Futureproof in MTZ

The weekend passed like the nauseous, glorious nights once did always. And Sunday morning I dragged myself up from the rheum and the ache, the gradual settlement of memories cast randomly out into the noise scant hours before. I am no solstice marking transition from dark scrawls on cave walls to constrained debate in the symposium's back-halls. I am alive in each instant. I die when the sun rises. Yuppified by some contrived crisis. Electrified each time I throw my dice in.

The ether of an evening pasted to walls dissolved in the instant you notice you're breathing. Or a glimpsed reflection hastens the ecstasy's bleeding. The spindly figure in the foreground pulls down the scaffolding and brickwork. The architecture of scant seconds plunging, inert.

Don't you recognize you belong to something different? Generation Edge looking over unconcerned. Why aren't you ecstatic in the collapse of the Empire of burden, not the energy required for orbit or Enlightenment but the toil demanded by this carefully planned haberdashery. Do you know how close to freedom you are?

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My grades this semester. Yes, I'm boasting

That one freakin' A. Damn!

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Yeoman of the Sewers

So .. . I just finished writing a short-story. Any critical opinion is greatly appreciated. It's below, or if its easier to read in Word or something else, hit me up and I'll e-mail it to you.




“What’s Trump?” the Captain’s demand almost sourceless between the echoing of the chamber and his great mound of white beard.
A collective hesitation as Bean meekly played his card; Gus finally and sarcastically:
“Spades.”
“No table talk!” Ulf, on Bean’s team and down several tricks to Gus and the Captain. His voice annoyed and mostly serious. The Captain played a mistake and Ulf victoriously slapped his laminate right Bauer to the table.

The four of them digest long hours in this fashion. Atrophying under bulky, drab suits to protect them from parasites, viruses and the infection on virtually every surface of the Sewer they collectively scrape and maintain. During downtime they sit in the enormous Combined Sewage Overflow because it is wide enough and tall enough to fool them. And the rectangular sun above casts enough light to bathe several city blocks of stained concrete in a natural glow.

Bean hated this job. Within recent memory he’d been a student of history at a crowded community college in the suburbs. He had hoped to find some order in the entropy he saw, to convince himself through anecdotes that things weren’t getting worse. But, it seemed, academia conspired against him. Funding interests and dwindling government aid incrementally snuffed his program out of existence and he soon found himself fighting the wolves in the form of creditors, and then landlords, and then others in the breadline. Eventually, this past spring, the Sewer Department threw him a bone. He would have tured jugular veins with a spear if he had to for that first paycheck.

The novelty of making money wore off almost instantly and through the first few months it was as if the job perpetually offended him. Recently, though, he tempered. The nauseating reek of humanity gradually receded. His skin sallowed, like Ulf’s, and when fully suited he could almost take a sudden immersion in waste without a grimace.

And this sort of test of grit was not uncommon. Just last month, Gus had to pull him out of a freak rush in one of the junctions during a swell. Tense safety lines and guttural screams down in the pipes. Facemasks fogged with exasperation. Finally Gus had hauled him up onto his feet, the bastard, and dislodged Bean’s leaky helmet. He laughed as Bean spat out some vile fluid that had leaked in; it was his contention that Bean would never really be a sewer man until he’d swallowed a mouthful of the stuff. “Topside people eat shit all day,” he was fond of saying, “we just have the balls to admit it.”

The Overflow was Bean’s favorite place in the Sewer. It was the only underground that didn’t excite claustrophobia. He liked the starkness of it, unencumbered by complexes of pipes or pumps. It was not a place to populate or regulate, but rather a space through which human matter and the city’s toxic run-off passed. Great mountains of water passing back out into the natural world, consuming its own poisons. The floor plan was only disrupted by strategic channels and a hand-railing and their table bolted to the concrete floor a few feet from the shaft of afternoon sun. At the far end of the room, there was a rough-hewn rectangle cut in the concrete. Big enough to pilot a Bobcat through. If someone were to now emerge from it, Bean thought, the sudden perspective would be jarring. He would appear tiny and alien, an anonymous figure out there on the underground horizon.

One game bled into the next. Victories merely breaks to smoke a cigarette in, or walk a few feet away and piss. Bean lost focus easily during these marathons. Going mute for long stretches except for a pre-packaged “pass” or “pick it up” and lolling his head back to look up at the distant ceiling. Gus re-told some awful joke, replacing one ethnicity for another, and shuffled. The awkward, stiff cards snapped out in a flourish; tiny machine gun fire. The arrangement of things way up on the ceiling, pipes and gears and catwalks and portholes still painted their urgent red and assembled in symmetry. They allowed Bean to suspend thought for the briefest of seconds before the Captain nudged the excess of his suit and he re-entered.

