Since I was thirteen. My rebellion against my parents' religious inclinations was in full swing, and I fought and kicked my way into church. The one saving grace was the free coffee every morning. The fellowship hall served water, juice, coffee, and cookies before Sunday school. I'd fill up a little Styrofoam cup, maybe add some water from the fountain to cool it down a little bit, and drink it during the interminable indoctrinations of Isaiah.
Caffeine had little effect on me. It wasn't about the buzz. It was about the taste and personality of the drink. It felt good to drink it, in a way that was different from simple jitters.
I started high school right around then. Recognizing my difficulty with mornings, my mother always had a mug of coffee ready for me right out of the shower. It took the edge off and got me ready for another day in the public school system.
In college, it was my filthy-but-sexy secret habit; akin, perhaps, to masturbating to pornography in which one of the participants slowly strangles the other. Nobody knew. I drank Pepsi in the presence of others, always. But on those early mornings that were the product of late nights, the precise second the cafeteria opened, I'd be waiting with a book, eager to get my Tater Tots, mayonnaise, and coffee. I'd sit down by the enormous bank of windows on the south face, settle into one of the comfortable chairs there, and read and drink and eat and look at the scenery. Winter, especially, seemed to accentuate the taste; a steaming cup in front of a sea of frozen silver under a sapphire sky.
When I went to work after graduation, I came in a half-hour early every day to get the communal coffee pot prepared, and wound up in a territorial war with a coworker, a long-time employee who prided herself on her ability to spoon grounds into a filter and pour water into a receptacle and flick a switch. My defeat came in a flurry of complaints about the strength of my creation. Hers was a Pyrrhic victory, however; I drank so much so fast that all subsequent pots for the day were of my own special recipe. Six or seven mugfuls and I was set.
The primary defining characteristics of the first six months after I moved back in with my parents were extended trips into the outdoors in order to hide my cigarette habit and an intimate acquaintance with the daily newspaper cultivated over my requisite coffee. After my addiction to tobacco was outed by an inconvenient appendectomy, both were combined in a delectable morning routine with a mug of coffee, a newspaper or book, my pack of cigarettes, and the pool deck table. Dewy sun filtering through a haze of tobacco smoke and coffee steam.
Even the word "coffee" carries weight for me; the very syllables suggest soft black depths with a gleam.
When I moved back out again, the first thing my parents bought for the housewarming was a coffeemaker. It's been my companion through good times and bad; bleary mornings and sleepless nights. My friend and sometimes lover.
It has now found itself in a predicament; our love has come under attack. A new competitor has emerged in the unlikeliest of places: Starbucks.
Starbucks has been my black-market dealer of fragrant, sugary confections for a while. There's nothing like a Frappuccino for a treat. Unfortunately, the cost and calorie count prevented it from being any more than that: a cute waitress at your local diner who exchanges evocatively dissonant glances far from the eyes of your wife.
Now, though, there's a new woman in town. I feel pleasured upon her face, the complex crenellations of her body. Mm--oh! Many a sweaty night in bed, wondering, dreaming--
I'd flirted briefly with her before, but always found her too sweet. Now, though, there have been a couple of skulking slobbery kisses stolen beneath the disapproving shelves. Today, today, our forbearance fell and our fever finally had its fullest, fairest flower.
I was going somewhere with this. Just a moment to calm down, and--
Yes. I've mentioned it before. The Starbucks Doubleshot on Ice™*. Venti. Three dollars, twenty-five cents, and two-percent combined with five shots of espresso in an obscenely large plastic cup spells moon.
It didn't quite make an impression on me, though, until this morning. Something about it now seemed deeper and richer, although I couldn't perceive any actual differences from my previous experiences. No flavoring syrup was added, and I enjoyed the bitter taste rolling around on my tongue. It wasn't until I walked into my office and felt amazing that I realized a Midsummer Miracle had occurred. My mind felt sharper and clearer than even my Bravia™. My skin crawled with electricity, my muscles alive with eager twitches. My emotions peeled back, leaving a bulbous upwelling of euphoria sheened with the scum of duty. I had, you see, to work.
I worked. So much and so well my coworkers had to act. Far be it from me to fully enumerate the tactics employed; it was a moot point, though, since I was asleep by 11.
Ah, well. I frequently avoid visiting Starbucks more than twice in one week, but I think I'll wind up taking a detour on the way to work tomorrow morning (easy enough; it's on the same road as my apartment and my job; I love urban living). That feeling is just too incredible to skip. I'm in the honeymoon phase, I think.
