Descanting On Mine Own Deformity

Dream Song

2011-11-30T07:42:00.000-08:00

Let an apple / nurture itself / into your / hand
Let a feather / snowflake / hover onto / your turned-up face
All this / and more / will be given / to you
If you can / remember / how to / receive it

You have gone / many journeys
Journeyed / many miles
You have been / many people
Lived / many lives
Now you are / home again
Now you are / home

A man stands / on ranchland / where
Where once his father / was murdered
Where once cranes / waltzed in snow;
A child of seven / mimed their movements

Comments on a Sunrise

2011-11-13T07:28:00.001-08:00

I watched the sunrise slowly expose the contours and colors of Catalina. At first it was only possible to see the profile of the island, not entirely unlike the profile of a body lying in state with its hands folded over its groin. The light went on to reveal textures and depth by grades and by degrees. From the vantage point of the Newport shore, on an exceptionally clear day--a day like today, a day after a rain--it is to distinguish brown slopes and patches of green scrub and the pixels of individual houses on the hillsides from twenty-two miles away.

I've been to Catalina a couple of times--seen its compromised wilderness and its blue waters and the town of Avalon, which is kitschy as fuck--I know it's a real place, beautiful in some ways and trashy in others, like most places I've been, though perhaps somewhat more beautiful than most. But seeing it like I saw it this morning, a person could believe that it is not some mundane place at all, but a locus for wonder and possibility, a frontier, an undiscovered world.

Such illusions necessarily fade, but they are glorious while they last. Such moments as these, though they come perhaps only a few times a year and last only scant minutes at most, can, in their remembrance, make tolerable the more vast by far slog of mundane time marked by disinterest and unmet thresholds and repetition.

Stupid Phones

2011-01-13T05:54:00.001-08:00

Let me be upfront about this. I do not have a smart phone. I have a stupid phone. I have what is just about the stupidest phone it is possible for a person to have, it being a $20 prepaid cellphone that I have had repurposed for long-term use. It has no web connectivity, no apps, no nothing. It sends and receives calls. That's it. That's all it does. I suppose I should add that sometimes it receives, unbidden by me, a text message, and it can do that, too, although I'd never respond to any such text in kind. I have neither the desire to pay an extra X dollars a month to respond to a text message in kind, or the desire to cultivate the ability to easily type on a phone keypad rather than communicating by means of voice or email, either of which is more convenient and doesn't cost anything.

My phone is very stupid. And yet it is adequate for my needs nearly 100% of the time. I didn't get a cell phone until I was 26--four years ago, some years after cell phones became "ubiquitous"--and I still think that, for the most part, it's a waste of money for me to pay to have one at all. In all honesty, if I were to put my cellphone through the washing machine (again) and not replace it this time even with the cheapest piece of shit possible, I don't feel that my life would be negatively impacted in any serious way.

I receive probably two or three phone calls a week. I make maybe one or two. And my phone, stupid as it is, is fine for this purpose. If I miss a call, my phone tells me the number of the person who called me. It even stores important numbers for me.

What else do I need a phone to do?

Do I need a phone that lets me slice digital images of fruit in half by making strokes across the screen with the tip of my finger? Not really. Would I like a phone that let me slice digital images of fruit in half by making strokes across the screen with the tip of my finger? Eh, maybe. Do I want to pay ten times as much for a phone that lets me slice digital images of fruit in half by making strokes across the screen with the tip of my finger, and pay more every month for the privilege of having a data plan that allows me to download the program to my phone that lets me slice digital images of fruit in half by making strokes across the screen with the tip of my finger? No, I do not.

I might like for my phone to be able to give me a weather forecast, or to let me know if I have any email. But I do own a computer, and the times when I would need to know these things when I am away from a computer--the times when I actually *need* this information on the spur of the moment--are very few and far between.

Smart phones are a fashion. Smart phones are a trend. Smart phones are a bourgeois affectation. And by that I mean to say that smart phones are purchased more for the sense of belonging to a group--a group of tech-savvy, up-to-date, digitally hip people--than they are purchased for any actual utility.

There will come a day, of course, within the next century, when people will feel completely unable to operate in unaugmented reality. I know that day will come, and my resistance will do nothing to stop it. We will *need* to have that level of information about us, at all times. And that will be a horrible day when we betray most of what makes human beings interesting--namely, our capacities for spontaneity, discovery, and originality.

The gentle reader might be screaming in insulted outrage at this point, wanting to chime in and say "Shut your face, you self-righteous late-adopter asshole! I use my phone for X,Y, and Z! I *need* my phone!" And that's as may be, and I may be a self-righteous late-adopter asshole. But what does a phone do that we really *need*? Allow us to be accessible 24-7, wherever we go? Since when did that become a necessity? What the fuck could anybody ever tell me that could ever be so urgent that a response would be required of me immediately, wherever I was?

Worst case scenario, you call me and tell me my parents have been in a car wreck and are now in the hospital. Even then, *even then*, I don't know what sort of response I'm supposed to present that is both timely and meaningful. You might as well let me know that by means of a physical letter, for all the good that my response will do.

If we feel we need to be available to anybody, anywhere with a phone at all times--if others feel that they need for us to be available in this way--I think it's time we seriously re-examine what passes for "needs" among us.

Do I *need* to respond instantly to any email that a person should send to me, such that I need to have the capacity to type up a response in my pocket at all times, type up such a response on a keyboard that was engineered for the slim fingers of a prepubescent Japanese girl rather than the blunt thumbs of an adult Germanic male? What reality do I inhabit that is so brutally urgent? If I inhabit that reality, fuck that reality. I'm opting out, and I'd prefer to be labeled an insane deviant than sane by some metric of eternal accessibility to the demands of others.

I will continue to find value in my life in exact proportion to the material affectations I am able to do without, freeing me for meaningful pursuits and *intimate, meaningful, and nuanced* communications with people. I will continue to reject the assumption that my life is meaningful based upon voids which are filled by mere *things* that I *need*.

The great trick of contemporary capitalism has been to alienate people from their natural state, rendering an unaugmented life impossible where it is not illegal, taboo, or outright impossible. Contemporary capitalism creates needs where none before existed--needs for human interaction that are best solved by actual human interaction rather than artificial surrogates, but where human interaction becomes increasingly impossible owing to the mediation of technology. Contemporary capitalism then provides products that encourage a further state of anxiety and alienation that can only be ameliorated by more, better, and new products, when all the while what is out of balance is within the individual himself, and not in his accouterments. It gives us mostly useless toys that we trick ourselves into thinking are indispensable tools, until we've come to rely on them such that we no longer remember how to do without them. Nuts to that, I say.

That being said, I really fucking want that interactive star map app that I've seen in the Droid ads. Oh, fuck, do I want that.

Get Thee Behind Me

2011-01-10T09:38:00.001-08:00

Some days you have no other way of describing your experience other than to say you are fighting with the Devil in the desert. You tell him to get behind you; even then he haunts your sleep and he haunts your every step. He's right there when you look up. He is tempting and taunting. And you are malleable and fallible and carnal and mortal. You know damn well that you are nothing more than a man. The devil knows damn well that he is going to outlast you.

A Bit of Absurdity in the World

2010-11-29T08:42:00.001-08:00

On my drive home on the southbound 5 through Oceanside, I pass by the Cavalier Mobile Estates. I have often considered this nonsensical juxtaposition of words. Cavalier—as in the dandyish Royalists who fought against the Puritans in the English Civil War? It's hard to imagine such a cavalier laying his belaced head down in a mobile home. Or “cavalier” as in “reckless, pompous, arrogant?” Again, when I think of mobile homes, these aren't necessarily the first qualities that come to mind. Or how about the bizarre idea of a mobile estate? Thinking back to what an “estate” has meant historically, it might well be the hundreds of acres that a nobleman—a cavalier, say—used as his personal hunting reserve and riding range and open space park, et cetera. I guess back in the day an “estate” was a mansion and environs which were expansive enough and subjugated enough such that the common folk working on the estate produced enough wealth to sustain the mansion at the middle. None of that really makes sense when you're talking a paved lot that is about three or four feet bigger on a side than the mobile home at the heart of it. Or how ludicrous is it to be talking about a “mobile estate” in the first place—as though an estate in the classical sense were something so inconsequential that you could pick it up and carry it around?

When I think of a mobile home, I think of depressing poverty. I'm sure there are exceptions to this; I'm sure that not all occupants of mobile homes are depressed or poor. But I very much doubt that very many of them are gallant princes wearing velvet and lace and riding off to show those upstart commoners what's what.

The Broken Cog in the Unmade Watch

2010-11-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

Of late I have been given cause multiple times over to think about deterministic universes, and how I seem to personally experience all the guilt and dread of living in one without seeing any evidence whatsoever of any sort of extrinsic judgment of human actions to reward virtue and punish evil--much less any universal definition of virtue and evil--beyond the feeble machines of human institutions, which are often subverted to support systemic cowardice and arrogance and greed for the material and psychic benefit of their subverters. And yet, acknowledging the material and psychic benefits of evil (e.g., believing my country has a God-given right to invade another country and take its shit), I will not allow myself to be evil, whether out of dread of a deterministic universe or out freely willing to generate what good I can so that what reality we enjoy might be less dreadful and painful, all the while suspecting that my perceptions of minimizing my own contributions to a general suffering and contributing in good faith to a general good have been subverted by my own cowardice and arrogance and greed.

I thus seem to have the worst of both worlds.

A Poem Written On The Occasion of a Rain

2010-11-08T07:07:00.000-08:00

I fear my friends the funnelwebs shall not feast today, as their webs are full of water: drizzle, mist, and spray. Colorless droplets depend--a frozen moment's unfalling rain; any wary insect should see this and should fly the other way, rather than serve my friends the funnelwebs in some capacity as prey.

Being on the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States

2010-09-15T05:44:00.001-07:00

Some weeks ago I heard about how Dr. Laura Schlessinger, a prominent radio talk show host (who is not, in point of fact, a psychiatrist or a therapist), felt compelled to leave her radio show after she had repeatedly used the word “nigger” on the air and criticized a black woman for feeling offended about it. This caused a number of Laura's sponsors to retract their sponsorship, and Laura then said she was retiring from radio in order to protect her right to free speech.

And yesterday you, student who alternates between talking when I am addressing the class and sleeping in class, who packs up ten minutes before class is to be dismissed, and who has never failed but to address me in a tone more suited to reprimanding a dog than addressing the instructor of your class, told me about how you felt that your own right to freedom of speech was abridged in the classroom environment because you were being evaluated on your adherence to the opinion of the instructor rather than any other factors. I have told you and the rest of the class that this is not how I evaluate your work; that I evaluate the work in my class based upon the strength of the arguments, their clarity and their use of evidence, not if they happen to be in accordance with my own beliefs, outside of my own belief that the best arguments are those based on reason and evidence, that is, and the employment of such is the best way to persuade others of your position. Pursuant to that expressed belief, here is my carefully reasoned counter-argument to show you that your argument that I am abridging your free speech is bullshit:

The text of the First Amendment is as follows:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Nowhere in those lines does it require all instructors to give As to all students for all work.

The right to free speech doesn't give you the right to choose how other people respond to your speech. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from any and all consequences of speech. The First Amendment does not, can not, and should not protect you from other people disagreeing with you if what you say is bullshit. To say that “congress shall pass no law” about something doesn't proscribe the personal reactions of all people all across the country. The federal government won't put you in jail for spewing bullshit, so long as you're not making violent threats against the government; spewing bullshit may still carry social and economic consequences. The First Amendment doesn't pretend to protect you from that. And thank God it doesn't; I'd be very afraid of any law that criminalized the act of thought or the capacity people to respond non-violently to the thoughts of others. Yes, you have the right to burn a Koran, and I have the right to think you are a total asshat for doing so.

I don't accept that you have a right to say whatever you want, whenever you want, inasmuch as doing so infringes upon the rights of the others. Insofar as my limited lights lead me, I don't believe that the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States was ever intended or interpreted by a court to guarantee the right of anybody to say anything, whenever, and that nobody be allowed to voice a dissenting opinion. The disruption of a classroom by means of constant talking, for example, doesn't seem to be protected by the First Amendment insofar as I read it; the First Amendment doesn't seem to guarantee that any one voice always be privileged over others.

The First Amendment does not insist that I hold any and all speech to be equally true, or important, or well-informed. The First Amendment does not demand of me that I not ignore my own personal and professional standards for the evaluation of speech, such that I become incapable of evaluating whether or not any given speech act (i.e., an assignment) measures up to the standards that I and other professionals in my field have established for determining how whether the speech act meets the standards of our profession regarding the well-reasoned, evidence-based, persuasive construction of an argument. I do not claim that a professional writer will always necessarily have more access to knowledge about writing than an incoming student, or that the student's assertions about writing should automatically be discarded in favor of those of the professional writer. I do claim that the First Amendment does not indicate that an uninformed opinion, because it has been the most recently expressed, is automatically allowed to trump an informed one by means of some sort of magical thought law.

In short, your freedom of speech does not extend to your having the freedom to force me to like what you say. My attention to your speech, and my estimation of it as something worthy, are a reflection of my own freedom of speech, which extends to my freedom in choosing what speech I want to listen to. And you must employ discretion in your freedom if you want to gain my attention—you must choose to use your speech in such a way that I choose to listen to you. My attention must be earned, my good will swayed; and what have you done to earn my attention, and what have you done to persuade me of the rightness of your position other than badger me for not accepting what you claim as its inherent rightness? Maybe, student, if you spent more time staying awake and paying attention in my rhetoric classroom and less time sleeping or talking, you'd realize the weakness of your position. Maybe, student, you'd realize that I am trying to give you the tools to make other people pay attention to you and hold your opinion in high esteem, and that arguing from a position of outraged entitlement is not one of these tools.

That I continue to allow you to express your opinions in my classroom, calling on you whenever you raise your hand just as I would any other student, is a reflection of my own belief in free speech that goes above and beyond that defined in the Constitution. I am such a believer in the value of the diversity of opinion that I will not, in point of fact, show you this argument, for fear of quelling your voice in my class entirely. I will instead call you in for an individual conference, and ask that we find some way to reconcile your pre-conceived hatred of me and the school experience in general with the necessity of your participating in the class in a constructive way in order to pass it.

But don't think for a minute that, outside of the context of the classroom, I won't think you're in grave error for misrepresenting and abusing the traditions of democracy in this way, and for absorbing this stupid and wrong idea that freedom of speech means you get to say whatever you want and people aren't allowed to respond to it.

Aural Analysis: "Bad Romance" by Lady GaGa

2010-08-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

Another commute, another aural assault. This time it was the GaGa-thing’s “Bad Romance.” I had this song stuck in my head for something like five or six days, and only managed to finally expunge it by means of a liberal application of Viking metal and medieval Norwegian folk songs. But then, yesterday, as I surfed through the vaster wasteland yet that is SoCal radio, the GaGa-thing came crashing back at me. As will be evident from an examination of the lyrics, the Gaga-thing is fixated on revenge; I believe she is reaching through the radio to make a personal attack on me. Well, it’s time for me to fight back using the only weapon available to me: Swiftian wit.

It’s notable that I heard “Bad Romance” three times on my way to Orange County, rather than the subsequent single, “Alejandro.” Is this owing to the absolutely outrageous acts of homosexual gang rape and blasphemy and Nazi fetishism in the “Alejandro” video that represent GaGa’s crossing of three too many lines? I wonder.

Before I begin, I should say that I actually have some modicum of respect for the GaGa, if only a modicum. In the intellectual desert that is contemporary pop music, I must concede that she exhibits some shred of originality and talent. She is the best of the worst. She can sing, and isn’t all autotuned to Hell and beyond. She has talent. Her songs are undeniably well-crafted; they are all earworms waiting to happen. She and her collaborators have catchiness down to a science.

But oh, how she opts to expend such on weirdness and fetishism when she could probably use it to make much better music. There is a Tori Amos inside of Lady GaGa, trying to get out but constantly getting beaten back by means of bizarre displays of perversion. So my criticism of the GaGa-thing is a criticism of misused ability, rather than a criticism of an absolute lack of ability, which is the criticism I might level at, say, the current incarnation of the Black Eyed Peas.

You want my revenge, GaGa? Oh, I’ll give you my revenge. As before, my responses to your lyrics are in the brackets. As before, I offer the video up to those who, in their innocence, have been spared the seeing of it. It would be another essay entirely to describe the aesthetics of the video which…I actually really like, much as it tries to toe this weird line between sexiness and repulsiveness which…I actually really like. But whatever. The song still be dumb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I

Let’s go, GaGa. Me and you, toe-to-toe, no maybe.

Oh, and spoiler alert: if you have not already seen Vertigo, you suck.

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

Caught in a bad romance

[These are the lead lyrics from the lead single for The Fame Monster album, intended to describe the negative aspects of celebrity culture. I think the concept is breaking down here; bad romances are hardly exclusive to trashy celebrities. I, being about as unfamous as it is possible for a person to get, will attest to that.]

Ra Ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma Roma-ma
GaGa
Oh la-la
Want your bad romance

[Let me stop you right there, Dame GaGa. Now, I know your name implies that you have only a cursory apprehension of human language (and your video reveals that you have an outsider’s dim and unintuitive appreciation of what human clothing is supposed to be), but that doesn’t mean you have to actually employ strings of baby-talk in your lyrics. You’re an adult, as your video abundantly reveals. You can use adult words. Can’t you?

Okay. Let’s keep going.]

I want your ugly
I want your disease
I want your everything
As long as it’s free

[Wow. Apparently, being ugly and diseased and poor, I am the GaGa-thing’s ideal lover. Nobody tell my fiancée.]

I want your love
Love love love
I want your love

[It really takes something for somebody to make an expression of love sound like “blah, blah, blah.” Thank you, GaGa-thing, for cheapening affection and emotion.

Actually, no. I take that back. I’m not going to thank you for that, not even sarcastically.]

I want your drama

[You do? Okay. I’m going to see a performance of King Lear next Friday night in Garden Grove. Would you like me to get you a ticket? It’s only $14.50 on Goldstar, which I know isn’t free (freeness being apparently the threshold for your love, in spite of your otherwise overwhelming materialism), but it’s close enough to it.]

The touch of your hand

[Wow, Lady GaGa. That actually sounds…totally human and relatable. You’re slipping.]

I want your leather studded kiss in the sand

[Oh, good. You’re back to being a freaky weird person again. Don’t ever change, Lady.

On a different note, can you imagine how awful a “leather-studded kiss” would be? It makes me think of studded leather armor. I do not want to kiss boiled leather onto which circular metal plates have been affixed. If my lover’s lips had that texture, I think I would need to get a better lover. Or some serious fucking chapstick.]

I want your love
Love love love
I want your love

[When you say that, Lady GaGa, somehow I don’t feel as though you’re being sincere. Something tells me that, in spite of your repeated requests, that if I were to try and give you my love I would very quickly be getting some hate from a bodyguard’s boot.]

You know that I want you

[I do? Well, okay, Lady GaGa. I guess you can have me. But I’m going to wear about seventeen condoms. I don’t know where in the universe you have been, and frankly, I don’t want to know.]

And you know that I need you

[That’s funny. You seem to have been doing pretty well without me up until now. Your vitamin-me deficiency hasn’t much affected your ability to wear spinal-cord extensions and twitch like vat-born abortion that you are.

I want it bad
A bad romance

[Alright, so let’s examine this wanting of the bad romance. What qualities does a bad romance have that you find desirable? Tragic failure? Does that mean you do want to see King Lear with me? Or are you drawn to the emotional or physical abusiveness? If so, I know a certain Katy Perry who, judging by her song lyrics, is desperately looking for a sub to dom over. You girls should hook up.]

I want your love and
I want your revenge

[Well, how convenient for you! ‘Cause that’s exactly what I want to give you!]

You and me could write a bad romance

[You know what? I bet we actually could. The bad romance that you and I would write, GaGa, being drawn together by a volatile mix of queasy lust and utter disdain, would be near-unlimited in its badness. I’ll take the first chapter; you get the second.]

I want your love and
All your lover’s revenge
You and me could write a bad romance

[Yes, I still think we could, too.]

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Caught in a bad romance

[Hey, wait. When did you go from wanting a bad romance to being caught in one? In the space of like two lyrics? You move too fast for me, Lady GaGa! Usually it takes at least eight lyrics for me to commit.]

Ra ra-ah-ah-ah

[Sis-sis, boom bah-bah. Are we doing some role-playing now, Lady GaGa? Are we supposed to be late 19th century college cheerleaders? Are we supposed to be reciting some sort of prayer to the Ancient Aegyptian sun god? Or are we back to talking in proto-linguistic babble syllables again? So now you’re into submission and paraphilic infantilism. That makes some kind of sense, I guess.

Oh God. If Lady GaGa starts to make sense to you, fear for your sanity.]

Roma roma-ma
GaGa
Oh la-la
Want your bad romance

[Yes, I know. Your wanting of my bad romance is abundantly clear at this point.]

I want your horror

[Really? First you want to go to see King Lear with me, and now you want to go see Piranha 3D? Well, okay. But we’re going Dutch. International superstars in my company can pay for they own damn tickets. And, seriously, have you seen the prices for a 3D movie these days?]

I want your design

[Uh? Well, I’m not much of a designer, but okay. Besides, seeing your outfits, it’s not like I could possibly do any worse than the designers you already wear. An eyeless ape who has had half of his brains scooped out with a spoon could probably design more attractive clothes.]

‘Cuz you’re a criminal
As long as you’re mine
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love

[You know, Lady GaGa, you’re an adult human female (I think?), and I’m an adult human male, so for you to have my love would have would probably be legal in most areas. Then again, I am confident that if anyone could start at consensual heterosexual sex and end up at the point of criminal sexual perversion, it’s you.]

I want your psycho

[So you want me to dress up like a woman and stab you in the shower as you scream and bleed chocolate syrup? Eh…maybe.]

Your vertigo shtick

[So you want me to fall in love with you, whereupon you will fake your own death, whereupon I will fall into a deep depression until I find you again and fall in love with you again, whereupon we will recreate your fake death and end up actually killing you? That’s a pretty complex fantasy to have, Queen of the GaGas.

It takes a lot to get you off, doesn’t it?]

Want you in my rear window

[Oh, I get it now. All this discussion of classic Hitchcock movies is just a lead-in to you asking for anal sex. Thanks for ruining some of my favorite films for me, Lady GaGa. Never again will I be able to watch Jimmy Stewart and the incomparable Kim Novak climb those fateful stairs without thinking about you taking it in the butt.

You know, Lady GaGa, the other pop stars—they’re just ignorant fuckwits. They know not what they do. But you, you have just enough talent and culture and intelligence to cause actual harm to the things I hold dear. With moderate ability comes moderate responsibility, and it’s unfortunate that you have opted to use your powers for evil.]

Baby you’re sick

[*I’m* sick? Hey, I’m not the one who just turned one of the best movies of all time into a request for butt sex.]

I want your love
Love love love
I want your love

[I don’t know. I was having considerable doubts about our love you even before you asked me for all the Hitchock murder roleplay. I don’t know if me repeatedly pretending to kill is a good foundation for a relationship.]

You know that I want you (’Cuz I’m a free bitch baby)

[I doubt that. I’m gonna go with the supposition that you’re actually a ludicrously expensive bitch.]

And you know that I need you
I want it bad romance
Your bad romance

[Yeah, I think we both know at this point that any relationship between us would prove to be pretty fucking terrible. And yet you want it anyway? This song really is a cry for help, isn’t it?]

I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
I want your love and
All your lover’s revenge

[More revenge? I haven’t given you enough yet? Okay, well, we have a bridge and a last verse and one more instance of the chorus to go. I hope to have satisfied your revenge quota by the time we’re done.]

You and me could write a bad romance

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

Caught in a bad romance

Ra ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma roma-ma

[Roma—like the Roma people of Cenral and Eastern Europe? So we can just flat-out use the names of ethnic groups as non-lexical vocables now? Let me try, using my own ethnicity. “Ger-Ger-German American.” Eh. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.]

GaGa, Ooh la-la
Want your bad romance

Walk walk fashion baby

[How is it that we’re discussing fashion now? This is the second time you’ve brought it around to fashion for no apparent reason, O atrocity that goes by the name of GaGa. I feel like you’re just trying to draw attention to your outfits, which probably don’t need any help in that department.]

Work it, move that bitch c-razy
Walk walk fashion baby

[In _those_ heels? I don’t think so, girlfriend.]

Work it, move that bitch c-razy
Walk walk passion baby
Work it
I’m a free bitch baby

[If that were true, how would you be paying for all those ridiculous clothes? Shit that ugly has got to be super-expensive.]

I want your love
And I want your revenge
I want your love
I don’t wanna be friends

[You don’t? But isn’t being bad friends a good way to lead up to being bad romantic partners?]

Je veux ton amour
Et je veux ta revenge
Je veux ton amour

[Look, you’re just saying the exact same thing in French. You don’t fool me. That’s not really very sophisticated. And yet there’s definitely something about the way your tongue curls around those vowels…ah! No! Must…resist…!]

I don’t wanna be friends
(Want your bad romance
I want your bad romance)
Want your bad romance!

I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
I want your love and
All your lover’s revenge
You and me could write a bad romance

[We’ve been over all this already.]

Caught in a bad romance

Ra ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma roma-ma
GaGa

[You know, just because you took your name from the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga,” which criticized the kind of infantile pop music that was “becom[ing] some background noise / A backdrop for the girls and boys / Who just don't know or just don't care” doesn’t mean that you have to continue you to speak baby talk. If anything, Lady GaGa, you are becoming the very thing that Queen set out to criticize. And, in the end, that’s my real criticism of you—that, in your addressing of the topics of materialistic excess, our culture’s obsession with celebrity, and the pop music that is devoid of artistry and serves only to provide an accompaniment for sex, by means of your hyperbole, you seem to be critiquing all of these things by means of hyperbolic excess, but I really don’t think you’re critiquing these things so much as I think you’re reveling in them with an absolute abandonment of self-discipline. You are not satire so much as you are self-parody. I don’t think you’re pop culture’s greatest critic as you are its worst perpetrator.]

Oh la-la
Want your bad romance

[You know what? No. Sorry, but no.]

I Have a Nightmare

2010-08-27T18:19:00.000-07:00

Fox pundit Glenn Beck has said that President Obama is a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred of white people or the white culture.” He characterized health care reform as “reparations.”

Tomorrow, on the 47th anniversary of the delivery of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech”—King’s dream having certainly found at least partial fulfillment in the election of a black American President—Fox pundit Glenn Beck will be gathering his people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the “Restoring Honor” rally. Beck characterizes the event as a “non-political” tribute to American soldiers, this in spite of the fact that the majority of attendees are likely to be outspoken members of the Tea Party, and politically charged figures such as Sarah Palin and Beck himself will be speaking about matters of national import.

It is possible that Palin and Beck will refrain from employing the divisive rhetoric that is otherwise their stock in trade. It is possible that the Tea Partiers will observe the solemnity of the occasion by refraining from holding up signs with insulting and abusive epithets on them or booing any mention of President Obama, which is otherwise their stock in trade. It is possible that the event will, indeed, be as “non-political” as any gathering of otherwise highly political people meeting at a highly political location can be.

It is also possible that monkeys will fly out of my dick. Rather profoundly unlikely, but possible.

Fox pundit Glenn Beck has said that he did not originally intend to meet at the selfsame place on the selfsame day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his speech. He has called the coincidence “divine providence.” Out of deference to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beck will be standing “two flights lower” on the steps of the memorial than where King himself stood. Beck has said “I am not Dr. King.”

And yet, inspired by this “providence,” Beck has gone on to say that “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the Civil Rights movement…We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, dammit, we will reclaim the Civil Rights moment. We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.”

We were the people that did it in the first place? We meaning the affluent white people who comprise the lion’s share of the Tea Party? Affluent white people were the people who did the Civil Rights movement?

Wow.

I hope that the notion of the kind of affluent, conservative, Caucasian Tea partisans “reclaiming the Civil Rights Movement” turns your stomach as much as it does mine, gentle reader. I have a very hard time seeing Beck and his people as being in the same situation as American Negroes in the 1960s. To the best of my knowledge, nobody is opening up on Tea Parties with firehoses. Nobody is unleashing attack dogs on Tea Partiers. While Tea Partiers might live in fear of a fantastical socialist takeover of America, they don’t live in actual fear of being lynched by their detractors. Nobody is liable to threaten a Tea Partier with beating or death because that Tea Partier might opt to date outside of the Tea Party, and I believe most states will recognize a marriage between a Tea Partier and a non-Tea Partier. Tea Partiers are not compelled to use inferior facilities or required by law to stay among their own kind or categorically excluded from places of business. Tea Partiers are not, to the best of my knowledge, systematically excluded from institutions of education, denied the right to vote, or the recipients of endemic generational economic discrimination. Glenn Beck ‘s expressions of disobedience are vetted and vouchsafed by the government, and have never landed him in jail.

Tea Partiers are, apparently, compelled to pay more taxes than they would like to pay in exchange for government services that they do not want.

Government services like assistance for the poor, which is a thing that Dr. King expressly did want. I’m willing to bet he would’ve wanted universal health care, too.

In my estimation, Tea Partiers have it pretty fucking good compared to African Americans in the middle part of the 20th Century. Pretty fucking good, indeed. Which doesn’t stop the Tea Partiers from portraying themselves as an oppressed minority victimized by a brutal and unjust state.

I extrapolate out and imagine the Tea Partiers “reclaiming” the Civil Rights movement which they “started” as merely the beginning of a trend. Soon, all oppressive groups will “reclaim” the victimization of their victims, and so gain self-pity and self-righteousness on top of privilege that comes at the expense of others. Meat-eaters will reclaim animal rights from PeTA: “Animals have the right to be carnivores!” Child molestors will reclaim molestation from children: “That six-year-old forced herself upon me with her sex-crazed ways!” Neo-Nazis will reclaim the Shoah from the Jews—“Our ancestors were oppressed because they had to shove your ancestors into the ovens. Do you realize how heavy a body, even a body starved down to bones, can be?”

And, in the coup de grace of inappropriate appropriation, Glenn Beck will reclaim the Civil Rights movement from black people. Because God knows we can’t leave something so important as the struggle against oppression in the hands of actual oppressed people.

Aural Analysis: "California Gurls" by Katy Perry

2010-08-09T06:55:00.001-07:00

Katy, my lady. (Yeah?). Now listen here, baby. (Uh-huh!). I had to listen to your stupid song three times today on my way from O.C. down to S.D. After being assaulted in this manner, I felt compelled to mount a counter-attack in the only way I know how: exposing the idiocy of popular culture by means of the ripping, mean-spirited satire that is ever the domain of those who receive an inadequate amount of sex from the bubbly, beautiful people described in your song and your video.

Here's the video. Watch it, if you've not done so already, if for no other reason than to see a woman strapping cans of whipped cream to her impressive breasts and blasting out a moneyshot of whipped cream all over an army of evil gummi bears, and then to try to carry on with a normal human existence after having been exposed to such imagery.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwE-SLnLkqY

So greetings, loved ones. Let's take a trip into the stupidity of "California Gurls." My responses to the original lyrics are in brackets.

I know a place
Where the grass is really greener

[Really? Where would that be? Surely not Southern California, where we have water rationing and many of the lawns die during the summer.

Are you in Paradise City? Axl Rose said that the grass is green there, but I still haven't seen it with my own eyes.]

Warm, wet and wild
There must be something in the water

[You mean the water we import from hundreds of miles inland and upstate? Or do you mean the water we plunder from the Colorado river, sloppy seconds water that has flowed through six other states before it gets to California? Either way, this is a poor claim for California Exceptionalism.]

Sippin' gin and juice
Laying underneath the palm trees

[I somehow doubt you or the professional models in your video have ever done anything so ghetto or high-calorie as to drink gin and juice. At 252 calories per serving, you and your girls aren't going to be able to pull off your Daisy Dukes for very long if you were to drink Snoop Juice. More likely, I can see you drinking reduced calorie pomegranatinis and then spending an hour purging afterwards. See also: your silly video.]

The boys
Break their necks
Try'na to creep a little sneak peek
(at us)

[This is weird on multiple levels. First of all, how is it "creep[ing] a little sneak peek" if you are clearly making a sexual display of yourself? But then there's this notion that the boys are "break[ing] their necks" just to look at you. What the fuck, Katy Perry? Are you suggesting that your sex is overpowering that it causes people to VIOLENTLY DIE? I'm sorry, but I'm not really seeing this as a good thing.

Oh no! I feel a mind-rapingly hooky pre-chorus coming on!]

You could travel the world

[Thank you for your permission!]

But nothing comes close
To the golden coast

[In what respect? Sluttiness? I hear Singapore beats us out in that regard.]

