Steven Schlozman

[But] zombies just don’t care. Can you think of a better metaphor for waiting on hold to talk to your health insurance representative, or sitting in an airport staring at the bars on your computer in the hopes that they’ll signal a functional internet, or for the deadened way you feel staring into the tired, blank eyes of the clerk at The Registry of Motor Vehicles as you shamble forward and are given a number that represents you in the most impersonal of ways for the next two or three hours that you are trapped under the auspices of fluorescent lights and low ceilings.

Wouldn’t it be strangely better if all these battles were in fact personal? What if everyone got on the phone with their health insurance representative and got exactly what they needed except you? What if no one but you got stuck in traffic? At least then you would have a better defined gripe. At least then you could take uniquely personal action.

A Bit of Religious Anxiety

A bit is necessary. Only, though, if its source is the purest spiritual sort. Too often, though, anxiety of this kind is optional, or, in most cases in my life, not present in any shape or form. Religion is dead among my peers and in my culture. It is a sort of faux pas to even mention it, or betray any inclination towards, or thought of religion.

This is true: spiritual thought is necessary. This is the real tragedy of this trend--that spiritual thought is being banished from the minds of the people. I mean thinking about dying and the universe and metaphysics, and what is beyond ourselves as individuals, animals, and living creatures.

For the most part, religion distracts from this essential thought. Religion is political, not spiritual. Still, I was raised in the Baptist church, and so any spiritual thought that I endeavor in includes some amount of religious anxiety for the ideas that I was raised with. The bible, the new testament, and the commandments of Jesus Christ are to be seen as absolute truths. This I can't rationalize with certain passages, pivotal moments in the gospel, that are so human. Commands to loyalty sound to me like the orders of a ruler to maintain his authority. Authority and dominance of ideas are devices of this world, but aren't the stuff of the spirit.

Another idea of interest is the chance of dominance of the catholic (christian) church. Christ died and his apostles went out into the world. Churches sprung up, but it was a time of religious turmoil, and there were many religions vying for dominance. To what degree of chance do we owe the catholic church being adopted by the late Roman Empire? And then, it is more to the political force of that empire that we owe the spread of this religion, its survival of the Dark Ages (and some diligent monks) and the whole course of events that leads eventually the protestant reformation and the religious identity that I was first inculcated with.

One last point about the political nature of religion. Thinkers throughout the years have pointed to the power of religion as a force for keeping populations in check. Dostoevsky sees the religious imperative to control men because they are incapable of moral and spiritual self-governance. How many others view it as an essential function of the state that social order might be maintained through the religion of the populous. My question, then, if so many historical thinkers have viewed religion as providing an essential function of social control, what has replaced it in our non-religious age? Certainly this trend to non-religion, or non-religious social control began after the French Revolution, and whatever political organ acting in the absence of religion has been honing its function and efficacy since then. Is it high rates of employment? economics? culture? Surely the state would not let go the reigns it has held for so long, so what form do they masquerade under today?

A Word to the Meek

I hadn’t had much sleep and I was driving late at night with my new wife asleep in the seat next to me—I can’t even begin to explain what it is like to love her—and we were going out of town down this shitty two-lane country road with absolutely no lights except for the brights of oncoming traffic and there were tons of those stupid deer that lift their heads up when they see you and dare. So anyways there were four hours ahead of me and I thought about them. There were four hours, 240 minutes, of concentrating on the road. That means keeping the car from flying into a ditch, or into oncoming traffic, which was, I’ll mention again, only about four feet away from our car, and concentrating on keeping those deer from driving me into a suicide pact with them. Concentrating fully. Concentrating without fail at 60 miles an hour.

I started to get nauseous.

When you drive, it is necessary to forget the fear of death. It’s just part of the contract. Because when you remember it how easy it would be for your explosion powered ton of steel to turn instantly into an execution carriage, it makes driving difficult.

I wasn’t giving the road my full attention because my imagination was taking me step by step through an intersection with one of those deer. How its horns would pierce the windshield and plunge at 60 miles an hour into my beautiful sleeping wife’s breast. How I would see it after it happened because my eyes would be closed during the impact and how we’d have swerved off the road. And I would be all alone under the darkness of the sky trying to figure out what to do without any cell phone reception. How my shirt would turn red as it soaked up her blood, bright with oxygen from her lung.

It’s almost enough to make you stay home. Lock all the doors and spend the day under the bed.

I know, I know. This is imaginative faculty. It’s up there to create situations and send us through them so that we’ll be prepared for real life, like that holograph chamber on the Enterprise. I know that it can get out of control if you don’t have sufficient discipline, and that the kind of thinking I was engaged in on that road trip was irrational, something verging on the territory of stress thinking, which everyone agrees is harmful.

But it’s also not all in your head. Growing up means knowing that you aren’t invincible, you aren’t lucky, and you aren’t magically impervious to harm. Bad things do happen, and some day everyone that you know will die. Imagination is life that you’re sifting through.

And life is uncertain.

But also, uncertainty is life. The big mystery. You have no idea what the fuck will happen tomorrow. And in the end, you don’t have any control over any of it either.

We walk in this cloud of uncertainty that bounces off all of our predictions and ideas, that gapes in front of us with its riddling smile wherever we go, arbitrarily spitting out the good with the awful in doses diluted by the mundane.

I couldn't let anything happen to that beautiful woman in the seat next to me. And I couldn't pull over or be toppled by all of those fears of uncertainty. So I faced into that howling something and denied what might be with the audacity to demand what I wanted out of the uncertainty of life. We had plans to keep.

There is some kind of power in not knowing. In being the person who perseveres blindly through that shimmering black cloud that leads to the future. It is a bold act to butt up against all of that uncertainty. But living is facing uncertainty. You have to bear up against all of those death traps set in life and walk into it. You are bold every minute of your life.

We should take that power and remember it in the small tasks that don’t require us to be bold at all by comparison. Telling the truth, saying what needs to be said, or sticking up for someone who needs it risks a lot less neck than you already did by opening your eyes this morning.

And when you really do need it, these small acts prepare you for dignity and courage, to have boldness when you need it most.

It's About Time

I write about Occupy Wall Street. I haven't been following it, because I haven't been paying much attention to the news in general lately, but I have been talking to people and I have been slowly growing an opinion about it. The first thing that I have learned is that the best question, the most relevant question to ask is "why are you going down there?" Because the nature of this event is that there is no clear agenda. When people try to create an agenda they are considered to be sabotaging the event, or at the very least their momentum gains no following. That is because, from my observations, everyone going down there does so for a different reason. And the only unifying factor, far above the 99% slogan, is a general unrest, disgust, unhappiness with the powers that be. I talked to a guy and his wife at a party and they had some interesting takes on the event, and I've been talking to a co-worker, so I'll try and describe their ideas here.

The guy. "Consolidation of wealth into corporations. When a single corporation has more power than a country we are in trouble. It gets even worse. Take the situation with greece. Corporations are investing in insurance against Greece defaulting on its loans. The more money that is invested in this insurance, the lower confidence there is that Greece won't default on its loans, and the more likely that country is to default. When a corporation has the money and power to do this single handedly, we are in trouble. When money is to be made in this fashion, we have a large problem of our moral scruples. New technology (computerized trading) and deregulation of the stock market has led us to trouble. The ideal of the stock market, and this was true up until several decades ago, was that it is there in order to generate money for investment into a company. Today you don't have that. You have people who have found a way to make enormous amounts of money by skimming off the top, and who invest none of that money into the businesses. The stock market is operating in a faulty manner. We need to get it back to its original intention. Originally corporations were granted the right to perform some business venture according to a charter. This charter was granted by a king and after a certain amount of time it expired and had to be reapplied for. This was completely top down. Mercantilism. Eventually corporations gained the freedom to organize of their own behalf, without the consent of the government, and conduct business freely. I think this was a good thing. We have come to a point that businesses operate so freely that they are beholden to no governmental laws or regulation. Globalization has created an environment in which, if a corporation does not like the laws somewhere, then it can just move somewhere else. In this way they are not answerable to anybody for their actions. Corporations are global while governments are still local. We need to recognize this problem and address it with some kind of international regulating committee. A lot of people are scared by this idea, but I think it is necessary."

