Conestoga Wagon 

(This story appears in the February 2013 issue of DOGZPLOT.)

The Communist Fairy Tale Manifesto, pt. 1 

Or, What I Like: Thoughts Toward an Essay

A year ago, in an effort to help cultivate more of the writing that I myself like to read, I sent out a call for fiction, and attached the following statements as a short manifesto:

1. We believe there are many ways of looking at the world, and you can see a lot by sometimes closing your eyes.
2. We believe the best ideas come out in unexpected ways.
3. We believe fairy tales are for grown-ups, who might not always be able to puzzle out the moral.
4. We believe the medium is a message, and we like the digital medium.
5. We believe in concision and negative space.
6. We believe a lot can be built with shoestrings.
7. And we believe that stories—even short ones—especially short ones—should leave us feeling transformed.

People did send stories. (Thanks!) But I also received one short, unexpected, hateful email from a stranger: four sentences of unsolicited vitriol which can be politely summed up by its final line, "Get a job!" I had a job, but apparently something in my bullet list struck a nerve, and made this man understand me to be lazy, wasteful, and anti-capitalist. Whether those things are true or not is beside the point. (They probably are true.) The point is, with precious few clues as to what set him off, I'd like to guess that he was lashing out at the term "fairy tale."

Nothing evokes childhood and its spendthrift squandering of time—time, the most precious of all adult commodities!—quite so quickly as the fairy tale. These are stories set in faraway times and places, starring princes and frogs and whole casts of characters whom we can never hope to be. These royals and freaks struggle in worlds that don't even share our own laws of physics: wolves speak, at least one parent is always deceased, and the prick of a needle might put you to sleep for years. The world is warped, causality is surreal, and a practical person could reasonably conclude that the morals of these stories must certainly be useless to us. The fairy tale is the most extravagant example of the uselessness of all fiction, and the uselessness of the time that we give to it.

Yet this talk of "use" and "commodities" speaks exactly to the fairy tale's real value. This, then, is a "Communist Fairy Tale Manifesto," because it proclaims that one function of these stories is to liberate you from the belief that your time must be well spent. When you read a fairy tale, your time is getting wasted, and you, the worker/shopper disappear; as a reader, you are transported, however briefly, into a place where the concerns of your job cease to exist, where nothing is being bought or sold, where shopping won't solve any problems, and where things are, in general, much too weird ever to be commodified.

Thus, the act of valuing a fairy tale is a radical act, because it expresses your independence from a capitalist dialectic (working/shopping) that defines so much of our everyday ("workaday") existence. Every time that I decide I "don't have time" for fiction, what I'm actually deciding is that it has too little "value," in the sense that it doesn't help me to get any of "my work" done (though "my work" is, in these cases, usually actually someone else's work). This habit strengthens the value of capitalism in my mind and on my time, and it weakens and devalues imagination—the one place we are most free.

The point of a fairy tale is to enable you and to train you to think fantastically, and expansively. It enables your humanity, and makes you a bigger, richer human being—arguably, I think, even more so than "getting a job."¹

---

1. I don't at all mean to limit the discussion of "fairy tales" to the Hans Christen Anderson and the Grimm Brothers: these stories are so entrenched and well-known that they may make it harder to think expansively: they are too canonical. But I do mean to include Garcia-Marquez, Isabel Allende, etc.; Milan Kundera; Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, etc.; Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, many of the writers associated with "slipstream", etc. etc. etc.... in short, I mean nearly all of the writers I read and like.^{2, 3}

2. The occasion for writing this not-quite-essay was a recent conversation with a friend regarding a playwright I much admire, Sarah Ruhl, and the common criticism that her work can be "twee." I disagree both that her work is "twee" and also that "twee" is, in itself, a criticism. Since none of my feelings on this particular subject made it into the above passage, I'd like to hope there will be a "Part Two"....

