Then it hits me like a ton of bricks

I have it. The terrorist solution to health care.

Take all the terminal cases who, for whatever reason, have found a distaste with the health insurance industry. Teach them how to make bombs. Provide them with information on where the executives and decisions makers within this industry live and work. Have them walk into these establishments and detonate.

Simple solution.

While the average American isn't whipped into religious fanaticism, I think their potential is overlooked. One just needs to frame their concerns, their identity, and their discontent in a way that drives them to action, one last fiery action.

I spent a summer working for a rich couple, landscaping their back yard. The man was too cheap to hire the professionals, so he would show me a picture that he saw in a magazine and have me recreate it. Then he'd take back the magazines for a refund. What a fucking cheapskate. Besides spending a lot of time thinking while I shoveled rock and dirt, I seared an image in my mind. I imagined myself setting up a sniper post and awaiting one of the area's most destructive and influential developers to leave his house. I just wanted to kill him.

You kill the person, but you don't kill the ideology. To mangle a quote by Kenneth Burke on this issue: "ideology sets up in a body and it goes about dancing to the ideology's tune."

Sure, my call to arms is ineffectual in that it enlists terminal cases to do the bidding of another ideology, an anti-capitalist ideology. Let's keep in mind that ideology and body are co-extensive in the realization of ideology. Words, ideas, systems of thought mean nothing sitting in a dusty book on an forgotten shelf in a dilapidated section of the library. They need bodies to house them and do their bidding. If you scare the bodies that house the other ideology you might be able to send their ideology back to some dusty book on a forgotten shelf in a dilapidated section of the library.

does a blog collect dust?

I sit here and I watch my small electronic devices break. They click, whirr, then abruptly shut down. I'm not sure what's going on. I have all my music on this device. After synchronizing the music the device's progress bar hangs and the device begins to click. I hit the reset button and now it hangs as it recompiles the library then shuts off. Sometimes the interface for these devices can be so unnerving. It's like you're Kirk and you watch as Spock, having stepped into a chamber filled with radiation to save the crew--"logical transaction Jim, one life for many"--lies down on the floor and dies. Being Kirk, you fog up the translucent protective barrier with your usual ship captain's histrionics but it's all an ineffectual gesture as you load Spock's irradiated remains into a torpedo casing and launch him into a genesis planet.

The interface for this device is unnerving. You mash buttons as the machine goes about ignoring everything you do. When it's working, it's like you've touched your soon-to-be girlfriend after about the 4th date. Everyone is electric with anticipation, closeness is an aphrodisiac. Each of you have your little psychic antenna wrapped around each other. Not now. Nothing. This device is treating me like she's gone and saw some greener grass and is giving me the cold shoulder as she sips her drink and looks off in another direction. That's fine. I'll take this device apart using the web's repository of pages dedicated to the Asperger's engineers who do this very thing. I'm sure I'll at least take it apart to see if I can reclaim some of its responsiveness.

I digress ...

Do blogs collect dust? I don't think so. I went to a friend's blog and noticed that his last post came about two weeks into January of 2008. He first linked his blog two weeks into December 2007. It was a short lived experiment for him. Mine? Well, I've fancied myself to have an audience. Do I though? Sometimes I do. I generally think I have to drag them back to this place every so often. And now that I've decided to force serious change upon my life, I'm not sure what or who is my friend. I don't want my current friends. The local variety that I knew and left when I moved to Colorado, the ones to whom I returned just two years ago. They don't know about this blog. Even though my name is plastered on it and my location will give me away for sure. I talk ill of them sometimes in here. I don't want these friends anymore. I've realized that I cannot run away from my problems. I can't even confront them that well. My personality, my behavior has no soft reset. I've always pined after a Ctrl+Alt+Del for the mind. The CIA believed to have found it through a cocktail of ECT and LSD. I think all they did was short circuit enough of the mind to disrupt some of its long term memories. That sounds like organic damage to me. What I need to do is to muster some neuronal networks to overthrow the ones that have my emotions and attention hard wired to the names, faces, sounds, and smells of this group of friends.

Can that be so hard?