Once you party with us
You'll be falling in love

[That's as may be. It's hard to ignore the hormonal demand to fuck you when you're practically begging for it. But it's been my experience spending the whole of my lifetime among California Gurls that it's relatively rare that the kind of women who figure in this sex fantasy will never love you back unless you're a producer, a director, or somebody who otherwise has six figures to throw around. So there's that.]

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

[Congratulations. You know how to fake an orgasm into an autotuner. Your Pentecostal parents must be proud, Katy Perry. Tell me, does that Jesus tattoo on your wrist ever itch or turn weird colors when you're doing stuff like this?]

California girls
We're unforgettable

[Well, that's for fucking sure. I can't go anywhere without stumbling over this song. Its simple major harmonies and insipid beats stick in my brain like barbed fishhooks.]

Daisy Dukes
Bikinis on top

[So, you're saying California is special because its women employ a fashion made famous by a character who was supposed to be from Georgia?]

Sun-kissed skin
So hot
We'll melt your popsicle

[Is that...is that supposed to be a metaphor for ejaculation? I think it is, but it has got to take the prize for the weirdest and dumbest double entendre of all time. And again with the weird violence; I don't know about the rest of the Y-chromosome havers in the world, but thinking about my dick melting off doesn't make me feel all that comfortable.

You're into S&M, aren't you, Katy? I feel sorry for Russel Brand. But I guess you met him by chucking a bottle at his head, so he must like it when you hurt him.]

Oooooh Oh Oooooh

[Now I'm envisioning you achieving that fake orgasm by strapping on stilettos and stepping on live mice. I like this image; it makes me not want to bang you so bad.]

California girls
We're undeniable

[Do you deny that I have devoted all of this previous blog posting to denying you? Hah! DENIED!]

Fine, fresh, fierce
We got it on lock

[While I actually appreciate the attempt at alliteration here, these lines have a couple of problems. First, that "sun-kissed skin" does not look all that fresh. Once California Gurls get exposed to about 30 years of golden sunshine, they start to sag and wrinkle like mountain hags. Of course, they then get botox injections to compensate, which makes them look like the plastic dolls they really are. Nothing comes close to the Golden Coast when it comes to presentations of surgical sexuality, I do grant you that!

Except Singapore, I guess. I hear they have some pretty wild things going on over there.

Also, to say you "got it on lock" makes sex sound like some sort of Xbox achievement. Don't do that.]

West coast represent

[Which West Coast are we representing here? The illusory one drenched in sex and smiling, or the one that I inhabit, full of bourgeois affectation and soulless pop media layered over racism and grotesque economic discrepancies and disappointment?]

Now put your hands up

[Yay, grotesque economic discrepancies!]

Oooooh Oh Oooooh

Sex on a beach
We get sand in our stilletos

[Oh, come on. Even the alien clone women of L.A. who represent an evolutionary leap forward into artificial life don't wear stilettos to the goddamn beach.]

We freak
In my jeep

[The lyrics site I adapted this from misquoted the lyric as "We freak / And we're cheap." Ho ho ho. As if that would be the lyric for this song.]

Snoop Doggy Dogg on the stereo

[Yeah, I'm sure you listen to "Murder Was the Case" and "Deez Nuuuts" on a daily basis.]

You could travel the world
But nothing comes close
To the golden coast
Once you party with us
You'll be falling in love
Oooooh Oh Oooooh

[Just one verse before the chorus now? Yeah, I know. Writing words is hard. Showing boobs and smiling like a naughty girl is much easier. And a much more effective way of selling records.]

California girls
We're unforgettable
Daisy Dukes
Bikinis on top
Sun-kissed skin
So hot
We'll melt your popsicle
Oooooh Oh Oooooh

[The more I think about my dick melting off, the less sexy this song becomes. But again, anything that helps me not want to get blasted by whip cream from Katy Perry's tits is a valuable asset in my fight to not have my sexuality hijacked by Hollywood.]

(Snoop Dogg)

[Hey, Snoop Dogg! I haven't really been following your career since _The Chronic_, one of the finest examples of West Coast Hip-Hop of all time! How have you been, Mr. D. O. Double G?]

Toned, Tan
Fit and ready
Turn it up cause its gettin' heavy
Wild wild west coast
These are the girls I love the most
I mean the ones
I mean like shes the one
Kiss her
Touch her
Squeeze her buns

[Oh, I see. That's how you've been.]

The girl's a freak
She drives a jeep
And lives on the beach

[Didn't Katy rhyme "freak" and "jeep" and "beach" a few verses ago? You know, Snoop, I never took you for the sharpest of wordsmiths. Your style was always more contingent upon your smooth delivery and your creative use of the letter "z" more than intricate wordplay. Even so, I would think you would have a little more self-respect, as a veteran rapper, than to take your rhymes from a twenty-six-year-old white girl.]

I'm okay
I wont play

[You'd better not. I saw _Get Him to the Greek_. That Russel Brand is scary when he gets a few (thousand) drugs in him.]

I love the bait
Just like I love LA
Venice beach
And Palm Springs
Summer time is everything

[I hate summer in Southern California. Everything is hot, dry, and slathered in U.V. radiation and inaccessible sex. I guess that's not all Katy Perry's fault. But it is partially.]

Homeboys
Hangin' out
All that ass
Hangin' out

[Lyricism at its finest, folks.]

Bikinis, zucchinis, martinis
No weenies

[Did you just rhyme "zucchinis" with "weenies," Mr. Dogg? I struggle to come up with a coherent response to that.

Except that I might observe that, while according to the most recent data gathered in 1996, California did place second in national summer squash production (being edged out by Florida), and that fresh zucchinis are indeed available here during the summer months, the presence of zucchinis would hardly seem to be a defining feature for California. Zucchini tends not to factor strongly into local cuisine, being far more prominent in the dishes of Mediterranean countries and Mexico. I grant you that, according to Wikipedia, California was the most likely place where zucchini production was introduced into the U.S. (the squash having been taken from the new world, hybridized and selectively bred in Italy, and then brought westward back over the pond). Were you reading up on agricultural history while composing your lyrics, Mr. Dogg?

Or were you just coming up with a ricockulous rhyme for "bikinis"?

And what's with the "No Weenies" injunction? No weenies other than your own, I take it, the better to leave you with your sexual pick of all these fine, fresh, fierce females. But I am thinking that the nature of the "California Gurls" video engenders a response that will involve a lot of weenies, even if those weenies are only being used for masturbatory purposes.

Because it's PORN.]

Just a king
And a queen-ie

[Ugh. No comment.]

Katy my lady
(Yeah)
Now lookie here, baby
(Uh huh)
I'm all up on you
'Cause you representin' California
(Ohhh yeahh)

[Hey, Mr. Dogg, I'm representin' California, too. The underside of California; the after-image of glamor, what's left when the lights fade. Does that mean you'll be gettin' "all up on" me, too? I'd best bust out my Daisy Dukes.

Now bring that chorus back! It's like sugar being directly injected into your brain!]

California gurls
We're unforgettable
Daisy Dukes
Bikinis on top
Sun-kissed skin
So hot
We'll melt your Popsicle
Oooooh oh oooooh

California gurls
We're undeniable
Fine, fresh, fierce
We got it on lock
Westcoast represent
(Westcoast, Westcoast)
Now put your hands up
Oooooh oh oooooh

Snoop Dogg:
(Californiaaa, Californiaaa)
California girls man
I wish they all could be
California girls
(Californiaaa)
I really wish
You all could be
California girls
(Californiaaa, girls)

Yeah, so that's "California Gurls." No matter how you might criticize it, at least it's not "I Gotta Feeling." It's got that much going for it.

Here are some other links to songs that, in my humble estimation, represent the Southern California experience in a far more musically adroit and psychologically realistic manner.

"Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwlogyj7nFE

"Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlUKcNNmywk

"Parallel Universe" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fPYyoY49Bc

"Down Rodeo" by Rage Against the Machine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KEKL8fcvzY

"Like a Stone" by Audioslave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QU1nvuxaMA

"L.A. Woman" by The Doors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMVnEGcMsFs

"Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkPb4s0-QcI

"What I Got" by Sublime
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uc3ZrmhDN4

"Aenema" by Tool
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCEeAn6_QJo

(Every time you listen to "AEnema," with lyrics like "Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA / The only way to fix it is to flush it all away. / Any fucking time. Any fucking day," a pop star goes to Hell! So put it on repeat.)

There are many more I might pick, but these will serve as a primer for quality Southern California music.

Also notable: this pitch-perfect gay tribute to "California Gurls." Gin and Juicy Juice! This is camp at is absolute finest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kelUCEcdO8M

Fairness

2010-08-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

Teaching teaches you a lot about fairness. Like how, basically, it doesn't exist.

Today I suggested to the instructor of the class that a student fail because she had been absent from three tutoring sessions. I had made it abundantly clear to the class that repeat non-attendance would result in failure, giving the students a written syllabus and verbal instructions to the effect that the second unexcused absence would warrant a failing grade in the class. I opted not to fail this student after the second absence, because I prefer to be more lenient in person than I am on paper. But with the third absence, my capacity for permissiveness has been pushed beyond its limit.

No doubt, the student will claim that it is unfair of me to fail her. Last semester, I was exposed to any number of allegations from students as to the "unfairness" of the exercising of my power as an instructor, when I was only operating in accordance with the established standards that they could and should have been aware of all throughout the duration of the semester. But of course, most any punishment is unfair when you're on the receiving end of it, isn't it? And if I don't fail her, the other students in the class will insist that I am being unfair, singling her out for special treatment.

What is fair? Is it fair to try to accommodate the rules to suit the needs of the individual? Or is it fair to try to uphold the rules as impersonally as possible? Neither one seems, objectively, to be more right than the other, and circumstantially either could be interpreted as the right thing to do. One's own experiences and personality will probably prioritize one over the other, but it doesn't seem to me that there's any absolute way of determining the rightness of mercy or justice; when to apply the rules and when not.

When it comes right down to it, there's no right or wrong here. Just a shot in the dark for me, the authority figure, as to what is the best for me and the student in question and all the other students who have not violated the rules but whose compliance might well be contingent upon the equitable enforcement of the rules.

And thus we come to a quandary, where all options are both right and wrong.

I wish the ethical option in any given situation were always obvious, but if it were, we wouldn't need ethics, would we?

How To Stop Staring At Girl's Boobs

2010-07-28T15:19:00.000-07:00

Today, through the vagaries of the Internet, I happened upon the wikiHow article for "How to Stop Staring at a Girl's Boobs" (http://www.wikihow.com/Stop-Staring-at-a-Girl%27s-Boobs). Oh, wikiHow, where were you when I was going through puberty? Or when I was...twenty-nine, which is my age at the time of this writing? Ahem. The article brought back memories of that time in my life when indeed it seemed that there was absolutely nothing to do other than stare at boobs...which, of course, is before I discovered that there were many other parts of a woman's body worth staring at. So, in the wiki spirit (it is, after all, the manual I can edit!), I here suggest a few additions and editions for the wikiHow page on boob-staring. From here on out, the text in brackets will be mine, to differentiate it from the original text.

Have you ever been in class or perhaps at a party and out of the corner of your eye you notice a beautiful girl with large boobs? [Or a plain girl with large boobs? Or an unattractive girl with large boobs? Or a beautiful girl with medium boobs? Or a plain girl with medium boobs? Or an unattractive girl with medium boobs? Or a beautiful girl with small boobs? Etc.] You gather up your courage to go talk to her, but you can't keep your eyes off her boobs? [Yes! Oh. That is a rhetorical question. I'm not supposed to answer it.] Here are some steps to help you in that and other similar situations.

1. Make eye contact with her when you talk to her. It's polite, and most likely her face will have some attractive feature. [If you don't understand this last assertion, then you clearly haven't been watching enough hardcore pornography, and if you haven't been watching enough hardcore pornography, then I doubt your credentials as an overly hormonal teenage boy. This article is targeted at teenage boys, right? Protip: I know fuck-all about the sexual development and desires of teenage lesbians, and the less I contemplate this particular subject, the better for you and me and the statutes of the great state of California, so I had best stop now.]

2. You can also talk about her shoes, earrings, and so forth, but not too much or she might think you're interested in something you really aren't. [Pretending to care about things that women are interested in but not really caring about those things is a great way to get near some boobs without drawing attention to the fact that you only care about getting near some boobs. Once you've mastered this skill the the point where you can pretend to care about a girl's thoughts and feelings, you will probably get to touch some boobs.]

3. Talk to her about anything: movies, school, current events, anything that at least partially distracts you from her breasts. [Yes. TALKING ABOUT ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING OTHER THAN HER BREASTS IS GENIUS ADVICE FOR TAKING YOUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM HER BREASTS. Unless the absolutely anything you're talking about is less interesting than her breasts, and if you're a fifteen year old boy there is probably nothing in the world that is more interesting to you than her breasts, and you find your attention straying back to her breasts anyway.]

4. You might get an erection from looking too long at her breasts. So don't stare. Look at her face. Look deep into her eyes. This doesn't mean look at another girl's breasts. [It doesn't? Oh shit, there goes my gameplan! I mean, of course. Stare into her eyes so her boobs don't give you a boner. That should be obvious. It's not like you can feel the gravity of your boobs pulling your little fireman up and your eyes down and your hands in closer, can you? It's not like her boobs have become the center of your attention, of your very universe, have they? Of course not! Of course not. No, stare into her eyes. Deep into her eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul, the gateway to the mind, and one of the most erotic parts of the body. Her beautiful eyes...redirecting all that libidinal energy towards this new body part can't have any possible side effec--ah, shit, now you've developed an eye fetish! You Japanese person, you! You're getting an erection from staring into her eyes, aren't you? Well, maybe there's another wikiHow page that can help you out with that, I don't know.]

5. If you are sure she isn't looking, take a quick glance at her breasts to relieve yourself, but don't forget to look away, as they can be hypnotic. [This gem of wisdom is perfect as it is; I have nothing to add to it.]

6. Don't daydream about girl's breasts, especially if you are in class. The teacher may call you out on it and jar you with a question, if you look spaced-out and have that silly smile on your face. [Because, as we all know, the best way to not think about something is to tell yourself not to think about it! Like if I tell you the last thing in the world you'd ever want to think about is the Candiru fish, which is an inch-long fish with sharp backwards-pointing spines on its back that lives in Amazonian rivers and is attracted to the compounds in urine such that it will swim up into peoples' genitals while they are peeing and so become lodged in their urinal tracts before dying of asphyxia and flexing its spines in reflex, causing unthinkable pain and forcing somebody in a nearby village to perform impromptu genital surgery with a hunting knife, THERE'S NO WAY you would think about a fish swimming up into your penis, dying and rotting and stabbing your penis with bony spines from the inside until you cut it out with a huge knife! And this thinking aversion technique works BEST when it comes to SEX, trust me! Alternately, you can try to think of horrific things to derail your sex drive. Think about your parents or siblings dying screaming in a fire, or think about how those boobs will, in the fullness of time, putrefact to black sacs of rot, shot through with maggots and carrion-eating beetles. There's NO WAY that distracting yourself in this way could be harmful to your your psyche AT ALL. If all else fails and your teacher does call on you while you have a silly smile on your face, you could always pretend as though you were happily contemplating the subject matter of the class. But she probably wouldn't believe you, because as you and I and your teacher all know, learning is for nerds.]

Tips

Make a vow to only stare at them a few minutes a day, and then lower the number of minutes each day until you reach an equilibrium quotient. [I think this tip is suggesting that if you learn what things like "equilibrium quotient" means, your brain will grow at the expense of your balls and you'll somehow sap your sex drive. Protip: IT WON'T FUCKING WORK. Translated into normal human speech, this could also suggest that you ration your boobage staring and decrease the amount each day. Because staring at boobs and timing yourself and taking careful mental notes about the boob staring and trying to be economic with your boob staring such that you reserve your quota for staring at the *best* boobs and not just any old boobs is surely a step in the right direction from willy-nilly boob-staring. And, just like trying to not think about boobs is the best way to not think about boobs, rationing your boob-staring is surely the best way to ensure there's no way you'll ever slip outside of the brittle, artificial, and arbitrary limitations that your higher cognitive processes have imposed upon overwhelming instinct.]

When outdoors, wear sunglasses, so she will not be able to see where your eyes are looking. [Actually, that's some pretty good advice right there. It's half the reason why you'll never see me outdoors without sunglasses. The other half: hangovers.]

The more you treat her respectfully, you increase your chances that she will show you her entire boobs [Sic?] in an appropriate place. This is what dreams are made of. [It is? Well, prepare to be shocked: GIRLS DON'T HAVE PENISES, THEY HAVE VAGINAS INSTEAD! Now you can stop dreaming about boobs.]

Get to know the girl in question, if you would like to become her boyfriend. That way you could see her boobs more often. [Again, we repeat the advice that the only reason for ever having any contact with a woman is for the purpose of seeing boobs, and you should engineer all of your social interactions with such in mind. I know it's totally non-intuitive to think that if you spend more time around a woman such as by becoming her boyfriend, you will have more opportunities to see her boobs, but believe me, it's actually true! You should totally base your boyfriendidness upon whose boobs you like to look at the most! Protip: You don't have to be a boyfriend to stare at boobs? Have you ever heard of this thing called "The Internet?" Fully half of it is dedicated to images of boobs. Really! Try a Google image search for "boobs" right now and see what happens! You'll be surprised. ProProTip: Your ability to see a particular pair of boobs is inversely proportional to your desire to see a particular pair of boobs. The more you see your girlfriend's boobs, the more you'll wish you could see more boobs and different boobs! But you can't! Hah hah. You got monogamied, bitch.]

Warnings

Don't look off into space while talking to her if you are that afraid of looking at her boobs. Try to practice looking them in their eyes while talking to them. Then before you know it you'll be fine. [Protip: Warning: The guy who wrote this piece of advice was an idiot. Don't listen to him. In all honesty, staring off into space is the best alternative to staring at boobs if for whatever reason you feel you can't stare at boobs at the present time. I'm an adult, and I still do this every damn day. No amount of "practice" ever enables you to stop staring at boobs. You might even be able to stop visualizing her boobs in your head while you stare away into space; if so, you will be promoted from padawan to Jedi Master.]

If you find it hard to look at her eyes stare at the space between them.
[Jesus, now you have a bridge-of-the-nose fetish. Luckily for you, there's a 104% chance that there's already hentai that speaks to that need.]

I round out the article with a few select portions of my own sage advice that should have been included in the tips section, but for whatever reason were not.

--Don't be a fifteen year old boy.
--Don't hang around girls like the one featured in the picture at the top of this article, the one wearing a super-low-cut blouse, who is clearly *asking* you to look at her boobs by means of her wardrobe choices. So if you are around such girls and can't stop looking at their boobs, you probably shouldn't feel all that bad about it. Nevertheless, many of these women will all but shove their boobs in your face and then try to make you feel guilty if you stare at them, because a significant percentage of women quite honestly have no fucking clue as to how to be honest, fair, and non-contradictory in their assertions. They are as screwed up and as confused and as ashamed as you! No matter how good the boobs on such women might be, I assure you, the boobs are not worth it.
--Pray (Protip: IT WON'T FUCKING WORK)
--Be Gay. (Then you can stare at pecs!)
--Masturbate already. Get it out of your system.
--Stop masturbating. You're only making it worse.
--Accept that there's really very little you can do to control your sex drive at this point in your life. Be glad if staring at girl's boobs is your WORST problem when it comes to sex. Be thankful, actually, if you don't have the opportunity to fuck up in ways that make getting caught staring at boobs seem absolutely and utterly trivial, which it pretty much is.
--Wait about seven or eight years for your sex drive to cool down from "overwhelming" to "mostly overwhelming."
--Accept that the intense shame you feel now will largely be forgotten in ten years' time.
--Wait twenty years, until you're about thirty-five. Many thirty-five year old women will be happy if you stare at their boobs, especially if you compare their boobs to those of a teenager.
--Learn to appreciate the curve of a shoulder, the graceful architecture of a neck, the gentle swell of a hip from a tapered waist, a slender arm, or all the other thousands of things erotic about a woman. You're so hung up on staring at boobs--have you even thought about staring at asses instead?

And most of all:

--Accept that your desire to stare at boobs is absolutely natural. It doesn't actually get much more natural than that. It's nothing to be ashamed of, though I can understand why you'd want to control it just the same, but you should definitely be accepting of any failures in this regard. And believe me when I say that, sooner or later, you're pretty much guaranteed to find a girl who will want you to pay attention to her boobs. Crazy, I know, but it's true. It might not be the first girl whose boobs you stare at, or the ten-thousandth, but it will very probably come in the fullness time.

Unless, of course, too much boob-staring turns you into a crazy psycho killer in the meantime!

The Myth of Originality

2010-07-27T04:20:00.000-07:00

Originality is a myth. Human beings never have and never will "create" anything; to do so would necessitate a mind that operates independent of sensory and symbolic input, and no such mind could ever exist and communicate with us in any way that would be meaningful. There is no creation, only infinite translation, re...-interpretation, and re-combination. All art, all thought, all action, is iterative, and derivative.

"But what about the space shuttle or the SR-71?" says the gentle reader. "There are no natural precedents for those creations."

Such as space shuttles and SR-71s are not found in nature, no. But just as the first human who picked up a rock and cracked at it with second rock until the first rock became a knife wasn't really creating out of nothing so much as he was adapting that which was extant for his or her own purposes, so too is even the most advanced human achievement an adaptation of that which already exists. There are a million or more permutations between that original stone knife and the SR-71, but there are such permutations. The SR-71 does not exist without the A-12, which does not exist without the U-2, which does not exist without the F-104...and so on back to the ME-262, and so on back more to the Wright Brothers Flyer, and so on back to the first human to look at a bird and envy its flight. The titanium in the skin of an SR-71 could only be produced after humans had mastered the metallurgy of iron, which was only possible once humans had mastered the metallurgy of bronze, and so on back to the knife again. Even the most radical breakthrough is no more and no less than an adaptation of that which already exists.

The notion that ideas can come from nowhere, that people can access some sort of headspace for inspiration that is anything more than the sum of their experiences to create something truly "original" or "out of this world" is fallacious, as is any valuation of that which is "original" over that which is "derivative." All human thought is derivative; the best of us can derive more broadly and deeply than others such that the origins of their derivations are not so obvious to him whose derivations are but narrow and shallow, until the origins of the best derivations are mystified in "genius" or made "divine," but even the best of us is merely creating a new permutation of existing elements.

Does a painter paint outside of the colors he can see? Does his mind tell him to go beyond the visual spectrum--that only by painting in colors that the human eye cannot perceive can his work be realized? So he paints a square blue sun--is the square unknown to him? Is blue? Is the sun? It is possible he paints a picture of the sun that the rest of us cannot even recognize as such, but in doing so he still rather reassembles elements of other paintings and of his own perceptions of the sun rather than do something truly original. Show me the man blind from birth who paints masterpieces, and I'll show you a sui generis thinker. Show me the cave artist who leap-frogged over twenty thousand years of technique to paint in exacting proportion and who then went beyond that to a new abstraction made only possible by the implementation of complex concepts that only developed in response to the perfection of established artistic techniques, and I'll show you an original thinker. Show me the poet who works in a language with which she has no other facility to create beautiful poetry, rather than drawing on the millennia of of literature and political history and conceptual development expressed in every syllable of our speech. Show me the poet who has never read any other poetry; show me the engineer who builds robots without understanding the workings of such simpler machines as other men have made and made explicit long before he was ever born. Then I'll show you an original thinker.

But until such time as that, I am going to aver that we are all plagiarists. Smartness is skill and subtlety in plagiarism; smartness is having so many sources recombining within one's head that one cannot attribute one's efforts to anything other than "originality."

Argumentum ad Novitatem

2010-07-23T00:10:00.000-07:00

I am a late adopter. Most of my friends are early adopters. This puts me at something of a discord with them on a fairly regular basis.

It is not that I am inherently afraid of technology or progress. Far from it. I understand very well that technologies such as vaccines and intensive agriculture and indoor plumbing have brought a lot of good into a lot of lives.

But just as I see nothing inherently good in man, I see nothing inherently good in his productions. For every beneficial technology, we have such counterexamples in the form of weaponization (theoretical physics to nuclear weapons, computer programs to spyware and viruses) or unintended consequences (pollution, exclusivity, the stress of adaptation, car crashes).

Embracing something *just* because it's new--lusting over Apple's every new release, making an unboxing video and posting it on Youtube, going to Comic Con to geek out over next year's movie releases that you know, on a rational level, are probably all going to be terrible--seems like a dead end to me.

There are a lot of perfectly good things that are old (and, not inconsequentially, cheap or free). Read _The Iliad_ lately, gentle reader? Read _Paradise Lost_? I know you probably haven't, but I assure you that these books are as better than anything that's likely to be released this year. When was the last time you played through _Grim Fandango_ or _Torment: Planescape_, gentle gamer? Oh, the graphics are too primitive? Right. And you, gentle technology buyer, do you really have some need in your life that your current smart phone cannot address, but that can only be addressed by the next generation of smart phones, or do you create within yourself a need for newness that has nothing to do with your other needs?

Of course, being dissatisfied with something just because it's not "bleeding edge" is exactly how corporations want you to think. They need you to continue to shell out for new products as frequently as possible. This is why they design things to break or fail on you after a certain number of uses, frequently compromising on quality for the alleged reason of keeping costs down but actually doing so with the intention of keeping rate of purchase high. This is why there are new fashions every year, new movies, new models of iPhones, new models of cars. Your clothes from last year might be perfectly serviceable, as might your iPhone and your car, and most of the new movies will not be very good. But in all this newness, whether material or cultural, you need to ask yourself "Is this new thing really a *good*? Is it better than what I already have? Or is it just new?" And I don't know, if you measure new things by the metric of utility or significant improvement over the old if many new things are going to stack up.

To my mind, the burden is on anything new--whether a new technology or new artistic product or a new idea or a new restaurant or a new anything--to prove that it is worthwhile. A new instance of art has to prove it's at least as good as the art that has come before it, its digressions from tradition being justified as worthwhile and not just new for the sake of being new. A new restaurant has to have good food, independent of being trendy.

Testing the boundaries of the status quo without a clear justification has exactly as much end value as reactionary paranoia. Neither approach is defensible in terms of logic. I guess the new adopters will act as test subjects for the rest of us--getting sick from the pesticide-laden GMO food, having their iPhones break on them, going to see the new superhero movie on opening night and telling the rest of us how awful it was--and there's a benefit in that, in that their sacrifices will provide the rest of us with the empirical data to say that yes, this innovation is okay or no, this one is stupid and useless. Of course, there may very well be hidden costs of such new technologies that we won't understand for *years* down the line, so it might be decades before the early adopters or anybody else truly understand what those commitments truly cost. Those who are afraid of any change don't provide such useful services as human guinea pigs. But, personally, understanding that undertaking any new endeavor engenders a certain amount of risk, I would prefer to know what my risks are and what my rewards are rather than throw myself all but blindly (or with an excessive outlay of my limited funds) at the new.

Neil Postman says that all technology is a Faustian bargain. He says that in the rush to embrace that which is new we rarely, if ever, realize what we are destroying or discarding in the old. To be sure, we think about technologies like agriculture as unalloyed goods. But look at how many of innovations in industrial agriculture are fraught with complications. The current model for corporate farms is to have huge monoculture crops. Planting great swathes of a single crop does increase yields, yes, I grant you. But it also means that the soil gets exhausted very quickly with all of those plants draining the same nutrients out of it, and the need for fertilizer goes up exponentially. Huge populations of the same plant leave fields open to epidemics of diseases and pests, which in turn necessitates the increased use of pesticides. The end result is that the innovation of factory agriculture involves serious risks to the human population in the pollution of dangerous chemicals, or even in the application and consumption of those chemicals. It poses a serious threat to ecosystems in the form of fertilizer run-off which can devastate aquatic fish and plants or be a real risk to human health if it gets into drinking water. It is a brittle system in that at best we are only ever barely staving off the consequences, and it is dependent on a lot of expensive, non-renewable chemicals in order to function. Does this make for a good?

We believe in a notion of "progress." But it seems to me that so much of human progress is not a movement forward as it is lateral movement. What metrics do we use to gauge whether we are better off now for our new technologies? Increased lifespan? There we succeed. Happiness? There we might well fail. In opening ourselves up to the new possibilities of technology, we do also open ourselves up to new risks and new demands. We are fast approaching our physical limitations with respect to our capabilities to interact with our creations. While the processing power of our computers increases all the time, the processing power of our brains does not, and we are hitting the wall with respect to the human capacity to absorb new information. We have new particular new afflictions--Internet addictions, increasingly widespread needs for constant stimulus and reinforcement and the adulation of faceless thousands, cyber-bullying, the damage to the psyche caused by such actions as spamming and trolling or a Facebook defriending--that would have been unimaginable in 1990 before the advent of the "good" of the Internet. We are reaching our physical limits, too--aided by that agriculture that produces huge surpluses of high-energy foods that we then edit in order to heap on even more energy, the non-physical nature of our new needs, so divorced from what our bodies and minds are adapted to do, will destroy us.

The newness that appeals to me is this: the re-discovery of the extant. That is the space that is available to us, that need not be mediated by any manufacturer or developer. The possibilities of the human body have not been exhausted--or if the limits have been proscribed, that should not mean that it should be any less interesting for an individual to use his own body. More to my taste, the possibilities of the human mind have not been exhausted. Do you think, with all of the need for networking and formatting, that individual initiative and individual experimentation and individual critical faculties are dead? And if such are dead, why the Hell would we want to persist in the world as it is? The possibilities for interaction on a personal scale are not dead. I have yet to see any technology that offers an improvement over the personal conversation. Social networking can distort time and distance to give us depersonalized fragments of a thousand conversations per day, but it cannot provide the intimacy or depth of actual human interaction. And why should we value a thousand snippets of conversation over one real conversation with all of its reciprocity, all of its possibilities for discovery, all of its capacity for the serious exploration of an idea? Because our brains, once tricked out with a love of novelty for the sake of finding new clumps of edible roots on the savanna, now are abused into getting bursts of dopamine from each new tewwt? If so, I say our brains are wrong--or rather, the way that our capabilities are being abused and misused is wrong. It is unhealthful, and it is unuseful. The best technologies are ones that render themselves the most invisible with regards to the "facilitation" of human communication.

So to you who reads this, I offer this challenge. Think about what you want, and think about what you need. Think about whether your technologies address a want or a need. Think about whether your needs are being satisfied by the technology you have, or whether those technologies are creating within you needs that cannot be satisfied. Think about whether your technologies are providing you with better opportunities than could your own mind and your own body. Think about whether you control your technologies, or your technologies control you with their constant demands on your time and attention and finances. Think about whether you are better off with a given technology, or without it.

And if you search yourself and find that your relationship with a given technology is positive, then good. If your judgment is not so compromised by an actual physical addiction to novelty or by a dependence upon something that is helping you in one way while seriously harming you in others and you can make the determination that a technology is a good and that its costs are acceptable, then all is well. Lord knows, I'm not giving up my flush toilet any time soon.

But if you do such searching of your extenuated soul and find that many of these appendages drain you in ways that they do not replete, or that there is nothing in the technology that is better than what you can do for yourself, maybe it's time to throw some of this shit the fuck away.

Let our approach to technology be strictly meritocratic. Let us not engage in the fawning nepotism of brand loyalty, the mad mob rule of trends and fashions, the autocratic impositions of giant corporations, the cheap liberalism that mistakes indulgence for progress or the reactionary conservatism that mistakes fear for genuineness.

Let us be conscious that humans make mistakes, and that these mistakes are frequently fashionable and highly expensive. Let us be conscious that the corporations that offer us newness are no better than the individuals that compose them, and often, due to diffusion of responsibility, quite a bit worse, such that there is nothing inherently good in their products. Let us remember that there is no such thing in all the world as an unequivocal good, that there is no progress without some form of compromise, and that we must be careful and conscious and conscientious in deciding whether the evils we engender are less than the evils we replace. Let us not forsake depth of inquiry and thoroughness of exploration for frequency or novelty of stimulation, no matter how much our pleasure-addled brains might tell us otherwise. Let us cultivate a sound understanding of that which we already possess before we rush to grab on to that which we do not yet have. Let us value intimacy, in all its iterations, over cheap sensation.

Let us remember that new is not the same as good.

Reflections on _Two Gentlemen of Verona_

2010-07-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

I took in a performance of _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ last night. It was the first time I'd ever been exposed to this particular play.

The play sucks. And when I say it sucks, I mean that the characters are inconsistent and a-psychological, the action is unfocused, and the language is dull. The lines are nearly bereft of those intricate metaphors, rhythms, and clever inversions that so characterize the Bard's better efforts. I'd say it ain't Shakespeare...but, well, it is. As a contrast to his mature works and as proof how of genius is not so much born as it is arrived at through effort and practice, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ can be interesting. In itself, it's pretty much a piece of shit. The funniest character in the whole thing is the god-damned *dog*.

