Cobb

Sean Hannity?

I watch exactly no television news, and I really haven't since the early 90s when I pretty much dropped everything except for Charlie Rose. And I basically watched Charlie Rose because many of his guests wrote books, and so I read the books. I have been out of the mainstream media for two decades. 

That said, when I moved from NY to ATL, it took some time understanding redneck radio and distinguishing that from Right radio. In those days Hannity was a rank amateur and picked all kinds of stupid examples for everything - but I understood finally where all of Right radio was coming from. 

The last time I listened to Right radio on the regular (meaning once or twice per week) was about six years ago with Hugh Hewitt, although I did listen to Dennis Miller for a while too, now that I think of it. But on the whole I don't miss it.

The reason is this. Radio has the opportunity to bring focused attention to deep issues. In order to handle the deep issues properly, you *must* have a companion website that is well edited and has transcripts of every broadcast. I think there are only a few radio personalities who are deep precision shooters, most shoot from the hip and just go overboard on thin talking points. So they would sound stupid in print, where real analysis could take place. But that's the nature of radio and they don't want to change. 

Now once upon a time, Bill Bennett had a radio show. There's no way I would give my limited media time to Sean Hannity if Bennett were still on the air. But you see the problem. Bennett got lynched over a soundbite, and that's how radio has been dumbed down to the level of Sean Hannity who sucks by comparison even to that other dude the Left hates. Not Limbaugh but.. the guy on CNN. Anyway. Oh yeah Glenn Beck. 

Here's the bottom line. All of broadcast media, all radio and TV pundits are are purveyors of CONVENTIONAL WISDOM. They neither have the will nor the capacity to *teach* and basically what they are expert at is bringing what you already know into punchy dramatic relief. Two maybe three stories a week. Week after week after week.

You will never get them to deal with any politics at the level of law. So everything they do can only be measured by popular polling, not legal or policy ramifications. So it is impossible for them to inform the public at a substantial level - instead they make popular polling seem more important than it is - thereby inflating the significance of their influence. 

Here's the other thing. When you're on radio and you come back to a story you did one way (NPR does this all the time) which was wrong. You come back and mention it as if it was only a small part of your interest. I don't know what the logical fallacy of that is, but it's basically like saying - Some people think Joe Biden is not an intelligent Vice President. They thought Dick Cheney was intelligent until he shot that guy in the face. Radio personalities always put disproportionate emphasis in their editorializing. It's horrible journalism and I wish all the Baby Boomers would just die. 

Brian Lamb is the last honest, intelligent journalist in America. And if I really cared about politics, I would only watch him and read books he recommends.

Sir

Most of my life, people have addressed me with respect. I'm starting to realize something - or maybe I should say I stumbled upon a realization which is both enlightening and a little sad. I am that man. 

It has always annoyed me when people I considered affluent and silly have demurred from being called 'Mr. Smith'. Oh please call me John, my dad is Mr. Smith. It betrays a false sense of humility - I don't quite understand what causes it but I have my theory. My theory is that they are connected, privileged and untalented & unserious. Informality is all the formality they can afford. They are the people who go everywhere and do nothing. They have an embarassment of riches - they are the owners of small fortunes, large houses and unpaid loans to wealthy in-laws. They smile a lot. 

My daughter observed that we live in a very nice neighborhood where the rich people don't act rich. Yes, we have some of those good neighbors. We live in a place where reasonably rich people can live normal lives; I'm attracted to such neighborhoods. But occasionally we pay the social price in the company of boys who inherit and don't grow up. 

Myself. I'm like a cousin to Robert Schimmel. Son of the Holocaust survivor. When things go bad, that's when I get funny. But most of the time, I'm serious, and for most of my life, I have preferred to be called Mr. Bowen. Yes, that's my father's name, and his father's before him and his father's before him. 

---

A couple weekends ago, I found myself in Carmel. Carmel is a town where rich people come to act rich, especially if there's an event at Pebble Beach. You can tell by the little logos. That one says US Open. That one says America's Cup. Here's a man wearing tortoiseshell glasses driving a fully restored cream and brown Citroen 2CV Charleston. Here's a man discussing the finer points of a $300 fountain pen. These kids are from Tokyo. I happen to think rich people are interesting in their element. Here's a tall fellow who exclaimed that he went through a cowboy hat phase and he and his brother have one of every sort. Shopping in Carmel is not enlightening, but like shopping everywhere, it's always fun to see people get gratification. 

I have expensive taste. I like things that do what they are supposed to do, for a long time, and are designed be repaired by engineers who expect they are used properly. Occasionally, I admire very well engineered things that are superficially functional and exquisitely beautiful. So I priced some Damascus steel folding knives at the cowboy hat store, but I don't have 3500 bucks to spare. I tooke th brochure anyway. I too am going through a cowboy phase, only I don't have easy access to capital. Still, because of my tastes, places like Carmel are not totally foreign to me, I appreciate restored old cars as much as anyone - I am generous with knowing nods for all gearheads.

As the Spousal Unit and the First Daughter were finding the discount arcade, I ambled purposelessly along the boulevard overhearing resort namedropping conversations in French, Japanese, Catalan and Connecticut Yankee. Most of it was the informed burble of Victorians and their best servants, updated to California Casual. One has to admire the spunk of men who would study golf, or hotel science so deeply and wear their khaki slacks, blue blazers and rep ties with such smug confidence all the while knowing the are lackies at the highest level. One hopes they are not abused. The stunning soundbite I caught amongst all of the street chat was:

"Well you have to treat everyone with respect because you never know."

It hit me almost at once that I was in America. The America I remember from before 9/11 when I used to think about the wonderment of fancy restaurants. In any fancy American restaurant, the guy two tables away from you just might be a multimillionaire. Of course that truth remained after 9/11 but we started getting all dysfunctional about what America meant. I'm talking about the open society that we still are. Free parking on the street in Carmel.

One of the things I remember most about that book I read about the rich, the wealthy and the super wealthy was that a lot of the wealthy are pretty peculiar folks, meaning that they are the guy who spent 20 years perfecting goat cheese, or ball bearings. If you were the guy who invented the Maglite, you started off with a dream to have a really good flashlight and then one day everybody in law enforcement wanted one. Four years later, you're a regular old guy with time and millions to burn in Carmel. You go to all the Red Sox games. You buy the wife a new Benz. Yeah the watch costs 6 thousand, but whatever. You just buy stuff that works, not all that flash. You can find things out if you really want to know. You have time. You have money. You have patience. You're not under pressure to make a whole lot of mistakes. You appreciate a good meal. You realize you have been blessed, and you take your freedom seriously. By my reckoning, a reasonable man, once rich, will get over the hump and mellow out or wreck his life within 5 years.

Obviously there are a lot of factors. But people have always called me 'sir', and aside from some testy Koreans back in 1990, I can't think of anyone who has ever pestered me out of their store. Although, I do get the itch in some of those men's departments in NYC on 5th Ave. So it occurred to me that outside of the actual buying, bossing people around and ordering things done, people are starting to treat me like I might be something of a wealthy patron. I don't generally ask stupid questions. I'm not in a rush. I've got my inner peace, and I take my freedom seriously. 

---

Today I realize that I am visibly older and chilled out. When I dress, I can no longer do the casual abandon. I have been working at home for 2 and a half years. Going out is always going out. And I'm noticing that I'm they guy who is often mistaken for a civilized individual. In other words, people treat me like I'm rich. And I am. In any context in the world I'm doing just great. The only thing I need is to replace what I already have that breaks. That and get my kids through college. But I got them through highschool and it went, more or less, according to plan - here in the most expensive neighborhood in the world.

I am Mr. Bowen. I only have regular American upper middle class standing, which is very often very tenuous, but I'm accustomed to dealing with the headaches. I've paid the taxes. I've paid the attorneys, almost. I've paid the dues. I haven't been worn out or defeated, and I'm not pretending that I'm going to take over the .. whatever or save the planet. But I'm someone you can look up to if you are young, and I'm not going to pretend that life hasn't taught me some serious lessons. I've got the deadpan humor to prove it. I know what to say when people die. I know how to react when shit hits the fan. I know when I need help and I know when I can be helpful. I know my dependents and my dependencies.

It never gets old. Facing life never ceases to be scary. I may be getting to that point at which I become like the old soldier who hasn't died yet. Like the gambler who makes a killing cheating, gets caught and knows how to shut up and give the money back. I understand the role of chance, and I know not to ever depend on it but capture it when it comes.

I have much life.  

First Quarter Report

It has been a rather extraordinary year so far. I like the way it's heading.

I realize that I am not foolish and that if I only maintain an even keel, I may very well move ahead, but sometimes I sail into rough waters. That's where I am right now, but there's light in the distance. 

The Age of Sail
I have replaced my science fiction with a somewhat new genre of reading which is making me an interesting person. They are personal stories, fictions all, of character. And I am investing more and more time into embodying into myself a bit more - how shall we say - perhaps a bit more Griffindor. Some bravery, some presence.  In my work, I am getting more aligned with the technologies that are most likely to make us money and gaining confidence. Some great fraction of this I am attributing to my reading of the Aubrey Maturin series which twist my Anglophilia towards the inevitability of my Anglo American cultural heritage. At some point I'll need to recover some French, but these days I am feeling how much my sense of propriety is Western in those traditions. I see direct parallels in the organization of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and the software industry - don't ask me how, it's complex, but I'm seeing it nonetheless. Sometimes one can do a great deal with a Brig. And certainly I see how Aurbrey's fortunes and misfortunes mirror my own. All one can do is sail. Sail against all odds and maintain your ship. Arcane and forgotten, we will all be, but for today there remain prizes at sea.

EDC & The Grey Sheepdogs
If my son didn't bust his budget, I would probably own a rifle now. As it stands I have only gotten my pockets a bit more emptied of cash and filled with survival gadgets. Knives, tools & lights. A quarter of watching videos about hunting, shooting, sniping, hand loading and many other gun oriented immersions have given me a stirling education about what's out there to know and what I actually want to know. As an extension of my go-bag paranoia I have come full face with what lethality I feel comfortable with and what the Sheepdog Class generally talks about. Of course I harken back to Bill Whittle's revolutionary rant and the consequences of what the more vocal Right has been yammering about for the past several years. On the whole, it feels a little like parenthood. I have this instinctual aversion to the hard work of going Grey which I can already tell will be overcome by my unwillingness to be irresponsible. I hope that I'll fall into it naturally. But I suspect it will all be some kind of inevitable accident, like parenthood. 

Going back to my new year's resolutions:

Quick - Say it all before you stop caring.

• New refrigerator (check)
• New Couch (picked out)
• New XBox (meh)
• Calesthenics - 1 each per day to 100 each situps, pushups, 4 count jumping jacks (better idea)
• Tai Chi (on the way)
• New Bike (not)
• Integrate Cubegeek & Cobb (soon come)
• Move static websites to Amazon (had a better idea)
• Move Limbo to Evernote (mostly done)
• Mac Mini (postponed)
• Start Men's Meetup in SouthBay (check)
• Find a Bar (in progress)
• 35 Year Reunion (check)
• Finish First Draft of Borky's Beach (meh)
• Read Classics {Middlemarch, Don Quixote, Finnegan's Wake} (also in progress)

The score is good.

In fact, I'm seriously downgrading my gaming, going bigger on the exercise and Tai Chi towards Aikido and some Kendo equivalent. Writing is not so important as doing things outdoors, and the indoor stuff is more about my regular work than some ineffables for my personality. So like I said, all is moving along positively.

The problem is simply this. I need to find a way to get more money. And that means I have to get aggressive and make a plan. I've been sitting on my cool surfboard waiting for the big wave. It's time to put a motor on it and cover more ocean.  

The Royal Family
I am coming to some harsh conclusions about my Family First attitude, and I'll be putting them to the test over the next few years. But it's starting to feel like I'm losing a great deal of trust in public institutions, and that very much means public corporations. I'm starting to feel very proprietary. I don't have words for it this minute but it rather goes back to a sense I have about the inevitability of war, of nepotism, of irresponsible classes and of the consequences of meritocracy in a libertine society. The preliminary conclusion is that the people who are best off in the world are those who are the masters of guilds and patriarchies. Is that exactly fuedal? Not sure, but it sure ain't public and it ain't democratic. The masses are a force of nature. (New Cobb rule, that). 

Tonight I watched a repeat of two hours of HD colorized video of WW2. What struck me was how many Frenchmen were turned in a matter of months into refugees in their own country. I know how relatively easily that could happen in Los Angeles, and how very difficult it would be in more rugged, remote country where civilians already knew how to shoot rifles. 

The Auden Project

As readers of Cobb know, I swore several years ago that I will not spend another dime on movies with posters of a man with a gun and a woman wrapped around his leg. Unfortunately, they don't do movie posters any longer, so it's harder for me to judge. And, quite frankly, I enjoy movies with heroes. Movies need to have heroes and we would be a poorer society without such heroic narratives upgraded with car chases, defenestrations, explosions and machine gun fire. Why? Well, imagine what kind of place this would be if a Saturday night date consisted of vegetarian dinners and movies by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The suicide rate would triple. Hell, we'd be Greenland. 

But the point is that I cannot resist heavy reading, at least in literature. So I have taken it upon myself to shoulder the burden of W. H. Auden's syllabus which had been making the rounds of the Chatting Class & Cool Kids recently. In fact, I've already eaten my first slice of that hearty bread in Kafka's 'The Castle'. Strangely nourishing - review soon to come. Here's the rest of the meal:

• Dante - The Divine Comedy
• Aeshylus - The Agamemnon
• Sophcles - Antigone
• Horace - Odes (Loeb)
• Augustine - Confessions (Loeb)
• Shakespeare - Henry IV pt 2
• Shakespeare - Othello
• Shakespeare - Hamlet
• Shakespeare - The Tempest
• Ben Johnson - Volpone
• Pascal - Pensees
• Racine - Phaedra
• Blake - Marriage of Heaven & Hell
• Goethe - Faust
• Kierkegaard - Fear & Trembling
• Baudelaire - Journals
• Ibsen - Peer Gynt
• Dostoevsky - Brothers Karamzov
• Rimbaud - Une Saison en Enfer
• Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams
• Melville - Moby Dick
• Rilke - Journal of my Other Self
• Kafka - The Castle
• TS Elliot - Family Reunion

All that and 9 Opera Libretti. 

And thus my Auden Project.

With today's news that Iain Banks has terminal cancer, I had to fly to John C. Wright's page to discover where I might ever find his like, or at least those authors that the Cool Kids know which will get me by rights to participate in the Long Talk. So as we speak I am downloading somebody named Gene Wolfe, who apparently has a universe, and we begin with the Shadow of the Torturer. So this may be a light side trip, or maybe even a detour. We shall see.

A Martial Education

"I don't believe in guns"
"What do you mean? They're not fucking leprechuans!"
-- Seven Psychopaths 

I have determined that my liberal arts education is complete. It took too long, and I wasted too much time on it. But at least I have gotten to the part at which the appeals to to those pop and middlebrow entertainments that are the vast legacy of mass communications fail to inspire me. I am resolved, for the most part, to the high arts and they give me genuine pleasure. It took a surprisingly long time. 

I'm not even sure that I was aware that I was in that pursuit. I was scooting along via inertia and aversion. The 'Noble Arena' I began seeking back at State, was more of an escape from Midnight Star in hopes that hiphop would get better, than anything more than a isolated fondness for Liszt and Debussy. It took me years to find the kind of industrial hiphop I truly loved as I suffered through Finitribe, Bad Brains, Barmy Army, and Skinny Puppy. It took me a decade to get past the Granta school of literature. It took me a very long time to settle on the sort of fashion I wish to use to convey my civilization in unspoken ways. All of this continues to evolve, but without the sense of urgency that kept telling me that I still didn't get it. I get it now. My Liberal Arts eduction is settled. I understand what to do with my frustrations when what is commonly out there insults my intelligence.  Also importantly, I know what and what not to expect from a deep dive into Epictetus or Sophocles. I can appreciate trees as well as forest. 

