News!

I must take a break now, from moving file cabinets up three flights. It's recycling day, and I had resolved to throw most of the files away. But I was stopped by these mountains of paper of my very own accomplishment. Letters written, students recommended, faculty evaluated. Chinese teaching materials, and other things I seem to keep thinking I'd be interested in some day.

Once before, already, I had emptied out these same file cabinets. There are only so many cycles a person can go through before there's nothing left to toss. And so I moved the first one, not even believing myself that it could be done alone. But so long as you take it only one step at a time, and work out the angles and the balance, it isn't necesssarily very much about muscle.

Still, the second one weighs a bit heavier on my mind. We all live this life of Sisyphus, condemned to push the rock back up the hill, knowing that it will come crashing down, and that we will have to start again.

Our condemnation is the foreknowledge, but the act is no more difficult than lots of things we do because we want to. In sport, in transport, in report and import-export. We're always moving and expending lots of effort. Even my U-haul boxes encourage me to mark the first the second the third the fourth time I will use them, so that they don't get wasted or recycled too early. As if I'm expected to be in some perpetual motion home to home. Save energy and cost, and keep your packing materials always ready to hand!

And it's not all bad, since were I to stay put I never would clean out various drawers and closets and cubbyholes and garages, quite evidently judging from the stuff I discovered after having forgotten about it completely and sometimes still couldn't quite discard. Rituals of renewal are or should be important. Wholesale cleanings out and paintings and refurbishments. And then the rock can start its uphill climb again, no different really from the downhill rush. It's all a matter of perspective.

We are at such at time with our country. Lots of people smarter than me wonder how to re-fund that fourth pillar of our democracy, the free press. Lots of people smarter than me actually do believe that the blogosphere will do it; that this empowering of thinking people to write whatever's on our minds, will keep our cappos honest in their deflowering of the earth.

Except that so much of the time, bloggers are just like someone in a crowd pointing up into the sky and gazing there. Lots of heads will turn. There may still be nothing there. No matter how many people are free to write, no one of them may have access.

Edited copy, with writers who have statutory access to the halls of power is essential to our republic, plain and simple. One whistlblower may be all it takes to bring down the corrupt and the dishonest. But plenty of times, there is no-one in the room to blow the whistle. Everyone there is in on the take, and that's by careful pre-arrangement.

The problem with the news has nothing to do with free copy on the Internet. The problem is that all the time we used to have to read the paper over breakfast or during our train-commutes has dissolved into paying rapt attention to the traffic jam we're stuck in. Breakfast is on the run, or in the car, and we must steal moments during breaks or in between work emails to get a sniff of the news from the company-provided Internet.

And what time we do have not at work, if we have any at all apart from our Blackberry tethers, we'd like to spend in family matters or self-indulgent entertainments.

We might spend a little time on Facebook, keeping up with friendly spam. Facebook is like our newspaper used to be. No need to read all the emails, just browse the headlines from those we're interested to keep up with; so much more efficient than to make epistolary rounds by phone or paper or electronic targeted thought. Which no one has time to read anyhow, if you take any time to write it.

Between Facebook and Google News our very Republic has been squeezed right out of existence, and we dare complain that Obama has let us down!!! This trouble has nothing to do with the medium. It has to do with how we organize our time, and what we do with our collective want. We want to drive. We want to spend that much of our disposable income on our wheels. We want there to be no choice about it, and we are desperately afraid that without that industry our economy really will melt down beyond the ability of government printing presses to bring it back.

No sane person wants to live in an economy run by bureaucrats. The bureaucratic structure embodies the Peter Principle, which means that those in power are always and only the ones who failed at risk taking. By definition, they are on the make or finished. These are not the folks you want to have decision making power over you. Anyone who's tried out banking in pre-capitalist China knows what I'm talking about.

But no sane person wants to live in an economy without bureaucratic controls on what the risk takers are allowed to do. And there really are ways to encourage creativity among the risk-averse classes. Just as there are ways for creativity to survive schooling. I'd guess it has something to do with the balance among standardized testing, performance review, and political correctness.

No sane person wants to trust those in power to wield it in our best interests. And the solution is to take some time that's not on the company nickel, over breakfast perhaps, or during a sane commute (perhaps you can do your exercising on a bicycle on the way to work, and take the time you would have spent at the gym??). Take some time to read the news. Peruse the headlines, and then look a little bit more deeply at the ones which peak your interest.

The web is no better or worse than paper for this. Sites like pikk.com, can help to replicate the newspaper's sense of location, and approximate the efficiency of scanning the open pages of an actual paper. Your renewed interest will guarantee the value of location and interest-specific advertising, and so those investigative reporters can be paid again.

But the automobile has got to go. There can be no negotiation on that one, or we're all screwed in every direction. It's not just the hot air, or the cost of the energy. It's our very survival as humanity which is at stake here. Driven, we are beastly.

And oh yeah, the news! My house will close before Christmas. The delay is all blamed on the unconscionable and constipated banking system. What are they doing with all that printed money, one might really like to know. They sure seem awfully careful all of the sudden to lend any of it back out. Well, Merry Christmas then, to one and all! Just a few days early. Though not soon enough for Santa's shopping. Well, there's always credit.

Sisyphus Rocks!!

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There is some meditative practice which I have never learned, which leads the mind to stillness. There are bodily rehearsals which I will never accomplish which remove the mind from a flow at one with qi. There is kung-fu or skill which I will never master which could allow me finally to deploy my metaphorical blade, of words, to find that space between to separate that which only apparently was conjoined. To split apart the armour, of words, and let some light in.

My mind quiets only at the end of a wild drive, through an ice storm, passing overturned and spun out trucks and sports-cars, driving much of the time with only my little finger, finally with jazz on the radio playing as though in some living room, the sound system is that good, into the inky and greasy mist of New York City. This drive was that insane, and yet only into that final tumult was my mind fully reciting ommmmmmmmmmmm.

Right to my daughter's doorstep, right through Wall St. canyons, still not losing my fine sense of direction, I traced my geographic mandala to its source and its conclusion, hardly stopping, and even, still, enjoying the cabby's look at those streets. My car now, at 300,000 miles approaching what a cab does, and starting also to show those rattles which cabs all used to have. My own hips from driving, feeling the way those cabs used to sound, and needing new ones like the newer cabs, all so miraculously smooth. That's the main thing which has changed in New York. The cabs no longer rattle. They have fine joint replacements.

I still enjoy threading through the maze, and accelerating to keep the pace of the stop lights up or down the avenues, finding impossible squeezes through and among pedestrians or construction or other fast moving objects who also must master that same flow, with awareness almost not aware, though never insane like what they do on freeways in L.A. I can only imagine.

Thank God I have a quiet reptile brain, which would keep obsessive compulsive types returning to check the water the lights the locks before leaving this home or that one. Mine only sends me back for what I've actually forgotten, the screwdriver to remove the cover frame so that the boat can be transported. But not, apparently, the flashlight for removal after dark. I'd need a human brain for that; one which wouldn't go roaring past the pornographic undersides of upended monster trucks and SUVs, amazed that there can be enough first responders in reserve to be there already, though the hulk still steams and spins its wheels.