“Bean, pay attention, please. Ve don’t vant to lose another,” Ulf said in his dwindling Swiss accent. “ ‘s all strategy, you have to vatch vhat’s thrown.”
“Strategy?” Gus laughed. “It ain’t even strategy when you play this long. You just know.”
The Captain raised his eyebrow. A white cylinder, abruptly crooked at his confusion.
“You know. A Man just knows,” he continued. Swiped the trick from the table.
The blaring of the klaxons didn’t startle them. They would have been virtually unnoticeable had they all been helmeted. Ulf slammed his remaining three cards to the table; his hand was strong and he was livid. House rules said the game was over.
“Just, you know, just as a fellow is about to do something . . “
“Life happens,” the Captain said.
Gus assembled the cards and stowed them in his pouch. The players eased up out of their bolted chairs, and single-filed fifteen or twenty feet to a spot. Ulf wedged up a plate with a tool, and the Captain whistled down a ladder into the Overflow’s nerve center. The rest, Bean next, followed and Ulf again sealed the room behind them. As he stepped off the bottom rung, the small chamber vibrated. Then rumbled. And finally a jolting roar of water overhead.
The narrow hole fit three comfortably, and Bean was pushed right up to the Captain. He looked down at Bean, nearly a foot taller, and said something unintelligible.
“What?” Bean yelled. The roar of the water like the engorged howls of a prison fight above them.
“I said we are getting a lot of overflows for this time of the year,”
“Yes,” Bean said. Dimly cognizant that he might have noticed the same thing. Either way, of little import to him. “Yes we are.”
They would have as many as fifteen minutes down in the chamber with one another. The energy required for conversation keeping them awkward and blatant in their speech. Bean had embarrassed himself a number of times down there, having to shout ever louder “I just wish we could get some time off” and “I said, I don’t think there needs to be four of us.” He now just stayed quite, half-heartedly poised to respond to the Captain should he say something.
A myriad of pipes, confusing and tangled from three steps back, snaked around the room. Terminated at bulging junctions of painted steel, alien panels and gauges that Bean could not comprehend. He took a dim satisfaction the complication and order, the Sewer so vast he wondered if it was even aware of him. And yet it worked practically by itself. Of course, Ulf was constantly trudging down here; wiping the filth from his facemask and twiddling knobs heuristically. But the knobs really did the work; they told the stuff where to go, which pumps needed to be engaged, which drains needed to be uncovered.
“You think robots might be able to do take our jobs?” Bean asked, in the roar of water confusing the out-loud world with the thoughts in his head.
“What’s that, boy?” the Captain shouted back. Gus and Ulf were playing rock-paper-scissors in the white noise. Gus beating him mercilessly.
“I said, you think robots might be able to do our jobs” and the roar whined down as the last few words escaped. Bouncing off the metal pipes and eliciting shaking heads from the others. This merely meant that the largest slug of overflow had passed, there were still millions of gallons to go.
“Bean, my boy,” said the Captain, and wrapped a stained arm around him.
“Do you see these pipes?”
Bean and the Captain were squashed shoulder-to-shoulder, unable to turn fully in either direction. Sullen faces six inches from the melange.
“Yeah, I see them. Nevermind, I was just sort of . . uhm . . thinking out loud.”
“That’s the problem,” Gus said, “You think too much. What’s there to think about down here?”
“Bean,” the Captain continued, “this set-up you see before you, the controls, the pipes, the valves. It might not seem like much, but without them the City is nothing. A city swamped in its own filth cannot survive.”

“Of course, but we . . .” Bean attempted to interject. The water sloshing above them, the ocean stomach of the bloated city. “Tut tut . . without the action we take down here, the city is lost. I know it seems as though what we do is rather meaningless, tedious, and facetious,”
“Hey you sound like one of them preachers!” Gus said, pulling an apple from somewhere in the recesses of his suit.
“I sure do,” the Captain beamed “But, Bean, my point is. Something as important as that can’t be left up to computers. You young people think that technology is better than us. But I’ll tell you something . . computers can only do what we tell them to.”
“Besides,” Gus said, crunching through the snappy skin of his apple “You want to lose your job or something?”
Bean stared straight ahead.
“All I’m saying is, what I’m asking is . . do we need to be down here?”

“Of course we need to be down here. What do you think we’re doing all day?” The Captain retorted.

“And, Bean. If you hate it that much, no one down here’s got a gun to your head,” Gus said, thinly sarcastic as though he were literally holding said gun.
“You’re saying we’ve got a choice . . . ” and in the middle of mounting his tirade, a perfect sentence to finally dismiss Gus’s vulgarity with cold logic, Bean slipped on brown slime and braced his impact on the metal grating with his elbow. It was incredibly painful even through the suit.
Gus helped him back up with a rough jerk. The troop fell quiet and filed up the ladder. Bean imagined a tension, that he was now at odds with the group, but Gus and the Captain never seemed to commit an exchange to memory. He could never really speak to these people. Every attempt, whether conscious or not, to talk about anything other than cards, human waste or women was met with something between condescension to his age or a brief silence.
The procedures rolled along until the four of them finally sat back down at the table, the Captain squee-geeing it off with one arm of his suit and then flicking the stuff to the floor. He was the oldest and hardiest, and Bean imagined he’d been so desensitized that had Gus left his apple on the table, and had it miraculously survived the gush, Captain would have shook it dry and sunk his teeth in.

Bean, rubbing his elbow, felt some sort of utility and value. Though much of their time was wasted, every so often they moved as a unit to tackle some necessary problem. At these times he felt like a worker gnome, hapless maybe, but nevertheless pushing through the city’s bowel movement. Denigrating work, to be sure, but vital.
A new game started. The long-absent stench now returning unevenly to Bean’s nostrils. Sour at first and not obnoxious, what a businessman might smell if he wandered by the wrong grate in August. There would probably be nothing left to do until they punched out and the smaller night crew replaced them. Gus and the Captain lost two hands, and then the Captain’s look of dumb-founded consternation (as though his cards displayed hieroglyphs instead of hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds) turned to urgency.