3. See also, "Mythic Proportions."

... and dreamt of becoming infinite 

“ Los Angeles is a city without boundaries, which ate the desert, cut down the Joshua tree and the May pole, and dreamt of becoming infinite.

- Mike Davis, City of Quartz

Pilgrimage to the Future Catastrophe

I lived in Los Angeles for seven years—long enough, no doubt, to have formed deep personal associations and memories of the place; yet, anymore, when I visit, it feels less like a reunion and more like a pilgrimage to pay homage to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (who once called the city "the finished form of the future catastrophe").

There are many things to love about Los Angeles, and many things to hate. Too few people understand that they are the same things. The garish excess, the social stratification, the semi-disposability of everything: this is American capitalist culture at its apex. From my home in New York City, I can see the high-rise towers of the great financial investment banks in downtown Manhattan, but the view from these steel pinnacles is reserved for a privileged few: New York may be the brain of American capitalism, but its body is surely in the archipelago of shopping malls that run from the Sherman Oaks Galleria all the way down to Rodeo Drive.

To live in Los Angeles is to consume, literally and metaphorically: every time I leave my home, I'll consume gasoline, to consume the miles between me and my destination; and once I've arrived at that destination, I've probably gone there to shop for something. This is not unique to Los Angeles. "All America," said Baudrillard, "is Disneyland." But Los Angeles was first: the first freeways, the first fast food chains, the first suburbs, the first exurbs, the first malls.

"As goes California, so goes the nation."

California is also home to the contemporary incarnation of the American Dream. Hard work is no longer required! Just a telegenic attitude, and the right hair. "Style" and "fashion" are always meant to describe a subculture of people who are in style and in fashion; and therefore imply the far-larger set of people who are excluded and left behind. And every part of the culture industry is founded on the idea that what you have now is inadequate, compared to what you might have tomorrow. Each new thing exists only long enough to be consumed by its children—next year's line of clothes, or cars, or smartphones, or pre-fab houses; next year's films, television pilots, and rising stars.

That's the dialectic of Los Angeles: its ephemera is its vitality. Everything is precipitous—at the edge of the continent, at the edge of fashion, at the edge of technology—and all of it is premised on an underlying implied destruction: some day an earthquake (again, literal and metaphoric) will carry all this into the sea.

Land of the Lost 

The Unexistential Desert Island

In Lost, a set of characters, each having learned to thrive in their own way in modern society as best they can1, is suddenly thrust into a radically new world, when their plane crashes on an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean.

If the show were a bit darker and a bit less fantastic2, this alone should have been enough drama to carry a TV series, without need of smoke monsters, hatches, time travel, or a nuclear explosion. How well would a spinal surgeon, a Lotto winner, a C-list rock star, and a Korean heiress thrive in the jungle, with nothing except the contents of some salvaged luggage3? Things would get ugly—and dramatic—pretty fast. If I were a betting man, all my money would be on Vincent the dog. (Photo, far right.)

This cutthroat Gilligan's Island would ask, first of all, this existential question: Who are you, when you're stripped of your context—when the skills you've honed over a lifetime are suddenly useless, when you can no longer take your identity from your job—and is that enough to survive? How much of what you do, and how you act, and what you believe, is circumstantial? In absence of society's structures, what are you?

By most measures, the passengers of Oceanic flight #815 are an exceptionally lucky bunch: they have among them a Boy Scoutish medical doctor, a cured paraplegic with a penchant for hunting boar, and an elite Iraqi soldier. Most times I fly, the plane is filled with people who can't even carry their own luggage without rolling it.

But moreover, the survivors of the crash are lucky because, through all their trials, their core values have remained intact. On Lost, no desert-island devolution of society ever happened: the doctor is still a doctor; the con man is still a con man, and the Lotto winner is still a lucky layabout. Thousands of miles from civilization and with no system of commerce, these people more or less elected to keep their day jobs—because without them, they (or we?) won't know who they are. And this would evoke existential questions that no television network is inclined to ask...4

---

1. Despite a societal bias to think otherwise, con artists and fugitives are also thriving within their particular circumstances: better to be the con artist than the conned; better to be running from the law than behind bars. "Thriving" is by definition circumstantial.