So now what I am missing is a Martial Education.

In parallel, all of my life I have thought at length about the fact that I did not have to go to Vietnam. And in my first full-time job I spent a lot of time with Vietnam vets. I remember how counter-intuitive it seemed to me that they were so level headed, honest and mellow as compared to that nacscent gangsta culture that marked the knuckleheads in my old neighborhood engaging the drug trade. But who was more deadly was never in question. 

There were times I flirted with the idea of ROTC, but never quite seriously. I very much would have liked to have gone to the Coast Guart Academy, but I was a lousy long distance swimmer and I didn't want to cut my hair. The idea of overcoming such obstacles was not something I placed a lot of stock in. There have been three or four times in my life I was determined to take my body image into my own hands and each was only a partial success. I've always routed around the failure. I'm tough and scrappy. I never really wanted to be.. well it's more honest to say that I long, long ago gave up on being tall, heroic and commanding. I've never even slam dunked on a 9 foot hoop, nor bench pressed more than 180. I spent all of high school shorter than 5' 7" and under 150 pounds. I've always had an indomitable spirit, admittedly to the point of what was always interpreted as arrogance. But it was the sort of arrogance one does not assume of bigger, taller men. In them it's called 'natural leadership'. In my last days before fatherhood, embarked on my penultimate physical fitness project. It was called the 'huge project' in which my aim was to make myself look an order of magnitude more pugnacious and swaggery. I suppose exactly like LL Cool J without the tatoos.

I started eating like a pig, and I really haven't stopped since 1993, roughly 50 pounds ago. I had a short hiatus in '03 with a literal poverty diet and dropped down to 185 via cardio-kickboxing and unemployment. But all the flab is back, on top of my sturdy frame. And quite frankly it's all belly. From a rear view, I still look athletic, but the side view is an abomination. I need to crank off four inches of waist. The odd thing is that until about a year ago, I had a certain amount of confidence that one crash program, maybe six weeks of unemployment, was all I needed to get right back to where I was in '93. Now I realize what foolishness that is. I still had a decent beach volleyball game, but that was all skill and not athleticism. 

I'm joining the geriatric gym this week. But that's only part of the story - what I'm really after is the martial mindset. What I'm coming to realize like a boot to the head that what I've been thinking about the martial world is all just theory, fiction and video games. OK that's a kind of triple redundant statement - but it has not been about getting in and kicking any physical ass. And so having purchased in my fever, some EDC and tactical folding blades, and taking shooting quite seriously, it has become quite plain to me that I need to just get out there and do. I have tools, but having the tools is meaningless. It's worse than meaningless, it's foolishness. 

I don't expect that mastery will come soon or simply, but I know that competence will. And that amounts to putting in something every day. And so I've begun to stretch - without the preconceived notion that I'm going to get over some magic bubble and suddenly become what I once was, only smarter. This is to a new body. A new beginning. Because it's necessary. I am no longer satisfied with the comeraderie of first responders. It has got to be me.

 

In Which I Describe the Decline of the West to a Russian

(Boris asks..)
Honestly, how in the world did the same-sex marriage happen to appear on the left-wing agenda in the West? Don't they have other things to worry about? It appears to me that this speaks of a serious ideological crisis the Western left are in. Convince me otherwise.

Boris, I share your sentiments.

The way I read this development in the West originates in the nature of rebellion and change during the Post WW2 period of America's growth. As you can imagine there was a certain arrogance that America rightly drew from its victory in Europe and a set of elites quickly formed. The younger Baby Boom generation, to its credit saw some of this as stifling. Nobody wanted to grow up in a Cold War world. But they incorrectly blamed all of their parents shortcomings for everything wrong in the world, and like never before the American Establishment was blamed for everything. The emergence of a genuine Left never really happened, but Marxist ideology was the only framework upon which elements of rebellion and revolution in miniature grew up. 

What was truly original and genuine was the counter-culture. So the American Free Speech, Free Love, Drug Consciousness, Women's Rights, Environmentalist, Civil Rights, Pop Art, Black Nationalist, Chicano Pride and Gay Pride movements all gathered force during the 1960s under the broad Anti-American protests against the War in Vietnam. We have had wars before and since, but never had there been such resonant ferment for change. How much of that was actually, genuinely aiming for Marxist revolution - not much at all. It was only culturally coordinated, not ideologically sound. And yet no doubt, true Marxists took advantage.

My opinion is that this counter-culture, this rejection of nationalism, is the only way most Americans who are not technically educated in the hard sciences know how to organize their sentiments towards improvement of society and the world. They begin with a rejectionist premise and devalue all of the social rules that have evolved in the West before the end of WW2. There is a generation of academics whose joy is revisionist history, and their intellectual framework is the language of French deconstructionists and post-modernists. They have made a fetish of 'other' identity and rejected most forms of conformity. They seek to elevate the abnormal and question the normal. I see them as cultural relativists.

It is thus a convenience that their interests are served by a Socialist state whose rejection of religion and celebration of the common man fulfills Marx's historicism. If the state can provide, then traditions and culture are of no use.

So under the guise of 'social justice' and 'equality' they have sought to give radical autonomy and authority to anyone who is willing to question American tradition and even the Constitution itself. They have repainted America's exceptionalism in the same tiresome diatribes of 'sexism' , 'racism' and now 'homophobia'. These are their transparent weapons of shaming, shunning and silencing. They are Leftists of opportunity, rallying behind candidates 'of color' and advocates of 'victims' of all sorts, who use 'social justice' as a figleaf for whatever government actions they see fit. This brings us to the very edge of fascism in America - a kind of 'whatever works', 'pragmatic' policy with none of the benefits of evolved political philosophy. True Marxists have never been fooled by candidate Obama, but those who would take their tired counter-cultural ideas to the next level seized the day. Now all criticism of America's first black President is reduced to 'racism'. 

America still possesses millions of patriots whose fidelity to the Constitution is unshakeable and whose resistance to the Orwellian levels of doublespeak now accepted as legitimate politics remains strong. But there is no simple way to coordinate their efforts and sentiments. I believe young Americans are impervious to the political overproduction of the 'Left' baby boomers and will see nothing special or energizing about the non-idelological counter-cultural identity politics of their grandparents. In a shrinking economy, they understand and value family and well-thought out structure. The personal failures which mark today's victimology does not stir today's youth to great sympathy, and they are not so eager in a post 9/11 world to trash their homeland.

As you can see, these identity politics have made millions of Americans insular and naive. They have impressed themselves with their ability to aggregate votes and support candidates here at home. The provinciality is stupefying. The great writer Aldous Huxley said 'an intellectual is someone who has found ideas more interesting than sex'. By that standards, we have few intellectuals left, because in America the standards of decency have dropped abysmally. We have more teenage venereal disease than almost ever in our history, and the single mother is yet another abnormal made to be the new 'normal'. Here we have someone defending left politics and exemplifying interracial sex as the great benefit. It is no wonder that such people have no vision in foreign policy and are apt to disengage America from the world. They are navel-gazers of the first degree and that is why they allow great failures of industry, education and economic solvency. They do not wish to elect leaders who solve real-world problems, they wish to elect leaders who make nice speeches and blame others and cry in public. 

The average American is encouraged to think street culture is legitimate and that family traditions and obligations are irrelevant and outdated. They are encouraged to seek sexual liberation at any cost, and to put the value of the life of animals and plants above that of human beings. Such are the people who can listen to rebellious rock and roll into their 50s and 60s and find the very perversion of homosexuality to be inherently interesting. But it is not homosexuality itself, but the socially transgressive political activist sort designed to make everyone else uncomfortable that these people seek out. Think about it. These activists are exploiting the sex lives of their fellow citizens in order to make a swipe at everyone else. Pathetic, but effective.

I live in a country where people are afraid of sugar, and brag about the fact that they are building hospitals instead of steel.

Secrets of the Bowen Library

I spent some time with Pops yesterday and dared for the first time ever in my adult life to peer into his notebook entitled Nationhood. I was appropriately astonished. 

There is no secret about the fact that I grew up as a Black Nationalist. I think most Cobb readers are aware that I was present at the invention of Kwanzaa and participated in the very first celebrations, some of which were done at my family's house in Los Angeles. I have characterized my father as a scholarly flavor of cultural Nationalist. But I have always noted his unwillingness to talk about those days other than the broad descriptions of the fact that we were preparing to abandon the US back around 1968 and that the FBI had tapped our phone. Robert Bowen founded the Institute for Black Studies and the Redwood Theater Group. Both entities had offices on West Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles for a time. I've spoken of this from time to time. As well I have mentioned that I spoke French and Swahili at home as a child and that my father was in touch with many Movement individuals. 

The few pages I read in the Nationhood binder were full of names to whom Mr. Bowen sent letters. These were the names of men and women of significance in the US public affairs. We spoke about this obliquely. I read the names listed on two pages of the binder out loud and listened to his grunting reactions. We children all know our father's grunts, do we not? The correspondance between my father and these individuals was a striking revelation. I do not know the extent to which those letters exist or their original content. There are a few notable individuals with whom I am certain a lengthy correspondance did take place. For example, I do know you can find one at the King Center's online archive. One thing I can say for certain is that there can be little doubt of my father's attitude towards the fate of black Americans in this country, and his saying out loud was certainly heard. He was a radical in no uncertain terms. If I ever doubted that the FBI had been following us, reading a few pages in Nationhood cleared that right up. I am now obligated to find out how much. 

What is only mildly interesting is that my father never taught or expected any of us to hate or dislike whitefolks, so much as to take pride in our own accomplishments. But what is fascinating to me now is the relief into which it puts his life and its influence on my own. Here is a man who has the equivalent of Nazi war medals in his closet, and he must live life in the world which has defeated Nazism. Every thinking man faces the exuberence of his own youth, but he has had to mentally re-integrate himself into the society from which he had exiled himself, and us. Talk about reversal of fortune. He is a man of bold sophistication who has had to turn it all into an appreciation for the simple pleasures of life. I can only see it in the parallels of the lives of ex-Nazi war criminals and fathers of the nuclear age - men in their 70s genuinely interested in talking about everything but the past whose details are the object of our fascination. Here is Edward Teller sipping tea in the garden speaking about what a lovely day it is. Here is my father sitting in his library of Black Nationalist secrets complaining about how fat his dog has become. 

To know anything about Pops today is to know his absolute devotion to the operation of the woman's shelter downtown where he never fails to volunteer, and to doting over us and his 10 grandchildren. His intriguing relationship with his Episcopalian faith, his dogs, his photography, his disgust for Wynton Marsalis and Satchmo, his love for jazz, the city and architecture and his irredeemable puns and goofy alliterations. His inability to keep any public prayer short, his Obama trance (which the two of us have learned to keep out of our conversations).  All of these which make him interesting in the present lie in sharp contrast to the man he used to be.

Pops has over the past 3 years, come into what is now clearly a very comfortable grasp on his mortality. He is slowing down ever so slightly and much more open to talking about his end times, his satisfaction with his time on the planet. Today however, it is clear that his intentions with the Library are to leave them with the family.

I mentioned to him the fact that our old friend Dr. Ligon was singly unable to place his collection anywhere. As far as I know, the proprietor of California's first black bookstore, has a legacy in cardboard boxes that survived the LA Riots that burned down his place of business, but only just. Pops has insisted that the Getty have no parts of his photography and so I have taken the past 12 hours to transfer about 20% of his digital collection into my possession. What is to become of the rest of the Library? Well, we have a very solid connection to the African American Studies Department at Brown. So perhaps I may convince him at length to hand it over to them. Otherwise the secrets will remain in the family as is his current desire. 

My father does not have any hunger, nor in fact is he properly constituted with the ego required for the spotlight his past would shine on him. And I cannot think but that I might exaggerate the importance of his writing and correspondance. He wasn't an attorney, nor a politician. He was in fact a genuine thoughtful man for others, a man of the people - a people whose best interests he believed lied only in their total independence from the United States. And when that possibility was aborted, he immediately turned to the cause of public health and became instrumental in the establishment of MLK Hospital in Watts, a legacy now more brilliant in intent than in realization. 

I think .. no, I know that my father's legacy will be best illuminated through his photography. Some of it should be here at Wellington House. More will be soon. 

EDC

I have fallen for a new kind of weird sense of materalism. I cannot tell you how many hours I have tried to make an arrangement that matches the beauty shots at everyday-carry.com but this is about as close as I can get.

This is more than I put in my pockets, but less than I actually leave the house with if I'm going to be gone all day, and certainly a lot less than I pack if I'm taking the computer bag. It is a good representation of some of my absolute favorite material possessions, not including my new eyeglasses. 

Starting at the top left, about 10 o'clock:

• Seiko SKX007
• Hamilton Khaki Field Quartz Chrono
• CRKT M16 13Z
• Fenix LD12
• Paracord Key Ring w/ Flint
• PNY 8GB USB Key
• Xicar Element
• iPhone 4S + Otter Box
• Mophie Juicebox Pro
• Apple EarBuds
• Plantronics Voyager Pro
• Leatherman Juice CS4
• Johnston & Murphy Snap Billfold
• Tungsten Steel Wedding Band
• Tombow Object
• Fisher Bullet Pen
• Pentalic Traveler Sketchbook

 

 

Wrapping Up

Scholar's work at the Knob Hill Community Center is all done but the paperwork, and once again I have paint spots on my knuckles.  

Getting Religion

Twice now, I've been hearing that religion is something I must have recently got, or should be in the process of getting. It's a puzzling thing to hear, and I'm a bit disconcerted about it. 

Here's what I think is going on. I think that I have all the inward commitments without spending much time in my outward expressions. I'm also playing a long, big game, and take it for granted that most serious people are. But in the way I suppose that warfighters must do their pushups every day, since I don't exercise some clearly visible form of religious discipline it might be construed that not only am I not in the long game, but that I might be indifferent to it. 

Well. I'm not going to pretend it's not complicated, because it is very complicated - my spirituality is complicated to the point of being exhausting. Talking about it is like dragging a large stuffed dog out of the closet and describing how it was when it is alive. But the long and short of it is this:

I do not understand why there are Catholics and Protestants who are not mutually exclusive. In other words, without a clear definition of procedural heresy, I am willing to bet my eternal soul that my interpretation of the meaning of the life of Christ is just as valid as that of any ordained minister. And I base that on the fact that the words have changed. What words? Why the words by which churches organize their rites to communication the Gospel to the laity. That means either the church is less than certain about what and how it should communicate, or it percieves that it must adapt its messages to the people and the times. We've been through this in reference to Spinoza.

Somewhere there must be some fraction of The Theology that explains how in some way the change from Latin Mass to English has improved the understanding of the laity in the matters of their own salvation. The implication being that saying some different set of marginally less well understood words in rites may have jeopardized the souls of the millions before Vatican II. Unless it didn't and the spirit of God is not captured in recitation at all. Between these extremes is a truth that I never expect any priest to sit down and explain to me. On the other hand, I cannot say that I've given too many that opportunity. Rather I am convinced that I'm already a good enough Christian in my public deeds - which is public writing and yet not so presumptuous as to second guess the Grace of God. In other words, if I'm wrong, then maybe all of Lutheranism or Presbyterianism or Methodism is wrong. If you can't explain the theological differences between those sects, you're really not in a position of religious authority as far as I'm concerned. But if you can tell me why an Adventist might be a better sort of Christian than a Baptist, then you might inform my own syncretism. 

Outside of that, I know I'm a good enough Christian, so much so that I don't bother saying so. Actions speak louder than words.

But since I do deal in words, it is important to me that mine be clear and cause the effects for which they are spoken and written. And in fact I do have within this corpus an entire section of Matters of the Spirit. When I last left things off, I was wrestling with the foolishness of the New Atheists. And yet that is another something which is bothersome. 