“Who cranked the hydros back on?” He thundered, standing up instinctively.

The unwritten code by which they operated required that Bean, the closest they had to a newb, double-back to correct mistakes in their collective memory. The urgency of potential backwash flattened any resistance, and only Bean’s uncharacteristic responsiveness kept the crew from hastily descending once again as a precaution. Unexpected action and a tiny surge in heart-rate. Perhaps it would be a close call and he would save the system with only seconds to spare.
Bean ran to the entrance, dimly envisioning the city far above him trembling in anticipation. An overwrought and complex beehive. An architecture of purposes relying on its weakest foundations. Relying now on Bean’s quick action.
He clanged down the stairs, the narrow tube and the space below completely odorless, and over to the valve they had neglected. As he moved to turn it, and alleviate enormous and building pressures, the wheel spun of its own accord. First dryly rubbing against his gloves but as he stepped back it gathered speed and made the two rotations under its own power.
Had no one hastily descended the ladder and rushed to open the valve, it would have made no difference. The captain, Gus, Ulf and especially Bean were suddenly not even drones.
He slowly returned to the game upstairs. To now truly waste time in a literal shithole with people he did not particularly like, so he could afford to eat in the scant, dark hours he got off. He dropped into his seat like a pile of antiques, letting gravity yank at his bones, and he thought, just for an instant, of saying something. He wanted to tell them so they could all give up the façade and go home and watch television or launch campaigns to win back ex-wives and girlfriends. Or maybe just go for a walk outside.
“Everything go alright down there?” the Captain asked.
But he couldn’t tell them. Either they had noticed similar goings-on and were afraid of the truth, or they would think him a pathetic liar. Or he could arrange it so they saw it for themselves; show them the grand futility laid bare like the contentious hand of a cheater.
The game resumed, and the smell returned in the way small folds of his suit would open and reassemble in the motions of snapping cards to the table.
The klaxons blared again, Ulf dropping both bauers and a trump king to the table in disgust. The siren wasn’t the same harrowing scream that signaled a complete flush but rather the meek holler of a clog somewhere under the city. One that hands would have to dislodge.
Ulf and Bean had to go, hardly any other option. Bean the newest, and his team losing at cards.
They walked away from the group, snapping buckles and tightening straps, paused at a cubbyhole to retrieve equipment and then trudged over to the stark rectangle in the wall.
The darkness in the tunnel mimics the deep, earthy black of cave diving. Stalactites of algae and filth. Their warm orange headlamps glistening over everything ahead. Bean and Ulf tied themselves together by a length of rope and sighed hunkered into a long uphill walk. The passage narrowed in stages as they climbed until they had to hunch over. A perpetual tiger trap of slick concrete. Some Pavlovian sense of duty the pressing wall at their back.
Bean was nearly dragged by the rope. A rhythm of tugs at each of Ulf’s forward steps. His legs trying to collapse or go limp at each one. The euphemism had failed, he remembered. It was over. He was not even a cog in the clockwork anymore. He was a mouth to feed, and twenty-four hours to occupy in the interest of preventing burglary or insurgency. Ulf looked back every few minutes in restrained irritation.
He, like Bean, had been given the job by some nseen bureaucratic hand after a dizzying stint of poverty and desperately waiting in lines. Swallowing dignity to beg some tender-hearted but eagle-eyed old marm for help. Support. The system, so efficient at automating and generating surplus, simply no longer needed them. Stupid day-workers like Bean, Gus, the Captain, and even Ulf could only stifle progress, could only gum up the works. As so it threw them a pittance and convinced them they were worthwhile.
“ulf!” Bean yelled.
“Vhat?” Not even fully turning.
“Hold on,”
Ulf took two or three more steps and stopped under the serrated light of a drainage. He turned and huffed, he worked too damn hard to put up with Bean sometimes.
“Listen,” Bean said to hold attention as he closed the gap. “I . . um .. I saw something down in the snakepit.”
“Really?” Ulf asked, “Vhat did the t’ermal expansion gauges say?”
“No, no. Listen. And you have to take me serious,“ where Gus and the Captain would have rolled their eyes Ulf merely looked away and then back.
“Ok. Vhat?”
“The valve that we turn, you know, the one that I turned after the flush earlier?”
“Of course,”
“Well, “ Bean said. “It moved on its own.”
“Vhat are you saying?”
“The valve turns itself, we don’t need to b e down here.” This last part under his breath as though he was suggesting it to Ulf subliminally.
Ulf looked at him with a frozen disbelief, not a reaction to Bean’s heresy, but simply unsure what to think. Barely able to articulate his confusion in Swiss, utterly incapable of doing it in English. Finally:
“I don’t beliefe you,”

A moment of passive reflection and consideration they’d be forced to call a “break” if asked and Ulf and Bean again trudged through the pipes to some nefarious trauma as far away as seemed reasonable. This time passed in silence. Ulf twice nearly turning back with some pithy insight or joking stab at the tangible doubt and biography that hung between them. Bean felt weightless and yet now bonded to the sewer by a force that acted not on appearance or heft, but on some less tangible quality. Really, some lack of quality that pulled him down through sluices of steel grating and dark shafts of concrete.
They arrived at the blockage. A stormwater reservoir that emptied out into a channel at their feet had coaxed an unprecedented mass of urban offal and the things that found solace in it to fully congeal and squeeze until the outlet was completely sealed. Bean poked at the blockage with an instrument. A blackish wad weighing hundreds of pounds.