2. So, a bit more boring and a bit more like other TV.

3. Which, to be honest, would consist of nothing more useful than 3oz. bottles of hair product and cables for recharging now-bootless iPods.

4. We say we work to pay the bills, but it cuts both ways: we accrue bills because we work. Leisure is the dialectic flip-side of work, its antithesis: it's what we do when we're not working. So even our leisure time is actually defined by our work.

This is the Enemy 

The Real Dangers of Communism

Some warning signs that your government may have given over to Communism, or its less-understood cousin Socialism. If you detect any of the following, take up arms:

1. Roads
   If your roads were paid for with tax money and built by the government—they are socialist. In a perfect, free market world, each stretch of road would be a privately-owned toll road, and you'd move around it like it's a Monopoly board, paying each property owner as you go.


2. 911
   If your town allows you to place free 911 calls, then call 911 immediately to report Commies in your midst. If a private corporation isn't making money off of your emergency, then there truly is an emergency: the Reds have taken over.
   


3. Medicare
   "Are you now or have you ever been on Medicare?" This government program poses as necessary relief for the elderly, but any red-blooded American knows that if you get sick or injured, it's only logical that your employer should pay the bill—not the government. Medicare reveals the elderly to be what they truly are: Communist sychophants who are useless to the free market society.


4. Mortgages
   If you can't buy a house in cash, you shouldn't have a house. If you have a mortgage, it's because the government has intervened: they've incentivized it by offering tax breaks to you and to the banks. There is nothing free market about that. Keep big government out of your house! Pay for it in cash, and waive the tax break.


5. Marriage
   If you are married, you're a Leftie pinko. Again, the government has intervened against the free market by offering tax incentives to marry: they've got their big government hands on your wife! Also: people who marry are choosing a life where they share with one another, instead of selfishly hoarding. That's the definition of communism.


6. Public schools
   The only people who should be able to read and write are those who can pay for private education. Everyone else is a serf, and should stay that way. Educating the electorate is a luxury that should not be paid for by tax-payers. Instead, we should have a democracy run by illiterates, Tea Partiers, and Joe the Plumber.

It's not too late to save America. Act now!

The Waitress 

There's what you are, on the one hand; and on the other, there's what you think you can be.

No, let me put that another way: there is what you are, essentially, in your heart—the sum of all your capabilities; and on the other hand, there's the smaller set of what you've realized to date. There is You the Greater and You the Lesser. You whole, and you fractured.

Some people believe that you, the "real" you, is the lesser one—the tally of what you've achieved. "What do you do?," we ask each other at parties. "I'm a salesman," we answer, deftly swapping a verb of action with a verb of being.

Other people believe that you, the "real" you, is that farther-away idea: "I'm a waitress and an actress, but I also want to direct."

You snigger when she tells you this. "She's a dreamer," you think. "She's a cliché." (And these things, too, might be a part of who she "really" is.) But clichés are lazy shortcuts, a rubber-stamp version of the truth: the outline is correct and familiar, but the details are missing. The details are the essence. The details are the differentiators. In the mind of this waitress, what she wants to do is more significant than what she is doing. To know her is to know that she wants to direct. To know her is to know that she is a bundle of potentialities, and to know which potentialities.

[When robots can bring us coffee at restaurants, then we'll all be free to act and direct.]

[When we fall in love, is it not with a person's wants and with their potentialities?]

It is our dream that distinguishes us—the dream, and the degree to which we are willing to chase it: the degree to which we believe we are not the man sitting in the desk chair at the office, day after day after day. No. Rather, we are the brilliant burst of light, looming just on the other side of the horizon. We eagerly, lovingly chase ourselves, to find ourselves.

