NaBloPoMo 2006

In some ways this whole NaBloPoMo thing is a lot harder than writing the first draft of a novel in 30 days. With the novel the only critics that need dealing with are the ones inside your own head. It’s a true creative effort bearing down and making a characters and conflict into a story that is even vaguely coherent.

With the blog if you’ve volunteered to be listed then, theoretically, you have to assume there is an audience. I don’t do well in front of crowds. Never have.

I promised myself these entries would look outward, that I’d try to get my head out of my ass long enough to formulate some opinions about what is going on in the world around me. I’ve been paying attention for a week now and it is draining at the very least and makes me fear for the fate of humanity at the very worst. In the last week the following news has passed before my eyes:

• A 19 year old in Alabama man admits to raping his mother, who was passed out drunk on the living room couch, as revenge against his brother after an argument over a girl. (story)
• The Virginia Governor’s race seems to have boiled down to a choice between a racist and a misogynist, both of whom are probably equally homophobic. (political ads by state: Virginia)
• We’ve fucked up the planet so much that analysts are now predicting there won’t be any seafood left in the oceans by 2048 (story)
• The Week reports that in nearly 30 years the wage gap for women has only closed 18% with women making 81%, up from the 1979 figure of 63%, of the median weekly earnings of men.

And yet, I still wonder silly, seemingly irrelevant things like: why has American cinema sucked so badly for the past decade and is there any hope for it in the future? (Thoughts coming soon in: Lawrence Kadsan: Why hast thou foresaken us?)

And yes, I’m whining today. Blame lack of sleep or the fantastic headache that won’t go away. Everyone is entitled to at least one off day.

For cogent commentary on the world try wandering over to visit St. Tropez Butler, find out what everyday encounter M. Luminous has turned into something lyrical and beautiful, get a delicious recipe from QCTester, or go encourage Jim in his pursuit of a finished novel this year.

I’ll have something more illuminating tomorrow.

It was one late-spring evening – the kind of evening that takes you by surprise in climates that have actual seasons, the kind that’s warm enough to make you leave the sliding glass door to your balcony open knowing as you listen to the murmur of conversation, the occasional bubble of laughter and the drift of someone else’s music that your neighbors have done the same with their doors. It was an evening like this during my late undergraduate years in college when I got into one of those looping “what if…” discussions with friends. What would you do if you had enough money to do anything was the gist of it mostly because we were all sort of drunk and some of us were kinda stoned (and not sharing which still pisses me off to this day).

There were, of course, the typical college male fantasies (the mansion, hot and cold running Playboy bunnies, the fast cars and loud stereos (possibly so loud they’d blow the women’s clothes off…but I digress)). There were the travel fantasies: see the world and do nothing but soak up local culture.

Because the bulk of the group was made up of architecture students and DC was just beginning its downtown renaissance there was a lot of talk about restoring this building or that building to its former glory (there was one Beux Arts building that was a particularly favored topic of conversation).

And when it finally came around to me what was my answer? I wanted to run a salon, the kind of place where you could go and get a decent meal, sit, have a beverage, and discuss ideas. (It should be noted that at the time I was eyeball deep in the world of Kerouac, Cassady, and Kesey and the mythos of the Beats and San Francisco coffeehouses. I never looked at night time shopping the same way after reading Alan Ginsberg.)

I wanted it to be the sort of place where the chairs were overstuffed, and possibly threadbare in spots, the rugs on the floor looked like something your grandmother would pick out, and the brass on the bar shined like a mirror. The kind of place you where you could walk in, pick a book off the shelf and just read all day with your drink at your elbow.

I was reminded of all this standing in line and waiting for my sandwich yesterday (yes, I know, no one cares what I had for lunch) at Potbelly. The place is a chain, it’s true, started in Chicago and spread mostly to the northern midwest (and Texas for some unknown reason). It is purposefully folksy featuring rough hewn wooden booths, tables with tile on top of them, live music at lunch time (which can be a welcome distraction or a reason to avoid the place like the plague) and a certain general store atmosphere.

While I was waiting in line I noticed a set of shelves on the wall in the hallway that leads toward the bathrooms. Yes, books, actual paper books; hardcover, soft cover, mostly popular literature of the Tom Clancy/Faye Kellerman variety but still, books for anyone to take off the shelf and read (though probably not walk out with). And it made me wonder: where is the line between kitsch and authentic?

Where does something stop being real and start being fake? Is it in the motivation (i.e.: doing it because it’s what you want to do vs. what you think will “sell”)? Or is it in the uniqueness? Potbelly is, after all, a chain with floor plans and standard signs and a systematized way of doing things (thank Ray Kroc for assembly line food). If I walk into a Potbelly in, say, Lansing Michigan will there be a bookshelf and will it have the same things on it?