The apparent task at hand was to skewer and slice the blockage until it conceded and fell into the channel in pieces. Here it could decompose naturally in the constant rinse of run-off. All tasks being menial, this one was of no particular notice. Save that Bean couldn’t resist the notion that if it were not for the teeming, squabbling population topside this problem would have never occurred. And yet, in the sewer’s new complexity, Bean saw no way for it to heal itself this time. He made a more determined, work-like stab at the mass.
“Vait, Bean. If you’re right, ‘zes vill fix itself. Just vait,”
And so they stood. The reservoir making incrementally angrier noises. The blockage making plastic squeaks as tons of water worked to force it through the eye of a needle. They waited, each sort of quietly daring the other to take no action as the wad pulsed and the chamber they stood in shook.
Finally the noise was replaced by a great rush of water somewhere on the other side. Some redundant and unfamiliar outlet eased the pressure on the blockage and the great squeezing mass relaxed. The sweep of water, as if blood circumventing arteries, tugged the mass away from the blockage and the channel surged.

Ulf was incredulous. Simply staring. And for Bean the smell finally pounced from the bushes. As fresh and repulsive as it was on his first day, but suddenly beyond merely nauseating. The fumes burned poisonous in his lungs. Bean’s eyes watered and crossed. His vision went blurry and after a graceless waving of arms to stay steady he careened into the channel loudly.

The current, stronger than it seemed and stronger as it deepened, yanked him beneath the filmy surface. One foot, Two feet. And then the safety line pulled taut. Warbled gibberish above the water. Bean reached a foot down, God how deep could it be, and launched himself weakly from the bottom.

His head surfaced briefly. Ulf pulling on the line, losing skittering steps to the current and Bean’s weight. A fresh shot of reek along with desperately needed air. He felt the burn of the sewer deep in his lungs and went limp. The back of his head smacking against some metal fixture, a brief unconsciousness as the indifferent Sewer pulled him back down under into the darkness and digestive system. Into the bowels, so much more profound in their strangeness. As alien to Bean as his own insides.
The line, the panicked umbilical cord between the terror and futility down in the pipes and the vindication and despair on the walkway, snapped. A jarring, hard sound somewhere in the penultimate static of water rushing over every inch of him. Swallowing him.
Bean was afraid. A hot ball of panic, starting in his gut and dispersing, splitting into smaller bursts of unbearable anxiety. The flashing images of grinding metal teeth and sharp edges testing the ferocity of the flow. He surfaced for fractions of a second in the few inches between the water and the pipe, his helmet filling with Sewer air and then back underneath to watch the invaluable little bubbles escape out into the blackness.

An unknowable quantity of time passed.

The flow of water calmed, not truly slower Bean knew, but without the turbulence, without the tiny accelerations beating away at his consciousness. He floated along, the nozzles of his helmet just above the water.

There was nothing in the pipe. Nothing he could do or any space to do it in. There was only to try and keep breathing and hope dimly that he ended up somewhere friendly to his soft, pink body. And yet even the safest fantasy of how it all might end failed to comfort him. If he could just sit down in the pipes forever, bobbing along and avoiding work.

As time went on, Bean started to convince himself that this would happen. He would drift here forever and acquiesce; learn to not care. Then there was a brief amplification in the rush and his numbing buoyancy blending almost imperceptibly, like a mother quietly exchanging a baby’s sleeping comfort in her arms for that of the bed, into pure weightlessness.
And light. Shocking and exhilarating light so that Bean’s enormous pupils could barely handle the unexpected luck and extraordinary freedom. And then plunged again into water; suddenly muffled and in slow motion. Bean was given to drift motionless for a moment as the bay scrubbed the sewer out of him. His eyes adjusted and, heavy in his suit, he looked up through the water at the purplish twilight. He had survived. And he was never going down into the Sewer again.
He pulled at his boots with an ineffective glove and just before he panicked they slipped off and he kicked himself upwards. His head broke the surface and his bleary periphery bulged with the city’s skyline. The city that thought him dead looming there in its sepia and soot, its chaotic afternoon bustle.
“It is a beehive,” Bean said, what felt like his very first words. And it didn’t really need him.
He swam toward it, no other choice really, and thought how tomorrow he’d wake up and go for a walk outside. Or visit the library. Or do absolutely nothing at all.

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On Binary Opposition

Sorry if this doesn't make sense, threw it up rather quickly

we have structured life on binary oppositions. Good versus evil, right versus wrong, love versus fear, rich versus poor. However, binary opposition is inadequate to resolve the existential turmoil that is at the basis of all dissatisfaction and epiphany. It is only when the universe is exposed as the multifarious and overlapping co-existence of concepts that one truly approaches the Genuine Experience. Being geared toward binary thinking, it is only when binary opposition fails to define a characteristic of our experience that we are pushed closest to truly living.

Marshall McLuhan states that whenever a system (be it an organizational system such as the Internet, an aesthetic system such as Impressionism, a philosophical system such as Existentialism and so on) is pushed to the limits of its capability, there is a sort of reversion to a system that is simpler (structurally) but more comprehensive and capable of handling more information. For example, think of spoken language. The way one learns is to identify “things”. One learns nouns for objects and verbs for overt actions. These words themselves are made up of tiny bits of information (syllables and letters). Eventually (and rather quickly), simply being able to identify “things” is no longer adequate. One needs to be able to express relationships between “things” as well as incorporate abstract thought into very non-abstract situations. The language system goes through a reversion. It becomes simpler in that words lose some of the “concreteness” in their meaning, the upshot being that whole words now represent the basic unit of language rather than syllables or letters. One may argue that poetry is an attempt to take that further and use whole lines as the basic unit of information (and potent information, with multiple connotations).

