Cobb

My Guardian Angels

A woman whose name I cannot remember told me something I'll never forget. She said, that you can never tell how something you write will affect someone else. She meant it in the most positive way, saying I had written something that inspired her. And since that day some 15 years ago at a meetup in the SF Bay area under the rubric of Howard Rheingold's Brainstormers, I have remembered to keep a high, healthy respect for all of my readers. Another thing I remember is to never underestimate the power of chance. 

This evening, I am compelled to recognize one person in particular and several others. As is my convention, I protect their identities - which means I'm going to have to give them pseudonyms. As I think of it, I can only think of one name for my primary guardian angel and that would have to be Xavier. 

I met Xavier about 4 years ago in a creole restaurant in an upscale black neighborhood in Washington DC. He had been a longtime reader of Cobb, my blog, and had contributed a fair bit. He was ex-military and was having some health problems of his own. That was clear when I saw him, and I say it as if it were obvious, but I had never in all the years head him complain about it something that obviously slowed him down. There was nothing about our online experience that gave me to expect that he might roll up in a wheelchair, and as I try to reconstruct the memory - there is nothing to reinforce its presence or suggest it in his personality. There was just the surprise of it. If it was actually there. 

These days Xavier watches over me on Facebook. I don't know it; I couldn't guarantee it, but I sense it. If I were to disappear, he would notice. If someone were to challenge me in court, he would be my character witness. I'm not certain of it, but I feel that it is true; Xavier watches out for me.

I don't know why. We are perhaps kindred spirits. Perhaps we take joy in similar things. I've never bothered to really ask, but I don't want to. I don't have to. Even if I'm making this whole thing up in my imagination, it remains something I expect to be true. I try to do right by people and those who understand that principle will reciprocate, not necessarily out of any high falutin' duty. They just do. That's how I feel about this certainty that Xavier cares. He just does.

When I was a kid, the oldest of five and nearsighted and fast and skinny and bold for my age, I wanted an older brother. Somebody to tell me the shortcuts. My father was something of a New England fish out of water in California, but he never broke ranks with the old school. I lived among rougue fatherless roughnecks. My father wore horn rim glasses and never cursed. He never lifted weights. He never cheered for the Dallas Cowboys. He never pined for a V8 Mustang. He was as blisteringly severe as Professor Snape, but unlike Snape, he never lost his composure. He was not the kind of man to ask embarrassingly stupid questions, even when he was in a mood, as he often was, to be perversely goofy. I could have used a big brother, instead I just got over it and tried to be one. I protected myself. 

And now, 40 years later, by chance I have a big brother, of whom I ask for nothing. I have become accustomed to asking for nothing. I wonder if I have passed that trait onto my children. My son makes enormously boneheaded mistakes, and he doubles down before he knocks on my closed office door. I am writing like the patriarch Lannister, minding greater affairs, and reply in monotones. I get him to fix things, but I would fix them. I fixed my own mistakes. I own myself too much perhaps. It took me a while to care about what people misinterpret about me. I was 35 before I managed to grow a human interface complete with smiles, genuine warmth and a lack of condescending judgment. Finally in 2003, I decided to write with some personal purpose and Cobb was born. I think it grew me some big brothers.

I thought I was complete but still missing a few pieces that didn't much matter. There was something martial in me I never fully realized. I took more pride in my father's military service than he did. But now I know another reason why. He tried some military discipline in me in an incident he describes but I could not remember. It reduced me to a snivelling diaper, and so he swore off it. Yet I felt only the backbone of it in my upbringing and the pride of seeing his panoramic wedding photo in full dress uniform. I remember him telling me the struggle he had as a black man in the USMC of taking his ceremonial sword off base. Having to petition my CO would have made me bitter. My father conformed into another shape and reserved his harshest criticisms of me whenever I drifted near the idea of service. He was in that way the ex-Marine that Marines often brag they never become. Where there was no pride for him there remained discipline and principle, and I grew up on those disciplines and principles which inevitably lead me to where I am. 

You see he couldn't resist introducing me to Robert Ludlum. And say what you like about its literary quality or formula, at the age of 19 I dove right in and that world completely replaced Robert Heinlein. In this way, having grown up the oldest son of a reluctant marine, I identified completely with Jason Bourne. The analogy extends as well to my Black Nationalist upbringing as well. I was forged in a forcefully forgotten world. 

And so my big brothers, my blog readers, my Facebook friends are military men. I have connected in principle to a shooter in Utah, an active duty father in Colorado, several disciplined martial artists, a CIA operative, a couple submariners, a big old bear from Texas, and a man who has named himself after a secret weapon. They have reminded me, without coaxing, of something that I deeply am yet remain uncertain what to make of it. Still, I may be the recorder of our times, and do them some service as well. To the extent I am a writer and my words reflect what we all see similarly, I will continue my part. 

You know who you are. Thank you. 

No Country for Young Chickens

Over the past year or so, having been freed of the necessity of care of a certain sort, I have endeavored to find the moral focus on the American Left to see whether or not it is true. My first stop was the investigation of the moral precepts of Socialism itself. What I discovered is that the American Left isn't truly socialist in any way that would be considered respectable by the likes of George Orwell. And I pretty much left it at that. 

These days I find that the worst bricks thrown at capitalism are that it is .. well I can't find a consistent set of descriptions outside of the adjective 'evil'. But it is clear to me that American capitalism has been socialized quite enough. Says me, the guy with the ACA healthcare. But if there is any consistency to be expected, then the bricks shold be thrown at the BRICs. I mean it's not as if Russia and India haven't been industrialized for quite enough time. Then why has their capitalism made a middle class as large and prosperous as our capitalism has made our middle class? Same thing goes for China and Brazil.So while discussing the 'undemocracy' of capitalism. I got the following: 

Third off we are already facing more dire straits than just a loss of democracy. Capitalism as we know it today is, quite literally, killing the biosphere and once that happens we are all fucked beyond words. It is kill or be killed and quite frankly I'd rather NOT be cursed by my ancestors & descendants for coming up with fancy sophistry to justify cowardly inaction and apathy.

My riposte went as follows:

Urban living is cowardly inaction and apathy. Dependence upon the government creation of services funded by usurious taxation of megacorporations that build polluting convenience is the essential neoliberal modus operandi. Neoliberals as well as most of the American Left are too nearsighted and morally ambiguous to sustain a real socialist revolution. Aside from that, their masses are only marginally skilled to handle urban living (thus their agenda), and have no real political pull from traditional self-sustaining rural peasants. 

In other words neoliberals ask Whole Foods to 'do no evil' and eschew learning how to raise their own damned chickens, because no liberal wants chickens in their backyard. They'd rather so sitins at the FDA over salmonella scares. (Not that they could identify it with a microscope). 

It is not 'capitalism' that is polluting the biosphere, it is the incompetency of the masses to be self-sustaining that generates the demand for mass-production of staples in the urban metropolitan model. If GM wasn't privately held but publicly held, that wouldn't make their automobiles less polluting. So long as the left requires a 'living wage' instead of 'life skills', then it accelerates dependence on mass production. 

