The Urban Sherpa

This is the Enemy

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:11:00 -0500

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 exact moment

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:11:00 -0500

I am capable of great things
but only in the morning
on sunny days
when it's not too warm
after I've had my coffee
and a mango
if I'm well-rested
and then only for a minute or two
by accident
usually at the exact moment
that I've misplaced my pen.

The Waitress

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:11:00 -0500

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.

Self-Expression is the New Entertainment

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:11:00 -0500

Sometimes people ask, "How come all these people want to write for free?" Right? Do you ever ask that question? How come people want to blog for free, or comment for free, or edit Wikipedia entries for free?

We need to understand here that self-expression, which has always been a big part of our lives, historically, is now bigger than ever. Self-expression is the new entertainment.

We used to never question that people would be sitting on a couch for seven hours watching bad TV. Nobody said, "Why are they doing that without anybody paying them?"

But we're still asking, "Why are people blogging?"

People want to express themselves.

- Arianna Huffington, "Publishing is Dead; Long Live Publishing!"

Down the Little Red Lane

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:11:00 -0500

Me and the cherry-red redhead
Out to paint the town red.
She's red-hot and I'm red-blooded and
She to me is like a red rag to a bull.
I spend every red cent to roll out the red carpet.
"Hey, babe, let's cut through the red tape
and go back to my place."
It's a real red letter day.

Philanderer's secret

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:11:00 -0500

“When I say 'I love you,' I'm not lying to any of you.

These news cycles

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:11:00 -0500

These news cycles are impossible. Someone here wants to run a story on Haiti. Specifically, she wants to run a story on text message donations to Haiti. Truth is, if you're covering technology, text message donation was the story to come out of this earthquake. (Deaths of tens of thousands, and the destruction of a civilization, don't unto themselves net much tech news: devastation has a way of rendering gadgets useless. Not to mention it makes you realize they're stupid.)

Anyway, the operative word, "was": this was a story, a few days ago, when it broke, but now, already, it's over, faster than you can say "tsunami warning system." I mean, the New York Times has covered it for Christ's sake. By the time they get there, it must be over.

"You got an angle?," I ask. Her story already is an angle, so now we're looking for an angle on an angle, because without it, the readers are just going back to Conan and Leno. She doesn't have an angle on the angle, so I kill the story. No reason to run it without an angle on the angle.

Whoever said "Life is a river" never worked in news. Life is a fucking class-six white-water rapid full of boulders, and the boulders don't love you one bit.

"What else you got? There must be something else. RFID tags on aid deliveries? The American SUV finally finds a possible use, more appropriate than soccer practice, in the rubble of Haiti? etc."

"A tech story on Haiti? They don't have roads. They don't have buildings. There's not even electricity."

"OK, OK, I can work with that. These aid workers, these reporters—how are they charging their batteries? Can you get me a solar story?"

Google, riding a wave of karmic good will after its "Fuck you" to China: what if Google buys Haiti? Sergey could build his very own Caribbean Utopia from scratch. God knows they've probably modeled it all out already, some SimCity / Google Earth mashup game. Idealistic freaks. That's a story.

God, I hate disasters. This job depends on writing about shopping, and human suffering takes all of the fun out of consumption. All that sobbing on Fox News makes my job impossible. You want something visceral? Go see Avatar at the IMAX. It'll shake your seat. That's visceral.

"We're still going with the original cover for February," she asks. "Right?"

"Hells yeah we are. Can't let one little earthquake get in the way of the biggest news of our nascent decade. Hells yeah we're going with the Apple tablet cover in February."

and wait... and wait... and wait...

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:11:00 -0500

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into some other one.

Lemons

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:11:00 -0500

“When God gives you lemons, throw them as hard as you can at His head.

Beauty

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:11:00 -0500

beauty. Noun. The look of an enviable future.

The Right Punchline

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:11:00 -0500

(Try again?)

You Are What You Eat

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:11:00 -0500

I'm in my parents' home. We're cooking a holiday dinner made up of some version of the foods I ate growing up, which no longer have anything to do with the foods I eat today. "You are what you eat," they say, and I wonder if that means I have nothing in common with the boy I once was, who grew up here eating pasta and roast chicken and canned vegetables. "You are what you eat," and now I eat self-righteous, prissy foods, and I don't know how to talk to the people from my home town, except about the weird things I eat.