We experience our lives using systems that are inadequate to explain the universe and ourselves within it. This is not an indictment; we are geared for a relatively simple life on a tiny planet. Cultural evolution (including the idle time available to agricultural societies, the broad sharing of information from society to society, and the ingenuity that allowed a frail, pink bipedal to dominate the earth) has repeatedly pushed us up against the very limits of our systemic capability to understand. For instance, creation myths served to satisfy our questioning nature for a time but eventually it grew inadequate. We were (or still are) forced to accept some new informational system to explain our life experience. The same occurs in the arts. We see a steady evolution in how art is produced, understood, how it interacts with our life, etc. This is because art is a powerfully self-propelling memetic system. I read great literature, learn from it, and understand that while it may be brilliant it fails in some way to render MY experience fully. Thus I am forced to make attempts, using the informational/philosophical/aesthetic systems I’ve encountered as a sort of cipher to decode the emotional communion I’ve made with the world.


Where does binary opposition come into play?
Binary opposition is the principal taxonomic activity We undertake. The first test we put any new “thing” to (a piece of art, a concept, a new food) is into the “good” and “bad” categories. Though I have little scientific support (but also no contradictory science), I would argue that this divvying up of our experience is directly related to our evolution. When our decisions were primarily concerned with life and death, it was of prime importance to efficiently divide the world up into things that were dangerous and things that were good. As time went on and our brains got bigger, we started to introduce what seems like ambivalencies. Fire is dangerous, but extremely useful. Water is essential to life, but can be deadly in the winter or can drown us. Upon closer examination, this is still binary division. Dangerous things are divided up into those that can be useful (“careful” things like fire) and things that are not (rotten meat). Moving from the simple classifications to these more nuanced classifications represented a shift. Our systems of understanding began to be inadequate, and thus “things” had to be considered not as monolithic entities, but as collections of characteristics (some bad, some good). This was a giant step forward in cultural evolution.

However, that understanding of our experience is only partial. First, it has been derived strictly by our subjective experience as humans with very particular needs (and thus is not required to be universally true). Secondly, we’ve merely divided the world into millions of pieces rather than a few and each “piece” still represents one side of a binary opposition. If you are familiar with calculus, you will know that one of the most important early uses for it was its ability to accurately measure the area under a curve. Calculus can take any function, no matter how wily and extreme its curves, and precisely derive the area underneath it. Prior to calculus, the only method to do this (and important scientists such as Johannes Kepler did this for integral astronomy calculations) was to divide the area under the curve into as many little squares as possible, and add up their areas. This is not only tedious and energy-intensive, its inaccurate. Our informational system, mathematics, was inadequate and thus we were forced from a system of binary oppositions (the question of accuracy presumes a binary friction: there are spaces under the curve that aren’t covered by squares) to one that could explain things more comprehensively and simply.

My point is this: we have made attempts to explain life by adding up a million tiny squares. It has been relatively adequate over the centuries, but as the spread and growth of information increases exponentially there are far too many nooks and crannies for us to stick our squares in. Our existential grief, this sense that something is missing and that the true meaning of our experience is fleeting and intangible, is our hackles being raised at the inaccuracy inherent in summing up a million tiny squares in our lives. We require nothing short of a calculus of life; a system of pattern recognition (and McLuhan says that only the artist is truly capable of this) and an identification of a new, simpler and yet more comprehensive system of understanding ourselves.

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Trying to divine some order to the spindly backwards reach of our culture

My year is shaping up to be exactly the sort of thing I had hoped for. By the end of the semester I'll have two short-stories that I feel confident about sending around. Interestingly however, I've come to the conclusion that publication in a literary journal doesn't mean much. No one reads them. I haven't yet met a single person who regularly reads them. That said, its a toehold and a tangible milestone . . .

I've got two major trips coming up this year. One out to Boston and New York for a reunion with a sample of the most important people in my life. Wandering around Gotham like we own the place. Getting a preview of settings I hope to later call home. Still vying for one of these Fellow Travelers to come to Boise again.

At the tail-end of the summer I'll be going to Burning Man with another cadre of my personal influences. Starving out in the desert. Trying to recreate a moment of Creation or Enlightenment or Epiphany that has always narrowly eluded me.

In a few weeks, I'm escaping to Ontario, Oregon to hole up in a hotel room and force myself to write. An experiment in ambition, insomnia, tolerance, creativity and fortitude. Hoping to come out with something clean and beautiful.

Taking a summer class that appears, on its face, to be the most promising course I've yet enrolled in.

Anyway, any plans out there?

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"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly"

^Bertrand Russell


There is no predicting the future. And no I never would have imagined that each morning at 8:05, just after the coffee's ready, I would walk into my boss's office and we'd discuss science and philosophy and the failure of our political system. Some tenuous understanding between the two of us that everything we do in life is one further stab at understanding it and one fleeting effort and enjoying it.