I’m not sure I have the answer but in an advertising soaked world (advertising in elevators, advertising above urinals in men’s rooms (so I’m told…most of the men’s rooms I’ve been in would have been better off featuring a sign that read “don’t eat the big white mint”)) where do we draw the line between what we actually want, what fits our needs and desires, and what we’ve been told we want? When does it stop being living and start becoming “an experience?”

Or in post-modern America are we doomed to lives suffused by “the Disney effect” where every risk is managed, every thrill predictable, and every event calculated to be just far enough outside our comfort zones to make us think we got our money’s worth but not so far that we’re forced to challenge our world view?

For my money, I’ll take the real thing every time. Dirty, messy, and unpredictable as life can be, I’d rather have authentic than pre-packaged.

A far greater writer than I once identified the signs of a sick culture by naming a complex of symptoms that included, among others, high taxation, a high ratio of those on the public dole vs. those who were gainfully employed, lack of faith in the courts, police, and criminal justice system, constant, small incidents of violence (muggings, arson, terrorism of any sort), and a legislature that attempts to cure social ills by passing myriad laws that are basically ridiculous or unenforceable or both.¹ He identified personal rudeness as the sign of a dying culture writing “This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength.”²

While Heinlein has a valid point about dying cultures, I am more interested in one of the symptoms he named as part of a sick culture: particularism, the cessation of a people in identifying with a country and the onset of identification with a group (racial, linguistic, religious) that sets them apart from the population as a whole. This interests me not because I am concerned so much with the breakdown of society – it is happening all around us and while it is true that the only thing that ever changed the world is a small group of thoughtful people³ I am more concerned with how these disparate identities get formed in the first place.

A baby is born, so we are told, a blank slate knowing only that where it was once quiet and dark, and she was warm and never wanted for nourishment the world is now a loud, bright, cold place, and hey, what’s this weird feeling in my belly. We take these little blank canvases and we imbue them with destinies that are determined by factors that not only do they not control but in which they have absolutely no say. Hell, we do this even before the child is born with the aid of modern technology.

The template of our identity includes expectations based on our sexual biology; little boys get blue rooms with tigers and elephants on the walls while little girls get the pink or yellow room with the ducks and the bunnies. Psychological studies have shown that adults when given an infant of undetermined sex will handle and talk it differently based on what they are told about its sex (don’t make me dig out the study). Where do these expectations come from, these gender roles we’re all forced into? They come from outside, from society at large which is a combination of religion and social biology (be attractive, get a mate, reproduce).

We’re given the template of an identity based on our family’s economic circumstance (born into a middle class family…you can be a doctor; born to a poor teenage mother, welcome to the gas-and-go, kid, how do you feel about third shift to start?) Often our families want better for us than they had. Sometimes, though, they resent us for the opportunities they did not have access to that a changed and changing society presents to us. They resent the constriction of their lives by the accident of the time of their births and comings of age.

How much of our lives is a struggle against these imprinted destinies? How much time do we spend bullying our way out of these expectations and coincidences of our births to find our true selves? Why do continuing generations perpetuate the theft of a child’s potential for self-determination by imposing these expectations?

And how much of what each of us has been told is essential to our core being is myth? How many of these expectations
– the ones that tell us because our genitals are formed a certain way we must act a certain way, that because we were born or raised in this particular part of town in this particular city in this particular country these are our options in life, that our religious and spiritual paths have been laid out for us by the choices made not by our parents necessarily but by generations of people before them – have been forced upon us against our will even before we knew there might be other choices?

I think about these things a lot as I wait for the subway or the bus, watching the people in their office drag trudge home with their bags and their briefcases. There is this one guy, though, who draws my attention every time. He’s a cross dresser. He’s not trying to pass as a woman by any means; he is, simply, a man dressed like we would expect a woman to dress. Yet he commutes like everyone else, getting on the subway in the evening with his bag and his purse. He makes me wonder what fortitude, what alignment of circumstance has allowed him to choose an identity that is so far out of the mainstream. How did he come to the realization that this is who he wants to be/really is? And more to the point, how did he ignore all the noise that we call society to stand up and say: no, this is my reality and it is not negotiable?

Once again…not many answers and a whole lot of questions.

As second languages go they say that English is the hardest non-pictographic based language to learn mostly because it is full of idioms. These expressions that change from city to city, region to region, and country to country can vex even the most conscientious student. Sometimes they even cause problems for those of us who grew up speaking the language.

