Let's change the rules

My only real rule, and it's about me and for me, so I don't have to justify it before any tribunal, is that I won't talk about myself on this blog. I'm fully aware that there is no other subject, if we trace the matter analytically through hoop after hoop, but you can take your hoop and put it in your nose. The simple fact is that I don't like me. I don't find me interesting. More, I loathe "bloggers" who write about the miracle of their daily lives. While these verminous scourges are less common these days, when I began here, they had not yet found their Facebook selfy Reddit Instagram Pintrest nirvana.

I recognize that I have an audience of perhaps two, thinking optimistically. I have made this so.

I want to change the rules a little. I want to talk about the vitreous that blocks me, even if it isn't universal. For example, anyone who reads all of this blog gets the impression that it is written by someone with clinical depression. That makes it nothing special. My last (look down) commented on the fact that this is just how things are, and talking about it might be profoundly useless. However, today I decided to make a play list for my funeral. I didn't do that because I'm planning on hastening the pale visitor's conquest, but because I've gotten a couple of cancers. That's no big deal, except that I'm paid so little that some months mean hunger (really), and our insurance just pushed the deductible from $3,000 to $5,000. I just, in essence, got a $5,000 pay cut.

The IRS has chased me around and taken this month's paycheck. The reason is that my mother borrowed against a life insurance policy of mine some fourteen years ago. The insurance company made sure that the premiums would never go to repay the loan, and therefore the policy would die. When it did, the company reported that I had gotten $5,000 in "income." I, of course, had gotten not a cent. My mother had. She's dead. I don't blame the taxmen. I blame the insurance industry that wants old life insurance policies to die, because they're too cheap. Nevertheless, I owed $1,000 on the "profit" I had made when the policy died. I barely get $1,000 a month, so I wasn't exactly able to pay them from my excess funds.

There's good news, though. If I owed $10,000 or more, there is a "Fresh Start Initiative" to take care of me to renegotiate! But owing $1000? Well, hell, boy, everyone can afford to pay that!

I've been working at a job for 10 years where I am making $5,000 less per year than the starting pay for my position.

Still, money is not something I think about until I have to. I hate money. I hate the people who allow money to carry value. It is, after all, the most abstracted and irrational unit in the world. It is unconnected to morality in the extreme. It is unconnected to work nearly as far. The construction worker works much more than the stock trader, but the stock trader makes an obscenity of ejaculating money, while the construction worker makes a wage and destroys his body while listening to Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boors.

My college president thought it would be a good idea if all of us provided our Facebook profiles to him for a new intranet (that would be linked to the school's Facebook page. . . I'll let you figure that one out). We were also supposed to explain our conversion experiences. When did we realize that Jesus was Lord? What book or preacher was most important to us?

"Consider the lilies of the field. They spin not, nor do they weave...."

I do not do Facebook. I never will. I have Reasons. I put "A Poor Man's House" by Patty Griffin on my funeral play list. My first song is "On the Nickel," because it says, "If you chew tobacco, and never comb your hair," which sets out two of my conditionals.

I took a long time, but I finally came up with a response to the president's request. He wanted to know, so I decided I should tell him. I wrote two documents. I'll share them here, I guess. Maybe I won't. One is the actual story of how I lost my faith thanks to the evangelical movement and its emphasis on altar calls. I came back to it later and discovered a quiet, certain, faith. I never, in the document, point out the problems with the theology and polity that this college president and his new trustees embrace. I only tell the truth. Then I turned in a second document and explained why Facebook and all of the commercialized web is the destruction of academic inquiry.

This second one is boring as a sand pudding. I will post it here.

The point is that we once had a volunteer Internet, where discussion was organized by joint projects or activities. We exchanged that for interest groups and consumer subsets under Facebook or one of the others -- all designed as being conversation under the power of sale.

I will offer one of my blogs of Ideas next.

I remember the t-shirt from 1991: "The Internet's Full: Go Away!" That was a response to the "AOLamers." I thought the snobs were wrong then, and I was right, but I thought the Internet had been destroyed then, and I was right about that, too. In 1993-4, I thought the invasion of graphics into websites was the problem. I was feeling a symptom. The truth is that the decision to sell bandwidth to .com meant that, at best, the "real" Internet of Usenet days would exist only in an underpopulated, unadvertised, esoteric bubble, but "the web" would become a midway of freakshows, where the marks are the exhibits.