I will simply say that I do in fact need my own personal priest, and I think of myself often in the same way as the Clint Eastwood character in Million Dollar Baby. I am not bloody likely to get the sort of priest I think I deserve, which is actually all I'm really looking for - when I bother to look. It is something I expect I can find in the best of friends, which is why I am seeking a particular sort. You see I'm looking out for my soul and defending it against corruption but I need someone who can understand what kind of shit I'm apt to deal with in the process. I know myself and I am not looking for absolution, just someone who can recognize the level of deception I am capable of and occasionally remind me of what I'm supposed to be doing because I should, not merely because I can. I don't need abstract scolding, I need somebody to hear out my dastardly daydreams understand their deliciousness and tell me of consequences I hadn't considered. Walking the straight and narrow is boring. Pushing a mafioso off a roof is much more satisfying. Surely in the eyes of God, the risk of the latter is more valuable than the discipline of the former. So I could use the kind of spiritual partner who understands why I watch gangster films and climb fire escapes. 

Sometimes I get the feeling that I am dealing with people who are unable to  deal with Colonel Jessup and I wonder if that's the sort of religious expression they are expecting out of me. 

I am not on a mission to comfort some restlessness or brokenness in my heart. I continue to seek wisdom in all of its manifestations. Sooner or later I expect to come to a reconciliation of religion and philosophy and all sorts of other things too tiresome to discuss at the moment. To me, religion is the application of rigorous self-discipline to moral improvement and spiritual refinement. Religious organizations, like the Christian Church give us a template, a form and a set of frameworks and communities within which we may pursue and apply that discipline. I think I've got mine all set, but I am not utterly convinced I could not be improved by the right friendships and relationships with proper members of proper sects. But I do think I'm special. 

I think I'm special enough to merit the consideration of all I've written on the subject. Absent that, I will consider advice as advice. 

There's another thing here as well, and that is the extent to which I perceive that weakness of the Church to exercise its discipline in an effective way towards the betterment of society that doesn't sound like and yet underweigh by half any marketing campaign. We live in a very corrupted society and world, and it seems to be all the Church can do is to barely hold on. That's a problem. 

The Occasional Brotherhood

Thirty five years ago I graduated from high school. It was, in fact, my 17th birthday. Tonight I entered the time machine to find out what happened to those long lost brothers. 

I had two missions, both of which were accomplished. The first was to find Ted whom I've been looking for since I discovered that his son knew my son from high school. The second was to try to say something resonant and hopefully inspirational to Paul without making a blithering idiot out of myself. I was pleasantly surprised to have carried these matters off although I did tear up at the end of the second task. If either of those had failed, I would have been disappointed despite the worlds of other secondary missions I had.

I needed to close with Don and make sure he didn't end up in a body bag in a ditch. He took a real risk hitchhiking down here from Oakland. I needed to explain to Chris why after several years, I had not shown up to his volleyball game. I threw my back out the first time and proved myself something of an embarassment. Either way, I never could manage to connect. Although I may be giving up the sport because of my bad shoulder, it was good to make that explanation. I wanted to see if Mike had gone nuts from his CT work, but it turns out that investigations are much more satisfying than HUMINT, so Mike is cool. Mario was his usual cool, leader-of-men self, and he actually got me to fetch him a beer. There's something very clever going on in that dude's head that I might figure out one day. 

I wanted to ditch the Mass. I really have a bad attitude about what I perceive to be an unholy amount of tinkering with the traditional wordings of professions of faith. It truly, truly unnerves me. Especially when I am so apt to want to get into extraordinarily gritty philosophical and theological discussions. The only person I got into that dimension was Phillip with whom I now have a new double bond - one through psychology and the other through Vermont. But I did end up in the chapel after all having not driven slow enough from the South Bay to get to the campus. And so took communion having humbled myself in realizing how many of us have died. 

I promised Dennis that I would attend his next function. I will. I misspoke to Rob about Mayfield. I knew I was connected somehow and I thought it was through Richard. It turns out that my sister Kay is a teacher there, duh. Richard went to Campbell Hall. I confessed to Robert why exactly I am no longer a 'liberal', basically because I can't stand radicalism, and well, I used to be radical. I promised Vernon, whose wife is lovely, that I can perhaps enter into a longer term discussion about how to think about the tools I'd love to provide him with. I once again said nothing of consequence to Pat whose charm is immediate and disarming. 

What I didn't realize was that Steve and I were so much alike politically - to the extent that I am 'political' any longer. And here is what I would like him to understand, among other things. It may be that more cities have to fail, and it's very difficult to predict what level of failure, failure is. There's a longer and deeper story here, but I guess I'll have to handle that separately.

There were other surprises. Andrew and I have similar perceptions about the ballbusting tactics of the Han Chinese, and we absolutely agree that they are bling obsessed. I can tell he's a real gearhead, but we didn't actually talk cars, amazingly. You see I really wanted to poke him about the new Vette and F1 racing here in the States, but perhaps another time. 

I have a very good sense that Weston and I should have long talks. I don't know why, but I am reminded that he has a mischeivous sense of humor. I swear that Dan C. does indeed look like the most interesting man in the world. I only saw Ricardo for a moment, same thing with Roland. I should have spoken to Ben but didn't get around to it, same thing with Dan S. By the time I got around to talking to Al and Rod, I was on old man time - like man I should be in bed but I'm only here now to sober up.

Of course I had to remind Richard that he was absolutely my best friend in high school which he made me immediately, of course you were about it. And I kept shaking my head with amazement at how much Jim looks like the President. I was in surprising violent agreement with everything Thomason said and implied about the overstressed nature of American high school and I think very deeply about the effect it has on my daughters. 

--

I spend too much time outside of the company of such men and the unease I had five years ago in approaching all that was both symbolic and real about that fact melted away this time. I did not spend any time analyzing the fact of our brotherhood or the premises behind it. I simply decided to take it for granted, and so when Jim and Bill made a small point about our absence of color lines I told them they were full of shit. Such things needn't even be mentioned, but it was beautiful to be kissed anyway. I reminded me, immediately of what kind of man I am not but Bill is, and by that I mean radient of love enough to teach the arts to young people. I am way too hard for that. In fact, I told my wife that no matter what happens to me, no matter how rich I get (if that is to be my fate) I will never wear Tommy Bahama - it always reminds me of Weekend At Bernies. But Bill is a member of what I take to be the proper Hawaiian Yacht Club, and he's happy that Ellison will bring more boats to the islands.

Such are conversations, especially when you watch Layne and Tom and Duke and Jimmy, that seem to go on. And I know they are conversations I have missed, taking my own path as I have. I know I am in a serious way, outside of everything, as I have become accustomed to that point of view. That is why this is one of 8000 blog posts - I am talking to myself. Talking to myself sometimes makes me very sure of certain things and sometimes uncertain of very sure things. Finding my old brothers alleviates a great deal. 

Five years ago I became a little bit more determined to get in closer with a few local brothers: Harold, Larry, Phil & Darryl. We had a couple bar nights and a couple smokers at my house. It was therapeutic. It was just magical to share to get loud and be ourselves in a way that life doesn't ordinarily ask us to be - perfectly honest and giving each other a chance to remind us how we can be. This year Don got us to breakfast for Phil's birthday and Ricky was here from Houston and Richard from Chicago. The magic picked right up.

And yet it is occasional. As I struggle with the death of a few men I have known and realize how matter of factly I have dealt with death in both the real and the abstract, I tend to forget that these are dramas others know as well - and for what touchstones of virtue we shared half a lifetime ago we can walk right into our brothers' lives and speak. Tonight it was easy. Ordinarily we don't go there. 

It's on me to make this brotherhood more than occasional. I know that there are more surprises and cross-connections that can be discovered in six hours. But I could hear in Mike's tone something we all seem to understand. We experienced something that is more increasingly rare today. And there will come a day when we all face death in the realization that people will see it as something more or less expected. Our rarity, our uniqueness... I am reminded that we are uncommon with a necessary quality in common. 

I don't know how many folks read this blog - I can only assume that more of my old classmates will than do ordinarily. I write this way less and less nowadays - I have always expected this arena to be of the continuing conversation. I already discount that happening here; unfair perhaps, but then so is missing brotherhood. There are so many conversations I started that I will complete in my own speculations until we all meet again and that may have to suffice. My brotherhood is not contingent, but it is occasional.  And this was an occasion for all of us to remember what care can be (because it has been) undertaken for our best interests as young men. As always, that is how civilization is born and how it is borne. 

Goodnight y'all. I'm always here - give me a shout. 

78 - the greatest of great

Looking Back On When I...

I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha in 1984. I think that was the year. Maybe it was 85, I honestly don't recall. But somebody raised the question of a kid having a hand in his own destruction. He wanted to pledge, and he found the hazing too rough. If he dropped from the pledge program, he would have the stigma from the fraternity that he wasn't man enough to do it. If he continued and got hurt, he would blame himself for being stupid.

My crazy theory is that it has a lot to do with the way people think about black manhood, and that is why this problem persists in black fraternities. Basically the (bad) idea is that only a black man can teach a black man how to be a black man, and the separate and distinct kernel of that blackness is the 'hard' experience. IE only a 'true brother' will pledge you hard so that you will be tough enough to handle what a 'real black man' will have to face in life. 

To me that is a ghetto mentality no matter how you slice it. Now my line was pledge quite roughly, to the point at which one of our sessions was interrupted by cops asking us pledges out of earshot of the brothers if we were ok. But for me - well, that's what I wanted to do, but I did it without any of the deeper black manhood issues hanging in the balance.

I pledged for several specific reasons but with one overall purpose in mind. That purpose was the make the most out of every big man on campus credibility cookie I could garner. The reasons were as follows.

1. Black unity

2. Alpha affinity

3. My best friend

4. My roommates

On Point One
What I could believe in 1984 was that a black man would be president in my lifetime. What I could not believe is that one would do so without being part of the black Establishment. So my part and parcel of belonging to the frat had a great deal to do with what I said in my interview. "I am going to be part of the black leaders of tomorrow, we're all going in the same direction and we're all going to end up in the same place, I might as well join up today". That illusion was well disabused before I left college, but it seemed like the right idea at the time. I figured out black diversity the hard way, but I did figure it out. If I would have known at that moment what I knew a couple years later, I probably would have not pledged.

On Point Two
This was basically the question 'Why Alpha', and it's basically as much answer as Myers-Briggs would give. Alpha was a personality match. Tradition!, First among equals, arrogant... blah blah. 

On Point Three
One day I was hanging out with my best friend, whom I thought to be one of the smartest guys I knew. He was wearing a cardigan sweater over a white t-shirt. As we got out of his car to go to lunch, he pulled out a pair of black Ray-Bans from his glove compartment. When he put them on, I joked that he looked like an Alpha from a step show. He told me that he was an Alpha. What!? He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do. Damn. I had to do that.

On Point Four
It turned out that my roommates were going to pledge Alpha. We could study together, we could help each other through the program. We turned out to be the only three out of the pledge class of seven that finished the program.  

On the whole, in retrospect, I'm glad that I pledged undergrad and if I had to do it all over again, it would be a toss-up. I'm sure that if I had to go to college, I would have tried not to care so much about the BMOC cookies, or at least expected a whole lot fewer from the frat. However, the fact that I got to be a national officer in my engineering organization turned out to be the introduction to business travel and the world that made me. It's hard for me to imagine the other me I might have been without that particular introduction to non-geek intelligence. But that's something of another story...

Tipping Deconstructed

I am starting to think from a new perspective that Mr Pink, from Reservoir Dogs, is correct. Play the world's smallest violin for all the waitresses. We have inherited all this tipping business without any good reason. If it's not mandatory, does it not mean that the market cannot sustain the higher price? Tipping is social coersion by extra-market forces, paying tips is like buying indulgences. It only matters, quite frankly, when you are talking to other people about your tipping habits. In economic speak, tipping is *signaling*. How many of us actually talk to the person we might tip about the reasons for tipping, no we talk to each other about that. Every time I tip, I realize that I am either, being morally self-congratulatory or on an expense account. A tip sends a message to the tipee only if it is very large or very small as regards the quality of service. But a normal tip sends no message at all to the tipee, but it always signifies something to the tipper.

Here's an experiment. (I've been reading Ariely). I bet that the amount of a tablemate's tip is a bigger influencer on tip size than the quality of service. Or back to the Tarantino movie, if there were more people in agreement with Mr. Pink it wouldn't matter how good the waitress was, she'd get a smaller or no tip.

I'm meticulous about my tipping and always tip everybody. It's a habit I picked up as a traveling consultant road warrior on expense accounts. I tip 20% rounded down to the nearest buck. I never write that amount, I just put in the bottom line and let them figure it out. If you want the money, do the math, I say.

I do distinguish.. now that I'm signaling I may as well got the whole nine..between waitstaff, cabbies, bellmen and janitors. My wife always tips the lady who cleans the hotel room. I don't know where that came from and I never do it. I never tip for takeout food. I tip cabbies but don't mind if I don't. The person I would never stiff is a bellhop or a shoeshine boy, no matter what.  

Hmm. Now whom do I cheat on a regular basis?

New Years Resolutions - 2013

Quick - Say it all before you stop caring.

• New refrigerator
• New Couch
• New XBox
• Calesthenics - 1 each per day to 100 each situps, pushups, 4 count jumping jacks
• Tai Chi
• New Bike
• Integrate Cubegeek & Cobb
• Move static websites to Amazon
• Move Limbo to Evernote
• Mac Mini
• Start Men's Meetup in SouthBay
• Find a Bar
• 35 Year Reunion
• Finish First Draft of Borky's Beach
• Read Classics {Middlemarch, Don Quixote, Finnegan's Wake}

That should cover the first half. 

Men of Good Will

I am beginning to accept some things about myself, namely that my efforts to become what I have wanted to be have been successful. I am a writer. I have written what I wanted to write. I am a systems architect. I have built what I could build. I have all the pieces and parts in my mind, and my mind remains capable.

I only struggle against sentimentality - to know the difference and maintain the proper perspective between that which was directly responsible for my growth and those principles which those actions served. It is this distinction I express in my reconciliation with those who now wrestle with middle age which I have begun to see the end of. 

If I had postponed life any longer to read what I might have to become as wise as I consider myself today, I would have only had the shadow of the family life I have today. I would have been more ascetic and more debauched, and moreover would have looked at my own extended family with much less sympathy. But this combination of choices I have indeed taken have made me so much less cranky and obstinate than I would have been otherwise. And so I see a reconciliation coming - the kind of reconciliation that is the practical experience of a true father. 

Most of all, and just recently, I realize that I do possess some power of mind that is extraordinary, and it is not a mere combination of quirks that distance me from the people of the world. I do not discount those quirks that exist, but I now see the extent to which my mind's discipline is real - my mental ability and desire forming a reinforcing loop driven by curiosity to form complete understanding - and the patience to take that in steps and pieces.

What I have missed is only the society and direction of the university path, a significant enough disabler. Were it not for the web, I would have been forced to pay such dues as academics require. 

--

Towards reconciliation I recognize that my combination of gifts and efforts have made me both thinker and overthinker. My own satisfaction requires much and in seeking the difference between the good, the great and the world historical I have finally validated the broad perspective I have sought. In realizing so many others would not be so dedicated, I have found both my value and my limits. And it is true that the love of my wife has allowed me this luxury - of composing at my keyboards rather than washing dishes or taking out the trash. For my refinements there is that debt - ever reconciled. 

So I truly believe that I am philosophic, that my disinterest allows for the sort of useless virtue of objectivity. I recognize the nexus of action and thought that defines interest for all the world. I also recognize how quickly the world changes dashing those nexii to worthlessness next to the principled value of disinterested objectivity. And so I offer my gifts in the spirit of the Way of the Servant. 

In this way it is the end of Cobb as it has been for the past couple years. Doubtless it was my new work and my appreciation of Bloom and Dickens that proved to be the catalyst. Cobb the blog remains and is permanent, but requires a new look. The look, I think will signal my own unity of pen and sword, personal and professional, philosophical and philanthropic, expository and inquisitive. 

