Thursday, March 30, 2006
Thursday, March 16, 2006
I usually find the A section of the Washington Post on the front seat of my car when I go to work in the morning. I made an agreement with certain night spirits that they would place the newspaper there if I made devotions to them. The paper wasn't there this morning, and I've contacted my spirit lawyer, but that's not my reason for writing this.
Without the newspaper, I felt unwell, so I asked my coworker if I could read the front page of The Baltimore Sun. He brings it in every day to do the puzzles and read the sports section. He handed me the A section, and it felt okay. It seemed like a real newspaper, felt like a real newspaper. I smelled it, and the smell was okay. I licked it, and it tasted fine. Comforted, I began reading, only to discover that I had been handed a cheap imitation of a newspaper, something like a Fischer Price stove set. It looked like it would work, but it didn't. Perhaps the CIA prepared it for me, as part of a plan to replace my office with a sophisticaed facimile while they searched the real one for terrorist suspects. I don't know. All I can say is that this newspaper had what looked to be articles about what, at first glance, looked to be significant news. Whenever I began reading them, however, they proved to be either minor stories about small-time issues in Maryland, or else badly written treatments of a random collection of world events. The former were almost unreadable, as they lacked coherence usually provided by background context, significant information about the actors involved, or an adequate and well-ordered description of the events being reported. The latter, the random collection of significant news, read like a summary of articles written for real newspapers, perhaps to be presented as a high school history class project. Sources were sparse, analysis was nonexistant, and the paragraphs might well have been the result of Microsoft Word's summary function.
I imagine that if I were to read this faux-newspaper every day, it wouldn't take too long for me to lose all memory of real news coverage. After a while, I would begin to lose my sense that anything important happens in the world; that my country's government is often accountable for major changes that affect real people; that this government has a two-party system fueled by debate between two sides of roughly equal strength; that things happenening in other countries aren't inexplicable and random events; that my own country's government studies these events and has a stake in them because the people of the country have a stake in them; that decisions of leaders in my government are often questionable and ought to be considered from many perspectives; that the changes in my own area are connected to the regional economy, which is part of the national economy, which is part of the world economy; that this sentence does not have to be indefinitely continued simply as an exercise in writing.
And indeed, the articles in this faux-newspaper seemed to be exactly that: exercises in writing. They give the impression that they exist only becasue the editor wanted his writers to generate a few articles about the events other newspapers were covering, in order to keep up the appearance that The Baltimore Sun has a staff devoted to activities other than publishing and revenue-generating.
What I can't figure out is why the CIA was able to replace every other aspect of my office perfectly, fumbling only on my newspaper. They're an information-gathering agency, aren't they? You'd think that they would excel at informing the public.
Without the newspaper, I felt unwell, so I asked my coworker if I could read the front page of The Baltimore Sun. He brings it in every day to do the puzzles and read the sports section. He handed me the A section, and it felt okay. It seemed like a real newspaper, felt like a real newspaper. I smelled it, and the smell was okay. I licked it, and it tasted fine. Comforted, I began reading, only to discover that I had been handed a cheap imitation of a newspaper, something like a Fischer Price stove set. It looked like it would work, but it didn't. Perhaps the CIA prepared it for me, as part of a plan to replace my office with a sophisticaed facimile while they searched the real one for terrorist suspects. I don't know. All I can say is that this newspaper had what looked to be articles about what, at first glance, looked to be significant news. Whenever I began reading them, however, they proved to be either minor stories about small-time issues in Maryland, or else badly written treatments of a random collection of world events. The former were almost unreadable, as they lacked coherence usually provided by background context, significant information about the actors involved, or an adequate and well-ordered description of the events being reported. The latter, the random collection of significant news, read like a summary of articles written for real newspapers, perhaps to be presented as a high school history class project. Sources were sparse, analysis was nonexistant, and the paragraphs might well have been the result of Microsoft Word's summary function.
I imagine that if I were to read this faux-newspaper every day, it wouldn't take too long for me to lose all memory of real news coverage. After a while, I would begin to lose my sense that anything important happens in the world; that my country's government is often accountable for major changes that affect real people; that this government has a two-party system fueled by debate between two sides of roughly equal strength; that things happenening in other countries aren't inexplicable and random events; that my own country's government studies these events and has a stake in them because the people of the country have a stake in them; that decisions of leaders in my government are often questionable and ought to be considered from many perspectives; that the changes in my own area are connected to the regional economy, which is part of the national economy, which is part of the world economy; that this sentence does not have to be indefinitely continued simply as an exercise in writing.
