new star song

The Mountain Goats had a song on their "Beautiful Rat Sunset" EP that became synonymous with loss. The song was called "New Star Song," and it's about a person's search for a lost other. The song's  narrator goes to another town and hunkers down outside a sheet music store. The narrative was subtle yet at times powerfully emotional. I first thought of a Far Side comic where a boy posts a lost poster of a rather large snake. But the song ultimately made me think of you.

You is Amy Metcalf. I call her the one that got away. She is married with kids and some kind of high-powered executive job now. Time flies. We got along so well. That was my impression. She was simply very accommodating. We'd bounce macabre humor off of each other. It entertained my idealistic and precocious late teen self. We stayed in touch for a few years after high school, but that only lasted so long. I moved away. I didn't leave for long, and some like to look upon my return as a retreat from potential success.

But a body with no job to which it must report becomes a restless one. And that is why I came back to thinking of you.

Do you think of me?

You probably think about your kids more than anything these days. Some parts of your day are probably punctuated by work deadlines.

Does anything in your life remind you of me? I can only dream that somebody thinks of me.

But that's an old habit acquired from years of being alone, unattached. Now I am attached, but it brings me very little in the way of passionate outcry.

Bridled contexts

I am trying out different words for a societal trend that is especially popular among youth. It is defined by "being random."

Now randomness, in and of itself, is nothing new. The use of the non sequitur has had a long enough standing in comedy routines, but something new is occurring that can only be an offshoot of indexicality, of mixing and matching and speaking through and about different media forms, genres, specific texts, and the like. Media, after all, are extensions of our nervous systems.

I suggest that being random is a function of a new grammar that is arriving through the mixed, multiple, and simultaneous use of media. Along with this experience qua landscape, an individual is having spontaneous reactions while engaging in phatic conversations with one or more contacts via one of the perhaps many readily available interactive information technologies. What crops up in these contexts are, as I have mentioned, real-time reactions, or cogitations upon media events while narrating those events to another person who is, perhaps, just as distracted by a thousand other windows. Thus, a being random moment is something akin to trying to reveal in narrative form with another what one has experienced. It's a haphazard and messy affair, but the attention spans required for such 'being there' are rather gnat like in their life span.

But this emphasis on being random perhaps has its detractors as well as its practitioners. "That's so random" can be an admiring assessment as well as a harsh criticism. My niece made an attempt at being random by calling her father, sister, mother, and self by other names as she giggled mischievously. This was a funny moment at the playful abandon of being in non-identity using an arbitrary set of terms from a readily accessible discursive background that make up the random information events in one's day.

But is being random something so dependent upon the atomized participation-saturated media landscape or does it merely afford its navigators an attendant sensibility to its expansive yet flat potential? Perhaps it's a little of each. I have little to back my hypothesis. I merely like to attach things that I dislike to the scapegoat of a media form that I don't much appreciate. But that's merely me.

Now, let's discuss what bridling contexts means.

To bridle is to put a saddle on a horse but in this case it's contexts. I would not dismiss the importance of the latter word's plurality too hastily. I think that's a key component of the whole ensemble. But one isn't saddling contexts to ride them. One saddles to place oneself squarely upon more than one context in order to facilitate code shifting and mixing for purely random effect.

But I like the non sequitur as well, and I have been known to use it effectively for laughs. Perhaps I am just being the martinet that I am for criticizing 'being random' while it's merely a rose by any other name. I am sure the spirit of the non sequitur would not mind letting its doppleganger masquerade in the minds of another generation as some rhetorical vision, a genuine hallmark of having had been there and done that.

