was a shape and it had rhythm and rhyme and meaning which seemed to happen by itself. There was no-one at its tiller, scraping long lines in the earth, for us to sow and blow away its chaff. Stirring, floating, idly by. Merrily.

Were we ever in that much control? Really? Yes we can cultivate our minds as well as the earth but toward what end? Just to grow and overgrow and finally to run out of tillage or over earth's edge and on . . . . ? And on? It can be sometimes hard to cleave unto practical matters. I like that word. It's very precise here.

Pounding then through our ways and into recumbent receptivity for it, what are we about if not destruction? Creatively, we are but a glaciated mass of liquid language held but for a moment in crystalline shapes upon some page, but that it evaporates into some ether. But not before the gouging has been completed. Without copyright at all, it would descend down through what ages are left us. There is no pencil with which to plow, nor prow, nor bowsprit anymore though I long I do long for it.

As once I did for swimming as far as I would through cool waters and sunning bottoms up grinding into warm sand. That is no more, and no regrets. I still remember.

Land ho! Ahoy! I see you there. And so why not, really why not just forget about all that stuff I left behind and gather new stuff in a new world and cultivate the wildness of it. Their terrible need to be rid of it will match my desire to have it as if it were new. I understand they really were pre-literate Chinese across the frozen straights. How could it possibly matter, since the words in either case have still come down to us, whoever it was discovered it first, which is just a pissing match into a puddle now, though we would Dam it all to hell and over.

I am but substrate not for my own story, but for the one imposed on me by my station. On the crossroads, or at them or of them or even sometimes through them. That substrate will be shed and I am I. The story only. And if that is the case, and ever will be, then these words might as well endure for longer than the I that wrote them can or even might, since endurance of that nature is just a pain. In the end. I'd rather thrust. I had rather.

It's just that I don't really care anymore. There might be a castle on a hill, or a beacon, but it's just simply too expensive and not worth its upkeep unless it be turned to the public trust for gawkers to imagine. There are these remains now everywhere and most of them more recent than you think. Than you would think, not germanic sounding schlossen so much as temples to the sacred Mary in one form or another of her. Underneath they're all the same to us.

Why would anyone do it? But if, you know, I do remain conscious and interesting and whatever words I started with have been educated out of me, or do I mean educted? Drawn from memory, and they have some energy of their own for sure. Some semblance. But if there is a me there at their center, then why not God? Actually, suddenly.

I would ask His Holiness since he's in town about now, but he's deep down just a chump like me, though in a different place at a different crossroads just by happenstance which shouldn't be so voided of sense if we were able to help it. But we aren't. I know a man who knows him. And a woman. Several, actually, on a first-name basis, or so it seems to me. Or so they almost say, though  they hang back and simply mouth it. His Holiness.

Ah but he came and went I see and I was strapped to the plow. To save enough for furnishings. I didn't even notice or pay attention. We only are negotiating price, right? He was just a man, and there are more than enough who take him seriously which after a while is just provocative. I am afraid of large forces. San Onofre set afire, but it was an outbuilding only and nothing nuclear. I spirited past in the night, last night, having lain aside my plow while others labored still to till 'til after-hours. On a Friday! Of all things.

Drink up please, it's time. I come by those words honestly, I really do, for I called them out in my youth, tending bar down under in Victoria Station, the Whistle Stop, and that should be a lesson to you. These were once the crossroads of the globe. Then  it was Freddy Laker and now it's likely some student service or maybe just a convenience store. I owe you nothing.

But if I this bag of blood and bones can still support a narrative, then why not God for earth? The quickening is that sudden. It rises like a Mayfly, and into the sand again to be washed away by unsalted tears. If we would only shut up and listen. It is not nice to shout Him down or call His name so chantlike. It makes us less than human. As we were and ever shall be.

Fanaticos at some arena, lusting for blood if we were to admit it. 'sblood. Machine-like staccato, methinks and it's time for silence. Really, would you ever with someone you don't even know on a first-name basis? I didn't think so. Those are but loose words, worth but the penny that they sell for. Mardi-gras beads to excite something which at its basis really isn't very nice. Who owns you anyhow?