His wife had a different take. "When I went down there there were a lot of people that I felt like represented the freegan movement. At least these are the hard core people who are able to go down there every day. I ended up feeling kind of isolated. Finally a woman got on a microphone and started talking about middle class problems. I agree with a lot of the freegan issues, but I draw a line somewhere. I mean, I still want to go to work, and drive a car and things like that.

"Something else that I found interesting was in this slogan 'we are the 99%.' I started thinking, who are the 1%. I went to the 99% web site and found a lot of disturbing things. A lot of Fox News style arguing, very emotional. Then I went and did my own research and figured out that the 1% are people who make $350,000 a year or more. When I think about this 1% I'm thinking about these dangerously wealthy and powerful people. $350,000 a lot, but that's not that much. Those people are still living, relatively similarly to us. What a lot of the anger is towards is really the .1%. I want to go to these people in the 1% and somehow make them realize that it is them that all of these people are angry about. These people need to recognize that and do something about it.

I'm going to have to talk to Peter again. He has a complicated and interesting view of history, capitalism, and anarchy. Much of what he sees in this is a traditional power struggle. In this general movement he wants to take the time to point out older issues. That power struggles have taken place between groups for a long time, that they need to be addressed here, now. That's not it, or nearly all of it.

A Short Description of How Time Travel Is Possible

"Since you are a capitalist from the 21st century it will be difficult to explain our history after a certain distance from your history, and our technology, which would be completely incomprehensible to you if I were to describe it directly, leading you into all sorts of misconceptions and contradictions that would ultimately confuse you. Take, for example, the computer. What we know as a computer is a radically different tool, fulfills a radically different role in our society, and performs actions of a nature radically different to the binary analysis machine of the 21st century, but symbolically we recognize it as the same thing. So of history and technology I will be brief and intentionally vague, so as not to mislead you, but of causes, which emerged out of your time, I will expound in great detail. Consider this the condensed, or simplified version, but in no way should you feel patronized by that.

"Around your time a group of min invested a great deal of resources into the creation of a machine that could track all of the movements of the global stock market, every trade of every share, with inputs of a variety of economic causes and influences on those trades with a function of determining the flow of market values down to the specific share. In the beginning the process was a complete failure, mostly because the secrecy of the project denied collaboration. Eventually an act of corporate espionage revealed the project which, despite its failures, was by this time showing great promise, and another group began competing to complete the machine first. Once the knowledge was out it leaked almost immediately and ubiquitously. Smaller nations were investing almost all of their GDP into the project and espionage among groups was almost so total as to have created a situation of violating collaboration.

"Eventually the project was successful. Once again, scarcely had the project been completed than was the blueprint copied and available ubiquitously. What had been created was a fair prediction device. All available economic data from as far back as was reasonable was fed into the machine, and a program traced the chronology intuitively up to the present, where economic data from a variety of sources (credit/debit, bank reports, corporate ledgers, all global, national, local economic analytics, not to mention stock activity, etc) was used to determine what the flow of values would be in the future, as determined by what happened in the past. The beauty of the machine was its specificity. The attention to detail. And the fact that it was self correcting. At first the prediction rate was around 30%. Within a few months the margin had closed to a fraction of a percent.

"Part of that success was that depicting decline is a blunt art. There was an almost immediate global economic melt down. Vast resources of capital were moved with such rapidity that the turbulent effect was immense. Companies doing poorly sank almost immediately. Successful companies were unable to respond quickly enough to changes and usually overcompensated to disastrous results.

"Faith in the market based systems was virtually non-existent. This was not due to this event alone, but events leading up to it earlier in the century. Popular upheaval was imminent on a global scale. Drastic measures were taken. Stock markets were shuttered. Crediting institutions were taken over by large multinational interests, and credit was dolled out by them. There was rioting in the streets. Most of the countries that had been struggling their way out of the third world for the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries were reduced to majority unemployment. The top countries suffered no less. Bankers and executives disappeared by the hundreds, usually found asphyxiated on some semi-precious object. Mercenaries were as popular in affluent neighborhoods as they had once been in other areas of the world. Martial law was declared. Anarchy and civil war were imminent.

"Somehow in all of this chaos a few ideas wormed their way into power. First, it was realized that the whole system of crediting and of fluctuating stock markets could be used, not as a way to hedge power and bets, but to regulate business with the aid of the machine, which could make adjustments to a global business model on a scale specific to individual units of production, even to parts per production. In that action all of upper and middle management became obsolete. Now that economics were beginning to stabilize, politics would follow. The second idea was a complete rejection of capitalism in favor of a form of meritocracy. This was the model in which humanity would flourish. Specific goals for the human race were decided. There were many goals, and they were ranked in tiered levels. Foremost were goals to the end of poverty, hunger, disease, resource exploitation, in another tier down was the advancement of beneficial technology, improvement of communication and transit networks, and on all the way down to systems for better heating and ventilation in buildings globally. In this way all of human endeavor was harnessed towards achieving ends beneficial to itself. For the individual, personal economic interaction appeared more or less the same as it did before. Bank notes were printed and distributed for work. Yet, this time the currency was backed by collaboration towards a set of goals. A person was rewarded based on the work that they did, and how much closer it got us towards achieving a particular goal. There was much discrepancy, and much debating, but councils were set up to judge those disputes, much like a system of law courts, different levels handling different degrees of severity.

"Under these conditions we kept up with Moore's law, even as the line appeared more and more vertical. The original machine was dwarfed by its current counterpart, which could take account of much more numerous and diverse subjects. The motions and currents of the molecules in a single body were studied. Then the sample was enlarged. As technology advanced, atoms were the object of study, the body of study was widened. Eventually the atoms of the body of a man were studied. Cancers were revealed in infancy, etc. Then the job of prediction came into the fore. It was not long before the body of study was all of the atoms in a room, then in a reserch center, then in a city and so on.

"It worked like this: a single atom was observed by the machine. It made a prediction as to how the atoms around it would interact with it. Then it tested this and observed the reaction, and adjusted for any discrepancies. Knowing how those outside atoms interacted with the original the machine then predicted how a further edge of atoms would interact with the known ones, then tested, adjusted and repeated.

"The universe was mapped based on the recoil of energy of particles on earth, though the map was only made at the rate of the machine and energy recoil, a rapid enough speed, but given the relative size of the universe the mapping of the solar system on an atomic scale took a long time to complete.

"But we had accurate maps of all of the atoms and how they interacted with one another on earth. Reactions from atoms bumping into one another at the edge of the universe were constantly interfering with the predictions, but these were taken into account when they occurred and the universe map was made larger. Completely accurate predictions were therefore impossible, but a great degree of accuracy was achieved for some things. Predictions were made for the weather, and they came back correct. Agriculture hit its peak. Strangely, when predictions of the actions of individuals were made, based on their atomic recoil, they did not have a high accuracy rate nor did those improve with increased data from molecules at the edge of the mapped universe. Predictions of reality, it seemed, could only be so accurate. The machine had reached a plateau, even though the technology running it continued to advance.