I drink whenever I return from long drives. I drink to endure the imprisonment of sitting still. I drink not to excess, just to the point of falling asleep in the midst of Julie & Julia which would inform me about how people make proper new beginnings writing blogs or learning how to master a man's world. My pacing is all wrong, and the rate of imbibing exceeds the attention I can spend on the moving picture, never feeling sleepy at the wheel no matter how over my edge I've driven. Well, unless and until it's maybe 3 AM, at which point the road starts jumping around. The way the movie does, and I'm asleep.

This reptile brain in human beings has such a fine and important function. It only signals "fit" or "not" taking stock of the entire picture the way a good film must while cutting shots from different angles made at different times. In an unquiet mind, the reptile brain keeps calling shots, compelling returns to something which must be laid out perfectly, and only then will allow hazarding out. Pieces all arranged. The ritual prayer. They have pills for that now.

Our major industries now also defeating themselves, railing against publicly funded healthcare, when really the level playing field would so relieve them of their burden. Or perhaps they really do just want slaves, beholden to their largesse in granting, what, insurance? Railing against regulation for the sake of the environment or the stability of the financial system, when there are very very few who prefer to operate as sociopaths, denying claims to patients to whom they're bound by contract. Secreting poisons beneath their very own earth. They truly only want that everyone should be playing by the same rules, except that they are afraid to lose their advantage.

The cappo at the top, now there's the real sociopath, who makes so much so much money on everyone else's fear, and so the team spirit overcomes the worker bees and they actually do start to believe that what is good for the company is actually good for the world and certainly for them. No different, really, than the person who gets a charge out of cheating on their taxes. Winning - getting the better of - someone in a financial dealing. It's all good.

Until it goes bad. Along my way yesterday - no, it was the day before the day before already - I endured some earnest theologian from the "9/11 Truth Commission." He was convincing. He doesn't know who brought down the World Trade Towers, but he knows it couldn't have been those planes alone. He knows that Cheney and Rumsfeld were in the middle of it. He knows that Bush's brother owned the company with the security contracts on the buildings.

On the outside, we all wonder at the code of silence which could keep such an operation secret. We want to know only about the families of the people on those planes, if they were fictional, and are pretty certain they couldn't be in on any conspiracy, no matter how cleverly written.

So, were the planes then filled with explosives of the sort to melt steel? And were the buildings also peppered? And were the pilots secretly guided or goaded in their grim design? Or were there only acts of omission, to allow an opportunity to be taken opportunistically for a design already set on some other level?

We do know that every smart bomb which is launched, or for that matter manufactured, will already be known to kill that many innocent civilians. We do know and accept these rationalizations, and buy the argument of collateral damage. We know how many more both of the innocent and of our own so poorly paid soldiers would have been killed with and by and behind the older cruder weapons. Once the objective is accepted, then the collateral damage must be accepted as well.

Getting the objective accepted is by far the more difficult part, and one might say the collateral there was also that much more finely tuned than was even the case with Pearl Harbor. I think that is what this "truth commission" claims. That the objective would not be accepted unless and until some precisely calibrated collateral damage became accomplished. And maybe there was even some secret knowledge that the Trade Towers would have to come down. Were already weakened. Were already targeted. Would fit the bill.

The American people are that unlikely to accept the fact of carnage and mayhem in our future when the oil runs out before we have prepared for it. So that even the stepping up of our addiction becomes a tactic in a strategic war for true world domination. I'm fairly certain that these are the games which get played in Skull and Bones. I'm pretty sure these folks are prepped for world domination. Only ever negotiating price and timetable and musical directors' chair.

These things are perfectly obvious, and require no conspiracy theorizing to confirm. So many of us feel bad for Tiger Woods, now that his behavior has been outed as at some odds with his fine image. We calculate what he has lost, and imagine ourselves somehow in his same shoes, what?? My young daughter taught me this as we were driving home. That it was his wholesome image which brought him all those contracts, and now we should feel bad for him when they get clawed back? This is business, pure and simple folks, and there was a lot at stake for him to keep it clean. I guess he tried really hardly, but you know if your sleep is disturbed, you really shouldn't be counting on Ambien. You'll just do crazy things while half aware. You need something much stronger, like Michael Jackson tried for. I'm not saying either of them was guilty of anything. I'm just saying that they couldn't sleep.

So we do know, or we should, what the leaders of the free world, so called, would do if they had full and complete discretion. Which they don't, and we should know that too. We may want them to do the dirty deeds they do in our name, for so long as we don't need to know all the details.

But I did catch enough of Julie and Julia to understand that what we don't want is for innocent people to be used as pawns. (That young blogger's day job was to handle calls from distressed relatives of the dead and missing from 9/11. To turn away and buy off their outrage. How many billions were spent that way, creating plausible deniability of claims for outrage?)

The trouble with focus on the trade tower conspiracies is that it deflects focus from the actual accomplishment of the objective the tower's collapse actually did enable. Metaphorical war was turned literal, in our name, and made nearly perpetual. Armed Blackwater (you can't change your name away from responsibility, Z) contractors make more and have more deniability than sworn upholders of our Constitution. These are not mysterious truths which need one single person to break the code of silence, as if he would be thought sane if he were to do so. As if he would be allowed to remain sane if he were to do so.

I actually might not mind, and it doesn't make me very proud to say it, but I might not mind if this weren't all being done somehow in the name of Jesus. That disconnect between image and reality just really makes me mad. But there again, I think you have plausible deniability, since old W. just might be stupid enough to accept the man-made literal Jesus, and Cheney and Rummie, whom nobody has accused of being altar boys, might be just cynical enough to take full advantage. Earnest preachers from all sorts of pulpits buy this story, and plug it in to some mantra of eternity, with geopolitical players and roles all mapped out in advance. These things don't require conspiracy theorizing to see in their full relief and detail.

I think it's only when the clear and present actual Jesus makes his appearance in our hearts that the big question mark at the center of all sorts of conspiracy theories can get erased. I don't think very many murderers march forth with their confessions. I don't think very many cappos find true religion before the end of their days. I think there's far far too much rationalization available to combat that kind of truth.

Which is, pretty much, how our reptile brains relate to the rest of us. Making our decisions before we know they've been made, and then we can use our cognitive powers to rationalize them. That's how abusive families stay intact. That's how the Mormons build their empire. That's what keeps rosary beads turning. And it's not, by far, all bad.

But family secrets kept in closets have power only to destroy. The chance for love and light. The chance for actual transformation of our lives. It is an act of faith, then, to refrain from calculations of the cost to achieve your objectives. Using anyone, no matter how mildly, is still too high a cost. Abusing anyone, no matter how obliquely, is still too high a cost. No matter your riches, you will still die, the same as the rest of us, but not with easy mind.

You will think it is, because you will have bought your own rationalizations. But your reptile mind will catch you up. Your workers will betray you. Your wife will not be bought off. There is a decent soul among the Blackwater operatives. There is a decent soul inside our government. All it takes is one, and I will never bank on perfect human craft. Never.

I risk my life each and every day, although I understand that car mechanics don't have perfect motives. I understand my fellow drivers' skill cannot be up to mine. I understand that I myself am far from a perfect driver, though demonstrably pretty good and courteous to a fault.

I wish that I had an actual choice. Not about driving down to NYC, which was simply a choice to afford comfort and leisure and time together with my daughter. I should not spoil her so abusively, I know. But I mean in general, so that I would not be required to partake in this conspiracy of destruction of our earth. This misdeployment of so very many smart weapons with so many talented Kamikaze pilots at their wheels.