The Neoliberal and Progressive agenda stops far short of socialist revolution to the transfer of wealth (not the means of production) into jury-rigged urban survival schemes. For them, the purpose of government is to provide a means of regulating and suing the drug companies they need for the free health care they need because their constituencies know nothing of midwifery or home remedies. For them, the purpose of government is to provide a means of building schools that teach how to socialize into urban environments because their constituencies know nothing of growing vegetables, repairing clothing, home repair or electricity. For them the purpose of government is to provide a greased slide from any sort of crippling handicap directly into First World living standards and life expectancy in one generation with all the affirmative actions necessary. Because science. There's your fancy sophistry. Destroy independent living, regulate everything, charge taxes.

I'll leave it as I wrote it. But as I excrept in the future I will bring up the idea of 'equality' in that bit about affirmative actions which also has tangents to The American Price. And I also like the idea of using the term 'independent living' rather than 'liberty' because that's what I mean by liberty. I mean yeoman-farmer, country squire, family compound, shabby gentility and organic self-sustained hunting, fishing, hiking, carpentry & small town values. I mean all the things I can do, unregulated, unhamstrung by government interventions. Me and my 700 Facebook friends living somewhere in one town in Texas. I mean a jurisdiction that never needs more law than the Constitution provided as of its latest Amendment, and laws that can be effectively abstracted in 1000 words or less. 

But the problem is urban living isn't it?

I've worked in all the major US cities, and I know that Seattle and San Francisco like their homeless more than the rest of us. They give way to them rather like the attitude towards cows in Madras. But the citadel of the city is no place for people with no skills. Such people will never be independent begging for scraps, no matter how well laid out and tax deductable those charitable donations may be. The point of the city is to aggregate the most complex and cosmopolitan of us in our arcane specialties abetted by a matrix of specialty services. Pizza by the slice, as Clay Shirky explains, is only a profitable enterprise with a certain urban density. (As is begging). But you cannot put affordable housing in the CBD - it is a contradiction in terms. The yuppies will always win in their gentrifications. That's the point of it being a city; it's where money and sophistication go. The attempt to make cities idiot proof simply undermines them. 

The American Left place little faith in corporations and yet they need them to fund their projects. The extent to which they feel morally compelled determines how much they are willing to tax, but it doesn't address the fundamental question of sustainability. It is not cost effective to have low skilled people in high density areas. It does not make sense to mass produce and ship goods to cities in the way we distribute retail goods. It does not make sense to morally justify wealth transfers to establish national standards for the short term, if you are interested in the biosphere. It does not make sense to create demand for mass produced goods that contribute to pollution when people can be trained to provide for themselves.  

Obligatory Update on Race

(excerpted from some Facebooking during the MLK holiday)

I have long held that 'colorblindness is the moral equivalent of racism' but I no longer do. I have been convinced that there is a moral blindness in the selective application of racial discriminations that undermines rational discussion - a position long held by the dude at http://www.discriminations.us/

. I am also convinced that there is a continuing pathology in America to have various theories of race upheld into which new generations must be subject. Thirdly I am quite skeptical of 'social justice' which I see as little more or less than the purposeful skewing of perception by the chatting classes, or as I say, 'social justice is crowd-sourced law, the whining little sister of mob rule'. 

I think it is certainly fair to say that conservatives, in their abandonment of developing a race-specific narrative, default to an audience for whom racial matters are of diminished concern - me for example, and those audiences tend to be unreflective and nominally 'white'. Many are insensitive or even hostile to racial analysis, and I believe most of the hostility is due to an attempt to racialize responsibility for institutional racism. IE "We 'good' whites who recognize the racism of the justice system have accepted our existential racial complicity in the status quo and you bad whites have not, therefore you must accept your racial original sin and serve penance as we do. " This is clearly a racial appeal to whites to be better whites, and that is severely problematic, because the reflexive and proper response is "We 'bad' whites already paid that price with the set of X", the largest member of the set being the Civil War involving commitment unto death, which no contemporary social justice movement demands. 

Again the history of multiculturalism and the multifaceted brokering of racial discrimination treaties (affirmative action) has failed to deracialize the roles and responsibilities of citizens against racial injustice. The target of racial injustice has shrunk (vis a vis MLK's principles of racial integration) but the amount of racial fingerpointing has increased as have racialized narratives. 
On the whole our ability as a society to solve racial problems has been dealt a series of crushing blows, fortunately there is a lot less work to do. So I perceive increasing shrillness over decreasing value. 

You won't find any conservative who is displeased with the results of the Innocence Project except to the extent that its supporters find it so necessary to call conservatives racists or talk about Goldwater or Reagan or their other fetish white boys. I'm thinking of calling this "White Battle Royale" in which some whites beat up other whites with black and brown clubs.

Indian Nation Building

I used to talk about internal Third World and the American Internal Empire. In this very moment I am now recategorizing the PNACian geopolitical expeditionary forces as a multinational global non-profit venture with GWBush heading the American prime contractor. But the point of this essay is to push forward an argumental point in favor of abrogating American Indian treaties and sponsoring similar infrastructural 'shovel-ready' projects on Indian reservations to a new 'Second World' standard.

Yesterday I had a peak at the Gates Letter. With the presumption that Bill Gates is at least as good in philanthropy as he was in software development, we can be fairly confident that he is sufficiently good enough to raise a standard from zilch to reasonably competent. There being nothing much more to say about Microsoft products on the whole than 'reasonably competent', Gates is likely to be quite productive over a set of zilch level standards, which is what we mean by 'Third World'.

In my universe, government functions at the national level, by which I would say legal jurisdictions of 20 million or more.  The United States, with 300 millions has three tiers, not counting counties or Chicago. Nevertheless, as I mentioned in The Last ID, there ought to be an open standard of global citizenship and a number of trans-national entities that should offer services in exchange for a reasonable tax.

But if the standard of living within Indian reservations stands below a universal standard of poverty, then perhaps there is the case to be made that the sovereigns of these internal nations should be entered into Least Favored Nation status. I don't think any are that bad, but I do think a case can be made that if there were a fast-track to American citizenship, many of them would take it.

Now forgive my ignorance if that fast-track already exists, but if there is anything whatsoever to the case for foreign aid and philanthropy at the Gates level, then I find it difficult to believe that Indian reservations are impervious to improvement of citizen movement. 

 

Two Mind Explosions: Sayet & Haidt

Damn this long weekend. I started reading too much. Here are two videos that have me reintegrating a lot of ideas. I'll review them later. 

 

 

First this from Evan Sayet.

 

And then this from Jonathan Haidt.

That White Backpack

Many years ago there was a set of questions or observations put together by a researcher by the name of Peggy McIntosh. You can look her up, but the gist of McIntosh is that her 'invisible knapsack' meme made her a star in the days before people figured out how to monetize meme-creation. She ended up resenting the popularity of her meme and withdrew support from the ideas percolating around them. But she still gets a lot of credit for the phrase 'white privilege' and of course 'white male privilege'.

I just dipped into some doo surrounding one of the derivative scoldings authored by a dude named John Scalzi, a scifi writer who can be easily described as an Ohio State fan. If you don't understand anything about Ohio State fans let me try to explain. There are several things that can be said about folks from Ohio, and in my experience the best three adjectives are, 'friendly', 'provincial' and 'self-conscious'. I really don't want to get into all that. Take my word, if you can understand that Ohio State fans believe themselves at once to be the greatest and most unpretentious people in America then you have an idea of where I'm ultimately going.