Anon

Post Post

How will I hold myself together? Once again inhabiting too many places, and my memory wasn't very good to begin with. So how shall I know which of me is where? Is it true that people with prosthetic limbs eventually inhabit them? Is it also true that some have body parts which are dead weight, and they want them removed? Where are the actual boundaries of myself?

I take a train now some days into work. It skirts the beach well down below Laguna (I could have said Dana or Capistrano but Laguna sounds better) and I can watch improbable surfers in the January dawn, and realize that inhabiting my metaphor though they do, they are more at home by far than I am. They are in their element, where they want to be and willing to undergo a fair amount of discomfort to be there. (I want only my womb with a view; warmth and an easy chair) Although surfing in January does not represent a whole lot of discomfort to a Buffalo boy who scoffs at what passes today for stormy weather.

They float like seals, clustering usually, although sometimes you see one all by himself off where there probably won't be any waves. The train shakes some. I leave behind the house-sit, bedeviled by a dog which is nothing but a nightly anchor and annoying for that. It's not my dog. Or do I need an anchor?

There remains my ghost in Buffalo still, inhabiting empty furnished space. And now I sit in another other person's house, holding down that fort while my being dissipates, embedded in the same toxic work environment as you are. Where emotions get the better of team work and discussion and everyone's under so much stress that the only thing they can do about it is to pass it along to whomever's convenient underneath who doesn't seem to be holding up his end. You have let me down, or I fear that you shall. It is very important that you be afraid so that we're all in this together.

Emotions like this, you know, are the automatic response to being out of control with pressure to make some particular way when the better choice would be to surf still. It just makes you mad, and someone must be called to task.

Who are those people who can surf the age and feel in control not only of themselves, but of the audiences they command. How does that get done, or is it a confidence trick merely, where maybe if you look the part in the first place, you will be assumed to know things you don't really have to know at all. Maybe - has it always been so - if you are nice to look at then the sound of your singing voice is just better too.

I read, now, David Foster Wallace after death, though I have scant time to read. It will be a long weekend, so nicely scheduled to boost the faltering rhythm of work after the long winter holiday break. I fear or I know that I will squander this time on self-indulgence of various flavors. I know that I won't read much. A shame.

But he can't be conscious, right, dead DFW? His words are artificially animated. Though I live now somteimes right down the street from the address he gave right there on the page, or would he have actually had he lived? He must have known that he couldn't actually publish this and that's why he had to hang himself, if that's how he did it. Was it existential suicide or was it an escape from pain. Or is that the same as escape from the imperative for pleasure? I wouldn't have been able to knock him up in life, so what difference can it possibly make that I can't do that in death either. His consciousness only meant to me when it was active on the page. How would I know the difference? He's a classic now. Larger than life.

There is surely no god but Allah, and yet he is no more there. Can I ring him up or out or over? There is a book for these things too, I hear. By why would anyone read what is already obvious before you open its covers? I guess some pleasures do reward return.

Do I still insist that I am conscious? I think that means that I can tell my story in response to yours, but look how poorly I write. There will be no book and yet then what am I for if I can be gone that easily. You know, my memory does deteriorate and I can't come up with words most of the time even while speaking. Maybe my consciousness is not really something for me to decide all by myself.  And why do I care anyhow about these scattered references to myself, those things of value I leave about? Why should I feel responsible since they aren't exactly hurting anyone, those pieces of me floating around in other peoples' spaces. Do I also exist only in other peoples' minds, then? Or only in my own, where I am legend?

I think it would be my own regret is all, you know, to have a part of me lopped off that still means something to me in my mind; in my imagination there is something there. Or is it only the money? Or shall I just scatter myself so far and wide and without memorable connection that I am no more there than a lone surfer in languid motion waiting for a wave which never will come because if it would there would be others there as well. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's all there is.

I do love, though, and that's not something a machine can ever do, although I don't doubt that there are lots of substrates on top of which narratives might ride. It's just that my own narrative is so scattered now. I don't know how much I care to keep it going. It takes so much effort and did I say that there is such a toxic environment now at work.

