I love, hate, leave, and return to Internet based video games, well one. It's a massively multi-player on-line role-playing game (MMORPG) known as World of Warcraft. I knew a group of mostly men who played, so I returned to play with them 3 nights a week, we form the 'guild' called 'Descent.'
I have yet to come to terms with what it means, and I've found my own love-hate relationship to be somewhat schizophrenic. Yet, the complexity of our character does produce some contradictions. Right now, I use my struggle with game mechanics as an opportunity to talk about how I interface with it. I posted the following to their guild forums. A post I made earlier 'e-friendship' was what got this blog rolling again back in November.
Meet Robo-Pfeiffer (Pfeiffer is the name of the character I play. A shadowpriest that I named Pfeiffer):
During our hard-mode attempts in Ulduar we picked up a shaman/hunter with some kind of Russian name. He recommend one of his friends, so we picked him up. That guy was Annesh. Once I actually beat Annesh on the meters. I had the unfair advantage of gear. He was a 10-man geared raider. He was also lagging worse than a satellite feed from Afghanistan. I remember seeing him with his character pointing the opposite way during a VOA25 run prior to entering Ulduar. "Poor guy," I thought. "Maybe I'll share with him my advice," I thought. How naive I was.
Then we took on the Iron Council. Annesh raped me like an altar boy. He was a priest after all. Melk sent me a private message and shared with me his log sharing on the forums about my performance versus that of Annesh. There, with my pants down, was every damn spell I had cast, when I had cast it, and when and if I clipped dots, plus my up-time. I felt a bit foolish. The managers were poring over my work, and I was the focus of their ad-hoc performance review. I learned the importance of mini-maxing, and the equal importance of hacking meters via maintaining a rune-empowered shadow-word pain on each of the Council's Russian sounding, metal members. I also learned that Iamdrunk was a cheap and dirty motherfucker who had absolutely no respect for any man. That's another story.
I threw out Squinky's macro and went back to manual weaving. Manual weaving has its benefits, and I got better at dot maintenance, finding ways to cheat meters, and maybe once or twice more I repaid the favor by playing the priest to Annesh's altar boy.
Once or twice.
I quit the game, and upon coming back I went for the minimax strategy by leveling JC. Now with Mixology and 3 runed Dragon's Eyes I was squeezing out as much extra dps as I could. That wasn't enough. My DPS still lacked. With 4 pieces of sanctified tier 10 I was still putting up mediocre DPS. This time Phrawd had to pull me into a different channel to tell me that on one attempt of heroic 10 man Sindragosa I had posted a meager 1k dps. Yeah, that was bad. I was playing it conservative and was once again caught with my pants down.
I took another look at my DPS, my dot up-time, my spell rotation, and realized something very important. The rhythm of dot maintenance doesn't play a song. It's a flow chart of choices that must be made in real-time and coordinated with fight mechanics, phase changes, the big picture. I have rhythm. I used to breakdance to Thriller when I was 6. My brother and I would choreograph breakdance moves to the synthesizer songs on Van Halen 1984 like one of us was Turbo, the other Special K. That was back when Michael was still black and before his nose became an impressionist drawing. Now he's dead, and buried with him are my brother's and my dreams of breakdancing fame.
I recently gave up. I tried a half a dozen recommended add-ons for tracking dots. None of them felt right. So I returned to Squinky's post for 3.3 macros.
Here is the behemoth that he created.
/castsequence [nochanneling] reset=target/6 devouring plague, vampiric touch, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, vampiric touch, mind flay, devouring plague, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, vampiric touch, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay
/cast shadowfiend
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
After I do my initial preparation and cast Shadow Word: Pain I turn to spamming the button for this macro.
Voila.
I did it. Top 3 on Blood Princes.
I feel like a cheat, a loser, a dead beat. I succumbed to the machine by programming my way around its clunky interface of lag times, dot maintenance, phase changes, etc.
I went out to the bar(s) tonight. I had a few drinks, alone. Most of my friends are married or working on establish it via common-law. I was drinking that cheap PBR, listening to Guided By Voices, and watching the Pac Man game play out. There it was again, only in a different form. I was witnessing machine control, voltage control, impedance application, turned into buttons, and knobs for controlling a raster scanned yellow, circular avatar to eat pellets and avoid ghosts. Beer after beer I sat alone and watched that same sequence play out on the table arcade. Pac-man is a finite play field with finite choices that one must make. Thrown in are objects which represent either objectives, bonus points, special conditions, or perils to avoid. While the perils zoom around according to their own algorithm, the operator of Pac-man finds his/her own algorithm and settles into it. The operator establishes a series of implicit boolean statements concerning "if this condition then this action." "Should I eat the cherry jumping around, or will I get trapped between two ghosts?"