Scalzi wrote a lovely set of sci-fi war stories in a set known as the Old Man's War series. I read the first and found it enjoyable but not particularly deep. Scalzi's protagonist is existentially simple - like a second string lineman for the Buckeyes. You know exactly what to expect in the wholesome department. But over at his blog he decided to block for Peggy McIntosh by writing an essay with a videogame analogy called 'Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is'. I once knew a guy who used to play the role of a white boy. This meant that he spent a bit of extra energy convincing people he thought needed convincing that even though he was a white boy, he could X. I leave defining the full set of X to you so you can explore your own ideas by offering one member of the set: eat spicy foreign food. 

Currently, I am under the influence of this bit of studied wit about post-literacy. I find it brilliant as it underscores what I have noticed about failures of modernity in the West and the increasingly serious farce of multicultural education. Additionally, I sense that this ties in with the higher level debate about modernity itself, perhaps expressed best as Lyotard vs Giddens, but I really don't have time for all that. Still I cannot deny the influence as I continue to find Dickens fascinating and occasionally refine my Peasant Theory. 

So I respond to Scalzi: Imagine a game called 'White Male Battle Royale' in which white males were thrown into a ring and forced to compete for a panel of judges. Scalzi emerges as champion with his essay (which tells you something about the judges) and raises his fists in triumph, but not too high. There I sit watching this channel on television and I change it, wondering why I watched it in the first place.

Scalzi did address who the hell he was supposed to be writing that essay for in a subsequent follow up, but that didn't seem particularly compelling. On the whole all of this white privilege backpacking, repacking and unpacking seems to be as pointless and significant, boring and compelling as Ohio State football.  Or football. Or sports. Or entertainment. 

It's difficult for me to assess what the point of making Scalzi's point is, or actually the point of my critique. Perhaps both of us have too much time on our hands.

Nah. That's too easy an exit. What I mean to say is that Scalzi is wasting time on a morally self-congratulatory mission which involves foolish white guilt of the sort that actually undermines modern society by advancing arguments about identity which have nothing whatsoever to do with the presence or absence of justice. 

Related articles

The Filter Bubble Problem

White Privilege: What Can You Do?

In Defense of Policy Ignoring Science

One of the problems with science is that most folks believe it should move as fast as humanly possible to bring utilitarian value to the masses. What I observe is that a large number of Americans desire this kind of democratic progress and quite a few, notably Atheists as I think of it, find no other frame of reference useful in checking this desire. For them, the rationality of science itself offers an insurmountable reason for action. This is foolish.

When I become harried by the insoucient impatience of those taken over by the fever of argument, I am forced to ask 'Who's your Leviathan?'. This becomes especially poignant when one considers the implications of global warming. When I first encountered the concept of Cap & Trade, I was all for it. I liked the idea of a market system assigning costs to environmental damage and I often cited the SCAQMD exemplifying their rules on leaded paints. Nowadays I tend not to trust newly minted market-makers, but I must say it has got to be one of the more penetrating fields of study and action. Nevertheless, I saw the problems of Big Air and in Monetizing Carbon.

To wit, how are scientists like those embroiled here, going to do anything more nagging than posting blogs? This is to beg the question that gets to the root of a central question of liberty, which is whether or not collective action done over our heads gets done right. You see there has yet to be another Carl Sagan who speaks broadly to the American people who is also properly connected to those scientific researchers that be. In fact, there seem fewer inroads to the popular consciousness by reasonable avatars of any industrial endeavors. This is why, I suppose, I am using the rather disembodied abstract of 'science'; it speaks to our diminished capacity. So I don't find myself particularly sanguine that elite scientific activism done on behalf of the common man with regard to policing the world's air quality is going to be anything nearly democratic.

I am rather convinced that China is the most awfully polluted place contributing the most dirt into the air, and that there is little American consumer habits are going to change about that. The Chinese will have to grow such habits themselves, presumably after they grow sufficient numbers of cancerous tumors. In the meantime, unless we determine that war is in order, there will be no megaprojects or globally persuasive treaties to reign in the Chinese compulsion towards greater urbanization and its environmentally toxic consequences.  So long as the Chinese poor prefer to ride in cars rather than on oxcarts, we can take this vector as a given. 

We thus in the States are to suffer the yelps of our elected nannies on carbon taxation against the Chinese perpetrators over which our taxation has no effect as we similarly suffer their gun controls against our own criminals. If we could only export our nagging nannies and emplace them into the National People's Congress. We shall not, and the effect of the tireless nagging will be a uselessly excruciating censure of our own actions to which our contribution to the global problem will be marginal. 

If the consequence of ignoring the research of scientists is that we don't empower global frameworks, I think this is a good development. One wonders how it is that scientists themselves don't consider the implications of global observations given no global Leviathan for fo their consquential activism. 

Science lives within humanity. Scientific agendas are political and economic. Humans will always make political and economic decisions, with or without science. Science is not an end to itself, even if that end is truth. Truth does not serve mankind. It simply exists whether or not people pay attention. 

Chris Pine is Jack Ryan

If you had a choice between being Jack Ryan, James Bond or James T. Kirk, which would you choose? Well, if it were a real life choice, then the answer would be Kirk. Kirk gets the most glory for the least effort, he's an emotional cripple and everybody knows it but they cut him slack. Nothing in particular motivates him except his desire to be Captain, roving out there in the unknown. Bond has a lot more fun than any of the others and he does put his life at risk a lot more often. His enemies are overblown monologuing villains with plenty of minions whose sufficiently crappy kung-fu provides entertaining exercise, and of course there are the girls. Kirk still has better gadgets, but the green skinned alien chicks? Really? Jack Ryan is the least appetizing choice. He's got bureacracy, decisions to make based on incomplete information, a patriotic streak in an America full of postmodern dissidents, ordinary weapons and a wife. Not a very satisfying job, unless you're an actor.

Chris Pine is the actor and he's chosen right, and you know what? He wasn't about to get offered James Bond's role, but by the second Trek we knew that train had run out of dramatic gas.  It's about time.

I say it's about time because like most people my age, I am sick and tired of whomever those creatures are that inhabit the 'End of the World' movie of whom I recognize two or three. Somebody with a little bit of brains in Hollywood should have seen that there had to be a new action star *somewhere* in America who wasn't previously a cartoon character. And quite frankly as much as I love Jason Statham (with whose body language I grok as a fellow springboard diver), all of his one offs were getting tired. Haven't yet seen Parker, maybe that'll last.

Chis Pine, with a name easier to say then Helmsworth and the age appropriate for this kind of thing gets the ticket. It actually makes me feel kind of sad for Joseph Gordon Levitt, who can act his way out of a paper bag, but not as a heroic lead. Fortunately, Pine gets to strut his chops amongst the likes of Kevin Costner and Kenneth Brannaugh in this film. Keira Knightley and he work some really good stuff, and boy do I love her non-perfect teeth. These are people who feel like people, and thus with just the suggestion of action, you get some heart-pounding drama. I think that's the way it's supposed to work, and yes that's the kind of spy Jack Ryan is; over his head but with great instincts and a fine mind. I tell you what, it works.

