I like to sleep with music playing – I used to be able to.Years ago, 1998 or so, I woke up in the middle of the night with the radio on and some random local classical show playing. They had decided to do something a little different and play some music out of their usual set of selections. I heard this thing… it seemed to enter my head in my half-dream state. The only words I remembered the next day were “Sultan Drops.” These were the early days of the internet, but I was able to do a search on “Sultan Drops” and came up with a CD from Amon Tobin. I’ve been a fan ever since.
Guys, I’m fucking sick of this. I’m almost 20 and haven’t been able to score a better job than a fucking cook at a local fast food joint. What makes it worse is that I live in a small town so business is pretty limited, and where I work is the only place that’ll hire high school graduates. I’d get the hell out of this town if I could actually drive too, but I’ve failed every damn test I’ve ever taken. I’m socially awkward, even my only other co-worker fucking hates my guts. I have repressed lust for one of my best friends too; she’s athletic, smart and a gorgeous southern bell. I love her. You know what it’s like; I’ve been friend zoned real hard. She’s my only real friend, besides this one kid, who I’m pretty sure is only hanging around me because he is mentally challenged. I guess he’s the only one that can tolerate me.
And what makes this all fucking worse is that I live in a fucking pineapple under the sea.
I was talking to Nick and Lee about digital technology, history, and advancement, trying not to be so much of an old fart – “When I was a kid we had to walk fifty miles to school through twenty feet of blowing snow….”.
They were messing with their IPhones and imagining what the state of digital electronics would be in ten, twenty years from now; when the IPhone will be as clunky and obsolete as a hand-cranked telephone. I talked a bit about when I was young – back then you were not allowed to own your own phone – you rented it from the phone company. They were usually hard-wired into the wall (when I was in college, our city of Lawrence, Kansas, was a pilot program for the now-ubiquitous cube taps – it seemed revolutionary [which it was, more than we imagined at the time]) and very, very few folks had more than one phone in the house.
The kids said that the smartphone was the most important digital invention in their lifetime (so far) and that it had changed the way they lived. They are right – the fact that you are now able to tap into the far-flung digital word from any spot (pretty much) on the planet at any time. They were especially adamant about being able to access the web at a moment’s notice is revolutionary – not only communications, but information, maps, social networks…. it really is amazing… here in this, the best of all possible worlds.
I think of going to high school in Central America…. I felt so isolated and out of touch. If the Internet existed then (forget about smart phones) I would have been able to stay up with things…. A few years later – single, back in the US, it was so easy to lose contact. Social Media, a smart phone – what a difference that would have made. I think of all the time I spent searching for pay phones, trying to keep up.
I started thinking of the moments of digital history that affected me. Not so much the technology itself, but the split seconds, the flashes of epiphany, when I realized that things were changing irrevocably – that new worlds of possibility were opening up.
Nick and Lee really didn’t understand what I was getting at, but I still thought about it-
I remember when I first understood the power of using a computer with a graphical interface. I’d been using the early Windows programs and the mouse and all was cool – but I didn’t see what the big deal was. Until one day, sort of at random, I realized I could cut from one program and paste the data, pretty much intact, into a completely different application…. I could do complex calculations in a spreadsheet, for example, and simply cut the whole mess out and paste them into a word processing document without any extra typing. And do that again and again and again until the report was done in a tenth of the time it would have taken me before.
That was a moment when I knew things had changed.
I remember, long before that, before the Internet, even when I discovered digital bulletin boards. I’d stay up late and use my computer to dial in (remember the sounds of dialup and modem negotiation, the tones, the hissing – like Pavlov’s dogs my fingers would itch whenever I heard that sound) and trade ideas and information with total strangers over the phone lines. Once the Internet arrived a couple years later, I was ready for it – it seemed like a single world-wide bulletin board (which it was).
There are hundreds of such moments… all clear as a bell with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia.
One moment stands out for me, however. In and of itself, it wasn’t a big deal, but something about it…. It was the first time I saw a laser printer spit out a document. I had been working for years with Daisy Wheel Printers and then with the Dot Matrix ones. The loud buzzing of the print heads, whopping of the paper, and the crash of the carriage return were ingrained in my ears, brain, and soul.
Of course, I had heard of Laser Printers, but they were somehow an exotic vision of expense and extravagance, something that worthless peons like myself would never have access to. I was visiting another company, one significantly more advanced than mine, and working on some joint reports. When we finished, the little box started spitting out documents with nothing more than an insignificant little whir. That is what amazed me, the silence. You want it? Here it is. No big deal.
My jaw dropped.