All of us live now in our effluent because we would like to remain that separate, to ride our cars and surf to authenticity on buff bodies and more buff minds. So no wonder work is that way too, since we are that convinced of bankruptcy though, you know, the sum total valuation of wealth by any measure has never been higher. It's just that so much gets discarded, and so many people too now, because they don't look so appetizing. If they would only cull themselves and then I wouldn't feel so guilty. Cut me some slack.

But you will determine when I'm gone for good, since that's no job of mine. As far as I can tell I'm still here and now. Or I can't remember. But you know I don't have the words now any more than Dad does. It's all relative, and I'm not sure we think he's really there anymore. But he must still think so. Or is there no there there, as with California sprawl. The background can repeat itself so long as there is something foregrounded, and the illusion of motion. Pictures.

So consciousness is aspirational. I desire that you think that I know something, am somebody, have something to say and yet I cannot get you to listen to me because I haven't the words. My words are not beautiful by analog to what makes beautiful people so powerful, and so the desire I have is leading to nowhere and nothing. I don't care enough, is that right?

So I am lazy. So I am decrepit. But here I am in SoCal and I can't get warm. Were it this indoor temperature in Buffalo now I would be very cozy and nice and warm. These words that people use now just keep getting better and better and so why would anyone want to listen to mine; to believe that I have something to say.

DFW has no aspiration anymore is all. Take him or leave him he has already said all that he has to say, and for the most part he remains that attractive compared, say, to someone like me, although I think you might like me better as a pal. I would never betray you that way, nor be quite that alone and therefore apart. From you. The trouble is not that he died. The trouble is that he never did publish this book that I'm now reading, and it's good enough that you feel betrayed. Like he copped out,

There are too many words already scattered about the planet, and I cannot align mine with them. There are too many things we know are true, and yet I know none of them. And so Zizek, for instance, since I'm watching him on video at the moment, is a freak as comfortable aligning himself with brilliant words as were those abstraticians described by DFW in his history of [the sign of] infinity, which means why bother for the rest of us. Our minds are simply never that present. Never that abstractable. There is so much power in that kind of mental focus. You can, for instance, propose an atomic bomb and get it built. To what end, you ask? Well, power is a foil to fear, am I right? Am I right?

Although I won't applaud him, Zizek, because who does he connect with anyhow except for people who congratulate themselves for having understood him. Another naked emperor, because how would we know, apart from the level of their applause and adulation, that they have, in fact and in deed understood Zizek. Are they doing what he would have them do? He seems nice enough and would never insult someone to his face, I don't think. Therefore am I?

The thing with Zizek, obviously enough, is that he grew up where one wasn't allowed to read openly and write openly and think openly and so what we feel guilty about not doing because we're too busy with what he calls the imperative to enjoy, to indulge ourselves, to spend money, he found illicit pleasure in reading and thinking and writing. Imagine philosophy as sex and you might almost be as much a Stalin champion as Zizek sometimes claims to be.

But yes, that would be back to the toxic workplace; execution of someone else's demands. Is he doing what he would have them do? What would be the act which would erase the need for philosophy then? But first I must regulate the money which means that I am regulated by the machine which means that my aspirational consciousness is but a fraud since, I think, I wouldn't do it if I didn't have the space to do it which means if I didn't have the money.

We are the most regulated people in history, which hardly makes us free. The calibrations enter to our most nether reaches. Even the pennies there. We cannot share. We are digitally consumed by thises or thats which cannot be their opposites. Which is much the pity. We will surely pay for all this pleasure.

Can one talk oneself to freedom? Or is there something one must do? And once done would I be there anymore, or would it be annihilation without absence a kind of AWOL of the mind. Would the body follow? Does it ever?

And so, dear heart, I go back to reading DFW, Zizek, leMonde, laLune. There was once, I am certain of it, a moment when I was conscious. And so can you. But if I read them to sense, these words will connect me in ways beyond mere livlihood. The lowest common denominator is to be, authentically, you. About as unique as being naked. About as authentic. Original.

