Charles Shultz, the master

I present you pigpen. We've come to believe that this is his dust cloud because he's so dirty and unkempt.

Au contraire.

It's his probability cloud. He's a Bohr model of his own pluripotent action potential. He's the Tralfamadorian. He's in more than one and less than two places at once.

Charles Shultz, the master.

Stranger than a fact list

I'm sitting on the floor, my back against the wall adjacent the closet, nursing my beer. The film plays on the tiny television screen, a documentary about Tom Flanagan, supermasochist. I share a story about a friend I had who loved pain, who was hit with a pipe and left for dead, who died. All the stories end sadly.

I sit on the floor, bathed in the glow of the television screen, I look over at the bed. Three bodies are tucked under the covers. One woman, two men. My friend Bryan is in the middle, he spoons the girl. Her name is Amanda. Thomas is on the outside, spooning Bryan. Giggles, moans, talk of the last condom. I nurse my beer.

I'm struck by the moment and what it signifies for me. It's Thanksgiving night. We've celebrated a founder's feast. I'm reminded of the bedding practices that I read about in a book of facts called "The People's Almanac." I'll paraphrase.

Travelers up and down the eastern colonies would often lodge at stranger's houses. It was a common practice to accept in travelers as they moved about. Another common practice, as was customary in the era of the potbelly stove, was to huddle together on cold nights, sharing a bed. There, bathed in the glow of the television was a practice as old, and older, than the 13 colonies. I was witnessing it, the bed as a chronotope. I was amused by this idea that the travelers and their hosts would share a bed and let the random shifting of bodies play out its own logic of titillation. I was witnessing a similar act. I was invited in. I avoided the invitation. I'm a prude, but I also want my mystery to remain. Perhaps she wants me to join her for many reasons.

We were playing Risk. In the middle of my roll, I went on a roll. I wouldn't shut up. The booze and the pot were kicking in. Thomas was sharing. I was partaking, laughing, smiling. I'm still full from the dinner, the beer is cold, the night is dark, the light glows warm, and we exchange glances, practice our global politicking. I have this idea to defeat all the other players but her, retreat my armies into Australia and 'give her the world.' Hopelessly romantic. She tells me that I made the stripper's night. I'm glad for this. A smile is a great gift to give someone. I play the clown, the goofball. I laugh and I cry. I'm singing falsetto, thinking of the story my grandmother told me about her father. He serenaded women from their window at night. Two women put out candles. He married the blonde. She was bright. She was from a rich home. He was a poor man who made a living working for a pharmacist and earning extra by carrying coal to the Jews on their day of rest, helping them stoke the hearth. It was the gay 90s, New York. Jacomino sang. Jacomino worked. Jacomino was my great grandfather.

It's impractical and cumbersome, this persona I create. It's clunky and selfish. I live out of my head like others live out of their car, a liminal life, a temporary condition. The body comes crashing down to the floor--a reminder of our mutual affinity. Beyond the words, beyond the promises, beyond the elaborate displays of affection, we're two bodies with compatible plumbing.

Mad like a teardrop in a storm.

Mad like a teardrop in a storm. Effervescent and wondrous, lost in the tempest mist.

A woman's eggs are finite. A man's sperm sputters to a halt. I have a finite amount of hugs, kisses, laughs, smiles, and doting woman worship inside me.

And I've been saving it up.

You come near and the flood gates open. When you touch me I burn. Communication leaking like a sieve.

I throw it all at you. You, my highest of summits, my holiest of holies. It's an intimidating interpellation this subject position I grant you. I build you an altar that's too discomfiting, too tight, form fitting. My worship is oppressive. Hit me. Are you there? I'm here. I force you back from a distant look. I'm afloat in your ocean. I'm afraid. It's dark in here. Perhaps I shouldn't do this. I'm not in control either, and I'm taking advantage of you. I want to hug you, but that would kill the moment, snuff the flame. I burn. Your face is burnt from a beauty therapy. You avoid the sun until you heal. You drown the pain in pills and alcohol. I am pain. You soften my fall.