Here's how the climax of the play goes down (Spoiler alert: if you're concerned about spoilers for a play that is 400 years old, you're a moron).

Guy A: Oh Girl A, stop running through this forest in search of Guy B, who was my best friend and your fiancee until I betrayed him for love of you even though I was already in a relationship with Girl B, who is nothing to me now! Stop everything you're doing and fall in love with me, even though you have absolutely no reason whatsoever to do so!

Girl A: Piss off!

Guy A: Ah, fuck it! Get ready for rape!

Guy B: I, Guy B, who was beset by bandits in this very forest and who has become their king and who was given all of their treasure on account of my rather trivial ability to speak at least one language other than Italian, will conveniently appear at just this moment to prevent the raping!

Guy A: Oh! Even though I was just about to rape the woman you love, and even though you were exiled on account of my maligning you to the Duke, let's be friends again!

Guy B: Okay!

Guy A: Here, you can have Girl A! I don't care about her anymore!

Guy B: Okay!

Girl A: I have nothing to say about any of this!

Girl B: Oh Guy A, I have been watching you all this time as you tried to rape Girl A! I dressed in drag so you wouldn't recognize me, and you didn't recognize me, even when you sent me to Girl A to give her the ring that I had originally given to you as a symbol of our love! But now look! I reveal my long hair, which means I also have a vagina! You should love me now!

Guy A: You're right! The failure of my raping has made me realize that I actually loved you all along!

Girl B: Hooray!

The Duke: Oh, I am captured by bandits! But I instantly forgive everybody who threatened my life, tried to kidnap or rape my daughter, or manipulated me! Now let's go party!

All: Yay!

This shit is pretty terrible. This Shakespeare guy might have some potential, though. Maybe.

Zarathustran Musing

2010-07-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Esteem yourself neither by the number of instances nor by the intensity of the esteem of others. Does the decadent culture of the crowd prove nothing if not that those who receive the most praise are often, in truth, the least deserving of accolade? As well esteem yourself by the disapprobation you receive—then you know you are doing something that the stupid man cannot understand. Let his hatred be an honor to you; take your bruises for badges and your scars for garlands. As well esteem yourself in accordance with the apathy your efforts encounter, for in creating such as finds no resonance in cheap souls you might assume that you have done something worthwhile. And if your creations should happen to be received with embraces and your words with welcome, look to it that you speak your own soul. Let any semblance of convergence with the sickly commingled spirits of unthinking men be only semblance.

Thus spoke David Kammerzelt.

Immaterial Song

2010-06-29T15:49:00.001-07:00

I built a house for you
I built it room by room
Color by color, line by line
One sensation at a time
The carpet was that rich red you wanted
The second-hand curtains hung just right
To proscribe the way that particles played
In the slanting shaft of light
I offered up the house to you
Describing its details with great care
All you had to do was look away from me
And the house vanished back into the air
The house was ever only
Ever only empty air

And all I have to offer you
Is sound and light
All I have to give to you
Are words
Come to me with empty hands
You'll go away the same
My own hands are empty
I have nothing to put into yours

I made a man for you
Take him as he is
Take him as a rival, a lover
Take him as a hero, a brother
Just please take him
Just please
Take
Him

And all I have to offer you
Is sound and light
All I have to give to you
Are words
Come to me with empty hands
You'll go away the same
My own hands are empty
I have nothing to put into yours

Rarefied until I am become
A living ghost
My hands go right through
You

I made a world for you
I built it word by word
I tried to make it like you wanted
Based on all I'd seen and heard
Based on all I'd experienced and learned
I opened the gates for you and invited you in
You took a look around and moved right on
You moved right on

The City of Gods

2010-06-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

It was one of the cities where no one ever died. It was a city defined by yellow and brown, dirty yellow; sunlight and dead grass and bare earth and the uncured, rough-cut human leather hanging in flaps and in skeins of empty fingers from the sun-kilned flesh of those who were whole. Or mostly whole, for the purposes of that particular moment, at least.

A newcomer walked among them, among the howling barbarians that were the grandchildren of high civilization. Though the cannibal savages danced mad dances around him, shouting and stamping and lashing with their fists in foreplay for an orgy of violence, they did not touch him. They accepted him readily, and did not visit the violence on him that they readily visited on one another, breaking out into meaningless brawls on all sides of him, tumbling into fights at his feet. The ones with unregenerate limbs sought each other out, clasping the gaps in their flesh stump to stump, jabbing bone against bone and knotting shreds of flesh together, wrestling as screaming cripples.

He took a place on one of the worn grey-wooden benches, shaded by an overhanging canvas that snapped in the wind. He folded his hands in front of him. He was, distinctly, Chinese-American. The people around him were too sunburned and interbred to be much of anything.

Black specks like flies that were in fact human ash skittered in the wind around the tables. There were no actual flies, for the ashes had eaten them. Flecks of ash would land on the Chinese-American man’s clothes and exposed skin (only at his face and the backs of his hands) and stick, shooting out small tendrils as soon as they landed and start to bloat like ticks with the intake of organic mass. He brushed them away when he could, when he could feel them, but there were too many, and any effort to repel them was only temporary, as was the effort to sleep away the hunger by means of immolation. But they knew that, and they burned themselves anyway, just as the Chinese-American man knew it was pointless to pick at the ashes, but he did it anyway.

Gobbets of tendriled human flesh scampered or oozed beneath the stamping feet of the table, seeking scraps. People crushed them when they saw them, stomping on a potential brother’s shinbone or perhaps the tip of their own mother’s brown nipple. This too, was pointless. This too, was necessary.

A vendor approached the Chinese-American man who, in clothes of rough-spun cotton rather than skin, seemed like someone with something to trade. The vendor
Opened up the cold chest that hung around his neck to show his wares. “Shaved brains?” he asked, paring away at one of the grey-white lumps in the cold chest and putting the shavings into a conical paper cup before applying a spot of redolent barbecue sauce to the cone that suffused the cold shaved brains with a rich red-brown color. The vendor kicked away a half-human mass that crawled up at him, moaning with hunger.

“No thanks,” said the Chinese-American man. “I’m a naturalist. I had my brains shaved a long time ago.” The vendor moved on.

The Chinese-American man, the naturalist, returned his attention to his hands folded on the table. He began to watch—as they all began to watch, somehow—a woman. She was moving through a field somewhere at the edge of the city, for all that it seemed as though the city consumed the whole of the world. Buildings were visible only in the background behind her. She moved through a swatch of dead grass that the ash-flies and flesh-rats, for all their trillions, had not yet found. She approached the grass and produced a woven basket from behind her back. She gathered up a handful of the dried yellow stalks and began to rattle them out over the basket. Slivers of yellow seed fell into the basket.

The noise and motion drew attention. One of the starving rose up from behind the thin screen of grass. Crumbs of dirt fell from his mouth. He had been eating earth in hopes of straining out some scrap of worm-flesh. Seeing and smelling the lush flesh of the woman he charged at her, his hands outstretched. She dropped the basket, the seeds lost to the wind, and shifted her body into a spring. When the starving man screamed and lunged she put a kick into his throat. He staggered back, choking. She pulled a long knife from her belt and slashed out at his neck. Blood bloomed. He fell, she continued to cut, sawing away at the tough nerves connecting the vertebrae until she had severed the head completely, killing him temporarily. She wiped the knife and its complement of starving blood on his skin and holstered it again.

Already his hungry blood was seeping out, seeking, a red amoeba. The machines that made his blood hungry, the machines small as atoms, would not let him die. They would never let anybody die anymore. And for the first five years, among those elites who could afford them, that had been a blessing. But when the nanomachines began to transmit from person to person like a virus until all in the world were made deathless, and all the appetites for energy and organified matter that had already been straining the planet to its breaking point only amplified with time, people began to recognize that it was a curse in disguise.

She picked up her basket. She moved among the plants and collected the seeds of grass. She collected the seeds of amaranth, here called pigweed, when it was called anything at all and not eaten whole and raw.

She searched for a cure to hunger. Or she searched for a cure to life, the Pure Poison.

The naturalist leaned back his head, exposing his throat. She had been a colleague. He closed his eyes. He blew his breath out through fixed teeth. The savages screamed around him.

Embrace

2010-06-09T06:34:00.000-07:00

Look at these lines and curves, these letters and words, these black absences of light against a background of white. They suggest sounds, and the sounds suggest a meaning, and the meaning refers to an action: embracing. And when you think of this action, it brings memories to mind; associations with hugs you have received before. If you allow these associations to fill your mind, you will recall the feeling of being hugged. Think about it long enough, and your skin will remember, and your blood will remember, and the very core of you will remember what it is to be enfolded.

I cannot now embrace you. I cannot hug you, I cannot hold you. I am too far away. I cannot comfort you, although your sadness is real to me, here. The transmission of your sadness suffers from no noise. All I can send to you is light, mere light,. That light suggests sounds, which suggest an action, that might evoke a memory, that might make you feel loved. Through all this abstraction, all these removes, it is all I can do.

It is all I can do, and it is what I must do.

The Body Bourgeois

2010-06-08T04:25:00.000-07:00

You know that billboard at the end of the 55? The one that's always rented out by Banana Republic, and always features some ultra-thin model in a pastoral setting? The image changes every month or so, but even so, you can always grass in it, usually sunlight. I commented to Bonny that it seemed to me that Banana Republic was consciously trying to court an upper-class clientele. I was thinking about how the urban poor would feel alienated by images of a carefully cultivated nature that only exists at country clubs and in the expansive yards of those who own fine houses. I was thinking also about how class implies a certain body type, how economic class actually fundamentally affects one's flesh--and that rich folks with their fad diets and personal trainers and yoga classes and plastic surgeons are probably model thin a lot more often than poor folks who are too busy dealing with economic stressors to spend time cultivating the perfect body and who, for lack of education or lack of options, eat shitty fast food and pre-packaged food and basically spend most of their lives awash in high-fructose corn syrup. Funny how the cheapest foods are often the highest in calories, meaning that you pay less for more energy (in an absolute sense), while more expensive foods involve things like garlic and herbs, using flavoring agents other than sugar and fat to be appealing. Health as a luxury item, health as conspicuous consumption; the fat cats are thin now while the workers are fat. It makes me hate my own conceptualization of beauty, seeing it as a contrived imposition from the top-down and reinforced by the heavily-edited images I see every day in advertising, as much as I fail in my struggle to subvert it. It makes me loathe my self-loathing, seeing my hatred of my own body as being a piece with that self-hatred that depressed ethnic groups experience when they measure themselves by the metrics of the ruling class and inevitably find themselves wanting. So yeah, this shot reeked of richness.

She informed that yes, this was true. Banana Republic is for rich people, while Old Navy and the Gap, which were owned by the same parent company, appealed to the lower and middle classes, respectively. I was a bit stunned. I was not aware that class distinctions in this country were so concrete. I would not have thought that a corporation would be so obvious in its efforts to say "Yes, this is for poor people" and "Yes, this is for the rich." Or rather, I might've assumed that a company like BMW would make a product that is the best it can possibly be and charge as much as possible for that product, but then, after achieving that threshold, I wouldn't think that company would pull back on its efforts and make a product that's just okay for the the rest of us (or a product that's really kind of crappy for those who can't even afford that)

I don't know why I wouldn't have thought that; I guess, being a person who wants options and experiences to transcend boundaries of ethnicity and class, I don't want to think about such boundaries as being rigid and clearly defined. Clearly price is a huge determinant, and as a member of the upper-lower-middle class I recognize that more than most, but it was still strange to me to think of the aesthetics of women's clothing--which I figured were all more or less decadent and an expression of conspicuous consumption--were actually graded along class lines. Is Banana Republic clothing the ideal to which Gap and Old Navy clothing aspires but falls short--and is this falling short a calculated thing intended to make Old Navy and Gap shoppers feel inferior? Or does each clothing store promote a distinct aesthetic, making the most of the styles and materials (and traditions?) within that set price range--"We're here, we're poor, get used to it!"

I don't know. I think it's all ugly, and when I say that I'm not really talking about the clothes themselves. Which is why I will persist in spending as little on my clothes as I possibly can, and in buying clothing that does not compromise comfort for the sake of class vanity, and is otherwise as non-descript as possible.

Not that I think that Banana Republic would have anything that would fit me, anyway.

Tresasure Seekers

2010-06-06T07:33:00.001-07:00

Treasure seekers
With their metal detectors
Sifting the sand
For gum wrappers
Pennies
And pull-tabs

I wonder
If they ever
Make enough
To recoup
Their initial
Investment

Somebody
Should do
A Study

(These city workers in their yellow vests have the right of it; scavenging the sand for the evidence of last night's debaucheries to put into the proper receptacles before someone steps on it and shreds a foot. I think these weekend adventurers would be hard pressed to earn the equivalent of minimum wage with their pathetic treasure seeking. But I'm sure it's more exciting to find a fallen quarter than it is to pick up the ten-thousandth Coors light bottle tossed away by some drunk and selfish fuck, even if it is far more useless.)

Orange Fail

2010-06-03T10:32:00.001-07:00

A few years back I went to the farmer's market across from U.C.I. for the first time. I bought some navel oranges there from a vendor who no longer comes to that market. These redefined my conceptualization of the navel orange. These were the Platonic ideal of the navel orange. Sweet and so full of juice that they soaked your shirt when you peeled them. The vendor has stopped coming to the U.C.I. Farmer's market for whatever reason, and I've been trying to find suitable replacement oranges ever since with mixed success. While my farmer's market produce purchases are usually superior to chemically-ripened waxy desiccated things at the super market that bear only a passing resemblance to fruit, I've yet to find a consistent grower who can deliver fruit that good.

If my hands stay dry after peeling your navel orange, you fail at growing navel oranges. I'm so tired of dried-up oranges with flesh that is the taste and consistency of packing material. Juice content, people, juice content.

Navel oranges are sterile hybrids, which means they can only be grown by grafting, which means that all navel oranges are genetically identical. Barring any delicious mutations like the Cara-Cara navel (which is the best kind of navel), all navel orange trees are genetically the same. So the pronounced difference in quality between an orange like a ball of uncooked rice and an orange that is dripping with sweetness must all be in the application of agricultural techniques. Nurture over nature. Something to think about.

All You Need Is Love

2010-05-19T09:20:00.001-07:00

The song was playing at the stand where I went to buy my tea. It got me thinking. Let us examine Mr. Lennon's claim, shall we?

All you need is love. Well, if we assume that a need is that which is necessary to maintain the organism, then I don't know how long one could be sustained on love alone. Nine minutes in an all-love, no-oxygen environment and you're dead. You may be loved, but assuming you need to continue to be alive in order to appreciate the fact, the love is rendered moot.

Okay, so all you need is love. And oxygen. And food, and water, and shelter. Because without these things you will very soon be popping your clogs.

(Yes, I looked that up. You can too.)

Now things are getting messy. In order to fulfill these biological needs, there's a lot of non-love activity involved. In order to get food, you either have to work to raise or gather it yourself or, more likely in this specialized post-industrial society, you work at some other task and somebody pays you for your work and you take your pay to a fourth party who has been commissioned by corporations to warehouse the food created by other other parties and then to exchange your payment--which has to be guaranteed by a government, so now there's *that*--for the food. Water and housing aren't much simpler.

Of course, all you really *need* to live in order to love and be loved are a few handfuls of berries and seeds and insects per day. But I'm thinking that if you're content to subsist at that level of material existence, you're not going to be getting much love from people who are members of a post-industrial society. Assuming that's the kind of love you need, and we'll assume that that's the kind of love Mr. Lennon is talking about, because that's the society he was a member of, drug-filled spiritual quests to India aside.

So now in order to love, you need to eat, and in order to eat, you need to work. In order to work, you need to do all kinds of other things. For a lot of jobs you need to get an education, so now you need to go to college in order to love. For those jobs that don't require a college degree, you might still need to undergo years of training. And in order to maintain most jobs, you need to cultivate a specific kind of appearance, work on one's social skills...so now we get to the fact that if all you need is love, in order to get that love, you have to wear a tie.

You're still with me? Good. I know it's been a bit of a jog to get here, but the logic is sound.

To Mr. Lennon in the year 1967, it might well have seemed that all one needed was love. But getting past that level of ebullient optimism, we see that there are layers and layers of economic necessity (and then layers of luxury that, once entrenched, are perceived as necessities, such that we think we "need" cars and flat-screen televisions and breast implants) in order to maintain the capacity for love. Recall that Mr. Lennon previously quoted Barret Strong to claims that "Your lovin' give me such a thrill / But your lovin' don't pay my bills;" his subsequent reversal of this position doesn't acknowledge the necessity of paying the bills in order to love. And this is to say nothing of the other realities that go into making one loveable and capable of being loved. Can one be content with love alone while dispensing with such other needs as job satisfaction, personal security, actualization through the meeting of self-created goals, variety, et cetera? Certainly love can contribute to the meeting of these other needs, and can even compensate for some deficiencies, but it can't satisfy all other psychic needs, all of the time. It can't really be all you need. Because nobody is liable to love you when you're depressed about how nobody cares about your work, or when you're panicking because you think the terrorists are going to come and get you.

And thus we end up with the causal relationship whereby in order to love, we have to have the war in Iraq. Personally, I'm not willing to make those links--my own needs for security and my own interpretation of the causal relationship between my personal security and the war in Iraq being very different from those of the lion's share of my countrymen--but I can assure you that there are plenty of people who do feel such a need, as stupid as it is.

And thus we end up with the actuality in which the need for love implicated myriad other needs, and the need for love actually generates wars and corporate capitalism and other dumb shit like that. Love equals the purchase of a diamond equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so love equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so John Lennon's original proposition could be retitled as "All You Need is Forced Labor in Africa." Not quite as cheery, but as true, given the assumptions we tend to make in post-industrial societies, some of which are based on actual organic needs but many of which are based on an incredibly luxuriant interpretation of what those needs actually are.

In any case, I am afraid, Mr. Lennon, that your position is an over-simplification of the matter at hand, ignoring the political and economic complexities of a person's "need." Perhaps at some point--like infancy--love includes and provides for these things, but by the point one is an adult, love is far more fraught and complicated

Nutshell

2010-05-13T05:35:00.000-07:00

Imagine a man. The man is tall. The man is fat. The man is blondly bearded and his blond hair is unfashionably long. The man is young, but his weight and his beard and the hard set of his eyes make him seem older. The man is dressed in dark clothing. He is wearing too much clothing for late spring in a desert climate. He wears his black jeans and black sweatshirt as though to shield his shape against the outside world, as though he would as soon wear steel armor over his skin as cotton. He wears a backpack on his back and the backpack is full of books that cause his broad shoulders to stoop.

He stands at the foot of a bridge that spans a city street. A human flood comes at him over the bridge. Hundreds of eighteen-year-olds with perfect or adequately perfect or at the very least perfectly adequate bodies come jogging at him. The eighteen-year-old bodies are wearing nothing but underwear. The eighteen-year-old bodies wave and shout and cheer and wave their hands in the air with drunken exuberance. Their sweat smells of alcohol. Their sweat is eighty proof.

The man sets his jaw and locks his eyes. He deliberately stares at the point in the air fifty feet directly out from him. He deliberately does not stare at the nearly naked breasts. He fails, locks his eyes again.

The man takes a breath. He closes his eyes and bows his head. He opens his eyes and raises his head. He forges into the human flood, going against the current. He is jostled from all sides by young flesh, the soft flesh of women and the hard flesh of men. He forces his way forward through the flesh and the laughs and the screams of ecstasy, refusing to concede one inch to the circumstances. He is a darkness among all the bright nudity.

The tide overtakes him. He is pushed back.

Unable to force his way through the flood, he heads to the street to take a circuitous detour. Nearly naked people clutter the sidewalks and clutter the air with their loud chatter. One of the naked girls walks opposed to him on the sidewalk; she sees the hard set of his eyes and sees his beard and his fatness and his darkness and shies away, scared. Her boyfriend with moves protectively in front of her, putting the wall of his abs between the girlfriend and the man. The man does not stop. He looks at the girl's shivering breasts as little as he possibly can.

The man reaches an intersection, sees people standing next to the base of the streetlight, doesn't trust their judgment, reaches out to push the Walk button himself. Naked people crowd around him. One of the naked girls loudly and drunkly asks him if he did the Undie Run. Without ever looking at her, the heavily-clothed and heavyset man shakes his head and says “No.” She then asks another waiting and standing person if he did the Undie Run. She says they do Undie Runs in London, which is where she's from. She is very clearly lying; her voice is from nowhere near London, although now, as if to give some force to the lie, she remembers to torque her vowels a little bit, but the effort is inadequate and unconvincing.

The light changes. The man and the others cross the street. The man walks the several blocks to finally get to the parking structure, and walks to the far end where he parked his car.

It is only when he comes to his usual space and finds it empty that he recalls that he parked in the parking structure on the other end of the college campus. He realizes that he has, in fact, been going the wrong way this whole time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give unto you the life of David Michael Kammerzelt III in a goddamn mother-fucking nut-shell.

(Last night actually happened exactly like this, almost.)

The Play in the Park

2010-04-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

I’ve tried to write this out half a dozen times now. It never comes out right. And yet it is one of those incidents to which my mind returns with regularity, a core of gravity around which the rest of my identity spins. I think I keep coming back to it in the hope that the final, decisive, conclusive, real writing of the incident will provide an expiation.

QUINCE
If that may be, then all is well. Come, sit down,
every mother's son, and rehearse your parts.

I won’t return to New York. Not if I can help it. Once was enough. One week was enough to suffice me a lifetime. I’d break this vow for a publishing opportunity, of course, of course, but nothing shy of that could draw me back. A week of breathing in that air, congested with congealed emotion, thick with stress that was a second humidity, walking through those concrete canyons and swimming through the air that was saturated with the stress and dead dreams of myriad millions was enough to make me disinclined to go back.

And then, of course, there was the play in the park.

QUINCE
O monstrous! O strange! we are haunted.

On the downslope of a week surfeited with sensory data and concentrated culture, we were going out to see a play in Central Park. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as interpreted by students from Julliard. The prospect of seeing Shakespeare in Central Park was, for me—suburban rube and aspiring literatus with deep-seated feelings of inferiority with respect to the cultural intensity of New York City—quite exciting.

QUINCE
Pat, pat; and here's a marvellous convenient place
for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our
stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring-house; and we
will do it in action as we will do it before the duke.

I was, I think, about sixteen at the time. Seventeen, maybe. I was with a friend from high school who had a number of relations in the City, and we were shuffling between his uncles and aunts in the course of our explorations of New York. On this night, we were out with one of his aunts. Maternal or paternal or incidental, I don’t remember. I do remember she smiled incessantly, smiled at everything. I remember that she wore a blue dress with a white polka dot print. I remember she was very overweight, and that each step caused her to huff her breath. We’d taken a taxi from near her place of work in Brooklyn to the place of the play.

PUCK
What, a play toward! I'll be an auditor;
An actor too, perhaps, if I see cause.

We drew up on the cheap plastic chairs arranged on a green, oblique to a cluster of hillocks. I don't remember if we paid or not, nor do I remember if there were sufficient chairs for everybody or if we had to sit on the grass or on the small wall that ran behind the green. These details have left me. We were open to the air; that much I do know.

The seats filled up with persons in buttoned shirts and dresses. Even to this outdoor play in the park, this free play, a goodly number of the playgoers had gone over the threshhold of business casual, at least, to make an impression of their professionalism and their richness. Or perhaps they had just come from their serious, rich, professional jobs and had not had opportunity to change. Or perhaps they always dressed like that. Unlike me, who enjoys plays but always balks at spending more than $40 on an article of clothing, such that even when I saved up to shell out the two thousand dollars to see the Ring Cycle, I was seeing it in jeans and tennis shoes. But I'm defraying myself. Back to it.

The play commenced. It was quite the minimalist affair—which was to say it had no set to speak of, other than the green hillocks and raw moonlight.

SNOUT
Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?

The actors had no costumes other than plain black sweatclothes. They were relying on the broadness and bigness of their acting to carry the magic of the play, I guess—and that there was in abundance.

I hadn't found A Midsummer Night's Dream to be particularly funny. I hadn't found any of Shakespeare's comedies to be funny, really. I'd read MND before, or had tried to and stalled out; I can't recall. But what verbal humor there is in the play is largely lost on a first time auditor, due to the now-unusual and intricate constructions of words and the rapidity of the delivery, complicated in this face by the manifold distractions of being in an audience in a park in the middle of the City. I've read it subsequently and I can parse out the jokes now, and some of them are actually quite good, but it takes a kind of concentration and the ability to re-read lines and scan the gloss to get the full humor out of the play. None of this was available to me at the time, with the result that the comedy was coming across as profoundly unfunny.

I wasn't the only one to feel so. The audience tended to sit in dumb silence, as though these graying people in button shirts and dresses didn't know any more than I did when it was that they were supposed to laugh. The actors were trying to assist us in this regard by making exaggerated gestures and faces, turning dramatic comedy into clowning. I wasn't really feeling it, and I don't think anybody else was, either, judging by the deadness of audience around me. We'd proceeded along to Act III, Scene 1, in more of an endurance than a mirth.

That changed, though. For, you see, a homeless man who perhaps had been sleeping behind one of the hillocks or a nearby tree was stirred to come onto the “stage.”

QUINCE
Ay, marry, must you; for you must understand he goes
but to see a noise that he heard, and is to come again.

He violated the fourth wall by violating what could have been the second wall but wasn't anything more than open air. He was thin and dark-skinned. His hand was held out, and an empty, dirty white polystyrene foam cup was in it. He began to panhandle at the actors. Now that got a laugh, a general loud laugh, more of a laugh than anything the actors had done up to that point had gotten.

The man was moving slowly. He kept holding out his cup. He held it at a slim, small brunette actress who was playing one of the mechanicals. She frowned and stepped away. He held it at a round-faced blonde actress, who made an expression of disgust before moving away. He held it at the thickset bearded actor who was playing Bottom, I think, and he slapped the man's hand away. The homeless man then violated the fifth wall that was the actor playing Wall, as indicated by a man covered in a bedsheet, by holding the cup at him, too. Wall swatted at the cup as though it were a fly.

All this was the greatest of improvised physical comedy. The audience was cracking up in laughter, in a way that it never had in response to the archaic boring tameness of a Shakespearean play. Sometimes the homeless man looked out at the laughter, looked at it sideways, as though it were confusing him. He was muttering something. I couldn't hear what. I think he might have been asking for change or saying that he was hungry or needed help.

Through the duration, the actors were gamely or lamely trying to bluster their way through the scene by means of going even more over the top so as to drown out the obvious fact of a homeless man standing among them. The thickset bearded actor who was playing Bottom, I think, and who had never been under the top in the first place, tried to be even louder and even more broad than he had before, until he was damn near shouting his lines. I think perhaps he was envious of the homeless man's inadvertent facility for comedy.

I don't think that the homeless man was aware that he was interrupting a play. He looked only rarely at the audience, and he seemed to be mostly oblivious of the extraordinary circumstances of these actors and actresses reciting lines at a great group of people sitting on the green. He held up his cup at Bottom again. He asked audibly for a little something. His voice was tired and sad and weak and old.

Bottom knocked the cup away. He turned to face the homeless man. Red blood burned in his cheeks and neck. Bottom screamed that no, he would not give anything to the homeless man, that he was interrupting their play and touching the actresses and that he needed to get out of there. The homeless man lowered his hand, but made no other movement.

The crowd cheered at the monlogue. People clapped and they laughed and they cheered.

After maybe half a minute the homeless man wandered toward the front row and began to panhandle the people in the good seats. He wasn't at it for long, though.

I saw the red and blue of police lights coming from the nearby street. A good New Yorker would tell you what street it was; all the streets have distinct identities in New York, I guess, but to me a street is just a street. Comes from living in a subdivision shot through with cul-de-sacs, I guess. Somebody—a uniformed policeman, I think—came and took the homeless man away.

TITANIA
Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed and to arise;
And pluck the wings from Painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes:
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.

There was more cheering.

The play proceeded.

We left shortly after. I don't know why we left. I think my friend's aunt, as hard-pressed as she was to move, was the first to get up out of her seat. But the underlying motivation for leaving? Had the play become boring again now that it was once again on course? Had the illusion of the Athenian youths and mechanicals gamboling in the faery-haunted wood been so thoroughly broken that there was no going back? Or was my friend's aunt, like me, sick to the stomach, sick to the very guts, with helpless guilt? I didn't know. I don't think we talked about it.

But I thought about it. I went over the incident again and again in my head, scanning and re-scanning my memory of the evening. Because I had to know, I had to be sure—it was everything to me that I had not laughed.

I remember myself sitting rigid, silent, horrorstruck. Not laughing. Never laughing. Even when everybody else was laughing at the antics of the ruined man up on the stage, I was not laughing. I could not laugh at the play, but I would not laugh at the ruin of another man's mind. I would not. Or so I told myself.

I tried to recall the memory of my muscles. Had my diaphragham heaved up, the breath rushed quickly through my throat? I swore that it hadn't, but I had to know. But I couldn't know. So I was obsessing about it, trying to coax answers out of my muscles that my muscles couldn't give, trying to sort out my memories of the event from any form of wishful thinking. Because it was everything that I had not laughed.

And I wondered if I should have done something, if there was some right course of action to take, if I should have somehow helped the homeless man, or if I should have somehow helped the actors, or if I should have done anything other than be overwhelmed with the most sickening sense of futility in the face of misery that had ever afflicted me in my life.

I was still obsessing about it when, the next morning, we were on the subway going to somewhere; I don't recall where. There was a homeless man passed out and stretched out on the seats across from us. I didn't notice it at first over the general humid acridity of the City, but after a while I recognized that the homeless man had pissed himself, and that the scent of his urine was sour and musky and brutally strong.

BOTTOM
Good Master Mustardseed, I know your patience well:
that same cowardly, giant-like ox-beef hath
devoured many a gentleman of your house: I promise
you your kindred had made my eyes water ere now.

Another guy—a young guy—opened the door into our cabin. He exclaimed loudly that he wasn't going to be in a cabin with a bum who had pissed himself, clamped his hand over his nose, and left. My friend and I stayed. We got off the subway eventually, because that is what one does.

I was still obsessing about it the next morning, yes. And I'm still obsessing about it ten years on. And I think I'll be tumbling it over and over in my head, again and again, as long as I have thoughts to tumble.

PUCK
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #7

2010-03-24T07:34:00.000-07:00

The Six of Pentacles

In addition to her moderately popular xeriscaping and much-ballyhooed water recycling initiatives, the mayor of San Diego instituted city sales taxes on meat products to counter federal subsidies, forcing San Diegans to pay upfront for the hidden costs of subsidized meat production, subsidized animal feed, water consumption by stock animals, and environmental degradation. “This is survival,” said the mayor. “It's us or the cows. They will eat and drink and crap us to death.” Beef prices skyrocketed to $200 a pound, pork $140, chicken $90. Black markets for unbonded Tijuana chicken and O.C. beef flourished. A city noteworthy for its restaurants dropped traditional fare from its menus and began serving untaxed meat substitutes such as squab (pigeon), chow (dog), and fish-chicken (seagull). Less reputable establishments began doing a brisk trade in long pork (human). Speakeasy barbecues and catering trucks swarmed the city, advertising their presence and drawing customers by the dozens with the scent of grilling meat and disassembling or driving away at the first sound of sirens. Small-scale riots and looting of restaurant freezers were endemic, as were violent scuffles between residents and city meat inspectors, resulting in multiple lynchings and impromptu auto-da-fes of inspectors. Acts of cannibalism at the burnings were not uncommon. The mayor's policies were in effect for all of seven months before she was assassinated. The interim city council vowed to repeal the mayor's “Stalinesque social engineering.”

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #6

2010-03-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

The Two of Cups

(This is a variation on an old story; the preceding events are the established story, while the dialogue that follows is mostly my own. I came across this story as an African-American folktale from the slave era, although a cursory Internet search suggests that it, like the flood myth, might be one of those cultural near-universals.)

One day a man found a snake by the roadside. The snake had been in some kind of an accident or a fight. Its scales were torn away, and there were long gashes in its belly, back, and sides. Its eyes were dull and dusty. It was not moving.

“Please,” said the snake. “Help me.”

The man took pity on the snake. He picked it up, holding its body close to his own, lending the snake his warmth.

He took it home. He fed the snake with milk squeezed from a cloth. The snake's forked tongue would flick out and lick up each drop of milk as it fell from the cloth. Its eyes grew bright. Its wounds scarred over. It began to writhe around.

When the snake had made a full recovery, the man picked it up again. Again he held it close to his chest, sharing the warmth of his body with the creature. He took it outside, back to the place at the roadside where he had first found it. He took it out of his shirt and set it down. As he did so, the snake whipped around and delivered him a fatal bite on his hand.

“Why did you bite me?” asked the man.

The snake hissed. “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.”

“I did,” said the man. “And yet I helped you anyway.”