I see all of you as men of good will. There is plenty enough room in this world, a world without end. Invert the divisions. Let us enter the world of multiplication.. 

The Dream of Hulk

Last night I had a stunning dream. I was the Incredible Hulk. More to the point, I was Dr. Bruce Banner and I chose to be the Hulk. 

My psychology was that of a werewolf. I was transformed into a creature of the hunt. I became bestial and ran quite powerfully on all fours. One of the most remarkable aspects of this dream was how realistic it felt to me to be using muscles in my back and stomach to spring and release my arms and legs to their positions. The rhythmic flexing was so much more involved than the leg-bound work of human running - it was so much more joyful than the greatest pleasure of running upright. I understood how animals derived pleasure from simply being animated, but most importantly I tasted the bloodlust.

It was in this early part of the dream that I found myself (in my old neighborhood of course) in the business of attacking some other creature with my savage jaws. I was totally captivated and 100% committed to destroying him. It was, in my mind, another wolf and I envied, feared and despised him. As he came at me, I visualized him in slow motion - a pencil drawing flip-book of a cartoon on a white background. I saw him in moderate detail, as that of a cel-shaded animation without the coloring. As he came I looked at his every aspect, but especially his teeth, jaws, throat and genitals. He was reduced to strengths and weaknesses which I evaded and attacked respectively. As the battle sped up into real-time, the colors, sounds, smells, sensations and effects became vivid. In a moment's time I stood over the bloody dismembered carcass of the wolf I destroyed - the wolf that might have been the Alpha Wolf, the wolf that was me - the only wolf that could be. I am the wolf. I am *the* wolf. There is no other, I cannot stand another. And then I ran.

Running I felt my musculature expand and contract. I felt the power and I tasted the blood and I remembered the guts of my foe. And I realized that I was intelligent and human and my gait was not wolf-like but gorilla-like. And so I imagined myself as a gorilla and something similar happened. I saw a gorilla in front of me with extraordinarily powerful arms, chest and back. But he was not facing me and I destroyed him from the blindside. And yet the human part of me surfaced questioning my rationale. Why are you being so savage? Why do you find pleasure in this killing? 

My answer was that of curiosity fulfilled. I recall specifically answering. If you could, wouln't you? Wouldn't you desire the experience? If I said 'brain on the sidewalk' in two seconds I have invented something you have never actually seen. You can imagine it, but have you seen it? Have you done it? I have seen it because I have caused brain to spatter on the sidewalk. I am more than just stories. I am *the* beast. 

And then I became The Hulk. 

From my old neighborhood now greasy with entrails and fly riddled body parts I was transported into the dark future - the post-apocalyptic city with its mysterious powers, its pandemic devastation, its huddling survivors. Every street was asphalt upheaved as unseen forces ripped through them. It was City 17 at night. It was alien-invaded and abandoned by honor, it cried out for superheroism. I was The Hulk, I sought out the evil forces and I smashed. 

I smashed them and collapsed the buildings where they hid. They were faceless, nameless enemies of humanity and I was the celebrated champion of the darkened human civilization. I explained myself. Yes I am The Hulk but I'm playing him differently. I am in control of what I have become because I love the anger. I love the destructive capacity, I love being the beast and I am Dr. Bruce Banner. I am the intellectual as I smash. I smash what is wrong, what is stupid and it only requires a small bit of intelligence to see that. I am not surviving to be that which I destroy, no - I am not the Alpha Wolf, I retain the will to destroy but I follow humanity's purpose often at the expense of humanity's own foolish creations. This worthless building, for example. Hulk Smash!

I calmed down and spoke in the patient tones of an NPR radio host. I explained that I am the new Hulk and I will play it this way. That was my dream last night. 

 

Thanksgiving Fragments

More Zombies
I'm currently about halfway through the book World War Z, which makes for a rather cute audiobook as it records a set of curious futuristic interviews from individuals around the world reflecting on their experience with the Zombie Apocalypse. Cap'n, my oldest daughter, is decidedly into zombies these days. She just got 'Warm Bodies', a new book that's sold out just about everywhere. 

More Endeavor
Just got together with a huge crew of buddies I used to hang out with back in the days I used to hang with a crew. They were the GDZ Crew to me, my close friends of mostly young black professional engineers based here in Southern Cal. One day I may have to tell the story of GDZ, which stands for Geographically Desireable Zipcode. Anyway, the trip was to have us and our families go see the Space Shuttle one last time, recounting for many of us, our various contributions to the Space Program. For me, at Rocketdyne, I built the Component Weight Calculator for the ISS, way back in 1990 or 89. My buddy Charles' dad designed avionics for the Saab Viggen some components of which were adapted to the Orbiter (as it was called back then). 

I also discovered that it was Endeavor that was the shuttle that scared the mess out of me by landing at Edwards AFB several weeks after 9/11. The double sonic booms threw me into a panic until I checked the news. Funny when I think about it, how my brother had cops check out a suspicious bag of white powder in his driveway around that time. Anthrax scares. 

The most awesome thing about Endeavor is the sweet curve of its underbelly. It's just a thing of beauty. 

Halo 4
I'm probably not going to write much of a game review of the new four that I have in slow rotation. I did a short and super enjoyable stint with Borderlands 2, which I probably will not finish. I also just got started with Dishonored which, while first rate, was not quite totally immersive. There was quite a lot of really great art direction, but I wish that it would have been as smooth as Half-Life. I'm really persnickety about control. This is the reason I'm not enjoying Assassin's Creed 3 as much as I thought I would. Something's not quite right. I haven't done much, three missions, in the new Black Ops 2. This narrative is truly incoherent. But it plays well. I'm going to have to give the nod to the Battlefield guys from here on out. 

Halo 4 however, I am digging in spades. Everything about it is damned near perfect. It is without question the best Halo multiplayer ever. I have to say that the campaign, while it has its moments, is not as good as Reach. It's still not clear to me why the Forerunner structures are so massive, and why 343 had to make me run through them all. But there is nothing so compelling as Halo online multiplayer, and they killed it. The loadouts, the in-game upgrades, the universe continuity, the daily, weekly and monthly challenges, the Spartan Ops, the weapons, the split screen multiplayer.  

Thanksgiving Meal
Ham, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, ratatouille, macaroni & cheese, stuffing, string beans, yams. Pumkin pie, peach cobbler, red velvet cheesecake, lemon meringue pie. Honey egg nog.  

 

 

Lost at Barnsdall

I was in a gifted children’s class at 6th Avenue School, and among the children I had gotten more points than anyone else. I was number one in the class - I had always been number one in every class. My best friend at the time was a kid named Guy. Guy was a Boy Scout. I never found out where he lived. At any rate, this class over at 6th Avenue, I had to ride my bike to on Wednesday mornings.

I liked the teacher well enough until she betrayed me. One day we had a field trip to Barnsdall Park, the art park in Hollywood behind Kaiser Sunset. I had been there several times before because all of my kid brothers and sister were born at that hospital. Our pediatrician was Dr. Robbie whom I liked very much. He was in the professional building just across the street from the emergency room entrance. So long as we were going to the professional building, things were cool, but that isopropyl alcohol smell from the other side of the street always felt like pain. Barnsdall, however was a happy place. The architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright was fascinating, as were the channeled fountains and pools that ran through the area near the Hollyhock House. I always wanted to get a closer look but the house was closed to the public. Nor did we ever go into the other buildings. For me, Barnsdall was a happy place; my dad and I would wait there, staring over the hill to wait for a new baby.

My gifted class went there for the art studios or something. I didn’t really know that there was much else there other than the Hollyhock House. Somehow Guy and I got separated from the rest of the class. We searched all around and could not find them. Nor could we find any adults to show us where they might be. We did find a frisbee, and so we played frisbee. Since we were lost, we were sure that someone would come looking for us. But nobody did. And the whole trip was over when we were finally returned to the group. The teacher blamed Guy and I for wandering off to play frisbee. As if. And she docked me several hundred points.

I fell behind in the lead of the class and I was never able to catch up, even though I closed the gap between myself and the girl who took first place at the end of the term. I no longer cared to please the teacher who betrayed me, and at some point during the term this contretemps solidified. It was during one of the drop drills.

During the Cold War, of course we all had drop drills and the air raid sirens usually fired off on the first Friday of every month at 10am sharp. I am always reminded of the corner of Jefferson and La Brea. That was the one place I knew that there was a yellow klaxon at the top of a telephone pole as part of the Civil Defense network. As it turned out, my favorite teacher, Miss Milliken who was a die hard USC Trojan, had the right amount of skepticism of drop drills. She knew that a nuclear blast would demolish the school and mere desks would not save us. Over at 6th Avenue however they took things a bit too seriously. I specifically recall that in the 6th Avenue drills, they had us leave the classroom to hide under the stairwell. The problem was that the stairwell led up to the east. Downtown was east of 6th Avenue and so the blast would come from that direction. If we wanted any protection at all, we should go to a stairwell that led up to the West instead. I informed our teacher of this contradiction and she told me to shut up. At that moment I realized she was an idiot and I lost all respect for her, she who would lead children to their deaths.

I think that is the last time, somewhere around my tenth birthday, that I would ever love school and obey my teachers unconditionally. I loved my oceanography class and remember how proud I was to have eaten the octopus that they had there on the last day of school. But it was the last time I ever talked about seamounts or the various types of plankton in any class for the rest of my schooling - and I remember being told not to eat any more of the brightly colored shrimp chips, even though all the rest of the children were full. I wonder if I might one day chase down the name of that teacher who proved to me that teachers weren’t all so smart and many unworthy of heeding. It has made me the sort that allows me great pleasure in reading about Harry Dresden and Bob Howard, wise-ass fictional heroes of misread genius and hearts of gold. Writing this at this point in my life I can only hope serves as some kind of lesson to somebody. I don’t get much pleasure from it.

A Combination of Curses

I have been traveling for training, writing my book, reading Iain Banks, reorganizing my digital media,  working on my daughter's community service project and building databases & wikis. Oh yeah and playing Halo 4. So you see a relatively empty blog. I'm also withdrawing from getting into spats over this presidential thing. 

I live in interesting times.

Things (and People) Hang Together

I've had a most extraordinary weekend. I've been in something of a weird combination of states as I handled various matters of business over the past few days. Mostly they orbit around my daughter's work for her Gold Award project and getting my son's leg repaired. 

So yeah we basically did that. 

We spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons at the Knob Hill Pre-School, which doesn't actually have a name. The (Angels) are one of Redondo's kickass families and we know them through Boy's band days. Mrs. Angel is the preschool teacher there. The preschool is a property that's not exactly in the school district but is part of the South Bay Adult School and is on loan through a special arrangement. It's serving the community for that special niche of kids that didn't quite make the age requirement for kindergarten and nont-pushy parents. But the playground is old and a little unsafe. 

Cap'n, aka 'Scholar' aka my first daughter stepped up and put together this project to upgrade the playground. It's part of the Girl Scout's equivalent of Eagle Scout rank. Her project was approved last week and we got down to business starting Saturday buying paint and beginning work on the jungle gym. We were all surprised by the effectiveness of something called Mr. Clean Magic Erasers. Got rid of all of the rubber shoe scuff marks on the fiberglass slide. Then we waxed it down with, what else but, wax paper to make it slipperier. 

We found that there ought to be a little protien destroying additive to the water hose that will melt spider webs, but no current such product exists. So Cap'n had to get her hands dirty. We put Soul II Soul and EWF on the boom box, sanded down, rust-proofed, primed and painted all the metal climbing poles and handrails on the structure. Sometime on Sunday morning before I arrived to say 'yes boss' to my supervising daughter, somebody spilled the paint. So what was once red, became red with yellow. So one part of the monkey bars is going to be more orange than the other part, but the results looked fabulous.

As a side benefit, I got some excellent macro photography done onsite. Check it out here.  I think you'll find at least one cool wallpaper for your desktop. 

For Boy, we ran around on Friday to get his medical records, xrays and other affairs in order and pulled him back to the South Bay. Thanks to some good friends on FB, I got lots of recommendations for orthopedic surgeons that I ultimately didn't use. It turns out through some bizarre rule that even though two of the recommended doctors were in my Blue Shield, my family doctor could not refer me to them. So the other great doctor who wasn't in my plan got the referral instead, and somehow my plan will cover it. As the singer from ABC said in 'The Look of Love', don't ask me WHAT it means. Still, it was an 'urgent referral'.

It seems that the doctor at CSUF was a little zealous and bored, perhaps, when he recommended surgery for the break, which was a spiral fracture of the distal tibiofibular articulation with a 2mm posterial displacement of the fragment. I guess he was overly concerned about the severe tissue swelling over the lateral malleolus. I would be, but then again what do I know? 

We showed up at South Bay Orthopedics, and hey wait a minute. I've been there before, with Cap'n's Osgood-Schlatters. Well, we see Dr. Z who has the serious mitts, handshake like a prizefighter, and he puts the thing in perspective with a couple grunts, somewhat disappointed that he doesn't get to cut Boy open. I too was hoping for pins and Frankenstein hardware, but once again, Boy seems charmed and floats away from disaster. He gets a green cast and two scripts for meds, and we're out of there in 90 minutes. No more hobbling on crutches for him. He can walk with a cane. Well, a cane and vicodin. 

So there we have a net positive. I'm feeling the resiliance in my family. Everybody has come through their crises with some difficulty but with good results. 

As I drove boy home for the evening Sunday, I noticed a line of jets on approach from LAX stretching back to the east, their landing lights in a string. I had my Red Bull and Modest Mouse on the box having just filled up the tank. Yeah it cost me 68 bucks, but I had it, and the truck is tuned. I think of all of my driving now as an excursion to do business away from the homestead, rather than as escape and discovery as I did in my youth. Home is a good place to be and we demonstrated that we can expand that realm of security this weekend. We do actually have a fairly awesome civilization here. 

On Saturday afternoon, with Boy in his cast and Cap'n in her bandana, we were listening to Soul II Soul doing the work and I mused out loud how much fun it will be to help them get their first houses together. Yeah. We'll get there. 

Things (and People) Fall Apart

What crazy freaking fortnights. 

It was just last month when I had to take the Spousal Unit down to the hospital for a fairly serious procedure.  Colonoscopy. Whe was knocked out for this, and I had to sit in the waiting room and stew. Results all good. Phew. Three weeks ago, Pops had all the signs of a relapse of prostate cancer. But that turned out to be the side effect of his original radiation therapy. Ok. That's two bullets dodged. Then over the weekend, Doc got slammed with a virus that had him cramping and puking like he swallowed ten bad oysters. He had to be hospitalized overnight while they scratched their heads to figure out what it was. Then half the people in his immediate family got it. Now they're OK. Three bullets. Whoosh whoosh, whoosh! Then my mother finds her phone dead, is short on cash and it's about snow time in South Dakota. That's all I need to hear is that she let the heating go out and we have a momsicle. But now she's ok. Still, her Facebook account is spamming me.

Then (horrors) I dropped my iPhone.

But then Boy calls me last night and tells me that he sprained his ankle doing a double back flip in gymnastics. Why is he taking gymnastics? Because he was a band geek in high school and now he wants to make up for it by being a fitness geek in college. So he's in gymnastics, kickboxing, volleyball and fencing. Oh yeah and English and Math. Well, he'll be studying now, because that's not a sprain, it's a fracture. Wonderful. Now I have to find an orthopedic surgeon... hey wait, my cousin in Arizona is.. in Arizona. He needs to get minor surgery within a few days. Let's see, how much is *this* going to cost me? Hmm...

I'm going to resist a political rant here, because nobody really knows how much it costs to fix a broken leg. But I'll let you know on the dowstroke. In the meantime I'll be watching fail videos and using a micrometer to measure the thickness of the skin on my teeth. Keeping my head above water. Making a way when I can.