It probably is. I am trying very hard to be productive. I spend a lot of time moving around web pages seeing nothing worth my while. I deleted some e-mails today. It's odd to see a part of your life and the messages you received from your friends the ones you want so badly to erase. I am trying to erase myself.

How do I plan to do this?

I need a job, a job that can bankroll my move. I'll get to that once I start moving some of the shitty merchandise I have collecting around my house. I just ended my run at social networking via MMORPGs. That was a rather narcotic but ultimately sugared approach to finding sustenance in virtual human contact. I analogize that I was in search of a steak and it was serving me Peeps, those shitty little marshmallow chicks dusted in colored sugar. Most dry into chalky statues. Some become microwave experiments. When I was a kid. I actually liked those damn things.

What's next after finding a job?

I move out. I move away. I don't even have to move far. I just need to leave, not give out my new address and then change my phone number and not give that out. In this electronic world, how fucking easy can you get. A dead battery or a shorted memory card can kill one's whole social network. All the contacts, all the numbers, and your way of contacting them, all gone. How strange it is that these little electronic devices become the prerequisite for staying in touch, for sustaining ties that are continually flung all over the map.

So, to sever my ties I need to get a job to afford my move, make my move, and dump my old phone number. That's easy enough. All I need to do is share this number with a few family members and leave it at that. Done!

That's too easy. That's easier than canceling my subscription to the World of Warcraft and severing my ties with about 30 people whose character names and voices over the internet became very familiar to me. Oh well. I tell myself I do these things to force change on myself. I won't hate on the game like the last time I quit, but I need to find projects in earnest to fill the voids in my life. Putting up a few auctions, and moving some old product out the door might help in freeing me of this historical residue. I don't want all these computers. I don't need all those jackets. I don't want this clutter.

What is this thing we call friendship? It feels like a series of obligations some of which seem more pressing than others, some of which hail you into subjectivities with which you're comfortable, others that you'd rather avoid. Is that the pure basis of friendship? A time existed when we needed others in order to sustain life. Friendship was epiphenomenal to a real need for help in building a shelter, hunting an animal, in raising a family. Now, we have all these wonderful technological relationships that can sustain our life. This leaves us tugged along by a relationship that is a literate construct, an idealized fiction, much like marriage and romance. In living up to the ideals penned within this construct we brush against its obligations, the obligations to see it through to its narrative synthesis. This I need to erase.

This is an experiment. I believe that much of our personality is tied to the behaviors that we engage in on a daily basis. I had this notion that most of our gadget fiddling ties us, like a marionette, to some obsessive compulsive desire to check mail, send short messages, check mail, refresh page, check mail, send short messages, check mail, refresh page, check mail, read news, send links of the news, check mail to see if the addressed person received and commented back, check mail, refresh page, send short messages, check mail, check mail, check television times for shows we've watched for the past two-to-three years, check mail, go home, eat fast food, watch television, check mail, go to bed, wake up, check mail, etc.

That could be my caricature of our technogadgetry habits. I don't think it's too inaccurate a picture for some, including myself. I read my sent messages for Christ's sake! So my experiment is to sever much of what makes these device disorders so damn obsessive, and see if I see a similar change in my behavior and personality. I'm taking on a lot of changes, but this is only a culmination of several critical views I've held for some time. It's time to act on them.

Will it change much? I have my doubts, but I'm doing a good job alienating friends. I didn't join my neighbors in their celebration of one of their birthdays. I didn't miss much, just a chance meeting with several friends and what looked like some alcohol-induced drama--nothing new. The same damn thing year after year. The same damn promises year after year. The same disappointment, the same anxieties, the same dreams, the same deferment.

Fuck
That
Shit

I want no more of it. I want to be an overman--time to get over it man.

I will cure my device disorders. I will stop refreshing the page. I will stop reading sent mail. I will stop marveling at records of my past. I will stop searching aimlessly. I will stop checking the fucking mail.

I will rid myself of the silly neologisms that are endemic to text-based communication: the lols the brbs the omgs.