I hope my wife doesn't find out. Spider innards don't go well with the taste of coffee.
* You may notice that the trademark has relocated from the last time I mentioned this drink. This is because the "on Ice" clause has now managed to integrate itself into my brand-consciousness via the mind-altering experience detailed above. More on brand-consciousness in a future post.
Inspired by One Post Wonder, I began to think about blogs in general.
One Post hunts down and posts the substance of blogs that were well-begun but all too soon done. One brief post (or several test posts in the same day, generally consisting of nonsensical phrases or self-deprecation (I r teh retard, etc.)), and their owners fall silent forevermore. Looking through those things, one notices a particular trend: those people frequently start a blog in order to give vent to their thoughts and feelings. Once those are out onto the Internet, the posters are (seemingly) never heard from again.
There's a particularly irritating theory currently circulating: the lack of commitment. Apparently maintaining a consistent blogging presence requires so much of the user that they shrug it off. Eh. Why do all that writin'?
The plausible stuff first.
Fame: Trenchant soccer moms get book deals. Gadget freaks get paid to write about gadgets. Living telenovela ingenues have hundreds of thousands of hits hanging on their latest sexual escapades. As soon as one realizes one is highly unlikely to become water-cooler fodder for Bangladeshi copyeditors because of what Todd said last week, *poof* goes the interest. Fair enough.
Passive aggression: Even I've been guilty of this one. This mostly consists of embedding near-subliminal messages in one's posts. "I sure wish I had some real friends who'd invite me when they go out to eat." "Surely there is such a thing as a roommate who doesn't eke oily secretions from inappropriate orifices." It's fun! Ultimately unfulfilling though; either the criticism is so veiled as to be totally unnoticeable, so misphrased as to be completely inapplicable, or so obvious that it leads to some unpleasantry. Either way, the blog's served its purpose.
Shitty attention span: You there! Millennial! Come over here; look at this baby gleam!
Plausibility runs rampant in those individual factors behind blogging, but the theory of commitment is nevertheless BS; it really doesn't take much.
Maybe I'm different. You may notice, by the way, that this post is about to shift into "Me" gear.
I've blogged more or less continuously since January of 2003 without a break longer than three weeks. I started with LiveJournal and have pretty much stuck with it the entire way; it wasn't until early last year that I began seeing Blogger on the side. This is less to establish any kind of "blogger cred" (a terrible, terrible phrase if I've ever coined one) than to at least give some idea of the gamut I've run in my relationship with blogging.
Dear Diary...: Everyone starts here: plebeian accounts of one's day and shout-outs to people encountered in the progression thereof. The neophyte blogger pretends they're addressing the quintessential audience: the silence. This is belied by the medium in use here; the blogger is expecting to be read. Period.
Chat room/IM surrogate: The shout-outs progress into attempts at conversations with other bloggers on the friends list which are inevitably disappointed by a failure on the part of those friends to mention the blogger's name on their blogs in response.
Comment-whoring: This is frequently characterized by brief posts consisting of the kind of questions invented while stoned or in deep trances of illusory depth, followed by a one-word command: "Discuss." There are also frequently pleas/threats/hostage situations for comments and/or outrageous statements admitting something inappropriate or wild accusations in order to stir the pot a little bit.
Phoning it in: Endless surveys, questionnaires, and quizzes. Frequently, several of each type are combined in each post, and save the blogger from the drudgery of originality. Unfortunately, this is also a sign of increasing disinterest.
Rut-skipping: In spite of the potentially exciting connotations of that phrase, the meaning is considerably more prosaic: time to switch to a new blog. For some reason, it seems that the change to a new name and new design also engenders the sense of a new beginning. This may be attributed to a decoupling from one's history, but is a short-term fix for a long-term problem: boredom with oneself. This leads to drastic measures...
Starting shit: The claws go "snickt." This is where the passive aggression begins to rear its ugly head; unless, of course, one is more inclined toward the aggression part, in which case one sees a lot of lists of "Things you want to say to people on your friends list but never would otherwise," which invariably get somewhere between 20 to 400 comments, depending on how widely-read one is.
Self-absorption: Very, very few blogs reach this point. It's when one stops worrying about the comment count and starts simply chronicling one's life and thoughts at a level deeper than Stage 1. It isn't a simple recitation of the day's events (or lack thereof and how bored one is as a result); it displays an ability to find underlying themes affecting one's life and meditate upon them and their potential repercussions. Individuals in Stage 7 may spend several dozen column-inches on a singular encounter, perhaps, or a small event that carries significant import (such as one's child using the big-(insert sex here) potty). Why? Because it's what matters to the blogger.