The Day I Hated My iPad

Saturday last, I headed out to my daughter's volleyball tournament. It was about 1pm and I was feeling great. So I plugged my iPhone into the blue stereo mini aux cable and was blasting some Stevie Ray Vaughn all the way up with the windows rolled down. I decided, since I can, to ask Siri the best directions to the high school where the event was taking place. As I got the results, lickety split, I propped the phone up on my dashboard to watch the instructions. 

Siri said 'Turn right', and so I did. Too fast. 

As the tires squealed a bit on my FJ, I watched in slow motion horror as my phone broke free of its cable, and flew right past my face and out the left window. I pulled over half a block later to walk up the street and recover my phone from the middle of the street. I saw it in the left lane just 20 yards past the intersection where I made my turn. Ooops a car ran over it. Oh, now a second car. Damn, a third car. Why do drivers never make left turns into the proper lane unless it's to run over my phone? 

The situation was so absurd that I started laughing out loud. But before the second car ran over it, I checked myself from displaying the universal sign of grief - palms against my temples, elbows out, jaw dropped. The guy in the SUV in the left turn lane waiting for the light knew what was up. "That's your phone?" he said. walked into the street picked ip up laughing. He honked his horn to let other drivers know where I was. I was OK. 

I have enough money to get an iPhone 5, but I have been also thinking that I want to get off AT&T's big plan and actually pay full price for a phone and go prepaid month to month. Went to the store and was told the replacement price for my 4S was 350 bucks because I have 14 months remaining on my contract. By this time, I was pissed. I paid 40 bucks for the cheapest flip phone in existence, recognizing how similar it was to Sprint's best flip phone I used to own 12 years ago before the first Treo. 

I used to phone all day with a vengeance. Who needs a smart phone? I don't. I can do this, plus I'm saving $45 bucks a month because I don't need a data plan any longer. Besides, I have an iPad. I'll just take it with me and everything will be cool. The little black flip phone, the AT&T Z221 was cool for about 2 hours. I was going spartan, but of course it had the worst UX anybody who uses the term 'UX' could possibly stand. It was not only bad, it was punishingly bad. 

Firstly, I didn't recognize my own ringtone. People would be calling me and I don't realize it's my phone ringing. Then, on the Sunday when I played volleyball I wore my contact lenses. It became impossible to text without reading glasses, which I didn't have. The menus were absurd, worst than Microsoft. Worse than APL menuing systems. Hideous mutant freak in psychologically disturbing colors bad. 

So my dependency swapped back to the days before I had an iPad except now my iPad was my phone (via Talkatone and Google Voice). It got weird. I had to carry the iPad around all the time to get mail. So now I started noticing how big and clunky my iPad2 is. What a pain. How often do I really use it for mail? Not much, I now see. How much for reading? Not a whole lot. Web surfing.. yes when I'm sitting down in a cafe and I have spare time. I still have my Kindle (the best one - with free 3g and the keyboard). No Siri on the iPad. No I don't use the apps that much. 

When you take the iPad with you every day, you don't realize how much you hate it if you find that you need to use it more than a certain amount. It's a big fat luxury. Right now I'm thinking that I want to get a new small one and give this one to my mother. 

Well it turns out that other than making my earside speaker a little fuzzy, my iPhone was perfectly repairable. Thanks uBreakIFix. You guys rock. I am back to normal and thinking, why did I spend 800 bucks on that stupid iPad? And I'm also thinking that the iPhone 4S is an even greater device than I imagined, and I'm loving my good old Kindle just a little bit more. 

Lost Funk Found

In a deep cravasse down the backslope of my psychic mountain, there's a hella funky little vent that's connected to the lava flow that goes straight to the magma at my core. Sometimes you can smell the brimstone, but it's generally upwind of you on the pleasant sunny face. I should be able to tell you in a few spare phrases, 'Material', 'On-U', 'Axiom Funk'. If you have tasted the maggots in the mind of the Universe and were not offended, then you know from whence the gents commence to drop you off...

Shout outs to the hideous mutant freaks & new savanna stompers: Xavier Moon, Cuda Lee Brown, Kenyatta, Double B, Darkstar and Tooley. A dinner that may yet happen.

Twelve Toes

In the category of fete manque, are the songs and styles and fashions and pieces of shared life that I shared without thanks from the thankless. When society is not social, there is the missed party, and the cloistered matters more.

From the mystery that was multiplication, a ritual supposedly kept from the Dark Dwellers by those whose ilk said, you're on your own, comes a public service somehow not affiliated with PBS. Made up entirely from scratch with no government requirement, assistance or regulation. Not from K Street by some simpering Sally Strutheresque emote-tank with high powered lawyers but from Madison Avenue by some wealthy parent who'd commission the overkill of melodic learning and share with the public. Not funded by some committee of education, but instead from the likes of Kenner Toys and the National Biscuit Company, better known as Nabisco, purveyors of Oreos to the sons and daughters of the neglected but half-enlightened (if only lightened on the inside and wary of Nadinola for the outside). There was this, multiplication rock in a blues key. My favorite of all. If you help me with my twelves, I'll help you with your tens, and we could all be friends, Little Twelve Toes, please come back home.  

And 40 years later people are still asking how to get to Sesame Street. Ahh..quel dommage.

Searching the Universe for Vile Rats

I read somewhere the other day that EVE Online is a thinking man's video game. Maybe it's just another level of sophistication in pursuit of making things go BOOM, or taking fragging to space. Either way, I'm intrigued. It shows every indication of being ridiculously complex. 

My Macbook seems to be for crap when it comes to 'PC gaming'. I thought I would give MMO gaming a chance, having pretty much done everything there is to do on my XBox. And so I took half the weekend to install and run EVE Online. You may recall that one of the staffers in Libya who suffered at the hands of radical islamists went by the handle of 'VileRat' in that universe. Well, if that's the kind of grownup I might meet in the MMO world, I'm all for it. As some of my readers know, my gaming has taken a nosedive since the death two of my best friends online. I understand and sympathize totally with those who have felt the loss. But my machine was no help. Once I downloaded the six GB it was a real clunker in the Barbie section, so I pretty much gave up. 

But the other night, having a bit of insomnia and free time allowed me to consider downgrading my video quality. It turns out that pretty much every problem had to do with the Barbie screen and the game runs fine. So I've created a couple of characters and joined a corporation and am off to do what's called PVP with my gang. 

--

On further review, I have found it nearly impossible to get over the psychological barrier of playing games on the same machine I use to do my daily work, and my writing. It's just too much time in one place. Unless and until I can get this deal working on my big screen with an XBox controller, I'm just not going to do it. Mouses are for work, all intrigue of vile rats notwithstanding. 

Bleak

I'm reading and about 40% through Charles Dickens' Bleak House. What strikes me most is that there is in Dickens' mind such a minute and detailed accounting of character that it's rather frightening to consider how little we might do in comparison. Much of Bloom's criticism inflects my perception to trust the story more than the author but one cannot help but notice how perceptive one must be to manage all the recondite nuances without prejudice. I am comparing and contrasting with my almost recent going through of the Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes mysteries as examples of Victorian literature in pursuit of a more thorough going understanding of our mutal history, much of which was spurred on by my less recent review of Stephenson's Baroque Series. I expect that this interest will continue as I feel less and less bound by contemporary social and political imperatives - I'm ready to unbelong. 

What matters then is character somewhat limned by deportmant, but character over all. 

I am writing, and may finish today some reflections on Neal Stephenson and his Neo-Victorianism and implications of.. well let me do that because there's little sense in writing more about Bleak House until I complete it, which won't be for another week. 

Stephenson holds my attention because he is, like I am, invigorated by the lacuna of modern self-sufficiency and looks to history to reconstruct that bit of human knowledge which our contemporary conveniences have obviated for the sake of the masses. I am certain that he has seen, via Anathem, the value of a monastic discipline in education and what a social lack of that produces. He, better than most writers I have ever encountered understands the value of practical knowledge - what the Enlightenment has done and how a lack of disciplined education will undo. It will not undo humanity, but the Humanities. And so in that gap which arises from the failure to mass educate, he inserts his literature, and lately a corpus of tools that go beyond literacy. 

As a backgrounder, understand that I strongly believe that the masses and those who lead them for better or worse will fail to correct their failures until they are lying in its detritus. The wasteland must be upon us for our bearing to adjust - and that is born of the beeline for convenience which has been the impetus for the vast majority of our social change in the 19th and 20th centuries. We have educated without enabling and have left it to the Lords to oversee. But they too have been outstripped and do not, I assert, with any constancy maintain the integrity of their realms. And so we live on the brink of disease and disaster amongst a lot of men who have forgotten not only the recipe for survival, but indeed how to be men. We have gone beyond feral motorcycles to zombies. We know that the motors will not survive.

Like my old friend Charles Cameron, I'm paying attention to the millenarians and listening intently to those people who believe the world is about to end, or atleast collapse in parts of Europe and the United States. It might be a bit corny to say so, but I think that all such Westerners with a bit of motherwit are going to survive very much more like Guy Ritchie's version of Sherlock Holmes than any Mad Max. I say in fact that there will be a style and a virtue and a power in the post-industrial man which will very much resemble that of the pre-industrial man. We will eat better and have better hygene, but I think the NeoVictorian is the model.

To the extent that I don't believe the Vickies will be the model, Stephenson has me again. It will be the logistics of the swarm that rule the next generation (which is not necessarily an evolution) of organizational dynamics. IE Mongolian hordes. The Khan model of assymetrics will dominate, but (and the new Mongoliad is out this week) OMVI tactics cannot be far off. The individual tactitian organized in the small group of multi-thinkers will have advantages I think cannot be overcome by those driven to complete selfless devotion to battle. But it will be a good fight one way or the other.

So I am preparing myself and my family, armed with Peasant Theory, books and swords, and some Mongolian organization dynamics, amid the view of Dickensian London for that which might devolve here in the US, understanding that cities may seem 'unlivable' by today's yuppie standards, but the woods will be much, much worse. So how is a gentleman to survive? The model is already out there. Victorian manners are survival skills. So the future doesn't seem too bleak to me at all. 

47 Spoonfuls

This afternoon I ate like a monk. An astronaut. A prisoner. 

I calmed myself down, slowed my breakthing, selected the pot. I opened up the can of tomato soup reminding myself of the sacrcity of this, in deep space. I marvelled at how effective the artificial gravity was, keeping the flame low as the pot warmed on the luxurious four burner stove. Gas. I remember when I could only find electric. I adjusted the flame down.

The one can of water I stirred in came from the two gallon canister on the counter, next to the rotating spice rack. I have it all. I selected a wooden spoon, no put that back. I selected a plastic ladle from the selection. I stirred gently, removed it and placed it on a paper towel.

I walked slowly to the living room and sat at the piano. I played with two hands remembering that I type so much that I have to force my fingers to work more than one at a time. I stretched them. I played a major scale in C, boring. I returned to the kitchen. The soup was ready.

I selected a bowl from the cabinet on the East wall. It was not Borky sized, but more appropriate to lunch - my midday half meal. I ladled out several until the bowl was 75% capacity and took it to the wooden table. It's quiet downstairs. 

I took my time with each spoonful, the temperature was perfect - I never had to blow. The scrim of red liquid contrast against the white porcelain as the level of soup went down. I counted. At 13, it seemed that I had an infinite amount and that the meal would last an eternity, and so it became my last meal. I would savor every moment and enjoy every bit of pleasure that can come from tomato soup. By this time, that amount seemed to be more than I deserved; I was going to die after the last spoon. I couldn't be more satisfied.

My eyes glanced aross the table to the folded bag of Doritos. I ignored them. I was eating my soup and there was nothing else in the world save me and this time with it. At 36 I started eating faster and forced myself to slow down. Don't lose count. Breathe. This is a perfect meal. I can do this for the rest of my life.

 

Against Historicism

I picked up Harold Bloom last night. He's got quotable quotes that say brilliantly and concisely what I needed to have heard several years ago, but better late than never. 

To recap. Several years ago maybe 4 or 5, I decided that I was never going to go watch another movie where the main character had a badass expresssion on his face & holding a gun in the movie poster. And I realized that while my favorite movie was 'Ran', I really hadn't read/watched enough Shakespeare or history. Around about that same time, I realized what a scholar Winston Churchill was. That too was about the time I found Larry Arnn and began looking at Western Civ in a bigger picture context. What I hadn't done is get rid of the political bug and so while I've been getting more serious reading done on that program, I've dragged along many of my political interests as well.

One of the first of many excellent lessons learned was the nature of the Marxist materialist view of the world as well as some echoes of the historicist matter as well. But it was the materialist, ie anti-spiritual, anti-religious aspects that held most of my attention. So I filled out the 'godless commies' thinking in my reperatoir, in defense of Western religious freedom. In parallel with that was the very important understanding that your soul and your character is really none of the government's business and that went categorized under the general buckets of 'new man' and Michelle Obama's 2007 UCLA speech. More recently I have been trying to get a grasp on the weakness of the New Atheism which cosigns a lot of Progressive politics.

But then I found myself watching more gun movies. My venture into sci-fi has kind of unwound because basically it's all about Stross, Stephenson, Banks & Bacigalupi. Meiville not so much and maybe not at all. Dunno. So I've been uneasy for the last few months and really bored with my historical stuff. I mean Koestler's Darkness At Noon was brilliant, and I really enjoyed the massiveness of Robert Conquest's great work. But my Civil War history lost my interest, as did the history of Eisenhower. So once again, I started back towards the Big Books. And that's why I'm reading Pynchon. 

But Pops dropped off the massive Yale Shakespeare last weekend, and he's been reading Bloom (at my suggestiong). And I decided to spend my Audible credits on two from Bloom. Boom.

Bloom within an hour reminded me of a number of authors I have rather forgotten. I'd dabbled with them but never gone as far as I might have. Chehkov, Mann, Coleridge, Maupassant. What's wrong with me? But he really zinged me in 'How to Read and Why' with suggestions about the attitude I should take with me towards reading. What surprised me the most was that as I was just now rummaging through an old diary of mine (circa 1990). that used to be my attitude. 

The biggest problem I have had in my intellectual career is that reading books has always been for me a zero-sum game with my sociability. I stay at home over the weekend and read 300 pages, that's a whole weekend I make myself happy and one step less engaged with everyone in front of me. What do I do on Saturday night when the rest of the people are drinking beer and watching the game with friends? I'm reading, with no friends and alienating myself from the beer crew. Which is perfectly fine with me: in 1990. Then along comes the internet and I become convinced that I can catch up to the fete manque of where ever Yale humanities dorm bull sessions go after graduation. So I invent all sorts of online personnas (about eight including Cobb, now 20 years gone) for my projects using the internet as social media as I have been since 1993. 

Bloom may be curing me of all that. Obama deserves credit as well. I couldn't sustain the fiction that by adding to myself I might be communicating better with whomever out there. It's just me cranking out my writing because I must - for me - for selfish reasons. And now I'm about to be 100% cool with that. And I don't expect to find that place I used to call the 'noble arena' - I discounted it long ago, now I'm about to release it. 

Two years ago I went Epicurean. I knew I had to get rid of politics four years ago. Now I think I'm somewhere between Epicurean and Stoic. If I remember correctly, the Epicureans were more public with their findings and the Stoics didn't give a rats if you were 'in' or 'out'. What may ultimately make that determination is how I resolve to deal with Historicism.

Historicists are those people behind every multiculturalism. So the Culture War and those things that drive the agenda of those who must Minister to Peasants, is based on what Bloom considers the uselessness of expecting people who read literature to 'get it' in some way that positively and predictably affects society. Guess what? Society has nothing to do with it. You're either individually fortunate to find the individual whose self-improvement has worked or not. Reading the great works is about self-improvement. Period. It is actually about *be* and not *do*. And I can get into that, because I have discovered what all the Peasants do, and it's merely survival. 

Historicists want to craft a framework for the interpretation of history. They're the ones that are compelled to leash the humanities curriculum to *something*. And it has all been identity bullcrap. Formulaic. Unimaginative. And that's what I have been pissed off about. The complete lack of imagination in all of the public discourse I've been part of for so long. 