W
T
F

I don't need all that shit in my life. What happened to writing simply? What happened to conversation, the memory of which decayed over time? Why do we think we can have a shot at publicity and fame by posting our likeness on the web? Why do we think people will watch our videos if we aren't pretty or can't dance or sing or aren't funny? Why do so many people fail continuously at being present before an audience? Why do so many people absorb hours of their lives as audience members?

I return to my small electronic device, the one that could potentially collect all the pages housed in the Library of Congress, the battery was low. It's working now.

Checking mail.

I dated this woman once.

She always pulled my card, my trump card. She'd piss me off to no end with some drivel about 'us,' and instead of owning up to whatever it was she thought I was doing I'd go off the deep end. I'd tell her that we shouldn't be together and that it's best that way because I have bad ideas and evil thoughts and that I'm a bad person at my core. She'd, of course, contain this semblance of freedom, this moment of agency and potency with her 'coy' laughter. Containment. She got what she wanted, she had that bumblebee in the jar and she shook it just enough to get it buzzing and pissed off. Then we'd fuck. She wanted me pissed because she'd know I'd give her a good fuck then. She wanted that red rocket of evil and hatred penetrating her fucking cul de sac. Then I had transmuted that evil, which I normally turn on myself, into a lightning bolt of energy and sexuality.

We both ended up pleased by this outcome as we lay there sweaty, her giggling, us talking about some bullshit 'social' 'theory,' a condom still hanging from my deflating dick.

I kind of miss those nights. I haven't been laid since about then. It's been almost a decade, since a woman with no concept of father has come and smacked me over the head, sucked my dick in the car, and drunk me under the table. I do miss that. As much as I tell myself I want a 'normal' girl, a girl with fewer tantrums, a girl with fewer liberal thoughts. I wanted a conquered wife, a traditional girl. That shit blew up in my face when I dated briefly a girl, also with no concept of a father, who quietly accepted my frequent impotence. Too bad she didn't open up that other door.

This violent woman I dated. She reduced me to tears some nights, and some nights I repaid the favor. I've walked out on her. She walked out on me. I was always 'disappointing' her with promises that were never fulfilled.

"No, honey. I can't take you to the circus. Daddy has to work."
"No, honey. I can't fuck you right now. Daddy has to please mommy."

War robots through and through. Whatever happened to the Spartans? They had such a complete system for destroying the ego, the self. From the outside, it looks so simple. I wonder though, how one-dimensional being trained to become a war robot is? After all, the same mind who can pen poetry and philosophy is being honed into a maelstrom of fighting techniques and weapon mastery, to fight until the every last drop of life has left the body.

So simple it seems. But what's under the hood?

The Fragile Absolute

My friend Mike was on a Slavoj Zizek kick and he sent me this. It's dated but always relevant.

I read this paragraph in Zizek's _Fragile Absolute_ and it was just
screaming out your name:


"One should not confound this primordially repressed myth (this
fundamental fantasy) with the multitude of inconsistent daydreams that
always accomnpany our symbolic commitments, allowing us to endure
them. Let us recall the xample of a 'straight' sexual relationship.
The sucess of Peter Hoeg's _The Woman and the Ape_ indicates that sex
with an animal is today's predominant form of the fantasy of full
sexual relationship, and it is crucial that this animal is as a rule
male: in contrast to cyborg-fantasy, in which the cybordg is, as a
rue, a woman (Blade Runner)--that is , in whcih the fantasy is that of
Woman-Machine-- the animal is a male ape copulating with a human
woman, and fully satisfying her. Does this not materialize two
standard common daydreams: that of a woman who wants a strong animal
partner, a potent 'beast' not a hyserical impotent weakling; and that
of a man who wants his female partner to be a perfectly programmed
'doll' who fulfils all his wishes, not a living being? What we should
do in order to penetrate the underlying 'fundamental fantasy" is to
stage these two fantasies together: to confront ourselves with the
unberable ideal couple of a male ape copulating with a female cyborg,
the fantasmatic support of the 'normal' couple of man and woman
copulating. The need for this redoubling, the need for this
fantasmatic supplement to accompany the 'straight' sexual act as a
spectal shadow, is yet another proof that 'there is no sexual
relationship.' (Fragile Absolute, p. 65-66)

I had this roomate once...

