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Originally posted: June 5, 2010
Superman was persuaded to hire an IT guy. "Why do I need email?" he asked. "I can see clear to the horizon. I can hear radio frequencies across the globe." But his mother Martha wanted to send him photos, and Lois was always looking for a decent Scrabble partner. Most compelling, the NSA had e...
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March 24, 2013
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February 10, 2013

After working so hard to find contentment, I'm scared now it'll bore me. Have I been aimed at the wrong thing all along?
What I think, lately, is that I should keep marching toward it, as planned, but pack a bag full of dynamite so I can explode it once I get there: I'll be the terrorist of Shangri-La.
We're hiking the Himalayas, me and the sherpa who keeps talking, incessantly, about Elizabeth Bennett. Pierre—the sherpa's name is Pierre, a transplant from Picardy—rattles on with his theory: that Elizabeth Bennett was the first modernist seeker. Her campaign to challenge the mores of her day, and her slow and reluctant seduction of Darcy, were the precursors to this very expedition that he and I are mounting across this glacier toward the lost city of Shangri-La.
"What about Thoreau?" I ask, not because I care for Thoreau, but just devil's advocate.
Pierre makes a poo-poo face in that French way. "Thoreau was a pompous ass-sitter."
We walk on, and he begins humming some sordid love song. Just my luck, halfway around the world, to get a sentimental pseudo-intellectual French sherpa instead of the normal kind.
His humming echoes back off the icy walls above us and I start thinking, not idly, about avalanches. I knew a man in the Alps, a former scout for the Nazis if you'll believe it, who retired under a fake name to Geneva, and we met there on a ski trip. The man had taken up a late-in-life interest in the study of avalanches—the interannual variability of seasonal snowpacks, their effect on the cryospheric reservoirs, that sort of thing. He knew avalanches like Eskimos know snow. But he got to know one a little too well, when it collapsed on top of him and buried him alive, avenging Jews everywhere.
"Just shut up about Liz Bennett already. It's a girl's book and I'm tired of hearing about it. You know how things get done in this world, Pierre? What two things power all of civilization? Pride and prejudice. So just shut up about Liz Bennett."
We climb a while in silence, watching the clouds of a coming storm. There's a thing the wind does when it hits the mountain ridge above the treelike: it whistles. It stirs up the snow in swirls, and they rise off the crest like ghosts. The whole mountain seems haunted.
"Are we there yet?" I ask, a childish sort of peace offering mainly to break the silence. Pierre looks at the ridge and then back at me. "I have a confession," he says in that froggy accent. "I don't know how to get to Shangri-La."
The wind howls and the ghosts dance. We're at 18,000 feet, give or take, with carefully rationed supplies of food, water, fuel, and oxygen, portioned out based on the precise distance between our base camp in Nepal and a destination that Pierre now claims may or may not exist.
Where are we going, then?
My mouth starts watering for the panang curry we ate in Kathmandu, after our plane landed, maybe the last best meal I'll ever have.
"In my defense," he says sheepishly, "no one knows how to get to Shangri-La. I needed your money. For my daughter's hairlip. It's very treatable with surgery. She'll live a normal life now, thanks to you."
I consider jamming a stick of dynamite down Pierre's throat, but then I remember the avalanches. "I'm glad she'll be alright," I tell him.
Then I set off up the mountain.
"Where are you going?" he calls out after me.
"Same as before. I'm going to Shangri-La. It can't be far now."
My crampons in the ice are like a raspy heartbeat. The wind picks up and I can barely make out Pierre's tiny French voice. "There's nothing up there!"
But he's wrong. There is something up there, over the ridge, and I'm going to find it. When I do, I've got a bag full of dynamite and a decision to make.
"I'm not gonna write you a love song," I sing, as I disappear into the snow.
January 24, 2013

If you could hear sound in space, you'd hear the groaning of metal, creaking, popping, uneasy expanding at its bolts and seams each time the Sun's unbridled heat makes its way around its temporary daily eclipse of the Earth, the metal beginning to stretch and bend as its temperature changes, suddenly, from arid, frigid, airless cold to its opposite: searing burning irradiated heat. If you could hear sound in space, you might hear radiation screaming. Energy makes sound, but not in space. Space is silent.
There's a small crew of astronauts inside the metal can called Bratstvo, "Brotherhood." The craft is Russian, but there are no Russians inside. They take six-month shifts, and on this shift, there's a Swede and an Australian and an American, and for the fist time in Bratsvo's four-year history, the official language inside the can is English.