Friendship: This is the most rarefied stage of all. The relationship here is not blogger-reader or blogger-self. It's blogger-blog. The shackles of self-consciousness are abandoned--names may not be changed to protect the guilty--and the blog instead becomes both one's repository and one's best critic. The eyes of others simply cease to matter, and the blog becomes an extension of one's mind. Thoughts are ordered, ideas are enfleshed, and the blogger turns inward. Introspection, sharpening, and self-examination are frequently to be found. In addition, the blog may often break out in overly-analytical epistles about very little of significance.
The truth is, after having progressed through these stages (in order at first, then with multiple retrograde leaps), I think the biggest obstacle facing the consummation of the blogger-blog relationship is the psychological pressure exerted by the empty text box.
The question, then, is not: Can I commit to my blog? It is: Will I commit my thoughts to my blog? One frequently gains the sense that what one chooses to commit (there goes that word again) to what may very well be a permanent record of one's inner space carries greater import than it ought to. In other words, you feel like you have to burp rubies and shit diamonds; otherwise, if they come across your personal anthology in a dusty corner of what was once the Internet, your descendants will think you were an imbecilic pop-culture freak with absolutely nothing interesting to say.
There is virtually nothing anyone can do to prevent this, short of ripping one's Ethernet jack out of the wall, having a computer barbecue, and excavating the nearest rattlesnake nest into a nice, comfy home. Either one's antegenitors' similarities will result in massive ridicule for one's final centuries of life, or they will be so different that one's blog may be considered a fascinating historical artifact, much like the diaries, journals, sketchbooks, and wartime letters of old. Imagine storing information in electrons, the brutes.
Another issue with commitment: Sometimes people just don't care all that much about putting their thoughts down. They have lives, y'all. And Facebooks.
In the end, all one can say is "Fuck it," and go to bed because they have work tomorrow, dammit.
First: It's been a while, feels like. Hi. Second: I've decided to drop my unhelpful subject-line convention of the day of the week. Screw it, you know? Strikes me as a pointless and irritating affectation. I may be the first two, but I strive to avoid the third.
Third: The new favorite.
Lately, I've been feeling angry and frustrated. Also brain-dead. Really, all three have a tendency to go hand-in-hand. After today, I realized that there's an always-reliable cure for that, which always seems to slip my mind: the bookstore.
Unfortunately, gas prices being what they are, and the local independent superbookstore being what it is (minus comfy chairs and cafe--I have been ruined utterly by prefab crossover deals), my options were pretty limited. The closest Barnes & Noble that I have a demonstrable affection for is in another city, a hellish thirty-minute drive away via average traffic flow.
Fortunately, the local state university has a franchise just on the southern edge of downtown. The Florida state university system has a sweetheart deal with Barnes & Noble, leading to scaled-down incarnations on every state university campus, including satellite grounds. In this particular case, the Barnes & Noble had been instantiated in the bottom level of a parking garage intended for students and employees of the school. For this reason alone, I've been leery of paying a visit for the past six months (already. Jesus.).
Driving into the parking garage, I found myself unsure of where to park. I still have a valid parking permit, since I graduated less than two months ago and the pass expires at the end of August. Who knew? The local franchise uses a totally different permit system, so it was basically illegal for a student of the parent to park in the garage of the child. Ridiculous.
But surely they have a row for nonaffiliated bookstore customers! I wound up circling all six levels of the garage, and wound up here (click to enlarge; all photos resized and/or cropped):
The top level of the parking garage, open to the clouds and void of supervision. Several thousand square feet of gleaming concrete with sweeping views of bay and city, a gentle breeze off the water, and nothing but me. I've always had a love of high places; a cynic I once knew chalked it up to a latent God complex. The view below, diminished by distance, guided along the electronic pathways of asphalt, impervious to the enormity of life itself. In spite of that deep-seated mistrust of my own motives, I felt thrilled: here was a little-known corner of my city, a place where almost nobody went, a place where I could feel alone without feeling lonely.
I got out of my truck and decided to walk the perimeter once. Enough to drink in the space. Halfway around the concrete plain, I came across a prickly reminder of higher education.
If you can't read it: if you don't believe in freedom of expression for the people we despise - you don't believe in it at all.