And indeed, the articles in this faux-newspaper seemed to be exactly that: exercises in writing. They give the impression that they exist only becasue the editor wanted his writers to generate a few articles about the events other newspapers were covering, in order to keep up the appearance that The Baltimore Sun has a staff devoted to activities other than publishing and revenue-generating.
What I can't figure out is why the CIA was able to replace every other aspect of my office perfectly, fumbling only on my newspaper. They're an information-gathering agency, aren't they? You'd think that they would excel at informing the public.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Pinstripe pants: does anyone really understand them? Are they classy, or is there, rather, something gaudy about them? Are they appropriate in some settings and not others? Do they communicate something specific about the wearer's style and taste? Are they considered to be affected, and if so, what are they affecting? Are they simply a variation on the solid pattern, or a synthesis of the solid/pattern dichotomy? I'm lost here. Does anyone have answers?
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
The desktop image on this public-access coputer at work is the Windows default picture of a rolling green prarie beneath a blue sky with whispy clouds. A couple distant mountains rim the right-side horizon. It seems somehow pathetic that Microsoft should choose this picture as their default, perhaps thinking that it will invite their users to connect with the coputer in a way that they cannot connect with the real landscape outside their buildings. Around this building, everything has been twisted to meet human needs. A few bushes grow in dirt patches between the parking lot and the walls, molded into brutal, low-cut rectangles. Some local birds and squirrels frequent a feeder placed outside the kitchen in the same way that residents frequent a cheap country bar. The ground itself has been formed with barricades to make flat land out of hills, and the surface is covered with straw, perhaps to save money on lawn maintenance. The sky is cut by buildings, and polluted with exhaust and flourescent lights. Could anyone possibly care to sit in this "office park" and gaze at this space like a romantic poet, trying to establish a connection with the universe? It feels more like a holding cell than "the outdoors." Without a landscape to connect with, office workers all over the country might gaze at this cheap pixellated replacement on their computer screens. Maybe they only look at it for half a minute every morning as they wait for Windows to load. Maybe some imagine themselves walking in these hills, over to the mountains to gather firewood and stream water. There could even be some among them who are inspired to believe they will take a vacation to a similar area. Who can say that there isn't at least one who wants to find the very field pictured in the default desktop image? There are a lot of people in the country. Were Bill Gates and his minions thinking about this when they chose the image? Maybe it was only on an unconscious, insidious business-sense level? Did they use focus groups? Was surveillance of Windows users involved? We want answers, Mr. Gates! Were you considering the impact of your actions on the national security? Did you stop to consider the dip in corporate productivity produced by endless office workers stuck gazing at their computer screens every morning when they could be using the time to make phone calls or respond to inter-office comminucation? Oh green field and blue sky! Come here to Columbia and save me! Take away this planned-city ugliness and squalor, this maze of suburban streets with names like "My Farts Smell Like Roses Boulevard" and "Dainty But Persuadable Milkmaid Lane"! Mountains in the distance, hurl yourselves toward the infidels! My faith commands it!
Sunday, March 05, 2006
I have long known that I have more interest in experiencing the world mentally than physically, but until today I didn't realize how broadly this tendency has affected my life. First, I made the faux pas of asking at dinner if my mother knew why the roses she had set on the table weren't entirely red, and learned that they were in fact carnations. (If you know what carnations look like, as probably most everyone but me does, you will understand how ridiculous this error was.) The taunts which ensued led me to realize that I never developed an elementary knowledge of the natural world beyond what I was taught in nursery school through first grade. I don't know the names, attrubutes and functioning of pretty much anything that isn't man-made, from basic garden plants and insects to ecosystems and landscapes. Moreover, I often take it for granted that no one other than experts knows any more about biology and geography than I do. As a result, whenever I discover that my friends have wide-ranging knowledge of these things, I am shocked, and feel by turns confused, frightened, and inferior. I even feel this way when I discover that my friends have things like a field guide to wild mushrooms, as Geoff Hoffman does, or photos from the Mars rover, as Wes has on his computer. These compendiums of facts about the natural world strike me as too advanced and exotic to understand whenever I see them in bookstores and libraries, and so I avoid them. In this way, my ignorance lingers and unconsciously sustains itself. Today, for whatever reason, I became conscious of it.