Though the three of them have only been in space a few weeks, they've lived together, more or less, for the past six years, every day training, sometimes in the old converted Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily base in St. Petersburg they use for mission control, sometimes in a deep-sea tank in the Swedish waters of the Baltic Sea. The astronauts were chosen partly for their complementary skills — "A scientist, a doctor, and an engineer walk into a space station…" — but mostly because they can stand one other's company without driving each other nuts. They're a quiet, kind, hard-working set.
They each have their own duties: a mix of maintenance, science experiments, and plain old chores. They keep a chart, like roommates, that tells them whose turn it is to cook, whose turn it is to clean, and though they've come to understand the Swede is their most gifted microwave chef, and the Aussie is a bit of mess, at least for an astronaut, still, they share these chores as equally as they can.
Today is different. They've put aside their tasks, at least the dispensable ones, so they can watch CNN and Al Jazeera. You can watch CNN and Al Jazeera from space. You can watch almost all television from space. The astronauts have a radio channel open to mission control, and they're receiving incoming calls from their various governments, too. But they can't get a clear understanding of what's happening. Pakistan struck first, or maybe India did, though there are reports that the initial launch may have come from somewhere in the South China Sea — from a submarine. What they know for sure, what's indisputable, what they've seen with their own eyes, is there were twenty-four blasts across Asia, mostly focused in the Indian Subcontinent, but a few spreading into China. There were ten sudden minutes of nuclear explosions lighting up a corner of the globe, and they saw it all.
Nuclear explosions, as you might guess, look beautiful from space.
The clouds of dust that rose up into the stratosphere changed very quickly the picture of Earth from space. The familiar blue orb was suddenly watercolor smudged, burnt sienna.
Every nation and every person on Earth is on high alert, except maybe a remote few who don't yet know what's happening. But the remotest people of all, drifting 350 kilometers above the planet aboard the Bratstvo, see it more clearly than anyone. The three astronauts watch it all unfold on their monitors and in their window, while cries of alarm go up on the news stations: it's happening. The United States, then China, then Russia, while making public pleas for calm, launch their stockpiles into the sky. Each one strikes, they claim, preemptively, at the other. The astronauts behold the longest hour mankind has ever made. From space, it looks like fireworks, like a switchboard, like a blanket crackling with static electricity in the dark, like the sparking neurons of a giant brain.
And then it's quiet. There is no radio. There is no CNN. There is no Al Jazeera. A blanket of rust-colored air rises up and blocks the view from space, and while those below suffer their fear and mortality, some instantly and some slowly, these three in space watch from above, no way out, no way down, nowhere to go, counting the days before starvation, before power failure, before orbital tugs pull them back toward the home they'll never see again.
January 21, 2013
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January 4, 2013
My contribution to "Arbitrary Haiku Day" goes like this:
My dog can write a
better haiku than this while
sucking on a bone.
It's supposed to be, I don't know, zen.
a geographic and spiritual guide to life in the big city...
The Complete and True History of Christopher DeWan, by Christopher DeWan
a geographic and spiritual guide to life in the big city...
The Complete and True History of Christopher DeWan, by Christopher DeWan
a geographic and spiritual guide to life in the big city...
a geographic n spiritual guyd 2 lyf n D big CT...
4 6306r4ph1c 4nd 5p1r17u4| 6u1d3 70 |1f3 1n 7h3 b16 c17y
una guía geográfica y espiritual a la vida en la ciudad grande...
un guide géographique et spirituel de la vie dans la grande ville...
een geografische en geestelijke gids voor het leven in de grote stad...
ein geographischer und geistiger Führer zum Leben in der grossen Stadt...
对于生活在大城市的地理和精神指南...
away eographicgay andway iritualspay uidegay otay ifelay inway
ethay igbay itycay...
a blog like no other...
rhetorical tonic...
aphorisms for the digital age...
I shall gather my flowers and present them--O! to whom...?
the decline and fall of the roman à clef...
helping you climb mountains of media...
textual origami...
it's about life and stuff...
the monkeys are at the gate...
minor metaphysical quagmires...
thoughtful and wistful and strange, oh my!...
tower of song...
you are what you tweet...
humanist geek...
it's my party, I can cloy if I want to...
where 'weird' is the highest compliment...
guardian of the zeitgeist...
cognitive egology...
mediating the media...
the greatest thing since sliced cheese...
filled with the joy of love, i gave up sadness...
featuring liberal use of the first-person singular subjective pronoun...
designated diver...
samurai worrier...
humanist geek...