We discussed the multiverse theory of existence this morning, complicated by the theories being posited currently that the universe is in a sense biological. That is, it replicates and evolves. That there must be a near infinite quantity of differing universes all competing for fitness as it were. Some dying on the vine because their unique physical laws prohibit expansion. Ours unfolding like a flower, a universe of light and energy and experience. How lucky we are.

The point, though, is that we should be careful of cynicism. I went into this job anticipating a cliched corporate existence. Meetings and cubicles and Microsoft Outlook; and it is that, no doubt. But at the same time I've found a place where value life over profit and at least some of them are good for stimulating conversation.

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Its tough to get people to read my work and give me their opinions. Tiva, fortunately, is a fantastic editor. She doesn't have a strong literature education, but she knows what she likes.


"I don't understand what you're trying to do here.


"You see, here. This is another awkward transition."

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One Laptop Per Child

The One Laptop Per Child program has kicked off.




"The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: Is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey – don't worry, don't be afraid ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people. "Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter, because – it's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace."
-Bill Hicks

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Cloisters, Cannibals, Consilience

Academia has a problem. As the last institution defending humanity from a rising anti-intellectualism, the University is a potential safe haven for those with new ideas or individuals seeking to understand. Nevermind that the whims of corporate America, the pratfalls of a consumer culture, the sweeping increases in enrollment, and the troubling and reinvented penchant our generation seems to have with obtaining "things" have all diluted the academic enterprise. What is more interesting to me is the carry-over of a certain arrogance from daily life to the pursuit of truth.

We all think our fields of study are important. That is why we have selected them or, conversely, these fields must be important because we've selected them. This field, no doubt, is critical to our perspective and is duly important to the community at large. I fear, however, that we become convinced that our department (English, Engineering, Biology, Psychology) is the most important. Taking precedence and preference over all others. This tendency (and straddling both an Engineering degree and the bulk of a Humanities degree, this has become obvious) engenders a certain rivalry and rancor between the disciplines.

How, exactly, does this play out? While at University for an engineering degree (at an, at best, mediocre institution) professors, colleagues and even administration at the level of Dean would openly dismiss Lib'rul Arts as useless, easy and (this just students) for women. My current university and department, a respectable and burgeoning English community, suffers the same problem, but in reverse. Engineering is reviled because our modern iteration of capitalism favors it. Calls to enhance math and science education are met with cold responses. Under everyone's breath is the notion that math and science aren't as important.


Why does this attitude exist? There are likely many reasons but I believe there are three that sort of round out the phenomenon. First, each represents to the other a fundamentally flawed prioritization of understanding (truth be told, they are both flawed because they've elected to become so narrow). The scientist or engineer sees studying literature as being inapplicable to life in the world because it is not seen as being supportable, tested, or rigorous. The liberal arts student sees science and engineering as a willful break from the beauty of life and the meaning of existence.

Additionally, each end of the spectrum is intimidated by the other. The English student bemoans mathematics because it is difficult (both in general, and for one inclined to study English) and thus uses there position as a liberal arts student to virtually condemn the study of mathematics and all of its affiliates. The Engineering student may be confused by the lack of factoids and heavily outlined principles in literary studies. I know for a fact that many of my colleagues in Engineering would not fair well in literary classes. Likewise, many of my current colleagues would miserably fail in an engineering course of equivalent 'difficulty'.

Finally, our current democratic capitalism has carved out a niche for each that is disrespected by the other. The liberal arts student is jealous of the 'easy' money made by the engineering student. The engineering student is livid that the liberal arts student doesn't appear to contribute anything. Neither truly understands the conditions of the other.

Where do the soft sciences play into all of this? Exactly where they seem to, somewhere in the middle. Never quite appreciated by the bookworms, never quite accepted by the pocket-protectors.


So, what is the problem with this? Isn't each of these fields for people inclined to them? Why should the liberal arts student appreciate software design? Why should the engineer give a whit about postmodernism? The short answer, of course, is that you are a human being. All of these things are a component of the human condition and life in 2007. This isn't a requirement that you master every possible subject, running from one to the next the moment some understanding has been reached and yet never applying anything. Rather, we must appreciate each as its own aspect of understanding the universe, truth, and ourselves. Not only that, but these disciplines (and I mean ALL disciplines here) are not capsules. They all have some insight to provide further understanding in progress in every other one.

So, I just said that. Where's my evidence?


What are some serious improvements in science/engineering?

The theories of gravity, relativity, and the discovery of the structure of DNA. All of these incidents required creative leaps in logic. None ever left the realm of rationality, and yet all required some bit of innovation and imagination that had been lacking up until then.

Some of our greatest achievements in large engineering projects have been ones of functional aesthetics. Beautiful bridges or cathedrals or skyscrapers carefully designed by both the artist and the engineer and capable of changing what it means to be a modern human.

Additionally, advances in technology (think peer-to-peer software and the iPod) have occurred strictly in the interest of elevating our access to art.

And art?
Art itself has been continuously advanced by technology. The paintbrush, the printing press, the camera, the digital camera, electronic devices that generate, store, and play music, software. Denying the importance of math and science in one's understanding downplays the significant impact that these things have on our ability to use, create and experience art.

The social sciences, too, are not exempt from this equation. Psychological advances have had significant impact on art and have also used art as a tool to enhance understanding (Freud's the Oedipal complex, likewise the influence of Lacan on our understanding of postmodernism). Anthropology frequently relies on the product of anonymous artists and artisans from the past, and art can gain insight to the human condition by understanding the vast expanse of its history.