I saw a rather illuminating documentary a few years ago: "King of Kong." A man with an apparent OCD and an extremely wide alturistic streak bought the arcade version of Donkey Kong and spent months perfecting his play until he had virtual muscle memory to be able to push the game until it spit its data onto the play field. Among my peers that was called 'flipping the game.' It was the digital counterpart to bumping the pinball game to direct the flow of your circular metal avatar. Putting the game on the ropes was the point. It was the ultimate challenger, and you'd muster all of your attention and patience in mastering the sequence of jumps you'd have to make to achieve the high score. Whether or not you used strategies outside of the game, like bumping the table, didn't matter because what showed of your progress on the screen next to your initials was all that mattered. That mattered outside of the game environment more than the game itself anyway. Games of my dawning consciousness were of that ilk. They were complex, yet finite. Their economics were simple. They established a scrolling complex set of choices thrust at the avatar, which became increasingly complex until the player's avatar had expended its last life. The balance in a game like this was to keep the player's attention and interest long enough to justify their quarter spent while ensuring that the increasing toughness of the game would keep quarters entering at a rate that couldn't be overshot by the extended play time of the virtuosos, the Anneshes of that game environment. The ingenious or the obsessive-compulsive ratmen who would find ways to play Defender for 7 hours straight were the stuff of legend among the gamers in the early 1980s. They gained notoriety as masters of their game. The news of course would lampoon them as the dupes of the gaming industry that only wanted their quarters or use their obsessive habits as the moral panic that this technology signified to the parents.
Why did I go here? I'm not a virtuoso violinist, but I see the connection clearer and clearer. The Paganinis of our time have 97% dot uptime on multiple targets. Their wow logs are the stuff of legend. I find the engineer who deconstructs this ingenuity into a spell cast sequence that establishes the best results, and I adopt it. It's a single button. I was good at beating Asteroids as a kid by spinning and mashing the 'shoot' button as fast as I could. Cockroach reflexes, that was my claim to fame. I've caught many a falling glass, potted plant, by way of those reflexes. I can mash Squinky's macro as fast as can be registered. I'm playing the game better now because I can play through his macro, his spell sequence, his decision tree for maximum DPS. I mash the number 4 button like a boss, and voila. It's like Annesh was never here to challenge me, but what it does do is reduce my play to gear and gear alone when comparing my play to that of another who relies on this macro. Yes, it takes some of the fun and mystery out of the game. Hell, it alienates me from the class mechanics that those slot-machine minded programmers gave to shadowpriests. But as long as my pointer finger doesn't fall off from repeated whackings of number 4, expect me to put up numbers worthy of my gear. I've found a way to maximize dps. I'm robo-pfieffer. Insult me. I will not cry. Punch me. I will not bruise. Ignore me. My blinking lights will not change. I am the lie that you think is my own ability to play the game. I'll keep hacking meters for the sake of performance measures. That's the point anyway. I just regret that I couldn't do it by my own ingenuity. I am the outcome of my choice to use this macro. I am robo-pfieffer.
Beep.
Beep.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Notes on Big Body
Big Body is society, its infrastructure, the habits of mind, and the broad strokes of human action that define its ebb and its flow.
Big Body is merely a concept for all the concrete, rebar, plumbing, wires, and other sundry elements that comprise a functioning society's substantive framework. It is the Big Body for it is both the body, the meat, the substance of societal workings and it is the projection for the individual. As the house is a projective body for the family dwelling within it, Big Body serves as the dwelling space for society.