Things had changed; things would never be the same again.
I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.
—-Montaigne
An economic crisis is nature’s revenge on those who make and those who accept false promises; it is a holocaust of lies when the dross is burned away and only what is real and true remains. Think of cotton candy melting and charring in the flame of a blowtorch; that is what is happening to the secure retirements that “caring” blue politicians and “committed” blue union leaders promised gullible state workers.
Constructing a city for the car alone shackles all to the burdens of car ownership and maintenance costs. In a city with a poverty rate of 23 percent and household transportation costs approaching 25 percent of income, fewer and fewer can afford to participate in the local economy, getting from point A to point B, without a miserable two-hour DART bus commute. Without choice in the transportation network, Sun Belt cities will go the way of the Rust Belt. A monoculture of transportation follows a monoculture of the very industry that produced it into collapse. Nobody thought Detroit would collapse when it was dubbed the Paris of the West. Paris, however, is alive and well. And so is bicycling in that world-class city.
When I was riding down the Cottonwood Trail to the White Rock Creek Trail, there was a little neighborhood I wanted to visit on my bike. It’s called the Urban Reserve, and it’s one street lined with custom homes “designed by a select group of regionally and nationally recognized architects.”,
Dallas is such an ugly city… both naturally (it is flat as a pancake, and far from the coast) and man-made (despite the great architecture downtown, most of the metroplex are cookie-cutter suburban developments thrown thoughtlessly across the prairie). So it’s pretty cool to see somebody doing something like this.
I discovered this spot driving around when Nick played basketball at a private school next to the Urban Reserve. The southern end of the street has a little strip of concrete that connects to the White Rock Creek Trail.
Some of the homes have water as a design feature. Unfortunately, that doesn't work well with the horrible drought conditions. If Frank Lloyd Wright did the work, it could be called "Stagnentwater." Architecture humor.
Since I found it, I’ve been trying to get Lee to go with me down there and look at the homes. He’s studying architecture at Tulane and I thought he’d be interested in something like that in his own city. Despite my best wheedling and pleading, he never was able to carve out enough time to go with me, and he’s back at school, so I’m pedaling around by myself.
Not all the planned and designed homes are built yet. Do you want to live in the "See-Through House"?
How about the "X-acto House"?
The architecture is billed as “modern.” A lot of the homes are of the contemporary boxy style – Personally, I’d like to see more variety.
Now, why would people pay the extra money to live in a place like this?
See the little blue sign against the dark wall in front of the house in the picture above? Look closely.
Cool People Live Here
This is what is says. “Cool People Live Here. please do not disturb.” This is it, really, isn’t it? Buy one of these houses, and be one of the Cool People.
Would I like to do that? You bet your life. I’ve always wanted to be one of the Cool People. If I could afford one of these houses, I’d do it.
I have been around the block a few times – I have lived long enough to have ridden the economic roller coaster in its up and downs. I’ve been telling folks that the last few years have felt a lot like the Jimmy Carter “malaise” stagflation of 1981.
There are a lot of parallels, and everything fades in memory, especially the worst things, but man, this one is nasty. I keep meeting people, hearing things, and reading more and more about this sort of situation:
“I don’t think anybody realized you had to recreate yourself out of the box,” Wiedemer says, noting that she has a BS in Finance and a dozen years of experience in the financial services industry. “If I had it to do over I wouldn’t climb the ladder in corporate America… Whenever I was unemployed in the past it was never for more than a couple weeks.”
I added a long TED talk to my blog post on Douglas Adams. If you are a fan of him or of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, go take a look. Don’t forget your towel.
There have been a lot of theories about the cause(s) of the drastic drop in the crime rate over the last few decades. There is certainly more than one explanation. The popular book, Freakonomics, attributes a lot of the drop in crime to the rising abortion rate. Obviously, our increased prison population and more police on the street had a part.
One idea that I always had is the fact that lead was removed from gasoline at the time. This resulted in a dramatic reduction in lead levels, especially in young people, especially in urban areas. Elevated lead levels are associated with aggressive behavior and other mental problems.
I have been criticised for this view; someone told me, “Only a man would think of something like that,” which I thought was pretty idiotic. My personal response was, “Only a person with access to environmental lead data, who had done blood level testing in elevated lead exposure situations (after the Livingston Train Derailment in 1982), and who had done research into how elevated blood lead levels lead to changes in behavior, would think of something like that.”