I don't mind the reboot. Pine's Ryan is not exactly the father or the son, but is presumeably the son by dint of age. But there's no Jack Sr in this film nor his mom, which is just as well. As a well-paced thriller that moves deliberately, any more characters would have made this film clunk down. 

Related articles

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - Jack's Back And He Looks Like Captain Kirk - Review

Chris Pine & Keira Knightley Are Perfection At 'Jack Ryan' Premiere, Chris Talks 'The Princess Diaries 2′

Gun Culture Club

It has been about a year since I began my romance with firearms. Like most things in my life, it relates to my desire for a more comprehensive understanding of everything and my general fearlessness when it comes to trying something I finally find compelling. It helps to have spare money and spare time, but I make those available in proportion to my interest. I have to tell you, the gun world is weird, but not in the way you might think. It's big and unexpected.

For a long time, I was involved in Scouting and went on several shoots with my son. So my first real experience with weapons came as a rather boring shock at a popular local range called Firestone. This was back in 07, just a couple miles off the freeway that separates some counties on the border of LA county. Not exactly the boonies but relatively so. I was really surprised at how serious the range master was and how casual the kids could be around rifles, but it left a fairly indelible mark on my first encounter with the NRA. They were the good guys who made sure dumb city kids didn't stay so dumb. 

But not all city kids are dumb. I can recall the first time I went to Boston around 1990. I hung out in the Copley Square Marriott and found myself at a newstand where some teenaged boys in bomber jackets were salivating over Guns & Ammo magazine as if it were Car & Driver. I was repulsed and fascinated by their familiarity with the terms. Like most people, I was clever about TV and film representations of guns, but ignorant about using them and understanding them from personal experience. And like most people, I accepted stereotypes about people with guns about the same way we accept stereotypes about people depending on what kind of automobile the drive. Like most people who think they're both smart and moral, I tended to be suspicious about people who actually knew more about gun tech and gun law than I did. Well, they must be nuts, because I am a reasonable man!

It turns out that I really didn't care enough for my reason or unreason to matter and so I carried that low quality deficit of understanding all the way up to the age of 46. But then I started getting a bit more serious in 07 and now I'm a gun owner in the State of California, which carries its own unique dramas.  I spent about a year overthinking firearms before I bought one and that meant a whole lot of television, a good bit of talk with shooters and an obscene amount of YouTube.

Now since I'm a gearhead, I rather expected gearhead gun TV to be a lot like gearhead car TV. Nope. Gun TV has that ghetto feel of hard sell advertisers of about 7 or 8 brands which dominate for every show. They're hardware vendors of OEM and aftermarket products, pieces and parts, each with their own stable of arcane celebrities and terms of art. And it's because of this, the whole things feels, to an outsider, claustrophobic, incestuous and weird. It's only when you start disaggregating what essentially comes from one or two channels on TV that the whole begins to make sense. Until you do, everybody with a gun seems to be from an incoherent and dangerous posse.

There are, from my way of reckoning at least six subcultures of shooters. From what I can see, the largest and most established group are the Hunters. This explains, if you're the kind of person that needs explaining to, why there's a southern, redneck vibe in the gun world. That's where the wildlife is and that's where I figure that people grow up shooting, as in getting a rifle for your 10th birthday and dad teaching you how to shoot. Now hunters have all their own subcultures depending upon what's your game of choice. You've got your bird hunters and each bird requires a different set of hunting skills, especially turkeys. You've got your game hunters, obviously deer and elk. But those split off into two major camps. There are bow hunters, who need to get right up close, and there are gun hunters. Then there are big game & wild game hunters. My favorite gun TV show right now is called Meat Eater. Think Bear Grylls who eats wild goats instead of spiders. 

The next recognizeable gang of shooters are the Tacticals. You can tell that more people want to look and feel like a Tactical than actually are a Tactical. The key word here is 'Special Forces', or the dead giveaway 'Navy SEALs'. But actually, I would bunch them together as your basic military and law enforcement professionals and wannabees, including Sheepdogs like me as well as mall cops. What distinguishes the Tacticals is the target. They train to shoot bad guys. Whereas the Hunters are all garbed up in wooland camo, spraying themselves with deer spunk and getting all excited in their whispers approaching that buck, the Tacticals concern themselves with other things, in deadpan tones. They're all about armed intervention which is, as you might imagine, deadly serious. These are the guys who are always firing into ballistics gel to see how far a bullet will penetrate a human body and how much damage that will do. Moreover, they are all about the reliability of their hardware and the art and science of shooting under all conditions. At night, indoors, from cover, while moving.

Right up there with the Tacticals are the Defenders. You might think of them in the same breath because the Defenders are training to shoot the bad guys too. But mostly the one bad guy who is trying to break into your house, or rape you on the street. The Defenders are all about small pistols and big shotguns. They're also serious about pepper spray and stun guns, but we're talking about shooters here. Obviously women figure large into this culture, and the focus is on tech that's simple to use and effective at countering the threat. I've noticed that the manufacturers who sell laser and light attachment hardware cater largely to this audience. Like the Tacticals, they want to know about the stopping power of bullets and pay attention to the ballistics gel tests but do so as consumers. These are the bang for the buck guys.

The Marksmen are the ridiculous gearheads of the bunch. You will never know much tech goes into these machines until you start talking to they guys who actually make their own custom loads, calculate corialis forces, reseat their barrels, polish the components and adjust the trigger pull all to get 'a good group' of bulletholes right on top of each other. Naturally, there are all different sorts of competitions. There are Cowboy shoots, where Old West technology is used. There is Three Gun, in which a competitor uses pistols, shotguns and rifles in combined test. My favorite is Precision Rifle, which is basically sniping. I've spent a lot of time studying this geeky angle of shooting. Most importantly however, being a Marksman is all about technique and manual skills. Beyond the requirements for safety, where is the best place to hold your hand when shooting off-handed? What methods of drawing a pistol are most accurate and/or speedy? 

Collectors are the gun nuts. These are the guys who can tell you the provenance of which company manufactured what in which country and how the import-export rules work. They will purchase a weapon in every caliber and talk your ear off about guns and ammo. These are the guys who are most likely, in my opinion, to get into a debate about gun control laws. Why? Because they want to buy whatever they want to buy, now.  When you first get the fever about owning a high quality firearm, you can feel the collector in you bubbling to the surface, espcially when the price gets over $1000, which is just the outskirts of collectorville. It gets very Ford vs Chevy around this. Most of the guys on YouTube I would call collectors. They will tell you all about their personal experience with this gun or that gun. A guy named Hickok45 is very popular and he seems to have shot everything in creation. He makes it look easy. But he's not the kind of collector that you find in stereotype. That would be more like the guy with a Ferrari and a Porsche. Exactly, he wants to buy what he wants to buy. Fanboys of the gun world.

Finally are the Professionals. These are the people in the industry. Like any other aspect of American life, there are squadrons of critics, pundits, gadflies and blowhards. But there are also people who make a living manufacturing, selling and repairing guns. If you stick the lobbyists into that equation you get the controversial group, but you'll never get the whole story until you speak to they guy who owns a gun store - the guy whose cash register has to talk to the FBI, and who fills out about as much paperwork as the guy who's selling you a car, definitely more than they guy who is leasing your apartment. I've only encountered these folks in the past year, but they always have an earful to say about rules and regs. 