“Fool,” said the snake. “Did you really expect me to go against my nature? I am a snake; I bite.”

“I don't deny you are a snake,” said the man. “But you speak, which means you think. Thinking is your nature. Making choices is your nature. It is your nature to choose what of nature you want to cultivate and what to repress.”

“Arrogant man,” said the snake. “Your kind and mine are enemies. All men have earned death by snakebite. Why should you be exempt from revenge?”

“It is in the nature of men to kill,” said the man. “I don't dispute that. Men kill a lot of snakes. But it's also in the nature of men to make friends. It is in the nature of men to hurt, but also to help. It is the nature of men to choose how they act, and this is the highest of man's nature, and I chose to be helpful and friendly even though you chose to be false and violent. My primary regret is that, in being helpful, I didn't plan for the proper contingencies and wear a pair of gloves.”

Angered, the snake bit the man again, and again. The man groaned and sat down, his blood on fire.

“And now I die,” said the man, “death being a part of my nature over which I have very little conscious control.”

And die he did.

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #5

2010-03-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

The Nine of Swords.

My mother was never one to experience much worry, guilt, or anguish. I think she was largely free from those emotions. Certainly when she followed her brother/boss into that shopping mall and pulled an automatic handgun on him and his young son and made a series of incoherent demands concerning the family business while gesturing with the gun into the faces of the brother/boss and the son and screaming onlookers, she seemed to be free from worry, guilt, and anguish. She told me that divine voices expunged all doubt from her mind, that they urged her on, giving her confidence and courage. She told me she felt inspired. Perhaps she felt less inspired when the police stripped the gun from her hands and found it empty, and when her brother/boss howled in laughter, the hot breath of it singing her face. But on those few occasions that I've spoken to her about it, I detected no worry, guilt, or anguish in her voice, except perhaps over the fact that she failed to kill brother/boss, as the divine had told her to.

I don't ever remember her exhibiting much worry, guilt, or anguish on her own part. On mine, yes. But that was different. When upon leaving our second grade talent show she pulled me aside in the dark parking lot and punched me twice, once on each side of my head and the diamond on her wedding ring breaking the skin on my scalp while my father looked on, for not being as pretty as the other girls in my dance group and for being the second best dancer and not the best, she was worried about me. She was guilty because of me, and she was anguished for me. But not for herself.

She didn't show much worry, guilt, or anguish when she rolled her eyes in that exaggerated way—the muscles of her entire face rolling with them and her head lolling on her neck like a broken thing—and flung her arms out and screamed at the ceiling when her daughter brought home a report card with a B and a C+ on it. That is to say that she showed a lot of anguish over my grades, yes. I don't dispute that. But did she show any worry about overgoing the melodramatic theatrics in a way that would embarrass even the most hysterical of her daytime dramas? I don't think she ever did.

She did feel some worry when she confronted me one day about the fact that I went to school with known terrorists and murderers, which was news to me. When she asked me if I was ready to do the right thing and defend our family if we were attacked, or to prevent our family from being attacked in the first place, I really got the sense that she was worried from the way her hands and voice were trembling. And when the disgust rose up in me and I shouted a refusal, and she slapped me to the ground, I know she did so because she was worried. Again, for me, not for herself.

When she woke me up in the middle of the night, pulling me from the covers and making me kneel next to the bed and pray for forgiveness for being ugly and lazy and stupid, because ugliness and laziness and stupidity were sins—it was right there in the book—and the divine hated me and I had to beg the voices for mercy, I do think she felt guilty about having given birth to me. I do think she felt worried about having a daughter who was such a failure, and about how she was going to have to deal with that fact for the rest of her life, and I think she felt anguished about everything that I was. Anguished would be a good word for it. Still, again, I would argue that that anguish was misplaced.

In any case, that anguish was a temporary thing. She got over it. She found a cure for her worry, guilt, and anguish. She was a bit anguished when, while taking me to my first day of college in the distant southern part of the state, she tried to drive the car into the center divider, screaming that I was utter shit and worthless and had done nothing, nothing, nothing with my life and promising she would destroy us both. I say she was anguished because I saw her crying, and I assume that action is indicative of anguish. But the anguish would end with our mutually assured destruction. Or it would have, if I hadn't grabbed the wheel away from her, barely able to see for my own fear and my own tears but somehow managing to steer the car back into the lane. Again, she might have experienced some anguish over her failure, and some guilt.

No, no “might have” about it, that time. That time I know. When she made her tearful apology a few days later, saying something about changing her meds and saying “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry” until the words had lost their meaning, I expect that was real guilt. Real anguish. I didn't quite know what to do with it at the time. I sat and listened, the muscles stiff and hot around my eyes saying “Yeah, I forgive you,” until the words had lost their meaning. Not that my words had much meaning in the first place. I felt guilty about lying. Not anguished, though. I felt a little anguished, maybe, about the fact that I didn't rip my mother open with my words, that I didn't make the air thick with accusations and drive her in that sobbing state to strangle herself or swallow all her pills at once out of overwhelming feelings of worry, guilt, and anguish. I felt a little anguished over my failure. But I got over that.

Now I go to see her and she is calm. No worry, anguish, or guilt. Whatever medication she is on is working well. It is as though the past never happened. She is still abrasive; she tells me how to interact with my boss, tells me how to do my work, tells me how I need to present myself in the office, how I need to dress. She feels no anguish over saying these things, though. It is as a light-hearted ribbing, the kind that men do, and it's not worth my feeling anguished over it, even though every time she tells me these things I feel like some vital organ inside of me is shriveling. She does not tell me how I should be with my husband, and for that I am thankful. Nor does she insist that the divine voices tell her that I am failing in my great purpose, a purpose which was only ever known to them and to her. The last time I went to see her to show her how my belly was swelling, she didn't offer me any mothering advice. That was good. If she had, I think I might've gone into the kitchen, got a knife, and cut her throat open.

My mother shows no worry, anguish, or guilt at all now. She picks up her cat, kisses it and talks baby talk to it. She watches the news and complains volubly at the daily betrayals of our nation. She waters the plants in her garden, and she smiles while doing so. These are the actions of a person with a clean conscience. These are the actions of a person who has been absolved. She meets each day—each day diminished now down to mere human scale—with courage and with confidence.
My mother shows no worry, anguish, or guilt at all. And that's fine. I have enough worry, anguish, or guilt for the both of us. Especially when I place my hand on my stomach and feel that small heart beating beneath my hand. The worry and anguish and guilt threaten to split me open.

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #4

2010-03-21T10:36:00.001-07:00

(I feel like the character in this is the Hermit in another context).

The Devil

Hands red with dove’s blood, I waited. The aftertaste of the words was dirty in my mouth. My elbow was aching.

It took several tries for me to hear the ringing of the doorbell over the echo of the bell in my skull. I got up; the slight movement made the weightless dove down scatter over the floor. My heart was crashing in my chest.

The front door? Really? No smoke and stink of sulfur? No solidification of shadows at the unlit corners of the room? No reverberating voice or sinuous whispers?

I went to the front door and opened it. Dove’s blood got all on the doorknob.

The man standing at the door was of medium height, slightly paunched. I had the impression—I don’t know from where—that his height and weight and age were at the exact numerical average for the country. There was something about his face, though…but I couldn’t tell what. I couldn’t say that his hair or eyes; his skin was the color of skin. Even looking right at him, I was forgetting what he looked like. It was like the image of his face would enter my mind and slide right out again. It made you dizzy. He wore grey—a grey suit of no particular distinction, no particular make. I would have latched onto it and said that it was professional dress, but even then I couldn’t quite be sure if the coat and shirt were business or casual. The fact of the presence or absence of a tie refused to stay in my mind.

Shaking my head, the reverberating of the bell growing louder instead of softer, I said “You’re here.”

He said something—mumbled more than said. The words were a low blur of sound. I pieced out words and bits of words. Day you tract you legal vice you ay I in. Oh. May I come in?

“Yes, come in,” I said, sweeping my hand toward the interior of the apartment and spattering dove’s blood on the wood of the floor.

He walked in. He walked past the ritual circle on the floor of the living room, stepping around the smoldering black candles that cluttered the floor like fungus in a forest and stepping over the lines drawn in blood already drying to flakes of rust. He sat on one of the cheap wicker-bottom chairs that I had shoved to the side of the room. He breathed in the air thickened by wax smoke and the smell of the insides of doves. He took out a briefcase I hadn’t seen him carry in, placed it on his knees, and open it. He took a sheaf of papers from the opened case and straightened them by racking them against his thigh.

My heart had died for a few moments there when I had opened the door and saw nothing but the man standing there. But now it had resuscitated, and had a desperate life of its own. It was drowning inside of me and trying to claw its way out. I walked to him.

“I tried so hard to bring you here,” I said. “Real dove’s blood. White doves, not pigeons. I had all the candles. I rang the bell a full six-hundred and sixty-six times, not eighteen times like those pissant cowards do in their rituals. I guess I could have gone with child’s blood, but I’m sure even you think that’s a bit over the top.” At that moment I tripped over one of candles, catching myself before I went down onto the floor but sending several of the candles crashing in a chain reaction of flame and black wax. I recovered, stood over him with blooded hands.

“And now you’re here,” I said.

He buzzed something incomprehensible. Listening to him was like listening to radio static. He held the sheaf of paper in his hands—largish-smallish hands, wrinkled-smooth hands.

“And you know what that means,” I said.

He droned. His voice was sometimes rough and harsh, clicking or hitting against a consonant, but there was something in that blur of words that made you want to lie down and go to sleep. I shook my head and slapped myself on the cheek to keep myself awake. I bit the inside of my cheek to shock myself with pain.

“You’re here,” I said. “And that means it’s true. All of it is true. Heaven, Hell. God and you. I prayed for years—decades without any verification. But I knew you would listen to my prayers. You don’t require an act of faith. You’re pragmatic. Aren’t you?”

If he said something, I didn’t know what it was. Maybe the mumbling was nothing but sound.

“You’re here,” I said, “and that means that I have a soul. A soul for the selling and the buying.”

He held out the papers to me. They were thick with print.

“No,” I repeated. “Now that you’re here, now that I see you—fuck you.”

He took the papers back. I had the impression that his eye-colored eyes were looking at me, although I couldn’t be certain. It made my skin want to slough off of my bones.

“Don’t you get it?” I said. I gave out a laugh, a brutal thing. “You fucking fool. That you’re here at all means I should never bargain with you. You’re proof of the scope of it, of the drama. You’re proof of it all. Eternity, all of it. “

He sat back. He listened.
“Don’t you get it?” I repeated. “Years of doubt, of gnawing doubt, of anxiety fit to split me open resolved.” I laughed again, and there was the high treble of hysteria in my voice. “Oh, you goddamned idiot. ”

“You don’t know what it’s like, do you? Doubt. You play on men’s doubts, prey on men’s doubts, but you’ve never doubted yourself. You always knew. You always knew that the impossible things that you can’t touch or see or hear or sense in any way were everything, in spite of all the reality all around you. You knew this was all trash, a dream, and that the truth was something you’d never experienced but only been told about and had no reason to believe in but that that nothingness meant so much more than all the everything you knew; you knew you were accountable to inscrutable rules that defied all logic and experience but that your living in accordance with these rules was the most important thing you could possibly do with your brief, brief time. You knew that everything that seemed good and pleasurable and sensible was a lie, and that attrition and self-punishment and the mutilation of your reason were what was required of you. You knew that everything that was false was true and true was false. You knew. Fuck you. Now you’re here, and now I know. Fuck you and fuck faith and now I will spend every second of my life ensuring that I live forever rather than wondering if I’m wasting every second of my life chasing figments and vapors.”

I knew I wasn’t making sense. I didn’t care. Nonsense was sense and sense was nonsense. That was what it meant.

He rose. His voice raised up until it was deafening, until I was drowning in sound. The buzzing hum of it filled my ears, the room, reality. It was the sound of every bee ever born droning its wings into a microphone. It was overpowering and awful—it made my bones hurt—and it put me straight to sleep.

And I forgot all about it.

That I remember now means what, exactly? I don’t know. It’s been years since that happened. Or has it? I’m not obsessed with black magic anymore, not obsessed with verifying the existence or non-existence of a soul within me. I’ve given up on all that. If I was ever into it at all. I remember eating bitter entheogens that made the shadows crawl and the walls waver but told me of nothing aside from the mind’s capacity for self-rape. I remember reading about the rituals, prepping them, going all out for the most elaborate and powerful one of all. But I don’t remember actually performing it. I don’t remember anything about it. You’d think I’d remember the hard, empirical fact of having to scrape black wax from six hundred and sixty-six candles off of the hardwood floor of my apartment, but there’s no memory of that. It’s just a blur, just a haze of words and long nights and doubt so acute it came as a physical pain in my guts that made me curl up and howl my lungs out until my howl became a breathy, spittled whisper.

And then there’s this. This memory that came back to me. Or was it a memory? A fever dream? A flashback? Wishful thinking?

I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, and I never will.

God fucking damn it.

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #3

2010-03-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

In faith, I wrote this last week, which is a bit of a violation of the term of the challenge which specifies that I should create a new work in response to the stimulus of the tarot card. However, thinking about the Juggler and its meaning of versatility, I could not do other than to put this selection up here. It's from the end of the second chapter of my current long-form work, _Chained_. I'm working on going forward rather than micromanaging my edits, and consequently I have already noticed a few errors in punctuation or unforgivable repetitions of vocabulary. But forgive me, just the same. The final product will be thoroughly edited, I assure you.

The Two of Pentacles

The warrior brought both of his fists up high over his head, even as the Dustman had done, and brought them down in one solid blow on the Dustman's skull. Magic leaked and sparked and vented; the skull caved in. Such a blow would've been mortal to any living creature, but that the Dustman was not. The remaining arm leapt at the warrior's throat, but he intercepted the two spear-sharp digits and grasped at them until he had torn them apart in a shock of shattered bone and ripped sinew. The Dustman was not dead, but the integrity of its magic was, and as the warrior ripped at the bones in the arm and stomped on the bones beneath the cloak they did not resist the impact as they once had. It took a long while to shatter all of the Dustman, but the warrior was determined and the warrior was thorough, crushing each rise of bone flat beneath his fists and his feet. He felt a tug at his waist and turned to see the slave threshing at the remains of the cloak and the bones with its umbilical chain, raising up the chain and dropping it and sending exaggerated waves along its length to tug at the warrior's plate-clad belt. The slave saw that the warrior had seen its actions; it stopped and dropped the chain. The folding-in of its arms and tuck of its head suggested a shame in being caught collaborating.

“Who is the Dustman?” whatever was left asked one last time, and then the unmuted wind roared back with full force. Whorls of pale and bitter-smelling powdered bone joined the rest of the wind-tossed dust.

The warrior sank to the ground, exhausted. His iron collapsed as though there were no flesh and muscle inside to give it shape. A tug on the chain, and the slave was doing its damnedest to wrench the collar off from around its neck and pulling itself to the very limit of its leash, as though to strain the chain to the breaking point. The warrior allowed it to persist in its efforts for a moment or two, feeling the pull of the slave's exertion, before grabbing the chain and snapping a sidelong wave across it that knocked the slave flat. The two of them sat on the earth, the warrior with his legs spread out before him and another hand behind him for balance and the great engine of his chest rising and sinking, and the slave breathless and silent and so bruised that it could do no more than sprawl on the ground. They regarded one another.

The warrior took off his helmet. He rubbed at the brown dust that had come to coat his brow through the visor, and at the white dust that was the remains of the Dustman. He took a drink.

“How did...how did you know that would work?”

The warrior paused. His eyes, so small and sunken in all that brute musculature, fixed on the slave.

The slave swallowed and spoke again. “How did you know that you'd be able to hurt it, even after your axe bounced off?”

“I didn't know,” said the warrior. “But I had to try.”

“My mother says--my mother said that doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.”

The orc coughed out a laugh as he slipped the axe back into its case. “Tell that to the wind that wears down the mountain. Sometimes doing the same thing over again is the only way to tear down an opponent's defenses. You persist, he gets fatigued and tired and bored, he makes a mistake, you win. It's not a bad strategy.” He paused, thought, chewed on nothing, chewed on the thought itself, spat at the dirt. “No, it's not a bad strategy. Except when it is.” He hauled on the chain, causing the slave to stumble up.

They moved on.

When the wind died down enough to permit it, the warrior spoke.

“You believe that flexibility is a virtue, yes?

The slave stared up at him with uncomprehending eyes, then glanced off into the hazed horizon.

“Adaptability. The ability to change. You'd think this was good, right? That this was a good quality for a person to possess.”

“Yes,” said the slave slowly, feeling for the trap behind the warrior's words. It shied a bit to the side, anticipating a blow if its answer proved incorrect. Wise child.

But no blow came. The warrior spoke on as he continued to slog against the wind. “Dedication. Determination. Resolve. The ability to hold fast to a value even in the face of challenge. These, too, are good things, right? Good qualities for a person to have?”

“Yes,” said the slave just as slowly.

“So which is good? Dedication or adaptability? They can't both be good, because they are oppositional. Can good be on both sides of a polarized duality?”

The slave said nothing. The wind offered trash noise for answers.

“Well?” said the orc. “Where is that vaunted human quickness of mind to grapple with my little question? Where is that adaptability of intellect for which your race is so justly known? I am but a humble orc, my head being all taken up by thick skull bone and hypertrophied jaw muscles and proportionately larger sinus cavities instead of brains; I can't be expected to figure this conundrum out for myself, can I?”

They said nothing more as full night came on.

The cool in the air calmed the wind. Its screamings subsided to pained-sounding whispers, bitter suggestions. The moving dust died down to mere tosses of substance in the air and small curled serpents of dirt winding across the ground. Stars manifested and shone their dumb lights down onto the moving and the still, the living and the slain.

There was no direct need to stop with the fall of darkness. The wastes were vast and all but empty, with only the rare sage scrub bush to trip over, and these were audible by the dry-toothed rattling sounds they made when their small leaves caught the subtle wind. There was little indeed to be moving towards, with nothing but nothingness visible unto the horizon. There were a few slope-shouldered boulders imprinting their shadows against the starlight here and there, boulders the size of beetles at any distance, and it was towards one of these boulders that the warrior seemed to be heading. He did not ask the slave if it required water or rest, and the slave did not ask of him. The warrior crushed the dry dirt into powder beneath his boots. The slave made an effort to walk outside of the warrior's defined footprints. It was a bit of an effort, as the warrior's feet chewed up great swaths of the baked ground and the slave's tether was not generous, but it was possible.

At length the warrior drew up to one of the wind-carved rocks. How he had known which rock to pick out of the dozens of scattered sentinels who threw their shadows over the wastes was unclear, or perhaps his coming had been pure luck. But he approached the boulder deliberately, loosing his axe and falling into a half-crouch to minimize his exposed profile. The slave imitated the warrior's stance, shook violently and stood full upright, shifted quickly through a range of emotions that were visible upon its expressive face but none lasting long enough to be parsed out, and then crouched again after the warrior. The warrior watched it all and said nothing.

The warrior drew closer to the boulder. His heavy boots crushed softly through the baked dirt, making no more noise than a beetle might have done. He sighted something and then stood up, slipping his axe back into its holster. The slave stood by, attentive, unnerved. Some quality in the air--a lingering electricity from the wind, perhaps--had its pale hair standing stiff on its scalp.

The warrior went forward and prodded at something in the darkness with the toe of his boot. “You can come over here,” he said. The slave obeyed, and found itself staring down a rigid body.

The eyes of the body were frozen open. Blood stained its cheeks and teeth, and small bits of dried blood flaked off from its chin to be picked up by the wind, more new dust. Death had set in when the muscles of the face and neck were still drawn taut, and the body was locked in an expression of fierce, tight pain. It was a woman's body, a relatively young woman, neither a girl nor old. Her hair was brown and short. Loose sags of skin hung from her skeleton, implying that she had recently and dramatically lost weight, which had left her gaunt rather than thin. She was dressed in rough rags that had been stripped of color by the sun and shape by the wind until they had the appearance of sacking. Her hands were bound before her, with coils of chain binding her palms and wrists together in a perversion of prayer and then sinking into the ground to anchor on to some buried object. A rock, most likely. The woman had scratched at the dirt in an attempt to unearth the anchor, but it was buried too deep and the earth packed down too hard, and all her excavations had made but a shallow crater with the chain emerging from its center like the worming limb of some alien beast grabbing her to drag her down. Several shattered fingernails like the discarded husks of insects but with bits of flesh still attached at their backings drifted around in the pit, played with by the wind.

The woman's body was mutilated. Mouthfuls of flesh were missing from her forearms, just behind the bindings. The wounds were round with ragged edges. Dust had mixed with the blood to make a kind of mud that had dried red-grey around the injury, the color muted in the starlight. Bites of flesh were taken out of her biceps, too, and from the tops of her breasts. The bites were so deep in places as to have exposed the bone, which itself showed signs of being gnawed and cracked open to the marrow.

The warrior toed the body. He knelt down next to it and produced one of the small axes from the bandolier that hung across his chest. He took the axe and planted it deep in the woman's abdomen, drawing it up until it hit the hook of her ribs. He wrenched the axe out, shaking away the few drops of dark, dense blood that had gathered on the blade. Then he reached into the incision and rummaged wetly inside of the woman's chest cavity before plucking out a small, brown, withered object like a baked apple. This he inspected, turning over in his hands, before setting back atop the woman's chest, outside now when it should have been inside. The warrior unslung his pack and rummaged around inside of it, in turn, and produced a small square steel box. This he unlatched and opened, exposing clusters of coarse grey salt. He placed the woman's heart inside of the salt box, sealed the box back up, and placed it once again in his pack. He sat back.

“You understand what happened here?” said the warrior. He waved a gauntleted hand at the woman's red teeth and at the rips in her skin, at her defleshed breasts, at the new mouths that her mouth had birthed in her body.

“'Even slaves who have no other power can find the power to die. We have to find reasons not to make that choice,'” the slave said.

“Wise child,” said the warrior, chuckling. “Wise child. Keep it up with the wisdom, and you'll fare better than she did.”

The slave stared at those awful open eyes, brown eyes, bloodshot eyes, very expressive eyes, for as long as it could and then looked away.

“You captured her, too?” it asked.

“Yes,” said the warrior. “In a village about three days southeast of here. Pioso. You know it?”

The slave shook its head. Its chain collar rattled.

“You killed her family, too?” asked the slave.

“Yes,” said the warrior.

The slave tilted its head up at the stars, as though to scan the sky for some familiar and reassuring pattern. They had not traveled so far in one afternoon that the constellations would have changed from what the slave had been used to, but whether there was any familiarity and reassurance in the same arrangements of stars as there had been the night before could not be known.

“Yes,” resumed the warrior. “I killed her family and took her as a slave. So also you. She didn't take very well to life as a slave, though. She didn't last but four days in my keeping, and as soon as I left her alone she seized upon the opportunity to bite herself until she bled to death. I show you this as an object lesson, and I tell you this to provide you with a negative exemplar of slave behavior. He nudged the corpse's head with his boot, and pulled down the woman's lip with the toe of his boot. “Next time you think about effecting your own death, think on the shreds of flesh drying between this woman's teeth.”

“So was this dedication or adaptability?” asked the slave.

The warrior's laugh erupted from the depths of his armor and echoed within the steel cavern that encased his skull. His ears were still damaged by the Dustman's keenings, and the echo caused him to clap his hands to the sides of his helmet in pain, which only caused him to laugh more.

“Ah, wise child. You will make someone a good slave, assuming he doesn't waste you on rape or brute labor,” said the orc. “It was both, I think.”

The warrior stripped off his helmet and gauntlets and set them aside, along with his pack. He moved to lean his back against the boulder. The corpse was only a few yards away, heartless and staring. The warrior paid it no mind and closed his eyes.

The slave pulled off to the edge of its tether, to be as far away from the warrior and the corpse as it could. It stood on the bare earth, with gusts of cold wind singing an idiot whistle all around it. The wind plucked at its clothes and plucked at its flesh. The slave stood out there exposed for a good while before coming back and hunkering down in the shelter of the rock, with no other comfort for the night. The dark bulk of the orc was right there beside it, another boulder. The slave looked at the orc and saw the dull red reflections of his open eyes, the only visible light in all that darkness.

In the windshadow of the rock they slept.

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #2

2010-03-19T04:23:00.000-07:00

The Hermit

I listened to the autumn wind. It spoke songs to me. It drew me on.

I thought I could hear a sense in the speech, in the song. I thought I could hear the variance in pitch and rhythm combined with a repetition that had the hallmark of sense.

I followed the sound, the song, the speech into a deep place, a place of leaves and red shadows. There are darknesses here that last all through the day; the acute angles of sunlight at dawn and dusk or the full blare of noon are never sufficient to pierce through the canopy, leaving patches of shadow that have not been dispelled in a hundred, a thousand years. It is a place fit for listening to the speech of the wind.

The more I listen, the more I am sure that there is a secret in the speech of the wind. They trees know it. They dance in time to it. They strip themselves bare before it. And if I listen hard enough, if I listen with aperated ears, if I listen with ears older than new and mewling forms of speech, I will know it, too.

The more I listen, the more I am certain that the secret in the song, the sound, the speech is that there is no secret at all.

How long has it been?

Yesterday I saw a woman, a wanderer who had lost her way. She saw me. She opened her mouth. Speech fell out, but all I heard was wind.

Tarot Creativity Challenge

2010-03-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

My friend John is doing this thing whereby he picks out random tarot cards from the deck and then encourages people to respond to them in some way. He describes his project here:

http://networkedblogs.com/p29731415

I don't know much about tarot. I am fantastically ambivalent about magic in all its forms, respecting its power to channel psychic energies but being very scornful about its capacity to affect objective reality or reveal future events or communicate with entities whose existence is empirically unverifiable, et cetera (and by psychic energies I mean emotions and ideas, rather than any kind of spoon-bending telekinesis). But I do know I like prompts. They channel my psychic energies, focusing that great haze of vague, undifferentiated impulses and half-formed narratives that floats ever at the back of my brain, routing that cloud into a useful condensation. Prompts, for me, are a kind of magic. And so, and because John is my friend, I am participating in this project, even if I definitely feel like the odd person out in the Mind on Fire community. And here is my first day's result.

The Knight of Swords

The battle fought, the battle lost, the death birds outnumbering now the living men, he arrives. The only struggle now is that of the feeble injured, limbs twitching and mouths making empty sounds as enemy men in orange doublets raise up pale throats for the cutting.
He observes. He draws his sword. He makes his sword naked. He wants to wrap his sword in red robes to hide its shame.
He hopes for the hopeless fight. Let there still be time to die. The universe could not be so cruel as to deny a man his chance to be transubstantiated into tragedy.
The horse exhibits a sane fear of death. The man does not. Its eyes roll back as though its body could follow. He spurs the beast on. Come carrion, come carnage, come corpses.

Vehicular Manslaughter

2010-02-17T03:56:00.000-08:00

Last night I almost murdered somebody. A young woman. It was dark, and I was not in full control of my actions.

I'd pulled up to the T intersection that feeds out from the parking structure back onto the street. I looked both ways--I swore I did--and saw nothing coming from the street and no pedestrians. I took my foot off the brake and let my car start to roll forward in anticipation of turning right on the red light. I looked ahead, and there was a young woman smack in front of my Explorer. I'd not seen her before, even though I'm sure I'd looked to my right (hadn't I?), but perhaps I'd not seen her because she'd been concealed by the pole supporting the traffic light or because she was wearing dark clothing and it was late at night and the lighting was poor at that intersection. I saw her turn to me, though, cuing in on the motion, and immediately tried to step on the brake. In my rush, the tip of my foot somehow got wedged underneath the brake pedal. I tried to pull my foot out, but it only shoved up against the underside of the brake. The car continued to roll forward. The woman was looking at me with an expression of horror and anger. The front of the car was only a few feet away from her and closing. I managed to extricate my foot and pushed down on the top of the brake pedal, stopping the car. She walked on, looking at me with complete contempt. I threw up my hands in a gesture of helpless apology. The whole incident had transpired in the course of maybe one or two seconds. I'd been possibly half a second away from mowing her down.

Now, the look she gave me was one of disgust and contempt. I know the look well; I've given it to any number of drivers in my time who didn't respect my right of way and didn't allow for the scant few seconds required for me to pass unhit in front of their anxious grilles. She saw a driver being careless and threatening her life, and she hated that driver. Does it matter that, during the whole exchange, I was desperately trying to stop my car and so not injure her? Not to her mind; she can't know that I was aware of her and doing my best to not hurt her, all she can know is that I very nearly struck her down. When she relates the experience to her friends, it will be of her walking innocent across the street with the right of way and some evil asshole of a driver almost killing her. If I'd been about half a second slower and had struck her, would it have mattered, in a legal context, that I'd been trying to stop? No; there would be the fact of one person getting hurt or killed, and the criminal repercussions to follow. I was half a second away from being a murderer. Would it have mattered, in a personal identity context, that I'd been trying to stop? No; I would have struck her down, and this act would have become the defining action of my life, and I would have spent a significant portion of the rest of my life paying for it either with jail time or trying to make remunerations that I know I never could make, and my consciousness of inflicting a horrible injury or death on another person would come to dominate my consciousness, and I'd feel that no helpful or kind action I could ever take would overrule or override that one heinous one, and if I didn't destroy myself out of guilt I'd spend the rest of my life trying to make reparations that I could never make, because I'd never be able to undo the death or injury.

Half a second away. Half a second away from all of this. Even though I was trying to stop it. Even though I would never deliberately hurt another person like that. I was half a second away from ruining somebody's life or killing somebody and most likely ruining my own. Any other aspects of character or mind I might have possessed--my writing, my desire to be ethical, my sense of humor, even, if not my life itself--would have been sacrificed on a fire of guilt.

But the fact of the matter is that we are only ever a second or three away from killing somebody when operating a car. Close your eyes for one second while driving at freeway speeds with vehicles drifting on either side of you, let the car drift in accordance with its poor alignment for one second, hesitate for one second in the decision as to whether or not it is necessary to brake, look to the left and not see the pedestrian who materializes out of the darkness to your right, and bam, you are a murderer. You've allowed a ton of metal and plastic operating at high speed to crush the life out of yourself or another human being. The opportunities to make such a mistake are manifold, even if you are careful. Even if you are careful, you are liable to make such a mistake over the course of your career as a driver of a motor vehicle, just because there are so many little things that can go wrong and eventually one of them will.

In any other context, this capacity for casual murder would be entirely untenable. Imagine a society where everybody is walking around all the time with a loaded shotgun. And we'll assume that most of these people have some baseline competency in operating a shotgun, at least enough to receive an operating permit (read "driver's license"), though many of these people nevertheless will not. And just having this permit or having a constant familiarity with this shotgun will nevertheless result in a wide array of behaviors with respect to this shotgun, some more responsible and some more risky. And even then, due to inexperience or carelessness brought on by years of repetitive habit, it is entirely possible that a person will forget to put the safety on his shotgun, and a slight toggle of the trigger could set it off, and maybe that just results in a bunch of buckshot lodged in the wall or maybe it vaporizes somebody's head. Alternately, imagine a society in which pedestrians walk down the street clad in clothing that is covered in an array of blades, spear points and sword points, and the slightest stumble could set two of these pedestrians impaled upon each other.

(I guess such the gun scenario would actually be relatively true if you lived in Texas. Why anybody would want to live like that I don't really know. The spikes would be true in Sigil and that, gentle reader, is why Sigil is better off as a fantastic place than a real one. Like Texas.).

Driving is a fucking death game. Even if you're sober, which many people are not. Even if you try to be cautious and aware, which many people do not, and which behavior the repetitiveness and mechanical monotony of driving inhibits.

Is this right? I don't know that this is such a good setup, imbuing so many people with the power and responsibility over death, tested daily, where the failure of a moment can result in severe property damage, injury, or death for oneself and others. I am aware of this terrible power, and most of the time I say I do not want it. But I've come to a point in my life where I cannot now live without it.

I lived without it for a very long time. Twenty-six years, in fact; I didn't start driving a car until I was about twenty-six years old, although I got my license at eighteen and only put it into effect for its primary purpose one time in those intervening eight years. Part of this was due to the fact with the piddly-shit income I made up unto that point in my life that I'd never be able to afford to purchase a car, much less pay to fuel and maintain and insure one, unless I wanted to give over about half of my net income as a minimum wage slave to do so. And I resented the notion of having to pay about half of my income just for the sake of being able to get to and from my place of work, which is primarily what I would have done with a car. But at least as much of my lack of motorized mobility was due to the fact that this responsibility over death scared the god-damned fucking shit out of me.