I came upon this idea in my many drives to and from school. I saw a building that I called the last remaining bit of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project built in St. Louis in the 1960s. That was a failed experiment in housing African Americans. Its residents took advantage of the space, ripping out all that was worth something and scrapping it. The density of the project also led many an enterprising resident to prey upon the more hapless residents. It was demolished after its brief tenure. It was a failed social experiment. The idea came from the stripping of the housing projects infrastructure, its plumbing, for scrap, which gave me the idea for Big Body. Big Body is merely a concept, an idea, a focal point for attending to the ways that people use their body not as labor per se but as product to be sold. People sell blood. People sell eggs. People sell sperm. People sell hair. People sell plasma. And people donate their bodies to science and to medicine for use in others. Science has rendered the body a site for consumption. And so the big buildings also present themselves as bodies to be harvested as well to the enterprising who see not a dwelling but an opportunity to seize.
That's all fine and dandy but to make this idea sing, to make it work conceptually one has to flesh it out analytically. I see Big Body as an evolving work. The past 200 years have seen the city become the focal point for dense dwelling. As such it became the problem of density that must be solved. Waste removal, water, heating, electricity, basic safety, health codes, and the like were ways of solving the problems that come with dense dwelling. So many bodies huddled into orderly spaces is an accomplishment of the modern city. Out of this, Big Body takes shape. As we've entered the 20th century, electricity and the telephone emerge. In its train follow radio and television. The next wave is the Internet and the continual remediation of past forms of communication through digital channels and the many companies seeking to set its standards. Taken as a whole we are witnessing the emergence of a true nervous system for Big Body. The epochal shifts in the evolution of Big Body also focus on shifts in individual relations between the little, personal bodies and our understanding of them plus how our little, personal bodies relate to others. The pathologies of our times perhaps find a connection within the changes and developments of Big Body. This is a work in progress.
I like the idea of Big Body. It has a certain sci-fi flair to it much like Big Brother. Big Body is merely the substance of our relations. The brief past echo and the built future upon which our bodies will interface. The life giving water that we drink passes first through Big Body. Our waste is carted away, distributed, and treated through Big Body. Features of our universal rights as humans, the things taken for granted, are the substance of Big Body as well. Recently, access to the World Wide Web was added to the United Nation's list of basic human rights. That is an outcome of human activity, human retooling, human remediation of Big Body. Most of what we write, see, read, and share pass through the copper cables laid at the beginning of the 20th century and maintained through this century. Big Body is our relation to the most intimate space and the most public space. People eat, shit, drink, sleep, and weep in and upon the surfaces of Big Body. Some prefer to do it behind a door. Others do it among others. How each of us navigates these realms, adds significance or none to them, and how individuals must contend with the uses to which Big Body is put but their little bodies among the constant traffic of humans punctuates psychology and its many pathologies. Paruresis, psychogenic urinary retention, is but one example of how contending with Big Body as a little body crops up. The public excretion avoidant and its opposite, the person who leaves shit in the toilet and on its walls or urinates in inappropriate places comprise the ways that Big Body affords opportunities for pathologies and socially inappropriate behaviors to emerge.
Notes on Big Body run much the way of how technology pundits describe standards and innovation. Big Body is the built environment. Into it we are born. The residue of our time spent among it is left in the names scratched into pavement, spray point on the walls. These isolated vignettes are but one way that the built environment is repurposed. These may provide fodder for the glass half full crowd. For the glass half empty crowd the built environment is a reality with which we must contend. Ultimately, this built environment is a limiting condition for the full and flowering potential of human expression. We see this in the ways that copper wire limits communication. We see this in the ways that our desire for cars congests cities. We see this in the ways our time gets wasted in traffic and in transit to and from locations. We also see this in the ways that telework enables us to avoid this, but also avoid most of the human relations that once punctuated our lives. The litany of pros and cons is not dissimilar to the usual techno-pundits' laundry list. To differentiate Big Body from the pack is to hone in on the interface and the pathologies it produces. Big Body is about finding ways to reconcile individuality with socialilty, to fulfill the needs of individuals both bodily and mentally while fulfilling the basic needs of a functioning and efficient dense-living social organism. The television images of cities from the 1960s through the 1980s plays out in my mind as I try to see Big Body. Koyaanisqatsi comes to mind. There the metaphor of the small, the electronic, the body, and society all came together. Circuit boards and cities find similarities. Traffic and circulatory systems find similarities. Also, the hubris that succeeding in bringing so much human potential together spins out in the end to remind us that no matter how much we can project progress and futurity upon the modern city as a trope we have not left the little fishing village, the little pastoral community behind. The thousands of years we spent following animal herds as opportunistic hunters is the in-built obsolescence of human social behavior that must be relegated to the Id in our Victorian blueprint for modern society. That's it.