It takes no great conspiracy theory to understand just why we do this. We want to. We like it. And I do have to confess, I like it probably a lot more than you do, or I wouldn't have taken a job which required 50,000 miles each year. I wouldn't have moved that far away from my daughters. I wouldn't have made the 100 mile trip 4 times each and every week and accepted full responsibilty that it was fully my decision and that I would require no help, at all, from their mom smug and snug at their center.

Because I too wanted out from my imprisonment, and have developed a full on ecology of survival. My stomach, co-evolved with alcohol, seems to know how to reprocess water since I'm not dehydrated, but drink only coffee and beer (I exaggerate shamelessly). It's like a camel's hump, I'm certain. Each time I drive, I am that blasted from myself and so when I get home there is nothing else to do but drink and sleep and rise again another day to do the same thing.

My rosary beaded circuits are complete now. My mandala fully traced. My last blizzard run down the pike toward New York or New England, my last circuit but a couple between my old house and my older one.

I have no conclusion. There is no conclusion. There is no final answer, but I will keep practicing my words, looking for a kind of kung-fu where they take over for themselves without my intervention. Where they find their own right way to open cracks for the light to enter in. To help catalyze the terrible libido stored in money, say, for deployment in other ways from terror and bought fictional security.

I race to find my place, standing still in motion, there will be no closure, it would seem, on house or love or career or tale, but things will fall to dust. They always do. That much can be counted on.

On Catholic Autopilot

Richard Dawkins was right that getting brought up Catholic constitutes a kind of child abuse. Rote gets substituted for understanding, so that men can use you for their purposes. Guilt is built up until it feels inborn. You deviate, you cringe. And here in Buffalo, the most Catholic city in the country, it is almost guaranteed that you can't start up something new. The certain response is mockery; a kind of sure, yeah, go ahead and give it a try, but you'll be back working for your dad soon enough. Buffalo is the place were dreams meet reality!

This is how abused people must respond. Free thinking is scary. Around here, good enough really is good enough, and maybe that's how it should be. The more we talk excellence, the more it seems another hail Mary pass for what at best is snow-bound and mediocre. Suicide in Buffalo, after all, is dramatically redundant.

And yet somehow there remain theatrical productions of almost every sort nearly every night of every week no matter what they do in the Big City. My very favorite is having a kind of NPR-style might-go-out-of-business fundraiser tonight, where I hope to see you. Live music and a reading from subversive Santa!

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Urban farming takes root in Buffalo too - and I even heard about an urban fish farm, taking advantage of the fact of basements, no matter the condition of their wooden cover. Why not, right? Water holds incredible quantities of heat, and can be charged up when everyone else is driving. Sell the fish and pay for the heat! We sure have lots of water.

I'm writing on Catholic autopilot now too. I have a simple mantra, and I can't seem to find any way to say it better, so I just recite it over and over like counting my rosary beads. Eventually, my I is expendable even to myself. That's the trouble with having an agenda. Or the hope.

Without any agenda, in my dreams, I was loved just for my being. That time so long ago now that I can't even project myself there, when I had no sense of shame and no need to perform on any level. Before the zits could make me insecure, such were our worries in the suburbs. Before there was any need for comparison shopping. Before even Mom had hopes for me. I've been beside myself for love, but never could do anyone quite proud enough. I've been oppressed by me.

So, as you know, I've fixated on a spice rack, my agenda for yesterday left over from the day before. I have no room now in my cupboards for all the junk I've mashed into this apartment. I'm too tired to throw any more away. I found some hooks to put coffee mugs outside the tiny cupboards. For those, I had to take a walk into my color-blind spot; the other way in my cognitive map of this post-modern urban landscape. Underneath the rainbow style of my own neighborhood, lurk cool divides which still tend black and white.

My ears were bitten from the driving snow, and I had to drive myself in any case to larger shops farther afield. My car's heater core is as old and clogged as my heart, and as expensive to replace. I became a Tibetan for a day then, on my Xanadu quest to find a spice-rack without resorting to the Internet. My excuse was that I had to stop by to fix my daughter's car, which was too far away to walk. And the subway - not quite on my cognitive map either - passes by no likely spots for spice racks.

Tibetan quests are always the goal they seek, where what you learn along the way provides relief for the vacancy of the goal once accomplished. The nothing after the layers of the onion get peeled. The fact that I could easily have assembled lumber, screws, and paint to build my spice rack before burning all that gas, in a fraction of the time it took to search.

I need more space for food in my cupboards, and I can't see cinnamon from pepper flakes up at eye level behind the rest. Cinnamon tastes really weird on pizza, trust me, and would never make it out of Buffalo like once-garbage chicken wings did.

Driving then, absurdly around cars sidelined by the inevitable bent fenders of first snow, my ears perked up when NPR Science Friday did a radio show on patenting genes. Genetic defectives who need to know whether to lop off their breasts must pay a company which owns that patent to find out if they've got the patented gene.

This is serious business, and people wonder out loud if there's any charity left in the world. Or if the only way there is to harness greed. Or if greed is just motive, and no trouble with that, except what ever happened to research motivated simply to true our understandings with reality? Is saving lives the same as selling widgets?

Like all such things, the point is reduced to minuscule punning differences among meanings. What is nature and what is artifice, what is science and what is art, what is discovery, what is invention? What is the difference anyhow between natural law and laws of nature? Perhaps the only difference is when a claim gets staked. Eureka! I've deciphered the code of nature, and now I claim it for my own.

There are elaborated sets of terms, and manuals of usage, to guard the way in to any advanced discussions. Citations which can and must be made to true these words and get at what essentially has already reached some point beyond absurdity. But you would never know it without a life's worth of study. So go, and be the first, and for a time you'll own it. You'll be filthy rich before the courts catch up. Before the side effects take hold. Before the Ponzi scheme that is life's perpetuation falls apart.

Still, I was compelled to listen since I've been following this discussion for quite a while. I moved Ira Flatow over to my internet-connected phone so I could continue listening even while connecting the battery charger to her car so that my daughter has some independence after I bring her home from college. I have no memory of what I did, and so when her mother called to wonder if it was I who hooked the car up, I could only conclude that it obviously must have been. Would someone else have done it?

Perhaps it is natural that Buffalo provides a center for Secular Humanism. We are among the most churchgoing and religious cities in the land - for some reason, I think we're at the very top. Perhaps it is inevitable that a scholar at the center of these debates about patenting genes should have gotten his start here, as my student at a school with Catholic roots; at a University with aspirations to aspire to greatness but where good enough is still good enough. And as executive director of that center for atheistic rationality. I also, did I mention, am not nor ever have been Catholic.

Apart from the snow, I know that driving during the shopping season is a dream here in Buffalo. I know that the traffic is infinitely more slight than wherever you live. And yet I had no patience at all to navigate and negotiate parking, to wonder from which side the hit might come; the slide; the crash. Walking across parking lots rather than to commit the absurdity to move my car from big box to big box, and realizing that once inside the car, the drivers no longer see those of us walking as real.

