Lauren,
I've been trying to be a writer as long as I
can remember. Bursts of bad poetry, endless study of concepts like
anapests and chiasmus, trisagion at the feet of Jane Austen and
eucharist at the altar of William Blake. I almost made it this year.
I
started a NaNoWriMo novel, one of those mindless sprints where you
hammer out words as fast as you can for a month, and maybe more
importantly, I quit my job and took stock of what I wanted my new
identity to be. I think men always have an unhealthy prepossession with
defining their identities by their profession; having given up the
title of "military dude," I got to look for a new self, a better self. I
wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to be a writer. And it was
time to embrace that.
But it's hard, and it's
dangerously introverted. I'm an unusual intellectual, in that I find
pro wrestling to be a form of art actually worth watching, and I envy
the artists. One of the awesome things about that mode of performing is
that you know, instantly and unambiguously, whether you're delivering
the goods. If you clobber your opponent and the crowd pops -- gasping,
screaming, booing, crying, whatever -- you know you did it right.
Writing is the exact opposite; if you've delivered the goods, you have
to keep on delivering until you've spent weeks, months, maybe years, and
you'll never know whether it was good till someone's read the whole
product. Monstrous.
I made it three-quarters of the
way through this damn book, and I know exactly how I want it to finish;
everything's done but the actual writing part. Probably another eight
thousand words (and then one eternity of editing and revising, but that
hardly counts). And I've run into a roadblock. Motivation sapped,
confidence eroded, will to live entirely undercut. I bet you know how
this feels. I hope you know how this feels... no, on second thought, I
hope you don't. It's not great. But I fear it's a natural part of
writing.
So Kimberly came to the rescue. She
encouraged me to write, not just the book, but anything -- facebook
posts, blog entries, e-mails, anything. And it has helped; I'm not
dreading the keyboard anymore, and I think I was almost ready to pick
the cross back up and try to finish the damn thing, but I was still
dreading it. And then she did something amazing, because she always
knows what I need, especially when I don't. She ordered The Smell of Good Mud.
I
got it today while she was asleep, and I opened the envelope, first
surprised, then delighted, then devouring. I sank my teeth into the
first pages, sure that I would read it cover to cover before I let the
mossy green cover out of my hands. I got as far as "Opening."
"dirty, flawed, and glistening."
That's
what I needed. It's what I've needed for months, and I never knew, but
Kim always knows. Thank you. Thank you for writing it; thank you for
knowing us; thank you for sharing your magic with us. I better get to
work.
--del
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
That stupid dress...
Everyone in the
twitterverse is all a-twitter about this ridiculous photo of a dress.
Leaving behind the mindless chirping for a moment (which we shall try
not to sound too condescending about, because God knows I spent half the
morning talking with my cow-orkers about that stupid dress, too), I'd
like to examine the phenomenon for a deeper narrative. It shouldn't
take but about a quarter second to find one... ahh, there it is.
The first article I read about the dress was on Gawker, a website I avoid (because, honestly, I don't think those people would enjoy reading the things I write about, either. They're fine, for what they are, but I don't think I'm one of them, and that's fine, too). But what struck me was how very angry they were about the dress. The headline, I think I am quoting accurately here, is "What color is this fucking dress anyway??" The article went on to question how some fucktards were calling it white and gold, when any idiot can see it's clearly blue and black, and WTF is wrong with these sonsabitches anyway, and what is the deal with this mofo dress?
(The deal with the mofo dress, by the way, is obviously that it's a terrible picture, overexposed and badly backlit. Whether the actual subject of the picture was originally black and blue, gold and white, or polkadotted and plaid is near impossible to tell, probably even in the original picture.)
But what's really interesting about the picture to me is that, in the current media environment, I probably saw something different from what you saw. I've actually seen it about six times now, and it looked different every time, because the one way I haven't seen it is the only way I would have been able to a hundred years ago -- printed in a newspaper or a magazine.
I saw it in a dark room and in a well-lit office, under fluorescent lights, incandescent lights, and natural light streaming in through a window. I saw it on two different laptops, two different cell phones, and three different desktop monitors -- all with different resolutions and all with brightness settings at different places. I saw it on facepage a few times, of course, and I saw it on Wired's website, which has an interesting CSS setting so that, when you mouseover an image, it raises the brightness level.