For instance, right now I'm drinking a gluten-free beer. There's some school of nutritious thinking that says people, and in particular people of European descent, aren't all that well equipped to digest the proteins in wheat. For 100,000 years, we didn't eat wheat, and then for 3,000 years we did, and now we put wheat in everything. But our bodies are still essentially the bodies of the foraging cavemen from 100,000 years ago, so eating all of this wheat causes ... problems. To get around these problems, I've stopped eating wheat—a primary ingredient in beer. So, if I want to "grab a beer," it now has to be a gluten-free one.

"What are you drinking?"

"Ah, it's a.... It's called a 'Redbridge'...." (I'd just as soon not admit I'm drinking a special-needs beverage, so I refer to it by name—but answering like that feels disingenuous, like telling someone you went to school in "Boston" to avoid saying "Harvard.")

"Never heard of it. Any good?"

"It's alright...."

This is why my conversations never seem to go anywhere.

"Never heard of it."

"Yeah, well.... It's alright."

"You're not from around here."

That was quick. Every conversation I ever have arrives at this point sooner or later, but this was faster than usual.

The confusing thing is, I actually am from around here.

"No, I'm not from around here."

It's nice, around here. It's very pleasant—trees and rivers and rolling hills and deer. I like visiting. But it's never quite been for me.

"So, where you from?"

He's hit on the crux of it now. Nowhere's ever quite been for me.

I tell him the name of some city where I used to live, and we talk about it for a while. Yes, it's nice there. Yes, I'm a bit of a fan of that sports team. No, I missed that game.

"Take care," he says as I leave.

"I'll see you," I answer in reply. But I won't see him. Even in the incidental conversation, I get it wrong.

Thanks for sharing

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:11:00 -0500

Standing at the microphone
reading my poem to the
room of expectant eyes
feels exactly like AA: they
thank me for sharing, and I
never forgive them.

i MeAnT $1000

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:11:00 -0500

Metamorphosis

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:11:00 -0500

Or, Destroying the Dream of my Own Translation

"Kafka's sentences often deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of sentences in German that require that the participle be positioned at the end of the sentence; in the above sentence, the equivalent of 'changed' is the final word, 'verwandelt'. Such constructions are not replicable in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text." - from Wikipedia

First, start with a phrase:

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

Use a computer to translate it into Japanese, and then back again:

One morning, one Gregor Samsa suffered from a dream, woke up in bed converted to their destructive himself.

Do it again:

One morning, one suffering from a dream Gregor Samsa, destruction of the bed, woke up in the translation itself.

And again:

Gregor Samsa dream, from the destruction of the bed one morning, suffering a single one, I woke up in the translation itself.

You've come here, to language, to literature, looking for meaning. It's why anyone comes to anything: to make sense and order of otherwise meaningless circumstance.

1 bed one morning, Gregor Samsa one dream of one suffering from the destruction of one, I woke up in the translation itself.

Trying to pin things down with words, you've discovered that meaning moves. It evolves. It flies. it flits. It flutters.

1 bed one morning, Gregor Samsa in my own translation from the burden of 1111111 I woke up one single dream was destroyed.

Instead of meaning, you've stumbled upon the destruction of meaning; and in that, you begin to find the true meaning of meaning: that it's made by looking for it.

I, 1111111, morning, 1111111, destroying the dream of my own translation from the bed, woke the burden of Gregor Samsa.

Destroying the dream of my own translation.

New

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:11:00 -0500

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.

The Zen of Social Media

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:11:00 -0500

Twitter is like a koan: it is so obviously pointless, till one day, a gong goes off, and it's the explanation for everything.

Facebook is like Twitter, but without the gong. Facebook is the sound of two hands clapping.