I had no patience, and so I entered a dream state myself, detached from the car, detached from my frozen feet and ears, marvelling that anyone could find anything they needed among the endless shelves overstocked with want. Spice racks galore, though most came intact with certified-sanitary jars full already. I could find nothing that I needed, and only things that I might want but have no room for. Bizarrely, some of these over-elaborations cost half the price I would ultimately spend for simple racks to hold the jars I already own for free when paying, supposedly, for their contents.

I finally found my spice rack at a local hardware chain store. This one's a holdout from just before national big-box, but just after the local stores got destroyed. They somehow cling to their niche by remaining small enough to navigate in a single bite, but large enough to overlap the really big box places. A sort of convenience store for between Home Despot forays.

Where people follow you and wonder what you're looking for in imitation of the old days. My old friend of a friend Danny Nevearth used to advertise them on TV. He was king of radio in Buffalo once, when radio was king. He turned out to be nearly as engaging on TV ads.

Now there's someone else who preserves his moves for those TV advertisements - I imagine Danny became too expensive? I wonder if he gets a royalty from those moves, or are there still things you can't patent? I saw a Julia Roberts look-alike on an Internet ad (you can see her too, just above, and see if you agree). Maybe it really was her? But, no you can't imagine she'd stoop to that. I wonder what the laws are for impersonation?

Well, I impersonate a real person most of the time. Or maybe all of us just simulate a time when something seemed more real. Maybe we're all just acting out by rote, behaviors which once were real. As in my writing, I just rehearse my stupid mantra. There's no one here anymore. There's only rote.

Or. Well, I've got to go now and see how the battery charged on my daughter's dormant car. I'm the energizer bunny. I'm on autopilot. There is a drug now which can be administered just as you are exciting memories, and which will selectively destroy them. It shows promise for traumatic stress syndromes. White-out for your disorders.

I also learned - on the radio of all places - that there is evidence that simple rote learning of phonics actually does build "white matter" in the brain for kids with trouble reading. I taught for a while at a school for dyslexic boys - I think that term's fallen out of favor - where we all learned to drill like that. That was when whole language was in and out of favor, and everyone was gifted.

Gosh, I remember trying to write a paper for a graduate course in Progressive Education, to qualify the certainties of "whole language". No wonder I always sound the fool - the science isn't there yet.

So, maybe rote will bring Jesus back down to earth after all. Maybe the very words will be made flesh, like white matter in the brain. Maybe if we just white out the guilty remains of magical thinking that if you break this chain of spam. And maybe with practice the brain can be reconstructed, and the sense will come back in to the words. Maybe we've just forgotten how to read. Maybe not.

Slouching Toward Christmas

You may have noticed, gentle reader, how many times I refer to having drowned once. You may get the idea that this was some kind of major event in my life. I'm not really all that certain that it was.

I really did experience my life passing by in an instant, but I honestly don't think I would have remembered it if I hadn't remarked on it at the time. Rather like a dream, which if you try to make yourself recall it in that liminal zone just as you are waking up, all you have left upon actual waking is the frustrating sense that there was something worth remembering. The reality of the dream becomes impossible to recapture.

By now, my memory of my life passing before mind's eye is but a conviction that it really did happen; what philosophers call a memory of a memory. It's not as if I can recall the actual event, which if you think about it would be pretty weird. That would be like dying again all over again, and then I'd be in some state of suspended super-animation or something. Like Chuang-tzu's butterfly dreaming.

You can already tell where I'm going with this, right? It's plenty embarrassing to me, who has made all sorts of fun of religionists, and who can almost not abide anyone who takes their religion all that seriously.

But you know, supposing that there actually was a Christ, everyone pretty much agrees that he wasn't all that much at the time. Sane and rational people have to agree that all sorts of traditional stories were piled on to that small life to true it according to what we wanted to believe.

Our Jesus joined all sorts of prior saints supposedly born on December 25 - or perhaps the winter solstice - of a virgin mother. Our Jesus fulfilled prophecies in the sense that Monday quarterbacking fulfills your genius calling plays. The words get trued to fit the expectations.

But over time, the conviction that there was an actual event, even though it overpowers the event itself, can also serve to heighten the actual event's reality.

My own drowning is important to me mostly as a metaphor. It reminds me that there are no real endings, although there are important boundaries. It reminds me that the boundaries are what make feelings possible. And that ultimately there is no distinction between the tenor and the vehicle in proper metaphors.

There is absolutely nothing that we can know for certain, since at its most reductive, reality is always known metaphorically through some theoretical trueing. Our instruments become not so much lenses at their limits, as metaphorical reifying machines, and the Chinese couplet works better than our Western grounding in the physical.

This is not so much a pun as a statement of the limits to rational understanding. So God coming down to earth; the making real of what can only be abstraction, has at least as much sense in reality as it does as punny statement.

Which is the Christ story too. Almost as though the moment of our awakening to the cosmic joke is the moment of God's actual coming to earth. As if the real Jesus that we celebrate really couldn't be the one we're waiting for. Since the one we celebrate was an elaborated fiction. And the real one depends on our collective awakening to the fiction of extravagant ideas like that of God.

In whose mind's eye, humanity remains but a twinkle.

White Out!

Since you know I now write from Buffalo, you must know what I'm talking about when I say "white out." Or maybe I mean that stuff we used to have on our desks way back when we used typewriters. There used to be jokes about blonds painting their computer screens with whiteout to fix typos. I guess blonds (and machines) don't do metaphors.

In a real whiteout - not the kind right now where there's an undifferentiated white fog blowing across the parked cars - your brain loses the ability to orient you and you can walk in circles getting nowhere just like some people did in our great blizzard of '77.

I've been moving from a house to a much smaller apartment these past many days, which has meant sorting lots of stuff and sending lots of stuff to the dumpster or the Goodwill (actually, AmVets, Salvation Army, St. Vincent dePaul, spreading things around a bit).

It surprises me somewhat that every little thing I grab elicits some familiar memory. Even the tiniest little oddball screws which I'd thrown into the oddball jar can sometimes remind me of the thing it came from, and the process I was involved in, getting it out. It makes an interesting trip down memory road to move. Like total recall at death, but a little more spaced out.

Some of the stuff is big, like the wetsuit and SCUBA regulator which I just tossed into the scrap heap. I'd actually squeezed myself into that wetsuit one last time not all that long ago, trying to rehabilitate my diving memories. My buddy and now business partner got me into it on a kind of dare. And it was really fun, until the regulator valve seat - which I'd repaired the way I do everything - blew. I actually did laugh all the way to the surface, but I didn't make a fool of myself since the water covered up the guffaw.

I must have long since gotten over any fear of drowning I should have (the time my life did flash before mind's eye). I seem pretty cool about making a fool of myself too, and that used to really paint me into a corner.

Throwing that stuff out was easier than you might think. Those memories aren't going anywhere - I mean they're pretty well fixed - and if I were to want to try SCUBA diving again, I think the equipment has evolved quite a bit since my day. Not to mention cracking rubber and flaky - literally - regulator valve seats.

Still, it's really hard for me to scrap the actual hardware, each piece of which was carefully machined. And the rubber wetsuit which I'd scrimped and saved for. Ordinarily, I keep these things around for those just-in-cases where I might be able to repurpose them. But there's no room anymore.

All through the house-move there have been things which pop into my head which I still have clear and present use for. And I can't place them. I've learned to stop searching because everything is so scattered around, so I tuck the item away in my head, metaphorically, feeling reasonably confident that the thing will turn up at some point where I least expect it. It usually does.