Finally, I actually found an article that also mentions this theory:
There may also be a medical reason for the crime decline. For decades, doctors have known that children with lots of lead in their blood are much more likely to be aggressive, violent, and delinquent. In 1974, the Environmental Protection Agency required oil companies to stop putting lead in gasoline. At the same time, lead in paint was banned for any new home (though old buildings still have lead paint, which children can absorb). Tests have shown that the amount of lead in Americans’ blood fell by four-fifths between 1975 and 1991. A 2000 study by economist Rick Nevin suggested that the reduction in gasoline lead produced more than half of the decline in violent crime during the nineties. A later study by Nevin claimed that this also happened in other nations. Another economist, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, has made the same argument. (One oddity about this fascinating claim has yet to be explained: why the reduction related to lead-free blood included only violent crime, not property offenses.)
2. Schedule your writing as early as possible in the day. If you fear or dislike writing, then once it’s done, you experience a tremendous sense of relief that you have the rest of the day to do everything else you must do…without having to think about your writing.
3. Think ahead and plan backwards.
4. Work with deadlines.
5. There is no writing, only re-writing, Lamott (1994) says, “Get it down, so you can clean it up.” Shaw (1993) says, “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.” If it helps to motivate you, you do not need to write a final draft, or even a good draft. You write today what you must so that you can produce good writing when you edit.
6. Reward progress.
7. Motivate (and comfort) yourself with stories of other good writers (and how they suffer, too).
8. Read others’ acknowledgments.
9. And here’s another good motivational strategy: Donate $5 to your favorite U.S. presidential candidate’s opponent for each day you do not write.
Do you ever watch the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs?
I have had the experience of actually doing a job, at the exact location, that was on the show (it wasn’t a bad job at all – and it certainly wasn’t “dirty”).
Salt Mine – Outside
Yes, I used to work there.
At a quick glance – “Dirty Jobs” is just another cheapy, throwaway, cable pseudo-reality series that gives you a few chuckles and a shock or two – barely enough to keep your hand off of the remote control and certainly not enough to justify wasting that precious sliver of time that it takes to watch the thing.
But maybe there’s something else going on here. Maybe you can learn something.
Take a look at this TED talk (yes, all of it) – the host certainly has learned something
Did you think you would get a lecture from the Dirty Jobs guy on Anagnorisis and Peripeteia? With the added instructional lecture on how to bite off a pair of sheep balls?
I remember when we first thought about moving from Mesquite to Richardson. When was that? Seven years ago? I had found this little worn-lookng neighborhood while walking the Owens and Duck Creek trails down from the YMCA at Collins and Plano roads while Nick was in a swimming club there. It wasn’t long before we were looking at specific houses. I didn’t know much of anything about this area – so I drove and walked around the place a bit.
One question I had was if it was possible/easy to walk/ride a bike from the nearest DART station at Arapaho and Central to the neighborhood. By odometer, it was what? Two point six miles? That’s a bit long for a walk, but an easy bike ride. In measuring the route, I found a little restaurant that looked intriguing along the way. A big sign proclaimed Suma Veggie Cafe. It was nestled into a little cheap strip along Arapaho road. Next door was a Subway, then a nail salon, a few mysterious doors, and then the other end held a big, brassy Texas Bar-B-Que.
The Veggie Cafe on Arapaho in Richardson
Veggie Cafe on one end… Bar-B-Que on the other. Well, this strip had the bases covered. I figured I could walk or ride my bike home from the DART station and stop off and get something to eat halfway, take a break. Some days the Bar-B-Que would be in order, or sometimes I could get a sandwich….
But it was the Veggie Cafe that caught my eye. From the sunsetting street it seemed a bright expansive friendly place. I made a note to eat there as soon as I could.
It took seven years.
Today I puttered around the house and once my chores were at a good stopping point (they are never finished) I decided to go get something to eat at the Veggie Cafe. I have no idea why I decided to go there today, except that I’m tired of the same old stuff and am trying my best to think of something, anything new or a tiny bit different.
I checked a website and found they have a Vegan Buffet from eleven to three on Saturdays – that’s the ticket.
The place is smaller that I thought it was when viewed from the street. It is exactly half the size – the back wall is mirrored. Its décor is pretty much standard for family owned Asian restaurants in strip centers that are getting a bit long in the tooth.
One unique feature is a prime table near the front that has been given over to newspapers, a steel water-bottle, books, ledgers, cups of pens and scissors, notebooks, mail in several languages and the other usual flotsam and jetsam that a small business generates. I guess a place this small doesn’t sport an office for the paperwork – it’s odd to see it all piled up front. From reading reviews it appears there is often a grumpy owner at this spot – but he didn’t show today.