No, I don't have a potato fetish. I liked it when you fed me, but I was also afraid when you got near. I fear losing control. I fear losing my composure. I want to be the private dick, the private eye. You can be my Girl Friday. I'm the brains. You're the beauty. We're an operation. I keep a bottle of whiskey and a .38 in my drawer. One or the other. I'm on the case. You hand me the note. You pick up my dry cleaning. "A man needs a maid," quotes Neil Young. You complete me. Do I complete you?

I'm mad like a teardrop in a storm. Effervescent, meaningful, lost in the tempest mist.

Game over son. One more dad.

I feel like we're losing touch, but I don't want the icy touch of telepresence to be mistaken for the warmth of a fond look and soft embrace. The socio-technical order doth make dead mannequins of us all as we fiddle with a small lighted screen, as we return a phatic response to another. The marriage of action and techno-fiddling is an interesting phenomenological insight about our time--our problems are gadgetry oriented. I suppose the coming of the age of quiet technology renders us much more quiet in social settings when each of us take time out from social participation to check our messages and scroll through our personal screens to feed our need for our fragment of esoterica.

Search.

Search is a representative anecdote for our time. The post-modernists ached at the post-material information order and recognized how it transformed our politics, our values. Search is here, and search is how we figure ourselves as participants in that information order. Search spells out the tactics that we employ to be searchable and to be found. The 15 minutes of fame notion is broken into an infinitely divisible soundbyte through which we seek to have our stamp of authorship. A forest of mirrors, a moment's notice, a sly remark, a performed persona, a mere textual element signifying no more than a sound and behind which hides a you a you you always wished you could be, fantasia on a theme by technology. Technology, telepresence, being no where, getting burned right here.

I moved gentlemen. I moved just down the street from my old place, and I moved into an odd situation. My new landlord and life-long friend is living the swinger's lifestyle. He tried persuasively to sell it on me. I moaned in my best Rossini that I'm living the catholic life. Obsessive, possessive, oppressive, I fancy what I am is a dusty relic made by my projection onto Renaissance ideals, Renaissance concepts, science, kitchen chemistry, learning as a hobby--the stuff that made us challenge the monolith of the ancien regime. Now I'm the dusty relic. I won't slide into that bed with one beautiful but distant woman and two of my guy friends. I sit outside nursing my beer, orally fixated, my nookie. I'm back there, playing Pac-Man.

Pac-man is the oral fantasy, an allegory of addiction. You're a mouth and an eye in a darkened maze littered with edible items. You seek things to eat and run from your ghosts. Occasionally you eat something special that allows you to eat your ghosts. Is it a drug? It's an oral coping mechanism, and the upshot is you get points and perhaps a cameo on the "top 3" screen. The girl sips her Tab. Her hair is feathered. I stand, transfixed, a 6-year-old.

"One more quarter dad."

"Game over son."

"Just one more dad."

"I'll do it right this time dad."

"Game over son."

In the box

“Calls from the Public” was a recurring segment on the Sifl and Olly Show, a 30-minute comedy show starring two sock puppets, which ran from 1997 through 1998 on the cable channel MTV. In “Calls from the Public” Sifl and Olly would field phone calls on any topic from other sock puppets who were presumably part of the show’s viewing public. In episode four from the first season one of the calls comes from a voice in a box who asks Sifl and Olly how to get out. This simple question becomes wry existential humor when Sifl and Olly reveal that he is the box and not simply in it. Yet, one must still probe what caused this box to believe that it was stuck inside itself or that it had any awareness of an inside at all. Was the identity created from an inner projection? The call follows:

Caller (C): Yeah, why am I in a box?

Sifl and Olly (SO): Why are you in a box? Are you dead?

C: No

SO: I don’t know.

C: I’ve been in here for ages.

SO: Well, can you move around inside?

C: What do you mean?

SO: What I mean is can you feel around inside?

C: Inside?

SO: Oh wait, I think you just are a box.

C: I am?

SO: Yeah.

C: Alright, I’m a boxer!

SO: No, you are a box.

C: I’m a box?

SO: Yeah, you’re a box. You got that?

C: Oh… (The caller’s voice indicates that it may be upset by this realization.)

SO: Ok, See you box. Yeah, thank you box.