Big Body is how past, present, and futurity coalesce in the built and lived-upon framework of society. While one could read this from that art-house flick. Big Body merely puts some academic dressing upon it.
These are my notes upon Big body. More to come I hope.
Big Body is merely a concept for all the concrete, rebar, plumbing, wires, and other sundry elements that comprise a functioning society's substantive framework. It is the Big Body for it is both the body, the meat, the substance of societal workings and it is the projection for the individual. As the house is a projective body for the family dwelling within it, Big Body serves as the dwelling space for society.
I came upon this idea in my many drives to and from school. I saw a building that I called the last remaining bit of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project built in St. Louis in the 1960s. That was a failed experiment in housing African Americans. Its residents took advantage of the space, ripping out all that was worth something and scrapping it. The density of the project also led many an enterprising resident to prey upon the more hapless residents. It was demolished after its brief tenure. It was a failed social experiment. The idea came from the stripping of the housing projects infrastructure, its plumbing, for scrap, which gave me the idea for Big Body. Big Body is merely a concept, an idea, a focal point for attending to the ways that people use their body not as labor per se but as product to be sold. People sell blood. People sell eggs. People sell sperm. People sell hair. People sell plasma. And people donate their bodies to science and to medicine for use in others. Science has rendered the body a site for consumption. And so the big buildings also present themselves as bodies to be harvested as well to the enterprising who see not a dwelling but an opportunity to seize.
That's all fine and dandy but to make this idea sing, to make it work conceptually one has to flesh it out analytically. I see Big Body as an evolving work. The past 200 years have seen the city become the focal point for dense dwelling. As such it became the problem of density that must be solved. Waste removal, water, heating, electricity, basic safety, health codes, and the like were ways of solving the problems that come with dense dwelling. So many bodies huddled into orderly spaces is an accomplishment of the modern city. Out of this, Big Body takes shape. As we've entered the 20th century, electricity and the telephone emerge. In its train follow radio and television. The next wave is the Internet and the continual remediation of past forms of communication through digital channels and the many companies seeking to set its standards. Taken as a whole we are witnessing the emergence of a true nervous system for Big Body. The epochal shifts in the evolution of Big Body also focus on shifts in individual relations between the little, personal bodies and our understanding of them plus how our little, personal bodies relate to others. The pathologies of our times perhaps find a connection within the changes and developments of Big Body. This is a work in progress.
I like the idea of Big Body. It has a certain sci-fi flair to it much like Big Brother. Big Body is merely the substance of our relations. The brief past echo and the built future upon which our bodies will interface. The life giving water that we drink passes first through Big Body. Our waste is carted away, distributed, and treated through Big Body. Features of our universal rights as humans, the things taken for granted, are the substance of Big Body as well. Recently, access to the World Wide Web was added to the United Nation's list of basic human rights. That is an outcome of human activity, human retooling, human remediation of Big Body. Most of what we write, see, read, and share pass through the copper cables laid at the beginning of the 20th century and maintained through this century. Big Body is our relation to the most intimate space and the most public space. People eat, shit, drink, sleep, and weep in and upon the surfaces of Big Body. Some prefer to do it behind a door. Others do it among others. How each of us navigates these realms, adds significance or none to them, and how individuals must contend with the uses to which Big Body is put but their little bodies among the constant traffic of humans punctuates psychology and its many pathologies. Paruresis, psychogenic urinary retention, is but one example of how contending with Big Body as a little body crops up. The public excretion avoidant and its opposite, the person who leaves shit in the toilet and on its walls or urinates in inappropriate places comprise the ways that Big Body affords opportunities for pathologies and socially inappropriate behaviors to emerge.
