Whiteness is of course, a flaw. Being white is almost as bad as having blue eyes. This is all environmentally speaking - protection against the elements and so forth. But most of us do come in contact with those elements: wind, rain, sun. Especially sun. I spend a lot of time either looking for my sunglasses or squinting. Lots of squinting. It’s not as if I’m some kind of inter-planetary instigating interloper, trying to fit in amongst elements unknown, against scapes unfitting. This is my home planet. So why is its sun so incompatible with my hides? I have a genetic flaw: my skin does not produce enough pigments to protect me from that giant yellow menace. But the last time I visited the beach, I was not alone in my disfigurement. Lots of combination pasty white and stop sign yellow creatures were frolicking. No wonder so many people out there cast evolution aside as a ridiculous theory.

Here’s the thing: at the end of the day, we all need to be on the same page.

Do you have a job? Most of us do. We need the corresponding paycheck in order to pay the internet bill. And to pay for the space where the computer is setup and the general living area that surrounds it. And for the food - stuff like that. So, what do you get paid to do? Do you make food? Maybe you build houses, or perhaps you construct furniture or something like that? You know, something tangible: you go someplace where you turn raw materials into things that necessitate life. No? You don’t do that? You go someplace and talk on the phone to other people about things that seem important? You write and/or read documents that describe processes or procedures or prophylactics? You read emails and fill in numbers on cells on LCD screens? You make sure that something gets from there to there so that things happen and magnetic fields on the platter of one disk array are altered to correlate with those of another disk array someplace else?

Yeah, that’s kinda what I thought. That’s mostly what I do also. And so as a result of spending 10 hours of my day thusly, the magnetic fields of the disk arrays that correspond to the bank accounts that are indirectly linked to my name store patterns of digits that then spread out  across other similar fields on discs at Wells Fargo Mortgage and HarrisTeeter and Duke Power and Time Warner Cable so that life as I know it can continue on.

So the other thing that happens during a typical week is that people get really caught up in all of this really important activity. They come up with important thoughts and concepts that invariably conflict with those of others with whom they interact. They seem to do this as a goal in and of itself - the competing  thought generally being almost identical to those put forward by others but being at least slightly different along one axis in order to bring about some harangue that might result in an opportunity to win forth and demonstrate some worthiness for the paycheck that lives in the magnetic field.  This is wizardry in our time and most of us are stuck deep in it.

So if I am stuck trying to state something that you are probably going to also state, but slightly altered by 2 degrees in the Z axis, I must then come up with something that will simultaneously force you to understand while also obfuscating with time sucking attributes of nothingness that serve to fasten both of our minds up with lacquer to make things seem shiny and sticky. And so we have “on the same page” and “here’s the thing” and “at the end of the day” and any number of other casings and accouterments of business discourse.

“I would just like to point out that, from a customer perspective and the point of view of marketing, at the end of the day, we need to evaluate the synergies of this proposal and engage cross-functionally to flesh out the details of the marketecture in order to better conceptualize the potential of a win-win situation.”

If time is relative, then to what does it relate? I don’t feel like it relates to me. It seems to me to be recursively relative. I’m very near the end of this day which is near the middle of my probable life and yet I’m sitting in front of an LCD wasting whatever time is relatively at hand. Hours pass like hours and as I contemplate the rest it sort of feels like stasis. Yet tomorrow morning I’ll be at the start of my day and minutes will race by and I will be franticly attending to all the things that need to get going and that guy in front of me will inevitably be going too goddamn slow! Why won’t he go faster - I … must … go … fass … ter! Then work will go up and down, grinding thru meetings, rushing to finish projects - bleh. It’s up and down and all over and it correlates to rhythms that ebb and flow predictably at random. Or randomly in a predictable way. Plan for retirement by giving up time now so you can have it later - just don’t get hit by a Brinks truck. Hurry up and get to the good parts but don’t go too fast and miss the good parts.

The trite idiom says Time is Money, but more importantly, money makes time irrelevant. Rich people who care overmuch about time are either stupid or terminally ill. If you gots the cash, you can afford to slow down, take it easy, do what you want when you want. Things will go at the rate which you choose. So get lots of money. Which means you gotta be in the right place at the right time, time the market, make time, manage your time and be on time.