My point is, please stop separating yourself from the world by claiming to be "an engineer" or "an artist" or "an anthropologist" and realize that you are in fact a human being. Our cultural evolution requires that we at some point all understand the unity of knowledge, and appreciate the fact that every discipline is merely the study of some other facet to this vast, intimidating thing we call the universe. No pursuit of knowledge is devoid of value. And no pursuit of knowledge is worth a damn if it stands alone.

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Intruder in the Dust

Spent a sizeable portion of this weekend reading Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner. Faulkner is one of the "greats" that I have come onto quite late in my academic career. I must admit that I am now absolutely enamored with him. The aforementioned book is both a lesson in what can be done with language (and implausibly follows none of the rules a professor will tell you are critical to good fiction) and an existential crisis of intense emotions, staring long into the abyss, the moral certitude and conflict of being a modern man. Likewise, it is one of the better "formative" novels I have read (in which a boy becomes a man) and avoids sentimentality at all costs. I had never read a prison door close or a spade dig into the earth until I read this book. In light of this, I'm not sure why Hemingway gets the title of Best American Writer, though I suppose it has something to do with his work being more accessible. Faulkner dares you to try and read it, he takes no prisoners and requires a dedication in reading that he must have devoted in writing.

Anyway, incredibly productive weekend. Booze, reading, writing, dizzying introspection as I try to conjure metaphors for the stench of humanity. Illumination as every little gear of this story or that falls into place. The realization that function is its own aesthetic system.

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Twitching

I didn't write this. It was written by Mark Twight, the guy that trained the Spartans in the movie 300. I stumbled upon his website and have since taken on a training regime similar to his (though scaled down). He makes references to outdoor sports because that is his realm, but the truth of the essay is living with emotional commitment. It doesn't matter if it is skiing or writing or studying. Anyway, this had a profound affect on me.

His website can be found at:
www.gymjones.com

Additionally, you can find work-out resources similar to the ones he employs at
www.crossfit.com . If you have been turned off by gyms and exercise because you disdain a bunch of muscleheads staring at themselves in the mirror, this is for you. If you subscribe to it, it will be the most physically challenging thing you have ever experienced. And perhaps the only thing I've been involved in that is so effective at developing mental strength as well. A half hour of suffering each day, and I for once feel human.




TWITCHING


BY MARK TWIGHT

What's your problem? I think I know. You see it in the mirror every morning: temptation and doubt hip to hip inside your head. You know it's not supposed to be like this. But you drank the Kool-Aid and dressed yourself up in someone else's life.

You're haunted because you remember having something more. With each drag of the razor you ask yourself why you piss your blood into another man's cup. Working at the job he offered, your future is between his thumb and forefinger. And the necessary accessories, the proclamations of success you thought gave you stability provide your boss security. Your debt encourages acquiescence, the heavy mortgage makes you polite.

Aren't you sick of being tempted by an alternative lifestyle, but bound by chains of your own choosing? Of the gnawing doubt that the college graduate, path of least resistance is the right way for you - for ever? Each weekend you prepare for the two weeks each summer when you wake up each day and really ride, or climb; the only imperative being to go to bed tired. When booming thermals shoot you full of juice and your Vario shrieks 7m/sec, you wonder if the lines will pop. The risk pares away life’s trivia. Up there, sucking down the thin cumulus, the earth looks small, the boss even smaller, and you wish it could go on forever. But a wish is all it will ever be.

Because the ground is hard. Monday morning is harsh. You wear the hangover of your weekend rush under a strict and proper suit and tie. You listen to NPR because it's inoffensive, PFC: Politically Fucking Correct. Where's the counter-cultural righteousness that had you flirting with Bad Religion and the vintage Pistols tape over the weekend? On Monday you eat frozen food and live the homogenized city experience. But Sunday you thought about cutting your hair very short. You wanted a little more volume and wondered how out of place you looked in the Sub Pop Music Store. Flipping through the import section, you didn't recognize any of the bands. KMFDM? It stands for Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode. Didn't you know? How could you not?

Tuesday you look at the face in the mirror again. It stares back, accusing. How can you get by on that one weekly dose? How can you be satisfied by the artifice of these experiences? Why should your words mean anything? They aren't learned by heart and written in blood. If you cannot grasp the consciousness-altering experience that real mastery of these disciplines proposes, of what value is your participation? The truth is pointless when it is shallow. Do you have the courage to live with the integrity that stabs deep?

Use the mirror to cut to the heart of things and uncover your true self. Use the razor to cut away what you don't need. The life you want to live has no recipe. Following the recipe got you here in the first place:

Mix one high school diploma with an undergrad degree and a college sweetheart. With a whisk (or a whip) blend two cars, a poorly built house in a cul de sac, and fifty hours a week working for a board that doesn't give a shit about you. Reproduce once. Then again. Place all ingredients in a rut, or a grave. One is a bit longer than the other. Bake thoroughly until the resulting life is set. Rigid. With no way out. Serve and enjoy.



But there is a way out. Live the lifestyle instead of paying lip service to the lifestyle. Live with commitment. With emotional content. Live whatever life you choose honestly. Give up this renaissance man, dilettante bullshit of doing a lot of different things (and none of them very well by real standards). Get to the guts of one thing; accept, without casuistry, the responsibility of making a choice. When you live honestly, you can not separate your mind from your body, or your thoughts from your actions.