"Scientists began to play with the input variables. The machine was capable of mapping out entire, if only hypothetical, lives on the atomic scale, and broadcasting them on a scale viewable to a human being. One scientist input the atomic history of his life, but changed the atomic inputs for the woman who had left him during his graduate studies by deleting her atoms from the history (or rather scattering them so that they never formed her) and played out the reaction. The result was disconcerting. He saw on a scientific monitor his life, but changed, playing out the actions of his body. It was both enthralling, and horrifying. Thus the machine was used to see lives, deaths and what could have been in many lives, but could not be used to see this life. Those predictions became an item of kitsch, like mythical prediction calendars of older civilizations.

"It was hypothesized that these predictions, alterations and the like were not calendars, but visions into alternate realities. If a universe could be imagined down to the last atomic detail, then it could also exist. Places where these things actually did take place. Alternate reality scenarios were played concurrent to each other and merged. The merging was studied. We divined how to leap from one reality to another this way, how to plant ourselves in any location in any place in another reality. How to arrange particles so that a sort of bridge was created, and our atoms and our consciousness was dragged through it. Thus we could time travel, only not in our own time.

You Must Leave the House

I was driving late at night with my new wife dozing in the seat next to me down a winding country road with no lights and lots of deer. There were four hours of driving ahead of me and the pressure of concentrating for the duration about bowled me over. I felt nauseous, unsure whether I'd be able to make it there or not. Then there were the other cars on the road. Trucks towing tractors shaking on their hinges. When you drive it is necessary to forget the fear of death. It is quite possible to never imagine the worst possibilities. In my state of mind I was tracing out those horrors viscerally. The horns would plunge through the windshield at 70 miles an hour and into Victoria's breast. The tractor would fall off of its hinges, bounce and spin on the road a few times before coming down on our subcompact and crushing us. Except crushing isn't so simple as the word. It bends metal all around you, broken glass into you, bones compact upwards in a horrible instant until the whole roof caves in and the cavern of the car swallows you up. And supposing I did survive either of these. What would I do if my wife was injured? Drag her out? And if I didn't have cell phone service? Wrap my shirt around her and watch it turn red as she died in my arms? These were some of the possibilities facing me in that car ride. This is life. Anything can happen. There is no rule that says horrible things can't happen to me. They can. In as many ways as there are to live. It is almost enough to make one stay home to know that all of these death traps are waiting in the world. But you can not stay home. You must leave the house, because the uncertainty of what will befall you is also that of what won't. Though there are unavoidable dangers in the world, it is not in your power to control them. And knowing that you have no control and no foresight means that you also have no power to change what happens. In this way it is a bold act to leave the house, to live. But we must be bold. We are bold in every thing that we do, most of the time without even recognizing it. Bold because of the things that we can't control, which in darkened imaginations are the demise of all that we hold close. This makes the other tasks in which we toil seem meek in comparison. Speaking up for someone risks a whole lot less of your neck than getting in your car and getting on the highway. And when we do face disaster, it is these minor acts of boldness that prepare us to act with dignity and courage, to have boldness when we need it most.

Several critics have been taken hostage. They are forced at gun point to write incredibly dense texts, invent new modes of readership for these texts, and submerge those modes (the means of gaining access to them) in the original dense texts.

Some of the critics wish to escape this bondage, wish to subvert the work or antagonize their captors, some are so afraid that they work tirelessly in the hopes of survival, and others see the whole ordeal as the most genuine form of flattery.

Transtromer

The funerals keep coming

more and more of them

like the traffic signs

as we approach a city.

Sci/Spec Fi. ideal

Setting opens up in a grand roman hall. A great decree is about to be proclaimed. Suddenly men appear from nowhere and begin blasting away with phasers, causing a great amount of casualties and even greater confusion. They snag a famous historian, Livy? and are gone just as quickly.

A double story line is created here.

Livy is in some far and distant future aboard a space ship. It is explained that he was taken into the future because they need him. There is a war going on among another group of people across time. The killing your grandfather paradox is solved by these people saying that when they go back into time and alter things, they don't alter their own time, but generate an alternate dimension in space and in time through their intervention. The people who they are battling are capable of the same technology, and so their fight spans multiple dimensions and times. They need Livy because he was a great historian and they need absolutely accurate data from his time in order to plan their attacks. Much of the information written by him did not survive to their time. And they need it to make exactly accurate military plans. They need all information from all times, a veritable map of all existence, or human action anyways, in order to coordinate their plans against their enemies. Another paradox occurs here. If they have time travel, couldn't they travel into the future when they already have Livy and recover him there, or couldn't the future send Livy to their current present and deliver the information necessary then, or when did they grab Livy, since logical ordering of time no longer is a factor, and wouldn't they be vulnerable since their enemies could anticipate their snatching and be there waiting for them in the roman hall in ambush. To this there are multiple answers. Yes, in some dimensions their enemies are waiting for them in ambush, but not in all, since it is impossible to dominate all dimensions. Another, it is necessary to create temporal artifacts--events, otherwise nothing could happen--which are exciting and dangerous, because they are the stuff of living, but also take on the airs of formalities for the people doing them, since you know that in another parallel dimension or in the future that event has already taken place and all of its consequences have been played out. The effect on Livy is thus: He is dismayed at being kidnapped and at the brutal manner in which it was done, but he is simultaneously fascinated with this place that he is now. Then they ask him to work for them. Not only do they need all of the information from his time, but they need him to track changes and record events across many dimensions. He was chosen for this in addition to his knowledge of the time because of his excellent record and detail noticing ability. This information is their military intelligence, and their battleground information. The time that they will need him to keep track of is relatively short, four months or so. He asks why this period was so crucial and they reply that it wasn't, but that they have another Livy on another ship (possibly in another dimension) tracking the next four months, and another Livy elsewhere tracking the previous, and so forth. He asks why that number, why that length of time when they could get an infinite number of Livys since with the parallel dimension crossover ability and time travel ability resource exhaustion is no longer a factor and neither is labor, and get each Livy to study a single day. To this they reply that there is a computer algorithm or anomaly that beyond their current operating number of Livys the data store becomes too huge and unwieldy and effectively useless. Livy agrees and stays in the time and ship, and then his work concerns the effort on his part and learning the technology associated, as well as considering his position--uncertain about aiding these people in a war that he has no reason for and and justifiably irritated about being abducted, but also in a very helpless position and in addition fascinated by the technology and culture and what these people are doing.

Battle tactics are very much more complex, since arriving at an enemy ship and destroying it has no real effect on an enemy that exists in duplicates across multiple universes, and you have to plan your attack to have significant effects across those other universes in order to inflict any real damage. It is, in no sense, traditional warfare. But very much like a complicated chess game.

The second story line considers these battle tactics. Back in rome, shortly after the first group beams away a second group arrives. These people assure the romans that they intend no harm, but wish to offer them a means to revenge. They provide the romans with the technology and information for future jumping, thus enabling them to do the battling for them, or teaching a new group to fight their enemy. This battle strategy is one of arming the past and making it fight the future. This way the future enemy has more enemies on its hands. It is also a way to imagine the romans in spaceships.

A possible ending, or deepening of the intrigue could involve the motives behind the war. First, there is no enemy. The war began as an internal decision to attack themselves out of 1. boredom 2. motivation to a)travel to other dimensions, b)advance technology, and c)create a thorough rendering of all times across multiple dimensions. (since a race that has overcome inter-species competition stagnates) This war, or internal motivation strategy has gotten out of control and can not be stopped because it has gotten too complicated and the original agents can not be contacted and ordered to desist. Even by going to the original meeting where this plan was decided and saying no don't do that because a future dimension already exists where the agents have gone on, and furthermore may pop out there and shoot everybody as a means of furthering the motivation. Also since the present people are hunting the original agents and the original agents are starting a war against themselves and enlisting people from all times and dimensions to do it, it is difficult to figure out which agents and who to influence and at what point in time to strike or influence to have the desired outcome. Now this group's motive may be in orchestrating an end to the original motivation, or returning everything to a neutral position. This war is fatiguing. But they are also facing the complex machinery of their own eschatology or survival as a species here.