I lived without a car in spite of the fact that the city where I lived, Irvine, presumes a car. The housing tracts are large and unbroken. When the city was conceived, walking must have been thought of as a source of recreation rather than a serious way of getting from point A to point B. To move out from my house at the center of the housing tract to the goods and services beyond was a trip of thirty minutes each way, at the very least; and that presumes that I was walking to the very nearest shopping center. If I wanted to so much as go out and buy a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of diet coke it was a trip that I'd have to plan my entire afternoon around. And then there was going beyond that point. Getting to work on the Irvine-Tustin border meant a walk of two and a half solid hours, or else a one and one half hour walk up to Jamboree and a fifteen minute wait for the bus and the payment of a dollar fifty for the privilege of taking a bus for another fifteen minutes over a stretch of road with no sidewalk where I could not walk (though I tried once, on my first day before I realized this, with the cars rushing by half a foot away from me) only to arrive at my crappy job; it meant that if it meant that I didn't bum a ride from a co-worker or a parent, which I most often did. Going to school at IVC was a commute of several miles and an hour and a half either way, and it was a long several miles in the hundred-degree heat of summer that wrung sweat out of my body until my clothes, when they dried, were caked with dried salt or else in rains so thick that my pants would get soaked and the detergent would come up of my jeans and get worked into a froth by the action of my one leg rubbing against the other. There was another bus that ran to IVC, but walking to the bus stop would've taken forty-five minutes and then there would have been more waiting and the payment and so it wouldn't hardly have been worth it.

I realize that when I did get a ride with somebody else, I was just outsourcing my own dread of the responsibility of driving to another person, although others never seemed to experience it as acutely as I did. And do.

But the greatest moral quandaries I ever got into as a pedestrian were when I heard the crush of a snail's shell beneath my foot--I always tried to step around them, I felt no need to end a life, even a snail's life, if I didn't have to--or when I would say hello to another pedestrian and he would only stare back at me as if I had said something offensive or when somebody would cross to the other side of the street so that she wouldn't have to walk near me in all of my hulking long-haired freakishness. Never was anybody's life on the line. I know I am a massive beast, but my ability to accelerate that mass into motion was limited without mechanical aid and so the overall force attendant on my person was always pretty low (scaled to human, rather than arthropod or annelid or gastropod, size), and I trusted my reaction time and my muscular responsiveness, unfiltered and uninterfaced through any mechanical impedimenta, to stop me in my walking before I crashed into somebody. I was a risk to snails and ants and lost earthworms, and believe me after killing dozens of such beings entirely incidentally it did play on my conscience, but I was no real risk to any other human, in spite of what the women who were terrified of my appearance might have thought.

(I suppose everybody who has ever walked anywhere has engaged in such small acts or murder incidental to his purpose. Walking in grass, it would be easy not to notice. Paved sidewalk, though, is like a canvas for the spatter of small-scale murder. Your crush a snail under your heel and you see the green of its gore sprayed out over the sidewalk, and you come back the same day the same way or even the next day and the selfsame corpse is still there, perhaps now with ants scavenging its guts and perhaps you end up stepping on those, too, although you think that most of them will fall between the ridges on the bottom of your shoe but you know that some of them will not.).

And my God, was it a chore sometimes, in the heat or the rain or when running a fever. It was a chore, too, to buy food for myself and then have to haul it back over two or three miles. Buy something so simple as a six pack of beer and it gets pretty damn heavy after the first five minutes or so. Your arm carrying the bag gets to aching, and you switch your package off from arm to arm but it's still painful and burdensome. Walking out to eat and coming back I would almost invariably get heat sick and diarrhetic by the time I got back. There were a lot of frantic clenched-cheek fast walks across the last few blocks back to home, and I hope you won't think less of me, gentle reader, if I were to tell you that your humble narrator didn't always make it in time, in spite of his best efforts.

(There were, of course, no public restroom facilities in that sprawl of private housing. Even if I could find a restroom in a public park, it was almost invariably locked. Let me tell you, gentle reader, that there are few things more distressing than knowing that you are half an hour out from a bathroom with absolutely no way to get closer other than to walk, which churns your bowels or your bladder up all the more. I was often tempted to knock on a nearby house's door and ask, as politely as I could, if I might use the bathroom and state that I would not impose if there were not a dire need, but in my mental extrapolations of this scenario there was no request, however kindly delivered, that produced the desired result. Many's the time when I was nearly seduced into the evil of going behind a bush in the landscaping, but I never did, gentle reader, I never did. I walked that line, and I walked it hard.).

But now I drive a car, and so that life of being at the mercy of distance is behind me. A trip that used to be an insurmountable obstacle, or else was a two-hour haul that was sufficient for me to make the comparison within my own mind of my own journey walking along a paved sidewalk in a suburb to the treks of epic heroes--Hey, take two hours in which you have no technology and no incessant demands of new stimuli to keep you from thinking and see how much of an inflated opinion *you* get of your own efforts--is now an eight minute drive. A chore, to be sure, especially when one has to get dressed and put one's shoes on for the occasion, but a chore, and not a true happening. Two hours of walking used to take me to the store and back, a journey of about six miles. Two hours of driving takes me now from central Orange County to eastern San Diego, a journey of about ninety miles.

And in driving a car, I see how perverse it is, how truly perverse and subversive, to walk. Everything in my home town, from the circuitous streets to the great tracts of houses, was designed around the presumption of people having cars, and wanting to walk only for recreation rather than having to walk out of necessity. Nobody intended for me to use the sidewalks in the way that I did. If everybody in Irvine had to walk for an hour to buy groceries and then bought only what he or she could comfortably carry, the city would shut down. If everybody in the city had to take the bus, walking to the infrequently-spaced bus stops that stay superficial, street-wise, and don't even penetrate into the core of most of the residential developments (because what good suburbanite wants to see poor people taking the bus and have to deal with that noise and diesel smell?), and then waiting fifteen minutes or half an hour or forty-five minutes for the infrequently-spaced buses to arrive but God knows you need to get there early because you sure as Hell don't want to be late, the city would shut down. On the street level, on the literal level of its streets, Irvine resents pedestrians. It resents poor people who have no engines but their own bodies to propel them across distances. And as much as I resent that resentment, there's no way, now that I have a car, that I would want to go back to being one of the resented, before whom all the city is arrayed as a punishment of distance and time and physical wear.

Yes, I do appreciate the lack of density and congestion that are attendant upon suburban sprawl, which I recognize as being the point of it all. I appreciate the increased amount of green space and landscaping. I'm not numb to these things. I couldn't be, having had such values inculcated in me by the buildings and by the streets themselves for so many years of my life, and also by the persons who would choose to live in such a community.

From aesthetics to perceptions of necessity, though. Given the way cities are constructed now, it seems to be necessary for a person who doesn't want to give over hours of his ever day to transportation (and the hectic demands of contemporary living make it necessary that we do no such thing) to drive. And on the one hand, this is fucked up. Because nothing that is technologically intensive and resource intensive and prohibitively expensive and carries such serious risks and responsibilities as driving *ought* to be necessary. On the other hand, how could we do without it? Operating without a car within cities that are designed to accommodate the needs of cars rather than people is brutal. As technology increases, so too does the expectation of intensity, of being able to get what one wants even if what one wants is fifty miles distant, or being able to maintain relationships or careers even if the persons and places involved are separated by distances that would be impossible without technological assistance. I don't know too many people who would be content only with experiencing what- and whomsoever is within walking distance; I know I wouldn't. Footbound as I was for so freakishly long, I wouldn't want to go back to it. On a social level, we cannot go back to that. The small community model is alright for some things, but it could not sustain the informationally-dense, highly complex and technical and global culture that we have come to expect (and that people partake of even in small communities, such as small mountain towns, in spite of their complaints about urbanization or corporatization or globalization). And that kind of culture is only possible with cars. Or it could be possible without cars, if we were to re-conceptualize our lives and our expectations of intensity such that a two-hour commute would be acceptable, or if we were to tear up our Southern California cities and re-construct them with the aim of having reasonable facilities within walking distance of residences at the probable costs of congestion and density. And everybody would have to live very proximal to his place of work, so given the frequent job changes that people undergo these days people would have to move every year or three to a neighborhood where housing values or crime rates might be entirely different from his previous expectations. And I would have to live next to SDSU, where every night there would be sorority girls attired only in lingere parading down the street near my window and the attendant shouts of drunken frat boys, all through the night. Yeah. Fuck that. Or I guess we could effect a mass exodus of car-centric Southern California and all go live in San Francisco or Portland or New York, where neighborhoods are designed without the expectation of driving and there are corner stores and public transportation or even walking from place to place aren't only for the utterly disenfranchised or the insane.

(Or we could develop teleportation technology. Gentle reader, there are few things I would like more in this world than for human beings to develop teleportation technology. I'd even settle for a magical flue teleportation network or the ability to apparate. I fantasize about it frequently, this magical technology that would enable us to move freely from place to place, but remove the terrible burden of potentially lethal operator error from everyone who gets behind the wheel of a car. Mr. Scott can take on that responsibility all for himself; I don't want it, and he usually does a good job with it, except in the first *original* _Star Trek_ movie that everybody seems to have forgotten now and I understand that because the script and direction are pretty abstruse and consequently kind of do suck and are unfun but the visuals are nevertheless pretty cool and worth watching. But I guess teleportation could go the other way and we'd all get our DNA fused with flies, which would be kind of shitty, except we could vomit all over each other and dissolve each other and slurp up the soupy mess of vomitus and enzymed flesh, and that would suck but also be pretty awesome).

But cars, man. Cars. We have become dependent upon what began as a luxury such that it is now a necessity. It's another one of those things, like eating large quantities of meat or having a household filled with cheap consumer goods manufactured in China, that is a relatively recent habit that would be alien even to our own ancestors four generations back in this country to say nothing of the many billions of people in this world even now who manage to get by from day to day without such things.

Do I want to hang up my keys such that I will never accidentally imperil another person's life ever again? Yes. I do. Absolutely. Do I want to go back to devoting an hour and a half to a five mile commute? Do I want to not be able to see my girlfriend on the weekends because she live in Orange County and I live in San Diego? No. Not at all. And when I think about the consequences of failure when driving, which are severe, my attachment to driving for the facilitating of my own schedule seems all the more self-indulgent. But unlike smoking, which is an addiction that only ever did harm to my own self, this is an addiction to a luxury drug that I don't know how to break. And unlike smoking, which is an ever more difficult habit to indulge, this is an addiction in which the entire world around you is literally engineered against the possibility of you breaking this habit.

So I'll get back in my car and drive to work again today, knowing full well that murder is a moment away. The Rolling Stones say it's just a shot away; it's far less than that. It's one foot stuck underneath the brake pedal away, a mechanical failure away, as little as a blink away. Pulling a trigger is a pretty intentional and deliberate act. If only all murder required such intention. Vehicular murder is a mere unintention away.

Hey hey.

In Which I Tackle The Subject of Activism

2010-01-27T04:14:00.000-08:00

Nation, you know I don't like social activism, and you know I do a crappy Stephen Colbert, especially in text where you can't even hear my lame attempt at a vocal impersonation. It's not that I'm necessarily opposed to the ideas forwarded by activists, it's more that I find most activism to be short-sighted and reactionary rather than constructive.

I'm not swayed by large groups of people making a public display of anger; I am frightened and disgusted. This applies as much to armed-to-the-teeth Tea Partiers as it does to people marching for amnesty for illegal immigrants. Well, maybe that's not true. The Tea Partiers who carry guns around in public *really* frighten me. At any rate, large groups of people minimizing a complex issue down to a single shouted, repeated slogan fucking scare me, so much so that I honestly can't even register their message most of the time. The diffusion of individual consciousness and responsibility and even identity into a mob scares me more than anything else. ANYTHING ELSE. Which is not to say that, given our heads, I think we tend to use them very wisely all that often. But an emotionally-charged humanity given license by what sociologists call "diffusion of responsibility" to act in ways that, individually, they never could? No thank you. No thank you at all. All ad Hitlerium fallacies aside, this is the primary component of Nazism, people, and of all other large-scale evils ever perpetrated in the course of human events. And of sports spectatorship, which also causes me to cringe and recoil in horror.

(I am so frightened by this tendency to de-individualization, which also causes those within the mob to de-individualize those *outside* of their group into conveniently targeted groups, that a major component of my life's work is striking back against it, and individualizing those persons who are all too often seen only as members of antagonistic "other" groups or urging conscience to those within a de-individualized group. This drive towards individualization is at the core of a good deal of my writing. I believe, rightly or wrongly but of course I think it's rightly otherwise I wouldn't think this, that the acceptance of individual responsibility and the refusal to generalize outgroups into one-note "others" are the solutions to a great many of the problems that we have created for ourselves.).

So, in order for me to be swayed, I need to be presented with a careful, rational argument replete with evidence and largely free of ad hominem demonizations or blatant emotional appeals. I'm still waiting for such an argument that will win me over to a free market approach to economics--I believe such an argument is possible in theory, although I definitely have yet to see it in practice. The day a campus evangelist can provide me with such an argument is the day I commit to Christianity (or Hare Krishnism, as the case may be). But I'm not holding my breath.

Let's be honest, these kinds of arguments are pretty hard to come by most of the time, especially in the public arena, especially in an age where media attention is all and stunts and stagecraft trump careful and considerate every time.

Which is why I was so incredibly charmed by this bridge:
http://www.bladediary.com/astoria-scum-river-bridge/
Make sure you click through to get the other photo blogs to be able to read the full inscription on the plaque and the local government's response.

Now this bridge, to me, is an activist gesture I can get behind one-hundred percent. I might even hyperbolically inflate that number over one-hundred, even though I know that such makes no mathematical sense, for the purposes of dramatic emphasis. For shits and giggles, let's say I can get behind this gesture one-hundred and *seventeen* percent, with the implication that this bridge mobilizes seventeen percent of me that I didn't even know I had or that is otherwise normally unavailable to me and puts that seventeen percent into effect.

Permit me to break down for you why it is that I think this bridge is awesome.

1. It is Useful: The bridge addresses a manifest public need, albeit a relatively small one, and offers a resolution for that need. Stepping in the Scum River was probably an inconvenience at best, slightly hazardous at worst when there were icy conditions. The consequences of not addressing this need were probably negligible in absolute terms--which is most likely why the local government never felt compelled to do anything about it, assuming it was even aware of the problem. Nathless, the presence of the bridge is of benefit to all who might walk that way, making the route safer and more pleasant. If the bridge is a gesture of protest designed to catalyze action more than be a solution in itself, it is still, at present, an improvement over what had existed previously.

2. It is Positive: The bridge does not fling blame. The bridge does not go on the attack. The bridge does not heap odium upon those whose oversights and failures have generated the Scum River problem in the first place. Instead, the bridge just works to resolve the issue. Of course, there is the implied critique of the city government and the corporation (Amtrak) for not being responsive to the needs of the public, but the critique is left at its implication. By taking this approach, the bridge has actually manged to engage with an individual in power, earning "a commendation...[and] a pledge to work with Amtrak to re-route Astoria Scum River off the sidewalk" from a city council member. Instead of causing those at fault to become defensive, the bridge inspires those persons to positive action.

3. It is Free: The bridge is made out of refuse, constructed at no cost to taxpayers or to anybody else, even its creators. One of the awfulest things about living in a capitalist society that inculcates one with the belief that everything has its price is the corresponding tendency to believe that that which has no monetary value is that which has no worth. We feel disempowered to deal with problems on account of the solutions being cost-prohibitive. Or, Hell, I don't know if I'm speaking for anybody else here, but I know I sure as Hell feel that way about a lot of things. This bridge, though, shows that positive outcomes are possible with the use of found materials and individual effort. It is a triumph of personal creativity over a depersonalized and exclusivistic economy. This is, again, a potent critique of those powers with the resources to do something in the traditional, cost-intensive capitalistic mode about the problem but that opted to do nothing.

And, clearly, like any good protest these days, it is media savvy. I think Boing-Boing has picked up on it now. But whatever. I couldn't care less about that crap. Even if the city councilman hadn't been guilted (maybe inspired?) into responding to it, it would still be sufficient in itself, exclusive of any external attention.

Now, just about the only *possible* criticism I can conceive of against this bridge is that, being constructed by two individuals who assumingly are not licensed contractors, the bridge is not built in accordance with state and local safety codes. The _O.C. Register_ loves to cite such codes as a corrupt Statist conspiracy to keep the working man down and to keep slick cronyism in place, but I think they're a good portion of the reason why the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake killed about 2,500 people and the 1989 Bay Area Earthquake killed only 57. Oh, I know there was a difference in magnitude and in distance from the epicenters for the two quakes. But the quake that struck Haiti a couple of weeks ago was about the same size as the Bay Area Quake, and that one caused 200,000 fatalities...I think that this ends up being a pretty convincing argument in favor of rigorously engineered construction. If the artists had waited for a bridge to be constructed in accordance with code, though, they and everybody else who walked that way would still be waiting for any kind of solution to the problem. For the end user, the fact that this bridge wasn't pumped out be a large, faceless organization and was instead built by individuals would be enough for my own mother, who literally lives in a constant fantasy of nearly everything that is not compulsory being prohibited by law, to avoid the bridge. I don't know how many people would share her thoroughly oppressed opinion. Too, there is the fact that the bridge has steps rather than ramps, which makes it wheelchair inaccessible. I expect that wouldn't have happened if the bridge had been built according to code.

But all of this is circumvented if one simply walks (or wheels) around the bridge. And then one is in exactly the same situation one was in before the installation of the bridge--i.e., walking through iced-over scum. Participation in the bridge is non-compulsory. One loses nothing by the bridge being there except for perhaps half a second of effort required to step slightly to the side, or some amount of resentment if one is in a wheelchair and cannot enjoy this amenity. But I'd hope that people in wheelchairs wouldn't be too bitter against the bridge for all that, and would look forward to the now-hopefully-imminent day when Amtrak and the city of New York effect a permanent solution to Scum River.

To sum up, if more gestures of protest were like this bridge, I would be a fan of more gestures of protest. I wouldn't expect everybody who has to confront some kind of public problem to deal with that problem with this same level of creativity, unambiguous and (relatively) non-exclusive utility, and freedom from resentment and malice. I think it's hard to channel these qualities, especially when the public problems start to pile up or are more life-threatening in nature, and especially when we get into groups, which necessarily dampen these qualities. Just the same, I think this bridge provides a model for positive and meaningful activism that could serve as a good example for us all when we think about how we are going to interact with the world beyond our doorsteps.

Erotic Fail

2010-01-21T04:30:00.000-08:00

I was walking away from a party with this woman I've known for some time now and whom I consider to be reasonably attractive, physically and mentally (and if you think I'm going to tell you her name, gentle reader, I am afraid you are gravely mistaken). We walked into this large sitting room, with a leather couch on side of the room and picture windows that admitted a view of the sun setting over the harbor on the other. The dissipating sun infused the water with orange light and silhouetted the masts of the yachts.

We sat on the couch, I in the middle and she at my left side. We smiled at each other. Both of us were feeling good. The small contacts between our bodies were electric hot. I felt a flutter of emotions in my chest. One these emotions was guilt at cheating on my girlfriend, but that got drowned out by a rush of other feelings.

Grinning, she knelt on the couch and turned her backside towards me. She hiked up her pleated black skirt, exposing her well-shaped ass and a blue thong. She told me to kiss her butt, which I did, happily and repeatedly. Things progressed from there, with us shedding our clothing and playing with each other and feeling very good.

(For the record, gentle reader, I will tell you that this is quite honestly how I prefer my sex: friendly and happy and good-natured. Lame, I know. I should probably, for dramatic effect, favor some sort of violent fetish or sleazy kink, but that's just not how I roll. With all the other things I could choose to focus on, I find nothing so erotic as a woman's broad and genuine smile, though a playful sly smirk is quite good, too.).

After an extended period of mutually enjoyable foreplay, she was lying nude under me as I knelt over her with only my underwear remaining on. I could feel the warmth emanating from her sex. Our bodies were moving towards each other, independent of any thought. She told me to take off my underwear, which I did. Quickly. I turned back to her, eager and ready. God, was I ready.

And then my mom walked into the room. Adam and Eve ashamed all over again, we quickly fell back on the couch and pulled a comforter up over our nakedness (Where did this comforter come from?). My mother seemed oblivious to our in flagrante delicto condition. She chattered on at me, as she is wont to do. I think I managed to mumble out some curt responses intended to make her go away, which she did not.

The woman giggled next to me. I gave her a smile that was the barest cover for one of the most colossal disappointments in living memory.

And then, in that most awful and inexcusably cliche of endings, I woke up.

Now, gentle reader, you must understand that my usual excursions into dreamland involve people hacking off my toes with axes, or my father crouching over me and eating the heart out of my body with my blood running down his jaws. A disproportionate number of these dreams leave me mutilated or violently murdered, which leaves me bolting up at night, heart hammering and out of breath and covered in sweat. The last erotic dream I can remember having had me watching as grotesquely rotted corpse-women proceeded to have lesbian sex with each other. So to have an honest-to-goodness wish fulfillment dream is damn rare for me. And I finally get one, and what happens? My mom bursts into the room. I think I would've preferred another screaming nightmare.

My unconscious hates me. Or maybe my unconscious is very committed to fidelity and honesty in relationships, in which case I think there are far superior ways in which it might make its argument that don't involve offering me the perfect temptation and then thwarting my desires by means of the most embarrassing of all possible extrinsic intrusions. Which is all dumb anyway, because I'm quite certain that my conscious mind would never allow me to be in such a situation in the first place, circumstances permitting, which I don't think they would ever be. Or maybe my id is the bitch of my superego, even in dreams.

I guess I should just be happy that this woman didn't turn into a feculent living corpse or a twisted sadistic demoness while I was inside of her, as dream women have done to me in the past.

I'm going to go with the conclusion that my unconscious hates me. Really, really hates me.

In Which I Get Het Up

2010-01-07T01:33:00.000-08:00

My roommate is moving to North Carolina. He says there's not much to do in his new town. I suggested he learn to fish, which of course he refused: he's extremely averse to animal cruelty, and has told me on multiple occasions that he would defend his pets with physical violence against anybody who would maltreat them. He also, with much attendant stink and greasy mess, cooks fish every week in the skillet.

I have a lot of contempt for this particular kind of hypocritical cowardice, which I find to be so very common. Few things bother me so much as that person who says "I don't want to hear about it--I'd prefer to stay ignorant [as to the actual ramifications of my actions]." If people make the decision to eat flesh, they shouldn't live in denial as to the costs and consequences of that decision. The fantasy that the processed product wrapped in hygienic plastic and placed on a Styrofoam tray--all of which is calculated to encourage this distance from the actual acts of killing and butchering--can somehow be divorced from the suffering of a living creature is self-serving and delusional.

My roommate takes a womanish approach to violence towards animals, in that he's the only man I've known to employ this particular disassociation. I've observed it in many women, though, who express great fondness for animals--even and sometimes especially chickens, cows, and pigs--and who are repulsed by the concept of killing animals but who nevertheless eat meat. The more common masculine approach that I've observed is to revel in the irony of eating flesh--to acknowledge that there is pain involved, but to laugh it off. This defense comes closer to admitting to the reality that eating meat engenders pain, but then retreats all the farther from that reality for it.

I believe I have heard Ted Nugent posit that all people should be compelled to kill and butcher an animal, so as to be aware of the process. God help me, but I think I agree with him. Not in any other regard, mind you, but I do think it is perverse and quite possibly psychotic for people to claim to love and empathize with animals one minute and sink their teeth into a steak the next.

For, in the end, I have a lot of contempt for a civilization that esteems it progress that the average individual be removed from violence, but that perpetrates violence on a scale that beggars the efforts of all previous civilizations, and is able to effect this violence largely by keeping it out of sight and out of mind.
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." It's so damn true.

And I wonder if we had to kill and skin and gut and butcher our own meat if we would opt to eat so very much as we do. (Personally, I'd have zero problems killing and gutting an animal--I'm a vegetarian for other reasons, in that I could not accept the environmental costs of the production of meat). I'm reminded of 9/11, in which so many people were shocked that that kind of violence could be visited upon American soil, as if Americans hadn't been going into other countries and taking their resources without effecting an equitable distribution of compensation and flooding them with an American material culture to supplant their own and as if these actions would not make those people really mad at us. But if we looked really long and hard at where and how we got our oil and how we dealt with the Arab world, I don't think it would've come as much of a surprise, and I wonder if we'd allowed ourselves to contemplate the real costs of our energy in a serious way if we might not have altered our course prior to 9/11. Just as if I wonder if we were to throw out the laptops that allow us to push a button that launches a cruise missile or an unmanned drone to blow up a target fifty miles away if we'd have as much war as we do now.

We look at immediate, intimate, interpersonal violence and say it is diseased and dangerous. I look at dispassionate, depersonalized, formatted violence and say it is far more so. We outsource and abstract the actual costs of things, but how long can such a system persist that is so ignorant of the sources of its own success? And even if it could persist into perpetuity, what would be the real cost, the real ethical and human cost, of this denial of cost? And if we were to examine the consequences of our actions and choose to go on in the same old way, would we not then be callous? Yes--but give me an honest, callous cruelty over a cruelty that affects the image of innocence any day.

Thoughs on the Holiday Special

2009-10-23T12:23:00.000-07:00

“But Grandpa Itchy, you're a Wookie! Why, when given the option to visualize any fantasy you want, are you dreaming about a human female?”
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. You'll understand when you're older.”
“But Grandpa Itchy, what's up with your ridiculous underbite?”
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. You'll understand when you're older.”
“But Grandpa Itchy, why do we have to dress up in red robes and walk into the sun? And why is our most sacred Wookie Life Day ceremony hijacked by a bunch of humans, including a singing Princess Leia? And why are our names so stupid? And why do we have five image projectors in our living room? And why is my attention span so short that I can watch a cartoon and be happy when there are Storm Troopers invading my house and I don't know if my father is alive or dead? And why do we grunt and growl at each other for minutes a stretch with no subtitles? And why does an 'unedited' video from Tatooine have cuts and changes in camera angles, and why would the Empire broadcast some lame-ass cabaret song that rhymes 'rhyme' with 'time' and that is critical of the Empire in an attempt to boost morale? And why would anybody think that Harvey Korman's physical comedy is funny?"
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. You'll understand when you're older. Or maybe you won't.”
“But Grandpa Itchy, why does participating in our wookie lifeday ceremony make me want to kill myself?”
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. Just hush. Eat your Wookie-Ookies.”

Duerminatrix

2009-10-08T22:38:00.000-07:00

She slept in a nest of loaded guns: sawed-down shotguns with sanded-down triggers. The walnut stocks were stacked and threaded thickly together. Each night she would insinuate herself, at the rate of one inch of flesh per minute, into the tangle of wood and high-speed steel, cobalt steel, Parkerized steel, and bluing finish. And, after an hour of careful contortion, she would sleep naked among the a-wake triggers, neither shifting nor tossing nor deeply breathing nor dreaming for fear that she would jostle the guns in the slightest.
I questioned her, asked why she did not sleep in a bed of synthetics and feathers or at the very least on the naked floor. She stared at me quizzically, jaw agape and teeth naked. She slept in a bed of loaded guns; it had never occurred to her to do other.

A Fire on One End and a Fool on T'other

2009-08-17T02:17:00.000-07:00

It's been twenty-one days since I last smoked a cigarette. This is less of an accomplishment than it might sound; it's relatively easy for me to go a month or more without smoking. I was up to five or six weeks back in February before I un-quit again. I'm sure there have been spaces of six months or a year since that I have gone without smoking. Everything in moderation, including moderation itself; I quit smoking, and then I quit quitting.

It's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-smoker. When I smoke, I tend to be more nervous. Smoking raises my blood pressure, which is already too high as it is. When I smoke, there is this feathery feeling in my lungs that comes whenever I breathe hard, and while I know it's not lung cancer, it's always difficult to convince myself that it's not. Concordant with this is my even-more reduced capacity for exercise such that I am incapable of walking up a single hill without wheezing. And I swear, although I've never heard of this being a normal side-effect of smoking, that smoking contributes to my migraine headaches. I bet I could accept all the other consequences, aside from this one, because if smoking does cause me to have headaches--and it definitely seems to me that I get a lot more migraines when I smoke than when I don't--it would be downright idiotic for me to voluntarily inflict that kind of torment on myself.

But it's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-non-smoker, either. I don't get pronounced withdrawal symptoms when I don't smoke. Even when I do smoke, I rarely have more than three to five cigarettes a day, which doesn't seem to be enough to cause me to physically addicted to nicotine. No; the withdrawal is mental more than anything else. When I smoke, I have a need that must be satisfied every few hours. I can satisfy that need, and then I'm good for a while again. I think it's the regularity and ease of satisfaction of this need that attracts me most to smoking--I should wish that all of my needs should be so scheduled and so simply met. And when meeting this one need, it's possible to ignore other needs--like my needs for companionship, comfort, reassurance, and touch. Those things, in my experience, are very hard to get. A pack of my preferred brand of cigarettes, on the other hand, is available at most gas stations and grocery stores for about five dollars.

Given my very moderate tobacco use, and given that brief, dizzying rush of stimulants to the brain that allows me to forget, for thirty seconds, whatever else might be bothering me, it's been difficult for me to convince myself that smoking is really harmful to me. I *know* that it is, but it's difficult to do the assessment and find that smoking is more of a drawback than a benefit.

Do you know, gentle reader, what the best part of quitting smoking is? It is, most assuredly, that first cigarette after you unquit again. True, the experience is tainted by guilt, but the physiological sensation of those pathways in the brain that have gone extinct coming crackling back to life in a minute of intense sensation not unlike orgasm--it almost makes it worth it. Repetition deadens the sensation as the brain becomes accustomed to nicotene, but if one can leave off the chase for the dragon for a few days or a week or a month or a year and then resume the chase, it's as if you've got the dragon by the tail all over again. After a day or three of repeated exposure, though, the experience becomes mere mechanics--no real rush, just a feeling of irritability and dullness without the drug.

And that small, stupid, completely legal high is only a single smoke away. And it's sad that'd I'd throw away three weeks of sobriety--or better to call it three weeks of relative calm, with clothes that did not stink and a tongue that did not taste of tar and stale ash--for a minute of craving satisfied. But I would.

I guess I'm waiting for some definitive, conclusive experience to forever purge me of the desire to smoke--because that desire still persists, even if I do my best to deny it satiety. I don't know if it's possible to hit that fabled "rock bottom" with respect to cigarettes, though. In faith, there have been moments when I felt the muscles in my neck constrict and red pain seared through my skull like some breed of contained organic lightning, and in these moments I swore "Never again." There have been a number of such moments. And, with the possible exception of the most recent iteration, I have broken that vow every time. I am apparently very bad at being operantly conditioned. (It should be noted, though, that it only required three or four such comparable incidents to forever purge me of the desire for being very drunk). Will this time be the last time I need to quit? Hell if I know. I think maybe keeping track of the individual days as they pass by might be helpful; it's harder to throw away twenty-one days of progress than it is to throw away some while of progress, and it's easier to congratulate oneself on resisting that temptation that comes multiple times a day if one reminds oneself that one has been clean for twenty-one days, rather than clean for a good while now. Ticking off that calendar in my head does seem to have both a positive and negative reinforcing effect.

Nietzsche says something about resisting temptation that I wish I could find now, but I can't. But I remember the essence of the quote being something like "There are two ways to conquer temtpation: the first is through regular indulgence, and the second is through surfeit." Oh, Hell, I don't know if Neitzsche said that, but it sounds like him. Anyway. I wonder if the means for conquering my addiction to smoking would not be to smoke so much as to make myself so absolutely sick that I can never ever want to smoke again, or to accept that occasional indulgences are less costly than the stress of spending a significant portion of my day thinking about not smoking. Or else, if there is some switch I switch I can find and then flick that will make me want to smoke no more forever. Until then, instead of enjoying the satiety of a cigarette, I content myself with the much colder comfort that it's been twenty-one days since I last lit up.

Tomorrow will be twenty-two.

The Dungeon Master's Manifesto

2009-07-18T06:46:00.000-07:00

I've been playing role-playing games for a number of years now. I think it's safe to say that a majority of the difficulties I've encountered in the course of my RPG career have not been with the game systems themselves, but with the other people playing them. That pen and paper RPGs are a social activity is one of their primary draws, insofar as I am concerned, but it's also one of their primary drawbacks, because it's hard to deal with other people sometimes.

It is sufficiently difficult to gather a group of people to want the same thing--like, say, participation in a D&D campaign. It can be nearly impossible to get a group of people who all want the same thing at the same time and for the same reasons. One person wants to be the center of an elaborate interpersonal drama, another person wants to have the most powerful character he can possibly have, another person wants to crack jokes and pull pranks, another person wants the freedom to do whatever he wants, another person wants to feel important and responsible within the structures of the game world, and so on. It is possible to accommodate all of these desires within the medium of a D&D game. It's possible, but it's not always easy, and it's certainly not possible to accommodate all of the differing desires of each of the players at all times.