There is a huge portrait of the supreme master on the wall behind the register and a big gold smiling Buddha beside.
The buffet was fairly small, which I see as a good thing. A huge buffet, groaning under the weight of a hundred steam tables may look good, but you know that stuff has been out there a long time. I like a small selection of dishes, brought out fresh and continuously.
The humble interior. The buffet says All Vegan (click to enlarge)
I can’t really say the place was really good but… I really enjoyed it.
What did I eat? I have no idea. There was something with tofu, something with those little corns, some cabbage in some sort of a curry sauce, a stir fry with something very tasty and completely unidentifiable, oh, and some tempura vegetables – broccoli and something else.
Would you like it? I don’t know. Probably not. The other customers were very eclectic – a young skinny pierced couple, she had bright purple hair – when I arrived they were talking to another illustrated woman who was expounding upon the evil of foie gras. There were some families, a few small groups of various cultural background, and a strange quiet frumpy older man by himself with an odd look on his face (I guess that made two of us).
I thought of the difference between an odd neighborhood place like this and a focus grouped cookie cutter chain casual dining chain. The biggest difference is in the customers – though it’s hard to put your finger on the disparity. Like the restaurant itself, the customers were all a little quiet, a little ragged, more familiar than fashionable.
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
Out came this girl, dressed in a scarf and a sneeze,
she did a little dance that made me weak in the knees.
she danced just like her back had no bones.
while the band played a tune they called the Main Street Moan.
She smiled a smile the whole world could see.
and then She turned around, and looked staraight at me.
I must’ve jumped at least six feet in the air,
and when I came down, that girl wasn’t there.
Oh Sharon, what do you do to these men?
You know the same rowdy crowd that was here last night is back again.
Rick Perry has never lost an election; I’ve never won one. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the world. On the other hand, I’ve long been friends with Bill Clinton and George W., and Rick Perry and I, though at times bitter adversaries, have remained friends as well. It’s not always easy to maintain friendships with politicians. To paraphrase Charles Lamb, you have to work at it like some men toil after virtue.
I have been quoted as saying that when I die, I am to be cremated, and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair. Yet, simply put, Rick Perry and I are incapable of resisting each other’s charm.
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These days, of course, I would support Charlie Sheen over Obama. Obama has done for the economy what pantyhose did for foreplay. Obama has been perpetually behind the curve. If the issue of the day is jobs and the economy, Rick Perry is certainly the nuts-and-bolts kind of guy you want in there. Even though my pal and fellow Texan Paul Begala has pointed out that no self-respecting Mexican would sneak across the border for one of Rick Perry’s low-level jobs, the stats don’t entirely lie. Compared with the rest of the country, Texas is kicking major ass in terms of jobs and the economy, and Rick should get credit for that, just as Obama should get credit for saying “No comment” to the young people of the Iranian revolution.
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God talks to televangelists, football coaches, and people in mental hospitals. Why shouldn’t he talk to Rick Perry? In the spirit of Joseph Heller, I have a covenant with God. I leave him alone and he leaves me alone. If, however, I have a big problem, I ask God for the answer. He tells Rick Perry. And Rick tells me.
So would I support Rick Perry for president? Hell, yes! As the last nail that hasn’t been hammered down in this country, I agree with Rick that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats. While Obama is busy putting the hyphen between “anal” and “retentive” Rick will be rolling up his sleeves and getting to work.
A still, small voice within keeps telling me that Rick Perry’s best day may yet be ahead of him, and so too, hopefully, will be America’s.
When I was younger, I used to enjoy riding roller coasters – but I can barely watch this, let alone ride the thing. It’s interesting how they have worked to increase the terror factor – the part at 2:00 where they are hanging and then drop….. That spot boasts the world’s steepest drop, 121 degrees – well beyond vertical.
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
Always had a soft spot for optical illusions… this is a doozy.
“Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don’t you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can’t think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you’re supposed to read? Do you think every thing you’re supposed to think? Buy what you’re told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you’re alive. If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.”
I have been looking for a word. Sort of a noun, sort of an adjective.
There is this goal in my mind – a something – that I want to create. Something I want to bring into being out of the pure ether. I can’t see what it is but I can feel it – feel it all the time like a burr in a sandal. If I’m going to see it, I’ll have to name it. To name it I need a word.
When I started this quest I assumed there would be a word – one single perfect word – that would mean what I had in my mind, a one-to-one correspondence between this thought and the written language… but I have come to realize after a long period of time that what I was looking for doesn’t exist. There is no one word that fits the meaning I need. I have scoured the thesauri – crossed off the whole unabridged – googled the ungoogleable and come up empty.
