September 2010 Archives

It was a small pill, a red pill, flecked with creamy white--when I asked Benny about its provenance, he said it was from this guy he knew who cobbled shoes and pressed powder on the side--and you wouldn't think a small pill of any color would do so much, but here it is now six weeks later and I can still see the dragons of other people's minds which, while not entirely unheard of outside of pill time, is not necessarily the kind of thing you want to be stuck with for longer than, say, three or four days. Great leathery wings of ideation beating slowly, their horny clawed tips curling down beneath the chins of the thinkers, while atop their heads the scaled lizards crouch, with whipcord tails coiled loosely about their shoulders and necks. It can be distracting to see: someone lays in about Middle Eastern foreign policy, say, and the dragon huffs and chuffs smoke and small flame, its head bobbing, serpentine, above the speaker's brow.

So I called Benny, earlier today, to tell him about these reptilian representations of thought, about how simply everyone seems to be wearing a dragon hat, and about the chuffing of smoke and fire during conversations, most distracting. And Benny said, "Hey, I can appreciate the trip, man, but that pill wore off weeks ago, and I think you're onto a whole 'nother trip now, like you're making your own brew between your ears, know what I'm saying?" Which, he went on to say, was sad for him, because now that I'm making my own I clearly have no further need of his services. I protested, telling him that I didn't necessarily want to be seeing what I was seeing, and telling him of the distraction of it all, but he laughed his slow and grinding laugh, and told me to adapt to the new reality. "It's all about adaptation," he said. "You can get used to a lot if you just accept the flow."

I told him that this is not a flow. It is dragons on people's heads. But he was too cool for me and had other business to attend to.

So if we happen to meet and it seems like I'm being shifty and can't quite meet your eyes, it's because you've got an iridescent mythical flying reptile crouched up on your noggin, and the more you believe what you're saying to me, the more smoke and flame it huffs out from behind its blackened teeth and between its burnished lips.

I haven't gotten into a serious argument with anyone since I started seeing their dragon minds.

I'm a little concerned about what will happen when I do.

If anyone has left a comment over the past 48 hours that hasn't shown up, please drop me an email at the address under my photo to the left right. Movable Type is doing some funky things, like increasing the comment count without actually showing me any new comments. Unless...

Unless my software is haunted!

That's clearly the most reasonable conclusion.

I'm in the peculiar position of having quite a lot going on while being unable to tell you about any of it. Seekrit Things. All very exciting, these things, but--as mentioned--under wraps for now. I'm not even sure when I'll be able to tell you. Probably not until after the first of the year. I wish I could tell them to you now--so that you could dig and grok and all those other unfashionable words that mean understand and appreciate.

But I can't, and for the moment I remain trapped in a fluorescently lit cubicle spending my time doing things that have very little impact on the world at large, esoteric software-related things, things the reward for which is merely keeping body and soul together. That's necessary, isn't it? Got to keep fed and sheltered. But there's certainly more to it, or should be. More than job satisfaction. Life satisfaction. Very hard to come by. It's so hard to come by, in fact, that we have a multi-billion dollar industry solely dedicated to producing pills purported to give us the ability to tolerate the intolerable. The percentage of Americans using them rises yearly. The tribe of the medicated now numbers 27 million.

Clearly, something is amiss.

Maybe people aren't singing loud enough, or dancing hard enough. Maybe there are too many people, situations, and institutions that consist of "No" and "You can't." I certainly don't have the answer, but I do know that there are leaps to be made, and by Whoever I'm going to make them.

You reach a point in life where there's nothing left to do except the things you haven't done before, the radical things, the magical things, the things that can potentially soar you into the air or bring you crashing to the earth.

There's nothing left to do but dare.

So.

That thing you've been thinking about doing? The crazy thing. The one that could wreck your life or save it. The one you've been afraid to try.

Go on.

I've spent a couple of hours this evening upgrading Movable Type--the engine that runs this place--to a new version. Surprisingly, it all went smoothly. No broken templates or weird formatting. The new version of Movable Type seems to be quite a bit faster, so that's nice.

However, the impetus for this upgrade was to get some anti-spam comment tools in place, but it looks like that's the part that's going to take awhile. So, for now, comments remain disabled, and comments are now open. Authenticated comments--that is, from folks who sign in use one of several account options, such as TypePad, OpenID, or nine others--will be published immediately. Anonymous (unauthenticated comments) will still require approval.

This is all still in the experimental stage, so we'll try this setup for awhile and see how it goes. I don't like having to require authentication, which is why there's still an anonymous option, but if the asshat purveyors of spam lists keep hitting the comment forms, I'll have to remove that option entirely. I also have several more options to tweak, to make sure I don't end up accidentally consigning friendly folks such as yourself to the spam pile.

The thing that I find most irritating about all of this is the idiotic uselessness of comment spam. I always approved comments, so not a single spam comment ever saw the light of day. All it did was waste my time and piss me off. (The second most irritating thing was the face punch-worthy inanity of the comments...I know they're automated, but at some point a human wrote the filler material, and if I was ever put in the same room with that human and, say, a two-by-four with nails in it...well. Gazpacho time!)

And there you have it. Be a dear and drop by the comments for this post to say hi, would you please, so I can see how everything's working.

They usually fall between two and five AM, sometimes lasting until dawn. Trivial hours for serious bloggers. Posts I write during that time might include stuff like this:

Life--that wonderful solar-powered accident of proteins and amino acids--is naturally bounded by its beginning and its end. Before its beginning and after its end, the intricate chemical processes that give rise to the Sistine Chapel ceiling and love and sonnets are mostly about atoms going about their nanoscale business. Bonds are created and broken, first during the anti-entropic dance that eventually bursts into the actuality of consciousness, and later during the complex decay of substances into other substances, all of which will eventually be reused, like that molecule of oxygen you shared with Buddha just now.