I should say at this point that it is specious to refer to English as “the language.” I know my friends from outside the U.S. would wholeheartedly agree that we’re people separated by a common language. Yes, it’s true: I can swear in two languages (English and American…three, really, if you count Australian) and while I’m really good with context there are still some things that confuse even me. Take the phrase “Man’s reach exceeds his grasp.” As idioms go, it’s a doozy.

If you pick it apart its meaning is, at best, confusing. In American English “reach” means a couple of contradictory things. As a verb it means, among other things, to stretch out toward something, to strain after something, clearly, of course, implying ambition and the desire to achieve a goal. Grasp, as a noun, means the power of seizing and holding, of comprehending. Looked at from that perspective, the idiom makes complete sense: Man strives for what he can never hold in his hand. In other words, man’s ambition outstrips his ability to achieve. But in this particular idiom, reach isn’t a verb, it’s a noun.

As a noun the definition breaks down, not so much in the sense of not functioning but in the sense of having so many meanings as to be completely obscure. Reach as noun refers to the ability to reach, it’s true, but it also refers to the extent or range of knowledge or comprehension. So…the extent of man’s knowledge or comprehension exceeds his power to seize, hold, and comprehend? When you add to the mix that idiomatically “reach” in American English means to attain a goal and “grasp” means to hold onto you get a mix of being able attain something that while you can touch it you can’t keep. This, in some ways, is the meaning that fascinates me the most as I’ve been feeling excessively Buddhist lately.

And I blame The Clash for all this thinking about language. I didn’t do punk when it came around the first time (um…thanks, really, but actually being able to play your instruments is the difference between noise and music) but as I was listening to the radio last night this lyric from Should I Stay or Should I Go caught my ear: “Should I cool it or should I blow?” Seemingly contradictory if you know that “blow” means to leave: in AE “cool” when describing an action means “to stop” as in “cool it.” Given that the singer is asking the object of his affections if he should hang around or take a hike it’s a lyric that plays with the head. But it only plays with the head because of how the meaning has changed.

If you look at the history of The Clash, when they were popular and when the came of age, you find out that not only are they British (which screws with the meaning of language for an American ear in and of itself) you find that they came of age during the 1950s and 1960s when “cooling your heels” meant waiting around. Context…it’s all about context.

Language is power, it’s true. And people develop their own languages, little phrases that having meaning to them because of context, so is it any wonder that we have global strife in a world where our government is run by people who specialize in twisting language and are influenced by movement groups that claim to be “pro-life” (i.e.: no abortions for you, young lady) yet turn right around and support the death penalty?

How hard can it be to write a blog entry a day? Pretty damn hard if you’re going to make them worth reading, of any substantial thinking or even amusement value. I’ve been thinking a lot the past couple of days about why I have a blog in the first place.

Was it because I’m a geek for both fun and profit and at the time they were the hot new toy? Not likely. At the time I was entirely too busy with work to have room for new toys (for the record: social networking is now the hot new toy; we’ll get to why I don’t care about that very shortly)

Was it because I needed some place to vent about the Type-A backstabbing insanity at my job (examples here, here, and here)? Perhaps. After all, until blogging became passe the biggest, most famous blogs were about work or politics.

It certainly wasn’t because I felt the need to join the “I am special” look-at-me aren’t I great pre-YouTube self-publishing revolution. I’m entirely too much of an introvert to put the total of what I’m thinking, feeling, and experiencing in a public forum for all the world to read and critique (I do enough self-critique, thanks. I don’t need to be told when I’m being inadequate.)

Was it because I wanted to raise the signal to noise ratio in my own world, to have a place to vent the things that I thought needed venting (can someone explain to me how we’ve recycled 1980s fashion so quickly?) and share the odd, quirky things that brought a smile to my day (See shoe, giant flying; extinct)

Maybe it was just because I wanted to write, and possibly be heard. I honestly don’t have an answer. What I do know is that blogging does several things: it exercises the writing muscles; it makes me focus on the world around me instead of on the world inside my head (after all, I am constrained by both the simple fact of the potential of readership and by propriety from disclosing all of the details of my private life); and it makes me think critically about things that, while they may or may not be Important, are at least amusing or food for thought. My personal signal to noise ratio has been a little low in recent months. With luck and fortitude that will change this month.

Since the title of this blog is Thoughts That Come Unbidden Department, and those thoughts are often questions, I’ll close with this one which has been bugging me since yesterday morning when I saw my first group of amazingly cute single-digiters in costume: Why is it that in America we devote an entire holiday to teaching children who are born not knowing how to dissemble to wear masks yet we spend most of our adult lives fighting to get off the masks we acquire starting in puberty so we can figure out who we really are and what it is that we really want?