The identity of the voice begins the conversation obscured by the walls of the cardboard box and its folded top flaps. Sifl and Olly’s questions investigate how the voice became located inside the box. This is a proper tack given that the voice’s query also presumes that it issues from its awareness that it is inside a box. Sifl and Olly’s questions reveal that the voice lacks any common awareness of being inside a box. The voice used the word “in” when asking why it was in a box. When asked whether it can feel around inside, the voice fails to understand what “inside” means. The original question presumes one’s existential status as entrapment in a box. Sifl and Olly’s questions reveal that this cannot be the case, since the box’s self-identity lacks the perception of a being who is enclosed inside a box. This perceptual voice reveals that the voice does not arise there. The space that the box walls entrap is empty. Therefore, the voice is that of the box, not of some other entity hidden behind its geometric exterior.
This short exercise lends some understanding to the trickiness of extension-related metaphors when they are applied to self-identity. Extension-related metaphors use object relations and perception of a material world as the metaphorical vehicle for self-identity. Self-identity is that tricky place where awareness of a material world is extended to that location of self-awareness, which reveals the material nature of awareness. Self-awareness is located within the body’s self-organization around its persistent perceptual interface with the world. Our body is an agent whose purpose is engaged by changes in the salient features of its environment. The box’s mistaken identity of being entrapped within its own four walls issues from none of the common awareness of being a body unable to leave a box. The caller presumably can see to use the phone and has learned how to speak, plus it has acquired a cultural gestalt of what boxes can do and grafted it onto its experiential gestalt of being accompanied by a box “for ages.” The mistake is that it had acquired the experience of an other that is wholly other than itself, therefore it has mistaken itself for a common object. The sadness in the voice at this self-realization issues from a smarting ego, a shattered self-identity. That which it has displaced to protect its own self-identity is the very thing it is. It is the box. The box’s fresh self-awareness still borrows, in sadness, the ego’s discursive construction using an other’s language. In wanting to create a common experience of identity, the box appropriated a constitutive discourse used by bodies outside of boxes. But in its fresh realization, the very discourse that constituted a common identity instead became an estranging discourse.
The word communication, which we apply to a host of behaviors bodily, gestural, verbal, symbolic, social, cultural under the purposive framework, sharing information, finds its Latinate roots in the word, communicare, which is to make common. The dialectical tail of this notion would be estrangement, the interminable gap that we continually smooth over with communication. Our angelic desires for soul-to-soul connection mistake us from recognizing that this ideal is never practical. One cannot be sure of one’s own mind let alone another’s. The atomically discernible surface of bodies, no matter how closely they are pressed together, never meet. They never met, and only in Seth Brundle (Cronenberg’s “The Fly”) have two bodies become one. The gap remains. A language that allows us to know another as occupying a type misdirects us from knowing another in the particular. Words are ammunition from old battlegrounds. A simple gesture or statement can bring the cavalry, trumpets, and cannons roaring back into a simple social exchange. Yet that which estranges us from knowing another offers us an opportunity to step outside our skin and occupy, ideally, the skin of another. We presume a superaddressee and communicate to another’s superaddressee avoiding talk that issues from the flesh. Sometimes we stand pious before one’s superaddressee, at others we are profane. But this is a precarious balancing act between meeting another “half-way” and leaving one’s self behind. Communication is self-alienation and it is built into the social contract of communication. The dialectical tail of making common is making strange or estrangement. This gap, a yawning gulf of roaring nothingness structures communication negatively as its practitioners enact it positively as the essential somethingness that makes any connection possible. We happily exist within this constitutive space blissfully unaware of the facticity of its non-existence at all the specific interface points where we enact it—in the give and take of simple conversation. Hopes, dreams, fears, fate, fights, hate are just that, words, that structure a complex host of bodily experiences that have long since lost their strangeness socially, yet are never reconciled personally. One presumes they are these existential states or moods by carrying out the performative mandates built into them as a matter of the social contract.
“I am sad” is an existential statement. It’s a constitutive act. A performative act that builds entailments that must be carried out for its fulfillment. It’s a tiny well into which our protean identities slide. The well, presumes a telos, a specific parameter or an outline for the fulfillment of an action. To communicate is to create little depressions into which our identities continually slide. A motor or arrow does not push us and we don’t control the process’ fulfillment. The process entwines beginning and ending into a simultaneous occurrence. The wisdom of the act is in the act. Given our estrangement from the act, we continually divine it as a source of wonder. And we continually slide our discursive pseudopodia forward by a pulling movement experienced as the tiny fate of a tiny act whose fate we mistake for agency. Communication as estrangement gives merit to: distributed intelligence and ecological psychology’s affordances, a dialectical philosophical stance that presumes the primacy of non-existence, and one’s mistaken occupation with an ideal existence projected through the fateful, constitutive act of communicating.