What I'm saying is, I have no idea what the photographer saw when he took it, and the variations of color, brightness, resolution, and even the angles at which I was looking at the monitor when I saw it mean that I never will know. I've seen the image "with my own eyes" a dozen times -- and it's never looked the same twice. And yes, at least twice, it's looked blue and black to me, just for a second.
The deeper narrative here is how frustrating it is to communicate with someone when you've somehow been fooled into thinking you've had a common experience. The internet was supposed to bring us closer, and in a lot of ways it has -- the "global village" is absolutely a thing; I'm able to read things that someone anywhere in the world and most places in outer space wrote within minutes after they've written it. It's a wonderful world for communicating. But our experiences, our backgrounds and environments, are still as different as they ever were.
I'm super rich -- like, ridiculously wealthy. In comparison with probably 5.5 billion people on this planet, I have more material advantages and less concern about being materially secure in my future than they ever will; in comparison with the billions who have lived throughout history, I'm living in another world from most of them just because I can say the following sentence: "I have no fear of ever starving to death or dying from exposure to the elements." Think how many centuries passed where virtually no man living could have said that sentence. But even for today, even for my nation, even for my culture and skin color, I'm fairly well off. I have to work forty-plus hours a week -- but I don't have to work so often that I have to give up blogging, for instance, or seeing my kids.
I can write this blog post and it can be read by anyone with an internet connection within minutes, and I can write it well enough and literately enough that it builds an empathy with people. But I don't share those experiences -- I can't sympathize with so many people; my privileges lie between us. I've never been afraid to walk in a city alone at night. I've never feared a policeman pulling me over. I've never wondered how I'd feed my children. I've never had to decide if I should sleep with my boss or look for a new job.
People on the internet get angry in their fights about values pretty often, because they forget these things -- you're not arguing with who share your environment or your background; you just share access to the same internet right now. And you have to use it not to shout down other positions but to learn about them. #Blacklivesmatter, #Yesallwomen, #Bostonstrong -- they're all hashtags that represent things that are foreign to me. The choice that confronts me, each time, is either to reject it out of hand, ignoring the voices that are so foreign to me, or to try to sympathize with them, to learn their language.
Some bizarre deviant crazy people out there really do see a blue and black dress. The lesson of the dress photo is that you have a choice -- either reject them as bizarre deviant crazy people, or try to see a blue and black dress yourownself.
The first article I read about the dress was on Gawker, a website I avoid (because, honestly, I don't think those people would enjoy reading the things I write about, either. They're fine, for what they are, but I don't think I'm one of them, and that's fine, too). But what struck me was how very angry they were about the dress. The headline, I think I am quoting accurately here, is "What color is this fucking dress anyway??" The article went on to question how some fucktards were calling it white and gold, when any idiot can see it's clearly blue and black, and WTF is wrong with these sonsabitches anyway, and what is the deal with this mofo dress?
(The deal with the mofo dress, by the way, is obviously that it's a terrible picture, overexposed and badly backlit. Whether the actual subject of the picture was originally black and blue, gold and white, or polkadotted and plaid is near impossible to tell, probably even in the original picture.)
But what's really interesting about the picture to me is that, in the current media environment, I probably saw something different from what you saw. I've actually seen it about six times now, and it looked different every time, because the one way I haven't seen it is the only way I would have been able to a hundred years ago -- printed in a newspaper or a magazine.
I saw it in a dark room and in a well-lit office, under fluorescent lights, incandescent lights, and natural light streaming in through a window. I saw it on two different laptops, two different cell phones, and three different desktop monitors -- all with different resolutions and all with brightness settings at different places. I saw it on facepage a few times, of course, and I saw it on Wired's website, which has an interesting CSS setting so that, when you mouseover an image, it raises the brightness level.
What I'm saying is, I have no idea what the photographer saw when he took it, and the variations of color, brightness, resolution, and even the angles at which I was looking at the monitor when I saw it mean that I never will know. I've seen the image "with my own eyes" a dozen times -- and it's never looked the same twice. And yes, at least twice, it's looked blue and black to me, just for a second.
The deeper narrative here is how frustrating it is to communicate with someone when you've somehow been fooled into thinking you've had a common experience. The internet was supposed to bring us closer, and in a lot of ways it has -- the "global village" is absolutely a thing; I'm able to read things that someone anywhere in the world and most places in outer space wrote within minutes after they've written it. It's a wonderful world for communicating. But our experiences, our backgrounds and environments, are still as different as they ever were.