Probably Hyperbole

I was at Mal-Wart on a Sunday morning, after church, and the lines were long. For some reason, we dumb customers simply REFUSE to go to the teller-less checkouts. Long lines'll teach us to fight Mal-Wart's obvious wisdom in going to a labor-free retail environment. (It's true: the management is decreasing cashiers and making cashiers stand by the "check yourself out" lines to "guide" people. Unfortunately, people would prefer to wait than check themselves out.)

Ned Ludd was right, by the way.

Ludd's loss isn't why I'm writing. Cosmopolitan is why I'm writing. Its cover this month is:

If I were good, I wouldn't hotlink this, but I don't think my traffic will inconvenience anyone.

Cosmopolitan is supposed to make people who view its cover think about sex. In this case, I will admit that I thought about nudity, simply because the dress-thing on Katie Perry was so offensive to the eye that I could only think about how much I'd prefer it if she took it off. I think a Burqa would be preferable. The copy on the cover explains that "Katie Perry is on fire," and this may be true, but not when she was photographed. When she was photographed, she appeared to be decomposing, as the gangrenous hair dye and the dress with cut-outs looking like a bug's eyes reminded me more of the grave than flames. (A thingamabob that's shorts, but with a long, exposed zipper, and long sleeves? Is there any element of the garment that works with any other?)

No, what made me pause is the magazine's offer to provide "20 OMFG Moves" and "Epic Summer Sex." I suspect the magazine's copy editor was drunk.

Many moves will result in a partner making the sound, "Omfg!" I believe an unexpected elbow to the solar plexus or the chin is quite effective. A sudden belly flop of one partner onto the other can routinely elicit that noise from both participants and "turn up the heat."

It's the "epic summer sex" that had me scratching my head. My fifth edition of the Holman Handbook of Literature tells me that the epic is,
1. Marked with elevated diction,
2. Invokes the gods and involves supernatural aid,
3. Deals with matters of national foundations,
4. Covers a large scope of action.

I appreciate the writers at Cosmopolitan Magazine making a contribution to the American epic. After all, the English epic has proven elusive enough. Oh, sure, everyone says that Beowulf is the English epic -- About.com says so! -- but it's about the founding of a nation called the Geats. . . in Europe. John Milton was gonna write an English epic, but he decided that writing an epic-epic -- the story of Man -- was better, so he wrote Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained. Everyone knew that King Arthur was the potential epic subject, and William D'Avenant's Gondibert had tried an epic in the a,b,c,b ballad rhyme in the 17th century. Finally, Alfred, Lord Tennyson did Idyls of the King and ended anyone trying to write an epic in English anymore, because it frankly kind of stank. American efforts have been even worse.

"Hark! we hear of hookups past in Forum and fanzines,
How Fifty Shades of Grey taught his lady much to endure,
She crouching and swooning and swatted and pierced to ecstasy,
That was good erotica. Then came she, he, and all
To America, the gods to bless, greedy for good sex, alluring. . . ."

I can't do any more, I'm afraid, because I didn't buy the issue. I am, however, looking forward to the summer sex that founds new nations and spans vast territories.

Where do babies come from? Your Levi's

"Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;

And I will cry with my loud lips and publish

Beauty which all our powers shall never establish,

It is so frail." -- John Crowe Ransom, "Blue Girls"

Hold that thought.

On the television, they have medicines more various than any Wild West show tent. At the break of the 20th century, men adventurous and adventitious went about with products to cure each malady, even the ones that people hadn't any idea they suffered from. (Be aware, O ye historically naive, that the wild west in 1825 was Alabama, that it did not go to Texas, Arizona and the like until the 1840's, and the people who showed up fully grown malcontents were already twisted criminals back home in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi.)

The television makes money for people today as surely as the newspapers did then. Why, now you can not only cure your iron-poor blood, but you can make your eye lashes grow! The huckster's old claim that "it" will restore youth has turned into "Regeneris" face cream to putty-in wrinkles or Botox to freeze them, and his pitch that "it" will grow hair on a bald man is, at long, long last, a dream come true. O brave new world that has such creams and potions in it! In fact, the same pill can relieve the blues or relieve your pain, and this is revolutionary, because, in the past, we were only worried about nasty, evil people who, when sad, would go buy illegal drugs that would make them happy and relieve their pain.