A depravity of seeing

An off-duty police officer is accosted by an amusement park worker when a customer tips him off that he is using a well-placed digital camera to capture shots from up the dress of his toddler as she sits on her plastic scooter. On a candid photo sharing site hosted by Yahoo! one photographer details how he separates the lens from the viewfinder to allow him to look unaware and away while he captures similar shots. Sites like this and other are quickly removed and more re-emerge. A college professor relates a conversation he overhears carried on by two men inside a Barnes and Noble at Colorado mall. “They called the book stores at the mall ‘masturbation libraries’.” The expanding consumption of internet bandwidth in recent years points to the popularity of video streaming sites like Youtube where young and old, male and female prance, dance, and shake in the presence and absence of music, friends, intoxicants in hopes of reading positive comments and for a general sense of attention from web-goers and subscribers. Social networking sties like Myspace and Facebook bring people and their friend networks together, giving their blog entries a growing reader base. A student in my class checks the Facebook profile of a student who had committed suicide the night before. His current status reads, “finally happy.” A teenage girl in Alton, Missouri kills herself after her friend and mother create a fictitious cute boy who grows interested, but then breaks off contact after he hears about her recent ‘selfish’ treatment of that friend.

A list of accounts like this revolve around a few converging technologies and their media forebears. Video, the direct descendent of film expanded the access and availability of visual media, moving pictures. Its digital counterpart has expanded that access by placing the visual and editorial power of Hollywood production equipment into the hands of any consumer with the money (or credit) and interest in using a camera. The personal computer neatly marries two media, print and television, by settling on the QWERTY keyboard as the sine qua non for creating and managing a database of information and the CRT as a proper way for presenting that data in a WSISWYG visual environment benignly called a ‘desktop.’ The reasons for this are clear when we trace its history. Xerox corporation sets up the Palo Alto Research Campus (PARC) through the capital gained from leasing its copiers to the world’s businesses and organizations to create the next information environment. It marries one business-native tool, the typewriter, with a home-based interface point, the television. Media scholars point out that the television, given its native dimensions and reduced resolution, is better as an up-close medium. It captures the head and face quite well, but loses that dramatic focus by widening to the action of bodies. By tying typewriter to television, the computer—in its current software-led manifestations—truly ties visual data with text and forces an up close and personal look at the particular editorial productions that a person with a web-connected computer produces. The upshot of this marriage of typewriter and television and the imaginative horizon it casts for early adopters, users, and innovators of its networked counterpart, makes the screen a stage and publicly accessible mirror upon any activity produced through it. The imaginative horizon for networked personal computing—the one that appears for good or naught to collapse in on itself—is interactive television. The charmed loop between user and public viewer that it creates becomes a self-fulfilling medium of perverse enjoyment made all the more perverse through the buffer of distance and anonymity that one can achieve by assuming only a textual nom de plume. This relaxes the usual social proscriptions that emerge from being within bodily and visual range of one’s interlocutor and affords each a greater amount of control over the persona they choose to present before a public. A single-pane comic strip illustrates this with two dogs, one operating a computer by handling the mouse and telling its companion that “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”