Desire anticipates consciousness. Consciousness anticipates destruction in dreams of immortality. Abstraction is a ruse. There is always a magic screen. There is always something uglier in reality.

Another New Year; Another Bird Flu

How long has it been, dear Reader, since I've found any time to write? I look back and find that I predicted Christmas, now come and gone. Even on vacation, my time is filled. Happy New Year!

I sit now upstairs from Mom, not having slept because I was fool enough to take an espresso after dinner out. Mom has trouble regulating her sleep as others have trouble regulating their bowels and not only in the old folks' home. Dad's language is not regulated and one can't be sure he's all there. Though he is recognizably Dad.

Home for the holidays, back from SoCal to Buffalo and glad therefore to be listening to some actual howling wind behind my head, out the window as the temperature plummets. I wonder if I can write. I wonder how to navigate the divide between what interests me and what might interest you. I think I approach writing as a problem to be solved when you, dear Reader want a story.

I know what loss of consciousness means. I sleep, and I watch others sleep and I've watched as the world closes out when I've lain dying. On the other side of that divide is only a wonderland mirror's image of the zeno approach to infinity which is death in practice. There is no crossing.

No, the hard part is to define what consciousness is. At what point does the self-regulation disappear and get replaced by automatonic processes? One could only know that from the inside. The soul a convenient supposition. It only feels as though there is some I here, I suppose.

There are certain narratives which feel inevitable. The plot is so powerful that it would be just too jarring to introduce such dissonance as would contradict the setup. Most of us can't change like that. All or none? In death, we do stop.

Multiple personalities are debunked, and it's back to being played roles and exaggerated evidence.

And yet we crave narratives to be sucked into. Books once, and movies now morphed into three simulated dimensions as though there were no end to the ways that the self-same plot can be twisted, tortured, torts, not sweet.

I watched the next installment in the Stieg Larsson after-death chronicles of a young girl who must stop the narrative and I recognize the pattern. Males whose need to dominate and impose and instill their narrative since it is the only way they can get off. And there is only one kind of force to stop it and it's female and still you are attracted to her.

The man asks - the foul and cruel and careless murderer - why then do we all fail to run even though our instincts cry out danger in the face of someone who pretends to charm us? Why do we fail to run screaming from the easy fuck? It is not fear of offense or is it?

I think it is the same reason that Mom still internalizes what Dad would have said, in some semblance of anger, about what she should be doing or thinking or feeling about, say, money. And so his actual alive presence is like some paranoid fantasy of ghostly resurrection after unresolved death.

I have no problem at all, you see, with automata in concept. Humanity can ride on almost any machine if it be complex enough. I am only the narrative riding, figuratively now, on my shoulder. The substrate hardly matters except as a strange attractor for those stories. The problem would be to make it attractive, as a focus for some feeling.

I suppose, therefore, I have no problem in principle with ghosts either. There should be enough stuff left-behind when a person leaves on which to ride some narrative continuity. The personage hallucinated must be as real, and surely the perceiver can't be accused of absence quite for presence felt, right?

The literal cartoonish Jesus might be so real. Meanwhile, I promised something about Bird Flu, which I understand has now been studied in the lab and perhaps a strain has been induced which might actuate the life-ending pandemic. It seems prudent, no? To create the strain so that it can be understood ahead of time, except that science - the process - demands a kind of openness and transparency to enable the replication which constitutes an important component of proof.

But if too many labs get the formula or its result there seems to be some kind of inevitability to its release and who knows whether the pandemic will have been induced or inevitable or whether the preparations for it will have been its cause?

Which is approximately or actually rather precisely what is going on with the CERN supercollider. Will the standard model - read "narrative" - of physics be bolstered or undermined by the probability that whatever instrumental artifacts get correlated corroborate or not the existence of this God, so-called, particle?

There are people who are automata. They know how to work your sympathies just as the predators do in that Stieg Larsson series. Like a used car salesman, they know how hard it is for you to be rude back to them when they pander their sweet inducements. In extremis, these are the psychopaths, who probably are still conscious, but in the ways machines might someday be. No emotive center.