So mark my milestone readers. I am once again off the chain. Unleashed.  My mockery factor is going up. Which means I'll probably be able to renew my friendship with Sean Paul, the Agonist. Maybe now I'll understand him better. And maybe I'll be a lot more subversive than ever before. We'll see. 

A Spy in the House of Racist Jokes

Since I belong to an abnormally large number of distributions, including the Kwaku Network which is that one I refer to from time to time as the black backchannel, I get all sorts of mail. I get Progressive mail from groups like Move On, and I get whatever CNN and the WaPo deem of special interest to black intellectuals and bloggers, I get mail from Stratfor and the Institute for the Study of War. I get mail on Israel and stuff from Libertarians. I get included in Data Warehousing groups, hacker groups, Occupy groups and organizational management groups. I get mail from Katrina contractors and Twitter spammers. I get mail from law enforcement and national security groups and just about every freaking retailer on the planet. I also get mail from oddball individuals including attorneys who think I'm their client, doctors who think I'm their patient, headhunters who think I want to work for their clients, and writers who think my blog is a good place for their creations. 99% of the time, I never respond. I just read this instead of ever watching network news. I get to know what I want to know. 

But the other day, I got an email from one of the above groups which included a very tasteless and juvenile joke about saggin' people.  (If you have a difficult time understanding, spell saggin backwards). I expect that the excrement will impact on the reticulating cooling device some time within the next week - or maybe not. That is because, although there is a public website where this sorry joke originates, I'm not particularly interested in outing the culprits. Interestingly enough, I find some ethnic jokes funny, but this one is merely pathetic.

So it struck me as something of a perverse test of nerve. Having been a race man for many years, I know very well what my tolerance for BS is, but it certainly varies from topic to topic. I don't particularly waste my time on the obvious, except when current events seem to demand obligatory seriousness. But what about you? Do you feel it is your responsibility as an x-person to speak out whenever something offensive or damaging to x-people is done?

For the moment, I am a spy in a house that harbors someone who is spreading tacky junk. I'm not particularly cool with it, but I'm also not making a fuss. Interesting position. 

That Culturally Embarrassing Moment

In one of the books I'll never write about the Emergent Americans is a small chapter on the tell-tale existentials. One of the examples has to do with the man who plays tennis at the club but still dreams about being an NFL quarterback. One day he takes his kid to a picnic, throws him the long bomb and realizes his kid is running in the wrong directions and can't tell a post pattern from a buttonhook. Ugh. Embarrassing. 

I had that moment this weekend and it reminded me of Cobb's Rule #14. When people are confused, they overuse their strengths. This derives from 'people don't have weaknesses, they overuse their strengths' which is a nice way of saying 'the idiot who only has a hammer sees every problem as a nail'. Same premise. Different language. 

And so it came to me with a sudden ferocity that over the years I have only taken one of my kids out to the basketball courts. That's the one whose knee you can see on the left of the picture heading to the get the rebound she knows is inevitably coming when the old man stops dribbling outside of the three point line. My other two lovely children are standing around like the clueless newbs they are. 

We had a good game of Horse nevertheless. Then the the volleyball kids started hitting a volleyball around and the cheerleader started doing handstands. My wife took more pictures. I started thinking about how and whether or not to write this essay.

Lux Et Veritas

For the past couple of days I have been entertaining the odd notion that I want to learn Latin. My young nephew has impressed his teachers and so they have sent him off to the state championships. I figure that I'm the only one in the family who might care enough to correspond with him and keep that light burning. But also I am thinking of the crypto fun I might have by employing a basic facility with it. As I keep breaking my fingertips on the bass guitar, I may come to admit after 30 years that I'm just not going to be good enough to play in a roadhouse band, but my language skills are still strong. 

And in another way, I find more reasons to be disturbed and cranky with people. This past week gave an interesting combination of impressions on me as I went to San Francisco. I am beginning to see myself, as I know more people who die and disappear every year, closer to old and more alienated from youth. And while I still often entertain paramilitary and doom thoughts at the unraveling of sense in society I'm a lot more likely to become a monk than a horse archer in the coming dark ages. 

So I look to Latin as a possible last language of logic, expecting perhaps that the same sort of wonderous diction I find in audiobooks narrated by Simon Prebble might be found somewhere in what remains of the Latin literate.

The prospects appear dim.

The only Latin Meetup groups are all about salsa dancing, and the few local professors I looked up seem hopelessly devoted to useless arcana. Outside of perhaps being able to read what all that Lorem ipsum stuff is, I am coming to believe that Latin is more dead than a little. Alas, my father bequeathed me this disease. O curiosity, you're killing me.

 

The Snobs Do Not Retreat

There is an idea that youth culture holds some meaning, or that it is even compelling. I know that this is an illusion but there are times when I forget. And so I have picked some difficult hobbies to remind me that the snobs do not retreat. One of these hobbies is history and historical fiction. And since I have given up my public spiritedness for the time being, I am trying to put what may be the illusion of democracy at arms distance as well. 

I spent some time with my daughter yesterday, reminded that she very much enjoyed that fraction of 'Man on Fire' that she was able to stay awake for the other night. She told me that the film reminded her of how much most movies 'try to baby me'. My little girl remains mine, but not so little is she. 

History is the story of power. We tend to forget that and behave as if people are as nice as they appear. American political partisanship is clear-eyed distrust of the other guy and projection. I have a little to do with that as possible, retaining the bad rightward habit. We pretend that nobody today is as bad a Gengis Khan. We pretend that smrgols don't do man in the middle attacks. We forget about the sewers beneath our suburbs, that shit does indeed roll downhill. We forget these things so that we can enjoy the little that we do understand, giving ourselves the comfort that our perceptions of the various melodramas presented for our amusement are true intellectual gifts. 

What are we to make of the society that allows us such conceits? 

I told my daughter that the British of Empire seem to know everything merely because they were connected to those who knew quite enough. When a first class berth on the P&O was what it was, perhaps they did know. Some of us pretend that we know of liberty better, but that may be the fool's luxury afforded to us by snobs who simply don't desire to mix it up with us. 

And so is born a new rule. Snobs do not retreat. They are only beaten down and retire from the field with some honor. 

When you know what you know, you have no reason to retreat. You have to manage your knowledge and your face. This is the lesson I will be teaching my daughter, because she admitted that she, like I, doesn't like to take anyone's word for it. She wants to know everything, and she hates the idea that she doesn't. Except she acts nice around people who don't. I'll try to teach her how not to - how to insist on what she knows to be true no matter what - how to survive the ostracism of the peasant class. How not to look too good nor talk too wise while being both. 

I think that it is a private enterprise - like knowing your own and daily improving, yet hiding your kung fu. Once you know. Know that you know and do not retreat. 

So That's What's Up with Jasmyne

I liked Jasmyne the first time I saw her. I can't remember exactly the circumstance, but on another occasion we happened to be in the same place at the same time. It was the end of the seminar and we were headed in our own separate directions but still on the same path at USC's campus. We shared some brief reflections on the event and suddenly she stepped into character and gave me an honest opinion. Most of the time ordinary people have to step out of character to blurt out some truth, but with us writers it's different. We have a mode that we go into where we are compelled to say exactly what we think and to describe exactly what we sense. We get all documentarian, and we know that we have to or else we'll be stuck with the burden of handling the truth alone. 

As soon as she did that, I had one of those very rare impulses which tells me, hmm, I could be with this woman. And so I tilted my head and jumped into character with her all the time wondering when I might see her again. It has been at least two years and I haven't seen her, nor have I been looking for her, but I do remember the moment. For some reason, Iyanla Vanzant was mixed into the moment as well. Either I had just met her or was just about to meet her. 

At the time, I was most definitely on the downslope of my media career. I had concluded that I didn't want to be spending my spare time climbing political and social ladders in order to make some impact on.. well that whole edifice of black edutainment of which Steve Harvey is King and TVOne is the institution of choice. Other people want it more than me, and I know how ethically difficult it is to navigate those pathways. I must confess that this is a Talented Tenth dilemma I have dealt with before and I essentially see no future in it for me. So I needed to stop dabbling and be serious about what I truly want to be serious about, which is my actual career. 

Jasmyne is for real in the dimensions of a few of my other black media pals, Jimi Izrael, Lester Spence and Jennifer Longmeyer - of the most well known. In particular, they have genuine hearts and are in no way the sort of opportunists who prey at the hopes of the black Americans. These are people who walk into a room and see individuals, not 'a people in need of leadership'. I am proud to call them friends because I know how rare people with charismatic talents of the sort those three possess and wreck havoc in today's media climate. I would summarize it this way. There are not many people on this planet who can get onto the national broadcast media and not make a fool of themselves, and fewer still who can make a positive impact. Do not be fooled, that is a death-defying business. As one of Cobb's Rules states, never underestimate the intelligence of people in power. The long knives are everywhere.

Now I'm going to say something that I believe most people would think I have no right to say, but it is true about me in a way that Michael Jackson once sang, I can't help it if I wanted to I wouldn't help it even if I could. But I do not care about the personal pain of individuals. I'm a stoic, and I have always been prepared to be one. Like Spock, perhaps, and certainly as a writer as I have described above, I possess a certain emotional detachment from the sort of personal emotional drama that has grown into the minds of America. And it is that facility, plus my age and experience that finds me moved ever so slightly (enough to write this post, but not a whole lot more) by the tale of Jasmyne Cannick's that I think is going to make it's impact felt on a lot of people. You see I have had a best friend die of AIDS back when people basically died of AIDS. And I have had a brother die before his 30th birthday. I've gone through the process. And since 07, it seems, almost every year, someone close to me has died.  

So for most of my adult life, since the age of 30, I have had the experience of dealing with grief and much of my personality is tempered with that. Who died and why? That's what I want to know. And I say that most of human activity that counts for something requires that grown ups are dealing in life or death decisions. Everything else is just shopping. 

So let me jump then, directly into the drama that Jasmyne had to deal with. Here, she speaks of a turning point in dealing with an ex-lover who was withering away in a hospital:

What I did find out was that apparently her right leg basically went numb and I guess her mom had stopped by to visit her—because she was keeping herself basically hidden away from everyone.  Her mom saw her and took her to the nearest hospital—again under the illusion that her daughter was suffering from “stress-related” health problems. 

At the hospital my friend never told them her status, so while they were wasting time testing for this and that, she just let them knowing all along what was wrong.  Why?  Because she couldn’t let her mother, her “up in the front pew, every Sunday church going, sanctified and holified” mother know.  She would rather die first, and was well on her way to doing so if you ask me.

Well, sorry, I can’t play that game and I told her that I was going to tell the doctor and the nurses immediately.

She almost had a heart attack. 

I had to explain to her that they couldn’t tell her mother anything because of patient confidentiality.  I had to explain that they weren’t going to treat her like a leper and that she wasn’t going to be shipped of to some remote area of the hospital and left to die alone. 

She didn’t believe me. 

If it was me, I'm hard pressed to say that I would remain engaged. I would struggle with it. People who are ill-prepared to handle the truth - even of their very own condition? Is every such death a slow suicide? 

I am reminded of Sex Panic. There was a clique of gays who were so enamored of their own sexuality that even knowing that their riotous ways were a high-wire act, they would rather be so engaged until death, rather than grow old, boring and unsexy. But at least they had the bold sort of stupidity that understood the consequences. Self-conscious lemmings are, in that way a bit better off - they leap from the cliff with a 'Whee'' rather than a 'What?'. Jasmyne roping in her friend halfway down the cliff from a position of strength is admirable from the close up perspective. A life, after all, is a life. But how complicit is the person who runs with that pack of lemmings?

One of the reasons I excel at my solitary pursuits is that I understand the value of what I do, whether or not anyone else does. There are a number of parts of my life that simply need no ascent or recognition. This is not unusual - many altruistic people express the same conviction, with the exception that their actions are pointed to individual intervention. "If what I do makes the difference in just one life, then it's all worth it.", they say in defense of their seeming folly. So there is a carefully constructed edifice of thought I've been building here at Cobb and elsewhere and it has led me to certain unavoidable conclusions. One of these is that is that grim outlook. 

I'm glad that there are lucky people. There are lucky people just like there are exploding stars, and the effects of the inevitable gift of chance gives us all a reason, like the birth of a nebula, to consider the eternal forces that mock our plans. But for the most part, the Universe remains constant with rules in effect that can be ignored but not avoided. As a stoic, I align myself with that which cannot be avoided, with the constant in the mainstream of the forces of life. And these alignments tell me that saving the life of a fool can make a lucky difference, but 99% of the time it is merely an act of individual choice. No monumental significance, no butterfly effect. Nevertheless, we humans are social creatures who are profoundly affected by certain types of drama. Awaiting Taleb's or Ariely's perfect term, I call them mental illusions. Like optical illusions, they are tricks and traps that lead us to believe that the true meaning of something is what we immediately perceive. 

There is no way to percieve Jasmyne's heartbreaking quest as anything but noble. Unless you're me and you have the habit of jumping into the character of a writer who is compelled to say something else. Something not obvious but evident. Yes, I am the grim faced crank who plays video war games for entertainment. I am the hardcase who has figured out how we all go soft in peacetime, how in this new wonderful Twitter-filled world of Instagrams, nobody is showing photojournalism of screaming naked Vietnamese refugees any longer. 

Everybody wants to be a lifeguard, because every once in a while, you get to save the drowner up close and personal. But...

Happy

What it feels like to be me.

These days I am thankful for all of the people who, despite my willfulness or seeming indifference, have pushed me in directions I didn't necessarily want to go. I know that I am mostly what I wanted to be because I have spent so much time in places I didn't want to be. All of those places gave me a more complex life, but none of those places was home. Today, I am home. I am home with my family and I am at peace with myself. But I miss you all, as I usually do knowing finally that you all have your own lives to live; all the small stuff that takes up our time - that I never liked talking about anyway. 

I have completed, at long last, the journey that led me to writing. I have not emerged as a writer, per se, but as someone with a sense of how everything fits together. I was fortunate enough to have the kind of youth that put two things together for me, a sense of self and a sense of what I wanted to do for work. So I never had to do much searching for those two things - only to get in touch with people who appreciated them the way I did. I had a headstart with my family who loved and appreciated me for myself, and I was fortunate enough to amble into Xerox who had a clue as to the kind of work I most enjoyed. But what was missing for me during the eight years out of highschool was any sense of how ideas and writing worked in the world and what it meant to know things - how to be worldly I guess. There seemed to be a conversation going on about America, about life with winks and nods and references I only obliquely understood and wanted desperately to live and feel. It was like half-understanding the dialog in a Woody Allen movie. Yes, I thought, I think I'm like that expression and I don't know how to have that conversation with anyone. And so I had to begin writing so at the very least, I could have that conversation with myself. 

It took me all of my life thus far to develop that sense of how ideas work in the world, and I no longer feel as if I have to expend any efforts to be philosophical. I have arrived at a comfortable plateau of something akin to wisdom and accomplishment. And while I expect that I would be a bit too self-indulgent, I am at the "I could die happy if I never did anything futher" stage, as far as that goes. I know enough things so that I am no longer a slave to curiosity, not so much dragged behind the wagon in shackles as comfortably sitting in the hay bales. 

What lies before me is living and working as ends in themselves, rather as means to the end of achieving enlightenment. I believe I will find a new kind of satisfaction from things I no longer need to put into perspective. I more clearly see the virtue of those simple pursuits. It gives me such great pleasure to be able to give cover to those so dedicated. 

As ever, I am a defender. Well, as I have been in fatherhood and as a big brother during the first part of my life. As a young man, I was all about me. But now I am more thoroughly some sort of sheepdog with that kind of inviolable sense of purpose, if not duty. I still like going out beyond the treeline and finding the bears. 