I'm super rich -- like, ridiculously wealthy. In comparison with probably 5.5 billion people on this planet, I have more material advantages and less concern about being materially secure in my future than they ever will; in comparison with the billions who have lived throughout history, I'm living in another world from most of them just because I can say the following sentence: "I have no fear of ever starving to death or dying from exposure to the elements." Think how many centuries passed where virtually no man living could have said that sentence. But even for today, even for my nation, even for my culture and skin color, I'm fairly well off. I have to work forty-plus hours a week -- but I don't have to work so often that I have to give up blogging, for instance, or seeing my kids.
I can write this blog post and it can be read by anyone with an internet connection within minutes, and I can write it well enough and literately enough that it builds an empathy with people. But I don't share those experiences -- I can't sympathize with so many people; my privileges lie between us. I've never been afraid to walk in a city alone at night. I've never feared a policeman pulling me over. I've never wondered how I'd feed my children. I've never had to decide if I should sleep with my boss or look for a new job.
People on the internet get angry in their fights about values pretty often, because they forget these things -- you're not arguing with who share your environment or your background; you just share access to the same internet right now. And you have to use it not to shout down other positions but to learn about them. #Blacklivesmatter, #Yesallwomen, #Bostonstrong -- they're all hashtags that represent things that are foreign to me. The choice that confronts me, each time, is either to reject it out of hand, ignoring the voices that are so foreign to me, or to try to sympathize with them, to learn their language.
Some bizarre deviant crazy people out there really do see a blue and black dress. The lesson of the dress photo is that you have a choice -- either reject them as bizarre deviant crazy people, or try to see a blue and black dress yourownself.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Rainy Day Women
I live near DC, and I tend to think of a lot of their local issues as my local issues. This works out pretty well for me, as they have some pretty exotic local issues -- the one they had today, for instance, had the potential to turn into a legit Constitutional crisis. It had conservatism versus liberalism, the ruling class versus the working class, some old white men versus a young black woman, and a bunch of people smoking pot. That's a pretty fun news day, in my book.
It all stems, of course, from one of the great social debates of our time at the beginning of the 21st century, which can be further generalized to one of the great social pursuits of all of human history -- namely, people would like to get chemically blitzed out of their minds, and governments tend to be wet blankets. At this point in history, alcohol and cigarettes are generally legal, whereas marijuana is generally not. In DC, there was a public referendum, and local law was passed saying that marijuana would be decriminalized.
Congress is, according to the Constitution, supposed to govern the District of Columbia, and sometimes they even do. More often, they defer to a set of rules in place establishing Home Rule, meaning that DC is allowed to govern itself as long as Congress doesn't notice and overrule them. In the case of a referendum like this, Congress has sixty days to quash the rule before it takes effect. The sixty-first day for the pot referendum was, as it happens, today.
Yesterday made it exciting -- a few Republican congresspersons wrote some threatening letters to Mayor Bowser, and maybe I was the only one who noticed that it was a few old white men that were threatening to throw 42-year-old black woman in jail if she didn't do what her masters told her, but even if the national press didn't report it that way, I'd be surprised if her constituents didn't see a racial component. I heard a guy on the radio (Marc Fisher, a local columnist for the Washington Post) say that this was our first chance to see if Muriel Bowser had a backbone. She's fairly newly-elected; maybe this was her first real test.
At any rate, she didn't back down. She and her staff set manageable rules and published a simple, memorable motto for the District's potheads: "Home grow, home use."
The third portion of the motto, the unwritten portion, seems like it's the loudest today: "Home rule." DC leans hard left, of course, a very liberal, very minority-heavy demographic, and it isn't a comfortable place for the conservative-majority Congress to throw its weight around. Today, they enforced local laws for the locals, defying their effective absentee landlords. Hard to think of anything more American than that.
Chalk up a victory for the little guys, for the local guys. And don't smoke pot, kids; it's more addictive than you think, and it's not great for your cardio system, your lungs, or your social life. If you're going to do it, bake cookies and share with your friends.
Actually, even if you're not going to do it -- baking cookies and sharing with your friends would be pretty cool this weekend, wouldn't it?
It all stems, of course, from one of the great social debates of our time at the beginning of the 21st century, which can be further generalized to one of the great social pursuits of all of human history -- namely, people would like to get chemically blitzed out of their minds, and governments tend to be wet blankets. At this point in history, alcohol and cigarettes are generally legal, whereas marijuana is generally not. In DC, there was a public referendum, and local law was passed saying that marijuana would be decriminalized.