Like this morning, remembering a sweater which is definitely in my current ready-to-wear collection, and I have absolutely no idea where it could be. The piles have been reduced now, and there just aren't that many places. So suddenly, again, I'm thrown into a kind of paranoia that it must have gone out among the bags and bags of rags and clothes that I've repurposed to some other person or sadly, to the landfill.

Except that I'm pretty confident I was more careful than that, flailing through the stuff and making triage decisions. Scrap/recycle, donate, keep. It was easy when it was a matter of size, or utility, as with the SCUBA stuff. But lots of little things still only exist in mind's eye. Oh well, I'll get over it.

Some things I just can't get rid of. I tried to give my boat away, and lots of people fell in love or so they said. But at the end of the day, they all decided one by one that they just couldn't swing it, and so it's back to me. Puts me in mind of my yesterday's post about marriage - I guess there are some kinds of falling in love which just overcome common sense entirely, and some kinds which go too far in the direction of fantasy. I probably should have put a price-tag on it, which would at least have limited me to the folks who can afford to live out fantasies.

And there are some other things which I still need to buy. For me, the experience of walking the aisles at Target, say, is like walking in a snowstorm. If there's some particular thing you need, a spice rack say, or towel bars, there's almost no real way to know which of the bejillion aisles to start with. And there's no real way to know if the thing even exists anymore.

The apartment is small, and I have space along the cupboards above the sink for spice racks of the sort that you used to see all over the place. Now, should these be near the kitchen gadgets, the closet organizers, the bathroom equipment? You might think you know, but I can almost guarantee that if you do it's because you have become an expert shopper, which I'm not.

Each time I go to a place like Target, I have to reorient myself to what they mean by housewares, say, as opposed to home-improvement. Bathroom towel racks are in among the towels, but the kitchen ones aren't in among the blenders. In the end, I either buy something which has similar utility but only the vaguest family resemblance to what I was looking for, or I walk away in a state of dizziness.

I have a magnetic towel bar now, which sticks to the refrigerator instead of the simple swinging dowels which used to be so common at every corner hardware store.

And the magnetic towel bar got twisted beyond recognition in the process of liberating it from its packaging. Now the packaging was recylcable carboard, but a whole hell of a lot sturdier than the sheet-stainless which looked so thick when packaged. I know you're picturing me yanking and pulling, but really it was simple trompe d'oeil and my body was doing my thinking for me. It really looked like the balance was all in the other direction. It was meant to.

Now I do have to say that this really pissed me off. Not just the ruined stupid towel rack which cost way too much, but the time it took searching for it and then not finding anything even vaguely similar to what I'd wanted. And no people around to simply ask where they stock such things.

I think lots of people enjoy shopping. They don't mind wandering the aisles, and discovering things they never knew about. Impulse buying, maybe. I know I have to keep myself in check when I see something I'd like to have. "Stay focused Rick, you have no funds nor real need for that, just get what you came in for." And then I still end up with something not quite useful.

Anyhow, I should really just make free and ask my shopping-expert peers. Except they all seem to be loudly talking on their cellphones. "Grace is love and . . . " some formula I can't remember, though I really thought I would. The woman kept repeating it like a mantra to whomever she was talking with, and then pretty much held a worship service while shopping. It sounded like a kind of math lesson. Then the other likely prospect was negotiating the delivery of a CPAP machine for her husband, who seems to take it personally that he snores too loudly.

I hate the fact that there are stores I have to drive to, even though I live in the most walkable area of Buffalo. There are no local hardware stores, and some of the most basic basics are hard to find. I'd hazarded out to lay in some groceries before the whiteout storm which has been realized this morning.

Well, I suppose that back in the day we all had little dowel towel racks because some enterprising merchandiser put them in front of our faces at the local store, and we all thought we needed them. And then pretty soon we found them useful, until suddenly they weren't. Or they just started looking ugly and out of style.

I have all my books now in stackable legal bookshelves inherited from my Dad's law practice after they got water damaged during a fire. I think the legal booksellers provided these back in that day when the books were leather bound, and had to be oiled every year. Later on, pages would be added to looseleaf books as the laws would change at an accelerated pace and with proliferating words designed, I can only guess, to meet specific hostage requirements for specific representatives without naming specific names. Pretty soon no law office could possibly be large enough to have a complete set of books and it all went online.

Pretty soon my bookshelves will be for decoration only too. You know, after I get my e-reader for Christmas because it's so freaking obviously the gift of the season for folks like me who read a lot.

But these bookshelves do remind me somehow of those spice racks I couldn't find. I think they also must have been distributed right along with the spices. But these days it's like trying to find one of those cheap and simple Melitta coffee filter cones which are all you really need to make a perfect cup of coffee. You can find a million of them packaged up in some sort of gadgetry to heat the water and send it through. At almost any price you wish. But you can hardly ever find just the cone, especially when you really need it.

Well, and so what's this all about? Why do I keep writing like this? Why do I keep rambling about among all the things which pop into my head depending on where I am and what I'm doing and what's the state of the weather?

For one thing, I think that's what blogging is. It's somewhere between writing a letter and writing an article for publication. It's fun and rather low impact. But I also find that it clears my head. It makes some shape of my life.

Now I'm certain that for many of you, were you to try it out, you'd find that it would give you better direction, sense of purpose, clarity about your decisions. For me, as you can tell, it just puts me further up in the air.

I trimmed my life partly because I'd thought I was moving to Seattle. But even trimmed, I don't think I have anywhere near the funds to move the remainder that far. And pulling a trailer on a VW with 300,000 miles already on it doesn't seem the greatest idea in the world.

The boat was supposed to be trucked tomorrow, but the trucker tells me that with this wind and lake effect blowing snow, there's something like a snowball's chance in hell that it's going to move. The house was supposed to close this week, but I'm sure the weather now will provide cover for whatever the hell's really going on among the lawyers. It was supposed to be last week, and the week before that, and etcetera, and now I'm going to have to kite another month's mortgage for a cold and empty space I no longer occupy but still heat and insure!

I suppose I should get pissed off, but they say that in Buffalo if you don't like the weather you should just wait a minute and it will change. That's not exactly true, since I hardly think the sun is coming out today, but if you limit your expectations properly, it really can surprise you. Many's the time I've been in the middle of Lake Erie and been surprised by what the weather came up with contrary to the broadcast expectations. That plus its shallow depth explain the record-book number of shipwrecks. Which explains my one-time passion for SCUBA diving in case you wonder why anyone would dive in water you can't see through.

I'm pretty sure true midwesterners have a completely different mindset. They can see the weather coming at them for days and days. And those who live in sunny California. They must actually believe that there's nothing they can do wrong which putting a cap on taxes wouldn't fix.

We actually tried simple-minded here in Buffalo back when we were "Talking Proud." It doesn't really work so well California, and you should get a clue.

Hey, I'm pretty OK with where this went today. I know you think I shouldn't be. More rambling, heading noplace in particular. But I did get out what I mean to do by writing. These words are like the stuff I've been triaging. Each one resonates with its use and usage. Each one comes to me as though by random chance. And I slog my way through them as though swimming through dark polluted waters, or trudging through a snowstorm.