I love Kierkegaard because he leaves room for the unexplained in his philosophy.

I would not wish to go into politics because I think it is a meaningless game with severe and long term real life consequences, but as long as I can remain emotionally detached, I think that it is a fascinating contest of human relationships.

I saw V checking out a guy in the supermarket the other day. I wasn't angry at all, because I'm not very careful about looking at girls when she's not around. Really, I was curious, because I'd never caught her doing that before, and I also don't know what kinds of guys she would be looking at. Who she is attracted to. I didn't get a very good look at him, all I could say is that he was the hoodie type, because the other thing I was curious about is what face she would make when she saw me looking at her, catching her. Again, not out of spite, or any kind of posessive malice, but because I know the excuses I make with my face when I'm caught, and I wanted to see if there was any of that there on hers, or if there would be something completely different. It was, both surprised, and causal, and a very quick moving on without any acknowledgment.

The problem with a lot of popular travel literature is that it tries to make adventure out of trivial stuff. Even though I consider P. Theroux's train book a complete failure and discredits him as an author for me, at least he keeps reminding the reader how mundane travel is. Instead, a lot of the books I come across now sound like this, "Aghhh, haggled by a taxi driver!" "Noooo, another line," "May god have mercy on our souls. Outdated infrastructure," (though this can pose a serious risk, I think it is blown out of proportion a lot of times).

"Scourge of capitalism you will burn, not only forever in hell, but here today, too, in this chair of light."

How Would This Happen

A woman wants to know what perscription drugs a coworker is on because she thinks that they will improve her life, but she is afraid of risking the taboo of asking someone a personal question like that.

Here's how I got to it. I was eating lunch at work and a woman walked into the break room to ask a question. After she left one of my coworkers said, jokingly, "I want whatever she's on." The woman in question is always positive to an extreme that it seems insincere, though by looking at her and hearing her say "awesome," you know that she isn't. Something about the look on her face, the way she carries herself, and a few of the things she says lead me to believe that she has had a hard life, a life that would only lead her to be forcing those emotions. Add to all of that she is a little bit spacy, and you could easily imagine that she's on the perfect cocktail of mood enhancing pharmaceuticals.

The story I have in mind involves taking that original question made in jest seriously. Either taken seriously from the get-go, or later on, after a bit of misery. Then the miser debates asking the woman what drugs she assumes she is taking. A lot of modern social taboos here, if you're like me and feel uneasy breaking people's personal boundaries like that.

It was a a kind that doesn't exist anymore, bright and empty at 4am a bare wood landing composed the second floor, was wreathed in smoke, filled with destroyed couches and some sculpture grad-student's thesis, 4 sets of gray plate steel tables and chairs designed in the brutalist tradition, a matching spiral staircase connected it to the ground level and cold stares from the bearded help where you exploited the never ending cup not because of taste, or ethical trademarks, but because caffeine gave you the jitters, and a window that that made a wall and loomed over everything and that took on an impressionist air when dew dripped and streaked the city sweating outside.

Is the New Testament more appealing than other religious texts because it features stories that ordinary people can relate to--stories of fishermen, tax collectors, ordinary fucking people--as opposed to other texts telling stories that are told from a hyperbolic perspective such as a king or a divine being?

The Philosophical Novel

, or the one's I'd like to read:

Iris Murdoch

The Mind-Body Problem, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Omensetter's Luck, William H. Gass

How to Sell, Clancy Martin

George Santayana

Thomas Mann

Robert Musil

Wittgenstein's Mistress, David Markson

All from this article.

"how we tackle intellectual problems depends critically on who we are as individuals, and is as much a function of temperament as cognition"

The Iliad

Violence is never an end, only a beginning to more violence.

Teenage Music

Listening to music alone in your room you feel that there is something deep and unique and profound in the music and you know that it is something that is not always there, at least not right there at the surface of the sound, and you understand that not all of it is the music, that some part of that power in the music is you, because it is you who understands these things, like the secret ingredient an alchemical process. But the other part to this great understanding up there in your bedroom is that this great thing will never leave you, that what you are experiencing could never be explained or expressed to another person, because words could hardly even let them know the outline of your experience. So it happens that this great and infinite thing is ultimately capped inside of you.

On The Books

Dust

Dust lies, of course, at the very edge of human visibility: it is as small as the unaided eye can see. And dust is not strictly terrestrial. “Amorphous,” Amato continues, “dust is found within all things, solid, liquid, or vaporous. With the atmosphere, it forms the envelope that mediates the earth’s interaction with the universe.” But dust is found, too, beyond the earthly sphere, in the abiotic vacuum of interstellar space, a freezing void of irradiated particles, where all dust is the ghostly residue of unspooled stars, astronomical structures reduced to mist.

I'm treating myself to getting in bed at 9 and reading my book until I fall asleep. I want this so bad that I'm even skipping drinking a ginger ale, which would take too long to drink since I drink it slow and taste the whole bottle. This day I went to work, drank a beer with a co-worker, came home and cooked dinner, and now I'm even getting that reading in. Is this what steady working life will be?

Ride With the Devil

“After that, the universe will simply continue to expand and dilute, and that will go on forever,” he says.

Smells

Sandalwood, Bay Rum, Rosemary, Hops

Eucalyptus.

Paolo Ventura

I found this photographer again because a photo set of his that appeared in Harpers stuck in my mind forever. When I first saw his work I couldn't tell what was happening, but I did feel that it was haunting and erie and empty. In the interview he describes trying to create a fantasy time period somewhere between the 1960's and the beginning of the century. I really like that idea.

Travel Literature

Invisible Cities

and

The Travels of Marco Polo

The man was set in prison inside of me for forgery or perjury I don't remember. Sometimes I can hear him singing he sings about how dark it is next to my vital organs sometimes when I lay outside in my bikini he sings about a faint red glow. He does not like it inside of me pressed into my organs in the shapes inside of the human body it is not all soft in there the bones. I do not like him inside of me I can feel him move sometimes or once even claw and sing often I do my part I want to make things better.

Do I know that he claws to get out? No. I can not say that for sure. That this is the best way to rehabilitate our criminals I can not say for sure either. You must ask wasn't I convicted once and what was I thinking then to put a criminal in my body what changed do you feel regret. Sometimes I am at a party and I have to talk about keeping a prisoner in my body. I was only convicted on one account--I want to do my part to make things better. I do not feel regret for overcoming inaction. I could not say that a man is punished unjustly and be no part of the punishment. Yes I agreed to put a man a criminal in my body. Action is only just.

A man at the party takes off my blonde wig and puts it on his head. The prisoner in my body tickles my ribs it would be like clanking a steel dish across prison bars the man believes I am laughing at him it is a painful laugh he wants inside of me I tell him that is only figurative we go to his house to have sex he asks me do I feel regret.

I do not know that putting the man in my body was the correct measure for the crime I cannot remember. You must not feel regret for having acted only for having acted wrong which is a deficiency of thought a failure of spirit which is laziness.

"Forgery or perjury is a moral crime, and infliction against the character of our identity a viscous skewing of our shared reality."

