Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.

1. Corporations are not more efficient governments. They are instead increasingly efficient money making machines. And while there's nothing at all wrong with money making machines -- indeed, wealth and growth depends upon them -- there is something fundamentally wrong with trusting these machines to restrain the drive for profits in the name of doing the right thing.

2. A friend sent this by way of encouragement. I like it:

The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic,
and to some extent even antibiotic -- in short, the closest thing to a
genuine panacea -- known to medical science is work. -Thomas Szas

I see Mr. Szas as a tremendously self-disciplined individual, yes?


3. The nicotine cessation project has progressed to the point where I have a cold and feel almost clairvoyant from having ceded over sleep to the energetic chemicals in my body asking whence the change in routine. I predict incredibly autumnal experiences for you today.


4. Two and a half cheers for T-Bone Burnett!

creative exploration defeating boredom

http://www.wefeelfine.org/mission.html

http://indexed.blogspot.com/


From Three Farmers on Their Way To A Dance:



The paradox of the self-attacking observer is this century’s hallmark, reached simultaneously in countless disciplines. Psychologists now know there is no test so subtle that it won’t alter the tested behavior. Economic tracts suggest that Model A would be inviolably true if enough people realized its inviolability. Political polls create the outcome they predict. Even in the objective sciences, physicists, in describing the very small, have had to conclude that they can’t talk about a closed box, but that opening the box invariably disturbs the contents.

These are the recognizable bywords and cliches of our times. Casual talk abounds with the knowledge that there is no understanding a system without interfering with it. This much I knew well. What did not occur to me until the second time through the Ford biographies is that this position is itself tangled. Generalized, it attacks itself. "All observations are a product of their own times. Even this one."

This recursion is critical, not because it places a limit on knowing, but because it shows the impossibility of knowing where knowledge leaves off and involvement begins. If there is no independent vantage point, if the sitter’s life is not separable from the biographer’s interfering observation, then each of the sitter’s actions must similarly be tied to biographical impulse. The two are inextricably tangled. Describing and altering are two inseparable parts of the same process, fusing into a murky totality

Now the zoologist on expedition to Africa to study the great apes is not freed by this paradox of the observer to make up figures or indulge in poetic whimsy. The scientist is obliged, however, to acknowledge that the presence of a field team and film cameras tells the apes as much about human motives as it tells humans about apes’ behavior in the wild.

With every action, we write our own biographies. I make each decision not just for its own sake but also to suggest to myself and others just what choices a fellow like me is likely to make. And when I look back on all my past decisions and experiences, I constantly attempt to form them into some biographical whole, inventing for myself a theme and a continuity. The continuity I invent in turn influences my new decisions, and each new action rearranges the old continuity. Creating oneself and explaining oneself proceed side by side, inseparably. Temperament is the act of commenting on itself.

it's just change. change happens all the time.

Fundamentals

There's something in a pop song about a boy who didn't call that warms heart cockles (Hey Boy by the blow). Same with a book about a crime whose victim is an altruist who doesn't the perp caught because he (the victim) had it coming (Samaritan by Richard Price). I am beginning to think there's really only four or five stories, and we just vary how they're told. This would be Hayden Frye-like.


Fungible Experiences

The world series is depressing me. I want more. IM basketball starts tomorrow. I am envisioning ACL tears and rampant palming. Please don't tell me any substantive news - I am on a diet.

Favorite smell on earth: sweatshirt bearing late October autumn smell (a bouquet of outside, leaves, impending winter, etc.) I think it only comes after wearing the said sweatshirt while engaging in some outdoor exertion for at least 50 minutes (arbitrary-sounding, but think about it - that's about right); the smell is more powerful if you somehow come into contact with the ground during this time. This morning I went on a long bike ride and at what point a five year old playing on the sidewalk held me at bay with a plastic sword and suggested i was under arrest and silly to have a blue bike. Then i played with my friend's dog. These are the events that have given the gift of autumn smell on sweatshirt. My longing to be able to play guitar and my love of this smell have been consistent, unmitigated features of my personality for like 15 years now. I bet these guys have that smell (they dont seem particularly happy, though)



Current strategy for living longer: Naked juice and organic chocolate, plus spinach and ricotta stuffed chicken. Don't front on pureed mango, bitches.