This told me I was free to pace. If someone had time enough to carve the above 20-word manifesto into the garage's balustrade, I had time enough to enjoy my isolation. A curve within the adjacent corner and another fifty feet along, a long strip of vinyl covered the rim. Leaning over the edge, I saw that it advertised the university. Just beyond, however, was this:
A lovely sight, burnished with irony. This parking garage, I knew, was new. This lone little strip of marsh infesting, it seemed, the highly-controlled grass growing around a drainage ditch only served to remind me of the transience of this place, this hundred-ton monstrosity faced with nicely-pointed bricks to blend in with the neighborhood. A stubborn splinter of The Environment (you know--that thing we must all be conscious of while living in it) encased in sapient artificiality.
Close to where I had parked, I saw something that urged me to bring the cell phone out again.
This view pushes all the right buttons. An exquisitely-manicured lawn splashing against an Old-World cathedral in an explosion of foliage seemingly dammed inside the unnaturally graceful curve of an interstate tributary, a demarcation between the uplands of the lovely and the lowlands of the foul. The entire time, I kept thinking about The Eagle by Tennyson: close to the sun in lonely lands/ringed with the azure world, he stands...
I do think I'll return some night to watch the city lights for a while, if the garage is open then and I can feel assured there won't be college students having a private drinking/transient-murdering party up there.
Anyway, after my little solo jaunt on top of the world, I spiraled back down to the lowest level and discovered a previously-unseen alcove specifically for retail customers--where it was explicitly stated as being "ILLEGAL" for USF students to park. Well, dammit. The tag goes hidden under the newspaper on my passenger seat. A venti Starbucks Doubleshot™ on ice later, I was curled up on a urine-yellow foam-stuffed chair with William Gibson's Spook Country and Chuck Palahniuk's Rant. The bookstore itself had scant floorspace in comparison to the full-scale copies I was used to, but this was compensated with a high ceiling. Another greater sense of space. The large halogen lights hanging off the steel rafters reminded me of a high-school gymnasium, but the harsh glow was dampened by the black-painted ceiling.
Two chapters into Spook, I decided I was going to make a rare incursion into my debit account with it, and wound up spending the next four hours reading Rant instead. Some books I know within the first few pages are worth buying; others trigger a similar sense, but twisted just enough that it begs an in-store reading.
Both authors' styles (Disclosure: I hadn't read either author before today. Super-shocking, yes, but true. Never read Gibson or Palahniuk) are interestingly discrete. They both show a pleasurable facility with words, but employ that skill differently. Palahniuk goes for surprise and humor, showing a distinct tendency towards scatological description and sexually-charged situations that nevertheless betray an unusual tenderness for the human condition and its myriad imperfections. His words jab, poke, slice, revel in the blood and pity its flow. The wry cynicism permeating the pages more than explain its appeal to the type of personality that carves bourgeois epigrams into parking-garage railings where nothing sees it but the sky.
Gibson, though, is elegant, highly observational. He doesn't go by the characters, as Palahniuk does in Rant by using the characters' personal statements to drive the story. Gibson paints the scene, sets his characters down in them, then coolly moves them around, watching their psychologies oscillate. His words resonate, stroke softly something in the back of the brain, slide into the mind with fine expertise.
Of course, my assessment of Gibson's work is based on the three chapters I've read thus far--also typical of my predilection for hair-trigger judgment. Once I get around to possibly finishing it, you may hear of it again.
In the meantime, I feel oddly secure now. There's a wonderful Barnes & Noble less than two miles away, down one road and back up another. There's a cafe inside it and a glorious emptiness six floors above it.
With every week that goes by, I think to myself more and more, "I could live here."
Undergrad Senior Seminar essay on Star Trek and the end of history
“Reflecting from the start the political ideology of the United States, the original television episodes of Star Trek are fundamentally democratic in spirit. The explicit mission of the Enterprise—“to seek out new life and civilizations” appears to capture the spirit of democratic diversity and what is now called multiculturalism. But I would like to reformulate the mission of the Enterprise—“to seek out new civilizations and destroy them” if they contradict the principles of liberal democracy.” Discuss.