Notes on Big Body run much the way of how technology pundits describe standards and innovation. Big Body is the built environment. Into it we are born. The residue of our time spent among it is left in the names scratched into pavement, spray point on the walls. These isolated vignettes are but one way that the built environment is repurposed. These may provide fodder for the glass half full crowd. For the glass half empty crowd the built environment is a reality with which we must contend. Ultimately, this built environment is a limiting condition for the full and flowering potential of human expression. We see this in the ways that copper wire limits communication. We see this in the ways that our desire for cars congests cities. We see this in the ways our time gets wasted in traffic and in transit to and from locations. We also see this in the ways that telework enables us to avoid this, but also avoid most of the human relations that once punctuated our lives. The litany of pros and cons is not dissimilar to the usual techno-pundits' laundry list. To differentiate Big Body from the pack is to hone in on the interface and the pathologies it produces. Big Body is about finding ways to reconcile individuality with socialilty, to fulfill the needs of individuals both bodily and mentally while fulfilling the basic needs of a functioning and efficient dense-living social organism. The television images of cities from the 1960s through the 1980s plays out in my mind as I try to see Big Body. Koyaanisqatsi comes to mind. There the metaphor of the small, the electronic, the body, and society all came together. Circuit boards and cities find similarities. Traffic and circulatory systems find similarities. Also, the hubris that succeeding in bringing so much human potential together spins out in the end to remind us that no matter how much we can project progress and futurity upon the modern city as a trope we have not left the little fishing village, the little pastoral community behind. The thousands of years we spent following animal herds as opportunistic hunters is the in-built obsolescence of human social behavior that must be relegated to the Id in our Victorian blueprint for modern society. That's it.
Big Body is how past, present, and futurity coalesce in the built and lived-upon framework of society. While one could read this from that art-house flick. Big Body merely puts some academic dressing upon it.
These are my notes upon Big body. More to come I hope.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
I am the apparatus
I am an extension of the apparatus. I am its business end, its interface, its worn, sometimes warm, sometimes wet functional protuberance. I am where the proverbial rubber of the apparatus' ideology meets the functional road of the masses. I am its mover. I am its shaker. I am its giver and its taker. My body gives it life. My behavior gives it substance. My pain gives it conviction. My screams give it voice. My death gives it immorality. It can be a flag but its meaning, its symbolism, its utter significance for every teary eyed follower is written in my blood, which I willing gave to close the circular argument in which it caught me. It moved me. I move into the path of destruction for the sake of it. My body is memorialized in it. It flaps in the breeze. That's my spirit haunting it.
I am a the moral significance of the machine. I operate it. It moves me. I move it. I feed it my time, my money, my gas. And it provides me a projection upon which the most whimsical of fantasies take shape. Conquering the space and time between point A and point B is not travel. No sir. That's freedom. I will protect it with my life for it is an extension of my citizenship in a free country. It is my badge of privilege. It is my extensible reality. It is my best side. I move forth in the world showing it. If I dent it, it becomes my shame. I paint my politics on it in so many adhesive messages. This machine allows me a public space for my own personal graffiti, and so I project. I tell the world that I'm proudly atheist. I tell the world to be forewarned that I'm, in fact, transporting precious cargo, my child. I proclaim to the world that my choice of brand is as important as my choice of political party. I let the world know that this machine is, in fact, one of many that I own. Yes, through this machine I present to you my fitness as a mate, my fitness as a citizen, my role as a member in our society. I am free in this machine, yet every turn I take requires close observance to speed limits, lights that indicate when I must stop, and directions that indicate where I must go. Where am I going? Why is it so far away? A conspiracy emerges, but the conspiracy is deep structure to a cleavage that I chose upon participating in the world that was made for and justifies the use of these machines. They are articulations, sentences, functions, a grammar of functionality through which I speak freedom, I speak common sense, I affirm the reality of the society that this car underpins and makes sensible and common. I am complicit in it by recognizing it as a reality to which I must contend.
"That man ain't right in the head." My step father used to say. He was commenting on a man who lived in a motel and who walked everywhere he needed to go. He was a university professor who had sworn off the niceties. He was a man perhaps with a phobia of automobiles. He was a man who had lost his wife in an automobile-related accident. None can fault him for his reaction. He had to do it to not forget his wife. Yet others, on the inside of their cars looking out upon him, couldn't help but notice that unlike us in our cars, he was no longer anonymous. He wasn't hiding behind the tint of windows or shade. He wasn't hiding behind a half ton of metal carefully designed and marketed to my demographic. No, he was using his own two feet, strapped into sandals, to go to an fro like a Jesus or a Gandhi. but he was just that loony fixture in that small town where he walked. "It's best to remain anonymous," seemed to be one of the messages that car ownership provides. No longer a Jesus or a Gandhi, this man walked the town, his message warped by the sensibilities in the ultraviolet filter of car windshields that passed him by. Each framed the faces that peered out while they framed the light of the world that came within. A strange moving world picture, and we continually find ways to affix a screen to our apparatus for the sake of being its audience.