... and she was really sexy. She was married to some ad executive out in L.A. She was going to school at UC Boulder. We were in the same program. She had space in her house, so I moved in. I pleaded with her to not get a divorce, but she did. Shit got weird (for me) for a bit. I began dating a girl, and it ended after she (and I) got the hint that I probably mentioned my roommate's name too much in conversation. She was dating a guy at this point. Some assistant D.A. for the city of Boulder. He had just acquired a C.I.O. job for a new airline out of Denver, a real hot shot. I was treated to the occasional rocking bed sound, but worse than that were images like this as I passed the laundry to enter my basement apartment.

Atypical response from a Chinese student.

Dredging the old folders I found this gem because it struck me as a bright, yet atypical response from a Chinese student in the level of vitriol that it contained.

First a synopsis of the lecture to which the student, Kaibin, is responding:

Liberal Representation and Global Order: The Iconic Photograph from Tiananmen Square

Contrary to the fears of public sphere theorists, liberal-democratic public culture always has been underwritten by visual images. Iconic photos are one example of how images organize social knowledge and ideologies, shape understanding of specific events and periods then and subsequently, influence political action both topically and by modeling relationships between civic actors, and provide figural resources for subsequent communicative action. The iconic image achieves its status not because of its news value, but because it embodies basic conceptions of political identity in a manner that provides aesthetic resolution of fundamental contradictions in the dominant social order.

The photo of a solitary Chinese man standing calmly before the barrel of a tank in Tiananmen Square exemplifies how photojournalism negotiates the tension between democracy and liberalism. The image of a lone individual stopping a tank in its tracks is rightly celebrated for its contrast of an anonymous figure of personal autonomy with a stock depiction of the totalitarian state. Yet as the image articulates individual human rights and a universal form of citizenship in a silent, empty public space, it displaces the vividly encultured expressions of popular democracy that had defined the historical event and suggested the possibility of alternative versions of modern development. This displacement can be traced from the design of the image itself through its history of appropriation. Thus, the Tiananmen icon is indicative of a shift from democratic to liberal norms of representation throughout U.S. public culture, and of a liberal vision of global order.

Now Kaibin's response:

Hi Jason and all,

Frankly, as a Chinese, I am very unhappy about the topic of his lecture. This topic has become a cliche in academics and international politics. It is nothing new and I bet what he'll say is but repetition of what many others said in early 1990s. I think Hariman should learn from Ward Churchill and criticize the U.S. government first (if he has that kind of courage) if he is seriously concerned about democracy, particulary when democracy is being threathened in the U.S. since Mr. Bush came to presidency. As a "distinguished" scholar, he should keep up with the changing world situation, not just be preoccupied with something that many others did before and with something on which a lot of literature is available and with what happened long before. His interests in delivering a lecture on such an out-dated topic to graduate students and scholars of a research 1 university, for me, reflects his neo-colonialist and ethnocentric point of view and cold-war thought about the world order and accomplics the U.S. government to use democracy as a name to intervene domestic affairs in other countries. For our department and CU, spending so much money and so much efforts on a lecture that could not yield to any new research orientation is but a waste.

Of course, as a Chinese, I am concerned with democracy in China. Democracy is developing toward a healthy direction. And we are confident of dealing with it on our own and don't want outside interference and misleadingly blind and empty comments. We don't want people who understand little about the contemporary Chinese situation to mislead others.

Can you forward this message to others? Thanks.

Regards,

Kaibin

Dream: 01/11/10

Do you ever have one of those dreams whose residual effect persists after you've awoken. The first time I experienced this was with a dream I had as a 7-year-old about a girl I knew and a boy I was friends with in the second grade. The dream morphed from me using the toilet to take a leak at my house to those two friends showing up and me eating the chlorine cake that my mother would hang on the side of the toilet. My stomach was upset well into the day, and I even stayed home from school I was so sickened. I do recall going to the grocery store with my mother that day and eating Whoppers as my mother declared that I wasn't sick. That's the kind of mother she was; quick to come to your aid in support of your view, then equally as quick to discount it with a mixture of scolding and laughter.