The Lean, Mean, Civilization-Eating Democratic Machine
Cantor’s statement in Gilligan Unbound (p. 41) makes an interesting point: that the advent of liberal democracy is tantamount to the destruction of a prior civilization that existed on different principles. This is very heavily tied into Fukuyama’s phrase “the end of history.” While most, as Cantor says, might take the word “end” to mean “terminus,” Fukuyama—and those after him—speak of the “end” as a “goal” (p. 37). Thus, the goal of history is to bring about self-determination for all men; the freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness as one sees fit. This might indeed bring about the end—termination—of history as known by those who exist in a civilization recently infected by the notion of democracy, simply because that civilization is over as far as basic principles of governance and human rights are concerned. This is reflected in Star Trek as Captain James Kirk and his crew traverse the galaxy at warp speed, bringing freedom and justice to alien races toiling under the yoke of authoritarian dictators and theocratic despots. Civilizations end—or are transformed—as his crew unseat gods and reveal that which was once divine as mere trickery.
Thus, the true question may be: does the end justify the means? Is the propagation of liberal democracy worldwide—and galaxy-wide—sufficient justification for the destruction of civilizations that once ran on the principle of the superiority of the few? This is not a question that Cantor seems to be capable of answering—or even asking—outright. He, however, does discuss the paradox at the heart of liberal democracy: a society based on tolerance cannot tolerate intolerance (p. 40). Therefore, systems of government that depend on the oppression of the weak or minority groups, or the exploitation of unwitting people to contribute to power, are intolerable to a society that proclaims its tolerance of all people and ideas. This leads to repeated violation of the Prime Directive on Captain Kirk’s part; although the Directive clearly stipulates noninterference in the affairs of other planets (much like the United States’ foreign policy once was), Kirk actively interferes in order to promote greater personal freedom and less authoritarianism (p. 42).
This begs the question of what pre-democratic regimes would fall under the category of “intolerable” for democratic governments. Cantor clarifies this: there are two main forms of government that seem to be anathema to democracy. The first is aristocracy, a system that assumes that some people are “born to rule others. Simply by virtue of their birth, they are entitled to govern, as if something in their blood makes them superior by nature to other human beings” (p. 39). In contrast, theocracy, the second form of intolerable government, assumes that “by virtue of some kind of direct line to God, some people have a divine right to rule” (p. 40). This is a noxious idea to democratic partisans because it assumes that the few are superior to the many because of their relationship to God, and thus have the right to determine how the many may live their lives. For the purposes of this paper, when both are referred to at the same time, the word “oligarchy” will be used: the rule of the many by the few.
This is illustrated both in Star Trek and real life. Cantor describes an episode named “Plato’s Stepchildren” in which the Enterprise encounters a race that visited Earth thousands of years ago, while Plato was still alive (p. 42-43). Impressed by the principles Plato espoused, those travelers return to their home planet to establish their version of Plato’s Republic, named Platonius, maintained by psychokinetic powers that they link to intellectual ability and use to oppress those who are less gifted. The philosopher-king of Platonius boasts that this is a truly democratic system: those who wish to succeed, may—indeed, if one wishes to become king, he or she may do so, provided he or she demonstrates superior mental prowess. It is that last corollary that Cantor points out as proof of the true lack of democracy; it is, after all, only another form of aristocracy or theocracy, the idea that one is destined to rule because of some form of superiority, whether by birth or divine touch (p. 43). This is echoed in modern times by the existence of “certain Islamic nations,” which are among the last vestiges of true oligarchy, such as Iran, which continues to be ruled over by Ayatollah Khamenei as Supreme Leader and administrator of the country’s policies (p.40). That Kirk, in the end, ingests the element in the soil that is truly responsible for the Platonians’ abilities and thus overthrows the philosopher-king shows that in order to truly destroy previous modes of thinking is to countermand its most fundamental tenets. The idea of a genetic elite is completely rebuffed by Kirk’s deeds, and an equalization of status occurs, one of the first steps toward democratization.
“Who Mourns for Adonais?” is another excellent example of this removal of superiority. When the Enterprise crew encounters the being known to ancient Greece as the god Apollo, the result is the destruction of Apollo’s power and the death of the god himself. Indeed, this seems to dovetail neatly with the idea of equality inherent in democracy—without a “bag of tricks” with which to gain tenuous power over credulous rustics, Apollo becomes simply a man (of sorts), and mortal: he can be stripped of his power and killed (p. 44). This equalization of power lends itself to the propagation of freedom as an alternative to the reclamation of worshippers as servants or the mentally-challenged (in parapsychic terms) as slaves, and forces an elevation of those inferiors to equal status.