When we were kids a week lasted - I dunno: a really long time. I can even remember as a kid, all the things that could happen in a single day. A day could roll on and scramble itself up and turn out one way and then resolve into something else. I could play with toys, run around, play with friends, eat meals (there were like, 8 meals in a day), take a nap, watch TV, , ride a big-wheel, read a book, take a bath, play a game and then finally end it in bed. All kinds of crazy shit could happen in a day and yet I know I was only awake for maybe 12 hours. Time is relative to where you are in it and so that makes time recursively relative to itself which is really friggin annoying…

I’m guessing that I am in a minority. The way market dynamics work, the stuff that people like, and therefore want to buy, is the stuff that the market produces and distributes. So people apparently like boring music. Boring music is really easy to find. It’s on the radio - even satellite radio. It’s on iTunes, it’s at amazon.com, it’s in the stores - it’s everywhere. Even walking around the mall or sitting in a restaurant - they pipe the boring shit all over the place. Vaguely melodic noise. I can’t stand it. I’d much rather have silence.

There is non-boring music - it definitely exists. But getting it almost seems like work sometimes. And the thing about even good, non-boring music is that even that eventually gets tiring. I can listen to the same thing for awhile, but then I need something new. I got an account on emusic.com, which bills itself as a vast repository of indie music. This brings connotations of unique-ness. It’s made out to be all the great stuff that you’ve never heard of, that the market maybe didn’t accept, presumably because it was just that: different and unique. So I’m all over this thing. And actually, for the first little while I did find a bunch of stuff, although admittedly it was stuff that I had meant to buy or check out and happened to find it amongst emusic’s catalog. Eventually I found all that old Fugazi and a few Bad Brains and Daniel Johnston that I probably had on some 8 inch or crappy cassette someplace at some time. But then I was left to try and wade thru lots and lots of stuff to try and find something new.

Here is what I learned: finding music that is appealing is hard work. Not hard in the sense of developing callouses on the mouse finger, but tiring none-the-less. Find a genre, pick something, read the blurb, download the samples, maybe find something that might be good, download a full track, find out that it’s boring. Repeat.

They try and revive some of that old Napster magic from the good old days, much the same way that Last.FM also tries. That is, “We noticed you like XXXX, another member on here also likes XXXX and he likes YYYY too.” This works okay on Last.FM because you are listening to “real” music - that is, music everyone’s already heard of. It’s tougher on emusic because the catalog is pretty narrow. So it’s really hard to just get to that “We noticed you like” part”. Even then, I haven’t found that to be very helpful for me. But then, the Last.FM thing tends to just tell me stuff I already know, stuff like: you listened to Fugazi, you might like Helmet. Yeah thanks, but, I already knew that - in fact, here’s some Helmet on the old HD right now, but I’m actually already bored with that. Napster was kicking of the ass because you could see the whole freakin collection of that other dude whose songs you just downloaded. You could judge for your own self how closely your musical tastes might align by just reading thru the bands and tracks. Then you could start grabbing the ones in between - the outskirts of the Venn Diagram. It was a beautiful system - too good to last.

Pandora works really well, but I tend to just listen to it - which is fine. Sometimes I rank something up, I often jump over to the PC to rank something down (for some reason, my choosing of multiple HipHop tracks leads Pandora’s algorithms into thinking that I don’t revile R&B with a burning passion of disgust). But I only rarely have the presence of mind to note down the occasional new artist that I hear and find appealing. I need a voice-activated Pandora. So then I could just shout “Sucks!” to give a track the thumbs down or “Fuck yeah!” to thumb up and then a “Buy it” to the good new stuff. Although, as cool as this idea sounds, I can see problems developing as a side-effect of this already. I’d be shouting out Sucks and Fuck yeahs at all kinds of inappropriate times whether music was playing or not.

People like to talk. Talking requires that sounds come from your mouth - usually in the shape of words. Mostly, people like to talk to other people. This implies that the other people are listening, but in actual fact they’re just waiting for their turn to make mouth noises that seem like words. Sometimes the words are about something that happened to them or maybe something they want to happen to them, but mostly the words are about other people. That is if those words are about anything at all. Most words are just noise to fill space and time.