The Strongest Man in the World, pt. 1

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:11:00 -0500

The world's strongest man wants to make omelette, but every time he tries to crack an egg, he crushes it, so he gets shell in the frying pan and yolk all over the floor. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man owes $125 in library fines because he keeps tearing out pages. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man hits a home run every time he has an at-bat, so baseball isn't any fun for him. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man once ate a fork by accident. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man can't put on a condom without tearing it. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man has never forgiven himself for the accident with his puppy when he was a boy. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man is tired of being called "Ox," "Bull," "Hoss" and "Big Guy." (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man wants to give you a kiss, but he won't because he's scared of hurting you. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

The world's strongest man worries that no one will love him for his mind. (Sometimes it's not easy being the world's strongest man.)

Egg

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:11:00 -0500

egg. Noun. A delivery device for cheese. See also: bread, french fries.

Epiphany of the Shopping Mall, pt. 1

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:11:00 -0500

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.

Escape is Everything

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:11:00 -0500

The escape is everything. The car with the top down, and a tornado's worth of wind in the back seat, and our hair is crazy in it. We dangle our arms outside the open windows and the wind tosses them like skinny kites. We're shouting and screaming and singing and laughing, and the wind and the car engine are both roaring angry gods. Everything we ever knew is in the rear view mirror, getting smaller, and the road in front of us is infinity miles long; and we've got a full tank of gas.

That New Flatware

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:11:00 -0500

Where I work, they recently bought new flatware, to supplement the dwindling supply in our kitchen. The new set is tinny and disappointing, and I go to some pain to avoid using it. By "some pain," I mean I prefer using (in order) the old set, chopsticks, disposable plastic sporks, my fingers, or your fingers, before I'll reach for any of the new utensils.

I like to believe I do this because the old ones are so much better than the new ones (so, because I am a snob) rather than because the new ones are new (and so, because I'm afraid of change).

But it's so hard to know ourselves...

Houseplants (pt. 2)

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:11:00 -0500

The plants don't seem to want to grow. I water them and give them sunlight, and every now and then, I re-pot them in fresh soil, but in the way that one changes the tablecloth and the place mats—for seasonal variety, and out of habit rather than out of need.

The plants, for their part, do not wither, and they do not complain. But they do not grow.

What is required to make a plant grow?

Like pets, do plants come to resemble their masters?

My Life

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:11:00 -0500

I always want to write, and then I don't write because I'm hungry, and I eat instead, and then after I've eaten, I don't want to write because I'm full, so I sleep instead; and my life, then, is made up of mostly eating and sleeping and wanting to write and not writing.

The Falconer Cannot Hear the Falcon

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:11:00 -0500

"Are we going to be forever hostage to the U.S. Congress?" - Bernarditas Muller, negotiator at this week's international conference on climate change, in Copenhagen

I wonder if most people, at most moments in history, look at news headlines and see in them the end of their own civilization.

It comes from all sides, it seems. The very day that NASA released a statement assuring that the world would not end in 2012 (since when does science purport to predict the future?), every other headline seems to indicate the opposite—if not the end of the world, then at least the end of U.S. dominion over it: the economy is in ruins (beholden to the Chinese and the Saudis, through unsustainable consumption, a failure of manufacturing, a terminus of natural resources, and a vicious cycle of debt). Sea levels are on the rise; ice caps are melting; the world's climate has already changed irreparably. Hate and fear have replaced reason and compassion: the social divides that keep us from coming together to resolve these issues seem to get more vast.

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer."

Yet the biggest threat to our society is that it will be forgotten altogether—society being made up, by definition, of people, who seem to be more and more forgotten each day. The biggest threat to our society is that corporate interests will entirely supersede the needs of the citizenry; and in this decade, this has already been realized. Every political agenda, every key issue inside Washington, is now entirely in the pocket of profiteering corporations.

Of this, there can no longer be any doubt.

Your elected officials do not have your best interest at heart. They are not working to make you and your fellow Americans happier or healthier. They to work to ensure their own re-election, by securing the interests of the companies that pay for those elections.

Your nation is not only for sale; it is bought, sold, packaged, and shipped.

That is the thesis here: our politicians are indecent and corrupt without compunction. They are trying to hurt us; and they are succeeding.

It is difficult to cite a single example, when every article in every newspaper seems to assert the point. Any topic—war? health care? climate change?—will do as an example.