The man in my bed tries to impress me I do not know that he cares the prisoner is gone so deep inside of me I do not know he will ever come out. When I drink my liver floods him with fluids of the poison directly is this excessive is it a matter of punishment or the course of the punishment it is bile he is covered in bile and he wouldn't be if I didn't drink and once I didn't know this I didn't know that when I drank I covered him in bile but it came upon me I realized this is what happens this is the result of my drinking I know for all future drinks that this will happen am I responsible for the drinks I had before I knew?

"Do you regret putting this man in your body?"

Internet Truths

The internet is almost like the real world. If I discover something here, and fail to remember it, it fails to exist. But if I write it down, or record what I find in light, then I may have a chance of seeing (creating) it in the real world. This is the step that removes it from the real world, but discovery is the same, and with pictures and light, it is one step closer to me than a picture in a magazine in the fact that it is possible for this picture in light to respond to my presence in a way that a static physical picture never could.
Here

This is where the tow truck driver told me to go:
Hill Country State Natural Area

Spring Break

Austin - San Angelo--4 Hrs.

San Angelo - Balmorhea--4 Hrs.

1 Day, 1 Night

Balmorhea - White Sands--4 Hrs.

White Sands - Casa Grande--6 Hrs.

1 Day, 1 Night

Casa Grande - Sedona--3 Hrs.

1 Day, 1 Night

Cottonwood

1 Day, 1 Night

Cottonwood - Austin--18 Hrs.

5 Days 4 Nights

I'm not sure why, but I need them.Gotta know more about Grenson.

Buy me

Don't know what I could wear with this. White denim summer? Only if I had curly hair.

Tango

In preparation for our trip to B.A. V and I are taking tango lessons. There was another lady at class tonight who had the same idea. This is what we covered in our first class:

• Finding the beat
• The tango walk--everything smooth, the musical phrase begins with a lot of energy and generally calms down (smaller steps) towards the end of the phrase, don't emphasize the step on the beat, don't bob your head
• Partner positions--man has hand high on partner's back, woman gently rests arm on man's arm and allows for movement there
• The tango walk with a partner--sense the step
• Tango square--1)back 2)side 3)forward and outside (as close as possible) 4)close
• Tango square with a flourish--1)back 2)side 3)forward and outside 4) forward and outside again, woman crosses her legs 5) Close and shift weight to opposite foot 6)forward 7)side 8)close

Ad Nauseam

referring to something that has been done or repeated so often that it has become annoying or tiresome.

I always forget that one.

Unfriend

I searched for you today because I thought of you and it occurred to me that I hadn't thought of you in years and that we probably shouldn't call each other friends, but at the end of my search I found that you already didn't think of me as a friend and that you may have had the same thought but months or maybe even years earlier, and the feeling I had from all that wasn't quite betrayal but something more like jealousy.

from The Outpost

Mission: to be where I am.

Even in that ridiculous, deadly serious

role--I am the place

where creation is working itself out.

from In the Open

The letter in my pocket. Desperate furious striding, it is a kind of pleading.

with you, evil and good have real faces.

With us, it's mostly a struggle between roots, ciphers and shades of light.

"I don't know much, but I know something... women and shoes, that's a special area."

--David Ball

Some things

are striking because you've never thought of them before.

15 "Participant" means a person approved by the Department as meeting applicable criteria guidelines to receive services under this Policy.

Minus Coffee

It starts at birth. You are born with a life. It is up to you what to do with it. After this, it becomes incomprehensible. I began this line of thought on the top floor of a parking garage overlooking downtown Austin. I could see people in a park and stuck in traffic and the idea sprang on me like a locomotive. They were down there, and from where I was positioned, it was easy to look at them as animals. Running around. Playing, practicing. Their clothes gave them some distinction beyond animals, but what are clothes besides straps of fabric on a continuum of time. Or rather, what meaning is bestowed on the particular fashion trends exhibited below when they changed in the past and I know that they will change again in the future. How were these clothes (the best visual referent from my perspective) supposed to set those people apart from the animals when I know that they are a functional, tactical piece of equipment adjusted across the scale of time. The vehicles I saw were even less convincing. A tool to help exert a desire. What animal wishes for anything less.

Here I was on a roof top under a perfectly clear day after a bad-weather-week. I felt like I was walking through a dream. Feeling like every instant I was realizing that I was looking at what I was looking around at and the realization was surprising as if I hadn't been looking at it the instant before. Except that I had my eyes open the whole time. It must have been a perpetual feeling--the feeling of being surprised with reality.

After that it was all surprises. Everything. This is what, I think, passes for epiphany most of the time: seeing an everyday event or occurrence free of all the emotions (signifiers) that you have attached to it, and beginning to construct new feelings and biases about that event based on this empty perspective.

I went to lunch with a friend. In all honesty I was a little bit nervous driving there--besides the fact that there were so many people driving crazy, breaking laws, valuing their time and effort higher than conventions, myself included--because I didn't know how to bring this, bring my state of mind to lunch.

Familiar routines are helpful that way. We talked and we didn't talk about anything new. Politics, city culture, future plans. And it was genuinely enjoyable. After lunch I was worried. A very mild anxiety descended. What are friends for if we didn't do anything new? If we didn't do anything at all. If we didn't build anything or really connect (because connection is sublime; human connection is the ideal above animalness) what did we do? Stroke our mutual desire to talk about ourselves, think fondly about the future, prove that we know something about the other. It didn't really seem to make a whole lot of sense. Or seem to have much point. Ahh, but this particular friend is a bar friend and we had never met for lunch before or at least not in a very long time and the social conventions of lunch are much more restricted than the par, particularly in respect to time where at lunch the time is restricted, though there is some variable freedom about how much time you get to spend at the table after all of the food is all gone, where at the bar the windows of time are unhinged and let free to expand until the bar man says that it is time to shut everything off and you have no other choice but to say good bye and hug and hopefully don't crash your car or somebody else's on your way home or the fast food place.

Here was where I started thinking about plans. On my way home. What were all of these other people in the other cars doing? What were they thinking? What were my friend and I doing and thinking? Were we acting according to some kind of plan? Was there a greater framework that we were a part of that we were agents within and crucial parts of? (According to physics, the new religion, yes). Was there any reason behind all of the things that we were doing? Individually, probably no. Impulse directs doing. Also, what we did yesterday is a good indicator of what we will do today. If you went to work yesterday, then you'll probably go to work today. If it's the weekend then you will stretch your imagination and do something in response to what you did last weekend. If you're the type, then maybe you made a plan. Maybe you're going to go to a park out of town. What's the reason behind that plan? Probably that you don't want to spend another weekend waiting around at home for the weekend to be over. Then what's the point of these plans? Why are we doing the things that we're doing? Is there any reason guiding it? Probably a lot has to do with the seemingly infinite number of days that we have ahead of us. If I was to count up the number of days in 80 years and tell you the number what would you do? If I put 80 years on a time line and marked the number of days gone by in your 80 years in red would you be horrified? I'm not going to do it to myself because seeing that would be too horrifying. Then what's the alternative to whiling away our days? Plans seem to be the answer. But our plans don't seem to mean anything other than ways to more elaborately while away our days. There are bigger plans out there with science and understanding and reasoning behind them. These are generally plans of the state, or the state's predecessor, corporations. There is some comfort in knowing that these massive plans involving each one of us have a bit of sense guiding them, but there is still uncertainty there. What is to determine if those plans are not in error? History has shown us that time and time again those plans are frequently wrong, or misguided, or horrible.

In a sense the kings of medieval Europe were more advanced than us. Their plans were backed by divine authority. There was no uncertainty. But an understanding of human psychology gives me new doubts. How many kings truly believed that they were under the authority of god, and not the ultimate authority themselves?