The notion of the destruction of civilizations through democratic principles doesn’t simply apply to systems of government, however—it also applies to religious systems. The idea of self-determination naturally gives rise to freedom of religion, which presents problems to those who would govern through the church or lead a nation by their personal example. As such, democracy is necessarily secular, independent of religion but recognizing it as a valid system of belief. Star Trek’s “The Apple” (p. 43) is an excellent example of this effect on religious systems. A race of people live in what seems to be the Garden of Eden—a rich, untouched paradise. This, however, is accompanied by compulsory worship of a god named Vaal. All obvious comparisons to Baal aside, Kirk finds this distasteful, and in unabashed violation of the Prime Directive, immediately goes about destroying the god and bringing freedom to the people (p. 43-44). What is particularly intriguing about this episode is near the end, when Kirk is called on his failure to obey the Prime Directive. His response is that they have “put those people back on a normal course of social evolution” (p. 44). The assumption that the introduction of personal freedom by an alien race of explorers is tantamount to a “natural” progression toward democracy would seem to echo Fukuyama’s idea of the end of history, in spite of the irony inherent in this event. That the system of worshipping Vaal has been completely deconstructed and replaced also seems to fit Cantor’s restatement of the Prime Directive.
Thus, Cantor’s attempt to refigure the Prime Directive as a mandate to destroy new civilizations is very valid and has a strong basis in history. With the introduction of new democratic ideals, the old order (political and religious alike) is destabilized and eventually destroyed and washed away. The question of the justification of the means to an end seems, in Cantor’s mind, to be amply addressed in the study of history and of the consequences of Captain Kirk’s actions: the removal of a system based on oppression and the division of humanity into “superior” and “inferior” is well worth the adjustment and pain a race may go through in the process of reaching the end of its own history.
I woke up this morning after a fitful night's sleep; I spent it waking up every couple of hours after dreaming about Cylons, Raptors, and the cast of "Battlestar Galactica". Silly, isn't it? It's the consequence of absorption.
I shrugged it all off this morning as I went through my daily paces. It's pretty much typical--it keeps going around and around in your head and you spend every waking moment watching this stuff happen and you start living through the characters and placing yourself into that world. It's the hallmark of a very, very good show. Nothing wrong with any of it.
Still, though. Things don't seem to be quite right. I'm in an ugly mood, which isn't that bad; when I sink into a funk, I get much quieter, so the coworkers aren't bothered. I doubt any of them have even noticed. In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out what it is that niggles.
Then it comes to me: writer's block. Or something similar. For the last few days, I've been starting blog post after blog post, writing about virtually everything I can think of, and none of it really seems to be good enough to commit to server space. I don't mean "good enough to be read by everyone else"; I place no value on that metric. I mean "good enough for me to feel satisfied." And none of it has been.
I wanted to write about storms. It just seemed like the same words over and over again. "Fury, magnificence, majesty, glory, rage." There's a point at which you start sounding a little loony, writing short-story-length soliloquies on cloud, wind and rain.
I wanted to write about "Battlestar". It was mostly just getting my thoughts out on the semiotics of the show and the application of myth-based archetypes to plot advancement. Then I figured that there've already been a few million blog posts on just that very subject. Probably been done to death.
I wanted to write about God. But where do I start? How do I explain why I think the Bible is an ancient exercise in synecdoche? That the three major monotheistic religions seem to be exploiting the human tendency to anthropomorphize events and entities beyond mortal understanding? Or that it wasn't until I finally abandoned Christianity that I began to develop a deeper understanding of how to live with the greater truth of things without needing to immediately understand its nature?
I wanted to write about the election. About Barack Obama and the perverse sense of solidarity I feel with him as an ex-smoker who has to cop to picking up the habit again from time to time and the sense of distance I feel from his ideas. About Hillary and how grateful I am to see her out of the race. About McCain and the creeping horror I feel at the thought of him in the White House. About the term "White House" and its near-mythic connotations, like the center of ultimate power for a far-off land in a fantasy novel.
I chose to dump all of that on my LiveJournal because I don't care about how lousy my work is there. The few who still read it are people I've known for many years, and they're used to lousy stuff, and so am I. It's like an old, comfortable sweater you slip on when you clean the house. You don't care what happens to it because you don't wear it out in public, and you're not worried about your family seeing you in it because you've worn it for years.
Last night, I tried to draw something, anything, and wound up with a senseless doodle that attempted to capture the grandeur I felt about the future. It looks childish and doesn't come anywhere close to what I felt, and I realized it was sort of a Monet: looks decent from a distance, but up close it looks like a blotchy mess (to borrow a classic line from "Clueless").
I thought about writing a short story, but realized that they tend to be thinly-veiled reinterpretations of commercial properties or exercises in speculation about my life or the imprisonment of my daydreams in static text, and that I probably wouldn't even read them myself if I found them at a bookstore.