Start with a more trivial one, though: Net Neutrality—the proposition that Internet service providers should allow equal access to all of the available content on the web, rather than offer preferential treatment to some (i.e., their own) content. The ISPs—the gatekeepers of the Internet (who, after all, take public bandwidth and then sell it to the public)—should do nothing to inhibit the competition and free market economy within that space; content creators should not be able to pay an ISP to suppress the content of other creators.

The only people who should oppose this idea aren't people at all: they are the telecommunication companies, who hope to be able to sell off prominent corners of the Internet as if they were beachfront property. John McCain—ostensibly a "free market" kind of guy—opposes free market on the Internet, opposes Net Neutrality. John McCain is also the number one recipient of donations from the telecom industry and its lobbyists for the past three years. John McCain is bought, sold, packaged, and shipped.

Tick through the laundry list of contentious issues in Washington to see the pattern: Joe Liebermann today announced that he would join a Republican filibuster against health care reform. (A filibuster, you'll remember, is where a minority party temporarily shuts down government, in order to circumvent democracy and refuse the will of the people.) Liebermann claims he's worried about "increasing the national debt and putting more of a burden on taxpayers," which, if it's true, is noble and patriotic, and he should vote in favor of the health care reform: it's been structured so as not to cost taxpayers a dime, and actually reduce the costs on Medicare. The only people who should oppose this aren't people at all: they are the industry already getting rich off of overpriced insurance premiums.

But Joe Liebermann opposes it, Joe Liebermann, the independent senator from Connecticut—headquarters of (wait for it...) the insurance industry. (When you, the uninsured mother of four, need prescription medication to stay alive, remember that this is the man who didn't want you to have it, because he needed someone to finance his re-election.)

Which brings us, finally, to climate change. Dispute the science of global warming, if you like (notwithstanding the fact that scientists do not dispute the science of it); even then, still, it is impossible to dispute that the world in general, and the U.S. economy in particular, would be better off if it were liberated from dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. It is impossible now to be concerned with the U.S. economy or with its national security, and not be concerned with its oil consumption.

But Senator Jim Inhofe opposes the curbing of oil consumption: in fact, he disputes climate change altogether, and has compared the environmental movement to the Third Reich.

Inhofe's home state of Oklahoma is the nation's second-largest producer of natural gas, and fifth-largest producer of crude oil. Want to guess who is paying for his political campaigns?

When the leaders in a democracy no longer serve the needs of their constituents, but rather are motivated to answer corporate interests, then it is no longer a democracy. The falconer has forgotten the falcon; the center cannot hold. It is no longer democracy.

Getting Your Aquarium Above Water

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:11:00 -0500

Today, while visiting your aquarium, we invented a few ways to improve it, which we'd like to share with you, in the hopes that they might help enhance your finances in these troubled times.

1. Monkeys

Your aquarium was sadly lacking in monkeys. As you know, monkeys make everything more entertaining, because they're funny, and they look like people. Consider having them take tickets or serve food in the cafeteria, or create an act involving a miniature bicycle, a tightrope, and the piranha tank.

2. Fish food

The average aquarium visitor is familiar with salmon, shrimp, scallops, lobster, and cod—in short, the fish we eat. Your aquarium has very few of these fish. We think that the aquarium would be a richer experience if people had deeper familiarity with the fishes you keep; therefore, we recommend opening a cafe that serves bite-sized samples of all of your fish. Remember, everything is good with the right dipping sauce.

3. Death Match

Once per week, pit a giant squid against a sperm whale and let them fight to the death. Gambling revenue will allow you to fund more programs for children.

4. Paint a beluga

Your whales are cute, smart, and friendly. But let's face it: they're white. Allowing children to finger-paint the belugas will give them hands-on experience with the wonderful creatures—literally!

5. SCUBA

Thanks to the effects of global warming, we'll soon all be living under water. Help people get used to the idea by allowing us to SCUBA our way through your fish tanks, and take our chances with the predators of the deep.

6. Dolphin Quiz Show

Everyone knows that dolphins are smart—but how smart? Pit a dolphin against a human for a special-edition underwater quiz show: "Mackerels to Mackerels."