Why are we afraid to be close, to confront, to put up with relative strangers? We are all human are we not? Why do we love the image projected from a satellite in space of an actor who plays a person that he or she is not while we live mere feet from people from whom we are worlds apart? I stand, sit, sleep, eat, shit, cry, masturbate, dream, fantasize, scream, fight, write, and moan alone a mere 20 to 30 feet from people I hardly know. I am white. They are black. I am alone. They have each other. We are human yet our ideas, our sensibilities, our values can be so far apart due to the choices we made, the actions we chose, the lives we chose to lead. Yet we still eat, sleep, shit, cry, piss, die mere feet from each other. Concrete and brick are all it takes to erect a psychic barrier between ourselves. Our music choices, our television viewing habits, our eating habits all help define our lifestyle and our identity yet we don't share this with each other. Even the windows the provide light to come in are blocked up to disallow the bored or curious neighbor from peering in. And so we remain in our homes. They are our boxes, our velvet-lined cases, where we store our personal menagerie of me-things. An "I" that lives separately from my body resides there. Fire, floods, and burglary remind us of this. We continue to invest in the object qua fetish. We collect some mindlessly while most collect dust.
I am a the moral significance of the machine. I operate it. It moves me. I move it. I feed it my time, my money, my gas. And it provides me a projection upon which the most whimsical of fantasies take shape. Conquering the space and time between point A and point B is not travel. No sir. That's freedom. I will protect it with my life for it is an extension of my citizenship in a free country. It is my badge of privilege. It is my extensible reality. It is my best side. I move forth in the world showing it. If I dent it, it becomes my shame. I paint my politics on it in so many adhesive messages. This machine allows me a public space for my own personal graffiti, and so I project. I tell the world that I'm proudly atheist. I tell the world to be forewarned that I'm, in fact, transporting precious cargo, my child. I proclaim to the world that my choice of brand is as important as my choice of political party. I let the world know that this machine is, in fact, one of many that I own. Yes, through this machine I present to you my fitness as a mate, my fitness as a citizen, my role as a member in our society. I am free in this machine, yet every turn I take requires close observance to speed limits, lights that indicate when I must stop, and directions that indicate where I must go. Where am I going? Why is it so far away? A conspiracy emerges, but the conspiracy is deep structure to a cleavage that I chose upon participating in the world that was made for and justifies the use of these machines. They are articulations, sentences, functions, a grammar of functionality through which I speak freedom, I speak common sense, I affirm the reality of the society that this car underpins and makes sensible and common. I am complicit in it by recognizing it as a reality to which I must contend.
"That man ain't right in the head." My step father used to say. He was commenting on a man who lived in a motel and who walked everywhere he needed to go. He was a university professor who had sworn off the niceties. He was a man perhaps with a phobia of automobiles. He was a man who had lost his wife in an automobile-related accident. None can fault him for his reaction. He had to do it to not forget his wife. Yet others, on the inside of their cars looking out upon him, couldn't help but notice that unlike us in our cars, he was no longer anonymous. He wasn't hiding behind the tint of windows or shade. He wasn't hiding behind a half ton of metal carefully designed and marketed to my demographic. No, he was using his own two feet, strapped into sandals, to go to an fro like a Jesus or a Gandhi. but he was just that loony fixture in that small town where he walked. "It's best to remain anonymous," seemed to be one of the messages that car ownership provides. No longer a Jesus or a Gandhi, this man walked the town, his message warped by the sensibilities in the ultraviolet filter of car windshields that passed him by. Each framed the faces that peered out while they framed the light of the world that came within. A strange moving world picture, and we continually find ways to affix a screen to our apparatus for the sake of being its audience.