--

I would say that everybody who shoots is some fraction of all of these. When you enter a discussion about guns, it might devolve into a debate about gun control depending upon whom you engage. On the whole debaters mostly want to debate and shooters mostly want to shoot. Navigating what comes across on TV, YouTube and endless debates online takes a lot of time. In some ways, becoming a shooter was like becoming a Republican. All you hear for a long time are stereotypes and it takes a while to situate yourself among people like yourself who are in it for similar reasons. 

Here in California, I am learning that people who shoot stay pretty DL about it. The idiot proofers are running things and applying regulations that are annoying at best. I actually have the words "Read instructions before using" stamped in steel on my pistol. Consequently, there are lots of interesting conversations going on inside gun stores, conversations you are not likely to hear anywhere else, including TV. This is all very interesting. Stay Tuned.

The Blue Zone

When I was a kid, there were no blue zones and all of the curbs at the curb were curbs, not wheelchair ramps. One day when I was 19 years old making 3.25 an hour at the local department store, I remember a lady driving a brand spanking new Mercedes-Benz through the parking lot at about 3 mph. She had a blue piece of plastic hanging from her rear view mirror that said she could park in the blue zone. So she did, and walked into the store. Right about that time, I was driving a 1968 Karmann Ghia with no insurance and no brake pads. The irony stuck.

Obviously rich people get Mercedes, but rich decrepit people with no driving skills who get Mercedes and privileged parking spots grated on my nerves. Why? Because when I was 19 years old living in what we used to call a 'redlined' neighborhood, I knew that I was being punished for being young and she was being rewarded for being old. I hated the insurance industry with a passion that only young ignorant boys can sustain. All these old farts from rich neighborhoods get discounts on their premiums because they never drive fast. Me and my cohort have to suffer the racial calculations of the good hands people. Yeah me and my cohort not my cohort and I, not subjects, objects.

I still think there is something wrong with America specifically engineered by the Baby Boom, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Actually, I recognize all kinds of blue zones, I just don't know what to think about them. Consider this story about artisan toast. I'm not mad that people are making money off hipster crap, and I'm not mad that there are mentally ill people who manage to be functional in society. I'm mad that life keeps getting easier for all classes of marginally competent people. I cannot help but observing the conclusion that society gets softer, and the profit incentive for making people dependent on blue zone after blue zone starts to dominate. Today, you and I both know that for an extra ten grand, that Mercedes has the ability to parallel park itself.

I deal with this dilemma in concert with another I'll call 'Crowding Out Quality' but I'll deal with that in another post. It's just another unresolved aspect of the tradeoffs between modernism and self-sufficiency. I think I'll always give the nod to self-sufficiency.

The conversation came up with my daughter. She saw one of those new three-wheeled motorcycles and she thought it was really cool. But I disagreed and thought it was a poor development. She argued that it is good that they made a new kind of motorcycle that would allow more people to ride. I argued that the roads would be less safe because the people riding them would have less skill than old school motorcyclists. But perhaps the new trikes would be more safe and would indeed require less skill. Wouldn't that be an improvement? I don't know. That's why this is a dilemma for me.

I've got to find some kind of simple test that helps me determine whether it's better or worse when new processes or inventions allow lower skilled people to function in a normal capacity. What do you think? How many blue zones should we create?

Producers, Consumers & Dynamic Data Warehousing

So we have a bunch of big ideas around here at Full360 and it seems that I have been doing them rather than talking about them. That's what I like about work. Here's what we're doing now.

via www.cubegeek.com

New this year is technical cross-posting. Integrating the free-standing Cubegeek block with everything here at Cobb.

The Dying Truth, Lone Survivor and the Sophomore Dog

2014 is my sophomore dog year. Sheepdog that is. I took all the survey courses last year and got my puppy feet wet. I'm never going to be anything more than I was when I was a kid, which is a big brother among the three big brothers in the neighborhood that kept us gang free. Codename Kool Moe Dee: Wild Wild West. I'm not ever going to pretend that I'm a warfighter or that I actually have some kind of metaphorical war to fight. But I do have the mentality and last year I connected some intelligence with my guts and made sense of all the fighting I've done in my life. I know with clarity that am a sheepdog in my bones. Can't help it. Just going to try and be smart about it.

I knew I wanted to see Lone Survivor. I didn't read the book, but I've known about Luttrell for a while. I'm sure I've heard him on one or two SOFREP podcasts. I think last year was when I read two or three of the sniper biographies that pulled me into that particular orbit. I didn't realize it was his story in particular but I knew it would be interesting to me in the same way some people are drawn to the story about the dude who cut off his arm to go rock climbing, or put on 50 pounds to prove something about McDonalds. It would be a kind of standout story that crosses over into the public consciousness. Except I know something about people who do for real. At the end of the day, they tell the dying truth.

Indulge me for a moment's consideration of the concept. We have a bit of society that is entirely skeptical of the dying truth. The dying truth is what you tell when you are absolutely convinced that what you know is real, right and that you cannot see it any other way. The dying truth is what you'll tell until your dying day, but most of the time it doesn't get told at all because you really don't care if people know, or believe you or not. You just know what you know. When I first became a writer, I always thought about this kind of knowledge - the sort you imagine a war correspondant tells in the salon of society matrons, or the adventurer tells in the offices of the philosophical society. It is that thing that defies the conventional wisdom because you cannot follow convention to find out such knowledge. It perplexes because it must be experienced. So you have to wonder how much of the dying truth anyone in society actually gets. When Merriwether Lewis returned to become the toast of Saint Louis, half of his diaries were lost. He didn't show the scar where he got shot in the ass by one of his own men. Some audiences demand only glorious narrative. Some storytellers indulge them. There will be a thousand reviews of this movie and how many of those will be written by people for whom the spirit connects beyond the infotainment factor? Such connections don't always matter, but in stories about life and death, in tales about the truth you will tell until the day you die, it does. 

We are fortunate to live in a nation of millions, and with a million millionaires there are often enough parlors that are built on dying truths themselves. I know Wahlberg was a good choice to wear the bloody makeup and navigate a good fraction of that truth through the corridors of Hollywood power. Yeah the movie was still a movie, but it connected with the fighter in me. And it reminded me of the term, a term we probably don't use enough in this nation of millions: warfighter. I just so happened to watch a National Geographic special about the C-5M Super Galaxy airlifter. The colonel in charge knows it to be a weapon that serves the warfighter. Every time I hear the term, I identify with fighting spirit and the will to win. But I'm not going to get fluffy with my vocab to illustrate the feeling, rather I will just call it ineffable. When you know it, you know it. If you had to grow up streetsmart as I did, you know it deeply.