7. Gift shop

Open a gift shop that sells overpriced plastic trinkets shipped from third-world countries, in the hopes that hapless tourists will lose their judgment long enough to buy all of it. Oh, never mind. You're already doing that. Congratulations on your proactive thinking about aquarium financing.

Aspirin for Gangrene

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:11:00 -0500

You're new. You show up in town with a few things you stuffed into a bag. They're not essential or valuable or even all that well-planned; they're just the things you happened to bring. You arrive for no particular reason: everyone has to live somewhere; and maybe it doesn't matter where, as much as people think.

This place will do.

You walk a lot, somewhat relentlessly. You could take busses or trains, but you don't, because you don't want to miss anything. You want to see everything. You want to learn to distinguish that corner from that corner from that corner; and you do. You've only been in town a few days and already you see the sense of it.

You learn your way around. You learn the bus routes and the ways people talk, and why it's better to buy your coffee from here and your lunch from over there. You find an apartment and a way to make a living, so you go back and forth, carving out a new routine, slowly, like a river carves a canyon. There are people you begin to see regularly, co-workers, neighbors; and you see some of them regularly enough that you call them friends.

You learn some shortcuts, some efficiencies. Direct routes. The routine cuts a little deeper.

But unrest is a whisper in your ear, or maybe that's ambition, and you find another, better job; and like two points plotted on a graph, you can now connect your two jobs and call the line a "career path." You find yourself out at restaurants and bars for the second or third time, remembering the first time nostalgically. People sometimes ask you for directions on the street, and you're happy to oblige.

You meet still more people, and some of them become new friends, till you've accumulated more than a few, enough that you actually sometimes lose track. You wonder, sometimes, whatever happened to that one, that old friend? You haven't talked to them in a while.

The freshness wears off. The grocery store, the pharmacy, once sources of small pleasurable novelties—cereals and toothpastes you'd never seen, medicines with unfamiliar labels—these things are the new normal. You cease to notice the quirks on your walks—the gaslights and the cobblestone streets, the woman who hawks newspapers a little too aggressively, the fountains and sculptures and scenery, the man who needs one dollar to ride the bus.

You're discontent; you're not clear why. You think maybe it's because the color of the light in your apartment is wrong, tinged with too much yellow. You find another job, but you're not certain that it's a better one. It offers you a fresh commute in the morning, and new people with whom to small-talk. You wonder if it's like aspirin for gangrene. You sigh deeply. You take longer walks home, if home is the word you mean. The routine cuts deeper, a habitual insulation that it's easy to confuse for continuity, direction, meaning. Nothing is actually bad, but still, you find yourself packing a bag, a small one, filled with arbitrary things, and thinking of other places. It doesn't matter where. Any place will do. Somewhere new.

Map of the Great Explorer

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:11:00 -0500

After the empire had continued to grow, year on year, till the Emperor himself was no longer clear of its boundaries, let alone what was contained therein, he commissioned a renowned explorer to create a definitive map of the empire's contents. Fully aware of the scale of the undertaking, the Emperor insisted that no expense be spared: the explorer was afforded a generous budget and three full years to gather supplies, resources and crew before beginning his great expedition.

Pronouncement of the adventure was met with much fanfare: the people excitedly greeted the explorer as their newest hero—he who would stake her flag in the farthest reaches of the world, would act as her ambassador while collecting its finest trophies, would calculate and define its exact glory for all posterity. The empire was truly great, and the explorer was both an effect and a new cause of her greatness. Yet he was veteran of many adventures, and took the weight of his great task with seasoned, methodical assurance.

Before setting out on his monumental voyage, he requisitioned a great collection of maps, journals and logs of those who had traversed the empire before him. Seeking to build on their knowledge while avoiding their mistakes, he splayed their charts across his oaken table, and studied them long into the night. He copied the maps longhand so as to learn every curve of every continent; he combed them for discrepancies, charting out every known and every unknown, till he could imagine, clear in his mind and without benefit of the map, exactly each route and its possible pitfalls.