I read what I've written previously - sometimes - and find that I no longer inhabit it. It's still familiar and recognizably me but I don't exactly remember it. I opened the door to my Buffalo apartment, still un-let, and found myself still there, the carpet vacuumed only yesterday and the kitchen still ready for activation. I had encountered my own ghost and was glad for the company of my two daughters who enabled a chuckle in the place of a different kind of howling exit.

The story of my life as it gets lived is hardly interesting. The attempts I make, now more and more infrequent,  are as unreadable as any technical manual, but no-one wants instruction on these matters.

I also watched Hugo, you know. The 3D semi-animated or is it  semi-computer-generated film which traces the magic spark that transforms a machine to life. Not bad.

A little late to wish it, but Merry Christmas! It really is too bad that so many who have expropriated Baby Jesus for themselves fail to see the magic anymore. By taking only the literal reading, they fail to see that it is the invention which has been enlivened and not the fact. I take hope that change is possible and that the roles we play will be collectively rendered into something quite watchable. Fictions of ourselves.

Yes mother dearest, the world is an awful place, and there can be no resolution to our lust for stuff. Self knowledge, yet again, will lose us our berth in Eden's paradise for surely that is the plot we now inhabit. But for the inconvenient truth that the earth can't support that particular narrative and stay alive.

The perverse incentives have us all and each trying desperately to stay afloat by finding our little advantage. Our narratives resolve themselves into hunts for the best price, and it's hard to make the connection that this is why, indeed, there are no longer any margins.

Shall it be luck which guides our identity, or shall it be hard work? Do we happen upon the gold mine's coordinates or do we maximize our chances, and supposing that we do what might be the obligation for those who conspired with us in ways small or large?

I hear now finally there is some sense of shared responsibility for the actings-out of those deemed insane by the rest of us. There are no narratives which get constructed individually, in isolation.

Well, gotta go! I say Happy New Year again and here's to some rediscovery of the commons before tomorrow becomes today.

Faster than Lightspeed

Oh dear, I really shouldn't get cute so much with titles, since my writings won't be indexed and no one will be able to get my take on the news of the day. CERN right? That superconducting supercollider or whateverthehell ya whatchamacallit. That border-crossing machine mostly underground where particles, so-called, can be accelerated pretty much the way you might swing a bolero and let fly a rock with more energy than you could get without the windup.

I'd thought they were all about collisions and detecting new particles  - that Higgs boson, again so-called, to be emitted (which really shouldn't apply to particulate matter at all) from the collision of things with more energy than they would ever have "in nature."

But I guess once you have a great machine, there are lots and lots of things you can do with it, and this one let them fling some neutrinos underground through rock to Italy where, with some degree of reliable assurance that the neutrinos arriving at the receiving end bore some relation approximating identity to the ones flung out from CERN, they would be detected.

Do the math, crunch the number and these things seem to have accomplished the transit at something greater than the one bedrock limit we've been pretty certain of up 'til now. Lightspeed wasn't supposed to be transgressable.

Maybe this is just a teaser experiment to be sure we all know that the cost of the machine can be fully justified by the surprising nature of its results.

We're all still looking for surprises, aren't we? Something really cool to get infinite energy into our cars. Some new way to think of money so that we can realize "debt" doesn't really define the condition of all the manipulative power we collectively wield up against the popular sentiment that there isn't enough to pay our bills.

We listen to readings about the economy the way we do the weather, and it fills our days with a cloudy feeling, no matter how much possibility remains for our particular daily outings. These grand science experiments loom also in the background, well beyond our ability to understand their import, but lending a sense, perhaps, of hopeful anticipation.

Where once we got an atom bomb, maybe this time there will be something a little bit less problematical.

Or maybe we won't want to see it because the problem is that we don't have any way to change our mind about what it might mean.

Every day now, I'm faced with my own ignorance about things important to my daily work. These get combine with things I'd really just like to understand to make me feel impressively impotent against the enormity of what I really can't get a handle on.