… or not a dog. Because often more than not the person will interact with the visual or text-based avatar with some reference to its face value. If the name is feminine the interlocutor at the other end treats the person as such. Interpersonal research calls the great amount of control and relaxed inhibitions hypersocial interaction. This greatly increases the intensity and speed of the online relationship. The two quickly move from greetings to divulging secrets as if each were afforded the cloak of a confessional booth. Yet this confessional, with all of its power-laden history in relation to the Church is lacking in the context of two relative strangers going on names, ideas, imagination, and context alone. Perhaps the superaddressee or some other pious other mediates the context for social intercourse in a way that lends some sense of authority to the between space of the interaction, its visibility, and its ultimate publicity as evidence for implicating any actions. Group communication researchers point out that GDSS technology leads to more tightly coupled groups. In my comprehensive exams defense I called this tendency among GDSS users to become meticulous curators of interaction data and in fact are overwhelmed by the content such that curatorial duties are a stop-gap measure. But the data take on a life of their own. The curatorial work becomes a fact, a task—Sisyphean at that—that consumes the psychic life and memory capacity of its users. This was the very thing the early visionaries saw as the expansive potential of a networked visual data storage technology Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider both dreamed, and in the latter, carried out business ventures in developing group presentation and decision making software. A more practical Tim Berners-Lee developed the mark-up language for distributing sharing of data and projects at CERN in Switzerland. He calls this HTML. The tool conquers a sea awash in data but conquering is a matter of firsts and seconds in choosing a tool to handle a problem. The tool exists as a fact and users quickly put it to task of handling search, retrieval, and storage tasks for an increasingly redundant, obsolete, and enormous amount of data. We curate the history of our computing.

At least some of us do. The others remain blissful in their forgetting, perhaps sometimes frustrated. Those that curate become frustrated in trying to remember the where or when of an idea in order to retrieve a file. Often the looking takes on greater significance than the drivel one typed out hastily one enlightened moment. You often remember the aura of the idea rather than the data collected attempting to capture some of that. Hence, the old proverb, you can’t capture light, makes pure and simple metaphorical sense in this case. The luminescence of a moment of insight, an epiphany, cannot be captured. The luminescence must be performed.

Performance is what most do on this new public interactive stage I call interactive television. The networked, personal computer operated by a user in the current age spends an inordinate amount of time curating data, continually retracing the metaphorical paths on the information super highway, looking for the familiar patina of interest from posters, admirers, yet ultimately from the original author, seeking comments as implicit editorial device.

The doing, the seeing, the remembering, the task of curating search terms, ideas, meta-data, dates, mnemonics form the nexus of what we call our current manifestation of networked personal computing as interactive television. What it leads to is clearly a perversity of seeing—seeing others, self, cataloging seeing, hiding in the anonymity of the seer or cavorting in the cruel editorial world of self-presentation before the anonymous, self-described expert on you and your genre.

Whether you like it or not.

The depravity emerges from both the anonymity and the distance underlying mediated computing and the tendency to associate with like-minded individuals so that each other can support and grow a community of diaper wearers, pedophiles, lovers and role-players of Japanese culture. This tendency to scan endlessly images of death, pain, wrecks, flatulence, obesity, clever edits of several frame of video feed this depravity of seeing. Images like goatse.jpg, depict a man prying open his anus with his fingers revealing a glistening raw inner space of sphincter muscle and colon wall. Videos like 2girls1cup depict two women defecating into a cup and sharing it while they kiss each other. Both become phenomena that emerge on personalized car license plates, inspire artwork, and are carefully curated via wikkis to become well-documented, searchable, and memorable internet phenomena. Everyone is watching, reading, editing, commenting, pontificating, posting and most of all they are rereading what they wrote, read, edited, commented, pontificated, posted to see who may have responded. The flame trail continues; I spend a half hour attempting to assume a profile and add to the litany of posts about a video on Youtube or on a forum where a man posts pictures of a pig hunt. I realize that I too am doing it more for the sake of the publicity of my post than for any real meeting with the original poster. Occasionally I reread what I posted to see if any have responded to my post, but I too have skipped to the last page, passing over the pages of posts that came before. Was my post redundant? How many people did the same as me and passed me up? A forum post serially depicts numerous posters’ comments, striating the posts temporally into a sedimentary layer until the post dies, becomes forgotten, becomes a broken link. The visual metaphor that the internet resurrects into a reality contributes to the contemporary cultural activity, trains its focus, and forges its memory. Endlessly useless entries are curated, helping some to remember and leaving others baffled by the labor of maintaining the internet’s recent history. The Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online repository of Internet phenomena, calls this “last Thursday” to address the real-time decay of internet history. Posts, activity, become long broadsheets that required scrolling down the screen and form the sediment of activity. A neat stack of activity assumes the patina of old news and is forgotten, cleared from the databases. A meta-community does its best to glean the best of what happened that week, and so they assume the role of journalists, capturing and commenting on the goings on during a week on a community website.