Let me take it out of the RPG ghetto. Gentle reader, have you ever seen a creative writing workshop? In one of these things, you'd think that all of the persons involved would have a similar frame of reference. Here are people who are spending time and money in the pursuit of an activity that the vast majority of humanity doesn't give half a shit about. Here are people who have taken time away from reality television and Twitter and Internet porn to write stories--how bizarre is that! You'd think, then, that these people would be very supportive and understanding, and would be in agreement as often as not. You'd think that, gentle reader, but then you'd be mistaken. Because creative writing workshops are fractious things. I won't say that friendliness and supportiveness and solidarity and encouragement are impossible in such a setting. Certainly not. But equally possible are rivalries, insoluble debates over subjective points of style, and competing and conflicting notions as to what "reality" or "realistic human behavior" are or are not. Ask twenty writers what "literature" is, and you're likely to get twenty different answers.

Okay, creative writing workshops are kind of a ghetto, too. So let's put this in an even better and broader context. You have a group of friends, right? These are people you like and with whom you get along, and you have already made the effort to befriend them out of all the other people in the world whom you could potentially befriend. How many of those friends are going to want to go and see a particular movie with you? And if you do find some other friends to see that movie, is it likely that you're all going to be in agreement as to whether the movie was good or not? And even if you do all like the movie, do you think that everybody is going to like the movie for the same reasons? Or is it more likely that one friend will focus on character and dialogue, while another concentrates on the hotness of the lead actress, and another friend comments on the special effects, and so on? The disparity of opinions doesn't mean that people can't enjoy the movie for different reasons, but I think it's unrealistic to expect a group of adults with distinct personalities and backgrounds to all want the same things in the same way, even if that group does share a core set of values.

All this is to say that coordinating a group effort towards the acheivement of a common goal isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world. Especially if the group is composed of those persons possessed of legendarily poor social skills known as "gamers." Lord knows I don't prove the exception to that particular stereotype. I think gamers are often people who have difficulty expressing their desires and finding positive channels for fulfilling those desires--I think a goodly portion of the attractiveness of games is that they can provide these things. If the gentle reader has spent any time at all engaged in online gaming, though, he will know that even the best-intentioned and most friendly game can degrade into verbal abuse and acts of virtual corpse rape.

I think, in some ways, the nature of RPGs complicates this problem. RPGs offer empowerment and wish fulfillment. RPGs offer a person a chance to feel significant, to go above and beyond the normal restrictions of reality, to express his will upon the world in a meaningful way. RPGs can make people feel like heroes, or main characters, when all too often in life we feel like supporting cast or expendable extras. This encourages a mode of thinking that is very different from the kind of approach one would take to day-to-day tedium, bound up as it is by the presence of tradition and custom and law and expectation and very real and very serious consequences for violating these things in order to act in ways that would be consistent with our imagined fantasies. This freedom to pursue one's own desires in spite of consequences lends itself to a feeling of entitlement that can then conflict with the interests of the rest of the group. If everybody wants to pursue the same form of empowerment, or to find his own particular motivation for pursuing that collective goal of empowerment, all is well and good. But let me assure you, gentle reader, such synchronicity is not always the case.

I think, in some ways, the nature of RPGs as a fun activity complicates the problem, too. In the course of one's occupation, one most likely accepts that there are certain things one has to do and certain people one has to deal with, not all of which or whom are pleasant, and one puts one's head down and accepts the unpleasant necessities for the sake of the greater goal (personal fulfillment, a paycheck, whatever). If the unpleasantries become excessive, some people will leave their jobs and look for a better one; others never will. An activity for pleasure, on the other hand, comes with an attendantly lower threshhold for compromise or temporary unpleasantness in the pursuit of a long-term happiness. Assuming you didn't like that movie that you wound up going to with your friends, is it possible that you and your friends would walk out before the movie was finished? Would you do the same in a boring business meeting?
In a meeting room full of your co-workers, it's unlikely that a disagreement is going to make you so inflamed that you feel inclined to stand up and start shouting at people. It's a lot easier to get more dramatic when you're around friends and loved ones and the defenses are down and the discipline is off and you expect to have a good time be validated and will feel cheated if you don't.

Thinking about all of these things, I felt compelled to write out my feelings about my upcoming position as the DM of a newly-formed D&D group. The breakdown of my previous group and my relationship with Bonny have taught me that there are some things that are necessary for the health of any relationship, whether that relationship be between friends and activity partners or lovers. At the present time, I think these are the most essential elements of a successful relationship:

1. That the persons involved take responsibility for their own wants, and that they express their expectations as clearly as possible.
2. That the persons involved take responsibility for their own actions, and for the consequences of those actions.
3. That the persons involved be reasonably forgiving of mistakes, lapses in judgment, or moments of strong emotion.
4. That the persons involved make some compromises and small sacrifices for the sake of the continuation of the relationship, and also that these compromises be spread among the persons involved as equitably as possible. In tandem with this is that one person understand that other persons can't meet all of his wants at all times.
5. That the persons involved agree to handle disagreements in a productive manner, owning their own ideas and feelings rather than blaming others for not thinking or feeling the same way, and accepting that disagreements are inevitable in any relationship and that they don't necessarily need to devolve into rage and personal attacks. That the persons involved agree that there is rarely only one feasible approach to a problem, and that multiple methods might have merit, and that even absolute notions such as "right" and "wrong" or "realistic" and "unrealistic" vary from one person to the next and should not be closed to discussion.
6. That the persons involved agree that such behaviors as are manipulative, deceitful, obsessive, controlling, or physically or emotionally hostile are undesirable and unacceptable.
8. That while one of the persons involved is responsible for his own actions and wants and feelings, he is not responsible for the actions and wants and feelings of anybody else. That mature adults will desire neither to control others nor be controlled by them.
9. That no one person, even a person in a leadership position, is completely responsible for the the success or failure of a collaborative effort, such as a relationship.

I think that about sums it up. I wrote these expressions out in a document in the hope that I can clearly communicate my own expectations for my new group and to let them know what they can expect from me. My hope is to avoid the problem that occurred with the last group when, after being dissatisfied with the course of events for over a year, the players all decided to express all their dissatisfaction at once, and a group that had been cohesive for years fell to pieces. Do I think they should have expressed their likes and dislikes sooner and in less critical fashion? Yes, I do. Do I think I should have made a greater effort to be approachable and to be more clear about my own expectations and to be open to their ideas before things reached critical mass? Yes, I do. Do I think anybody is really at fault in this situation? No, I don't. But I would like to avoid, if at all possible, the kinds of communication failures that rent my last group with this new one, and I was hoping by being clear and explicit in the expression of my expectations that I might manage to do so.

Then again, it might seem weird to have a relative stranger hand you a seven page document at the game session, detailing all this stuff about relationships and communication, the discussion of which holds very little appeal for most men.

Then again, a lot of what I'm saying in this document is fairly close to the advice given by the Dungeon Master's guide with respect to group management. And I've already seen the potential for cohesion-sabotaging arguments just in our initial emails and forum posts, and I think it would be a good idea to provide some channels for argument resolution from the get-go. And I might save myself a lot of time and stress if I can identify my dealbreakers from the start, so that anybody who knows he can't accept my conditions for friendship and for collaboration in an interactive fiction project will move along presently.

Is this the right thing to do? Hell, I don't know. I know it's a bit extra-ordinary. But then, what I'm trying to do is deal with the problems that have ordinarily prevented me from deriving full enjoyment from a D&D group.

So, gentle reader, if you've been patient enough to read this far, I encourage you to read on to the end, and tell me what you think. D&D nerd or no, I expect that you will have some experience with human relationships, and will be able to give me some feedback as to whether it would be smart or suicidally stupid to give this list out next Monday. A lot of this might seem repetitive, given that the gentle reader has already read the condensed list, but perhaps not.

How I Roll: Some Things You Might Want to Understand About My Interpretation of What It Means to Be a DM

I do not design or run encounters out of malice. I don't punish characters in order to punish players. I will never design an encounter with the desire for or expectation of the failure of the party. I design encounters and challenges in the hopes that each will be overcome, and that the characters will show their worth in the overcoming of the challenge. Contrary to what you might believe about Dungeon Masters, I take little delight from frustrating, humiliating, or punishing PCs.

I do not see myself as being in a competition with the PCs, and I hope that the PCs don't see themselves as being in competition with me. If anything, I want to see your character succeed as much as you do. That's not to say that there won't be times that I won't be at least a little pleased if the monsters that I have selected are doing well in a combat. I might also be pleased if a villain should get away with some form of evil, if only to make the final reckoning between that villain and the party that much more satisfying. If the PCs should out-and-out lose an encounter, though, I don't count this as any kind of victory. If anything, I'll have wished that I toned down the difficulty. I enjoy giving the PCs a worthy challenge; I don't enjoy seeing them defeated. If I wanted to get involved in an arms race with the players, I'd just have four Demogorgons port in from out of nowhere and kick everybody's ass. But that'd be a stupid abuse of my authority and my responsibility, don't you think?

I believe that the challenge rating of D&D encounters isn't always 100% reliable. Some above-level encounters will end up being a breeze, while the goblin minions that were supposed to be easy can wind up wiping the party. Even the best-balanced encounter can get screwy based on a few rolls of the dice. I hope that we can all take this variability in stride.

While some of the characters in the game world might have telepathic powers, I do not. If you want something from me, you need to ask me. More likely than not, I'll be happy to give it to you, whatever it is. If you do not ask me for something, then I hope you won't be surprised or resentful if I don't anticipate your wishes.

I believe that people play RPGs for a number of different reasons. Even within such a outside-the-curve and self-selected group of people as D&D players, most likely there will be some individuals who prioritize combat mechanics, who prioritize the social experience of gaming, who prioritize roleplaying, who prefer to be passive participants, who prefer to be leaders, and so on. I don't feel that any one approach is necessarily superior to another. I will try to offer experiences that appeal to the variety of players in the group. This does not mean I can appeal to all of these varied interests at all times.

I will do my best to give each character a chance to shine. I will appreciate the patience of the other players when it is not their particular moment.

Charm spells aside (and those rarely used for this very reason), I will not force a character (or a player) to do something he does not want to do. I will respect your right to decide your own character's actions within reasonable limits.

While I respect your ability to choose your characters' actions, I hope you can respect my ability to decide the consequences of how those actions affect the game world. That is to say, if Jimmee the Halfling Rogue decides to cut the throat of a sleeping townsperson, then I hope that Jimmee's player won't be shocked or hold it against me if the town guards come after Jimmee. This also means that rolling a 20 doesn't automatically mean that a character gets what he wants; Gruumsh is not going to be persuaded to change his alignment to lawful good no matter what result you get on your diplomacy check.

I do want to give players what they want, so long as what a player wants doesn't conflict with my own wants or the wants of another player or the integrity of the game. I'd much rather empower than disempower a character or a player. I see my role as DM as being to help people have a good time, not to prevent them from doing so.

I will never inflict a permanent, incurable, disabling condition on your character (unless, for some weird reason, you want me to). I will never say that your fighter's sword arm has been disintegrated, or that your wizard has taken a blow to the head that has rendered him incapable of ever casting spells again. I won't cripple your character's capability to perform his primary function in the group.

I don't believe that rules discussions should derail a play session. If there is a rules dispute that can be resolved in a minute or less, we can resolve it on the spot. If there is a rules dispute that's going to take any longer than that to resolve, we can note it and come back to it later, preferably in email.

I don't feel that “griefing” (e.g., stealing from or killing another PC) can be justified by any assertion of the rules or role-playing or humorousness. If that's what your character would do, then you need to make a different character. Acts of comic mischief are fine. Disagreements and rivalries between characters are fine, and are even beneficial for the game on occasion, so long as the tone does not become hurtful to the players. Characters causing serious harm to one another is never good for anyone involved.

I will do my best to be approachable, and to give due consideration to any arguments you might have. I will do my best to be adaptable. This being said, I reserve the right to adhere to the rules as written (or, at least, my interpretation of them) if I feel that such an adherence is in everybody's best interests.

I view D&D as a cooperative and collaborative effort. I truly value players' input, and I do my best to give players what they want so that we can all pitch in to tell the most exciting, most entertaining, and most satisfying group story we can. I strive to be democratic and reasonable in my leadership of the group rather than dictatorial and arbitrary. The reverse of this is that if something goes wrong in the game, I will not very much enjoy if people go out of their way to dump blame on me. I view the relationship between the DM and the players as reciprocal. I very much believe that the players need to take responsibility for the fun of the game, too. I think that players need to take responsibility for improving a situation rather than resorting to bitterness, anger, or resentment. We're all adults here; let's try to work things out.

I believe there will be points in the campaign—in any campaign—where I will not be able to reach a mutually desirable agreement with one of the players. In such cases, if we cannot achieve a compromise, I hope that we will be able to accept the disagreement and move on for the sake of the flow of the game.

My first priority in being a DM is to be respectful and considerate, in language and in action, of the players. My second priority is to be fair and to maintain game balance. My third priority is the general good and cohesion of the group. My fourth priority is satisfying the requests of individual players. My fifth priority is adherence to notions of realism. All of these priorities descend from the first priority. If you come to me with a claim from a lower priority, don't be surprised if I reject it in favor of a higher priority. You say you want your level 1 character to have a level 30 magic item (#4), I'll most likely disagree on the bases of game integrity and unfairness to the other players (#2 and #3).

Claims about the “realisticness” of certain rules aren't going to carry a lot of weight with me; we are playing a fantasy role-playing game, not engaging in scientifically-accurate modeling of sociology, psychology, geology, biology, physics, or history. I believe that people's notions of what is realistic and unrealistic are highly variable.

I try to give considerations of realism credence within the game, but I'd rather not have the game overtaken by them.

I'm not going to accept disrespect or rudeness to or from another player under any circumstances, and I wouldn't expect you to accept it from me, either.

I view adventuring as a hazardous occupation. I think that a lot of the excitement in D&D comes from overcoming danger and peril (without ever actually being endangered or imperiled). While I bust my ass to ensure that the dangers and perils that the party has to face are appropriate for the party's abilities, there might be times when the party has to retreat. There might be times when a particular objective lies outside of the party's abilities. There might very well be times when the party is captured. There will be times when a character dies, maybe even the whole party (but hopefully not). I am not inclined to make the monsters pull their punches in order to ensure that nobody ever dies, and I don't think, in the long run, that such patronizing behavior would be very satisfying for anybody. I am more inclined to make monsters act in a way that makes good use of their abilities, and is consistent with their intelligence, their attitudes, and their desire for self-preservation. I will avoid last-second miraculous interventions in combat if I can help it; I respect the players enough that I'd rather have them solve their own problems than see them coddled by dei ex machinae. That being said, if a character does die, it is not necessarily the end for that character. Unless there are very obvious reasons otherwise, resurrection should always be an option, and if there are obvious reasons otherwise it's usually not anything that a little side-quest can't cure. Coming back from the dead in 4th Edition involves the payment of a relatively small amount of gold and a -1 penalty to a character's rolls for three milestones (which probably equates to six combats). This is a pretty mild penalty, and is significant without really being crippling (as opposed to, say, the old skool method of permanent level loss). I don't see it as unfair or cruel or even all that unusual that a PC should die from time to time. Consequently, I don't want to make character death unduly punishing. If the player decides that his old character is all-the-way dead and won't be returning—and the player should always be the one who has final say over this—the new replacement character will enter the group at the first possible convenience with gear and experience that are equivalent to that possessed by the rest of the group. I know character death can be stressful; people get attached to their characters, and character deaths can cause some anger or sadness. Character death shouldn't be deeply traumatic, causing rage or serious depression, and if it is traumatizing for you then maybe there are other, better games for you than D&D. I'd like to cultivate an attitude where death in the face of fantastic peril is a heroic thing to be admired rather than begrudged.

I am very willing to make aesthetical changes to the game for the sake of flavor. I reserve the right to say that the giant scorpion isn't a giant scorpion at all but is instead a giant cockroach with a nasty rancid bite instead of a poisonous sting. If you want to say that your scale armor is composed of the overlapping shoulder blades of werewolves instead of metal scales, that's fine, too, although it would be rather silly. I regard appearances as mutable. I regard actual game mechanics as far less so, and not really things to be modified or forsaken for the sake of flavor, but again I will try to be adaptable.

I reserve the right to say yes or no to any material that lies outside of the core books. You can make a case for including something found in a third-party supplement or an obscure splat book, but let's please be reasonable about this. Just because some fly-by-night publisher or fan-run website publishes a feat that gives a character +5 to hit and damage with all swords doesn't mean that including such a feat in the game is a good idea. If the new material is so awesome that every single character would want it, then chances are, it's over-powered and broken.

I think that rules exist in a game for a reason. I think that the rules provide a consistent mechanism by which imaginary characters can interact with impossible things and have it all make sense. However, if there's a good reason for changing or eliminating a rule, then I think that the rule should be changed or eliminated.

I come to a D&D session in order to play D&D, not to watch other people use their laptops to play World of Warcraft all night except for those few seconds when they are called upon to toss a d20. Laptops can be fine for finding a rule now and again. I don't think they belong at the game table for extended periods. D&D is a team effort, and I believe that the effort will be more successful if everyone involved makes the attempt to be as engaged as possible.

I am only human, and I will make mistakes. I will misremember rules. I may get impatient or irritable from time to time. I hope you will be able to forgive me when these things happen, even as I should forgive you.

As much as I think there are different playing styles, I think there are different DMing styles, too. I acknowledge that I am not the right DM for all possible players. If you acknowledge that I'm not the right DM for you, then I'll wish you luck in finding a new game and we'll both move on.

Post-Religious Ethics

2009-05-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

I don't believe in a God that intervenes in human affairs. To me, the massacres of the last hundred years pretty much prove the non-existence of such a God. Where was God when six million of his chosen people were massacred in the Holocaust? Where was God when 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed in Turkey? Where was God when 1.75 million people were killed in Cambodia under Pol Pot? When tens of millions starved to death or were executed in China under Mao Zedong, or in the U.S.S.R. under Josef Stalin? Where was God on 9/11, with both American Christians and Arab Muslims believing that He had justified their faith and way of life, and entitled them to kill the other? I can't imagine that a loving God would hold human life so cheap. If He takes the time to invest each person with a soul, and He believes that killing is wrong, why doesn't He bother to stop it when it happens?

So God does not intervene in atrocities. If an all-powerful and loving God existed, He would. Even if not on an individual scale, surely He would care about the deaths of millions of people. So if He does exist, then He chooses not to intervene on account of wanting people to play out their own particular realities, even if this freedom leads to tremendous evil. In which case, God is essentially irrelevant with respect to day-to-day earthly human affairs, as irrelevant as the light that comes from a distant star. You can note that starlight, study it, and ascribe to it all kinds of influences on human affairs, but really, is it somehow affecting life here on Earth? No. Peoples' *belief* in the power of that influence might affect the course of human events, but the influence itself is nearly nonexistent, and then it is the human capacity for belief that's really influencing events, not the thing which is believed. And that capacity for belief lends itself as readily to perpetrating culturally narcissistic genocide (My God can beat up your God! You are all infidels/pagans/heretics/a social virus!, etc.) as it does to preventing such horrors from occurring. Belief itself is neither good nor evil--like technology, it only serves to enable the good or evil that already exists within men. Alternately, you might think that the God is too weak to stop these events. I have been led to believe that the Christian God can do whatever he wants, so capability is not the issue. A third option might be that God allows these evils to happen with the intention of preventing greater evils down the road. In this scenario, God is like that Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, staving off catastrophe with stop-gap measures. All is a part of God's plan, and all is part of the greater good--even environmental devastation, the extinction of His species, and the murder of millions of people. And what kind of a God is that, then? A god who *could* stop these evils, but allows them to happen so...what? People learn to be good from evil? People swear to never again allow such things to afflict the Earth? As if. As if the Holocaust has put an end to all subsequent racial genocide. Hell, it hasn't even kept the Jews themselves from inflicting genocidal atrocities on their Palestinian neighbors. Maybe, on account of being the victims of genocide and repression, they have more entitlement to now perpetrate it on others. I don't think they do.

I encounter people who believe that it is not possible to be moral outside of faith. Maybe it's not--if you take morality as being the received values particular to a certain cultural group. If homosexuality is a sin, and I am a sinner if I see no real purpose in being intolerant of homosexuality, well then, I guess I'm not a moral person. However, I think it is entirely possible to be *ethical* outside of a faith tradition. Because, you see, here's the kicker: morality is specific to a group, passed down through tradition. Ethics are a rational attempt to create a code of conduct independent of any one tradition's say-so. Sometimes the two coincide; God says it's bad to lie (morality), and we can see the destructive power of lying in such things as the Enron or AIG scandals, so we know if we want society to function properly we shouldn't be lying to people all the time (ethics). Often times, these things do not coincide. The Bible tells me that I should not suffer a witch to live; I've got no personal investment in killing people who practice witchcraft, and I don't believe that killing them is of a benefit to society, and I think killing anybody for any reason is a bad fucking idea, because then who's to say that I don't deserve to be killed on somebody else's say-so, divinely inspired or politically justified or otherwise?

I guess what I'm saying is that I think it's entirely possible to be moral--or at least responsible, and conscientious, and compassionate--independent of any religion. Indeed, I have a harder time seeing how people can be moral--or responsible, or conscientious, or compassionate--*within* religion than without it. Because religious beliefs inhibit the individual from using his conscience to decide the rightness or wrongness of any particular course of action. Certainly there are religious people who have worked for great peace and charity in this world, and I'd never disavow that. But how easy is it to fall into the trap of thinking "Well, this is justified in the Bible, so it *must* be what God wants," even if the action is morally objectionable. Certainly the Bible is not a consistent guide for moral behavior. Take the story of Abraham and Isaac, for instance. It's one that's always given me trouble. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham takes Isaac up to the mountain; Abraham ties Isaac up and puts him on a pile of kindling wood, and has his knife out to cut his son's throat when at the last second God intervenes and tells Abraham not to do it. God is pleased that Abraham has passed this test of faith, withholding nothing from Him, not even his own son. Elsewhere, of course, the Bible tells us "Thou shalt not kill." Some people take this to mean "Thou shalt not murder," whatever finicky little distinctions that people make between killing and murdering that somehow let good Christian soldiers off the hook, which seems like a lot of bollocks to me. But, at any rate, God says killing is wrong. And, certainly, any sane person would feel a very strong revulsion at the prospect of having to cut the throat of his son. A person's conscience, which we might otherwise assume is God's way of guiding us through life, would revolt at such an act. And yet God asks Abraham to do the wrongest thing that he possibly could, even though God Himself would be abhorred by this act in any other context and would expressly forbid it, except on this one occasion when he decides to contradict Himself? What kind of a guide for living is *that*?

So, given the inscrutability, cultural bias, the inaction of God with respect to mortal affairs, and the general ineffectuality of religious morality when it comes to preventing evil in the world (or, indeed, the collusion of religious morality in the perpetration of such evils), I don't see how I could possibly live my life in accordance with religious tenets. God might be the ultimate judge of the living and the dead, but I guess that's something I'll have to worry about after I'm dead, because I sure as Hell don't have any proof that His will is done here on Earth. I don't see that it's somehow better to listen to received dictates--which, again, are dependent on a person's cultural inheritance, much as every religion claims to have the ultimate truth about the universe--than it is to listen to my own conscience. That's not to say that my own conscience might not be wrong about things--it often is--but, frankly, I don't see how I'd be a better person if I were to spend my time scanning through the Bible, trying to find one consistent answer about how I should go about any given task. This is especially true when it comes to contemporary problems that were not issues in Biblical times. What does the Bible have to say about global warming? That we are the custodians of the Earth, after Adam and Eve, or that Earth is the Devil's portion and the End Times are just around the corner and we shouldn't give a crap about worldly things when we could be storing up treasures in Heaven? I go with the former rather than the latter, but you see there's no way of prioritizing this information and coming up with a solid solution.

I don't see that God strikes down sinners. I don't see that he really helps people to be good. I don't see that God operates in this world in any way that our own consciences and our own experiences, fallible and limited as they are, do not.

When you think about it, you really are free to do whatever you want. Either God doesn't care, or he's not going to stop you. You can murder all you like. Go ahead. You can have sex all you like, and it's extremely unlikely that He'll strike you down with lightning (or AIDS, which was seen as God's judgment against gays in the 80s; now AIDS is largely confined to the poorest countries in Africa and Southeast Asia while people in the developed world, gay or otherwise, are able to prevent or live with the disease--is that saying that AIDS is now God's judgment against poor people?). Go on, eat a double cheeseburger--God's not likely to strike you dead for gluttony. Of course, there are consequences for any of these actions. You eat cheeseburgers, you will have a heart attack and die. You have a lot of disaffected casual sex, even with a condom, and maybe you won't get an STD or end up unwanted pregnancies, but I'm pretty sure you'll develop all sorts of emotional problems in the long run (at least, I tell myself that when I get envious of men who seem to bag a lot of hot chicks). You kill people, the police will get you--or maybe they won't. What I'm saying is that the repercussions for these actions are human or biological in origin, not divine. Maybe there's some kind of divine judgment down the road after death, but we can't know it, ad there are certainly no end of different and mutually exclusive interpretations of just what that judgment (or non-judgment) will be, such that adhering to any one interpretation is a crapshoot. But until such point as that, not all evils will be punished, and not all good acts will be rewarded.

There is no effective or actual guiding principle to human action, aside from that which we create for ourselves, and that which is instinctual in us. We can say that "This is good" because it brings pleasure to people and benefits the individual or the group, and "This is bad" because it harms the individual or the group. And there will necessarily always be conflicts in the prioritization of how the interests of the individual interact with the interests of the group; the majority is not always right, and uninhibited freedom for the individual can result in some awful things, too. I think the sooner we realize this, and realize that God or the gods or whatever are content to let us fuck ourselves over good and proper without the need for any divine or demonic intervention, the better off we, as a species, will be.

I think we need to understand that there is nothing stopping you from pulling the trigger, save for your own conscience. Just as important, there's nothing putting your finger on the trigger in the first place, save for your own conscience.

We are truly and awfully free, much as we try to convince ourselves we're not. Much as we want to believe that we are relieved from the terrible responsibility of having to make our own decisions, insofar as I can tell, it's all a cheat and self-deceit. If anybody could convince me otherwise, I'd be glad of it.

The Will is Weak

2009-05-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

I've been faltering quite a bit on my vegetarianism of late.

Outwardly, I've been a vegetarian for about two years. Inwardly, it is as if those two years haven't been but a second, in that my taste for meat has never gone extinct. If anything, after going for weeks without eating meat, I get this keen hunger for flesh and blood. I lust after meat, much as I might lust after a woman. It's ghoulish, I know, but most Americans are getting their fix for flesh on a daily basis. Mine gets temporarily beaten into submission, only to come back stronger than ever.

Some vegetarians develop an aversion to meat, or else they become vegetarians because of that aversion. Why can't I have this aversion? I want it. I really, really do. But no matter how much I tell myself that I don't want to eat meat, the smell of chicken or steak on the grill drives me a little crazy.

It's not like I'm not getting enough protein. I eat almonds and beans and peanut butter and cheese and meat substitutes. A lot of meat substitutes. Too many meat substitutes; they're laden with sodium, and I hear bad things about excessive consumption of soy. But my point is that this isn't a need thing (I don't think), it's a taste thing.

My inhibitions against vegetables break down. I experiment more with the leafy stuff in the produce section that used to scare me. I eat more greens. I accept the necessity of eating avocados, even though they still don't taste like much to me unless they're in guacamole with excessive amounts of salt and garlic, and then it's not really the avocados I'm tasting, is it? I eat exotic mushrooms--mushrooms are great because they *aren't really vegetables*. Fungi aren't plants; they're more like animals that don't move, and you can taste it in their flesh. Thank god for mushrooms. I go to the farmer's market and buy all kinds of Asian vegetables like giant radishes and purple carrots. But this variety of new foods to which I am now amenable is not sufficient replacement for meat.

Being a vegetarian would be a lot easier if it were not for polish sausage. And bratwurst. And pepperoni. And mutton chops. And fried chicken. And chicken strips. And teriyaki chicken. And teriyaki beef. And Korean ribs. And ham. And bacon. And bacon cheeseburgers. And roast duck. And smoked salmon. And beef jerky. And calamari fritti. And carnitas. There are not replacements for these things in a vegetarian diet. It's possible to find vegetarian versions of a few of these foods, but the pretend meat is never convincing. It might be alright in its own right, but it would never fool anybody who had any experience with the genuine article. If I have a jones on for fried chicken, let me tell you, Morningstar Chik'n Tenders are better than nothing, but they certainly don't ever quite satisfy. Sometimes I can find vegetarian specialty restaurants or markets that sell usually overpriced but often quite excellent pretend meat. I don't feel like I'm cheating myself or punishing myself when I eat the teriyaki chicken kabobs from Mother's Market; but I can't have them every day, and I don't know where a good vegetarian market is around here in S.D., anywho.

The real essence of the problem is this: I love the taste of meat. I am quite confident that I always will. This taste was strongly inculcated in me as a child--my parents rarely, if ever, served more than a garnish of non-potato vegetables with any meal, and most of the time left me to scrounge for myself in the kitchen with few, if any, available vegetables. My mother had a thing for canned vegetables--canned peas, canned corn, canned beets, canned potatoes, canned mushrooms--but I found such fare disgusting, and do to this day. Meat or pastries or very unhealthy dairy products were usually the default foods in my home. I'm still struggling to uninculcate the overstrong tendencies towards these foods in myself.

I love the taste of meat, but I don't allow myself to have it. Some small part of this self-denial is a concession to health--lord knows I don't need to be consuming large quantities of cholesterol and saturated fat. Nobody does. Some small part of this self-denial is on account of animal cruelty. This isn't a major issue for me. I don't think animals have any special right to life. I don't think of animals as friends, or as having a human-like intelligence. I acknowledge that animals can feel pain, but insofar as I know that pain and fear involved in industrial-scale slaughtering techniques is relatively brief. Whether the animals suffer in as a result of confinement and overcrowding or the mutilations they incur as part and parcel of contemporary industrial meat-raising techniques, I cannot know. It's hard enough for humans to gauge pain in other humans; I have no idea what goes on in the mind of a chicken, and I don't think that Peta does, either.

No, the real reason I deny myself meat is because I want to protect the planet. I don't give a rat's ass about cows and chickens, but I do care about biodiversity and the wild species that are compromised as a result of industrial agriculture. I like wild animals; I think of them as "real" in a way that domesticated animals are not. I want civilization to last out my lifetime and the lifetimes of my hypothetical grandchildren. And I don't see that happening unless there are major changes to the way we get our protein in this country.

I was writing this entry last week and got lazy about finishing it; my renewed interest comes with a special article in this month's NatGeo. It reminds me how it takes five pounds of corn to produce one pound of pork or ten pounds of corn to make one pound of beef, not to mention the exorbitant amounts of water and fossil fuels used to produce meat and then there are the tons of pig or cow shit to deal with afterwards which often end up getting dumped into rivers and causing lethal algae blooms or leaching into groundwater or causing some other nasty pollution problem. And, see, this is why I don't let myself eat meat anymore. Because with populations continuing to increase around the world but resources already being stretched to their limits, there's no way we can continue on with our current lifestyle into perpetuity. Scientists have been busting their asses to increase the efficiency of food production with things like growth hormones and factory-style mass production of animals to be slaughtered, and there may be breakthroughs yet to be found that will solve some of these problems, but in the end there is no possible way that the American diet can be sustained beyond the next generation, any more than can the current American consumption and combustion of gasoline. And if we can't increase efficiency, then the only other alternative is to put new land into production, which causes habitat loss, which is then the greatest threat to biodiversity on our planet. You see how it's all connected? And you see why, much as I really really want that ham and cheese sandwich, I ask for the Veggie Heaven instead. Veggie Heaven. As if.

It's not that the production of plant foods isn't fraught with problems in itself. You've got your dependence of petro-chemical based fertilizers, your use of carcinogenic pesticides that love to leach into groundwater or remain as residue on food, your problems with mono-cultural single crop farms that only necessitate the use of more fertilizers and pesticides, your soil degradation issues that come with exhaustive and super-intensive farming techniques. You know when they slash and burn down the rainforest in Brazil? They plant soybeans in the ashes. Yeah. But, of course, all of these problems are intensified by the consumption of meat. Maybe farming practices are pretty sucky at present, but if you recall that something like...damn, I can't find the actual percentage right now, but it's about 75%...something like 75% of the grain produced in this country goes for animal feed rather than human food, you realize how it is that the consumption of meat exponentially aggravates all those other extant problems with produce farming practices, because a large majority (whatever the exact number) of what we make is not going directly to meet human needs, but is instead being given to animals who are then killed to satisfy human wants. Meat is a luxury that our country, and our planet, cannot afford.