All of the ideas that I've heard about time are echoing faintly in my head. Who said that time was an illusion and that all we really know of is this one perpetual instant and that the past is a delusion or at least function of memory and the future is only imagination or an aspect of planning, or maybe he didn't say much more than that time was just an illusion. I'm imagining some kind of all devouring worm inching (or not moving at all?) through time (nothing) and destroying everything in front of it and rendering everything behind it null and thus with it's slow illusion of movement represents the abandonment of time and a false conception. And who else wondered what it would be like if we viewed time in reverse, knowing all that would happen in the future (our deaths, etc.) but edging towards a past which we were completely ignorant of, our past and history and what brought us to the present and tells us everything about ourselves. Whoever said that had something to do with the movie Momento. And Mark Twain quipped that we would be infinitely happier if only we were born at 80 and slowly inched our way towards 18.

Kropotkin

Dunbar's Number

Words

sub specie aeternitatis- viewed in relation to the eternal, a universal perspective

hyperbole- exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally

superlative- of the highest quality or degree

It makes sense that I would think of each of these words in sequence because they are variations of each other, and in some sense are representations of an error of thought, or rather that error is in our ability to imagine something that is beyond our powers of conception.

Technology and telecommunications companies receive thousands of subpoenas and court orders every year in which the authorities demand a broad range of information about their customers, from the content of their e-mails, to the Internet Protocol addresses of their computers, to their files that are stored online and location data from their cellphones.

This Is How It Is

If you mess with ATT, they will sick the long arm of the law on you.

Also, are hackers getting older? In the next generation, will they not be around any more? Will we loose the type that attacks large corporations out of political motives, and be left with the ones who steal credit card information out of greed or desperation?

Internet and Privacy

Digital Due Process--be aware that this group was founded by internet providers and large internet companies. Largely a response to government and police snooping justified by the Electronic Communications Privacy act which was created in 1986, the year I was born, and has no idea what the internet is. The Center for Democracy and Technology is part of this coalition as well. Any reform of legislation is difficult because of security measures enacted after 9/11 and henceforth justified as well.

A bunch of articles in the NYT. I heard most of this on their Tech podcast.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/technology/10privacy.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/business/media/10link.html?ref=technology

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/

Middle Generation

Too young to remember the 80's, too old to be part of this childhood technology phenomenon. Nobody gave us a name, like Gen-X, or tween. We're the middle child of generations, mostly forgotten, kind of not really a part of anything that goes on around us, a little bit disenfranchised, but mostly wide eyed and blinking and trying to figure out how to stand and where we figure into everything.

More Net Neutrality Stuff

Open Rights Group-- The UK's Net Neutrality defense group. They've got some petetitions on their page, but they're for GB. Doesn't mean you can't copy and paste to make your own quick petition.

The Oxford Internet Institute-- Not just NN, but a whole trove of useful and interesting information here.

Political speech writing is a lot like SEO. More important than what you say are the words that you use to say it. Look at any politician's words. Generally they stick to a party line. It isn't hard to figure out where they stand on an issue in relation to everybody else--on side or the other--thanks to the polarization of our political process. They can go on and on and get flowery or historical or whatever, but that doesn't matter. The real meat of their speeches is in a few key words. You always have to look for key words when you listen, because that's where they're getting their message across. These key words correlate to larger issues and they way they use these key words is how they choose to relate to those issues. The goal of a political speech is a high frequency of key words to make the speech easy to follow, clear.

SEO is similar. When you create content for a website, you want the content to be good, of course, but the real value in the content is its ability to rank higher on a google search. You do this by including a high frequency of key words which you believe will be entered into a search bar by a potential customer. If you out rank your competitors, then there is a good chance that you will win the consumer game.

How similar are these two writing devices?

An Essay

That has a bunch of books in it.

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth.

So that as Plato had an imagination, that all

knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth

his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

Francis Bacon, Essays: LVIII

"Scepticism is as much the result of knowledge, as knowledge is of scepticism."

Theodore Alois Buckley

in his introduction to

Pope's Illiad

"

"

Pope's introduction to

Homer's Illiad

Low Pole Lit Mags

Glimmer Train

Front Porch (by the MFA program where I got my undergrad)

I'm Looking for Work Online

vworker

Guru.com

motownwriters.com

worldwidefreelance.com

fundsforwrtiers.com

writersmarket

mediabistro.com

My friend Stacy Muszynski showed me the way.

Thinking New

Isn't that a beautiful thing, to think that we are all being recorded and as such elegized continually?

I think that a poet is really just a way of perceiving and interacting with the world. For fun, I would like to call it an interface, though more often than not it is considered an identity. Poetry is the expression of whatever comes out of that perspective in language. Of course, the term artist may best evoke what I'm describing, a person who is deliberate in her observation, and revelatory in his actions, but in regards to our world of technology I think the term poet fits better. Html is, after all, a string of numbers and letters, not pigments. A person who perceives and interacts with the world wide web in ways of significant insight may or may not be classified as a poet. Physicist, mathematician, engineer, may also be appropriate terms for people who choose deliberative language as their mode of expression, even if that language is actually a non-lingual iteration of latinate-aribic forms.

Tom Bissell makes the case for video games in his book, and what is clear from his analysis is that information technology, when it produces art will be something more than a composite of previous art forms, and may even border on something new. In his book, he lobs complaint against the gaming industry for failing to produce a legitimate work of art. I believe his blame is only halfway accurate. Before logic can take on the form of art there must be a sensitivity for consuming it. Imagine, how will that even come about? A purely logical, hypothetical reality construed as the part of us so completely irrational, numbers impregnated with affirmation and doubt.

All of the new technologies may be simplified as masses of information, tricked through metaphors into modes of interaction. (I could simplify information to basic operations, and from basic operations to elementary arithmetic--1,0) These are constructions of logic. They were created by and for people who, at least according to the mythic stereotype didn't care for, or understand art. It has been shudderingly whispered that the new technologies are incommensurate with art. Another way of saying that our future is incommensurate with art. Which, if you ignore the obnoxious art world image that the word connotes and imagine instead a word that conjures up fundamental questions of consciousness, gives cause for great concern. Now that we have finally accepted technology as our common denominator route to the future there has been a scramble to figure out what this perfectly logical construction means for the illogical mess that is the rest of us. The gap is enormous. But in a world where so much personal meaning resides in these machines, the imperative is huge.

What Bissell is asking for isn't possible from a design side only. It will only arise out of our shared experience with these logic devices. Once we exchange intellect that is bound up in unmediated organic experience, and receive one that is inextricable from the visceral experience of hypothetical logic we will find out that we can perceive meaningful art in our experiences with technology. Simply put, it will take a new way of thinking.

What will that new way of thinking be like? It is impossible to say. But rest assured that the work is underway. Every day millions of people interact with the new technology and make personal connections between the logical underpinnings of the data they see, and the illogical complications of their own lives. Every day the paradigm shifts and we split our reality between a world governed by subterranean calculations and a world governed by unknowable calculations. The new thinking is inevitable.

Unfortunately there is no consolation in inevitability. Because it is inevitable that our consciousness will be altered by our experiences with technology does not mean that the resulting consciousness will make beautiful things. Or even be aware that that is a possibility. Or even be aware that there are possibilities beyond vanity, pop-culture, and unrestrained consumerism. In fact, without some effort being made, there won't even be any awareness of the new consciousness. It will take a poet. By this I mean a person whose mode of expression is language, or any string of letters and numbers governed by semantics. It will take a person with a particular sensitivity to their environment to perceive the world of information and render it in a way that is evocative and meaningful, and perhaps, with luck, establishes some modicum of understanding for what the new thinking is, or at least points us in the direction of perceiving it ourselves. Who will we be calling poets in the next 10 years? Programmers, engineers, Sony?