An over-reliance upon vision as a form of remembering is used in the relatively constrained activity of blogging, browsing, or commenting.

Manifesto for now

It all started with a public speaking project. I was going to make an impassioned speech to my audience to buy the Atari 2600 (or some other simulated wood home gaming system created by that company). All I needed was a picture. Instead of a picture I stumbled upon a world.

Chalk it up to serendipity, consider it an answer to that value question of why libraries promote the 'collect everything' OCD--I found a mountain of information. A couple of things stick out at that time. Arcades were at that time a threat to the youth. It stole their lunch money. Using their narrative savvy, the news reporters would report about all the young adults, men with jobs, on their lunch break, pumping quarters into these machines, aiming for that lucrative high score. Regulations were passed. I'm certain that town halls were amassed. All of this 'sturm und drang' over a silly machine. But I remember the kind of hold they had on me. My adrenaline would flow, my heart would race, I'd die continuously as I fumbled with the controls, and I'd continue to beg for quarters. I became rather acquainted with my dad's hand reaching into his jean pocket. Therein lay my video game Valhalla, the quarter. From the ages of 6 to 8 I basked in that arcade glow, which economists recognized was a video-game industry bubble, and I loved it. That same transfixed gaze and cast iron attention that I exhibited toward the arcade would be the same that inspired Gibson to write Neuromancer.

I found out something else about games in that afternoon I stood transfixed on the microfilm machine. Stories of great feats on games were also making the news. One kid mastered the game of Defender so well that he played it for a stretch of 8 hours, letting lives that he racked up during his virtuoso piloting to expire while he used the bathroom. He drew a crowd and at least one reporter who's long-forgotten story I found amid the dim glow of the microfilm's screen. I found and read the book "Zap," which I did in an afternoon. I had tapped back into that excitement. It inspired my writing and led me to some provisional views about interfacing with technology. I'll present them.

Interfacing with technology is a performance. Aside from commenting upon the world that opens up, the avatar you control, the narrative that plays out, I was merely interested in how technology bisects bodily action. I tied this performance concept to that of musicianship. The reason I did this was merely because I found some affinities in how people spoke about Paganini's violin performances and how people spoke about computer hackers. I was seeking something on the order of transcendence, the arena of action and interfacing that lay beyond the code not only of the technology but the social code that regulates how this technology is used. I wrapped that up into a paper, got my A, shipped it on to a national conference, and had my moment on the panel. My god, a beautiful woman was in the crowd, and I did my damndest to put on a show. That was my last great moment of academic show.

But now I'm back and I'm fired up about this notion of how computer algorithms or technical logic form a basis for tactics out of which emerge discernible human performance--the stuff of Victor Turner's culture, performative anthropology, the lived now in which an old idea finds new life in the cultural actor's body. Fun stuff. The prose is still clunky, but I come back to this idea. Now what do I want to do with it?

Well, I really want to dig down to that point where I think I can marry the materiality of the machine with the materiality of the body. Interface works for this, but how deep does it go? Provisionally I say it goes to the code, but I suspect it goes deeper than that. What's to say about code? In playing the idea in my head, I wanted to explore code by doing 'viral criticism.' What's that you say? Rhetorical criticism of a computer virus: where I splay the code out and describe its finite elements in detail that demonstrates how each element can be figured as persuasive elements, persuasive enough for a host computer to reproduce them or reproduce actions contained therein. But I suspect these actions aren't discreet. I'm not going to find a code that says, 'host computer, jump on one foot and bark like a dog.' No, what I suspect I'll find again are the tactics employed by the virus' author to exploit elements of the computer. More tactics.