None of these issues apply to fish, of course. Fish are just out there in the ocean; nobody's spending fossil fuels and grain to make them grow. Instead, we are just overharvesting our seas such that world fish stocks have fallen about 80% in the past fifty years, turning the once-abundant ocean into a vast wet desert. And that's no good, either. A large amount of the fish that get caught turn into chicken feed, besides, and so that introduces layers of inefficiency again.

I know I'm not doing an extensive analysis here. That's not the point. The point is that others have done the research and the analysis, and I can find no reason to dispute these facts. I really believe it's important to take this information into account; I believe it's important to live a responsible lifestyle that doesn't threaten the continued survival of the last remaining wild places on earth, and potentially human civilization as we know it. The way we are living now will not abide. The disasters of climate change, hovering over our current fragile and over-extended food production system like vultures. Either we will change before we encounter the imminent catastrophes that come with overconsumption, or those catastrophes will come and force us to change, or those catastrophes will wipe us out. I'm just trying to get a head start on the future.

But it all seems so abstract sometimes. Knowing that these problems are global in scale and endemic in our culture seems so damn impersonal. If my resolve does crumble and I order a cheeseburger, does some polar bear drift past on a shrinking ice floe, howling its pain and starvation as a result of my own poor choices? No. No such polar bear appears. I can't see the results of my own successes in reducing my carbon footprint, or my own failures. The impact of my actions on the environment remain terribly far away, and terribly small. It's only when millions of people convince themselves that their actions are insignificant and choose not to pay attention to the repercussions of their lifestyle choices that there is a serious problem. And, at best, I can just say that I am one person who is opting to be conscious and conscientious when there are many millions more who do not care. Those catastrophes aren't depending on my own personal collusion or resistance to occur.

But just because everybody else is doing something doesn't make it right. And just because everybody else is doing something wrong doesn't mean that I am excused from doing right as I see it. And right for me means minimizing the damage I do to the planet. And so that means salivating at the smell of my neighbors grilling sausage on the grill and then going to eat my sauteed greens. And probably accepting that I am fallible, and not feeling guilty when my resolve does fail, and so get discouraged from doing anything at all.

I just wish the wanting would go away. But it never does, does it? Perhaps this whole life thing isn't actually about getting what you want, but learning how to accept that your wants will always outstrip your capacity to satisfy them, justifiably or otherwise, and to keep those wants in submission. A rather unhappy thing to contemplate, but I wonder if it isn't true.

Loneliness is Such A Drag

2009-04-26T06:25:00.000-07:00

One of the many songs I have floating around in my head half-formed and never really written is entitled "Long Cold Summer." The chorus goes like this:

It's gonna be a long, cold summer
As cold as I've ever known
I could not feel any number
Chills me to the bone
These things I've not outgrown
History has shown
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone

A lot of the songs that come to me never get farther than the composition of a refrain or an initial melody, which I suppose is why I'm not much of a songwriter these days. And maybe that's for the best if I'm going to be producing such forced rhymes in my songs as "summer" and "number" or invoking the grand cause of history to describe something that would be strictly personal.

At any rate, these coming months promise to be a long, cold summer like the one years back that inspired me to come up with the fragment of song. I've known a lot of long, cold summers in my time. That's not to say that the cold is external. Growing up in the desert (even if we try to paint it green with borrowed water), I've known weeks of waking up in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, of having a sheen of sweat burst forth from my forehead the moment I take a step outside with no consideration for the fact that I have miles yet to walk, of having the blood run so hot beneath the skin that it feels like fever even when it isn't, of breathing air that burns the lungs and scorches the throat and seems evacuated of oxygen. And, physically, I expect this summer to be like those other summers.

Internally, though--internally, it will be cold. So cold that I'll be able to sit and sweat and think for hours on loneliness, for want of anything better to do or anywhere else to go.

I've been on a school schedule for most of the years of my life now, and that brings with it a boom-and-bust cycle of socialization. I meet people during the school year, and that's good. I even form something like friendships with those people after many weeks of forced proximity and sometimes forced cooperation on obnoxious group projects and the unforced but still automatic bitching about instructors and their methods after class. But then summer (or the change of a semester) comes around, and before I've managed to build those friendships into ones that would warrant socialization outside of the class (or, alternately, the office), those nascent friendships are lost to me. There's a big difference between being tossed together by chance and unified in the amicable dissing of a common enemy (be he boss or professor) and achieving that point where I could comfortably ask a person "Hey, you want to come over to my place some time and hang out?" By which I also mean to say "We could watch a movie or maybe play a board or card game, if you didn't think that was too socially deviant, but I don't know you well enough as yet to know whether you'd consider that deviant or not. Or maybe we could just talk, because you know, there are times when I need to hear another human voice. I'm trying to minimize the amount of pressure I'm exerting on you here, knowing full well that you'll probably say no, or maybe say yes just to be polite and even feign enthusiasm but that doesn't imply any kind of follow-through. Please? I could really use a friend right now."

I've got a girlfriend now to act as a buffer against these boom-and-bust cycles. Call her social insurance, if you will, though I know that sounds callous and overly-mechanical. She keeps me away from the worst of the loneliness. But when I am otherwise lonely outside of my relationship with her, it shows, and then she gets impatient with my feelings of alienation. Not that I blame her, really. But if I am otherwise lonely, then my relationship with her becomes lonely, too. And anyway, she's going to be gone in Europe for much of this summer. So going to her for some small amount of human contact won't really be an option.

And I have other friends. I have friendships that I have cultivated for years, which is the normal course of things for me. It takes me probably one or two years to feel fully comfortable around another person, and to reach that aforementioned level where it's okay to ask for some kind of intimacy beyond the casual interactions that occur when disparate persons are placed essentially haphazardly into close physical proximity (maybe the sorting is guided with respect to intellect and social class, whether at work or in an academic setting, but the factors of emotional compatibility and personality are still essentially random). I form friendships but slowly and carefully, and I can only maintain a few at a time. And when those carefully-laid friendships begin to crumble, as they are for me now, I have no immediate other recourse.

It's gonna be a long, cold summer

Previous summers such as these have given me ample opportunity--no, more like need--to write, and to read. In the silence that comes from a dearth of human voices and the stillness that comes from a dearth of human interaction, I am clacking away at my keyboard, trying to populate my barren universe with fictional characters. Or I am glutting myself on books or films or video games, trying to invite those characters into my desolate life, allowing their stories to take over my own, which is sad and boring. But it doesn't really work. The characters I create are all fragments of me, and I know it, and they can't provide me with real company any more than I can pretend that the person in the mirror is a friend rather than my own reflection. And while other peoples' works can be a balm for a time (see the entry on WoW), I can't allow hide my mind behind other peoples' fictions indefinitely, any more than I could ask another person to dream for me. None of it, really, is a replacement for real human contact. The history of literature has shown that lonely men like me have tried, throughout the ages, to replace the volatility of relationships with the constancy and predictability of books, and it's never really worked. We've got exponentially more media now to distract us from that loneliness than Dante did when he wrote verse for dead Beatrice or Catullus did when he said love is like being crucified. But media can only mask loneliness, it can't really take it away. It's a change in appearance, not in essence.

So maybe I should be grateful for a summer that will demand that I write even if only to keep emptiness from crashing in on me, but it's hard to feel grateful for that.

Another fragment gestated into a full song:

I'm going nowhere
And no-one's waiting there for me

Oh, I will have time this summer. I will have time in abundance. And when I am socially-integrated, I am always regretting the loss of that time I have when I am going nowhere and no-one's waiting there for me. Time to think, and reinforce the same dark tracks of my thinking until they are so deep that I do not know how to extricate myself from them.

The therapist tells me that a painting shut away in a dark cellar where no-one can see it still has value. He tells me that a flower blooming on a distant and desolate mountainside where no-one will ever find it and where it has no chance of producing seed still has value. That these things are not to be disparaged for their lack of connectivity and value to others, but still cherished in and of themselves. He tells me that even if a man should alienate his friends and his love, he still has value. Maybe he's right, but what he says seems damn alien to me a lot of the time.

I know I hate feeling like I can go anywhere or do anything, because nobody really cares what I do, and nobody is waiting for me or wanting me to come back.

It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone

On The Eating of Vermin, etc.

2009-04-14T05:04:00.001-07:00

This past weekend was Easter Weekend, and for the past three years that has meant that I go on up to Julian in the eastern part of San Diego county for the O.C. Friends' Easter Retreat. I could go on about the kindly company of my fellow Quakers or the merits of Camp Stevens, but I will limit myself to one of the highlights of this years' excursion; namely, the eating of worms and scorpions.

There was some free time allotted us on Saturday afternoon, which prompted many of us to go into Julian proper and poke around. The town is justifiably well-known for its apple pies; there must be at least four pie shops on the one mile of the main street, and these shops proved the primary draw. There's also a lot of kitschy crap stores (including a store named Cats, Cats, Cats that put off even Bonny the Cat Fanatic), and three candy stores.

One candy store, the Old Mine, is really just buckets of stale taffy and Tootsie rolls in the small basement of a drug store. Another, The Cider Mill, has got lots of original chocolates and taffies and popcorns and all kinds of tooth-rotting, calorie-intensive health pitfalls. The last candy shop, whose name I now forget, is tucked away in the second story of a building just off the main strip. This candy store is more of a novelty candy store. Its shelves are lined with retro throwback candies like ox tails and chicken bones and acid pops other things with even more dubious names.

I had spoken against going to a candy store. I did not want to go into The Cider Mill and come out again carrying several pounds of empty calories in my hands (that would ultimately translate to several pounds in other places), as I had in previous excursions to Julian. But as I poked around among the selection at this other candy store, I felt no real compulsion to buy pounds of taffy or chocolates. Rather, I was attracted to the repulsive qualities of much of this candy. This repulsion culminated in picking through one particular section of the store that housed the scorpions trapped in candy amber, the "cricket lick-it" lollipops, the chocolate-covered bugs, and the tequila lollipops con gusano.

I'd been to this candy store before, reveling in the gross-out factor of these candies and reveling in pointing them out to Bonny even as a boy might revel in holding a lizard in front of the face of a pretty girl on the playground. This year, though, I felt compelled to purchase the scorpion in amber candy. This probably had something to do with the fact that there were additional f/Friends along with us that day in the form of the Remy family, providing something of an audience for my idiotic antics. I also got some cactus fruit candy, because that was somewhat hardcore (though not quite so hardcore as the scorpion).

When we returned from town and were messing around in the hall of our lodge, the children were gathering around me, eager to see my nasty candy with the bugs in it. I showed them the scorpion. It was a real honest-to-goodness scorpion trapped in that candy; its stinger had been removed, but otherwise the three-inch long yellow scorpion was all there, claws and tail and legs and eyes and all.

John Remy produced one of the tequila lolipops with the worm; he said it was intended for me as a gift. I thanked him, and decided to eat the tequila lolipop first, for his benefit.

The lollipop was a large, rectancular thing, about an inch and a half from top to bottom, an inch across, and an inch thick. The candy was a pale and translucent green, the better to show off the chewy center. It took me some while to unwrap the damn thing, as the outer layer of plastic seemed to have been shrink-wrapped onto the lolly. As I was unwrapping it, I observed that the creature stuck inside the candy like some primitive beast frozen in a glacier was not much of a tequila worm at all (these being the larvae of agave moths), but a regular old mealworm, like unto those that are eaten by my roommate's pet gecko.

I finally managed to extricate the lollipop from the plastic wrap. I gave it an exploratory lick, much to the squealing delight of the children around me. It didn't taste like much of anything, really. It certainly didn't taste like good tequila--and believe me, gentle reader, I know a thing or two about good tequila. It tasted maybe like vaguely lime-flavored sugar water.

I looked at the lollipop, and all that crappy flavorless solidified sugar-water surrounding the "prize" at the center. This was going to be an ordeal.

Several more licks, and no visible progress towards the worm, and I was thinking of that old Tootsie Roll pop commercial. "Mr. Owl," asks the naked wandering boy with the prominent and protruding butt, "How many licks does it take to get to the mealworm center of a mealworm pop?" "Let's find out," Mr. Owl responds.

Lacking the patience to be sucking on this awful thing all day, I tried to chew it. In truth, I think I am like Mr. Turtle, in that I don't think I've ever gotten all the way through a lollipop without biting.

Biting proved to be even worse than sucking (Get your mind out of the gutter!). I managed to chip away some of the lollipop by grinding it with my molars, conscious always that if I were to bite directly into it with my incisors I might well break my teeth. Chewing on the lollipop was like chewing on glass; the bits were still sharp and hard in my mouth, and had this terrible habit of getting stuck all along the cracks between my teeth. Having a mouth full of candy glass was even worse than sucking on the stupid thing.

So I resolved to take more extreme measures. I got the lollipop out and went into the kitchenette at the back of the hall. I looked around in the drawers for something hard, finding a can openener. Placing the sticky lolly on a paper towel on the counter, I proceeded to smash away at the lollipop with the butt of the can opener. It took quite a beating before fragmenting into smaller pieces and emitting a fair amount of white crushed candy dust.

Now, with the candy cracked away, I could get at some smaller chunks that included at least portions of worm. Naked portions of worm peeked through; here a segmented section of body, there a bit of head. Chewing through the lukewarm ice was still an ordeal, but at least now I was rewarded also with bits of mealworm to leaven out the awfulness of the candy.

The mealworm had a gritty consistency, like...well...grits. The taste was rather pungent, especially after all that flavorlessness. Not surprisingly, the mealworm tasted a lot like uncooked cornmeal. Like cold, slightly greasy and slightly rancid corn grits.

I described all this to the interested onlookers. I asked them if I had eaten enough; three-year-old Sonya insisted that I eat the whole thing, and who am I to refuse an order from my superiors? So I ate as much of the worm as I could. In faith, the actual eating of the worm was less unpleasant than the eating of the candy portion. I buoyed up my spirits by singing "Nobody likes me / Everybody hates me / Guess I'll go eat worms," although the children assured me that not *everybody* hates me. Sonia said she guessed she liked me, but I still had to eat the worm anyway.

And all the while, I was thinking "I compromised on my vegetarianism for this? Not even for rosemary lamb chops or a bacon cheeseburger, but for this? O, Man, how weak thou art."

There were urgings that I follow up this performance with a scorpion encore, but I had endured enough candy torture for one day. I promised the children that I would eat the scorpion for them tomrorrow, when Bonny and I had charge of childcare.

The next day, after eating an excellent vegetarian breakfast (those folks at Camp Stevens really know how to get a lot of mileage out of vegetables and tofu), I chased it with the scorpion candy. The kids and I were out at the treehouse near the lodge while the adults were inside in discussion groups, and the children wanted to see me go one better than the night before. I obliged.

Again, the packaging was eXXXtremely difficult to remove. When I managed it, though, the first lick told me that this candy was just as bad as the stuff I'd had the night before, but now with a very indistinct flavor of orange instead of lime.

Feeling brave, Bonny licked another corner of the candy. Then Sonia licked the bottom. I said this was all very unsanitary, but I guess it wasn't like I was eating scorpions for my health, anyway.

My patience was very quickly shot with the grotesque candy glass, and I didn't wait long this time before smashing the candy open, now with a rock plucked up from the ground. The amber cracked into shards; the empty ones I tossed away, and the ones with inclusions of vermin I proceeded to eat.

The scorpion, not surprisingly, tasted a lot like mealworms, which I expect provided the lion's share of its diet. It too was gritty and greasy and somewhat rancid, and made my stomach convulse.

The kids got a big kick out of it. I'm glad someone did.

I chewed through the body and the tail and at the legs until there were only little black scraps of scorpion flesh remaning in the the scattered chunks of candy. I declared that I was done.

Suffice to say, gentle reader, that eating candied scorpions is about as awful as you might imagine. Be glad I have done this empirical research so that you don't have to.

I can't quite figure out how to upload the photos to this blog, so I'm just going to link you to the gallery that Bonny made on Facebook of my gustatory masochism:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/album.php?aid=73721&id=617021888&ref=mf

And here is the video:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/video/video.php?v=83433566888&subj=1405575226

The Path in the Jungle

2009-04-08T07:03:00.000-07:00

Imagine you are cutting a path through a jungle. Your tool is a machete, and with it you begin to hack your way through the vines and bushes and branches of trees.

Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.

And yet you press on.

You can see your progress behind you. It seems very minute in the vastness of the jungle. It seems pathetic. It seems like nothing at all.

But it is something, isn't it?

After days or weeks or years of cutting and carving and hacking and slashing your way through the jungle, your path intersects with another path. This path is well-used; you can see the impressions of many feet in the mud. Or perhaps it is red sand, or gravel. Or even concrete or tarmac. This new path--not your path, but the path you have found--leads off into the distance. There you can see, rising above the treetops, the flashing lights of a city. You can see the columns of the city's smoke, and you can hear the honking and the shouting and maybe music or gunshots from its streets.

The city is not so far. And you have been such a long time in the jungle alone. Surely you must go there and see its squalors and its delights and its squalid delights and its delightful squalors for yourself.

And you go to the city, and you stay in the city for a while. Maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe years. Maybe you never leave. Maybe you find what you are looking for in the squalid delights and delights and squalors and delightful squalors and you never feel the need to leave again.

Or maybe you do.

Maybe one day you go back out on that well-established road that leads up to the city. Maybe you don't think anything of it at the time; maybe you're just going on a walk or out to get some air. Or maybe you do remember, thinking back on what it was like to swing that machete over and over and over and over again, leaving mangled plants and the thinnest of trails behind you.

Either way, you happen upon a scar in the jungle. A place where someone has been clearing a path, and where the ever-regenerating vegetation has yet to completely erase the evidence of passage. And you realize that this is the way you have come to the city. You look to the jungle on the opposite side of the road--not your road, not the one you had made but the one that leads to the city you had come to think of as yours, but is not now your city, in this instant--and see that the jungle is whole and unwounded. The jungle is vast, fast, and oblivious.

And maybe that's all you think. Or maybe you become dour at the meaninglessness of your former efforts, and return to your pretty, dirty city a little bit bitter, and that's the end of it. Or maybe you go back to the city and purchase a new machete--your old one having been so rusted and notched and pitted that it would be of no use now, even if you hadn't thrown it away--and you go back to that place opposite your old path and plunge into the jungle again.

Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.

And you ask yourself why you are doing this, and there is no good answer.

You do not know where your trail is headed; maybe it goes nowhere. You do not know if anyone will ever follow you on this trail. There are perfectly good paths that lead to the pretty, dirty city; why not follow them? Why make your own?

And yet you press on.

You sometimes see trails that parallel your own. Trails that near yours, but never quite touch. Or perhaps they do intersect. Sometimes you even see the trail-cutters who are making them. Sometimes you speak to them. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes these parallel trails are covered over in old vegetation, only barely visible as trails at all. Sometimes the sap is still stinking-bitter and the severed leaves have yet to turn brown. There are trails that come close to yours, but your trail is never quite exactly like any of the others.

Is that sufficient?

There are other cities, other well-worn roads. You pass them. And maybe you enter into the second city, or the fifth. And maybe you don't come back out again.

Or maybe you do. And you take up a new machete that will grow just as quickly dull.

And you continue to cut a trail that might be of no use to anyone, not even to you. It might be redundant, or it might lead to nowhere worth going. Your trail ultimately leads away from the light and life of the city, into dangerous wilderness.

And yet you press on.

Or maybe you don't.

Once An Addict, Always An Addict

2009-04-08T04:49:00.000-07:00

Facing the imminent possibility of the break-up of my D&D group, or the necessity of my leaving it on account of my having made everybody feel too bad about things too often, I've been feeling intensely the desire to return to World of Warcraft--or World of Warcrack, as my boss is given to calling it.

I hate WoW. But I love WoW.

WoW (and EQ before it) is wonderful in providing me with a sense of purpose. "Here's a quest, go do it!" says WoW. And, unlike in other MMORPGs, many of the quests are actually doable. And there are a lot of them. Many hundreds of hours' worth of quests. And in addition to the quests that I could ever actually do, there are a great many more that were contingent upon the assistance of other players, and these always hung just out of reach, like a fruit on Tantalus' tree, and they kept me interested even if I was barely ever able to satisfy them.

The so-called "real world" is very bad about providing me with a sense of purpose. Most times, when I complete a task, the reward is vague or long-term. If I motivate myself sufficiently to do my push-ups and sit-ups in the morning, do I get fanfare and a monetary reward and a sense that the world is right again and an observable increase in my capabilities? No, no, no, and no. If I write a piece, what is the reward? A brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by agonizing doubt, followed by nothing at all, as the piece lingers and dies on my hard drive. Or else goes to a workshop where my fellows pick it apart and show it to be the ugly and ungainly thing it is. That feels like more of a punishment than a reward.

But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of purpose. Even if I achieve maximum level--a feat which takes about a hundred hours of gametime, if not more, which equates to several weeks of real-world life spent doing nothing other than experience grinding--the finish line recedes away from me. "Oh, you're level 70," says WoW, "That's cute and all, but do you have a thousand gold for an epic flying mount? And you don't have any Tiered gear from the dungeons. So you need to start at the bottom of the level 70 instances and run each one between five to ten times (each run taking several hours to complete, and more hours to initiate and arrange, if it ever gets off the ground at all; most of them don't), and then work your way up until you have the gear you need to go see the biggest and baddest and most exciting dungeons." And all of this participation in the "uber" end-game is contingent upon other people to go into these dungeons with you. So that means that groups fall apart, or that if I am not up to an elite hardcore standard set by people who *only* play WoW in terms of gear or damage per second or knowledge of the intricacies of every little aspect of the dungeon, I am open to extreme and mean-spirited criticism at any time.

WoW is wonderful in providing me with a sense of discovery. Every new quest and new zone is an opportunity to see something new. And I like exploring. Not physically, so much, but intellectually, absolutely. There was so much to see in WoW--I don't know how many virtual miles of terrain actually exist in the game, but it's a lot. There are caves, and marsh channels, and purple-leafed forests, and cities built atop colossal mushrooms, and floating islands, and all kinds of interesting things to check out. And all of it filled with ore deposits and rare herbs and treasure chests and other exciting things to find, as well as strange beasts. And there are a number of classes to try, each with its own different playstyle.

But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of discovery. With all those pressures to get more gold and get better gear, now now now now now, many times it's difficult to actually appreciate exploring the virtual world. And with all of the pressure on being uber, the pressure is always on to copy somebody else's approach to playing one's class, or to be open to such comments as "You suck" or "You fail at life" or "Learn to play" if one does not. That, and it becomes abundantly clear after a while that the game rewards certain classes and builds (i.e., the ones that do a lot of damage) and punishes others that might have utility but that utility is too limited in solo play. But I know there are some people who always have groups and for whom this is not an issue; I've just never been one of them. You want to be a healer, or a warrior who uses a sword and shield? Tough shit, unless you're already level 80 with tier 8 gear (or whatever it is these days).

That, and over the course of leveling up many characters in both the Horde and the Alliance, I've been there and seen that. The world doesn't change--or if it does, the change is slow in coming. There are no seasons and no weather. The quality of light is constant. NPCs stand in the same place all day, every day--unless they walk a predictable and prescribed path. If I kill a monster, a few minutes later it will be standing in exactly the same place where it fell, sometimes even looking over its own corpse. If I complete a quest, that same crisis will still be unresolved if I take another character to the same place. The world is persistent--which means that there is nothing I can do that will have any lasting effect on the game world. How could it, if it were to mean that one character gets to do something and then it is closed off to all of the thousands of other players on the server? I guess some Chinese or Korean MMORPGs have such things, but that is a large part of why they are terrible.

I love WoW because it makes me feel like I'm not alone.

I hate WoW because it makes me realize how alone I really am. The other players in WoW--they don't tend to be people who appreciate quality fantasy literature, or epic poetry, or even tabletop RPGs. They approach WoW from the perspective of a FPS (i.e., a first person shooter). To them, WoW is like Halo. What matters is score, kill count, and superiority. If they meet you in battle, they will kill you and then humiliate your corpse by an act of virtual rape, and then they will probably hang around for ten or fifteen minutes just to prevent you from getting back up and playing again. If they are in your group, they will constantly be checking damage meters and bragging about their primacy and criticizing those on the bottom. I'm not like that. I care about story and feelings and setting. And when I take all kinds of criticism because I'm not hardcore enough, it only serves to hurt me. A lot.

Or when the other players do want to discuss things, it tends to be television shows, or abrasive and uninformed political commentary, or how work sucks, or such things. It's generic, uninteresting, unstimulating, impersonal.

Or when the other players do want to engage in the actual "role-playing" elements of an MMORPG, it's even worse. They manufacture crises for themselves, and play out such dramas as though they mattered. They play at being nobles, or vampires, or great heroes (greater than the other heroes who are all around them), or tragic scions of extinguished families, and other such insufferable narcissistic bullshit. They have feuds and duels and factional wars, for no other reason that to generate conflict and resentment and opportunities for irrelevant antics.

Compounding all this is the fact that people tend to be extremely unpleasant while playing WoW. Much of this unpleasantness is attributed to foreigners and teenage boys, but I don't think all of it can be attributed to them. There is the bragging and verbal abuse and humiliation mentioned above. Then there are those people who engage in price gouging by purchasing all the items at auction and re-selling them at higher prices. Then there are the people who incessantly beg for money. Then there are those people who slander Horde or Alliance players in terms that would be hatefully racist, if they weren't referring to virtual identities. Then there are those people who overreact with threats or profanity at even the slightest of mistakes (or non-mistakes). Then there are those people who abandon your group for no reason at all. Then there are those people who refuse to help out with even the smallest of tasks, even when such an alliance would clearly be of mutual benefit, and instead insist on working at cross-purposes.

Two of my books now have been about the failure of the virtual world to sustain interest and a sense of self-worth. My current novel, After Life, describes an MMORPG that is so immersive that the characters have forgotten that they are characters at all, and they play out all of the racism and greed and meaningless agonistics that choke the real world, believing all the while that these tendencies are "perfection" in their virtual utopia. But, of course, it's all crap, isn't it?

All this...and it draws me back. Like the need of a clean junkie for just one last needle, WoW tries to pull me back in. It gets worst whenever I experience a fit of depression; then it seems most soothing to submerge my consciousness in a virtual world for a while, and so afford my soul a chance to regenerate. Until, of course, the injuries I sustain in WoW hurl me back out again.

I don't want to go back to playing WoW. I don't want to get back to those days when I begrudged the 30 seconds it took to go to the kitchen to get a cereal bar or to go to the bathroom to urinate before plunging back into playing again. I don't want to feel that intense sense of inferiority to those cruel bastard braggarts who enjoy making others feel bad about themselves, and so often feeling as though I am failing at life.

But there's an entire continent I've yet to explore, and a class I've yet to try. And I have been very depressed lately.

Fuck.

WoW is haunting my thoughts right now; recurring every thirty to sixty seconds or so. It won't be much--just a slight sting, an ache, a pang; a screenshot, a memory, a "What if" moment.

We shall overcome.

I hope.

Reflections on Battlestar Galactica

2009-03-28T06:41:00.000-07:00

The BSG era has come to a close. There might be subsequent spin-offs, but BSG in its essence has ended.

I only started getting into the series last September or so. For a long time I was inclined to lump Battlestar Galactica in with the rest of the drek on the Sci-Fi channel (or the SyFy channel as it is soon to be known, which goes to show how very little the channel's executives actually care about science fiction). Oh, a remake of that sucky Star-Wars-coattail-riding Battlestar Galactica show I saw as a kid? Yeah, let me get right on that. It can't be any worse than the Stargate spinoffs. I'll definitely schedule my Friday evenings around the watching of such a show.

Hell, I thought the original BSG was stupid when I was five. And I was a lot more forgiving of stupidity when I was five, as long as it was stupidity with space ships and robots and lasers.

But last fall, after hearing good things about it from people whose opinion I respect, I began looking more into the show. I noticed that it had scored emmys for writing; for *writing*, of all things. That's not something I'd expect from a show that was of the caliber of the Star Gates or any of the more recent Star Treks.

You see, gentle reader, when science fiction and fantasy and horror are at their best, they are some of the best fictions we have. People with small imaginations--the kind of people who use phrases like "truth is stranger than fiction" or "you can't make this stuff up" or "I was disappointed to find out that it didn't actually happen like it did in the movie" or "with so much interesting stuff going on in the world, why would you want to make anything up?"--refuse the validity of that which strays too far from their perceived reality. If it doesn't speak to their own particular reality--that of being a liberal middle-class caucasian around thirty years of age and living in 21st centurty Southern California or WHATEVER--it has no meaning for them.

And you know, I think those people are not entirely unjustified in dismissing speculative fiction. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror *does not* speak to any kind of reality. Certainly, there are the fantastic elements, but more critically, these forms usually do not speak to the realities of personal experience and personality and psychology. The speculative fictions indulge in a fetishistic worship of the conventions of genre, forgetting that stories--in whatever form--are supposed to be about people. Not about gods or emotionless monsters or sword fights or giant ships crusing between the stars. If the people in a story are not interesting and conflicted and complicated and complex, then the rest of the story is not interesting, no matter how much you cram it full of laser-spears or seven-foot tall bald dudes with weird tattoos or bad-ass mutant zombies or what have you. And that is why, even speaking from the point of relative ignorance whereby I have only seen scattershot clips or single episodes of the Star Gates and the post-TNG Star Treks and Babylon 5 and any number of other fantastic shows I can say, with confidence, that they all fucking suck.

But when science fiction or fantasy or horror *are* good and *do* have interesting characters, then they can serve to show us our own reality in a new light. They can explore possibilities, both psychological and scientific, in a way that straight fiction simply can't. Just as dreams can show us things about ourselves that literal, expository dialogue never could. The trick is to bring it back from that dislocated reality and socket it back into place with our own literal realities. The trick is to wake up from that dream (or vision or nightmare) of raw imagination and put it into context with experience. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror never bothers to do so. Maybe horror is justified in getting away with it sometimes, as horror is about the exploration of what happens when reality breaks down, but I'd still posit that horror is most interesting when its characters have a psychological reality--R.J. MacReady or Kirsty, instead of an utterly fungible twenty-four year old breast-augmented and already-faded starlet.

So when I went to watch BSG, I was watching it for the characters. I wanted the special effects to be good, of course--and they are. The CG space battles are as good as anything I've seen, and the CG cylons are honestly terrifying (at least in the first season). More telling, though, was the fact that all the enemies *weren't* CG; the pilot introduces cylons who look exactly like humans. It also shows a city with trees and fountains and streets. People aren't decked out in silly silver spacesuits or heavy robes or body paint, but wear clothing that wouldn't look out of place in any contemporary city. When the soldiers pull their guns, they have pistols and assault rifles, not laser weapons that fire beams of animated light (that perversely travel far slower than projectiles, such that you can actually see them go across the screen; go figure). It's as if the science fiction elements--the robots, the spaceships--were dropped directly into a contemporary or very-near-future society, and nothing else is changed. There's no Trek-like utopia. There's still racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, economic strife. The better to allow the characters to be real. And the conflict between the humans and cylons is ultimately a metaphor for such things as racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, and economic strife. It's not an easy battle between good and evil. Very soon, it becomes clear that these cylons are not your daddy's (and certainly my own father's) easy-to-hate Others who have no conscience and no identity outside of being evil.

Still, I wasn't sold on the show. At the outset, the characters were more interesting than those of most science fiction shows. But I didn't know if they were interesting enough. Commander William Adama, as played by Edward James Olmos, is a father figure who sometimes struggles to balance his personal feelings with the responsibilities of his post. He strives to keep control over his ship and the remnants of the human race, and that control often slips. It's an interesting character, and certainly more interesting than the kind of benevolent paternal authority figure who is always right about everything (see Lorne Greene in the original BSG), but it is one that I felt I had seen often enough before. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, as played by Katee Sackhoff, is a rebellious hotshot who has trouble with authority. I *knew* I had seen *that* character before. But Colonel Saul Tigh, as played by Michael Hogan, is an alcoholic who experiences no miraculous recovery in the course of his character arc. He is abusive, both with himself and with others. And yet he is utterly dedicated to his job and gives as much as he can to the honor of his office, and he is lost without his uniform and his position to define him. Now this was something I had not quite seen before.

I was still dubious about BSG for the first half of the season. I appreciated the changes between the pilot and the first actual episode: the ship got darker, tighter, and the shots were more close-ups shot at cramped angles. The show was becoming more intimate, and more intense. But I didn't yet know if it really had characters--and so stories--that would keep me interested.

I wasn't completely sold on BSG until episode 1-8, entitled "Flesh and Bone." In it, Starbuck goes to interview a Cylon prisoner about a bomb threat. And by interview, it is understood that she is planning to torture him for information. When this was starting out, I was expecting something along the lines of 24, wherein the bad guy is put through excessive and gratuitous pain before he caves and tells everything he knows, and then the good guys rush off to save the day. I was thinking this was where BSG was going to lose me, even as 24 has lost me.