Ander Monson is a traditional poet exploring a new medium. So far as I can tell he isn't writing poetry in html or making code haiku. But he is intending to innovate with the internet. What I've seen is pretty primitive, some hyperlinking between poems, an evocative interface. But he is a poet, which presupposes a certain sensitivity, and he is publishing on the web. Assume that means that he is paying attention to his experiences, perhaps even tracking what happens to him as he commits day by day to the new paradigm. It is this work of using the new technologies while trying to understand them that will bring the humanities a revelatory presence on the net.

But when it came to rules that might boost network neutrality -- the notion that end users (you and me) should decide what content and services we want without interference from the ISPs -- the FCC's order paid lip service to the concept while enshrining its eventual demise. In theory, land-line carriers (traditional phone and cable companies, for the most part) won't be allowed to play favorites. In practice, the new rules invite them to concoct new kinds of services that do precisely that.

But even that fuzzy concept won't apply to mobile carriers, which means that discrimination will be explicitly permitted by companies like AT&T and Verizon for customers of the iPhone and iPad, among other devices that are increasingly the most important entry point to the Internet.

In Friendship

There is an affection that becomes the heart of the relationship, and everything else is accessory to that fact. Conversations are only a means to facilitating it. Speaking is only a way of keeping time, because time is what is important.

Gov't vs BigBusiness (and everybody it's got to do with)

I've always admired radicals, who I believe are at the vanguard of our civilization and necessary (and sometimes not so necessary) social change although I don't consider myself one, because I believe my place is in fostering cooperation and advancing the efficiency and effectiveness of existing structures.

This comes from some getting lost on the internet. Tonight's reading sprang from the cypherpunk article on wikipedia. Early hackers were the brainiac cowboys of the really wild days of the internet. Did the sun set on those days with the FCC ruling today? Or maybe that sun was preserved. My vote isn't cast yet, as it seems the ruling was set in place only to give the FCC an arm over broadband providers, who, as big business, are generally regarded as the enemies in the net neutrality debate. Though, if it is merely a pipeline issue, then who is this ruling really protecting? Does the average user really generate enough content to be put into a higher price bracket, or are these rules really protecting internet entrepreneurship and established businesses that ply their trade in huge bandwidth, sites like facebook, netflix, and the like. The latter seems the more believable, since language around the bill praised it's ability to preserve innovation on the net. My own fear as a personal user wasn't so much for the restriction of large bandwidth so much as it was the restriction of specific sites and a pay for use plan for the internet. If an ISP could charge you for the amount of internet that you used then your internet bill wouldn't go down, thought I'm sure that's what they would advertise. You would end up paying the same for the internet as you do now, only with the added fear that without a strict limitation on your bandwidth, you might slip into a more expensive bracket and have your bill go up that month, like a cell phone service plan. That is, by the way, where all of this is headed. The FCC regulation was vague about cell phones, which already have data plans that charge you for use. And as they become the primary means of access, the broadband argument will become irrelevant. Then in that case, who wins? ISP providers? Wireless carriers? Certainly not the consumer. And will the result be restricted content use or restricted data flow or both? I have been witness to two separate accounts of ISPs calling and threatening lawsuit if the user doesn't discontinue illegal downloads. I think the worst case scenario would be giving ISPs a framework for totally restricting that activity by limiting the nature of their internet provided to constituent groups. But that doesn't seem likely because that would defy the nature of the internet as being vast and interconnected, not closed networks of constituent consumers. What does a more likely scenario look like, and how long will we have to wait before it becomes a reality? Much like the current reality. Strong efforts to, if not able to block access, discourage use of certain types of websites. BitTorrents being the main target because of the money hole that they create for everybody in business. Would there be good cause to restrict alienate websites where forums conducted by hackers are hosted? For public safety. Then what about anarchist forums, since most of those operators blend with the former crowd. Well then you're getting into a first amendment issue since blocking those sites could be construed as a form of censorship of free speech. By the private sector. On the behalf of public safety because, after all, identity theft is no joke. And before long the entire outskirts of the internet where pirate cowboy hacker banditry exist is marginalized, fenced off and blocked by ISPs. And the vocal portion of the internet is silenced. Of course they can regroup elsewhere, but with the framework in hand ISPs will be much more effective at shutting these groups down. Perhaps I am a bit Big-Brother paranoid, but because a primary ideology of the major innovators of the internet is to keep the dissemination of information on the internet free, and since this means movies and music, which translates into dollars and lawsuits, I see a major incentive by the ISPs to go on a witch hunt. Can any FCC regulation keep this from happening?

1. Access to Computers - and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total.

2. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative.

3. All information should be free.

4. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.

5. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race,or position.

6. You can create art and beauty on a computer.

7. Computers can change your life for the better.

-Steven Levy

Links:

Crypto Anarchist wikipedia

Jim_Bell wikipedia

the cyphernomicon

cypherpunk on wired

Steven Levy on wired

net-neutrality at mediaaccess.org

Who is writing the book that describes the migration of radical left-wing geniuses from poorhouses and printing-shops to bay-houses and blogs?

Christmas Notes

No sleep

Waking up with the babies

Staying up late with my cousins

Lots of drinking

Almost as much eating: cookies, candy, green beans, cookies, coffee, this morning we all pitched in and cooked a feast of breakfast tacos

Stories: On the morning of my mother's wedding her brothers were on a boat and off one. He wanted to see what the highest speed was that he could jump off before it really hurt. After the wedding my mom got an MG with a convertible top. Her brothers took it out on the highway and with one sitting on the back of the car they would switch lanes and try to throw each other off. In high school my cousin fell ojk;ff the back of a car and into a coma. She spent a week in ICU. She's all better now. "How's work Brenda?" Ringworm (is a hug that follows you home) running havoc in my room. Grandfather's there in spirit and a champagne toast to family in the morning.

LIST

Figure out how to travel and where to go in Patagonia
Figure out what to take

Quick dry undergarments:

Quick dry towel

Rain jacket

Figure out how to fly there

I vow never to wear a scarf again.

This is what it's like:

You need money. You always need the money because you're in debt but nothing's new about that because we're all in debt and together we're in it up to our ears, but that community feeling doesn't change the fact that you really need the money. So you go back to taking shit jobs for now. Always for now because you don't want to put up with this forever, but just for the time being it'll keep clothes on your back until something better comes along. Or rather, until you find something better anyways. Strangely enough, it turns out that this something better comes in the form of this shit job. They want to promote you to shit manager. Lots of better pay. Like crazy good money. Not that you're wealthy and you'll be driving a beamer any time soon, but you're on time on bills and you don't need to worry about rent anymore. You really shouldn't be worrying about rent anymore because you're at this job something like 60-70 hours a week, but that's only humor. You need your apartment to go home to, to sleep a good eight hours before you shower brush and go back to it again.

It's weird being on the other side of the manager's pin. Everybody knows customer service jobs. We've had them since we were 16 since they were the easiest, most visible jobs to get. Everybody knows the shit that you have to put up with to work there. "This is the phrase that you have to say to every customer who walks through this door," and "I don't see enough smiling," and "no more than 4 ounces of cheese and you're taking too much time slicing the bread and you're making a mess with the mustard." But now you actually find that it's your lips that these words are issuing forth from. And you like it. Not because you give a shit about perfect mustard rings, or even making the rich assholes who came up with this not-so-novel franchize idea richer, but because you can actually excel in this environment. The rules are laid out clear. There isn't any nuance in what they want. Sell more sandwiches, spend less money doing it. You can hit the mark every time. And even if you don't have time to sleep, or time to call your friends back, it's ok because for once in a very long time you're doing something exactly right.