Another word: bricolage. Piaget considered this the lesser learning practice to its counterpart, conceptual learning. Bricolage is working with what you have and mucking through, theory in practice. Conceptual learning is making your blueprint and carefully following it to completion. Yes, two different ways of learning. Turkle and Papert recognized these as two epistemologies operating in the computer programming classroom. Conceptual learning is the canonical view. Bricolage is the hacker's MO. Let the logic of practice, the logic of the machine, and the emerging intimacy with how the person interfaces with that machine to define the experience and the learning. That's a simple ethical stance and the grain of a pedagogy. But I'll leave that aside to consider the other version of bricolage. Bricolage, as it is defined in a footnote to Rabinow's book on the invention of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), is simply any extraneous movement, a ball's ricochet during tennis, the follow-through after a swing, the stuff that isn't necessarily part of the match. But it is, am I right? We're back to tactics. Ricochets are part of the game. A quickly returned ball can take advantage of the time it takes the other player to re-cock for a return after just swinging. It's tactics, adjusting play, upping the ante, finding an exploit.

My manifesto for now is to do viral criticism. My manifesto for now is to explore how the game narrative is itself built upon the computer algorithm. Think about it. The first video game was a showcase of the ability to connect a few simple transistors to a monitor to move a point of light. The next showcase was moving that movement knob away from the exposed transistor and onto a spill-proof surface built for the rough wear of a bar. Why is this important? We're witnessing proof of concept. Techno-poesis in making a manipulable object on a screen, and using this to create a game for metered play--the beginning of an industry. While the narrative has gotten more complex and involved, there are still algorithms underneath.

"No matter where you go, there you are."

An industry that started by figuring out how to move a point of light on a screen has evolved into a billion-dollar entertainment industry. That doesn't interest me. What does is that, everyday, the development crew, the creative army, is still working within the confines of the algorithms that define movement, shading, dimension, space, color, fluidity, realism. Those can't be forgotten. An industry and a discipline have grown around tactics for working with these algorithms.

I witnessed something in an HTML training course that interested me. I was studying them, more or less, and I witnessed a student become excited by watching something he programmed his page to do, show up on him refreshing the page. He commented upon it, and it stuck out for me, that it's this interactivity between us and this graphical Galatea that enamors us to it. We fall in love with the thing that we create. This takes me into new territory. This forces me to read Hegel, not all, just some--the Hegel I need.

That's my manifesto for now. Will I accomplish either of the two agenda items? We'll see.

Monday won't come soon enough

Back before I moved from Colorado I was convicted of a DUI. Over the course of my state-sanctioned rehabilitation I told the support group that 'you're my only friends.' I said it halfheartedly and one guy seriously believed me. I believed his belief; it was stronger than my belief in myself. At that time my family consisted of a cohort of graduate students struggling through a tough program, finding jobs, finding love, marrying, and moving on. I had been there 4 years, completed my comprehensive exams, and watched my close friends and professors fade into their busy schedules.

I moved to Muncie. Alone, hating my job, my students hating me, I began to play this game. Somewhere along the line the job ended. I ended it early. I gave up on writing a dissertation, thumbed my nose at academia and moved back home.

Home is where you hang your hat.

I live on the cusp of poverty, and I give all my kind words to an itinerant group of online students at the university of phoenix. The pay is paltry. It lacks benefits. I enjoy their stories and I share mine. I call the job 'occupational therapy,' owing to the subject matter. Every day feels like practice for a job interview. 'How do we balance task and social communication?' I say in a thousand different ways. Some students are widowers. Others await their husband's return from Afghanistan. So many soldiers, so many military wives. Godly and good people. I feel foolish teaching them, knowing that my beliefs are antithetical to their own. It will show up as organizational communication on their transcript. I soak myself in beer, and I attempt to make 'funnies.' I teach and I learn.

The last couple of weeks had me moving, meeting my neighbors' new friend, flirting, fighting, drinking, and saying some pretty mean 'truths' in all their faces. I've watched the sun come up every night this weekend. Brief images of lucidity are burned in my mind. Speaking with my life-long friend's girlfriend as moans leak out from behind a closed door. A veiled comment about revenge sex. Being a curious bystander to my life out of control. I keep speaking to them about 'our solar system' and how the new planet is upsetting the balance. I scream at them because the walls and the floors are thin, and I can't help but be part of a situation to which I wasn't invited. I press my friends' 'buttons.' My friend chokes me and kisses the girl that I thought liked me. I feel used. Thumping of shoes stomping overhead, giggles coming from a bed full of naked bodies, and me retaining my sanity by pretending that I'm talking to people who aren't there. Practicing my 'I hate you; you're trash; go away.' Trying to convince myself that I have a hold on my life, a life that is careening out of my control. I scrub years of black hair care products from an old tub. The toilet clogs on rumors alone. Biracial children play outside on an old coal bin. I look outside a world apart.