---

"There's What You Are On the One Hand," limited edition print by Jessica Doyle

New 

O, blank page. You are blanker lately than usual. I don't know what to do with you.

I got a stern talking-to from Amazon.com a few weeks ago, for not writing enough. Amazon, of all people. Amazon's not even people; it's an online megalith retailer; and it gave me a stern talking-to. Me! Would you believe? Don't they have more important things to do?

They said, in effect, they didn't care one way or the other about the quality of what I write here, but if they were going to continue distributing The Urban Sherpa to the Kindle (you can get this, for the low low price of $0.99 a month), then they were going to need more quantity.

"But Amazon," I replied. "I've been trying to go in the other direction. I was thinking I'd actually like things here to be a little better, a little more cared for."

No, they answered. None of that. No room for that. No time. It's more important for content to be new than for it to be good. Can't sell content that's old.

"A week old is old?"

So that's when it dawns on me that capitalism needs to erase history, because if we forget, then we need to buy replacements for all of the things we've forgotten. Then, further, it dawns on me that most of what I read is new, which is to say it's less than a week old, which is to say it exists in order to devalue the things that existed before, to push them farther out of my mind—which is to say, for the most part, it's all just writing about shopping.

So I need to decide what sort of writing I intend to do here, going forward...

Till then, I'd like to recommend that you try to enjoy some of the older posts. Take a look at the "Best Of," click through some of the tags, or just pull a few entries up at random. Every single one is guaranteed not to be new.

Epiphany of the Shopping Mall, pt. 1 

All people are aesthetes. In the absence of art (i.e., at the shopping mall), people flock to the only art that is left: branding and advertising.

Human nature compels us to seek out the highest forms expression, and the highest forms available to us are offered up by Adidas, Sony, and Coca Cola.

We consume with the appetite of the half-starved.

The Margarine Manifesto 

Part One: Counting My Blessings

In no particular order:

1. My apartment
2. My neighborhood
3. My city
4. My education
5. My quirk
6. My steady reliable income
7. My family
8. My friends

Part Two: Setting the Scene

I considered making toast for breakfast. Instead I ate half a chocolate bar and had four cups of coffee. I'm still in pajamas.

Part Three: Panic / First Response

In order:

• Sleep in
• Take a long shower
• Go for a walk
• Indulge long email threads with old friends
• Take the subway somewhere you've never been
• Read job listings in other career fields
• Flip through the dictionary, learn new words like feasance and outre
• Write a manifesto

Part Four: The Woods

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promissory notes to keep
And I have promissory notes to keep.

Part Five: Panic / Second Response

In no particular order:

• Take a class
• Get a dog
• Leave the city
• Leave the country
• Move to the country
• Enroll in grad school
• Get a houseboat
• Get an Airstream
• Get a horse
• Hike the back country
• Join the army
• Join the Peace Corp
• Join anything
• Start a magazine
• Start a novel
• Start a memoir
• Start a religion
• Finish something
• etc.

Part Six: Things That Sometimes Hold Me Back

In no particular order:

1. My apartment
2. My neighborhood
3. My city
4. My education
5. My quirk
6. My steady reliable income
7. My family
8. My friends

Part Seven: Capitalism

Capitalism is the system by which we (the capitalists) take whatever amount of initial wealth we are dealt (the capital), and then, by hook or crook, make our best effort to multiply this wealth through the opportunities afforded to us.

If one's wealth is zero, then no amount of opportunity will lead to more wealth: zero times anything is zero.

If one's opportunity is low, then no amount of initial wealth will lead to more wealth. Pursuing a poor opportunity (i.e., a multiplier < 1) may in fact lead to less wealth—even if it is the best opportunity available at the time.

The model is complicated by the fact that greater wealth leads to greater opportunity, and lesser wealth to lesser opportunity.

Part Eight: On Margarine

I considered making toast for breakfast. The making of toast presents a choice. One may:

1. apply butter to one's toast
2. apply margarine
3. leave one's toast as is

Butter is a bad choice, because it contains saturated animal fat, which leads to heart disease; and because it contains lactose, which is hard to digest.