It's easy to understand your employees, those kids you used to be, never on time, always trying to scam a sandwich for a friend, confusing a corporate stranglehold with their own laziness. They're pretty simple, you see. The profile doesn't include much more than conceit and shortsightedness. It's this side of the pin that's much more difficult to comprehend. Because once you stop hating that hierarchy for actually making you work before they give you money you begin to see how complicated and ingenious it is. All of those silly acronyms that seemed made up to make your life more annoying before are actually intricately wrought strategies for increasing efficiency. Somehow the Byzantine layers of corporate regulation actually streamline the place. It is fascinating to see how statistics can cut waste, how a computer algorithm will be able to predict correctly 9 out of 10 times how many customers will walk in that door on any given day, down to the hour. The training program that you went through that seemed so much like brain-wash at the time is actually a device they use for manipulating their labor pool without having to change it, for spreading talent around, to make your skills reach the furthest.

And this is why it is so much easier to understand the corporate regulations towards employees. It finally makes sense to fire someone for being a minute late, or to refuse to hire someone with tattoos because it actually has so little to do with them. You're perfecting an invisible machine that only happens to require people and sandwiches to run properly.

I periodically need to assert control over my life by abandoning certainty and embracing uncertainty.

Imagine you have this friend who keeps dropping names about this new job that he got. You don't remember him doing this in the past, but now he can't seem to talk about anything else. You aren't clear whether he is trying to brag, impress, or if he is just excited about his new job. All that you are sure of is that he is annoying the living piss out of you. Call him out, right? But this friend doesn't take criticism well. It's not that he'll throw out his chair and walk away. Rather, he'll get real quiet there and kind of sulk. Plus you haven't seen him in a while so it is exactly this kind of catching up that you're supposed to be engaged in. Making him a silent "not offended" friend would be counter productive. And while you're sitting there weighing this out in your head, on he goes making more irritating references to famous people you've never heard of and don't care about. You're distracted now so it takes more concentration to follow the course of a conversation that you find annoying in the first place, which makes you even more irritated. Eventually you decide that it is madness--trying to figure out how to nicely criticize that friend, which the combination of trying and caring are making you more infuriated than the original annoyance in the first place. So you decide to drop it. It doesn't matter much anyways. People get excited about new jobs.

Does this constitute defeat? When you make this decision, is there some kind of universal tally that marks a point in your friend's favor, that takes a point away from you. Are you at a loss of some limited quantity of victory in the universe because of this decision that you made in your head?

As all archival researchers know, there is a special quality of understanding that comes from exposure to a large body of sources, be it a novelist's letters, a ministry's papers or diplomatic traffic – even though much of the material is routine. With prolonged immersion, you get a deep sense of priorities, character, thought patterns.

Timothy Garton Ash

I guess my ideal form of travel involves a constant readiness to be floored by something and loosing myself in my surroundings. Loosing yourself sounds as dumb of a phrase as finding yourself, so lets sound it out. I believe that your surroundings define you. Objects are really just thought associations in your head, and things like house, car, grocery store, bar have strong associations with my identity, they are primal ideas that form some core of my values because they've been there shaping future emotions since I was young, started listening, watching movies, absorbing my culture. There are a zillion other objects that we have ideas of in our brains. When you see them every day they constitute a major part of living. It's what we interact with. And what we interact with is one definition of living. Certianly there are others, and there is more diversity to identity and living than that, but you take this one thing, objects, throw them all out and replace them with a whole bunch of unfamiliar ones, or familiar objects that have been altered and you are left with only that core part of your identity that takes up residence solely in your brain and you begin to form new associations and a new identity with these objects. Don't mistake this for a material-capital association. I'm not talking only about the things that you buy. You can't buy skyline and you can't but the mountains. A rock and a road are equal objects in this assessment.

So we travel with a different identity of ourselves. For most people this identity is the traveler. It is a scratch pad identity which can be picked up at the beginning of a journey, manipulated how the journey will take it, and then allowed to slowly fade away after the journey ends.

Man working in a light bulb factory. The old fashion kind. You must work at night in order to effectively test the bulbs. Those kinds of light bulbs are being phased out. He's out of a job. Thinks that maybe it is a good idea to get rid of the old kind of light bulb because that will encourage industry competition and result in a better CFL.

Idea is a way to write fiction about my interpretations of the news.

Traveling Without a Guidebook

Maybe there are some good ones out there. Admittedly I've only tried a fraction of what's on offer. And while I'm making admissions, I must say that there is usually some essential information contained within the guidebooks that the traveler must have before departing.

That said, I want to cultivate an idea of going out there without the Lonely Planet. My reasons are twofold. First of all, the guidebook is by definition part of the global travel industry. From my experiences this has been a synthesis tool which takes local elements and combines them with a generic framework and employs itself in reducing the monetary possession of the traveler to zero while inflating its own multifarious coffers. If a guidebook lists something it becomes, out of necessity, a part of the industry infrastructure--there is too much foot traffic not to service the need. These are Hotels, Hostels, Restaurants, Bars, and Activities catering to an affluent, typically western, sensibility. Everybody looks for the place that hasn't been in the guidebook for long and still has sufficient attractions. These people can see that it only takes a couple of years for the new addition to be worked over. The economy adjusts itself, and a quick, safe barrier of distinction is erected between the town that existed there before, that always existed, and the new tourist infrastructure. This fact makes traveling to a place in the guidebook a less than enchanting experience.

Which leads me to my next reason. Traveling with a guidebook eliminates the sense of discovery that is behind the impetus for travel. When you can read about everything before you go and see it, it reduces the trip to something little more than an act of verification. As well, the guidebook which so efficiently lists out the attractions of a particular place limits the options of the traveler to places on that list. This eliminates chance, which eliminates a certain amount of risk and reward. But most importantly it limits the spatial possibilities of the traveler to a line. A connect the dots game, where the birds eye view from a map should reveal the possibilities of a pancake dropped from a high flight.

The most rewarding experiences that I had in Panama were, with the exception of Kuna Yala, which I found the guidebook entry on confusing and didn't read it anyways, not in the guidebooks. They were the result of a concoction of nerve impulses resulting in a decision that landed me in an amazing place whose images imprinted themselves on my brain and taught me how to think on different regions at a later date (travel is an experience, but so remote afterwards it's purpose can not be in anything at the present, but rather in instructing or cultivating a sense of wonderment which can later be generated outside of the quest situation because wonderment is useful as a mode of thought and essential as a resource for being). Part of this was because I felt like I was discovering something, and when that happened, I felt like I was really traveling.

In North America we embrace information culture (I have recently stopped calling this a worldwide phenomenon because the slum lifestyle is growing around cities growing at the pace of the internet and as a collective experience rivals that of the internet), and so wish to be informed completely on a subject before encountering it. Maybe we rob ourselves of something this way.

A guidebook is helpful. It is a good organizing tool. It is also efficient. It is a good way to trim trip-time down and pack as much into the allotted space as possible. Again, maybe this isn't a good thing. I think that you need some down time between seeing utterly novel and having amazing experiences. Otherwise the act of wonderment becomes common place. These places which should hold some emotional or spiritual or whatever kind of meaning can not dispense them on the traveler because he is still adjusting, sorting through the experiences of the last one.

The answer of course isn't one that is compatible with busy committed lives. Travel longer. That's all it takes. Without a guidebook, you just ask other people questions. They send you somewhere and you discover something amazing on the power of the spoken word, words from a stranger. Or you look on a map and see what draws you. In between inspiration towards inspirational places, walk the streets of the unfamiliar city you're using as a base. As long as you're surrounded by the unfamiliar you'll be traveling, and the brain process will make it all the more worthwhile.