And that is how things start. But the Cylon is not spiteful or defiant. He doesn't condemn Starbuck or humankind, indulge in racial epithets, or do anything that would invalidate him or justify the torture. Instead, he questions Starbuck on her own morality and spirituality. Starbuck is unnerved by this intimate contact with the hated machine enemy, and ceases to be an effective torturer.

The episode resolves with the President of the surviving humans, who had up until that point been an almost too-sympathetic character, lying to the cylon and promising him his safety if he reveals the location of the bomb. The cylon reveals that there is no bomb, and the President has him blasted out of an airlock.

Now this was something I definitely hadn't seen before at all.

The characters are further made interesting by their struggles to define their own humanity. Some of the "humans" are revealed to be cylons, and have to reconcile themselves to this knowledge in some way. Others come to love cylons, or at least think cylons have some claim to be free from persecution.

In the end, there is no difference between man and machine. The creator is not divorced from his creation. What we do is who we are. Our essence is not divisble from our actions.

Good and evil--human and cylon--are labels applied after the fact to try to simplify beings with limited capabilities who are compelled to make choices in a complex world. And these labels are ultimately shown to be bereft of real meaning.

Having spent most of my life feeling excluded from humanity, it's natural for me to sympathize with the monsters in a piece of fiction, and so this kind of thing is right up my alley. My own personal issues aside, I do believe that the exploration and examination of what makes us human is a worthy one. I think it's too easy to assume that "personhood" is restricted to only living, organic humans. Or, better yet, that it's restricted to people of a certain race or creed, and that everybody who is not a member of a certain in-group has no right to life. I think speculative fiction, when it is at its best, challenges our narrow definitions of what it is to be "human." BSG certainly does that.

Maybe the reversals are too facile in some cases, especially in the last season. I felt like a lot of the shows towards the end, after the false duality of cylon and human has largely been deconstructed, try too hard to show that cylons have feelings, too, and are sad when they have miscarriages or when they lose a loved one or when they are unloved. But I'm still glad that those reversals exist at all. Again, good speculative fiction challenges the assumptions of its characters. Immature and fetishstic speculative fiction (and most video games, and most fan fiction) doesn't ever challenge the characters' beliefs in any serious way. And while I don't always like the way BSG handles these developments, and there were times when I felt like I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy in Space for all of the overwrought drama, I would say that BSG does hit the mark at least as often as not in creating meaningful and defining moments for its characters.

So I am going to miss BSG. It is the kind of sophisticated, intelligent speculative fiction that I always want and so rarely get.

Unless I write it myself. Which I try to do.

On Johnny Cash, Existentialism, and Self Esteem

2009-03-25T22:44:00.000-07:00

Today I was reading a text concerning co-dependence and self-defeating behavior. In it, the author says that people with low self-esteem rely on what she calls other-esteem; that is, that they define themselves in terms of how others see them. They evaluate themselves based upon their actions and the reception of those actions, rather than believing that a person has inherent worth and value, as imbued by a creator (a "Higher Power," as she calls it). She makes a distinction between "human beings" who have a sense of self-worth independent of their actions and "human doings" whose self-worth is dependent upon their interactions with others.

I am not a "human being" in accordance with this definition. Indeed, there have been many times in the past when I thought about membership in a species, including homo sapiens sapiens, as being conditional. One scientific definition of a species is that its members are capable of true reproduction--that is, mating and producing viable offspring of the same species as the parents. In the many years in which I had no access to sexual intercourse I questioned my own validity as a member of the human race. I wondered many times whether this lack of access was biological or psychological or social...but in the end, I concluded it didn't matter. If I couldn't mate with another human being, for whatever reason, I wasn't fully human.

I struggle, really seriously struggle, with the idea that people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Quakerism posits that all people have access to the divine, and that all life is worthy. This leads to the Quaker prohibition against violence (how can one person use force on another when all are equally worthy?), and the Quaker tendency away from absolute doctorines and towards Testimonies that have their root in human experience and not abstracted ideals.

It's not that I cannot see the value in such an approach. But it's difficult for me to accept and believe.

I think people are defined by their actions, not some innate quality of being. Or at least, that's how I define people. When I have to summarize somebody, I think of him in terms of profession: he is an engineer, a soldier, a singer. I think of him as doing these things well or poorly: he is a competent engineer, a poor soldier, an excellent singer. Maybe I think of him as being a good person or a bad person, as expressed by his actions that tend to be either towards a general good or towards a destructive selfishness. I might think of him as a friendly person, or a rude person, a giving person or a cruel person, but again these evaluations are based on expressions of these qualities. I rail against that easy conceit whereby somebody is said to have a "stern mouth" or "intelligent eyes" or "kind hands," and all that can or needs to be known about him is expressed in his innate physiology.

I am obligated to be re-reading Tess of the D'urbervilles, and Thomas Hardy does this kind of thing a lot. You can tell all you need to know about a person just by looking at him; Alex D'urberville has sensuous lips and a long moustache which he tends to twirl; only Tess can recognize the cruelty and crudity of him, but that's because the other characters in the novel are simple and stupid people with broad cheeks and big hands, while Tess has the delicate and transcendent beauty of Innocence and Intelligence Wronged. So fuck *that* shit.

I am a writer, an ethical person, a boyfriend. I am a friend, and a member of my family. If I fail at these things--if I write poorly, if I have a lapse in ethics, if I am a disappointing boyfriend or friend--what am I? Do I have some value outside of my failures? If I do, I cannot see it.

I don't pay much attention in any serious way to defining myself in terms of nationality, sex, or race. I don't think of such definitions as being valid. I am an American...but what is that? Either it is expressed in my actions and in my way of thinking about reality, or it doesn't matter. A person is a competent engineer or an excellent singer; does it matter if he is black or she is Indian? Not really; not to me. I know these definitions are very important to others. But I only think of them as being important in their act of expression, in their capacity for shaping choices, not in their "beingness."

I don't even like to think of people in terms of names. I forget names; I never pay attention to them in the first place. Titles have meaning; they are indications of achievement. Quakers are against titles. But I am against names. Especially American names, which are a mish-mash of Hebrew and European traditions and which are usually chosen for their sound or popularity and so evacuated of their true meaning. My first name means "Beloved;" beloved of whom? Of God? Of my parents? If so, then my name is more of a lie than a truth. Is it a reference to the Biblical King David, that singer and sinner and giant-killer? Did I express some analogous qualities in utero that caused my parents to pick that name for me? Or do I just have that name because my father had it, and his father before him, and should I believe that there's some kind of inherent "Davidness" in me?

Another thing I rail against is someone saying "You're such a David" or "I never met a Tim that I didn't like." What the fuck is this essential "Davidness" or "Timness" by which the individual is being compared? It cannot be anything more than the comparer's composite experience with Davids and Tims, and thus is an expression of experiential qualities, not essential ones.

My middle name is Michael. Michael is a question: "Who is like God?" in the Hebrew. It's the battle-cry of the right angels as they go to fight against the fallen. I've been thinking a lot about this question of late. There's no answer to it. No one is like God; no one can do what God can do. Anyone who is like God would be spared the angel's wrath. But no one is like God. And so anyone would deserve to be spit upon an angel's flaming sword.

What is physical beauty, but an admiration for the potence and potential in a person? Muscularity is beautiful in men, fertility is beautiful in women. Men are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as providers and defenders, women are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as lovers and mothers. Why do you think it is that men are drawn to a woman's breasts, if not as an implied promise that she will be a good provider for children? We admire youth and health--the capability to act, and express one's will upon the world. We do not admire sickness and impotence. We exalt athletes. Capability is attractive. Confidence is attractive. Ineffectuality is ugly. I am ugly, because my body is largely ineffectual, and reflects years of poorly chosen actions.

Wisdom is beautiful in those who are older, but even that has a relative quality; would wisdom have worth if it could not guide the young? Wisdom is beautiful, but senility is awful. Or, at best, tragic.

Does a person whose actions have no value to others have worth outside of those actions? Does a serial rapist have worth? I don't know. I wouldn't think so. Does a person who is bound to a wheelchair and who exhibits no brain function have worth? I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't think of such a person as much of a "person" at all. Maybe the serial rapist or the invalid have value to their families or friends, if such are available, but would that value be the valuation of some inherent quality in the loved one, or a projection and creation of value on the part of the loving one, and so an action and a subjective assertion of value?

I would think any person would have the right to be free from inflicted pain and suffering. But this isn't really an estimation of a person's value. It wouldn't be right for me to stab you with a knife or steal from you or poison your dog, whether you were an average person or a great humanitarian or a serial rapist. The prohibition to not cause pain to people does not show that people have worth. It just shows that pain is terrible in the infliction and in the receipt. I am not obligated to go around preventing other people from being stabbed or robbed or having their dogs poisoned because all people should be free from these things. I am only obliged to not do it myself, because the power in the action of inflicting pain on a person is overwhelming and negative and can cancel out whatever else that person has done. Simple acts of cruelty can destroy whatever worth a person has. Else why the tremendous prohibitions against violence? It is action used unfairly and unconscionably.

I can act to prevent other people from being stabbed or robbed, but that is a choice I can make--an action I can take--and isn't required or expected of me in the way that not stabbing and not robbing and not caniciding are expected and required.

We exalt the fireman who rushes into the crumbling tower to try to save a life, and so taking action. He is a hero. We don't exalt somebody who stands on the sidelines, and is merely being there. He does not matter.

History remembers Alexander, the conqueror of the world. History even remembers Alexander's horse, Bucephalus, so essential to that conquest. Does history remember the soldier who was assigned the ignominious duty of sweeping the shit out of Bucephalus' stall? It does not. His actions did not matter. Now he does not matter.

How do we assign value to non-human organisms? We value those which are useful to us--apples, cats which at first killed rats around Egyptian granaries and were only later seen as pets or gods, aesthetically-pleasing trees. We do not value weeds or parasites. The biologist might, because she can see things that the rest of us can't, but often that is a respect for the capabilities of these organisms and their success in their respective fields or the value of their genes, not because something just "is." If there was something inherently valuable in life, we would value Rhinovirus cells as much as we would value the life of a beloved pet, or the President of the United States. But we don't. At least, I don't see many people boycotting anti-biotics because we believe that the billions of cold virus cells have as much claim to life as their human host.

Increasingly, people put a value on animal life in accordance with its intelligence--its capability to understand, and to act upon that understanding. Certainly most of us would think it abhorrent to kill a gorilla that could speak in sign language, or a parrot that could speak in complete sentences. I think back on a National Geographic article from some months back in which it was described how a family of gorillas had been killed by guerillas (the verbal irony was quite funny to me) in the Congo. When rangers found the "murdered" gorillas, the rangers carried the great apes out of the jungle on biers and gave something akin to a funeral. Villagers *mourned* the loss of these animals. We would feel no such compunctions about jellyfish or tapeworms. When was the last time you saw a funeral for a maggot? There are those among us--many among us now--who extend the valuation of awareness and capability far beyond its traditional limits, but even then it is largely circumscribed by a recognition of human-like intelligence in the animals so valued, now that intelligence is evaluated in differences of degree, rather than absolute differences of kind. One of the commonest arguments I hear from people decrying the consumption of meat is that pigs are intelligent animals, as intelligent as dogs, and suffer under their living conditions and experience terror when they know they are to die. I hear no such arguments about plants, which are assumed to be immune to feeling and fear. So it is intelligence, then--the capability to assess, and to act upon that assessment--which is valued. Being, in itself, has little meaning or worth.

All this is to say that I see every interaction with another person as a performative interaction by which I will be judged. If I am praised, then I feel validated. If I perform poorly, earning scorn or even ambivalence or disinterest, then I question where my worth as a person might be found. I do not believe, as the author of this psychiatry book does, that existence preceeds essence and that I have value outside of my actions and interactions.

The concept of unconditional love is so surreal to me. I've often thought of unconditional love in terms of being that which is given freely, and hence that which has no worth. I don't think I had much of that in my own experience. Even now, among the people who care about me most, I am just one or two offenses away from alienating them utterly. I am ever only one or two offenses away.

The concept of a God who loves unconditionally is perverse to me. A God who evaluates and hates his creation, finding it wanting, hating humans for not being able to live up to impossible standards even as He created them to be inadequate, a God that banishes people to the darkness beyond the wall where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth--that God is also perverse, and yet He seems more real to me. More believable. I reject Him now; I hate Him. I reject that Father so like my own father, who would punish His creation for His own inadequacies. I reject that God who would hold sinners in his angry hands just barely out of the reach of a destroying fire. And I cannot believe in a universe that would have such a cruel organizing principle. Or I refuse to, anyway, even if I suspect all the while that it might in fact be actual. At the very least, I can refuse to adore and validate such a God, even as all the while I scramble to please him and dread the utter anihilation that will come with His pleasure as I writhe in fire forever and ever after I am dead.

But a God who would love and forgive me for my failures--even unto such things as rape and murder--does that God make any more sense? A God who blindly loves, rather than blindly hates, is still absurd, even as the person who tries to hug everyone is as mad as the person who lashes out and bites anyone who comes close. Or maybe divine love is just beyond human reckoning, in which case I am an idiot to try to fathom it, and I should spend no more of my effort on it. Certainly I find no evidence of divine love in my life--or divine anything--nothing I can touch or taste or see or hear or feel or measure and objectively know. I interpret this emptiness as an absence most times, when I do not interpret it as contempt or as that dreadful anticipatory silence in which the cop need only wait for the criminal to fuck himself over with his babbled lies and contradictions and so prove himself the guilty party (See the ending of Til We Have Faces for exactly this). I cannot accept, then, as the author of this book asserts, that I have worth inherent in my being created by a Higher Power.

She says that forming a healthy sense of self-esteem is contingent upon believing that I have inherent worth. Certainly, I can see that my tendency to constantly question my own worth in so many things and to rely almost entirely on feedback from others to be able to guage the efficacy of my being is extremely hazardous. But I will have a great deal of difficulty in accepting that I somehow am worthy and even loveable simply by being.

I was thinking about all this in the lonely hours of last night after a writing workshop that had exposed flaws in my work to which I had been oblivious, and left me feeling as though I had little worth as a writer, and hence as a person. I turned to probably my greatest spiritual guide in life, Johnny Cash. In his songs, he posits that people have value and dignity independent of their actions. The first song that came to mind was "The Man Who Couldn't Cry." The protagonist of the song fucks *everything* up.

To wit:

"The Man Who Couldn't Cry"

There once was a man who just couldn't cry
He hadn't cried for years and for years
Napalmed babies and the movie love story
For instance could not produce tears
As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts ran dry
He grew to be a man, the feces hit the fan
Things got bad, but he couldn't cry

His dog was run over, his wife up and left him
And after that he got sacked from his job
Lost his arm in the war, was laughed at by a whore
Ah, but sill not a sniffle or sob

His novel was refused, his movie was panned
And his big Broadway show was a flop

He got sent off to jail; you guessed it, no bail
Oh, but still not a dribble or drop

In jail he was beaten, bullied and buggered
And made to make license plates
Water and bread was all he was fed
But not once did a tear stain his face

Doctors were called in, scientists, too
Theologians were last and practically least

They all agreed sure enough; this was sure no cream puff
But in fact an insensitive beast

He was removed from jail and placed in a place
For the insensitive and the insane
He played lots of chess and made lots of friends
And he wept every time it would rain

Once it rained forty days and it rained forty nights
And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried

On the forty-first day, he passed away
He just dehydrated and died

Well, he went up to heaven, located his dog
Not only that, but he rejoined his arm
Down below, all the critics, they loot it all back
Cancer robbed the whore of her charm

His ex-wife died of stretch marks, his ex-employer went broke
The theologians were finally found out

Right down to the ground, that old jail house burned down
The earth suffered perpetual drought

See, the protagonist is forgiven all his sins and errors. Note that he gets his dog back before he bothers to retrieve his arm. His worth is not in what he has done--all of which has failed--but is inherent in his being. Johnny Cash songs are full of such forgiven failures--indeed, if anybody could actually make me believe in a Jesus who forgives people for their errors and finds worth in human beings independent of their actions, it would probably be Johnny Cash. I think he sincerely and seriously believed in such redemption.

But can I believe in such things? It might be healthy--or effective--for me to do so. And yet it is such anathema to me.

The writing of this blog entry was a performative action. I don't think anybody reads this blog; therefore, the action will fail. Funny, that. Or not funny. Tragic, maybe; tragedy is about an actor going beyond his capabilities, and that actor being brought to task and punished for his transgressions. But even in that punishment, does not the actor prove his worth in trying to
do what other men do not dare to do? Yes, he must be blinded and exiled and murdered, but what wonderful and terrible things he has done. If Oedipus had never been king and taken up that forbidden bed and tried to cure the plague, Oedipus would not matter. If Achilles had never raged against Hector and the sons of Atreus, Achilles would not matter.

My God, I love tragedy.

"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."--Philippians 4:8

Arete.

If I am not excellent, I am not anything.

San Diego Radio is the suck

2009-03-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

Imagine my excitement, gentle reader, that first time I was driving down to San Diego and was cycling through the FM frequencies and discovered a hard rock station. This is not to disparage the rock radio stations in Orange County, except that KROQ mostly plays music that appeals to seventeen year olds (adolescents, forgive me!) whose musical appreciation does not reach back past Nirvana's Nevermind and, thus, whose opinions of music have been entirely informed by the popular products of the past ten years which are, I can say without reservation, pretty crappy. So I do mean to disparage KROQ. KLOS is not bad, but after listening to that station (and KRTH before it) for years, every single song of the limited setlist was so burned into my brain that I could conjure up a memory of that song from beginning to finish, lyrics and melody and guitar solo and drum line and bass line and all. At some point, even such classics as "Interstate Love Song" and "Sweet Home Alabama" grow tedious for want of a leavening of new material. So, when I stumbled upon KIOZ and heard "Closer" on the radio--"Closer," gentle reader, "Closer!," with half the song being modified into scratchy sounds where all the f-words are supposed to be!--you can imagine my delight. You can also imagine my delight when I found, only .4 up the dial, San Diego's XLNC 1 classical station. Synergy! When I grew tired of the hard rock, I could listen to the Beethoven and Mendelssohn that I have been coming to love, which are not unlike metal in their own rights.

I maintained this enthusiasm for a week. Then went through a phase of pleased acceptance. That gave way to disinterest, which ultimately degenerated into out-and-out disgust.

KIOZ friggin' sucks. As little as I like Korn or the Offspring, I find myself longing for a song by these bands to save me from a spare of uninspired "new" garbage (Saving Abel, Disturbed, Puddle of Mudd, Papa Roach, et cetera). It's a sad day when I actually think that a Slipknot or Linkin park song is the best song I've heard all day, or when I can at least concede that Disturbed has a good sense of rythm even if their melodies are trite and their lyrics are stupid and David Draiman still sounds like a grunting chimpanzee to me ("Ooooh wa-ah-ah-ah! Get up, come on get down with the sickness!"). Every so often, there'll be this weird inclusion of a "L.A. Woman" or "Castles Made of Sand" or "Paranoid," which just serves to highlight how rock has degraded in the present age, weak as men are now. Even the music from the mid 1990s has merit; I enjoy bands like Pearl Jam, Sublime, Alice in Chains, and Rage Against the Machine. But if you are trying to tell me, as KIOZ does, that these songs with lyrics like "I'm so addicted to / All the things you do / When you roll around with me / Inbetween [sic] the sheets" that play over boring acoustic riffs and then play over hyped-up crunchy power chords are real *music*, then dammit, I will call you out. How dare KIOZ play Jimi Hendrix in conjuction with such crap.

That, and the little tags they play between songs are offensively stupid and unfunny. "Sex is like bridge: if you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand (squishing noises)." What, are we all in sixth grade again (no offense to real pre-adolescents intended!)? "Now for a long block of uninterrupted--(cell phone ringing) Hey, dude, I'm going to have to call you back, I'm busy--a long block of uninterrupted rock." "Now for a big stankin' nugget of your music, bud." Does KIOZ think these puerile antics help to sell their station in any way? Ugh.

There are times when I grow disgusted with KIOZ and turn on the local classical station, XLNC 1, but I find it to be very much inferior to Orange County/LA's KUSC. The station seems to be completely automated during the day, such that there's no knowledgeable DJ giving an introduction and context for each piece as there is on KUSC. That, and XLNC 1's selection tends towards the kind of breezy, inoffensive classical music that made me hate classical music for so long and that I've only in the past year been able to overlook in order to find music that has power and depth and drama. I mean, "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" is cute and all, but can we get some Beethoven's Third or Fifth or some Spanish guitar or some Stravinsky or some Gustav Holst all up in here? No? Alright, fine.

O San Diego radio, how you have let me down. I had such high hopes. Our relationship started off so well.

Entreaty

2009-03-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

Want my blog to link back to yours? You can achieve instant Internet celebrity...or something. Let me know if so. We can originate an entire community of like-minded free spirits...a *social network*, if you will. Wouldn't that be something? And then I'll read your blog, too, and you'll read mine, and Barney the Dinosaur will sing a song to the effect that we are a happy family.

Necromancy

2009-03-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

So now I am forcing life back into this stillborn blog. Fitting, I suppose, in a way, given my interests. The forcing of life part is fitting, I mean. Not the blogging part. That's never jived with my interests, weirdly enough.

The gentle reader who has at least a passing familiarity with my person will know that my mind is surfeit with literary pretense. "Whence and wherefore then this dearth of a consistent Anima Umbrae web journal?" the gentle reader may well ask. "Blogging is living literature on the Internet, a forum whereby you could share your words with the faceless millions--or at least with an interested few, which at times is more audience than you have and mayhap more than you deserve. One might think that web logs would hold a profound allure for you." And if you were to ask this question and make these observations, gentle reader, you would be most astute! But the gentle reader is always astute, and needs not my assertions by way of affirmation.

The real crux of it is that I developed a severe hatred for blogs and bloggers and all things bloggish shortly after their debut. Back then, they were called online journals, and they were just that--personal journals. And not journals that chronicled cool things like people dying of the black death in London in the year 1665, but journals that described such noteworthy subjects as a kewlio new haircut or that boy in sixth period intro to bio who had the most soulful brown eyes or how Justine was such a biatch last week when she said that I said that she said that she was a biatch, and such other hyper-emotional adolescent garbage. I remember running across a number of journals of this caliber and thinking that the online journal, as a form, was doomed to failure, and that it would never ascend above the level of "journalism" that goes on in a fourteen year old girl's diary (the kinds bestuck with stickers and locked with tiny little heart-shaped locks that are a totally impotent barrier to any kind of serious effort to open the book, as if anybody had a desperate need to read the thoughts of the average fourteen year old girl).

And if it seems like I'm being misogynist or ageist here, let me be the first to say that I don't think I had very much to offer the world in the way of insightful or beautifully-crafted prose when I was fourteen, either. I'm glad I wasn't on the cutting edge of blogging, come to think of it; if I had been, I'd have to look back at that material now and be reckoned by it, and I expect that'd be a damn painful procedure.

Ah, Hell. I'm being too hard on adolescents. I'm just exaggerating for effect--creating a straw young adult. No real disrespect to adolescents intended. One of the coolest people I know is an adolescent. I have friends who are adolescents.

ANYWAY, what I mean to say is that I had considered blogging to be the realm of teenagers with ADD. And right wing extremists. I'm still amazed at the number of pro-military, pro-survivalist, pro-race war polemical blogs I stumble over when doing research on bulletproof vests or Biblical archaeology.

I didn't see the blog as being a proper venue for actual writing done by professional writers, as ironic as that might seem. Here was writing that could be distributed to an audience without the possibility of editorial rejection or the cost and humiliation of self-publishing or any of the hundred other things that keep me and writers like me from actually getting our work out to the people who might actually give a crap about it, and I wouldn't touch it. I think this is in part because of the disdain I've felt for those authors who sink to the level of vanity publication just to have something in print, and I viewed blogs in much the same way. I also, of course, turned a blind eye to my own anti-vanity in insisting that only work that had been validated by means of official and professional commercial publication was worthy of attention. I don't think that now. But more on these fantasies of official infallibility at some other time.

Then there is that issue of vanity. I would wonder that anyone would want to read anything that I had written. It's battle enough to get people interested my fiction, which is (in my estimation), the best of my work, and the best justification for my continued existence here on this planet. The person that produces the fiction, I would have thought, would necessarily be a lot less interesting than the product. I would think that people would care about me in the same proportion that they might care about the delivery person who brought a birthday present or a longed-for letter to the doorstep. You may love what is within the parcel, but that doesn't enkindle a love for the UPS dude in your heart. I didn't think *I* mattered, only that the work mattered. I didn't feel that the events of my life were interesting, and I didn't want to be like that solipsistic chit who felt that the whole world should compliment her on her kewlio new haircut. Again, these attitudes are changing, and we shall speak more on this at another time.

But I am taking these prejudices, whether outlashing or ingrown, and I am setting them aside. I am giving blogging another chance. I'm trying to keep my expectations in line. I'm not trying to be the high-handed morally superior voice howling in the wilderness, nor am I trying to convince the world of the worth of my thoughts and my words. I am not trying to disparage my own experience. I am trying to talk about things I find interesting--most of which will probably be related to art, and thinking. I am trying to be a better friend and be more communicative and read other people's blogs in turn. I am trying to write about the things around the writing, which ultimately serve to inform the writing itself. I am trying to get more actual writing done in whatever iteration rather than think about writing all the time without actually doing any writing.

So there. With this lopsided manifesto out of the way, the gentle reader can rest assured that the next post will be more concrete, topical, and accessible.

Which is to say that I intend to carp about how damn distracting it is to see so much cleavage at SDSU in a given day.

The House of Filth and Vermin

2008-09-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

Oh, Gentle Reader. Know you where I live? Have I yet harangued you with my story of my filthy lodgings?
Yes? No? Allow me to hammer home my point about how suck my current house is.
Last Thursday when I came home, it was to the strong odor of onion soup suffused throughout the living room and hallway. The next morning, the smell was somewhat abated but still detectable; I observed the crock pot with its stock of brown soup sitting on the stove, the surface of the soup now scummed over with whitish floccules of fat. The crock pot was still sitting there on the stove when I left to return to Orange County on Friday, and it was still sitting there on the stove when I returned to San Diego on Monday. It is still sitting there now, and I fear to even peer into it for fear of inhaling some bio-weapons-grade noxious mold. And believe me, gentle reader, when I say that this kind of health hazard is the norm in the kitchen, rather than the exception--the counter is ever covered with dishes flecked with bits of rotting food, and the whole kitchen has this thick, milky aroma hanging about it. Some days it is inhabited by a literal swarm of several dozen flies that will erupt into a black cloud if disturbed; other days I can see columns of several thousand ants marching up and down the walls. I am afraid to even go in there for the five minutes it would take to make a sandwich.
The ants in here approach intolerability. Even though I take great pains to leave no food lying around in *my* room, they march through as if they own the place. As if they were paying $625 dollars a month to live in this shithole of a house instead of me. Normally, I'm a live and let live kind of guy. I'm not the one to smash the spiders I see scuttling behind my bathroom sink or to take umbrage with the occasional moth I see clinging to the corner juncture of wall and ceiling. I don't want to kill bugs just because they're ugly; I think killing creatures only on the basis of aesthetics leads one into some very dangerous ethical territory. But I draw the line when animals start to threaten me. Ugly creepy crawliness, I can forgive. Biting, I cannot.
The ants gnaw on my flesh. They bite my toes and legs when I sleep, they bite the inside of my elbow and the backs of my arms when I am awake. These little Argentine ants don't pack much firepower, but their bites do sting for several seconds like the pricks of a pin. It's sharp enough to wake me from sleep, and painful enough to be a severe annoyance. I don't know why it is that they bite me--whether they detect some slight movement on my part and react as if threatened, or whether they detect that I am made out of meat and are putting in an honest if utterly ineffective effort to devour me alive. I don't imagine an ant's cognition is very complex, and it probably only has a few hard-wired responses to any stimulus--and I expect the ant's primary response to just about any situation is to chomp down on organic matter and return a great 50-ant's-weight chunk of it to the nest. In any case, their tiny mandibles clamp down on my skin and prompt a shout from me. The individual offender is quickly rubbed up into a crippled ball by my retaliating fingers; but the ants, being very community-minded, care nothing for sacrificing the life of an individual for the sake of the greater good. Sure enough, some other intrepid sister will try again presently to either slay this titanic beast that disrupts the well-laid scent trails with its oafish movements, or else to bring home a meal that will last the ant colony for years to come.
So the ants piss me off. This is to say nothing of the other unpleasant peculiarities peculiar to my current place of lodging. Like how, living in an unincorporated and rather economically depressed area of San Diego, I hear the scream of sherrif's sirens on a regular basis and hear the chop of helicopter blades as the sheriffs chase down some fugitive or other. Like how there are places not a mile distant where you can pass a man standing on the balcony of his apartment building and return three hours later to see him in the same spot--and assumingly you could repeat this process all day long and he'd just be standing there, causing one to wonder just what it is a person does for a living that involves standing in one specific place all day long. Like how the yards around here are filled with dead weeds and dead cars, and how stray dogs run up and down the street. Like how my roommates toss empty grocery bags on the dining room floor or leave crushed soda bottles lying in the driveway or put expended yogurt cups and greasy fast food wrappers right outside the door and feel utterly no compunction to pick any of this up, ever. Like how the last time I tried to say hello to one of my roommates he just stared at me as though I were speaking in some alien tongue.
I move out of this den of disease and filth on Saturday. The process of finding a new place to live was a stressful and time-consuming one, and couldn't have come at a worse time, seeing as how I was just starting graduate studies at a new school in a new city. But the details of my search could easily comprise another complete post, if not more. So, Gentle Reader, please understand that I will be a lot less crochety come Saturday, when I do not have insects chewing my skin off and I can draw breath in my house without fear of contracting cholera.

Dive, thoughts, down to my soul

2008-09-22T20:09:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I did this whole blogging thing. Stepping back into it is rather like...I want to say stepping into a minefield or testing the temperature of the bathwater with my big toe, but both of those metaphors now strike me as supremely stupid.
Let's start over, shall we?
So it has been a while since I last attempted anything in the vein of a blog. My last blog, hosted by Live Journal, was a pathetic thing. I'd post essays on literary criticism and receive nearly zero response. I had maybe one or two regular readers, and they only read my shit because I had known them IRL (which translates "in real life," for those of us who still cling to the usage actual words). I had a number of irregular readers who posted comments like "What a great resource! Keep it up!" in response to my essays on literary criticism, which made me think that people were cannibalizing my essays for school reports, which pissed me the fuck off.
I had a lot of trouble handling a blog. Emotionally speaking, that is. I'd sit by and stare at my inbox, waiting for the copious comments to whatever wisdom or witticism I had posted that morning to come rolling in. Those comments never came, and I started to feel cheated and unappreciated.
I had thought that blogging would be the ideal means by which I could connect with my fellow man (and, I was very much hoping, my fellow woman). A forum where people will only judge me by my words and my ideas? Where I, as a person who fancies himself to be intelligent and literate and eloquent will shine among so many lesser, duller narcissists who spew their thoughts out onto the Internet? Yes, sign me up! Oh God, your very Heaven is no more than this!
A blog, I realized, is a piss poor way to achieve validation. At least for somebody as socially clumsy as I am, who has trouble making and maintaining associations whether on the Internet or off of it. As I browsed around the blogs of others, I saw that most of them were only connecting with pre-existing friends. Some were part of communities based on shared interests, but mosts of these interests were not my interests--I had no desire to participate in the anna positive community or one of the many Naruto fanbases or to hitch my wagon to the Fallout Boy fanclub. A few rare individuals had such command of language or ideas that they actually attracted discriminating interest from the outside, but these were rare. I thought I could be one. I can't.
So why am I doing it again? Why am I even thinking about blogging? Why am I typing out my thoughts in the full expectation that no one will ever read them instead of working on my homework for this coming Thursday? Well, I'd say it was the tequila I drank this afternoon, but I reckon I must be mostly sober by now. I think it might be because the attraction of plotting out all my interests in my profile in the slim hope that somebody will think I am cool and mail me to compliment me. Or it might be because typing my thoughts out in journal form, if nothing else, can serve as an organizing principle for my otherwise disorganized mind. Or it might be because I really hope that people will read what I write and connect with it and so we shall create this vast network of sympathetic and sensitive souls across the planet, and none of us shall ever feel alone ever again.
Yeah, right. Well, I don't know why. I'm willing to attribute this desire to demoniac possession. Seems as good an answer as any. In any case, here you go, Intarwebs. My very first new blog post. Anima Umbrae is back. And he certainly has a lot of other things he could/should be doing, instead...like working on his campaign website on Obsidian Portal, or reading up on pedagogical methodology in the writing classroom. Or sleeping.
Sleep. Yeah. How about that. Well, good night, Intarwebs. Sleep tight. Don't let the programing bugs byte.
Ohhhh. That was some witty shit right there.