Congress is, according to the Constitution, supposed to govern the District of Columbia, and sometimes they even do. More often, they defer to a set of rules in place establishing Home Rule, meaning that DC is allowed to govern itself as long as Congress doesn't notice and overrule them. In the case of a referendum like this, Congress has sixty days to quash the rule before it takes effect. The sixty-first day for the pot referendum was, as it happens, today.
Yesterday made it exciting -- a few Republican congresspersons wrote some threatening letters to Mayor Bowser, and maybe I was the only one who noticed that it was a few old white men that were threatening to throw 42-year-old black woman in jail if she didn't do what her masters told her, but even if the national press didn't report it that way, I'd be surprised if her constituents didn't see a racial component. I heard a guy on the radio (Marc Fisher, a local columnist for the Washington Post) say that this was our first chance to see if Muriel Bowser had a backbone. She's fairly newly-elected; maybe this was her first real test.
At any rate, she didn't back down. She and her staff set manageable rules and published a simple, memorable motto for the District's potheads: "Home grow, home use."
The third portion of the motto, the unwritten portion, seems like it's the loudest today: "Home rule." DC leans hard left, of course, a very liberal, very minority-heavy demographic, and it isn't a comfortable place for the conservative-majority Congress to throw its weight around. Today, they enforced local laws for the locals, defying their effective absentee landlords. Hard to think of anything more American than that.
Chalk up a victory for the little guys, for the local guys. And don't smoke pot, kids; it's more addictive than you think, and it's not great for your cardio system, your lungs, or your social life. If you're going to do it, bake cookies and share with your friends.
Actually, even if you're not going to do it -- baking cookies and sharing with your friends would be pretty cool this weekend, wouldn't it?
First post
The website Fark used to have an automatic filter on it -- whenever anyone posted the phrase "first post," the software would replace those words with "boobies." I find that I still do that instinctively in my own head, so I'm already starting this blog off in an inappropriate place.
Don't worry. It'll get worse.
Kimberly asked me to start blogging, and it's hard for me to turn down someone as persuasive as her. What she didn't do, of course, was tell me what she wanted me to blog about, or where I was going to find the extra 17 hours a day I need to be an active, reliable, habitual writer. She just said I should write every day. So, the natural and easy topic will be to complain about her, and I'll probably default to that whenever I run out of more pressing matters.
But, as it turns out, there's a lot of stuff in the world to write about, and I guess I can start off with some of those things before I get around to burying her. There's stuff to discuss in the news, in sports, in politics, in science, and even in my own writing. I'm working on two major writing projects right now, one a novel about suicide that is probably 80% done, the other a novel on wicked problems, which is about 0% done. Writing's hard for me. It's what I love, what I feel like I ought to be doing with my life, but it's also the ultimate test of attention deficits -- no matter how little there is in the world to distract you, you can always find something to do when you should be writing.
So my plan is to work on you, my dear blog, first thing in the morning before I get out of bed, before I get distracted. This will keep the entries fairly short, hopefully focused, and doubtlessly entirely incoherent, but they might be reliable, at least. Time will tell.
Don't worry. It'll get worse.
Kimberly asked me to start blogging, and it's hard for me to turn down someone as persuasive as her. What she didn't do, of course, was tell me what she wanted me to blog about, or where I was going to find the extra 17 hours a day I need to be an active, reliable, habitual writer. She just said I should write every day. So, the natural and easy topic will be to complain about her, and I'll probably default to that whenever I run out of more pressing matters.
But, as it turns out, there's a lot of stuff in the world to write about, and I guess I can start off with some of those things before I get around to burying her. There's stuff to discuss in the news, in sports, in politics, in science, and even in my own writing. I'm working on two major writing projects right now, one a novel about suicide that is probably 80% done, the other a novel on wicked problems, which is about 0% done. Writing's hard for me. It's what I love, what I feel like I ought to be doing with my life, but it's also the ultimate test of attention deficits -- no matter how little there is in the world to distract you, you can always find something to do when you should be writing.
So my plan is to work on you, my dear blog, first thing in the morning before I get out of bed, before I get distracted. This will keep the entries fairly short, hopefully focused, and doubtlessly entirely incoherent, but they might be reliable, at least. Time will tell.
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