I am also a witness - a story teller and an explainer. It is my gift and the one I will give more often and freely. I will do thing in life and in work because I cannot cook. I can't talk about baseball and I can't run for 15 miles, but I can tell stories and talk a blue streak about something I know. I can answer questions and tell you the moral of the tale. I can tell you how it used to be and maybe what it's supposed to be. I can use my words and be a comfort. 

I think I am on my way to being a bit more selfless, or perhaps I am just anticipating what little I'll have left for myself in a few years with three kids in college. There's a bit of mystery around that corner but I hope to negotiate it reasonably, if not reasonably well. 

That's about it. I wish people I knew didn't die before we had another good meal together, but people die anyway. I feel sad about the fact that there are so many people I have known that I never will see again. I never will know who they really were except for what they seemed to me at the time - when I probably wasn't paying that much attention. I will go on unsatisfied that we didn't have all the transcendent conversations we might have.

Every day gives me another opportunity to fulfill the roles I've accepted. Dad. Architect. Writer, Entrepreneur. I will be more present in the moment and more focused on the now. There will not be so much of the complex implicated future in my occupied present. I will be available. And I intend to use my body up, and use my mind up, and use my life up on my way to my grave - to express it fully and not hold back so that I will make my impact felt while I'm here. 

So if you are wishing me a happy birthday today, I say thank you for thinking of me. I'm thinking of your part of me and telling you that my happiness today is part of your doing. It feels pretty good out here at milepost 51. 

Courtney Goes To Prom

The Man With the Horn

Chris Bowen: First Trumpet

His Name is Shusei

in my generation, there were certain images that sparked the imagination. None were so thrilling to mine as the artwork of Shusei Nagaoka. I have just discovered that this was the man. It happened almost by accident. 

At all of my remote assignments, I keep track of where I am and what city by changing my desktop wallpaper. Generally, it will be something iconic about the city. This last time around, I changed up because I had two screens. I saw that somebody else used the Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon LP album cover for their desktop, and I thought that was pretty cool. So I thought, hmm, what's the coolest album cover ever? It was pretty simple. Earth Wind and Fire's All N All. 

It turns out that Nagaoka also did the the Out of the Blue space station for ELO, and the legendary album cover for Jefferson Starship with the dragon holding the glowing sphere. Next to Star Wars and the space ships from Superman vs Muhammad Ali, these EWF album covers by Shusei were the epitome of my teenaged aesthetic. 

It wasn't until the 80s that I got into Moebius and Geiger, despite Heavy Metal, the movie - but we could talk about that. 

626 Night Market

I just woke up from a moderate nightmare. I was in this huge indoor clothing store in China with me and my cohorts being chased around.

We had just made a deal with the head laundress to process our bulk clothing at $3 per 20 pound sack. She had the hots for my young, aggressive associate Yung, so I encouraged them to indulge themselves. Just after the deal was sealed, Yung decided to stir the pot by spitting on the sacks of our Japanese rivals. (Their sacks are bright red, ours are white with three blue stars and an outline of California). Yung goes left, I go right, the Japanese are chasing us. Meanwhile the people who run the joint are trying to find out what the chaos is all about. So Im scrabling through aisle after aisle packed with shoppers trying to get back to my American group and maintain some dignity and not have to whip out the pistol...

(cliche of man rising up in bed, breathing deeply covered in sweat)

Last night I took my daughter and her friend out to Pasadena for the 626 Night Market. There was no chasing, but there were huge crowds of Chinese people everywhere. The traffic was horrendous, but it was indeed a spectacle. 

The Night Market is an old Chinese tradition and if people have any sense whatsoever, it's going to be a new huge one in the San Gabriel Valley. It was a shopkeeper's nirvana. The foot traffic was Times Square intense. For a measly one block setup of no more than 30 odd tents, you had easily 15,000 people.

It was nostalgic for me to get out to Pasadena. I used to live in Altadena and in South Pasadena so I have more than my share of memories about the place and its affinity for Asians of all flavors. The girls, by showing up, practicing a little of their Mandarin and taking photos will get extra credit for their class and there were certainly plenty of opportunities to overhear conversations in all sorts of dialects. 

We ended up eating down in Old Pasadena six blocks away to get away from the swell. Great steaming bowls of spicy ramen could be had at Naga Naga. So we had ours after a 40 minute wait. I say go for the kimchee + beef, and the green milk tea is great, but too small - you should order two, or just get a Sprite. The huge fishtank in the middle is cute for about 10 minutes and then you start noticing how disgusting it is in the nooks and crannies. That is if you are sitting at the bar that surrounds it. My advice is to get a table far away. 

Ont the whole, it was nice to get out of the house and into the street, but I hate crowds and there was absolutely nothing worth buying. Not even a cool T-Shirt. The experience was rather like Venice Beach, but not as well organized. 

Triangulating Boohab

The problem with famousity is, of course, that you cannot get unfamous. Neal Stephenson notes that you can become remarkably inconsistent with your Wikipedia page. And so I recall being Boohab.

I ended up writing 'Today's Blackification' instead of this post in the context of that age-old problem of reconciling blackness of the sort I acknowledge with that marginal subset portrayed in the media. But that's all external. What I actually did as Boohab sitll echoes from time to time and I haven't bothered to comment in some time. 

Boohab was the identity I took on many years ago - circa 1995 to be more precise - as what I called a 'persistent black object'. The purpose of Boohab was to be a character that always and everywhere on the net reflected and signified on a particular flavor of black cultural nationalism. Boohab was in your face to remind you of race. 

I always wrote as Boohab in lower case to remind myself and everyone that this was an alter-ego, a character of my creation. It was the black part of me that needed to fulfill what I considered the public imperative of my generation of black Americans. The following was my full word, mostly written in retrospect on the headstone of the grave that is now Boohab's Factotum.

i'm michael bowen, creater of boohab and his website, boohab's factotum. i've been discussing social issues of all sorts online since about 1985 and began concentrating on black cultural production around '93.

my day job is business intelligence. i am a data architect involved with orchestrating information systems designed to help corporate folks make better decisions. i'm a proponent of weak ai, a devotee of the parc school of augmentation and the deming school of continuous quality improvement. i am fascinated by the ways people use computing systems to help them think (or not think).

i began to get involved with black cultural production back in '89 when somebody asked provocatively why black people get all upset when white people say rap 'is not real music'. my response took about 1700 words and a poem. i was an early participant in the open mike circuit in los angeles, and have also performed in nyc at nuyorican, st. marks and various other venues including the infamous march down 7th avenue headed by william kunstler and others following the los angeles uprising. my form of activism has a highly literary bias, but i am formally unpublished.

i took my writing and activism online having considering several venues of 'guerilla media' including spoken word, multimedia and cable access. so i began showing up in all the 'black' spaces online including some old forgotten bbs sites like idette vaughn's bbs, alex hartley's place. i ended up on 'the well' expecting a warm welcome and discovered that a LOT of people needed schooling on the basics. so following in the footsteps of my intellectual mentors, i dedicated myself to the practice of defining and teaching 'anti-racist praxis'. and so i have been a provocative figure in usenet, and various web-oriented discussion spaces for years.

i'm 36, married with 3 kids and recently moved 'back' to los angeles, having lived in atlanta, brooklyn, harlem, and boston. i'm an obsessive news junkie and compulsive reader. i'm the product of a new haven family and a new orleans family ("would you kindly pass me somadem mudbugs, sir?") i consider myself old-school socially, i'm an episcopalean with a jesuit education and i expect my kids to go to jack & jill. intellectually, i wish i were edward said - i very much dig on the model of insurgency outlined by cornel west. i know when to clap in jazz clubs and would consider any evening perfectly spent which includes at various points: whiskey, cigars, jazz and embarrassingly arcane debate. (oysters are optional)

it is my duty and pleasure to serve the public good through our joint creation. i am singularly committed to anti-racist activism; in concert we can move mountains.

It becomes clear that much of this was about being, and that is perhaps the prerogative of young middle age. How can I get people to accept that thing I want to be and almost am? At least that was the question for me. But I understood that Boohab was not all that I wanted to be, just the particular flavor of a particular time that needed expression. 

In that expression I see the consistency of academic friends in my generation. It is with confidence that they must convey the spirit of Boohab, to beat the last bugs from the screens - the bugs of racism and the unsure identity. It is a project for modernism against tribalism and I think it may be doomed. But that depends upon how much faith one feels one must have in modernism. I like Baldwin's take on idenity - let it be like the loose robes of the desert, so that one's nakedness can be lived and perceived. Humans are tribal and hierarchical down to our DNA, and Dunbar's number ain't no joke. There's only so much xenophobia we can train out of our systems, and I despair that my academic bug beaters don't despair of their own project's Canute-like futility. 

I have the fortunate position of not having reduced Cobb to a racial battle royale and not necessarily being known as a race man. But I'm not necessarily in control of those perceptions. But the Boohabian history remains influential in having been done. I don't do it now because I did it then. And just as I predicted with some confidence, America has not fallen off the cliff. I was hella pessimistic after the LA Riots and the rise of Gangsta Rap in those days, but from my perspective the country has never been so bad as in the bad old days. Despite the fact that pop culture has become debased beyond what I thought possible, the important things have held together, and yes Denzel did get his Oscar. So I laid down my racial sword and sheild, down by the riverside. 

It wasn't difficult for me to find the transcendant values. Community is a necessary but insufficient condition, so is middle class stability, lethargy and status quo. Steaks and bourbon help, mostly singly, sometimes in triumphant combination. The future of Boohab? Respect for the dead.

Running From the Devil

For some time, I entertained the fantasy of 'The Beloved Community', and I have spoken about it at Cobb in the fair terms of 'aggregation'. It has been some time since I've given that idea any lip service. But there are a few things that are abundantly clear to me in contra-distinction from my efforts *towards* anything resembling an 'Afrotocracy'.

One. I have disclaimed the pretensions of the Talented Tenth, and have not been proud of them since 1986, roughly when I left college. So one should not confuse my attraction to elite blacks with any attempt to re-establish or reform any such Talented Tenth regime, formally or informally. Put simply, I like rich blackfolks primarily for aesthetic, not political reasons. Powerful blackfolks, I don't particularly care for. I remained in a quandary about that until I read Drylongso, around about 1992. So yeah I wasted a lot of time in those six years thinking about black cultural production, but it was mostly aesthetic.

Two. I doubt the existence of any particularly organized pan-American Boule. My experience suggests to me that Oprah Winfrey did not keep council with Franklin A. Thomas who had no particular connection to Skip Gates who didn't bother with Colin Powell who didn't have dinner with Art Shell, etc, etc. I think the best that can be said is that we all listened to Miles Davis, but only for a few albums.

So in conclusion, I will point you to the biggest beef I ever had with black popular opinion over the value of the life of Tookie Williams, and make it personal. I'm not trying to be part of the leadership of the new school, and had absolutely no difficulty passing up on the Obama bandwagon for all that represented in that direction. I've just been running from the devil, trying to save my soul. And I did it.

Today's Blackification

Trayvon Martin is a punctuation mark in the book of life. A comma, or perhaps a semicolon. His erasure upsets grammarians, and a bad sentence is a bad sentence, but I'm reading above syntax. 

In fact, for blackification purposes, one might be curious to know that one such as myself is not particularly influenced by the fate of random black teenagers in random southern towns. So I swear to you this moment that I don't know the name of the any of the Jena Six and cannot recall the name of Shaquanda Cotton's Texas town.  It was Texas, wasn't it? Such snuffed candles do not light my path through history with all due respect to John Donne. 

However there are some blackfolks I've been considering of late whose fate seems lost to the hoodie class and their fetish defenders. As I might have mentioned, I'm spending more time thinking about aerospace, rocket science and the long now. A couple weeks ago I bought a 5 disc boxed set of video covering NASA starting with Friendship 7. I recall actually meeting several black astronauts when I was in college when such matters were important to me. But just to remind you where I'm coming from with regard to blackfolks... When I was a freshman, I went to the library and grabbed a copy of Who's Who Among Black Americans. There were something on the order of 35,000 entries in that book. I basically swore that day that my social involvement was done - if the only black people I met were people from that book, I would be perfectly happy. After all, I did have to get married one day. So I did in fact meet Guy Bluford, Ron McNair and Mae Jemison. And then that was done. 

Several others are at Wikipedia which is of course doing a better job of putting such things in front of the public than any of the so-called black leaders. There are 14 who have been in space, 11 more than once. But on any day at any college campus, you'll probably find more professors who can sing the lyrics to Gil Scott Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" than name five black astronauts. Hell, I know the lyrics to Whitey on the Moon and I still haven't memorized the names. But my priorities are straight.

I'm secondarily impressed with the progress of my own family. My son has been accepted into the business program of Cal State Fullerton, which was legendarily run by a woman by the name of Jewel Plummer Cobb. No relation but her biography is no joke. Look it up one day. She too was about the hard sciences. We'll see about Boy, he's recently attracted to economics and Freakonomics in particular. The Scholar is insisting on taking challenging courses for her senior year as she bucks up her already nice GPA, and the Sprite is breaking her own records in track. She's a sprinter, hurdler and long jumper. 

But I've come to meet another branch of the family that goes back to the old days in New Haven, who have been doing quite well for themselves for quite some time. I'll call him Uncle Mack because what I've come to know about him leaves me with little doubt that somewhere in one of his many closets is a full length mink coat. Uncle Mack lives one of the most exclusive suburbs in New Jersey in a castle of his own design. So far as I can tell those ceilings are 20 feet above ground and there's at least 6,000 square feet on the first floor. Uncle Mack wears French cuffs at home and reminesces about the days when Atlantic City was newly revitalized and high rollers actually tucked in their shirts. I brought up the Tyson Spinks fight on my iPad.

There used to be a club on Amsterdam Avenue that was all that when I lived in NY. I met Mike Tyson there and found I was a half inch taller. When you go back to those days, when Eddie Murphy filmed 'Boomerang', there wasn't a black American living who didn't have some metaphor of black power that didn't include Mike Tyson. He was the unstoppable force and the inevitable symbol. Uncle Mack loved to see him fight in Vegas and Atlantic City and had good seats, but not as good as some Jamaican drug dealers. There's always a bigger fish, but not always a better flavor. Uncle Mack has done better with his wealth than Iron Mike.

Finally, I've been considering the possibility that Condi Rice might find herself on Romney's short list for Veep. Either way, I listened to an hour long interview through the Hoover Institute and found how easily she grasps the motions of the geopolitical world. She is one of the great women of our time, who stepped up and made her mark. She has returned with passion to Stanford and is certainly the only living Secretary of State who bothers to teach undergraduates. I'd say the future is bright.

I know why it is difficult for some black Americans to keep their eyes on any prize worth having. They have been distracted by those in control of short attention span theatre, who are by definition not interested in knowledge. But I have plenty of confidence that human nature triumphs and that people will unplug from nonsense when the time is right.  I'm not on a mission any longer to prove something or even exemplify something about a proper blackness. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. I am a writer, and this is what I'm thinking about black America today.

Oh yeah, and I hear Tiger had a good game, and I realized that Ron Artest lives in my neighborhood, and I'm feeling Lewis Hamilton not being happy with 3rd place.

Goings On

I am in New Jersey, America's first industrial suburb. I am working in a white collar factory in a beige building on the back forty next to screeching high tension wires. I'm happy and content.

This month I am the mule, hauling moolah for the partnership by being billable and writing small scripts to replace various incompetencies and inefficiencies. I am reimagining the world through my greater systems vision rather like the poet Michael Jackson. As he said in 1986, you're just another part of me. The unglued crusty but eminently recoverable part. My yi jing this morning is #46 - Sheng - Growing Upward. In the middle of the nourishing grows the gradual. I am nourishing my company and we gradually grow. New Jersey is a good place to do so. It is that part of industrial society that never lets you forget its roots, the grassland in the context of the factory, the woods off to the side of the refinery, the meadow that echoes the machinery, the backyard of the shipyard. It is the boxed garden state.