The dream I had on the 11th had this residual effect. Luckily, it only persisted for about 5 minutes after waking. Two disconnected pieces of the dream will remain seared in my mind for some time. I'm at what looks like a house party. It's evening. I can faintly make out lights strung in the air and people around the periphery. None I can make out. I walk down the steps that go into the back door. There's a phone on a stand next to a tree about 10 feet from the steps. I am on the phone talking to a man who, I am informed by disembodied voices, is speaking to me from a research station in the Arctic. He's trying to give me his address, and I can hardly hear his voice. He keeps repeating his address. The pen and paper I'm using aren't working, so I ask him to hold as I get an actual pad and a new pen. I return to the outdoor area, and that same phone rings. Apparently, the way I rested the phone back down on the cradle hung the phone up. I assume it's him calling me back. It's not. It's my grandmother. She's been dead for almost 6 years.

She says hello. Her voice sounds quiet and somewhat infirm. I return with a hello. Instead of how she is doing, I drop the bomb. "What's heaven like?" I ask. I was feeling somewhat brave. She responds, "Everyone is dead." I then hear an explanation of what that means. I get the gist that the dead are the non-believers. She was one of the few devout Catholics who is in heaven, but she's surrounded by dead, non-believers. I tell her that, since I don't believe in an afterlife, I won't have to worry myself with being surrounded by the dead because I'll be one of them. The conversation ends. I enter the house, and now the house has morphed into the interior of a bar. This sets up the second part of the dream.

I'm at the bar. There are people there. I notice at one table a woman, more a girl really, looking at me. She has light blue eyes, and they're locked on mine for a length of time, the kind of length that indicates attraction, which some study that you'd read about in the news has determined scientifically. I'm convinced that she's interested. She's with friends or family, I'm not sure. Several are at her table. She stands next to it. I build up some courage, and when I see her again, she has re-entered the bar wearing a dress. She's still at this table, only now she is with a girlfriend. I muster up some courage, talk with the friends that I've apparently accompanied to the bar, and set off to make my move.

I approach her table and say a simple hello. She's speaking out loud to her friend about the hot guys at the bar. She's ignoring me as is her friend. She scans around the bar as if I'm not there. Dejected, I walk away. I pass my friends' table. Apparently, by the short conversation that we have the girl is my friend's sister. I say my goodbyes. I want to leave this bar. "Just don't pity me." I say as I leave the bar area for the exit. On my way out, I stop into the restroom. As I round a corner of the bathroom, I see that a man using one of the stalls has barricaded his section off with several trash cans. He's on his phone as he unseats himself from the toilet he's been using. I'm trying to focus on using the urinal, and I wake up. I have to take a piss.

People tell me that when they've dreamed of going to the bathroom they've inadvertently gone somewhere in their house or in their bed. I suppose that I'm glad that in my dream all the usual anxieties surrounding women, the afterlife, and even pissing in public are involved. The one saving grace of the dream is that I didn't follow through and piss my bed that day. As I get up to go to the bathroom my ego is still smarting from the dream. I'm still actually feeling somewhat hurt and dejected. The worst feeling is being treated as if you're not there, and the dream girl switched from locking eyes with me to being oblivious to me. I'm thinking of this as I try to take a piss and I'm having trouble still. I'm thinking too much and the anxieties have me all pinched up. Nothing is flowing. Eventually I do piss, and I go lay back down in bed.

Dreams like this reference my current state of affairs. My fascination with the dead and with being treated as if I'm not there are recurrent elements in my fantasies. They do have something in common. When you're being utterly ignored, you're non-existent socially. As an ignored entity whose only affirming presence is that of your own self-awareness you consider yourself as good as dead to the others. After all, you came all this way to be among others. For them to completely ignore you sends a message that your presence is more than not welcome--you presence isn't even worth their time to acknowledge. I'm going to see how long I can go unnoticed. My one magic trick is my disappearing act.