Tell the truth. First, to yourself. Say it until it hurts. Learn the reality of your own selfishness. Quit living for other people at the expense of your own self, you're not really alive. You live in the land of denial - and they say the view is pretty a long as you remain asleep.

Well it's time to WAKE THE FUCK UP!

So do it. Wake up. When you drink the coffee tomorrow, take it black and notice it. Feel the caffeine surge through you. Don't take it for granted. Use it for something. Burn the Grisham books. Sell the bad CDs. Mariah Carey, Dave Mathews and N Sync aren’t part of the soundtrack where you're going.

Cut your hair. Don't worry about the gray. If you're good at what you do, no one cares what you look like. Go to the weight room. Learn the difference between actually working out and what you've been doing. Live for the Iron and the fresh air. Punish your body to perfect your soul. Kick the habit of being nice to everyone you meet. Do they deserve it? Say "no" more often.

Quit posturing at the weekly parties. Your high pulse rate, your 5.12s and quick time on the Slickrock Trail don't mean shit to anybody else. These numbers are the measuring sticks of your own progress; show, don't tell. Don’t react to the itch with a scratch. Instead, learn it. Honor the necessity of both the itch and the scratch. But a haircut and a new soundtrack do not a modern man make. As long as you have a safety net you act without commitment. You'll go back to your old habits once you meet a little resistance. You need the samurai's desperateness and his insanity.

Burn the bridge. Nuke the foundation. Back yourself up against a wall. Have an opinion one way or the other, get off the fence and rip it up. Cut yourself off so there is no going back. Once you're committed the truth will come out. You ask about security? What you need is uncertainty. What you need is confusion; something that forces you to reinvent yourself, a whip to drive you harder.



In Dune, Frank Herbert called it "the attitude of the knife,” cut off what’s incomplete and say “now it has finished, for it has ended there.” So finish it, and walk away, forward. Only acts undertaken with commitment have meaning. Only your best effort matters. Life is a Meritocracy, with death as the auditor. Inconsistency, incompetence and lies are all cut short by that final word. Death will change you if you can't change yourself.

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There are so many decisions to make. Every day it seems I am confronted with not the false binary choice of Frost's two paths diverging but rather a multifarious and intimidating array of options. Even the debate over free will is almost always posed as all-or-nothing dichotomy, rather than the complex that it is. As Americans we often have more choices than some people, or less. As a strong-willed individual, one has more options than another. No doubt much of our life is determined by simply the way we've been laid on the tracks, however it is our choice whether to follow our instincts or swallow them.


Corporate 'merikuh has begun to wrap me in its leathern tentacles. The lure of ever-increasing wages intended to pay for a lifestyle I am not interested in. The promise of a life of intellectual and physical slack while "things" (cars, homes, wives, children, plasma TVs) pile up around me. The spectre of comfort in a world that starves or flays its children many miles from here. All under the arrogant assumption that this evanescent condition is fixed; that the earth will not swallow us at its whim.

Perhaps in the grand scheme of things, my passions are irrelevant. I'm willing to accept that. But that suggests that everything is irrelevant to the larger system, and that the only important metric of this epic life (and maybe that's the point, to make our life an epic, no matter the specifics) is what I think of it. When the time comes, I know I will be ready to choose freedom and difficulty over subservience and ease. Or at least I hope that I will.

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Finally, something happened

I've returned from the National Undergraduate Literature Conference (the "Nulk' as we call it) with something along those same lines of irreality, exhaustion, revelation and self-affirmation that once accompanied most weekends.

On Thursday morning I met with 12 people that I had never met and crammed myself into a van to make the five hour journey to the armpit of SLC and hang-out for three days. The gentlemen I sat next to drew The Portable Nietzche from his bag and made an offhand comment about the need to drink a great deal this weekend. I was armed with a fifth of Whiskey, he with a 12 pack of PBR. The group of strangers (and most of them proved to not know each other as well) ended up working very well together. For a few days at least sharing the same sense of witty cynicism, desire for strong drink and the willingness to both make sacrifices for academics and criticize the weak in our field. My room-mate and another kid from the group hung out in our suite drinking until the wee hours. Agreeing on 90% of everything, carefully listening on the remaining 10%.

The following evening we all went out to eat and drank 3.2% beer. Made jokes at each other,increasingly as though we had known each other a long time. My introversion peeled off as I began to really understand these others. The entire situation affirming that I am now studying what I should . Interacting with people that represent the only people I've met that have a # of books read-to-age ratio as myself. Occasionally railing on the stupidity of modern politics and religion together.



My readings went well. The poetry reading accompanied by a fair amount of conversation and questions. Me briefly defending hip-hop. My fiction reading, in my opinion and that of a few others in attendance, was the best of my session (so, as compared to 4 other stories) and came as a refreshing surprise. I felt much more natural than I have ever reading in front of a group. With the support of new friends.


I'm proud of Boise State as well. We were the second best-represented school at the conference. Likewise, in each session with a BSU student I found we (if not making the single best presentation) were often irreverent, thought-provoking and bracingly honest. We attended without professors and began to develop a reputation by the time we left. Students from other schools gathered around to see us off.

The entire thing was incredibly satisfying. I got to present work, and listen to the work of contemporaries. I feel much more established within the English department at BSU, and I have made friends that I will be hanging out with from time to time. A seminal moment in the Boise experience up until now.

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