Well, among the illnesses we have discovered once we found their cures on the television was "man-o-pause" or, for those wanting language that sounds less like a joke, "andropause." ("Andros" is the Greek word for male, but that "pause" is a problem.) Here is a typical discussion, guys. It will help you with "that little problem."

Now, me? I entered into the shadow of death long ago, and time's umbra covered me in its numbing wing. Like the noble mosquito, "it doesn't hurt when it begins," but, of course, it does not merely begin. I was never particularly over dosing on martial prowess, or any other sort, but a few blood tests showed the infamous "low T." I thus found a ready supplier of injectables and began a few months of imitating Barry Bonds and other heroes of the game.

My motivation on the surface was to rectify biochemical abnormalities and to achieve triglyceride reduction. My ulterior motivation was the relief of fatigue. Really, it was. Ok, and some awakening of desire, but not in any way the other. That, alas, has not been a concern.

You don't care about why, though. You want to know what happened. Well, after a full summer of shooting the dope every two weeks, I have decided to return to my old self. The effect of exogenous testosterone was....

Do you know where babies come from? They come from lawn mowers. Now, I have never seen a lawn mower directly involved in the insemination or ovulation or carrying of a fetal human, but I have noticed an overwhelming correlation between young couples purchasing a lawn mower and producing a baby. Newly weds beware the John Deere salesman! Unless the purchase is of an ATV -- which is a well known contraceptive and cause of sterility -- any purchase of a lawnmower is likely to cause conception.

Not many people are aware of this correlative relationship, but I figured it out about the time my friends Bill and Donna bought a lawn and then a lawn mower. I had no proof of causality, no isolation of the agent, but I knew the phenomenon. I could not isolate the cause... until now! You see, taking testosterone made me want to mow the lawn.

I'm serious. All summer, I watched the grass grow, hoping for it to recover from its last scalping so that I could go inflict more savagery upon it. I loved the soaking with sweat, the smushing of dog poo, the face slap of tree branches, the stings of the ants. I stomped and chopped and was smelly, wet, and manly.

I was not, however, more lusty. Not in one way or the other. Nor did I grow large. Not in one way or the other.

So, do I quit shooting it because autumn will be coming in two or three months? No.

Remember that quote from John Crowe Ransom? Well, compare it to something I wrote recently: "The youth of beauty, and the beauty of youth, demand those who lost years to watch and demand them to seek out the joy of their own vital pulse, the concerns of the overhang and undertow that remove their exceptions, and who can blame either party? The one who missed and misses longed and longs and surfaces briefly in the filling of senses, and the one in potential is compelled and curtailed, devoted and dovetailed by and in time. Nature could allow no exception, and will complies." Pretty whiny, isn't it?

What both of them are talking about is that men and women who grow older as they stand before college audiences notice, more and more keenly, the beauty of young members of the opposite sex. The desire increases as the distance from the competition for them does. Now, there certainly are creeps. Make no mistake: some people are creeps and maladaptive fools. However, every one I have known has been content to sit in the stands and watch the game, has loved walking through the gallery and looking at the paintings. None of them has grown confused and tried to grab the merchandise, run onto the field, or believed that he or she was in the game.

Actually, I take that back. Very recently, I knew of a teacher who was by no means on the field nor artist. However, every female student reported that she was creeped out by the way he looked at her. They were not able to articulate precisely what it was, but they knew what they experienced, understood what was conveyed. The pornographic gaze wishes to take. It wishes to strip, to dissect, to grab, and to own. The other one... the aged eye, I suppose, wishes to linger and to revel and is shy; it wants the original to remain. (It can be as guilty of objectifying as anything -- is guilty -- but not guilty of malice.)

John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt saw the pretty girls. This is no surprise. Robert Herrick saw them too. Whether a man has the years to justify it or not, the same feeling is the same: presence calls to loss, loss longs for surfeit. Surfeit never knows itself. These are truths abiding. However, the sweet melancholy plays an artistic tune in even the dullest woman or man.