Wondering what shape will resolve itself from the whiteout, and hoping that it's not some scary form like that white cadaverous huge sheephead which nearly caused me to swallow or spit out my SCUBA regulator back when I was junior Diver Dan. Or the taillights suddenly flashing an impossible stop along the blizzardy highway.

There's nothing new to any of this except the 'me myself and I' which makes this writing so narcissistically lousy compared to the real thing. But, well, it's not as though I'm trying to get paid for it.

I'd thought I was going to write about "cronic," a term - I now gather - for hi-grade weed. About how difficult it is to look it up on the Internet, because the search engines all helpfully substitute chronic, whose meaning I already know, thank you very much. And then there are a lot of auto dealerships out there, for some reason, called "Cronic". I wonder if they're as embarrassed as we are at pikk.com by what pikk means in Nobel country. Oh hell, my name could have been Dick, so who really cares, eh? I mean the Pulitzer prize people should be embarrassed by their name, as should Nobel, Carnegie, and maybe even Bill Gates.

Just don't try contacting me at dick@pikk because computers, remember, are really literal, no matter how funny you think the combo is. I really should have been born a blond, don't you think?  I mean, metaphorically speaking.

OK, so you're going to think I'm making this up, but out my window this very minute, I see blue sky. No shit, honest!

And our President is headed over to Norway now to pikk up the prize he says he doesn't really deserve. He's already insulted the King by suggesting that he might have more important things to do than dine with him. I suppose anybody could use a spare million dollars, but something tells me he doesn't quite have the degrees of freedom right now to do with it what you and I might like to. I'm sure that whatever he does will be whatever is required by public opinion.

And he'll be blamed for that, you know, as if he doesn't have a thought of his own.

The guy who clued me in to the meaning of cronic urges me to stay in the mainstream where I belong. Yeah, I'm pretty whitebread, and will likely get swamped when the real storm comes, or so he suggests. This fellow is one of the few I know who actually does transact business across the color divide, and friendships and no, I'm not talking about dealing cronic.

I've got a hell of a lot of learning to do. But at least I'm not obsessing about the weather. Well, not the way you do. I mean I'm plenty worried about global warming, and I don't need any jokes about how more hot air is not exactly the solution. I'm working on it. I mean, the solution really is in and through and by words.

The solution is as simple as a metaphorical reversal. Where God comes down to earth, in just the simplest sense that we stop making an abstraction real. Where we take all that unbelievable talent, skill and training which we deploy for the purposes of driving and of shopping and use it for something actually useful.

Of course that would mean end-runs around a system which elaborates laws for the purpose of rendering up all the veto power of every single senior representative. That would mean people letting go and breathing; getting in touch with qi, a nicely untranslatable Chinese term you all think you understand.

Those kung-fu movies which show the impossible skill [kung-fu] of martial artists attempt to depict the results of endless training which gets your mind out of the way of what your body has been trained for. And your body learns to move in ways as if by accident, out of the way of blows, or more absurdly, of speeding bullets.

That kind of kung-fu training is at least as difficult as are the moves for ever greater control which we in the West still try to master. Finally turning over the matter to some machine which can be calibrated to near perfection. And still the bullets find their way into innocent flesh.

OK, true confessions. I actually did just watch Terminator Salvation, where the Governator made a cameo appearance. I'm pretty sure it was just his likeness, a kind of avatar of virtual reality, for which he maybe donated his royalty to some PR-friendly cause. Then I watched Red Dawn, making good on an old promise to the right wing of the family.

Neither of these is very good in the highbrow sense of cinema. But they do just fine to express the plot I'm scripting. Ideological machine-think is the thing we should be fighting. And just as soon as we relax our grasping grip on all the things which we think will make our life better, or last a few hours longer, just that soon our collective efforts can turn, as though catalyzed, into something as much more human compared to how we act now, as is my pikk is from my thinking heart.

At the moment, we all have fallen for the silly and ideologically based notion that the more we consume, the more the economy grows and the more likely it is that we can have full employment again. And yet the number of our fellow citizens who remain in a state of "food insecurity" now numbers a percentage of us far larger than any conscionable profit margin. Some 30 million is what I hear.

Clearly, the pinnacles of success keep getting sharper and steeper, while the puddle at their bottom is over peoples' heads. What if, and this makes a really really big if, we actually did let everyone in to hospitals who needs them. What if food were as free and cheap as public education. What if death were not so scary when its time comes around, and so people would not grab after those last few months which cost such a huge part of what we spend on healthcare. What if the mega-profiteers were not controlling all the conversations?

Isn't it possible that we could find a better way to organize ourselves? Where each of us might have a chance at matching wits with things that interest and excite us? Utopian, perhaps, but this change requires no particular ideology. It just requires each of us to let go a little and to share. It requires each of us to sidestep the emotional quality of money, say, and let it flow in directions not dictated so much by want. Well, depending on how you use the term.

I'm guessing - it's really just a wild guess - that the economic system would look a lot like capitalism, written very small. That all the monopolies would be, by consent and decree, government monopolies. And that life would get a lot more interesting than it is now with us all interacting with and by and through all sorts of silly widgets.



P.S.   Always the bigger fool, it took more lily-white snow for me to overcome my mental color divide and realize there actually is a hardware store within walking distance. Of course between shoveling, walking there and nearly losing my ears, and returning, the sidewalk needs shoveling again as if I'd never touched it. And there was this really nice, um, blond lady who evidently knows hardware who directed me to everything I've been looking for. Except the spice rack. She helpfully directed me to Target for that. I guess we all have our blind spots.

A Public Marriage Proposal

It's a wonderful life! Let's shoot the moon, hey? (watch out, this one will ramble you to numb, exhausted, worn-out actual reading death, by it's nearly ideal ending) I have to admit I'm having a hard time bringing this one home.

Don't get all excited, there's only one person the joke could possibly mean, and I'm not that stupid. But with people now twittering their vows, or posting on Facebook from the altar, there is a sudden new immensity to public protestations of "forever!"

Marriage too, when it's not part of the Big Business machine, has taken on new aspects of that Platonic Ideal it was always meant to be (you can know it by the hell reserved for those who fall short of this trivial requirement to keep a promise). Or was it just a chattel contract? Oh, who knows? I can never keep these things straight.

It could be just the media exaggeration, and I'm sure someone once somewhere proposed skywriting, say to Virginia Woolf (yeah, right), but it seems they do it now on billboards, and on the megatron at a football game, and people find this romantic!!??

It sure does seem as though good ol' Tiger Woods' marriage was more a contract than a bond, no? I guess everyone has to hedge his or her bets. Or maybe marriage only can be bondage, and enlightened people stay clear of it, or at least clarify the important, which is to say financial, implications.

Marriage is being whittled away now from the side of infidelity and divorce, which make the institution rather more harmful than good considering the financial and emotional ruin which often ensue from its dissolution.

And from the other side, gays, queers and lesbians seem no wiser about the pitfalls of "forever" (I'm pretty sure the "bi" folks have it figured out). But they face financial discrimination to some extreme by being left outside this sacred trust.

Oh, well, lots of people have pointed out that the sacred part should be left separate from the state where it belongs, leaving only the civil union to be concerned about in public.

And the kids. It's all and only about the kids anyhow, and the security they require from eternal bonds (plus the legal apparatus to mandate financial security when the bonds get broken - talk about bondage!). But the state has an interest in protecting the kids, right?