Like do they have insurance in China now that they have all those cars? What happens to a driver who hits a pedestrian in a system without lawyers and transparent judicial processes? What do the schools really feel like to the majority of kids whose work is never rewarded, no matter the 10 hours per day they must put in? What is really going on with No Child Left Behind, and are we really becoming still more addicted to quasi-quantitative measures for school effectiveness?

Idle questions, surely, but working as I do across cultures, I become impressed that beneath the wreckage of our schools we still allow impressive numbers of self-motivated individuals to pursue dreams toward improvement. Some realize these dreams with impact for the greater good, and not always because they chase after some monetary reward. For my work, I really need to know what the motivations are in China.

Does parental and societal pressure there lead to wonders similar to those we believe that we enjoy over here? Does the implicit intense competition in the face of certain knowledge that there is always someone right behind you willing to work that much harder lead to great accomplishments? Neither here nor there?

I'm getting the sense that Chinese workers, like workers in civilized places the world over, are used to long mid-day siestas, and are a bit baffled by our long workdays and unpalatable cold and hasty lunches. Maybe their Euro-style civilized workday is payback for the relentless pressure they felt in school.

I played and lollygaggled and did my basement science experiments and so now I enjoy the payback of no time in any day to ponder or read a book or consider answers to those many things I remain so curious about. This is what drives the American economy, and I'm almost proud of my hard work. But I'm also wondering if a different kind of productivity is MIA. The kind which led some among my kind to invent this CERN time-machine.

You know it makes me uncomfortable that I am valued in my work partially because I know the Chinese language. I think that's the easy part of cultural border-crossings. The really hard part is to make contact culture to culture not just for the purpose of making friends or doing business, but for the purpose of making education actually happen.

It no longer makes sense to assume that Chinese want to study in the US because we are that much better at stuff than they are. We aren't. One assumption might be that the only difference in accomplishment is that we are temporarily ascendant - that we have all the money and power - and that visiting Chinese would like to learn as much about us as possible so that they can take over that ascendant role.

But a better assumption, and the one which makes it possible for me to remain excited about my work, is that it is the differences which define the value of the education. The assumption of one party having some advantage over the other leaves the education as more of an economic transaction. Trading for comparative advantage leads to benefits for both parties to the trade for sure, but education is supposed to have a direction from ignorance to enlightenment.

I guess that's the same as the direction implied by economic transactions where the net distribution of goods and efforts means that everyone is better off than before the transaction. Despite the cloudy outlook, more of us than ever before can live in comfort and relative security with full bellies and temperature-controlled dry spaces in which to weather come-what-may.

But the end seems near. Our load upon the environment is going to break the limits of the earth's carrying power. What really will happen when that as yet un-posited limit gets transgressed? Or maybe the question is why we don't identify that limit as a universal constant, the way we once did with lightspeed? It really is the limit between life and death, and we, collectively, act like Cher now, thinking that we can cheat death with technology. Maybe in just the way that we cheated the ultimate limit of lightspeed with this supercollider.

I suspect or maybe just hope that someday real soon some among us will start to awaken to the necessary and fairly obvious conclusion that it isn't the lightspeed barrier which has been transgressed. Instead, we've transgressed a definitional barrier without even recognizing it.

Information has long been known to be unlimited by particulate transmission limits. This falls out from certain principles of quantum physics where identities distributed in time and space can be established such that knowing some characteristic at one end entails instant knowledge at the other. No matter that the spatial separation negates the possibility for the information to be transmitted.

The data is now out for analysis, but the one thing which won't happen because it can't happen is for the scientists examining the data to come up with an alternative framework for the interpretation. They will be looking for systematic measurement errors or calculation effects which caused the results to only seem as though the neutrinos could have beaten light to their receivers.

But if they did consider receiver and sender both to be a part of a single identity to begin with, well then I'm guessing that the measurement of arrival before the expected appointment is really nothing other than a measure of the degree of ambiguity in the extent of thingness of the thing being measured. It's the looking glass that's been transgressed. There will be no Higg's boson, since there is a limit to particulate reality.