Then they really go off the rails. Life! Fiction! Death! Meaning! Fresh fruit! Spare us, darling, please.

Consulting a dictionary about "earnest" will get you a definition along the lines of "a serious and intent mental state," which doesn't sound so bad. I find it it such a peculiar quality to get wrapped up in on the page, though, that the line between seriously meaningful and downright goofy seems to be gray, and fuzzy about the edges, and not very straight. Maybe not even stationery. "Earnest" can kill your fiction in short order. Plot, dialogue, and--most tragically--characters become subverted, pressed into the service of the Big Big Idea, that particular thing you want to express which will somehow elevate your prose into the rarefied realm of Art, but the Big Big Idea itself can become a supermassive hidden structure at the center of your tale, distorting everything with the force of its Suck.

Then, too, there's the quality of "earnest" as contrasted with the modern conception of irony, which I find increasingly difficult to differentiate from simple insincerity. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace said,

Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

The average Schmoe who's been soaking the modern culture of irony usually hasn't absorbed the subtler aspects of the form, so that contrast further reduces to "Fuck you! And I mean that," versus "Fuck you!" with a wink and a smile, and the infection of the latter is so widespread that some days I think I shouldn't bother writing anything here in this space that I might actually mean, because it's on the Internet, that fortress of possibility built upon a foundation of LOLcats and Mel Gibson losing his shit. There is the omnipresent danger of unencumbered sincerity sparking off a frenzy that results in remixes and tee-shirts. It's become downright dangerous to mean anything at all these days. You're liable to get your fingers caught in the roaring meme-chipper and then sprayed out over the frozen lake of an ever-diminishing online attention span.

My previous media empire was built on politics and war, and it gradually devolved into public depression and unhinged rants about sexual identity and psychiatry; this one's a bit more of a walled garden, somewhat isolated from the facets of my life that don't pertain to fiction. And I've heard it said that that's exactly what you don't want to do on a blog, because people want to relate to the individual behind the site. I suppose that's true, for some people. When I first started out, people were still saying "weblog" and my immediate predecessors, in terms of Internet generations, were folks like Instapundit and Lileks. The former is a link aggregator, and the latter a somewhat obsessive writer, collector of ephemera, and chronicler of his life. Now, the 140-character Tweet is the lean, evolutionarily sleek perfection of the form. You can offer every little detail of your life and convey nothing at all about yourself.

I've just deleted a long and rambling paragraph about the vast and deliberate difference between the writing of fiction and the writing of the blog; and about how, in the former, I spend a great deal of time concealing all traces of myself. I deleted it because I was in danger of attempting to writing some sort of Meaningful Post, and I'm actually in the late night frame of mind where, if I close my eyes for even a second, that momentary closure threatens to turn into minutes, and my thoughts wander off, and I come up with stories about having drinks with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's wearing a suit in a very bright banana-yellow color and cheating on his wife, and needs my help to hide from her.

And that means its time to just punch Submit and hit the sack. Perhaps, while my dreaming self ponders the words I've just written, it will come up with a better way to write here for just one person instead of the world.

I was about two weeks away from finishing a four-month tour on my recumbent tricycle. It was a heavy-duty touring machine, with a trailer, and I'd equipped it with solar panels to run my laptop, charge my cellphone, and keep my GPS going. I left from Yorktown, Virginia on May 25, 2006, and pedaled into Santa Barbara, California on September 17. Which isn't quite as impressive as it sounds--I bailed on the whole Pedal Across America thing in the middle of Kentucky and drove to Astoria Oregon, then pedaled down the coast--but it remains one of the great adventures of my life. At some point I'll be doing it again, too--better prepared, and from west to east, and with more determination to do the whole coast-to-coast journey.

This particular day in 2006--September fourth--was my last day in San Francisco, hanging out with Doug Heinz and crew before pedaling on south. I had spent 10 days in the city, along with a couple of British traveling companions that I'd met up with in Oregon, and at the time I was planning on moving back there once I'd reached my end point in Santa Barbara.

But plans have a way of changing, don't they? And for the best, sometimes. If I'd been in San Francisco, it's likely that I would have gotten caught up in the economic bloodbath of 2008. And, as it turns out, my mother's declining health means that it's a good thing that I'm nearby. So I'm gainfully employed and able to take care of my family, and all sorts of minor things have lined up in an entirely unplanned yet suspiciously orderly way to put me exactly where I need to be.

This long thread of consequence reaches all the way back to September 11, 2001. If not for the events of that day, I wouldn't have left the city and bought a house in the Lower Hudson Valley, and if I hadn't done that, I probably wouldn't have ever left on my cross-country cycling trip, and if that hadn't happened, it's very likely that I wouldn't have ended up here in Santa Barbara.

Of course, you can play these sorts of games all day and go all the way back to the providential formation of a certain organic molecule in a puddle of ancient goo, but in the frame of reference that is my life, there are a few glaring fulcrums of circumstance upon which I've managed to leverage great changes. The task now, I think, is to recognize such fulcrums for what they are and use them deliberately, instead of being tossed from one track of life to another, seemingly by happenstance.

This isn't to say that I've had no control over my life--far from it; my decision to go on my cycling tour was made with full knowledge that it was going to do something to my life, I just didn't know what. We can never predict the outcome of such leaps, but if we don't put ourselves in the position to make them, we'll walk a straight and level path, to be sure...and we'll never know the risks of flight.