But I haven’t given up. The quality I want to express is still there in my mind and if there isn’t a single word that will work… well, maybe a set of words, a series of syllables, a cluster of tokens that, taken together, will deliniate the space that I’m trying to define.
You see, I want to do something and I want to define the quality of what I want to do. The word “good” is a starting point… I want to do something that is “good.” But that’s not enough – what I want to define is more than “good” – more subtle than that. As a matter of fact, “Subtle” is a quality I want to include.
So I’ve been working on this….
Let’s start with Subtle and include the other words I’ve settled on:
Subtle
Sublime
Provocative
Exquisite
Elegant
Transcendent
This is what I have so far.
Some of these seem to be incompatible.
Subtle can’t be Provocative, can it?
Elegant and Transcendent?
But what I’m looking for isn’t a synonym for these words, but an unknown space that is, maybe, bracketed by them. So two opposites can define the limits – even opposites can have aspects in common and this commonality is what I seek. What can you define by the commonality of opposites? Something as Subtle as smoke, as Provocative as a kid that doesn’t know any better, as Sublime as a symphony, as Elegant as mathematics, as Exquisite as a Monet and as Transcendent as that what is left when we are all gone.
I want to create something like that. What it is, that doesn’t matter. As long as it is like that. Everything else is a waste of time.
Do you not understand what I’m writing about? Ok, fair enough. I’ll give you an example.
Time flies – it’s hard to believe it’s been that long.
After work, I drove down to Big Shucks on Mockingbird to meet the family and friends for dinner. We always love the place – great, unhealthy, cajun and fried food (I had an oyster po-boy – usually I get the Mexican Shrimp Cocktail, but not tonight) and we packed a bunch into the back room.
Nick and some friends laughing at the text messages some strange woman sent Lee.
After stuffing our faces, everyone came back to our house for further festivities. Lee and I then drove the revellers into old downtown Plano and dropped them off. They’ll call us when they need to be picked up – I think Lee will make two trips to bring everybody back.
I have to work tomorrow, so I’m messing around the house and will try to get some sleep – I’ll be the only one, I’m sure.
from her facebook page – HOLLYWOOD SAD CORE SUMMERTIME SADNESS DOPE SPECIAL THANKS TO Tim van den Hoff (vloedlicht.nl) and Andrew Livingston whose films inspired this video. Super-8 …..
10,000 Steps a Day – They gave out pedometers at work, I discovered I was walking about 12,000 steps a day during my workday alone.
Take a Picture a Day – Been there, done that.
Write a Novel (Nanowrimo) – Been there, done that.
How about a blog entry every day for a month… yeah, that sounds tough, not.
Then he gave a short list of examples of things to stop:
No TV
No sugar
No Twitter
No caffeine
I don’t find giving something up for 30 days to be so inspiring. If you want to give it up, give it up. If you only need to cut back, then cut back.
So, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. What can I do for thirty days that wouldn’t be too difficult, expensive, or time consuming, starting tomorrow. Let me think about it and go on to another TED lecture.
Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself
Interesting idea. I have always thought that telling everybody your goals gave you the advantage of using social shaming as a motivating force. Another thing to think about and come back to.
Don’t eat the marshmallow yet
The most important principle for success is the ability to delay gratification. No big surprise. Anyone that has spent a lot of time around teenagers knows how rare and important this is.
Of course, there is another factor that isn’t discussed. Even when I was a kid, I hated marshmallows. I would have hidden the thing to make them think I had eaten it so I didn’t have to deal with another one.
Life Lessons Through Tinkering
I spent an enormous amount of time as a child tinkering. My children never really did this at all. Does that make a difference? I don’t know.
My tinkering spaces (my office room and my half of the garage) are sorely neglected. They are cluttered and inefficient. I miss the tinkering. I have a handful of tinker projects half completed.
Can I put the lessons from all these talks together?
OK, here’s my plan. I’ll work some, every day, a few hours a day, for thirty days, on the half completed tinkering projects I have laying around.
What are they?
I’m not going to tell you. Keeping it a personal secret will help me get it done. I have two projects in mind, both rather small projects, I know I can get them done. The bigger projects, such as redoing my office room, I’ll put off for the next thirty days… or the thirty after that.
Thirty days or so from now I’ll write a couple blog entries on what my projects were. Come back and see.
What about the marshmallow? Well, in this case, delayed gratification isn’t really an issue, the doing is the gratification. Maybe I’ll reward myself in some small, extra way. I don’t know how – there is no extra money laying around…. I’ll have to think about it.
Bill Chance 