Margarine is a bad choice, because it contains hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is high in cholesterol and is associated with cancer; and anyway, it tastes a little funny.

Dry toast is a bad choice, because it is not very satisfying, and one only eats breakfast once a day, so it should be satisfying.

Sometimes all of the choices are bad. Hence, I had half a chocolate bar.

Part Nine: Global Free Trade

The premise of global free trade is that, unfettered by local restrictions, we are free to choose from a wider set of capitalistic opportunities: if Country Y offer more opportunities to multiply one's wealth than Country X, logically one should pursue those opportunities with Country Y. One is "free" to "trade" loyalties and obligations, when presented with a better chance at greater wealth.

Thus, if one has the opportunity to flee a country, and leave the jurisdiction of one's massive debt, thereby breaking the promise to repay, for the sake of a fresh start, then this is simply holding with the premise of global free trade:

An outre solution: not submissive feasance; not irresponsible malfeasance; but legitimized non-feasance.

Part Ten: The Woods

In the deepest parts of the woods, there are no forking paths, because there are no paths. The eye looks at the spaces between the trees and, connecting them, imagines a path where there is none. We walk these imaginary paths, marching forward into the woods, unafraid, till something causes our faith to waiver; and then we wonder: Am I lost? Is this a path I'm on now? Or am I merely in the unconnected spaces between trees? Am I on a walk, or have I gone for a hike in the back country? This thing that I started, this thing that I am doing—is it something I can finish? Can I finish anything? When a path seems to fork, are any of the choices good ones? Or is there no path at all?

Magazine Stand 

The lowest form of capitalism is selling writing about shopping.

Charity, Chastity 

There's a man who came over to my table an hour ago to ask for money. He was well groomed; he had a nice watch and good teeth, and spoke gently. He claimed to have just been released from the hospital, and showed me his bracelet, though he didn't say what hospital or why he was there.

He touched me twice, softly, his fingertips brushing my arm while he spoke. And now, in retrospect, I'm furious. I hate him for touching me, because now, on account of those two touches, I won't be able to put him out of my mind1; and also because he'll probably be the only one to touch me today.2

---

1. I use the same trick myself, when I want to make an impression on a stranger. I do it consciously, manipulatively, and sincerely, too. But I hate having my own trick used against me.

2. I remind myself, like I might have reminded him if he were still around: we move to the city and surround ourselves with people, in order to be left alone.

On Punching the Clock 

or, Work, pt. 2

You say you assemble us here to work for you because we're smart. We're adaptive. We're hackers. We're raised on games. So you give us a set of rules—on tardiness, on non-disclosure, on whatever—you give us a set of rules and we're going to game them. We're going to learn your system till we know them better than you, and then we'll punch holes through it—partly because you say you want misfits, rebels and troublemakers—and partly just because that's what we do.

Precious Time  

I get it in my head that I need a watch.

I'm not sure where that idea comes from: I don't need a watch. How could I need a watch? No one needs a watch. There's a clock on my phone, a clock on my computer, a clock on the wall; clocks on the TV, on the microwave, on the coffee maker; clocks on the bell towers, on the subways cars, on the billboards. Everywhere I go, someone or something is telling me what time it is.

And most hours of most days, I don't particularly care what time it is.

So if I need a watch, that's not the reason.

But I can't get it out of my head: I need a watch.

* * *

The last watch I owned was a Mickey Mouse watch given to me by my parents when I was in six years old—a timepiece whose accuracy was only slightly compromised by the big, puffy, three-fingered gloves of the watch hands. My parents wisely understood that I was in first grade now; I had responsibilities; and that meant I needed to know what time it was. Bells rang, students shuffled through the halls, and for the first time in my life, I had appointments to keep: I was on someone else's schedule.