So at this point in my life, when I am beginning to peak out as 'Daddy' and focus again on my own growth and what I know to be true, I am coming to reconcile my fights and my will to fight, and my capacity to fight. It goes without saying that my reasons must be proper. What resonates from the film is all over the place, but I will talk about the bullet to Axe's head. It made me mad. It made me madder than I can ever remember any scene in any movie made me mad. I thought about it with Maestro yesterday - those movies when people walk out silently, overcome with emotion. Glory. Apocalypse Now. Schindler's List. Blackhawk Down. Saving Private Ryan. It belongs in that group of films, but unlike those, this movie isn't a big arc war film. It doesn't give you a whole lot of dramatic introduction. It gives you a close-up of a platoon of warfighters. Trained to be deadly. Trained to think on their feet. Trained to survive. Trained to win. It's the kind of head that it's difficult to crawl into, especially for a generation raised on the narrative of meaninglessness, romance and deceptions of All's Quiet on the Western Front.

I have begun to learn something I will never learn fully. That is how to fight with firearms. In doing so, I have to reject a lifetime of dramatic representations that make no logical or ballistic sense. I learned something about first aid last year. It was so simple, but it took 40 hours of experience competing with a lifetime of television fakery. Everyone of us who lives in the Idiot Proof City must at some point recognize how closely we are held hostage by the ignorance of interdependence. Some of us see it as we take control of our diets and realize the ultimate liberation of growing our own food, some of us see it as we exercise rigorously for the first time and realize how far we can run. Good literature can shake us up and make us realize we have been accepting conventional wisdom instead of dying truth. I have been consuming this kind of good literature for about six years now, starting with Churchill's account of WW2, and moving on to understanding the Eastern Front, and then back through time to Rome's Punic Wars and all sorts of history since then. But only recently have I begun to see how it applies to me personally, transforming from mere understanding to training and responsibility. 

What that means is, for better or worse, at that moment in the film, I felt that I needed to be a part of the solution. I recognized in myself the determination to be a force to be reckoned with as trite as that may sound. They say of the responsible man that he wishes he could have been at the moment of truth to make the difference because of what he knows he could have done. Yes, I'm a yapping little puppy, but I'm growing up. I understand the fight in the dog. That's what that movie was about and it most connected with me in that simple moment of dying truth. 

Ten Albums I Still Play

I bought my first LP when I was about 19. I can't remember what it was, but a good bet would be that it was either Yellow Magic Orchestra's debut or Spyro Gyra's Morning Dance. The first 45 I bought was EWF's "Getaway" and the first pop songs whose words I memorized were Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On", "The Bells" by Originals  and "Ball of Confusion" by The Temptations. Of all those songs and music I've purchased over my lifetime, there are some that I've had for many years and still play now.

1. Moonlight Sonata
When I moved to Brooklyn from LA, I began a nightly ritual that helped me sleep despite the D Train's rumbling reminding me of earthquakes. The first would be that I would watch Charlie Rose on my 9 inch black and white television, the second would be that I would play Maurizio Pollini's version on Deutche Grammophone. 

2. Material - Hallucination Engine
This is most likely my favorite album of all time. I never ever tire of it. If my personality were a five sided two dimensional object, this album would represent a full 20% of me. If I were HAL and you unplugged my mind, the last thing I would sing would be this album's version of Naima. 

3. Synergy - Sequencer
Of all the electronic synthesizer music in my world, this album remains singular. More than Switched on Bach, more than anything by Billy Preston or Stevie Wonder. 

4. Steely Dan - Aja
The first time I heard Aja was in an Avis Rent-A-Car office at the San Jose Airport the year that it came out. I had heard that it was the jazzyest album he had done, and unlike everybody else who was a big fan, I hadn't run out to get it. But the title cut seeped into my consciousness while I was waiting in line, and suddenly I just knew this was it. 

5. Windham Hill - Sampler 84
There's something about this album that I keep coming back to. Well, everything. I was on a quest for the soundtrack of my new life as the mellow yuppie programmer I believed myself to be. This was my album. My generation's Montovani.

6. Bobby McFerrin - Beyond Words
The first time I heard this album, coincidentally, was on an airplane flight. It was literally on the plane's jukebox. I was stunned, floored, blown away. What McFerrin and Chick Corea did on this album was singularly profound, and I think it's one of the greatest treats in music that most people don't know about. It is joyful music that defies the misery of our age. 

7. Modest Mouse - The Lonesome Crowded West
I think most people will agree that this is probably one of the greatest rock albums of the last 20 years. It still works. I still gravitate to it. If you haven't seen the documentary, please do.

8. The Bad Plus - Best of
Well, I made this album myself because I love this group and I just had to have a collection to play in my truck. It includes all of their popular covers and my other favorites. 

9. Stanley Clarke Band - The Stanley Clarke Band
This is the newest album in the collection here. Just three years old, but I play it end to end all the time.

10. Radiohead - Best of
My favorite Radiohead songs are almost all covers. So yeah, I made a mix of my favorite cuts which include some of the originals and covers by Vitamins and Radiodread. Awesome. 

My First Grandmother

I have three distinct memories of my father's mother. And it's rather odd at this moment to consider them in the absence of a great deal of other stories about her. Sometimes it's as if she never lived, or as if she were an unfathomable legend part human part myth. Someone asked the question, 'What was the best advice your grandmother ever gave?'. I didn't know her well enough to parse any, but I have these memories.

The first thing you have to know about Lucille was that her nickname was 'Miss Madam'. She was exactingly proper. She survived polio. 

Memory One.
I am about four or five years old. That would make it 1965 or 66. I am to go downtown New Haven with my grandmother to the fancy department store. This, in a time when such things were not done by Negroes. I am dressed up in my light blue double breasted jacket with navy shorts. I am casually, but notably on my best behavior. Eyebrows are raised and I am reminded in no uncertain terms to be good. We go. I am good. We stay quite some time. We return. Miss Madam reports that I was a perfect gentleman. Eyebrows are raised again. 

Memory Two.
I am ten years old. I am spending the summer with my uncle in Cleveland Heights. Miss Madam will be there for a few weeks. All of my cousins are dreading the prospect. They call her 'Mee Ma' and says she is as mean as a witch. I have no such memories or experience. This will be my second time seeing her. She is as frightening as they say. She bosses everyone around. It's fascinating to see how she bosses my uncle around. I don't understand her. She seems relentless, but I have no idea of the reason. She sits on the back screen porch and smokes. My uncle told me the story of the Tell Tale Heart. I knew that it was Poe, but I hear it every night when I go to sleep in the attic. My grandmother tells my uncle to leave the poor boy alone. Aha. He was knocking on the wall.

Memory Three.
I am 12. I visit West Haven's icy winter. My grandparents live on Captain Thomas Boulevard in a new condo. Down on the beach there are horsehoe crabs. My grandfather now shows the effect of years living with Miss Madam. He waits for his time to be free, and then indulges himself. I see that he has made several ships in bottles. My, what a patient, perfectionist man. One evening we have spaghetti for dinner. I use a knife and fork and cut the spaghetti. My grandmother explodes. She knew my father married a woman with no sense whatsoever. I am taught to use a knife and spoon, swirling the spaghetti around. I never had seen such a thing in my life. 

That's it. Other than her raspy voice, her crisp diction and her stringent discipline, I have few other memories of my grandmother, and almost nobody tells us any funny stories about her. She died of emphysema around the age of 65. She smoked three packs a day. She was admired; she was respected. She was feared. She gave no easy compliments, but she was fiercely proud of all of us. She made us make her proud. The story I hear most often about her comes from my uncle.  Somewhere around the time I was born, he received his PhD in microbiology. The local newspaper came to interview the family and asked her what she thought of this achievement. "It's what I expected. He's my son."