Back when I knew girls who baked banana bread

I suppose it's not unexpected to walk into a coffee shop and come upon a young male playing a Weezer song on an acoustic guitar. And to look at the audience and see a lot of unexamined facial piercing. But so after getting the coffee and thinking about it for a second, I began to feel like a prick for thinking the issue was with the crowd and not the person (this one here doing the writing) assigning blame for populating a space with the stock figures one may expect to find there. Maybe it's a shared responsibility, but I do know it's a sensation I haven't really succumbed to as much as I used to. I lot of shit people did used to make me viscerally angry, and a large subset of those things had to do with what may be called a sense of decorum animated with a conception of what was cool. Overt expressions of exuberance were not a good thing, is one example. Likewise trying really hard to accomplish something and being earnest about it in conversation without also mixing in little self-effacing diminishment of whatever the intended accomplishment is. There's been a lot of ink expended of late (like, say, the last decade) about the self-bounded universe of art and popular culture that takes "ironic cool" as its aesthetic-marketing touchstone. I think I still live in that universe a few days a month (like today with the coffee incident) but mostly it's been a relief to find myself having to devote energy and mindspace to more pressing (and potentially more banal) shit.

What is this about? It started with banana bread, which I genuinely missed. After that I dont know what happened. It's 2 oclock in the morning. i have that excuse. day three of nicotine cessation evidences a rather dramatic turn toward the darker recesses of my personality, but only on the inside. Walking away from people is better than saying whatever it is you want to say, sometimes.

Alarmism as a kind of warm blanket in the cool night of the present

Not that I’ve ever taken a class on microeconomics, macroeconomics, or political economy, but isn’t our general pattern of earning money and then buying and selling things, combined with the way our government collects money from us and then spends it in ways that may keep it in office, just about as apeshit crazy as it could possibly be? On like a larger order of Things That Do Not Make Sense, it is viable to be trillions of dollars in debt when foreign banks and/or individuals are propping up the dollar because of a sort of psychologically consternating double-bind akin to the Prisoner’s Dilemma? Is it viable to have an eight-year period that combines Republican domination with unfettered growth of government? When will it become ok to say, “you know, the economy’s big enough . . . let’s ride this inertia out for awhile?” I know I know I know – this all can work in the sense that fundamental breakdown is not an immediate risk, much less a foregone conclusion, as far as superstructure goes. Post-industrial economy 3, long-term sanity of a culture 0 – things really went to shit when hoboes became an endangered species, is what my reactionary side wants to plead, but really there are probably no answers one would need to capitalize, it’s just the totality of aggregate circumstances built from frenetic individual lives.
This is not anything but a case of plangent griping about inexorable human infirmity.
Which is to say I drank too much coffee and my stomach hurts.

the man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be

Having a peripatetic nature means having to come up with excuses for short attention spans and aimless wandering. It means risking the epithet "lost soul" and giving the impression of being allergic to stability and all the evolutionary values said to be genetically selected for. It may also mean a kind of perpetual escape, never knowing a place well enough to have its tentacles overwhelm you and change you in the overwhelming. It may also mean succumbing to weakly constituted romanticism, fueled by a lifetime of stories whose fiction always proves so unbearably enticing. It is the fix for nostalgic addiction.

More to come.

Things that make sense don't always make it easier to get up in the morning. Having an alarm does, though. At this point, what percentage of individuals in the world have seen a painting that triggered something in them? What if by painting it's allowed to mean "commercial" - or is that too quaint, vis a vis the general acknowledgment that advertising is the new art in terms of its ability to captivate one time for every hundred times it exists as background noise?


i am taking a walk that may turn out to be long.