For example, people will say “How are you?” or “How are you doing today?”. This is a formality that allows them to give the impression that they’re not in fact waiting to say a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with you. Generally, those issuing this query don’t actually about the answer and are not really prepared to have anything given back to them except for “Fine”, “Okay” or perhaps “Great”. It’s a sort of politeness instrument designed to let the other person have the first crack, but then allowing that person full rights to steam roll in after the other person has stopped making their mouth noises. I used to respond to this inanity with “I am”. But that was too short and confusing and just led, ironically, to complicated explanations. I switched to “I am a living”, which has sufficient syllables to mostly just go completely unnoticed. It does occasionally draw a chuckle or a remark and it has actually once caused some unintended awkwardness when said to a person who had recently experienced the loss of a relative. That person was no longer “a livin’” and so there was some repose and hesitation.

People also just like to say things just to have something to say - to either fulfill their turn (thus avoiding uncomfortable silence) or as a result of forcing themselves into the mix without actually having prepared a thought to surround with word noises. So they’ll repeat back whatever the current speaker just said. Or they’ll say “that’s funny”, or “that’s interesting” or “I know what you mean”.

Generally, people just want to talk. Listening is difficult and requires concentration which is work and work sucks. Ideas form and then they need to get out and into someone else’s ear and really that is all that matters. Dialog is virtually impossible to find. Banter probably evolved into our brains as a result of some kind of useful evolutionary mechanism - though it’s very difficult to imagine the specifics. It’s very like the chewing of cud: something that soothes the sated beast and helps with digestion.

Try this: the next time someone is speaking, even ostensibly, to you - just listen. Not just to the sounds, but to the words and the meaning. Ask questions. Hear them, pay attention and absorb. Think about the thoughts that their words summon and figure out what they really want to say. It’s hard work and I don’t make any guarantees that the results will immediately garner worth - but the exercise will. Once you get the hang of it, go a step further: challenge the talker. What do they really mean to get across? What are they really thinking? What lead them to carry forward on this topic of discourse?

No, you won’t actually do it - anymore than I will. It’s damned inconvenient. The people around me who engage in this verbal mouth breathing activity are generally there as part of some scheme in which my participation is required in order that my mortgage gets paid and my internet service continues. Or else I choose to immerse myself in their presence because the alternative is a bleak monologue of echoes that would certainly make me even stupider than I am now. The risk is too high - though I do see the reward as almost, but not quite, tipping the scales.

Prose is the normal form of writing - obviously. It’s what you see in newspapers, magazines, novels - every piece of reading material you make use of. The normal course of writing is to be explicit and direct and grammatical and generally easy to use. We like that. Occasionally a good writer will take some liberties and attempt some flow or pretend some substance via an affected linking of words or playing of metaphors. But generally speaking, nothing we read would trip the squiggly green underline of MS Word. We write according to rules and try not to get in our own way when conveying meaning via written language. This is a good thing and something for which I am all in favor.

But prose is not the end of everything. There is more out there in the dangerous world of thought and concept conveyance. For every 10 strictly photo-realistic portrayals of human experience, there exists at least one mad attempt at stretching the imaginations of a witness with a twisted shape or a crooked pallet of abstraction. In words, there is poetry.

The thing about poetry is that almost one hundred percent of it is smelly, puss-oozing, shit-stained crap. To give insight to my opinion, understand that I hold the same objections for abstract art. Jackson Pollock was a clever fraud even if VerMeer never touched a brush. Generally, poetry is too easy just as much as splashing paint on something may as well be an accident. Really good poetry is rare, even when the author takes great pains to make it great. Maybe even especially so. My idea of a really great poem is something like Blake’s burning tiger. Stuff like you read in 6th grade and maybe yawned at.

But those were clearly different times with different motivations and structures for rewarding or cursing those with a desire to string together words in an artful and compelling way. I don’t necessarily think that times and people are all that different today than they were 200 years ago when Coleridge doped himself up and wrote about sailors. I almost guarantee that he and dudes like Wordsworth would be equally successful in 2008 as they were in 18 whatever - but instead of straight written words, they most likely would’ve written songs. Or maybe commercials about fast-food and fizzy sugar water.

Regardless, poetry in the strictest definition of it is stupid crazy rare today. There’s just no market for it. Writing it is mostly an affectation of art-fagdom, not something someone seriously takes up as a form of self expression. People who might be good at it would simply take too much heat from their drinking buddies to ever write some shit down, much less share it with anyone who might read it. All that is probably for the best anyway.