It's odd that she stands as she does in such shadows of memory, but I do remember other things. She introduced me to fruitcake, which I do indeed like, and sherbet. But I do not remember anything resembling advice coming from my grandmother. No. She gave orders. 

A New Season

and forth comes the season
extending the wonders of the ordinary
a time for hope
a time for miracles
new and old ones
regular and unusual
the remaking of man in all his wonder
with all of his stumblings
again he comes therefore
as he seeks that better page
that better chapter of himself

what has been and what has not
the new spark more intensely viewed
than the simplicity of casual curiosity

more oh so much more
it portends a life/a year of expanded
and renewed faith in new beginnings
for all who will but breathe deep
with eyes slowly closed and
a gentle whisper that murmurs
yes yes yes
and yes again

Maple

WHP Reborn

This year I have a few resolutions, but the primary one is aimed at shooting. Cameras and pistols. The pistol packing stuff will rarely be documented, but the photographic angle is open for all. I've long had a category at Cobb for photos, most of them have been from my father's collection. I am taking up that part of the legacy, and while the two of us can amble and ramble, we'll be going out most every weekend on photo safaris. 

This Saturday past I went to Playa Vista and Playa del Rey for a shoot. My angle is macro, he's got a good eye for capturing people. So we complement each other. I thought about putting together a separate blog, but I am realizing that it's probably better for me to trust Typepad to have all this mess archived in one place on the off chance I don't get it into S3. Anyway, I think that I will mix a bit of prose and maybe some poetry along with the photos that I share here. Blogging photography will be a good expository release. 

I've been thinking about two or three preliminary themes. The first occurred to me when I went downtown the other week. I found a new building posing as an old one as someone had planted creeping flowers on the brick wall. It looked cool until I got close and found that a good quarter of the flowers were diseased. I don't know the name of the plant or the disease, as do very few of us. So I'm thinking that dead and dying flowers serves as a decent metaphor for the silliness of environmentalism in LA. Naturally Playa Vista was my first target. 

You see if you don't know how to cook, you don't know how bad McDonalds is. If you don't know how to live in the woods, any tree in the city looks like nature. If you live in Los Angeles, you can call Ballona Marsh a swamp. But I have driven many times over a 40 mile causeway in Louisiana across a swamp of the sort that makes me nervous. While I'd rather not be snarky over that pitiable bit which exists here in LA I might at least learn how diseased are the plant in our garden - because nature that doesn't overwhelm is a garden. I will be exploring the gardens in LA. 

Secondly I'll be creating macro shots with an eye to the unidentifyable and micro mechanical still lifes. Some will be composed. Some will also be oriented towards making some commercial quality desktop background if people still pay for that kind of thing. I'll likely open source them anyway.  So. There it is.

Best Meals Ever

For a couple years I was an elite reviewer on Yelp. I would give a restaurant five stars only if the meal showed me something I'd never seen before and it was really that good. What I'm going to do now is try to come up with a top x from memory - that is to say without going back to Yelp and seeing what I wrote. So these will be in no reviewed order.

Whist: Santa Monica
Whist was a special meal for my anniversary when the Spousal Unit worked as a restaurant recruiter. So imagine you're a headhunter for chefs in Los Angeles. So we definitely had the hookup and had the chefs come out to meet us. Fabulous, daring meal. 

?: New Orleans
There was this little restaurant in New Orleans next to the Marriott a couple blocks from the convention center. It was on the corner. I had the most awesome shrimp dish ever. It was as if the chef knew how to capture the ocean breeze and put it into a broth. It made me feel like I was Aquaman and could breathe salt water, and this was what a fresh warm current tasted like. 

Musha: Torrance
Musha as anyone will tell you, is the most wholly original Japanese restaurant you are likely to find anywhere outside of the coolest neighborhood in Tokyo. You will eat things there you never imagined Japanese people ate. 

?: NYC
I really ought to remember the name of this joint. It was my first closing party. We got the upstairs room in a classic Italian joint over near the Citibank Tower on Lexington. There were about a dozen of us and it seemed as if we each had our own personal waiter. I'm sure that it went something like $200 per plate. I don't remember the main courses, but I do remember that we had 1977 Port and chocolates for dessert. Best service ever.

Del Frisco's Double Eagle: Ft. Worth
Basically changed my steak from NY Strip to Ribeye. It was as if I had never tasted beef before, it was simply that flavorful. Astoundingly perfect steak. Still hasn't been approached. 

 

Two Turntables & No Microphone

Once upon a time I was a DJ. I was a different kind of DJ, hooked into an interesting clique in black LA. I was Mellow Mike but most of the time I just used my regular name because there often wasn't a whole lot of dancing going on. I was the guy who did Quiet Storm receptions. My two most significant gigs were the one for the Brotherhood Crusade back in 1980 when the Nickerson Trio performed. They were a dancing, singing trio - basically En Vogue 10 years before En Vogue. Then when Maxine Waters was first elected to Congress, I DJ'ed her reception. I was the regular DJ for all of the dances at my church and of course all my neighborhood got to hear my mixes. 

I had a goregeous Setton integrated amp that blew 60 watts per channel and stacked Advents. I used Dual turntables with ADC cartridges. To top it off, I had Sony's first solenoid cassette deck, the TC-K6. Anybody who was an amateur audiophile could tell you that was a sweet little setup. So yeah I know the contradiction, an audiophile DJ , but as I said, I did Quiet Storm receptions, and you just don't compromise when it comes to sound quality if you're playing Mr. Magic. 

It would be a year after I sold my gear when Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel blew my mind and started scratching.  I did know there were some DJs doing extended breaks on the best beats available. They had the Numark mixers, but although I wanted the skill, my clientele was into that funky smooth jazz and songs they could cha-cha and slow dance to. Yeah we every once in a while dipped into Rick James punk funk stuff, but that was for high school kids. We were more sophisticated. The Invisible Man's Band and Herbie Hancock's Feets was more our style. Not to mention Ray Parker's  jams For Those Who Like to Groove. I could go on about Jamaica Funk, but the point was you didn't scratch and mix those songs. They had their own perfection, and no matter how much people wanted to dig into the urge to keep remixing the break for Lenny White's Peanut Butter, that was done with *tape* not with turntables live at a sophisticated party.

Nevertheless over time, I realized that things were changing and having two turntables and a microphone mixer that you only used like Levi Booker was going to be a trend with fewer fans as time went by. The kids wanted rap and scratch. I actually wanted New Wave, Ska and TwoTone. By the time Fishbone was on the LA scene, there was nothing interesting on the wheels of steel that Art of Noise wasn't doing best. 

Still I remember the days when I was putting my system together. There would always be something breaking down. One of the belts on my turntable would break and it takes a week to get a replacement. The special battery in the microphone died and I couldn't find another. I have run out of TDK SA 60 cassettes and have to use TDK D 120s. Three steps forward and two steps back, the volatility of chasing perfection left me oftimes with the almost perfect junior audiophile setup. Ever since then, I've called that condition 'two turntables and no microphone' or sometime 'one turntable and a microphone'.