The watch, then, marked my rite of passage from childhood's boundless play time, to at least a miniaturized version of adulthood, the constraints of which were bound to force me onto someone else's schedule.

At some point, I lost the watch, and that was that.

I never was very good at keeping to other people's schedules.

* * *

They say time is money¹, and as I browse the expensive Swiss timepieces under this glass counter, I couldn't agree more: time, at least in this store, is a lot of money.

My desire for a watch comes and goes, but seems to return whenever I want a badge of adulthood. It's more of an amulet, then, than a timepiece—adornment to announce to the world, first of all, that I am a responsible adult who needs to keep precise track of time (in the case of this particular chronograph watch, precise to the tenth of a second); and secondly, that I am capable of arranging my finances in such a way that the purchase of a piece of finely-crafted Swiss jewelry is a completely reasonable, and not frivolous, expense (which is untrue).²

Adulthood: the paradox that if we work hard, we can reward ourselves with expensive things, like a nice watch: we work more in order to pay for it, and have less time, while wearing a water-resistant quartz timepiece on which to watch time tick away.^3,4

---

1. Certainly, those of us ever lucky enough to have an excess of one almost certainly have precious little of the other.

2. A few months ago, my life was full of too much adulthood, so I quit my job and adorned myself like a child.

3. Not unlike spending good money on an expensive trash can.

4. And again, the need to remind myself that simply not shopping, or not working, does not in and of itself constitute a critique of Late-Stage Capitalism.

Man of Leisure 

As I wind down my three+ months of "unstructured time"—a time that's been exhilarating and also, surprisingly, frustrating—I'm reminded of an essay from Jock Young's 1971 book, The Drugtakers.

I haven't spent the last three months sucking on a bong, and the drugs aren't what interest me in Young's essay. Young is a criminologist whose research focuses on class, and mostly the working class—and in this book, he's curious about the meaning behind drug use. Much of the essay is dedicated to "the nature of work and leisure in advanced industrial societies."

It's not enough that we are subsumed by our day-jobs, and forced to seek our unalienated identity only during leisure hours:

Whether it is the relatively simple alienation so characteristic of assembly line work in factories, or the highly sophisticated kind of alienation we find in the folk ways of higher occupations, one thing is clear: the disengagement of self from occupational role not only is more common than it once was but is also increasingly regarded as "proper". It is during leisure and through the expression of subterranean values that modern man seeks his identity. [my emphasis]

But also:

The world of leisure and the world of work are intimately related. The money earned by work is spent in one's leisure time... A man is justified in expressing subterranean [non-productive] values if, and only if, he has earned the right to do so by working hard and being productive. Pleasure can only be legitimately purchased by the credit card of work.

The values of capitalism (i.e., productivity, consumption) are so deeply entrenched in our society that leisure is simply the flip side of work, and it's hard even to know how to have fun without consuming something. ("Wanna meet for drinks? Go out to dinner? Catch a movie?")

And long gone (to childhood) are the days of pure simple unstructured play, outside of this capitalist dialectic of productivity and consumption.

So I'm looking forward to going back to work, because now finally, ironically, I'll also be able to have some fun.

The Idealist Versus the Progressive  

Are we voting with our hearts or with our heads?

The difference between the idealist and the progressive: the idealist is pursuing abstract principles of an imagined better world; the progressive is working step by step for change. The progressive works to create, one policy at a time, a world fit for the idealist to live in.

[Many on the left are picking their candidate based on one issue: the war. The war, as an issue, is a red herring. It's silly. There is no war. Fix what is broken—the sanctity of civil liberties and human rights, the mutual respect between nations, the economy—and let Bush's shameful, egomaniacal invasion of Iraq follow its natural course from that. If there was ever a time for easy answers ("Get the troops out now!"), now is not that time. Troop withdrawal solves what? Who cares who voted for the war? It is an obsolete footnote now in history.]

The question is whether Obama's idealism can spark the fire for sweeping progressive reform—is he tilting at windmills, or is he the "long-awaited champion" of the Democratic Party?—and whether Clinton's pragmatic furnace is the better engine for change.