The second realization came while reading The Geography of Nowhere, a $14 impulse purchase at Barnes & Noble which enriches my awareness of modern culture every time I read it. Tonight, that enrichment was of a different sort: in the middle of a chapter about the short-comings of suburban architecture, I realized that my knowledge of the man-made world is as severely limited as my elementary natural science. I have become increasingly aware recently that I have a poor-to-nonexistant mental picture of most colors beyond the simplest ones (red, blue, green, etc.); in addition, I now realize, I get almost no associations from any sort of word describing the building blocks of physical objects. While I was reading, words like "vinyl", "clapboard", "corrugated", "split-level", and "cupola" were very nearly meaningless to me until I looked them up. They served only as audial flourishes in sentences, like "la la la" in a song, the only difference being that I could tell they were nouns and adjectives intended to convey meaning. Somehow, it had never occured to me that I had a systematically dismal physical vocubulary. This extends to my memory of spaces and objects, even familiar ones. While reading, I was struggling to think of examples of the things Kunstler was describing. For example, while referencing common simplistic additions to cheap ranch houses, he mentioned "a fake portico à la Gone With the Wind, with skinny two-story white columns out of proportion with the mass of the house, and a cement slab too narrow to put a rocking chair on . . .." I couldn't think of any houses which met this description. Then, when I went for a walk to smoke a cigarette, I saw one: my own.
These two areas of ignorance combine very nicely with my atrocious sense of direction and my neuroses surrounding food and clothing. I am considering making a list of physical terminology and studying each term, first in a dicitonary, then an encyclopedia, and finally in technical manuals. Perhaps it is not too late for my unconscious mind to realize that I have a body, which exists in a three-dimensional world.
The second realization came while reading The Geography of Nowhere, a $14 impulse purchase at Barnes & Noble which enriches my awareness of modern culture every time I read it. Tonight, that enrichment was of a different sort: in the middle of a chapter about the short-comings of suburban architecture, I realized that my knowledge of the man-made world is as severely limited as my elementary natural science. I have become increasingly aware recently that I have a poor-to-nonexistant mental picture of most colors beyond the simplest ones (red, blue, green, etc.); in addition, I now realize, I get almost no associations from any sort of word describing the building blocks of physical objects. While I was reading, words like "vinyl", "clapboard", "corrugated", "split-level", and "cupola" were very nearly meaningless to me until I looked them up. They served only as audial flourishes in sentences, like "la la la" in a song, the only difference being that I could tell they were nouns and adjectives intended to convey meaning. Somehow, it had never occured to me that I had a systematically dismal physical vocubulary. This extends to my memory of spaces and objects, even familiar ones. While reading, I was struggling to think of examples of the things Kunstler was describing. For example, while referencing common simplistic additions to cheap ranch houses, he mentioned "a fake portico à la Gone With the Wind, with skinny two-story white columns out of proportion with the mass of the house, and a cement slab too narrow to put a rocking chair on . . .." I couldn't think of any houses which met this description. Then, when I went for a walk to smoke a cigarette, I saw one: my own.
These two areas of ignorance combine very nicely with my atrocious sense of direction and my neuroses surrounding food and clothing. I am considering making a list of physical terminology and studying each term, first in a dicitonary, then an encyclopedia, and finally in technical manuals. Perhaps it is not too late for my unconscious mind to realize that I have a body, which exists in a three-dimensional world.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Flagg is restless. He circles the computer chair like a shark around a boat, making sure to rub his tail on the underside of my legs so that I cannot fail to notice his presence. Then he pads hurriedly to the back door, and when he reaches it, he scratches his paw on the galss a few times and then stares out into the barren field that is my back yard. Perhaps he wants to hunt all those little blades of grass bending in the wind. Maybe the fading light draped over the hills has caught his eye.
Now he turnes, takes a few steps toward me, and then arches his back while yawning. His jaw clicks shut, and he arches the other way, stretching his back legs. Then he walks over to the side of the chair, looks up at me with longing and angst, and sets in punishing the fabric. Then back to the window briefly, then over to me to look up and make a little "mrrgow!", then back over the window to scratch and imagine his freedom.
Back over to me, staring into my eyes as he scratches the back of the chair again, trying to communicate his pent-up and long-suffering whiney nature, to exercise his rightful power over me despite his inferior physique, his general shortness and his puniness. But he fails. I have no pity for this cat. He will get no dashing journey outside. He will eat no birds and field mice, nor become a dragon to things even smaller than him.
Hey gaiz, catzzz.
Now he turnes, takes a few steps toward me, and then arches his back while yawning. His jaw clicks shut, and he arches the other way, stretching his back legs. Then he walks over to the side of the chair, looks up at me with longing and angst, and sets in punishing the fabric. Then back to the window briefly, then over to me to look up and make a little "mrrgow!", then back over the window to scratch and imagine his freedom.
Back over to me, staring into my eyes as he scratches the back of the chair again, trying to communicate his pent-up and long-suffering whiney nature, to exercise his rightful power over me despite his inferior physique, his general shortness and his puniness. But he fails. I have no pity for this cat. He will get no dashing journey outside. He will eat no birds and field mice, nor become a dragon to things even smaller than him.
Hey gaiz, catzzz.