In fabula veritas...
invisible to the naked eye...
why chromosome...
hyperbolic and hyperbolicker...
lyrical and romantic, beautiful and strange...
home of the pithy maxim...
beautiful, sad, and smiling...
two hundred pounds of pith...
thanks for reading...
to be continued...
happily ever after...
non-Euclidean psychology...
fine artisanal suffering since 1971...
a collection of delicate quandries...
fragrant and hot Marxism...
cultural assayist...
pretty, witty, wiseass...
your dashboard to the universe...
patently peripatetic...
Internet legend...
naked underneath...
foreign contaminant...
seeking truth through verbiage...
Internet mystic...
guileful...
Baudrillard is the bomb...
when I say "I", sometimes I mean someone else...
liberal artist...
like laser rejuvenation for the soul...
aphorisms about neologisms...
teller of tall tales...
seeking truth through fiction...
monitoring internal processes...
home of the half-baked bread...
unreluctant antihero...
am I not fascinating?...
monkey wrencher...
comprehensibility, truth, appropriateness and sincerity...
handsome, ruthless and stupid...
sophomoric sophist...
life, liberty and the pursuit of media...
knows a few things about a few things...
el camino unreal
poetic futurist...
silence, perfections, mysteries...
landscapes of the floating world...
fictioneer...
inventor of the Internet...
phrasologist...
Borges's wisecracking, sardonic son...
already it is dark...
we ♥ xml...
warranty void unless assembled by an authorized dealer...
needs an editor...
if all else fails...
100 views of Ego...
loves. labors. lost...
journal of my reverberations
a deep, uncanny mine of souls...
hope-monger...
reluctant and recalcitrant, but not redundant...
confessions of a dangling mind...
digital archeologists will pick through it and understand...
internet hero...
enjoy your stay...
smarter and more unfocused than ever!...
strawberries, cherries, and a monkey's kiss in spring...
dingos ate my maybe...
new ideas, coming soon...
mixed media, dimensions site-specific...
five by five...
sometimes capricious, sometimes capacious, sometimes carapacious...
if you like words, you came to the right place...
sec fluctuat nec mergitur...
erratic magician of the Wu-Tang Clan...
chronic ironic...
staking out the boundary between bathetic and pathetic...
tengo mucho duende...
quintessentially postmodern...
proof of scientific materialism
looking for love in all the wrong times...
where everything is an allegory for something...
we are lost, but we are not gone...
inhuman, relentless, unstoppable...
amuse-bouche...
sexy dumpling...
not too hot. not too cold. just right.
is the orignial Urban Sherpa: he has a Sherpa jacket to prove it...
No lifeguard on duty. Swim at your own risk...
call of the Wilde...
palisade of pith...
a bit mental...
this is what idle hands made...
I'm just not that into me...
I'm not as thoughtful as I think I am...
i wish i had another hobby...
disestablishmentarianist...
great bathroom reading...
microscopically divine...
stories and curios...
my kung fu is gentle but strong...
is the original Urban Sherpa: he has fridge magnets to prove it...
trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, thrifty, brave, clean and irreverent...
cautiously optimistic...
mid-career introspective retrospective...
little doses of strangeness to liven up your day...
i've got a ph.d in horribleness...
lost in time like tears in the rain...
really, it's all about the little windows...
pessimist of the intellect, optimist of the will...
I kinda crack myself up...
a blog by Allen Smithee...
urban is this blog's middle name...
like a clock-face without hands...
Cogito, ergo doleo...
home grown...
desperately seeking serendipity...
a bargain at the price
on metaphysics and melancholia...
no cussing, no horseplay, no alcohol...
where the human being and fish can coexist peacefully...
professonal driver on closed course...
any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely intentional...
meta-melancholy
Ça ne fait rien...
fortune and glory...
the revolution will be digitized...
helps fight cavities by strengthening teeth...
events, setbacks, annoyances...
warning: contents may contain traces of hyperbole...
poor misunderstood beloved Byronic boy...
read between the subtext...
nice limbo you have here...
where every week is Shark Week
changling child...
Don't worry: I won't off myself till I at least have a book deal...
hasn't lost the wanderlust -- just the wandering...
little peeks into little windows...
reluctant socialite...
hey, let's be careful out there...
We may have reached a critical desalinization threshold...
where profundity falls like overripe fruit...
kiss me, you're beautiful, these are truly the last days!...
Vescere bracis meis...
is a strange old hermit who lives out beyond the dune sea...
transcendental idealist...
is feeling lethargic...
meeting every midlife crisis halfway...
tweet this
a righteous fellow...
your map through the minefield...
"Jeepers crumpets, who could that be...?"
your map through the minefield of modern living
no man is an isthmus...
an affable unreachable fellow...
can't tell the baby from the bathwater...
in the neighborhood and feeling daffy...
is an American cultural critic who prefers mostly to write about his belly button...
like the boy next door, if the boy next door spent a lot of time alone in the basement...
large with largesse...
frack you!
providing metaphors for better living...
is shrinking...
for president...
anecdotal evidence...