The highs and lows that I've felt are intoxicating. Having romantic interests built on false promises taken away. Watching this romantic love interest get naked and head into a darkened room with other men. Seething with anger. Doting and kneeling next to a girl puffing her cigarette, indifferent. Finding myself disgusted by a woman to whom I was sold and who I've progressively alienated by my whirlwind of emotions and odd humor. Throwing my money at a stripper who is missing a hand, smiling uncontrollably at a moment in my life that is stranger than make-believe. Repeating like a broken record that I'm happy. I watched a white man pay for a black man to have sex with his girlfriend. I watched us watch the act. I cheered the guy on. It was swingers night at PTs. I was, once again, trying to upset my friend. I pushed. I pushed. In the middle of a strip club, I danced. I motion to the women around me to come dance. Nobody is dancing but me and the strippers. He blew up. I didn't know what I was doing. We talked. He hugged me. I went to bed and awoke to a locked door behind which are simple possessions: a coat, a hat, and some gloves. I placed a five on my face and laid across the stage as the stripper with a stump for a hand picked it off with her crotch. It wasn't for me. It was a show, a show for a woman who entered my life by way of my neighbors, who entered my life by way of my friends, who was sitting with a friend of ours, the same friend who choked me the night before. I gave up on that situation, but I couldn't help but put on a performance of indifference, of suave, macho indifference. I dance, leave a trail of singles on stage for the stripper with a stump for a hand. I feel a bond with her through her deformity. I stare and I smile. She smiles at the money falling out of my hand. "In God we trust" the money says as it floats to the stage floor. I trust that what I'm doing is sending a message. 'I'm better than you.' I want my actions to say to the woman sitting with my friend. It's all a show. I'm with a stripper on a stage.

I can't hide from this situation. I can't park my car down the street, dim the lights, and avoid contact with these people. They stomp overhead. I leave messages trying to extract my belongings from behind a locked door. Subtly, I'm being held at arm's length, forced to watch a life that I wish I could have occur without me. I'm jealous, possessive, obsessive, and I find solace in writing things, imagining myself someone else. I pretend that I'm back on stage, speaking to the crowd, being adored, walking through a forest of mirrors. The sounds leak through the floor. I roll in bed. I play the music loud. I scream at the walls and convince myself that I'm OK and it's they who are going to get burned, they who have upset a balance, they who have me as a contrapuntal contraption, screaming my jokes, drinking their beer, buying more, fading in and out of consciousness, fading in and out of relevance. I sit on the floor as the party goes on, and I begin telling myself that 'It's not me. It's all in my head.' I believe as much but it's bigger than me.

I was so used to living alone. I was so used to not caring about the sounds leaking through the floor. I live in a house that is not my own, I rent from a life-long friend who seeks to control his world and by extension mine. He works with the unfortunate, the poor who become victims of drug abuse, who get processed by a system that turns people into numbers and feelings into psychology. I work with people. I work with ideas. I play my Renaissance humanism card; it's dog-eared and fading with overuse like a teamster's union card.

I can't wait for Monday. I can't wait to hear your voices. But we're all just pixels and voices to each other, and I'll take these pixels over the fleshy reality that I've been struggling through of late. I don't have friends. I have a friend through whom I have made other friends. I feel like I'm kept around for the sake of his menagerie, and I hate this sense that my life is not my own. They won't even call me by my name. 'Jay,' they say. It's Jason. She sarcastically corrects herself. 'Jason,' she says slowly with a mischievous grin. I say nothing. I fade away. I interject stupid philosophy, book learning that nobody wants to hear. I'm obsolete. I'm an oddity. I'm a curio to my worldly friends. My nose in a book, theirs in a travel guide to Cuba. I've lived so long alone that I convince myself that they're trash, that they're not worth my time. If they won't go away I will.

Monday won't come soon enough.