Marriage doesn't seem to be working for anyone these days, and all the extravagant expense and public fanfare some folks put on just serves to beg that question. Or could it be that it works just fine for lots of folks who aren't that public about it? Give me a coldcuts in the churchhall wedding and I'll give you better odds. Mmmmm. Maybe not so much.

Here's my capper: the more liberal and educated you are, the more you seem to treat your kids as property. You hover over them to be sure they don't make any mistakes. You monitor their intakes and outflows; their entertainments and their schooling. You even hire special agents to get them into the right schools.

Yeah, yeah, there I go generalizing again.

Leave the kids alone! You don't own them. Love means letting them figure some things out on their own.  Well, except we don't allow for error. We love zero tolerance, as if we never had unprotected sex, tried drugs, or kissed the wrong person the wrong way. And as if science could tell religion when life starts, or was it vice-versa? I'm so confused.

I can't imagine anyone more prone to failure than the kid who gets coached for the Ivy league from age two.

Well, except for the evident fact that they don't fail. They actually succeed extravagantly, which then just feeds this vicious cycle. Until what? One of them walks on water? I sure would hate to be on the inside of that kind of perfection.

You have to wonder if there are any cases where the person subject to the powerplay of public proposal just says "hell no!" in simple response to the humiliation of being outed like that in public. I guess you'd never do it though - propose marriage publicly - unless you were that certain of the answer.

Evidently also, the more people spend the less really certain they are. It's as if the extravagance of the act can counteract it's fundamentally (Platonically, ironically, if you catch my drift) ideal and therefore fictional quality. But the "yes" answer must be readily enough gotten, given the number of people who pull it  off. After the lawyers work out the codicils. I mean if you're rich enough to require lawyers in on the deal.

There's an interesting play on words in English among resolve, resolution, vectors, pixels and, um give me a sec., yeah trust. Remember back in the last inevitable greed meltdown, when the 'Savings and Loans' were all decimated? They were caught building houses on speculation, down in Texas maybe, and lots of rich developers made it off to the Caymans or someplace while the taxpayers refunded the public coffers. (Remember "It's a Wonderful Life"?)

There were significant savings and loans up here in Buffalo which were wiped out by that fiasco. And as I recall, there was a new quasi-government entity called Resolution Trust which was called in to buy up all the toxic assets and complete an orderly dissolution of the bankrupted and newly so-called banks.

Who knows a person really when they first come into your life? Over time the deal changes, and the contract you thought you'd signed gets changed as the rules change.

Sure, those savings and loans used to just lend out your savings to other people needing money to build homes, say. And there was plenty of trust involved in the transaction. But then the rules changed, and the banks could package up their liabilities and assets and sell them to the highest bidder. And leverage them. And empty meaningless houses got built in Texas because they had paper value, even though nobody was around to live in them. And the banks could make do with cardboard frontage, since no-one was buying the fiction of stony permanence anyhow. As long as the paper was good.

I'm sure I've got most of the details wrong, and no one person was hurt in the end (um, except for shareholders and rich people, but they don't count). We all got dinged with the tax bill. And some people moved in to moldy plastic cardboard houses later on.

Outsourced trust can be a terrible thing.

So, the rules change in marriage too, effectively, as all around a person spouses are being traded up and down. And anyhow, the person you thought you could know and trust might come into sharper resolution - that's the wordplay part - under stress. Earnest fictions might develop cracks in the face of temptation, or reality.

Hence the pre-nuptials, which bring marriage contracts into contact with reality outside the fantasy of romance. Sure sure, I absolutely do trust that you love me. Now. But, you know, we all change, and well, I have to look out for number one. It kind of makes you wonder what would be worth dying for, no? If not family.

Which brings me back to the kids. No matter what might happen in the relationship between Mom and Dad, each of them must resolve to love the kids forever. But what if all these ego investments in the wonder-kids don't pay off? Are you allowed then to turn them in? Pay up or you can't see the kids seems to keep Dads away if that's your goal. And people do get away with murder, just as they can be put away for fictional murder that never happened.

Well, I'm certain they don't let over-parented kids into Yale, say, and that all those hyper-achievers did every single bit of it on their own. For Yale, it's all a matter of predicting success - it's a kind of vector math - so that if, for instance, your name is Bush, then you have pretty good prospects for success. And if you score highly on some standardized assessment of potential, trued over the years and against your peers. Success, as they say, does breed success. And vector graphics keep their resolution no matter how zoomed in they get. Cool, huh?

And if at first you don't succeed . . . well, you can always pay Kaplan, the idea for which was started by a subversive friend of a friend over at Princeton who was fed up by the silly propaganda that you can't game the testing system. Yeah, yeah, and why are so many Asians crowding the Ivys? Genetics, what? Um, I don't think so.

Now "they" have all sorts of compatibility measures for personal matchups too. Some of them are free on-line, and some probably cost lots of money, especially if there's lots of money at stake. I wonder if Tiger can sue the one who trued those two? His wife won't need to, hey!

I think I told you before that I got jilted by eHarmony. They said I couldn't be matched, which turned me off to them forever. I can't believe they're still in business, since public relations folks will tell you that bad PR goes around ten times times further and lasts ten times longer than positive PR. And since eHarmony tried to make me feel good by assuring me that there was nothing wrong with me - it's just that 20% of their applicants can't be matched and no hard feelings. They prove their integrity. But right there is a good clue why integrity never quite works in the real-world market place, or politics.

If you do the math, eHarmony pretty much shot themselves in the foot. Come to think of it, I haven't been hearing much from them lately. But hope does spring eternal, and maybe matchmaking isn't subject to the rules of the marketplace. Maybe, as with politics, there's no such thing as bad publicity, only publicity.

Now (I know, I know, when's it gonna end already!!) labor contracts sure are an anti-romantic aspect of real reality. Labor contracts put a person in mind of the good old marriage longed for by those who think that morals have all gone to hell. The power is all on the side of the employer (read "man", as in "the man") and the labor is all on the side of the worker (read "woman" as in ends in "ee", like manner and mannee, or bonder and bondee, or cooler and coolee how about).

Now right wingers these days seem all mixed up about sacred and profane arrangements for love. It's kind of as if they expect that a person can know all about himself, the world, and everything before even trying and screwing up a few times. There's no redress for mistakes, and no allowance for variation. And they tend to be father-knows-besters. And instead of hovering over their kids, they just let their kids know what they expect, and then, by God, they get it.

And some of the left wingers can't seem to figure out if they need to always include the baby with the bathwater, as in, sure it's OK who you lust after even when it's a different person every time. And they love their kids so much that they sometimes don't seem to have a life themselves.

Naturally, in the political arena, you find the right wing on the side of "the man" and the left wing on the side of the "ee", the one subjected. You know, you've got your screwer and screwee. Employer and employee.

The only thing conceivable to redress the imbalance of power is a labor union, right? I mean, left? Unions are able to approximate equivalence to the power of owners, and make the agreement a more equitable exchange between laborers and the profiters from that labor.

So, I guess here's the trouble with public protestations of love. They always still seem to come from men. What's up with that? And labor unions still always seem to wait for management to move and then they move only in defense.