I think I deal with the condition well. When I last spoke to my witch doctor, he told me not to worry so much. I told him that I was chasing small perfections; he said nothing is perfect, and I chose not to correct him. The other day I saw a quote about demanding perfection and settling for excellence. That's about my mania, but it always leaves me short a component. I have an incomplete collection of excellent bits and pieces, in myself, in my life. 

--

This Christmas, I earned so it seems, the biggest bonus I can ever remember getting all at once that wasn't a payroll error. And while I am scared to death to spend it because I'm sure it puts me in a different tax bracket, I have done quite a bit of shopping. I'm sitting on the cash until I can get my accountant to figure out what I ought to do, but maxing out a credit card or two in anticipation that I can blow at least a quarter of it. 

I'm happy to report that I no longer have any desire to own a Breitling watch. I don't want a Rolex either. I checked out an IWC. Nope. Don't want it. I have no need for a Hollywood Suit. I don't want a BMW. I thought about a paddle board and a scuba suit. Nope. I thought about some new studio monitors for my desk. I don't want them either. I restrung the acoustic guitar this summer and I've already decided to file for non-operation of the motorcycle. I do have to buy a rain cover though. 

All I want is a pistol and a camera. And a water hookup for my icemaker, and a new corner group. Throw in a rug and a new coffee table and I'm pretty much done. 

--

If you know anything about my wife, then you know that she has put up with my minimalism for a very long time. We had been married eight years before we finally got rid of the futon. I have slept on the same queen mattress on the floor with no frame and the same comforter since 1988. OK 1984. But the comforter is from 88. So ever since we moved to Redondo in 02, she has been the master of the found couch. We've had about 5 or 6, and I only remember the red leather one and the current corner group, which has been destroying my back when it's not poking my butt with that loose spring. So we're finally getting the big leather sofa and loveseat. No easy chair and ottoman, but I don't want them. 

I was originally going to get the Olympus PEN E-5. I fell in love with this camera when it first came out. I liked the idea and I have been surfing Amazon every Christmas since its debut. The other day, I finally went to Samy's Camera in Culver City with Pops. The Olympus was puny. I got a used Nikon D90 instead. On the spot, and a nice 40mm lens on the guy's recommendation. I saved 600 bucks. 

I was originally going to get an H&K USP 45. I really loved this pistol when I put my mitts on it. Last year I was sure that I was going to get a rifle, but it swung around on the Maestro's recommendation to pistols. You have to have your pistol skills the same way you have to learn to drive a stick. Once again, I took the recommendation of a pro and picked out a Sig Pro instead. Saved 600 bucks again. 

OK so now it's all going into the corner group. But I'm happy about that. That's for the family. And quite frankly I'm shooting frames to be with my dad and shooting bullets to be with sheepdogs. Pops and I are going to spend a lot of time together on photo shoots starting tomorrow. I'll finally, after all these years, have a fast digital camera, and I've been wanting one since back in the days when there was a company called Cingular, like 02. 

--

I have something that I call The American Price. It's the premium we pay for having exactly what we want, which goes far beyond what we need. What we want is mediated by our class desires and the amount of self-confidence we have that we can flaunt or ignore them. I'm very much aware of the American price when I go into a store and talk to a pro, because they are competing with online markets, fashion commercials and friends' advice. It doesn't often work in their favor unless they work in the Apple Store. Speaking of which, the last time I went into an Apple Store, there were at least 50 employees in red shirts. They can't all be full timers can they?

The American Price for a shirt includes the overhead of advertising it on television, the cost of logistics to get it from China to the US, plus the additional cost of getting it from the central warehouse to the expensively designed high rent mall store. Plus you pay for the pro who, if he actually knows his business, will be fighting against all of your expensive prejudices and desires with real world knowledge and experience. If he's honest, and most pros are. 

We finally pay the American Price and not only do we have an article of merchandise, we have a story of anticipation and desire, a human drama of saving, scrimping, thinking, choosing, acquiring, using and critiqueing. Our anecdote becomes fodder for the next pro to wrangle with. But even in all of that meta shopping, we increase the value of the product in this virtuous inflationary cycle.

--

I was telling Pops something about the Idiot Proof City and our expectations of meritocracy. The way I see it, most of us are rather shameless when it comes to exploiting our knowledge. That's what the Idiot Proof City encourages us to do, to prove we can master the city with style. It's not enough to have a beater that gets us from A to B. If we're smart, we get a better job with a better company so we can afford a better car that gets us to A to B about the same time in traffic, except when we honk our BMW horns, we make people both envious and angry. It's still a better car, with better looking people in the cooler looking commercials, wearing nicer shirts. BMWs and Lexus autos have audiophile systems built in, although now nobody uses cassette tapes.

Priests and spies have valuable information as well, but they are trusted to discretion. The rest of us get knowledge as cheaply and quickly as we possibly can and shoot off our mouths and resumes as loudly as possible. Then we can get the interview and name our own American Price for our labor, if we're good enough. Our hiring managers then begin their own  human drama of  thinking, choosing, acquiring, using and critiqueing. 

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I want a pistol because I'm trying to escape the Idiot Proof City. I don't want to go as far away as the Meat Eater on the Outdoor Channel. He's way down in New Zealand hunting chamois and Canada geese, fording rivers with ice-floes. I don't hate the idiots that much, nor do I love self-sufficiency to that professional survival level. But I do want to be a free man and add as many skills as I can so that I can buy something used and broken, be my own pro and put it back into working order. I don't want to depend on the whole inflationary system of commodity delivery. I don't think the whole thing is going to crash, it's just going to degrade the quality of items it delivers to mass markets. 

You can't get audiophile integrated amps like you used to. The whole audio industry has been dumbed down. You can't get quality chrome cassette tapes any longer. Reel to reel? Not at the mall. See in order to get excellence, you have to understand perfection. You actually have some resistance to overcome to realize that perfection even exists. Then you have to separate function from fashion. That's harder to do. You'll have to rely on a pro, or become one yourself. 

The road to becoming a pro has no exit strategy. You can't just swallow the knowledge whole and barf back quality labor. Even if you put quality in, you can't regurgitate quality lickety split. You can expect the American Price immediately because the organic pros, well they don't necessarily want to be in the Idiot Proof City. The City has room for inflated commodities, but no mass markets for those who understand perfection and demand excellence.

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What if there is no meritocracy? What would we do in America? Could we be unpopular DJs for the sake of sophistication? What if you couldn't describe your skills in a quick paragraph, and no household name celebrity would get on television and give an audience of 10 million the number give your labor a text thumbs up?  What if you had to just relay the acknowledged purity of Grover Washington Jr,  without shooting your mouth off, just providing the music? 

Sometimes the best way to 'add value' is to shut up and provide, and not to inflate. I can't expect everyone to be a pro or even want to be a pro. But there's something about quality for the sake of competence that gets buried. There's something wrong with driving a car whose features you can list in braggadocio but whose component perfection you cannot understand.

I don't know how to end this essay. There's probably a way to wrap it up concisely and cleverly, but I only want to tell the stories, not be so clever. I hope you find something useful in there.