But before I leave this post in its hasty prose I want to emphasize a very important consideration. People participate in their realities to a greater extent than ever. We can owe some of this to the media in use, their affordances for usage, and the habits of those that get involved. What I trascribed above is an interior vision brought forth for the sake of its logic breaking, yet logically native potential. And all this was something that required the participation of many times, places, and windows of information to bring that forth. Along with this comes the search strategies, likes, and social networks that also help to perform what makes up one's world. 'Where do you want to go today?' has increasingly become where you went yesterday. Why? I think this answer is simple. People can get addicted to interaction if it presents itself as an appetite to be satisfied. If we sent mail, we wait to see if someone responded. As we wait, we pore over our writing and look for potential gaffes. We look over previous messages to spot trends in the mail relationship one may feel one had created with the recipient of this current mail. The list of potential situations spawned by interactive information technology enumerate along lines such as these. And just as sturdy of a foundation of empirical data I presume to have collected to satisfy my vision another may come along and negate my efforts. After all, the interactive technology user I characterized actually cares about his or her messages. Not everyone does, nor does everyone fret over the tiniest detail in one's veritable Library of Congress holding of interaction histories readily accessible and a keyword away from remembering strictly along those lines.

I get rather giddy about these kinds of things, but I blame the coffee. I am in a coffee house trying to showcase my publicness and feign ignoring the public around me. I fancy being surrounded while it is my imagination that surrounds me, and that is the thing from which I cannot escape.

a David among Goliaths

To assume the mantle of the blue collar laborer you make bodily sacrifices. And paramount of all you must keep your mouth shut about the pain and discomfort you may feel from your labor. To reveal this is to be branded 'cunty.'

'Cunty.' It's a rather funny word. It reflects the heavily masculine coding that undergirds the culture of blue collar work where I practice it. At the core of this symbolic world is a body at work, and its relative place among other bodies engaged in the same or similar practice. The eyes are averted from the body per se, but the body is on display because it's the body's fruits, its labors, that are a means of judging the person.

The nature of the labor that I do is a grab bag of heavy lifting, holding oneself in stress positions, walking along precarious perches high in the air, and exposing oneself to general environmental dangers requisite to the type of work done and the tools used: fire, heat, vapors, combustible materials, electric shock. Granted, the majority of the work I perform isn't done under a stopwatch nor does it entail much heavy, repetitive lifting. Sometimes it does. In fact, just about once a day I may be required to lift something that is heavy. And with zeal I jump to it or am forced by the seniority of others to perform it anyway. This is where I am on display and pitifully so.

Into the cauldron of blue collar work I place my weakened and only mildly calloused body. I gingerly walk about high spaces. I grunt and strain under normal loads. I am the first to drop a collaborative carry. In all these instances there I perform my inadequacy, and there my colleagues register their vocal judgment of my abilities to do my job. I simply am not as big, nor as trained in the performance of these duties, duties that most of my colleagues grew into through circumstances stemming from their social settings.

Not me. I was sent to a wall of encyclopedias 30 years ago, and with some zeal I began to read. I loved those damn things. Strangely enough, the ideas and information contained within has, by many accounts, become outdated. And the medium itself has been supplanted by search. But I digress.

I am a small person among big people. Some of my colleagues enjoy my idiosyncrasies. Others set me up to fail for their own personal enjoyment. But on the whole, my body is on display. And through my work it is forced to engage in a ritual performance of labor. In that dramatic space I find myself straining both through age and a long tenure of mental work, and in doing so engage in producing the struggle. I suit up with all my tools and stumble over half of them, some of which I've hardly if at all used. I am learning a lot at my job about my job, yet at the same time this is a space of relative lax enjoyment for the majority of my colleagues. The magic word is "T and M," time and materials. Jobs bid by time and materials are not nearly as strenuous or time sensitive as those bid by the weight of the steel being put in place. The more notorious of the field's jobs are those requiring a multitude of reinforcing bars of varying weights and lengths to be tied into mats in place.

What does this brief discussion of my job and blue collar work tell me about the profession I am in, labor in general, or about me? I suspect is says a lot but not a lot worth discussing per se. The body says it all, and the basic tools of judgment employed by my trade 'brothers' more succinctly address the issue while simultaneously enacting a barrier for my 'graduation' into either proficiency with the tools and the trade or to the general conditions of my work. In a sense, they help to perform my inadequacy as my struggling body could have pointed to something else. Perhaps I am merely engaging the body in underused ways and my struggles reflect the learning curve required to acquire proficiency.

But so long as I am the short guy with all the education under his belt I will continue to labor under the stereotypes that both bring for the men that populate my current trade. They are ironworkers. I am not, at least not yet.