What would be so wrong for the unions to stand up and say hey, since you aren't providing what we need to keep working, let's change the rules a bit? Let's say now that you've been outed as a cheater, and so now we might be able to set the field markers.

I mean, we've already got socialism; that bandied-about terrorizing term. The drug companies, in cahoots with the health insurance companies, own the elected officials who must keep in place the system which provides Prozac or like-minded post-modernisitic drugs so that our soldiers can keep up their sociopathic act. AND, supply the permanently unemployed underclass with both a new way to go to jail when they sell their prescriptions, PLUS, a way to endure the unemployment and sense of zero-worth. As I was told just yesterday by someone in a position to know - healthcare for the poor is incredibly expensive!

Someone's getting all that money, and I'm pretty sure it's not you and me. How the hell did we survive before, and fight actual bloody wars, and, well I suppose we did co-evolve with alcohol. Maybe that, like the hookworms which might cure auto-immune diseases, would be the cheaper way to go. No wonder we had to make it illegal once upon a time!

No no, I've seen firsthand how post-modern drugs can work. And post-modern capitalism, which isn't capitalism at all. More a sort of corporatism where size really does matter. But it's not all bad. On balance, I think we all turned out OK.

Which takes me back to the marriage bond. Best honored in the breech (sic)? Well, maybe, but can't a person have some privacy anymore? (Um, no, since Google already knows all your secrets) I think we ought to come down off our overheated rhetoric sometimes (yeah yeah) and try for a little humor among our aspirations. I mean, come on, tell me that sex with strangers is really all that great. No, wait. I don't wanna know. I've got my ears in my fingers and I'm singing nah nah nah nah. You do what you want, and it won't bother me. I'm going for the real thing.

Now, if I could just figure out what real is. I know you know I'm a little reality challenged. I get my hi-res porn all mixed up with my low res vector graphics gaming, which,however, moves!! I get the real woman all mixed up with the ideal one, and then I keep falling in love all over again. It's pathetic, really. But reality usually is. And I've never played a computer game. Honest!

Ah well, real life sure is a muddle. A nice muddle. Happy with the kids I've got. Happy with the man I'm not. Happy is as happy does. Happy with the man I was. Happy with the man I am. Well, for the moment, that's what I am. Now that ideal woman I'm looking for, she doesn't exist. But the real one, ooh la la.

Sheesh! What's a fellow to do when the world's all topsy-turvy? I'd say, go for the cosmic forgiveness, do your best to honor your promises and your promise, but let in a few screwups once in a while. We make the world a more interesting place. And, um, nobody's perfect.

Editorial Control

I now have a new home - it's actually my old apartment, overstuffed with things from my former house. When I used to live here, somehow there was space for two daughters, a sleepover girlfriend, and room to work. Now it's just a mishmash of junk, and that's after I donated away or sold the bulk of what was in the house.

I'm not known for my decorating sense. Well, that might not be quite true. If I'm working on someone else's house, I can be pretty good at it. I can also be pretty good at sensing someone else's style, and offering editorial assistance. But I'm blind with me, always being taken aback when someone offers how ugly that tie is that I thought was pretty cool.

I tend in the direction of experimental is my excuse. I'm always conjectural about myself. So I end up walking the streets in teal chucks, say, or with a stupid looking hat. I know I write that way too.

Some folks are gifted with proprioception; with a solid sense of self. They can dance, for instance, or intuit just the right sense of style about themselves. I'm not gifted like that. So, blogging might be just the wrong pursuit.

I sit now among furniture poorly deployed, pictures hung at just the wrong height and in the wrong spot. I have no more energy to deal with the little piles of stuff which just simply can't find any place but isn't quite ready for the garbage sacks.

I've written myself into some alive sense of who I am, and so now what? I have two pretty good job prospects lined up, and I know that you, gentle reader, are urging me, please to take one. It would be the sensible thing, and two job prospects ain't bad the way the economy's going.

I actually think these prospects would not have materialized had I not taken it upon myself to exercise my voice in public. Or maybe it doesn't count as public if no-one's paying attention, like that famous tree falling in the woods which might not make a sound.

(lots of "I" at the begining of my paragraphs here, like Doris Lessing's famous machine gun, right?)

This must be the power of prayer then, which I must take the word of religionists actually does and can "work." Giving oneself over to the unknown, which is different from writing in a private journal, say, must have some power quite apart from whether you make an actual connection. Very much as if words themselves have power.

Like many of you (I would hazard a guess that anyone who reads this would fit the category of "many" here), I mourn the loss of books and newspapers. I feel very much as though they represent, on balance, a power for good. Sure, there are idiot screeds like "Going Rogue" which represent the foolishness of thinking there are still geographic-style frontiers. I guess that would be easy to believe up in Alaska. And Pulitzer-style newspaper power has caused its share of mischief.

But the best of us, well edited, is encapsulated in books. And a newspaper is such a brilliant "technology" for rapid orientation to the events going on around us. Professional writers become that well accomplished at giving us something we can both skate across and dive into, with headlines calling out their slant.

But we are different readers now. The books we buy often represent what we already know and believe in - bestsellers designed to push the envelope only of what we already think. With Rupert Murdoch in control, what do we expect of free and independent reporting?

Much though I will also mourn the loss of local independent booksellers, these could be replaced by coffee shops with readings, say. It isn't necessary that we do all our interacting on the web.

Our startup, pikk.com, will shortly be going regional. Like Craig's list, you'll be able to see what people in your neighborhood are thinking about. You might be interested to contrast and compare the voting between, say, Kansas and Buffalo, on stories of national interest. You might want to read only the stories of relevance to Buffalo.

We're hoping that there might be something there to recapture part of the energy of newspapers. Headlines to draw you in. Some localized ad revenue to pay for the editors behind the pikk links. We hope that the good bloggers will rise to the top too.

Everyone struggles now with boundaries. Some kid surfing porn accidentally downloads child pornography and must go to jail. He'll be labeled a sex offender now for the rest of his life. Protectors at Virginia Tech tell their own families before telling the ones they are paid to protect. And people were killed because they were allowed out of lockdown too soon. A sex and drug unbalanced preppy-style college student gets put away for thirty years because of proximity to risk-takers perhaps more familiar with murder.

These are judgments which assert our distance from those kinds of risks. But still the heartstrings thrum with a kind of terror that there but for the grace of some God . . . . And there are other kinds of risks which we are also terrified away from. We can't quit a lousy job because we see too many people bankrupted by illness. We can't criticize our leaders because we see too many extremists waving teabags in mockery of their freedom to speak. We won't speak out because we might sound as ridiculous as we do when listening to ourselves on tape. And we know what the flamers on the Internet sound like.

It really is hard to tell the gentle from the dangerous. It is nice to be affirmed by those around you, even when and if they're just taking advantage of your vulnerability.

We just found out that pikk in norwegian is a rude word for that famous male member which can be referred to only by such oblique references as dongle, say, when referring to something you plug into your computer. But just like those scrotal sacs you now see hanging from the trailer hitches of really big pickups, aren't we grown up enough to call a thing what it is? Waving teabags just makes you a fool when the cool folks know that it's homophobic balls you're swinging.

Well, I have to exercise some editorial control on my apartment now. Rearrange the pictures. Sweep up the debris. I hope I get a kindle for Christmas, since I can hardly bear to move all these books again. And I'm practically dying to find some time for reading. Santa?