He examined too the roads and paths. As he was a traveler by trade, he understood that every road exists to connect two things which would otherwise be isolated; thus, he studied each point of departure, and each destination. He requisitioned more books—tax records, local laws and customs, the ledgers of commerce—till he began to understand the roads as a great circulatory system, the arteries of the empire, and he could imagine the flow of goods that coursed through them like the empire's blood.

And now the great explorer saw that trade is always the result of appetite, and that a map is a map of needs, pulsing to and fro, town to town and state to state. What is missing from here is sought from there. A road without people is not a road. He began to see in his ledgers longing and loss and love: he saw in them villages built from hope and villages decimated by famine and disease; saw cities leveled by earthquakes and war, then rebuilt; saw babies born, lovers wed, parents buried. He saw caravans trekking mountain roads to relieve the suffering of faraway people; saw caravans avoiding those same roads for higher profit elsewhere. From his map, he began to hear songs in a thousand languages, tales of small glories and great pains. His map had grown into an almanac that charted people's aspirations as if they were weather—here temperate, here stormy—and he saw them pass in seasons.

A road without people is not a road, so at the explorer's bidding, his agents brought him books of history, and literature, and poetry, and he read them without pause, till his great sailor's eyes began to fail; and when this happened, then his agents brought him the poets themselves, from all corners of the empire, and in the explorer's study, they regaled him with their tales of faraway lands.

But poets have a way of romanticizing things, especially when those things are far away; so the explorer sent for others, too—fishermen, farmers, whole families; he sought out soldiers and merchants and pilgrims, holy men and criminals, too, and brought them all together under his roof, and asked for each of their stories; and he listened carefully, and sometimes they would cry together, and often they would laugh, and usually come to some understanding; and then the explorer thanked them for their time, and closed his failing eyes till he could see it all clearly, and made some adjustment to his map.

At the end of the three years, the explorer was called before the Emperor. The budget for the great expedition had been exhausted, and not a single ship had sailed. By now, everyone had seen or heard tales of the parade of constant human revelry, long nights of singing and storytelling at the explorer's home. The patriotic people, having once felt so much pride in the explorer's impending journey, now felt betrayed, and in their anger and disappointment, they accused him of fraud and treason.

The explorer unfurled the map before the Emperor, a map which, by now, resembled no mass of land or expanse of sea, marked no towns, showed no roads or riverways; but which, from various angles, reflected the face of every one of the Emperor's subjects, and charted out all of their possible futures, their dreams and losses, all possible contentments and disappointments and joys, to scale. It was a map which excluded nothing, so preferred no single path over another; had no boundaries, no borders; and which would take a lifetime to explore.

Wanderlust

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:11:00 -0500

Wears on the sole [sic].

Tomorrow, pt. 3

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:11:00 -0500

"Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."—Martin Luther King

In many ways, it was better when Bush was president. Being a progressive was easier: it was fueled with anger and righteousness—rightness—and the genuine need to get "their" guy out of office, before he did any more lasting harm.

A champion rose on the left, beautiful and wise: he spoke with the tongue of angels and he inspired us to put aside our despair. "Hope," he said. We had a vague memory of the feeling, but we wondered aloud if it was still possible. In the face of so much, can we still make the world a better place?

"Yes we can," our champion counseled. He saw this better world already, clearly, as if it were a place he'd already visited. He described it to us:

Where there was war, there will be peace. Where there was lawlessness, there will be respect. Where there was sickness and suffering amongst the poor, there will be care and compassion. Where there was torture inflicted, there will be swift justice. And where the voice of the people has been drowned out by the gold of the oligarchs, there will be democracy.

Inspired by these promises, we lifted him onto our shoulders and carried him to victory.

Now it's "our" guy in office. The gold continues to flow to the oligarchs; the prisoners are still nameless in foreign prisons while their torturers are free; there are still executive signing orders and redactions; and each passing day, the sick continue to languish. There is no peace.

Where there was anger, there will be anger again. But where there was hope—only hopelessness.

Now, our champion seems to wonder aloud if, in the face of so much, we can still make the world a better place. Now, we must lift him again on our shoulders, and counsel him:

Yes we can.