Smudge Stick 

You're feeling a bit out of place for some reason, but not in a bad way. Now is a good time to sit back and think about what the future holds—and how you can shift the odds in your favor. (Pisces horoscope, week of November 26)

"Christopher is wondering what comes next."

So reads the status line of my new Facebook profile, which I'm staring at from the computer in what was, until a week ago, the home office I used to telecommute for a Boston-based Internet shop. But I worked my last day a week ago, and now I don't know what to call this room, or how to use it.

I came into this room to smudge it clean, figuratively if not literally. But after clearing my desk, I feel leaden, and I'm not sure how to proceed. Instead, I stare at the computer screen, looking for inspiration, and when it doesn't come, I switch back to Facebook to play a game of Scrabble. Welcome to the first day of the rest of my life.

O brave new world.

* * *

Over the course of the week, I watch the flow of my email inbox trickle almost to nothing. It's typical: after applying some significant effort toward removing myself from the world, then I feel disappointment to be so quickly and easily forgotten. When I'm surrounded by people and their expectations, I want to retreat to a hermitage; and once I've achieved it, once I'm safely inside a hermetic seal, then I miss being at the center of things, and wonder why I'm so alone.

* * *

Hermetic. 1. Pertaining to the Greek god, Hermes. 2. Relating to or dealing with occult science, esp. alchemy; magical; alchemical. hermetic art, philosophy, science: names for alchemy or chemistry. Also, unaffected by external influences, recondite.

Alchemy, the science of transformation, dedicated to turning lead to gold.

Another week has gone by. I feel leaden, and I'm not sure how to proceed. Instead, I stare at the computer screen, looking for inspiration, and when it doesn't come, I switch back to Facebook, and read another horoscope. Welcome to the first day of the rest of my life.

"Christopher is wondering what comes next."

---

Puer Aeternus 

or, the Adult Struggle With the Paradise of Childhood

There's a dormant neglected child inside me, wailing, beating on a drum, beating his way out. "You poor pollywog," this drummer boy calls me. "You piece of half-freak. You sad stuck-in-between, only partway misshapen. I am misshapen. I'm grotesque; I'm irresponsible; I'm disgusting; I'm selfish and careless and I cry and whine and shriek, and my shriek can shatter glass. And your world is glass and glass is made to be shattered...

"Keep me close to your heart (or I'll eat it)."

Ridiculous Ironic Dilemma 

Damn Wikipedia.

It started Sunday morning, trying to learn the historic origin of Father's Day. (More collect calls on this day than any other.)

It traveled, somehow, through John Banville (after being told, at three bookstores, "I've never heard of him." Don't you know, people, that there's no higher goal in life, there's nothing I want more, than to win the Booker Prize, like Banville?—though for me it's just plain impossible...)

It passed through Trazodone (who knew it conflicted with grapefruit juice?), through absinthe (not poisonous, after all...), through Erik Erikson (which stage is this one, Erik?, because I need to know...), before finally arriving—four hours later—at the same place it always seems to arrive:

Marxism.

Marx is the Kevin Bacon of Wikipedia.

Damn Wikipedia.

Now I'm caught up in the midst of a ridiculous ironic dilemma: I have to decide, before the registration deadline, whether to spend an exorbitant amount of money at America's most elite private university on a class on Marxism—because after many years of study at other expensive and elite schools (and many many visits to Wikipedia), I have to admit that I still don't understand what is meant by dialectical materialism.

[Knowledge of Marxism has absolutely no commodity-value and barely any use-value, and frankly, I suspect my motives in wanting to take the class, because I've never forgotten the graffiti in the men's room of New York's KGB Bar: "Communist girls are легко."]

The registration deadline is coming up. And if I could just manage to get off Wikipedia, I might even fill out the application...

Work 

n. nautical. to sail against the wind.