At the same time, Levi's Jeans company is running commercials, has been running them, which purport to be American (TM). They have Frosty sounding recitations. "You (glug glug) are a god!/ The gods (glug) dance before you (glug)/ Hoping to catch your radiance (glug glug) on their tongues/ The dumb jerks," the poet says, and we see truly spectacular images of youth.

I'm amazed. The pictures are exactly like the poetry. Both are seductions. Read the Whitman, or the Ginsberg. These are poetic lines in praise of the young American, and of American youth, that is primarily flattering, not celebratory. Instead of taking a real quality and showing its beauty, it takes a quality and gives it hyperbolic, mythic, supernatural qualities. Instead of, "You weave through the air," it is "her skin is like nature dipp'd her hands in milk." Everyone knows that the lover gets the beloved by compliments.

The message from Levi's is not "go, do something," but "come here, you." The visuals celebrate the bodies of youth, youth stretching, contorting, sweating, and doing other physical functions that show the body's shapes and features alone, and they do so wonderfully but synecdotally. Each is a clipped fragment rather than a montage. The message is, "Your blue jeans want to have you," rather than "you want to have blue jeans."

Perhaps young buyers are flattered by the commercials, but it's more likely that men and women of my age are stricken by sympathy pains. We, like the commercial, long for what is lost, and we will buy some jeans. We will need some help, perhaps, need a supply, but we will avoid that longing and shovel dirt into the hole.

What I've been doing

I owe my many readers some word of explanation about why I have been absent from these frames for so long. Part of it has been due to lassitude and inconsiderateness, for I have decided that I want my fans to anticipate and thereby enjoy the next post all the more, but part of it has been due to my overloaded extracurricular activities.

You see, I was called upon, by those whom I may not name, to infiltrate and stop a gun-running circuit operating on I-95. This involved spending considerable time drinking absinthe and mescal at The Li'l Rebel roadhouse and tavern while I gained the confidence of the one known as Big Coot. Despite his moniker, Big Coot was not, in fact, my goal, for he was a small man in a large organization of perhaps six. However, with the Big Coot in my pocket, I might be able to gain access to Gemany (pronounced "Gemini"), a two-toned blond with a checkerboard tattoo on the sole of her left foot and dagger ear rings, who was purportedly the leader and chief liaison to the higher ups.

It was as a consequence of a bottle of mescal and a discussion of low pressure weather systems and the movement of air that I found myself in a knife fight with Tim "Leadhead" Jimson, whom I called "Weed," behind the Li'l Rebel Friday night. The local police arrested all of us together, after sending several bystanders to the hospital for unrelated wounds that were discovered during processing.

This led to my needing to rely upon Juan Abigados, the noted loanshark of Blufton, South Carolina, who is deeply connected to the Paris underworld. There was no question of making the "big" with him, but the bail money sent ripples through the Parisian gangland, where my personal asset manager has been worried about my long position in Asian currency markets. He is convinced that the Chinese Communist Party is about to unpeg the Yuan and thereby allow exchange rates to lower in order to increase national market positions in manufacturing. Well, it's hardly worth mentioning how dangerous this would be to my Parisian contacts! If the Yuan falls, the Malay and Chinese gangs will be desperate for liquidity and will dump merchandise, devaluing all assets in the Parisian black economy. That, in turn, will ruin Juan Abigados, and that will make him sell information about my true identity. We can't have that.

Obviously, I had to do something drastic.

Therefore, I contacted Lady Elizabeth Cantrip, my London paramour, and I had her begin a desperate course of action. She organized a "protest" of Chinese human rights policies as the Olympic torch passed through London. This was an ruse, and my only fear was that my former colleagues in MI-5 would see through it too quickly. It was important for my agents to actually seize the torch briefly so that they could implant a small microchip with an RFID device that I had to hastily design and program over the Internet the night before.

Now, when the torch finally reaches Beijing, the Chinese finance minister will read the chip and be sure to keep the exchange rate high, thus keeping my monetary futures secure and preventing the gang warfare in Paris that would otherwise break out.

So far, all of my plans are working out, but I'm still concerned about Gemany and why she refused to go out with me.

--

So, that's it.

Well, either that or I've been sick and depressed. You can take your pick of which you believe to be more likely.