The practical upshot of all this is that I feel creatively constipated. The spirit is willing, after all. I have so many things I want to get out, but when I look at the product, I feel as though there's nothing there of any real value; you strain with all your might to squeeze something out of your anus, and at some point, you feel as though you've succeeded. When you stand and zip up your pants, though, and turn around for the inevitable examination of the bowl's contents, you find that it's empty, and you realize that you've risked cerebral hemorrhage for nothing.
There's a very real sense that my ability to gain a glimpse of some larger system at work behind the various aspects of life has gone on the blink. The motions are being passed through without much consideration or examination, just random events that don't demand any scrutiny, partly because I don't have the energy for it and partly because I can't convince myself that it's worth the effort.
To put it baldly: I'm depressed. Not in a clinical sense. It's just the blues. If I had a harmonica, I'd probably be squawking away. If I had bagpipes, I'd learn the funeral march. If I had a guitar, I'd probably bring it crashing down on various pieces of furniture. If I had drums, I'd slap those skins until they bruised.
My dog didn't die, no car accidents have occurred in recent memory, cancer hasn't struck, no homes have been foreclosed upon, my pickup truck hasn't bottomed out, there hasn't been much rain lately, and my moonshine still hasn't exploded. No reason for a country song.
Still. My bones swell pregnantly with silence, an unnameable loss. A line from "Titus Andronicus" runs through my head every so often: with our sighs, we'll breathe the welkin dim/and stain the sun with fog...
I took the garbage out around six o'clock. The air was hot, dry, and still. I remembered the morning weather report; the weatherman (that blonde, rangy fellow with the fauxhawk and expensive suit) complained that a hot mass of high-pressure air off the Rockies was interfering with our local system's ability to "pop off" a few good afternoon storms. Still, he predicted rather optimistically that we might see some rain by evening.
My sense of timing continues its unabated record. I looked out of a kitchen window around 7:30 because the heat was radiating through it like an overheated car, and I rather thought we were due for a pisser. I turned away, heard a rumbling, turned back, and it looked like it was raining, but everything was dry. Then I realized it was actually the air being distorted by waves of heat, sort of like a road mirage, opened all the windows not located near books or electronics, sat down at my dining table, rested my head on the sill and waited.
Not thirty seconds later, the storm hit, complete with palm trees lying down, various debris swirling about, total whiteout of the lake not a hundred feet away, continuous thunder and lightning. It was beautiful; full-on meteorologic glory. I whipped out the cell phone so I could blog about it from there, but it was over before I'd finished tapping out the second paragraph. So it goes; I am nevertheless pleased that I got to watch it.
I don't get a whole lot of opportunities these days to just sit and watch a storm do its thing. I am, at this point, utterly grateful that I lucked into this apartment; trees and lakes and lots of stuff waving about. It makes the experience much more visceral when you can see how the local environs are impacted by a storm absent simple rainfall and thunder.
Weather has always been one of my greatest loves. The sky is amazing, each and every day, and I love our clouds. I get the feeling one would be hard-pressed to find vistas of such grandeur on any other planet, but then I might be just a bit more geocentric than the Pope.
Okay, I made myself laugh with that one. Galileo disapproves, I'm sure. Thank God he's in Heaven (per Papal writ as of a few years ago) and therefore probably utterly apathetic.
It's funny; I just realized for the very first time (ridiculous, really) that Battlestar: Galactica is a pretty awesome example of a post-Singularity civilization.
The Cylons I find particularly interesting. They do a pretty good job of approximating humanity, up to and including the deterministically sanctimonious methods of systematic oppression in the name of da Lord. One does have to wonder, however, why the apparent apotheosis of Cylonhood is a perfect replication of humanity. Wasn't the whole point of developing AI and advanced computing technologies (such as those that comprise Cylon flesh) the merger of human and artificial? There shouldn't be such a stark divide between the Cylons and the humans.
On the other hand, of course, the humans made the quintessential mistake of enacting absolutist doctrine sheathed in self-delusion about the greater good, and as claims the parent, so shall the child. Ridiculous.
Unfortunately, I have nothing particularly insightful or entertaining to share today. While this is essentially similar to every other day, it is notable for having been marked by a post nonetheless. Well, there's the whole Democrat-nominee issue. At this point, I feel as though now that the big O's gotten the nomination, the hard part's about to begin. This is mostly because I now have to decide who to support in the general election.