The measure was a measure of the predictability of the neutrinos' arrival which turned out to have been something greater than unity; a measure, perhaps, of the extraordinary effort expended in making sure the reception was good.

I mean these neutrinos are apparently capable of a kind of shape shifting and so why can't the cloud within which speed can be detected (someTHING has to be detected to start at someWHERE and finish at somePLACE) be large enough to accommodate the lightspeed excess?

If the lightspeed constant remains intact, and assuming no gross errors yet undiscovered, then this greater than lightspeed measure is not a detection so much as a prediction of detection having enough certainty to be nearly identical to actual detection. Sort of like the perfect translation I long for, where I can 'go native' and really understand what the hell is going on when the discussions become animated and hilarious.

I can feel left out in English too, especially when watching a movie. But we all know that solid sense of being native to what's being said. There are always new expressions or words but negotiating their meaning happens quickly and with assurance. Which also creates lots of trouble.

I watch translators who work for us to provide meaningful lectures from the alien tongue of the presenters. I can get pretty frustrated knowing enough Chinese to tell when the translator just moved ahead with what she assumed was being said, and missed the point entirely because its ironic twists was being signaled beyond the subtlety of the non-native translator.

The fact is - maybe this is the only ultimate "fact" - that we can't really know the nature of reality 'out there.' It will always remain elusive, the way that "foreign language" must, but also the way that any other must. It would after all be pretty uninteresting to live in a social world where no communication was necessary. Probably even more uninteresting than one where it isn't possible.

The impulse to communicate is emotional, I think. The sum total of all the things we know or can know rendered into the vector of an impulse. (and yes, I'm bored with this too. There is no way to bring it home without, well, learning yet another language which it is beyond the span of any possible life for me to learn it in).

And so the time will come before too very long when we will once again examine our impulses. What did we think we would discover by this super-collider, if not the limits of our own ability to go native within whatever it is that still is and must ever remain outside our mind's apprehension. Did we really need this expense of energy and money just to en-state the obvious?

And what if the current model were to remain intact, augmented by the further elaboration of the Higgs boson contribution? When would boredom set in? When would we realize that the solutions we must seek now regard the political impulse to drive beyond all reasonable limits?

The Good News is that the shifted figure of emotion as part of the fundament, allows consciousness a role in transformation. Change your mind and change the world.

Well, see ya next time. It's been a nice languid few hours without work, and never enough time to finish a thought. Maybe Christmas?

More Virtuous Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bite me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For sure there is no God but Ah Ha!

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

Flash Mobs

Is it anger when individuals resolve by twitter organization to let loose anomic angst? Is it the resolve of a nation-state when cyber-attacks come in as though launched some superstar conspiracy-director qua Putin?

(Flag wavers need no direction, no do the money-makers)

Has it ever made sense to tie nations together with a currency, the Euro-busters ask. Is it really politely helpful to know my shopping habits and offer discounts for my direction? Who's directing whom here? Price is not my only modifier, I'd like to tell someone.

I anxiously await the screaming match which surely must erupt between Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman, and I assure you that this represents no libidinous displacement on my part. Plastic pneumatic toys do not attract me.

One does have to wonder how Ken dolls Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman stay civil in a room together. I suppose that's latent sexism to wonder. Well, they belong to the same club, the way that Bush and Kerry were both Skull and Bones. Women just don't have such long histories in the paneled corridors leading to the halls of power.

I learned today that selfish genes don't always rule: unrelated wasp queen wannabeeeezzzz can lay in wait to take over an entire colony when its queen dies. No anti-rejection injections required for this tissue transplant!

Reminds me of a joke I like to tell about Albert Kinsey, ideal types and WASPS. "It seems there was this paragon of high-salary one-of-a-kind leadership, who discovered that all of his speeches and memos - internal and external missives - were governed by such easily discoverable rhetorical constraints that a machine could have and probably should have written them. . ."

We pay our highest tributes, in salary or position, to those who can, somehow, channel what it is that's expected of them while still somehow managing the illusion of humanity. Look what's happened to Obama! His degrees of rhetorical freedom have been reduced until there's nothing much to separate him from a corporate CEO, a general's general, or for that matter his idiot predecessor.