We still believe in the arbitrary power of the non sequitur

"

It took centuries of dressing
to make this nakedness "




talib is vanna white, Mos Def is Carey Grant/Jack Nicholson/Chester Himes/James Madison/Mr. Rogers/Baraka/[any other dude worthy of your attention and, if I may suggest, undying respect]

Douchebag

Hey Douchebag -

You've got a really bad bite. A really bad one, right.

all the William Perrys in the world can't save you now

Was there such a thing as "a photographic memory" before the camera was invented? What do you call the condition of being intolerant, to the point of paralysis or rage, of having to wait in line? Have you heard of the 7Up, 14Up, 21UP, etc. documentary, which follows a group of British people from different backgrounds in seven year intervals as they grow and carve out their lives? How come we don't see more of that, what with our having the technological means and all? Does everyone have a certain kind of desire that will never be satiated (food, God, sex, silence, orchids, paintings, money, etc.) or are there some people for whom "yearnings" qua yearnings are really at the low end of the spectrum? If there are such people, do you think there lives sort of just hum along until they die? Without proffering another tired version of Manichean soul/body division, would these people who do not really feel all that much desire for anything be more or less evolved than us regular carrot-chasers?

Problem being, your acts of kindness are always so random

As incongruous as a digital prayer, fireworks shot off in the sky tonight. The display was standard-issue blooming flowers, with the occasional montage of red-white-blue, the better to procure the crowd's oohs. It is homecoming, is why the fireworks. The grocery store clerk, whose fingernails were painted a very banging shade of phosphorescent green, proved a fount of wisdom on what homecoming entails. Visitors that span generations will arrive later in the week to pledge continuing fealty to their alma mater and get very very drunk. The young are already quite restless and the empty cases of Miller Lite are already appearing in lawns just off campus. T-shirts that say "if found drunk and passed out, take to the Dome [football stadium] ASAP" are selling faster than [insert cliche] at the undergrad library. The marketing strategy came from the braintrust that is my class's student government representatives. According to a recent email, "we are looking at something like a two-fold return on the initial investment," so at least the catering at the next class function will have chocolate-covered strawberries. Sigh.

I have a feeling I will make an excellent curmudgeon, starting at like age 32. I do not want to get ahead of myself. I hold out hope that the weekend (which starts tomorrow around here) will be baseball-oriented and based out of a cabin in WI. Unless someone volunteers the use of a cabin in WI, it will just be baseball-oriented. I still can't not be awake, which is distinguished from not being able to sleep in inexpressible but not intangible ways. Also, did you know that the use of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is younger than my father? Stupid me, thinking we've been blessed by Divine Providence since before my Norwegian forebears boated over to become part of us.

Incomprehensability as a kind of neurological affliction

convoluted thoughts on matters unrelated to baseball or the legal definitions of negligence, of which I have little present understanding, prompted by reading the news reports on the Jenna six in LA and the deTocquevillian commentaries that followed in their wake -

1) Do you think Reginald Denny ever harbors in his heart a desire to watch the footage of the day he got bricked? Or, more pointedly: a desire to encounter each of his attackers lying prone on the street, asphalt chunks at hand, with no witnesses? I've been thinking about Reginald Denny, in fits and spurts, for about two weeks now. As far as victims of irrational mayhem go, he's both emblem and enigma. I have no particularly strong interest in examining what thoughts might permeate the collective consciousness of a riot, though I did - at 14 - think the Sublime song about the riots was worth listening to. (That says more about 14 year olds than artistic defenses of otherwise indefensible behavior, but . . .) It does seem odd to recall that "environmental factors" were cited as an affirmative defense, if not justification, of what was clearly a brutal act inflicted on a stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color. Ok, then, the other coin's side: what about the guy who did the bricking? Does he brag about it to his friends or regret it in a way that might signal more than the most minimal sliver of atonement?
Is atonement an all or nothing proposition, or does it exist on a spectrum of possibility?