90% of household dust is human skin, and this blog is the other 10%...
rebuffering stream...
give us this day our daily blog...
brought to you by the Interweb...
Mission Accomplished!
unmonetized...
a blog you can believe in...
why me...?
touch-sensitive...
ours is not to do and die; ours is but to reason why...
Unrepentant purists can stick to Ralph Lauren and Gucci...
technosexual...
staying the course...
warrior-poet...
bottled at the source...
would rather be blogging...
one thousand and thirteen tales from urban bohemia...
sodium free...
yumm-o
para-site...
rated M for mature...
one apostasy after another...
shiny...
wiseass...
disaster area...
Hit the deck, Mordicai!...
repent now...
tastes like chicken...
if you act now, these words are free!
cleverer than thou...
rub my belly and make a wish...
lighting candles, not cursing darknesses...
long pole in the tent...
literally, metaphorically...
if ingested, induce vomiting...
laconic, not so much...
free beer tomorrow!
straight / forward
all part of this nutritious breakfast...
or, the evening yellowness in the west...
neo-journalist...
voted off the island...
60 crayons short of a full set...
repository of me...
now accepting donations...
winding road ahead...
where Left is Right and Right is Wrong...
that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers are irresistibly drained...
filled with the joy of love, I gave up the sadness...
mortgage-backed, rated AAA...
100% organic...
water-soluable
unplugged...
something for everyone...
numinous...
defying the laws of gravitas...
so many tropes, it's downright tropical...
preternaturally pretentious precious precocious pompous...
now you see it, now you don't...
not running for re-election...
wide-stanced...
since you asked...
enjoy neat, or on the rocks...
where every day is laundry day...
come here often...?
self-medicated...
I love you, too...
reporting live, from Utopia...
cyber-humanist
bloggering since 2004
how am I supposed to type with these bloody knuckles...?
it's not easy being me...
can you hear me now...?
cuidado piso mujado...
pimp my blog...
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy..."
nitwit! blubber! oddment! tweak!...
would-be latter-day Proust...
oh, no, the ennui is winning...!
sharp and full-bodied, with nutty undertones...
desperately seeking serendipity...
love in the time of post-modernism...
nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Costume...
premium artisanal blogging since 2003...
exegete of life...
cyberpunk!...
never will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villany...
featuring autoschadenfreude...
facing the pathos, head on...
random access memory...
where the ellipsis is the punctuation mark of choice...
asking eternal questions, like "Huh?"...
partly cloudy with a 20% chance of rain...
because you really need one more thing to read...
introspection r us...
you, there! yes, you!...
you have the right to remain silent...
fines doubled in work areas...
the intersection of progressive and quaint...
the intersection of solemn and carefree...
the intersection of inflections and innuendos...
do not use for more than 14 days unless directed by your physician...
blogging is so 2004...
imagining whirrled peas, and carrots...
coming soon to a city near you ... if you're near New York...
i'm not cool...
living la vida sola...
putting the "art" in "artifice"...
one love poem and twenty songs of despair...
undefeated in the post-season...
high in fiber, low in fat...
brought to you by the letter "I" and the color yellow...
it's so meta...
true confessions of another middle class white guy...
my kung fu is better than your kung fu...
it's the way of the future... it's the way of the future... it's the way of the future...
gratuitously verbose...
syndicated communist...
not brilliant, but not cancelled...
random...
is anybody out there...?
the director's cut...
more fun than a barrel of, well, you know...
a new gimmick each and every week month...
reply hazy, try again...
and the award goes to...
fair and balanced...
tastes great, less filling...
contains no hydrogenated oils...
Gesundheit...
home of the random tagline...
where next year is now...
o, negative...
mischief. mayhem. words...
I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar...
receding byline...
"aren't you a little old for an enfant terrible?"...
"aren't you a little old for a wunderkind?"...
"don't you do any real writing?"...
Slap mah fro!...
a heartbreaking work of staggering mediocrity...
more post-literary reading...
approval ratings over 32%...
where guacamole is king...
lacking discernable moral focus...
of all the blogs in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine...
triskaidekaphobic...
back, and to the left...
fair and balanced...
have blog, will travel...
now playing in stereo...
voluptuary logorrhea...
expect delays...
uncommodifiable...
inside the kayfabe...
Everything's Denver...
literary analysis of myself...
satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back...
unfungible...
membership has its privileges...
a geographic and spiritual guide to life in the big city...
The Complete and True History of Christopher DeWan, by Christopher DeWan