I posted the following on a forum many years ago and I’m re-posting it here because this is an election year and blogs should have political crap in them, right?

Partisanship. It’s all really just about how you divide up the money. There are some idealogical disparities thrown in there, mostly (I think) for entertainment value and as a distraction.

Democrats: social services, lowest common denominator, “safety net”, give the money to the poor (and/or lazy).

Republicans: corporate incentives, loopholes, contracts, defense spending, etc.

I think welfare is rife with waste and abuse. However, welfare is chump change compared to say, the missile defense program.

It is ironic that the welfare recipients don’t even friggin’ vote. But Dem dudes do get the votes from rich whiteys who feel guilty driving to the polls in their Bimmer.

What I do find interesting, at my particular local level, is the level of corruption on the Dem side in terms of kickbacks, shady deals, doling out contracts, etc. But that may just be b/c I live in a Dem controlled city.

I guess the summary of my little pile-on here is that, for me, it’s not Rep/Dem, it’s politicians and the incentives in the system. We have what we have because that’s just the way it’s set up.

And besides, do any of you wanna be a congressman? I sure as hell don’t. The system attracts a certain kind of person, shuffles them to one side of the aisle and the incentives push them to pass laws that make things more of what they already are: welfare teat-suckers and corporate fat-bellies. And between the 2 a gigantic pile of programs and tax codes…..

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Color in dialog is underrated. In general, I don’t like extra verbage that doesn’t aid understanding, but I do like to be entertained. I appreciate wit and clever interplay between words, meaning and sounds during a conversation. Likewise, I tend to make attempts at injecting some joy of life into my speech whenever possible.

So, for example, I like to make exclamations: very binary and abrupt qualifications of opinion as if they were Einsteinian fact. Early on, in my teens for instance, this would come across as “That’s awesome!” or “That sucks!”. Lots of people do that - it’s typical. Then there was lots of profanity introduced. As I moved out of dorms and into cubicles, profane outbursts (eg “Fucking fucktastic , ass-grinding compiler! Why the fucking Fuck won’t you build this shit-stained code?!”) were brought directly to the attention of my good friends in Human Resources. Gradually, as I tried to reach a bit further to both convey my views and dynamic sense of sarcastic cloy, I branched out - but not too far. At some point I latched on to “That’s retarded” (better would be, “That’s fucking retarded”, but then I get in trouble). Not sure why, certainly bereft of originality, but there you go. I also liked to call things “Gay” or “Gay with an H” (as in G-Hay - sort of an extended, over-wrought pronunciation). Later I added “Gaytarded”. I have hundreds of other of these little verbal punctuation marks, but these serve the example well enough. The common theme here is that certain people will take offense. Which is a shame for both them and for me.

Over time I have had differing views on this situation. The most obvious is that it’s fucking gaytarded for someone to take offense at words that aren’t even being directed at them. The possible exception could be those who are gay or retarded or who have close relations who are either and who have also made the analysis that the subject of my description is in fact being derided and therefore with that derision is being made an unfavorable comparison to the state of being either homosexual, cognitively impaired or both. The other view is more complex in a semi-introspective way. Why is it that it’s the offensive words that are the most satisfying? By that I refer to those times when you really want to expediently stretch the expressiveness of an idea or just give breath to some pent-up frustration. I could just as easily say “I find that unappealing or inadequate” or “This falls short of my expectations”. But for some reason it’s much better to say something vulgar and/or obscene that people involved in the conversation or just within earshot might find off-putting.

Much has been written of the word “Fuck“, so I don’t need to go into it here. But making that quick little guttural sound is just so very satisfying that little else can be effectively substituted. My grandfather used to say “Dirty Name”. Somehow he trained himself, probably with help from physical punishment at the hand of various authority figures, to utter that little phrase if he stubbed his toe or broke his pencil. I dunno how he did that. I much prefer “Fuck”, or “Ass-pimple” or “Shit-butter” or “Dick-puss”. Apparently when the world offends me by allowing me to drop a transmission on my foot, or fails to prevent me from cross-threading a bolt into an engine block, I need to be offensive right back. Nothing else will do…