2) A crime that lingers in my memory -

the family doctor, accused of sexually molesting his foster daughter, pleads guilty. at sentencing, his wife stands up and berates the judge, an instance of courtroom drama that reignites the town's internal debate, which has been as about contentious as Midwestern small town debates can be. The local paper covers the story and righteous indignation spills over in letters to the editor invoking violations of the public trust and "what has the world come to?" lamentations. I read it all, eating a bowl of Lucky Charms and feeling uncertain about things I didn't really even want to contemplate but knew, at 12 or 13, were part of what ideas like "justice" and "sin" were all about.
And none of the publicity or whispered conversations in the aisles grocery store overcame the central fact that all the actors in the drama were known to us. This is the guy who diagnosed the six or seven cases of strep throat I came down with as a kid, stitched up cuts, set a broken finger, etc. He seemed like the archetype of the friendly, compassionate small town doctor (Cf. Field of Dreams); the ring finger on his right hand was gone, severed in a farming accident. The divergence between the man I knew and the man portrayed in the paper were paralyzing and created a tension beyond anything even a cursory inquiry into the illusion/reality distinction could bear. Weeks go by, and the story goes dormant, except for the occasional mention of the case by a teacher or adult.
Years later - probably close to a decade even - I learn that a sizable portion of the adults I knew, including those who vilified the doctor in public, had come to the conclusion that he was not the story's villain, but its veiled martyr. According to the revised version, the doctor's biological son, two years older than me, was actually the molester. The doctor confessed to the crime he didn't commit to spare a son he would from then on no longer be able to face. He goes to jail, does his time, and he and the rest of the family meet with the son once a year at Christmas but have no contact other than that. The wife's outburst at sentencing becomes intelligible, if only as a symptom of the fundamentally fucked truth to which she alone probably has access and from which nothing good could be gleaned. When I first heard all this, from a mother of a friend who was more like a brother, growing up, I couldn't really breathe and even now the attempt to parse it all out, as a thing that actually happened, proves to be too exhausting.

pale green things that need sunlight

That last post was not meant to be hostile, which it appears, now, to be, but more like here's a joke I thought was funny.

If you've read Crime and Punishment and remember the dream about the vodka drunk guy who beat down his horse and defied anyone who attempted to intervene with the truism that it's my property and I'll do with it what I want, then you may understand me when I say that a self is a serious thing to have. And not serious in a bad way, necessarily, and not serious in a "heady" way as a Hippie girl I once knew liked to nominate a certain kind of gravitas appertaining to a given situation, but serious nonetheless, and meaningful, too. What sayeth you? is a question permeating the ether. indeed.

You Want To Be 19? - Go ahead

a fuck you friday, brought to you by mon-thurs.

"Taut" is a superlative

1. Back in the day, when January hid the sun behind big gray Gothic buildings and the logic of walking through the packed snow of the park on the way home from an ebullient night prevailed over any instinctual self-regard that stemmed from wearing Vans and gold-toe socks that hugged ankles jealously, it seemed like it might not matter if Kleenex were available, because sleeves were, and the fact that you didn't own a brightly colored scarf was secondary to the fact that you couldn't feel your toes.
Subsequent periods lacked the clean reliance you glean from existing in a stable frame of reference. It became unfeasible, for reasons of being a thousand miles away, to climb into the window of that old abandoned church near Salonica's, which was done with the express intention of being scared shitless. For that matter, scaring myself shitless became less of an imperative and more of an accident, like locking your keys in the car. No one I knew huffed gas or slammed Tussin for fun and no one rode around in cars to kill time, so it wasn't like high school, which was a good thing; there were no bus rides to ethnic enclaves available and I didn't have access to comfortable chairs in a library for napping purposes, so it wasn't like college, which was a necessary step. Somewhere back there, the next placard flipped, as it always does - a qualitatively neutral observation, that, not sepia-toned Scorcesesque pining - and new oddities availed themselves before becoming assimilated back into the ordinary.
Eventually - always "eventually" - having friends who lived in double-wides with non-functioning fireplaces and eating mac and cheese with hot dogs for extra protein made an extraordinary amount of sense, as did sitting in the workplace bathroom with lights off for ten minutes because it seemed like those ten minutes made the rest of the day crawl less slowly by. I guess it's a matter of context, which isn't saying much but is more than saying nothing at all, and being open to the idea of context makes those random memories more tangibly explicable and strange at the same time.




2. There is still time to pay attention to the baseball. That is for certain.