A co-worker asked me to lunch, and when I said "No thanks," she replied, "Why? Because there will be people there?"

Which made me like her even more than I already did.

But I still didn't eat lunch with her...

* * *

n. physics. force acting upon an object to cause displacement.

Someone at work just told me I'm "more blunt and less charming" than my usual
self today. When I told her to "Fuck off," three people turned around like there was about to be a fight.

Can't anyone take a joke?

* * *

n. fine arts. a creation, such as a song or a painting.

"Chris, what are you doodling?"

"Oh, it's nothing. It's ... a little duck."

"You mind paying attention to our meeting?"

Well, since you asked...

* * *

n. religion. a moral or righteous act or deed.

"The slavery of civil society is ostensibly the greatest freedom, because it appears to leave the individual perfectly independent. The individual considers as his own freedom the movement (no longer curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man) of his alienated life-elements, like property, industry, religion; in reality, this movement is the perfection of his slavery."

Note to Self: when you start quoting Marx in the office, it's probably time to call it a day...

The Simple Life 

Go to work.

Go home.

Go to work.

Go home.

Go to work.

Go home.

Go to work.

Go home.

Go to work.

Go home.

How was your week?

Like Coffee with Your Cream? 

It's Thursday and it's my third time to Starbucks in a week. I'm not the kind of person who goes to Starbucks. I'm not. And yet, I am, because here I am at Starbucks for the third time in a week.

Just to be clear, I am also not the kind of person who thinks that each Starbucks is a colonial outpost for a vast evil empire, that they propagate a conspiracy of over-caffeinated Illuminati, that they are the official coffee sponsor of the World Bank, or that they roast their beans in Hell.

I do think that Starbucks is a particularly ubiquitous example of how capitalism works in a so-called "free market" economy—which is to say, it is an example of how things are not fair, and often not even kind, in this world. (A pound of Starbucks' "Guatemala Antigua" coffee costs $10.15, which, coincidentally or not, is the average weekly income there.)

I can't deny that I find this disturbing. But I'm also not ready to blame Starbucks exclusively for the unfairness of the world, not without also implicating The Gap, Nike, all of the banks, and, in fact, all corporations—any company that exists to make money. Though unfairness keeps me from enjoying Starbucks coffee, it doesn't strictly keep me from buying or drinking it.

What puts me off Starbucks is this: through sheer marketing muscle (read: $$$), they have convinced the world that they are a good product rather than a mediocre one. They have, through conscious misrepresentation, actually altered our tastes, and given us an appetite for things we never wanted. They have lied to us, and made us like it.

Let me put this another way: Why is it impossible to get a small drink at Starbucks?

Before Starbucks, there was a general understanding between retailers and consumers that drinks tend to come in three sizes, and these three sizes could be fairly represented as "Small", "Medium" and "Large." Since the three sizes are relative to one another, the actual capacity of any particular cup (8oz or 44oz) can't alter the reality that, as long as there are three cups of three different sizes, there will always always be a Small, a Medium, and a Large. This fact is as fundamental as Goldilocks and The Three Bears.

At Starbucks, there is a lexicon that is now familiar to all of America, though it should be held up as alien and strange. There is no small; small is "Tall." Medium is "Grande." In no dictionary should these sets of words be held up as equal, yet every morning, across this country and the world, people violate their own common sense to speak and think in the way that Starbucks has taught them.

Well, it's just coffee, really. What's the harm? It's not as though the same marketing muscle has changed the way people think about other things—about "weapons of mass destruction" or "enemy combatants" or "freedom" or "torture" or "family values" or "liberals" or "no child left behind." Or "free market."

Then we'd need to worry, wouldn't we?

Would you like one lump, or two?

Automobiles, Bombs, and Movies! 

"Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.... It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop."

As our elections fall more and more into the domain of a "media ritual," how much they are governed by the same (market) forces described in Adorno / Horkheimer's conception of the "Culture Industry"...?

Discuss.