I was warned not to fall for him, and it makes me really sad that I was too callow: too enamored of the sometimes great notion that there could be a leader . . .

We have resolved now - those of us who still make the trek to the public arena - into opposing teams. Our certainties have no more depth than do the thumbs up thumbs down of those once playfully and now deadly certain that the home team really should rule and death to the infidels (or was it the Christians?). I suppose that's because there is no way anymore to get to the bottom of any argument and so we go with something like our guts.

* * *

I am nearing the end of an extremely tiring summer. I have been straining to follow lively and highly nuanced  conversations in Chinese. This while I am struggling to master the political landscape of a university that's new to me.

And I do a good enough job that it's almost as if it's no big deal, what I've accomplished. I'm not talking about getting done the job I'm paid for, which has been plenty difficult. I mean that the trouble with being able to speak Chinese is that sometimes you're also expected to know the rules for drinking, for instance, which I don't. So you get measure by what you didn't do, or so the silence seems to tell you.

(Sometimes you run into someone for whom the university make sense, and you wonder how they could have so little sense of irony.)

Chinese drinking rules, it turns out, are incredibly simple. They can be taught with a few sentences as they were to me finally by a lovely young woman who could do it without insult.  Still, I feel vindicated that I hadn't been able to internalize the rules since in Chinese, I learned, they call their habits "drinking culture." Something barbarians like me might have a hard time with.

You might think "culture" would be reserved to describe more exalted activities, by you know the poets drank.In Chinese anyhow.

Strict rules for drinking are mostly observed by business-people for whom showing respect relates directly to deals accomplished. So, the kind of "culture" I'd like to internalize should be rather more nuanced, where rank ordering can shift depending on the honor claimed or bestowed or rebuffed and diffidently returned.

* * *

To hell with rules. But we have boundary issues all over the place now; 50 years after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall there are late discoveries that it also did us lots of good.

But the big bogus boundary is the one which we think keeps our mind within the confines of our head. Somehow - and honestly I can't find the reason - we think that the mind is contained within the brain within the skull. We think that we could freeze the brain, for instance, and then thaw it to find the mind intact.

The mind is composed, of course, of the innerings of various outerances from people all around us. Not just language-dependent, but language-constructed. Written tongues expand the scope, but the principle remains: there is no mind without its partaking communicatively, with myriad others. Which makes its bounding rather more difficult if not harder than the skull.

You know I struggle for compos mentis as much in English as I do in Chinese. Well, of course you know that! And I don't get the privilege in English to be supposed to know more than I reveal that I do in Chinese. In Chinese it's patently obvious that the language isn't harmonizing, quite, with the thought (whatever a thought can possibly be without the language of its expression).

As far as I can tell, I'm of at least two minds about most things. I know people who have more separation than I do between or among their various minds. Twins who split a mind between them also, conversely. And, as I indicted above, corporate leaders whose similarity one from the other might make you think they're clones.

Our striving still for authenticity or originality is misguided and perpetually will be for so long as we mistake self-contained for authentic. We must, of course, relinquish Western archetypes for God. Or at least we must not suppose God is quite apart from us.

We are not angered nearly so much by the thwarting of our will as by the violation of the archetype we inhabit. Neither God.

But, you know, serfer dude [sic] that I am now here in SoCal, I cannot impose by will that archetype on the universe around me. It will rather invest me with something that might become me. Willful people all look the same to me. Can you picture Mitt Romney surfing? Barbie and Ken only flex so far and then it's all dress-up over something which wears fundamentally the same face over the same rhetoric trying very very hard to win you over.

Verizon, amazingly, doesn't answer service calls on the weekends. That must be the best time to start a flash mob. To try for sense beyond sensation. When whatever once was called individuality is felt crushed out by impositions from faceless though differently branded archetypes, what is there to do but give oneself over to the wisdom of the crowd.

Or is it lunacy? Full moon. Full stop.

Holiday Themes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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