Calm down. I know. I've been a rabid Obamaniac since January; suddenly, a change of heart? Who am I, John Kerry (with the flip-flopping and all, I really hope you get it because 2004 wasn't that long ago)? The sad truth is, I supported Obama by default. I just did not want that slimy bitch anywhere near the White House.
Now the question becomes: do I want that slimy bastard near the White House? I sure as Christ don't want that ex-POW fucker in there. I'm still seething over that idiotic "America was founded as a Christian country" comment he made last year. To say nothing of the fact that he's liable to die in office, he's a panderer, he's become more happy about linking his ideas to the Current Occupant as the year wears on, and he's just a disgusting rich old white male whose idea of humor probably involves vaudeville.
On the other hand, there's Obama, who's probably one of the smuggest upstarts I've ever seen. The Alice Palmer situation, for example, from back when he first ran for the state legislature, speaks of a surprisingly ambitious young fellow who screwed over the woman who gave his political career its start. The only mitigating factor is that she fucked him in the ass first. Then there's the shit he spouts against free trade (because it costs American jobs; HA!) and the fact that he supported the Secure Fence Act, which has to be one of the most enormously satire-friendly federal boondoggles I've ever heard of. The mitigation there is found in the other provisions of the Act relating to opening up immigration policies a little bit. The fact that other laws have been passed to counteract this, however, is problematic.
Then again, the fact that he taught constitutional law for a few years kind of makes me feel better--at least, it would if I knew more about his personal attitude towards the Constitution. An intimate understanding of the document can lead to either effective preservation of its basic tenets or effective manipulation of its meaning for one's own ends. If he veered more toward the former, I wouldn't even mind that much if he turned out to be a revisionist.
I'm just a-noodling my options for November. It's surprising how much I wound up saying. I sure must be good at the yap-yap, even if it winds up inconclusive in the end.
Lately, I've been feeling nostalgic for the mid-'90s.
Obviously, it isn't too surprising. I think people actually miss that decade, when we were still looking upward at the rest of the curve after the end of the Cold War and the Internet and cell phones were just burgeoning. There were no personal data devices, TVs were deeper than they were wide, the 24-hour news cycle was still only 23 hours long, and...
Wait. Where was I going with this?
Oh yeah. Shit seemed limitless, you know? We thought we'd taken care of our personal issues and were comfortable enough to laugh at them. Friends, Seinfeld, Clueless. Oh, those silly bitches with their baggy clothes and poorly-styled hair that looked as if it were trapped between the teased '80s and sleek double-naughts, when microscopic, repetitive prints coupled with patchy vests were seen as über-fashionable and neuroticism birthed stellar pharmaceutical advancements like strange and delicious ferns squeezed out of the earth. New York wasn't three buildings lighter, but the government was lighter by about 60,000 intelligence analysts, surveillance experts, and researchers. Constant, unending war seemed ridiculous and far-off, a silly thought for a silly nation, not for our newborn colossus.
I remember when, the other day, I ran across a vast library of old PDFs from the earlier part of just this decade, consisting of the local newspaper's front pages; nearly four years' worth. Even that looked old, primitive, the victim of a laughably unattractive aesthetic. Those were the early years of George W. Bush's presidency, when Iraq still had an approval rating, when high-definition television and Web 2.0 were still in business plans.
Now we're already halfway through 2008. The last year of the decade is only a year and a half away. I'm surrounded by gizmos and spend a good 90% of my time awake looking at a screen. My cell phone has a camera, but it can't do video--yet. A month from now, a signal will be sent over three thousand miles from T-Mobile's headquarters that will sink into my pocket and awaken something within. I will be able to watch videos of my niece walking for the first time, copies of my favorite TV shows and movies, and send myself to my best friend in Toronto from this amazing little gadget in my hand.
The constant war is, of course, still far-off. We throw away an amazing amount of money every day, spend human capital like tomorrow will never arrive, have forced millions out of home and hearth, but life in the homeland continues like very little has changed. The only signs are higher gas prices, lower home prices, fewer jobs, and more homeless. The future continues to display its expertise at appearing both bright and bleak at the same time.
I dream every day of opening my hand and watching a city bloom like a flower, of being surrounded by tiny helpers as a new world rises around me as softly as yeasty bread. I can see the towers gleaming in the sun, the utility fog keeping the metabolic promenades clean and moist, the augmented children playing games with colored magnetic fields that arc and sparkle between the buildings.
Although, of course, there's always the possibility of wrack and ruin. Or worse--stagnation. I can't imagine a greater horror than a future that's little changed from today.