I have stumbled onto an old friend whom I haven't seen in 10 years. It was a miracle that he was stationed two cubicles away from me here at my new nourishing encampment. We will eat together. He will cook. I will bring stories. This is my gift - the gift of patience. Patience for the sake of wisdom which over observes and attempts to make lessons of every consequence.

I will reconnect with another long unseen compatriot of questing spirit. He is the man who understands the cognitive power of melody and rhythm. He interprets the silent, secret conversations written into the urban landscape in the language of spray can glyphs and discarded babydolls. He consults the mighty who wrestle with unseen runes within digital oceans. He purses his lips and blows. He lives in New Jersey and his name is on the bell. We will walk through Liberty Park and contemplate the skyline above the crumbled twins.

Bloomberg's Keene and Pruitt remain the smartest men in broadcast media, and Bloomberg has recognized the wisdom of returning to the free podcast, and so I am returning. RAND gives free pdfs as well. Knowledge is gaining foothold, like classical music and free software. Yay.

 

Muted but Still Cobb

I've decided to leave the redacted banner. What is spontaneously happened is I have recognized that no matter what happens with SOPA or any other legislation, I'm not going to be the dumbass who will be restrained. I know enough schmoos to get hip to their lingo and find a way around. I know this because I just stumbled upon the fact that I still have pgp keys on the MIT server back from the 90s. I don't use them, but I have them. As I have other stuff that I don't use. The point is that I'm not the masses, and I know they're coming for me anyway. So to hell with participatory democracy and up with armor.

I figured at some point, probably 10,000 posts, that I would close down this shop, but it will probably happen sooner than that. Ten years prolly, which will happen in about 12 months. I've done all of the non-community bleating, the black conservative blathering, the christian apologia, the decent and humorous things I needed to do to consider myself the writer I wanted to be. And my writing muscles are good. And my coding muscles are weak. So for the next period, I'm going to amp up my coding muscles, but that's another tangent. As I began to suggest that I would begin studying psychology just because of Stephen Pinker, I realized that my writing has become an annoying habit. I never quite saw it that way, but in mastering my time in a new way, it is becoming evident.

This creates another problem, which is that now as I point my attention in the direction of tech, architecture and away from society, I'm going to alienate people whom I actually like. That is because, for a short period of sophomoric time, I'm going to remain pissed at the technological corner I've drawn myself into. It's like getting married and starting to see your homeboys from your wife's point of view. What was I thinking? 

But that's all part of change.

I'm going to try to find a new way to connect with the new audience I'll be cultivating as I transition. You see there are a lot of technical notes I've been taking that will get exposure, and there's the way I see the bigger picture that I must of necessity include in my technical writing journey. I don't know how that's going to work out, but I suspect like all of open source. You just put it out there and hope somebody can and will read your code. 

So I don't know what's next for over here. Something about Whitney I think.

OK & Stoic About It

 

As I move forward in this, the final third of my planned life (whatever happens after I'm 75, I basically don't care), I am discovering the ways in which all the life I've lived is different or similar to the ways people have lived throughout history. Right about now I'm discovering my stoicism.

 

About 15 years ago, I put together a 'hyperbio' which was about 300 phrases, each tied to a specific memory, that I had grouped into about 7 phases of my life. At the height of my corporate professional career and the beginning of my corporate management career I considered adding the 8th phase. In 2000 I got ganked by the Feds and in 2001 I got laid off from Hyperion and there was 9/11 of course. I still hadn't gotten full custody of my son, and I had lost my last grandmother. So thinking about how to end phase 7 and begin phase 8 meant that now that I was over 40 I was going to have to consider death, loss and failure. So what to call phase 7? Should that include the death loss and failure through 2001 to start anew with phase 8, or should it end on a high note and phase 8 be the beginning of death, loss and failure? It was a lot on my mind as I flew Southwest Airlines every week with bumpy landings at BUR. 

I didn't resolve the ontology problem, but I did change the way I think. Ever since 9/11 I have asked, as a part of my morning routine, what broke while I was sleeping? And those of you who have worked with me may recognize that hangdog look on my face, and how I actually brighten up slightly when I am working on something that's broken. Failure makes me laugh, because in some ways it is the comeuppance of incompetence. Except, of course in IT, you generally don't get to know exactly who screwed the pooch, how or when. We're all organizationally firewalled and only blame goes over the transom. So I came to expect SNAFU, even find comfort in it. It's a horrible dualism to deal with in a world of technological improvement where people want ever increasing slices of their lives digitized. It is at once progress and chaotic dissolution. 

When I was the admin at Xerox Centre, I had the audacity, just ask David Bradley, to wear a disk drive head assembly on my keychain. it was my digital red badge of courage, having mounted a disk pack incorrectly and listening to flying heads grind into the platters and then crash in a cyclone of crumbled bits of aluminum and burning FeO₂. Somewhere around that time, in the late 80s, I was losing my patriotism over the flubs of the Reagan Administration in disbelief over news reports about the runways lengths in Grenada and then finally over Iran Contra. But I was still much too young to be a stoic - I lived at the beach.

But now I understand that thing Taleb calls the Dumbell Strategy, which is to pursue seeminly contradicting aims simultaneously in recognition that he who plays both sides manages risk. But it is not being two-faced, but being antifragile, the difference between which are the stuff of wisdom. There's no easy way to explain it, and I won't until I read his book which is due out in six months or so. But I am indeed finding parallels of this thinking in history and coming to terms with what has been said by the likes of Epictetus and Cryssipus as well as the gods of OODA. 

I am of the opinion that all human folly ends in war, if the folly is big enough. That is because stupidity rarely fails from killing things and epic stupidity, that which is powerful and sustained by cowardice and/or credulity inevitably kills people. Evil *is* rather banal in that you can see it coming a mile a way. Stupidity, on the other hand, usually presents with the symptoms of inattention.  Expect Inattention; it is legion.

What does it all mean? It means that when I have a miserable week, as I had just the other week, starting with a funeral I really was unprepared for, a backlog of work I had committed to and failed to deliver, and an increasingly busified schedule full of tasks everyone hates like auto repair, tax preparation and helping kids study for finals at midnight; there is a solution. That solution is to listen to the tribulations of the thousands of Bolsheviks being falsely accused, tortured into confession, summarily tried and executed of being bourgeois nationalists, which is basically everything I ever wanted to be. Robert Conquest is my staid and sometimes deeply ironically arch guide through that horror - the details of which when I first encountered them 9 years ago sent me to sleep weeping. And now, like the whiskey I once could not stomach, I consume it for comfort.

I'm OK. I can handle it. 

I try to be both concerned and unworried. What I hate most of all is not the bad news, but being blindsided by it. I am comfortably down Miller's Alley and concerned (but not worried) about those things that are reasonably within my ambit of capacity to change. I reckon that to be a Stoic approach, but I'll let you know how Stoically correct I am. At the same time, I'm a Californian which means I do not intend to be fat or lazy or overly concerned with the quality of affairs in the public square, that which our meddlesome liberal friends insist on calling 'Zocalo', and will, I suppose until their Yankee inflected Spanish fails to deliver them from being dragged foot-first up the coming ziggurats of political human sacrifice ot the greater glory of La Raza. I'm going to the jazz concert anyway. I'm going jogging anyway. I'm going to eat in my walled garden like an Epicurean anyway. That's how I roll. 

I'm becoming convinced, as I'm sure the Stoics were, that Vulgaris populus ago in obscurum. Ordinary people live in darkness. Being OK is slightly better than that, especially for one such as I who is not likely to curse the darkness. That's part of the dumbell strategy. That is part of living up to Boyd's theory of liberty. 

“The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.” 

But Taleb adds the kicker. He imagines, and we expect that he will describe, systems that benefit from failure - not creative destruction, but perhaps one can think of them as twin OODA loops, one for success and one for failure. Here is Taleb:

Seneca was the wealthiest man in the world. He had 500 desks, on which he wrote his letters talking about how good it was to be poor. And people found inconsistency. But they didn't realize what Seneca said. He was not against wealth. And he proved effectively that one philosopher can have wealth and be a philosopher. What he was about is dependence on wealth. He wanted the upside of wealth without its downside. And what he would do is--he had been in a shipwreck before. He would fake like he was a shipwreck and travel like he was a shipwreck once in a while. And then he would go back to his villas and feel rich. He would write off every night before going to bed his entire wealth. As a mental exercise. And then wakes up rich. So, he kept the upside. In fact, what he had, my summary of what Stoics were about is a people who really had, like Buddhists, an attitude. ...

And my definition is a Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. Very different than the Buddhist idea of someone who is completely separated from worldly sentiments and possessions and thrills. Very different. Someone who wanted the upside without the downside. And Seneca proved it. And the way you get there, Seneca is suggesting, is through mental exertion. Through renunciation--some of it's action, but some of it is the way you look at your life and what you prepare yourself for and how you affect your expectations.

Righteous.

I Paid My Debt to Society

After 15 years, I have settled my beef with the IRS. Well, I should say that I retired my debt. I continue to loathe and fear them like the blood sucking monsters they are. I have lived a very fine life even pulling that extra wagon, but now I will be able to sprint. The ankle weights are off.

Oh wait. Can they see this?

It's funny how I've always mocked Hollywood celebs who die broke from their financial foolishness. Not long ago it was Wesley Snipes who had some idiot excuse for not paying taxes. Well, I got busted too, but now I'm done. The gangsta feds are paid in full. I'll go about my business.

So this is, finally, my last 'coulda woulda shoulda'. I have corrected all of the major errors of my life with the exception of the fat on my belly. Hello 2012. 

Snow Country for Old Men

Doc sends his regards from South Dakota. He took his youngest there for dog sledding. He's reading Thoreau and sends me a handwritten note:

The most gratifying work is that produced of your own hands. Four days of wood cutting, snow removal and leaf burning is infintely more gratifying than putting LA's crooks through the revolving doors of State's criminal justice system. What an elaborate joke. What gratifies me the most pays the least, heck it doesn't pay me a dime and herein lies life's mystery. If I live well, correctly, in the country, I'll never have to work for strangers again.

I have yet to see the beloved country but I hope to this year. By the time I'm ready, the snow will be gone, but with any luck so will be 20 pounds of my own fat. I am determined, once again, to lift the heavy weight and fall back into my body again.

For most of my life I've been extra athletic, but in a way that seemed oxymoronic to me. I was of medium height and slim with broad shoulders. I always thought I should have more of a gymnast's body, instead I had a cyclist's body - not quite enough meat on the chest and arms for my druthers. Still, I had extraordinary stamina, could play all day and eat without end. At my top conditioning I rode about 50 miles a week on my bike and got in about five hours a day of beach volleyball over the weekend. That condition was something I purposefully persued, reducing my life to simplicities. 

There have been two times after my 30th birthday when I purposefully persued fitness and one time, two years ago when I figured I could just diet my way into health. I know myself too well now. I have to hit the dusty trail and feel the pain. So it's on. 

I'm going to get up tomorrow at 6am and run. No matter what. My reading list is going to get shorter and I'm going to develop my symphonic vocab. I'm done talking and expecting so much from talking. 

 

Alienation of the Deeps

Somewhere in my RSS feed is a writer named Nicholas Carr. He has written a book called 'The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains'.  I don't have to read it to know that he is right. I would have to read it to know precisely how to talk about it at the dinner party I'm never going to be invited to. I have the internet instead of dinner parties. And I have to presume that my blog is in the deep end, but I cannot be sure. At some point there must be some advantage to having this thing online rather than in binders on my shelves. I may come to figure out when that point arrives.

In the meantime, during a surfeit of indoor alone time over the long weekend, I watched the entire Firefly series, finally had my fill of Skyrim and began to watch the crapulous series 'Doctor Who'. The latter has given me a whole new appreciation of Charles Stross but generally downgraded my estimation of the literacy of the entire UK. It turns out that there were exactly two moments in the Firefly series, which I found very enjoyable, that has been presaged by conversations I recall being the odd man out. And so for just a few moments of communal appreciation in retrospect, I have eaten 14 hours of entertainment. Part of the problem is I can't remember exactly whom I was talking to. No matter. There is always the Chinese bits and through that perhaps I can get my daughter to follow the series behind me.

I also watched the first half of Dustin Hoffman's Marathon Man, which I had never seen and look forward to finishing. It just so happened that YouTube's Travel Film Archive had sent me an update and I was looking at videos of New York back in time. With Steven Pinker in mind, and also a brief listen of West Side Story in the back of my head, it was refreshing to consider how unviolent NYC is now compared to the 70s. I do have a recurring meme that we will be reliving the 70s when the economy gets worse than it is now, but I must confess that watching Marathon Man reminded me of how awful it used to be. In one way, I think today's incivilities are more hypocritically passive-aggressive and byzantine.  In another way I miss the overt hostility of yesteryear's horn-honking, bird flipping  screw yous. Overall, however, we are more civilized. Maybe the future is Singapore.

Sunday night extended into Monday night and I sat twiddling my mind's thumbs at a seemingly endless selection of depths to plumb. But I am starting to believe that I am at the ends of my edification. It simply makes no sense to me to go delving into yet another Dwemer ruin only to find another collectable, either in the real life world of literature or in the electronic sandbox. I am overbrained and becoming arcane, making myself irritable and insulting.

In one scene from Marathon Man, Roy Scheider (who used to be one of my favorite actors), attends an opera at the Palais Royale. He disturbs a gentleman in the loge who is following the score. Yes, following the score; he has the sheet music of the performance in front of him. How extraordinary. I think that I should never see such a thing, and today I feel that I would never want to be such a thing. It is so alienating.

We have to pick our alienations.

Before web 2.0. Before the web itself, there was the world of BBS. They were like phone numbers scribbled on bathroom stalls - for a good time, dial. And there would be some small flock of weirdos who didn't seem so weird because you were all in the same predicament, like a collection of barstools awaiting the asses of the lonely, it was welcoming and isolated. You ordered up conversations like cocktails, and there were regular topics like common mixes of booze. A bit of indulgence bore friendship, as much as a co-drinking stranger is a bar can considered a relationship - as much as a bar can be considered a place to start one. The world is a ghetto, why not online too? That was considered the progressive sentiment in 1990. Today there is gratification of the same flavor to be had all over the web, leaving us old jaded pioneers pleased but indifferent. There are a million people out there to connect with - but it's really like walking Fifth Avenue now. Where did all of these people come from? How can they be content just staring into windows? Where did all the bars and coffeeshops go? What is there really to talk about anyway?

I feel more often than not that our civilization really has no place for old men who are not rich and powerful, and am wary of approaching that barrier. I'm not sure exactly how to live. Outside of being a jolly uncle and picking out which grand- name I should eventually adopt, there are no yellow brick roads for me to follow. I despair of becoming anyone's eminence gris; what a disgusting denoument.

So I don't know. It is perhaps my impending far life crisis, and I am healthy enough for the moment to believe I have a choice.

Sixth Grade Memories in Song

I do actually remember certain things very well. One of them was singing in the sixth grade in Miss Milliken's class. Our favorites were these four.

The Hiking Song | The Caisson Song | Joy to the World | I've Got Sixpence

I woke up this morning with the Hiking Song on my mind, but Google doesn't know it. 

Hiking through the fields we go
Eu ki dee Eu ki doe
Even through the ice and snow
Eu ki di ki doe 

In each season of the year
Hiking brings us health and cheer

Eu ki dee ki dee ki doe
Eu ki dee Eu ki doe

Eu ki dee ki dee ki doe
Eu ki dee ki doe

--

And one more little note as I read on in Stephen Pinker's 'Better Angels' and reflect sunnily on Niall Ferguson's killer apps. Civilization will continue to be civilized, and Western Culture will continue to prevail, as we go rolling, rolling home.

 

Merry Christmas To All

May the eternal blessings of the God, the good will of good men and the spirit of the season find you and your family in health, serenity and prosperity today and throughout the new year.

Peace, Love & Soul from the Bowen Family
Boy, Scholar, The Spousal Unit, Sprite & Your Humble Servant.