Why are we afraid to be close, to confront, to put up with relative strangers? We are all human are we not? Why do we love the image projected from a satellite in space of an actor who plays a person that he or she is not while we live mere feet from people from whom we are worlds apart? I stand, sit, sleep, eat, shit, cry, masturbate, dream, fantasize, scream, fight, write, and moan alone a mere 20 to 30 feet from people I hardly know. I am white. They are black. I am alone. They have each other. We are human yet our ideas, our sensibilities, our values can be so far apart due to the choices we made, the actions we chose, the lives we chose to lead. Yet we still eat, sleep, shit, cry, piss, die mere feet from each other. Concrete and brick are all it takes to erect a psychic barrier between ourselves. Our music choices, our television viewing habits, our eating habits all help define our lifestyle and our identity yet we don't share this with each other. Even the windows the provide light to come in are blocked up to disallow the bored or curious neighbor from peering in. And so we remain in our homes. They are our boxes, our velvet-lined cases, where we store our personal menagerie of me-things. An "I" that lives separately from my body resides there. Fire, floods, and burglary remind us of this. We continue to invest in the object qua fetish. We collect some mindlessly while most collect dust.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Notes on a dark comedy
Man molests child. Man goes to prison and suffers abuse from inmates. Man goes to in-house counseling services.
As man serves out his sentence child goes through her own counseling and coping. Child explores the dark side of adolescence. Child becomes a teen, and begins to explore her own sexuality. Teen cuts herself. Teen does drugs. Teen realizes that after man who molested her, she hasn't allowed to let anyone touch her psychically.
Teen contacts man in prison. Man in prison is grateful that he has a pen pal. Teen doesn't reveal her identity nor how she tracked down her molester. Man is free and meets up with teen. Teen strap attacks man. Man's prison experience accustoms him to being sodomized.
Teen's strap-on dildo contains a plastic softener substance known to mimic certain hormones. Man begins growing breasts. Now a woman, the teen suffers a double mastectomy from breast cancer. Woman has no tits. Man has them. Man takes it in his butt, woman delivers him this using her cheap strap-on with the plastic softener known to mimic certain hormones. Man's body continues on its confused existence. Man then contracts prostate cancer. Destitute and dying, the woman accompanies him. As he lays dying, she reveals her true identity. The man views this as his penance. Man is buried with the woman's strap-on. Now middle aged and sexually militant, the widowed woman who married her sex-offender tries to start over. She cannot.
Woman who lost her innocence to a child molester. Woman her lost her tits to cancer. Woman who lost her husband to cancer becomes a killer. She begins hunting down the executives for industries that produce carcinogenic chemicals. She establishes herself as a dominatrix with a very select clientele. She plays the submissive role in order to get some of the high-powered execs into her home. Her tit-less body allows her to play the child role. She relives her violent past. She turns on each of the executives that she's lured in and rapes them with a special strap-on, one that causes serious internal injuries resulting in the bleeding death of each executive that she lures to her home.
As man serves out his sentence child goes through her own counseling and coping. Child explores the dark side of adolescence. Child becomes a teen, and begins to explore her own sexuality. Teen cuts herself. Teen does drugs. Teen realizes that after man who molested her, she hasn't allowed to let anyone touch her psychically.
Teen contacts man in prison. Man in prison is grateful that he has a pen pal. Teen doesn't reveal her identity nor how she tracked down her molester. Man is free and meets up with teen. Teen strap attacks man. Man's prison experience accustoms him to being sodomized.
Teen's strap-on dildo contains a plastic softener substance known to mimic certain hormones. Man begins growing breasts. Now a woman, the teen suffers a double mastectomy from breast cancer. Woman has no tits. Man has them. Man takes it in his butt, woman delivers him this using her cheap strap-on with the plastic softener known to mimic certain hormones. Man's body continues on its confused existence. Man then contracts prostate cancer. Destitute and dying, the woman accompanies him. As he lays dying, she reveals her true identity. The man views this as his penance. Man is buried with the woman's strap-on. Now middle aged and sexually militant, the widowed woman who married her sex-offender tries to start over. She cannot.
Woman who lost her innocence to a child molester. Woman her lost her tits to cancer. Woman who lost her husband to cancer becomes a killer. She begins hunting down the executives for industries that produce carcinogenic chemicals. She establishes herself as a dominatrix with a very select clientele. She plays the submissive role in order to get some of the high-powered execs into her home. Her tit-less body allows her to play the child role. She relives her violent past. She turns on each of the executives that she's lured in and rapes them with a special strap-on, one that causes serious internal injuries resulting in the bleeding death of each executive that she lures to her home.
The psychosexual relationship to nature
Slavoj Zizek has made hay out of the environmentalism movement. He calls it the dominant ideology of our time. He likens our views concerning the ill consequences of not respecting the environment to the fall from grace contained in the genesis narrative. He uses mobilizes religious imagery to support his claim that ideological analysis is the proper way to frame environmentalism in popular discourse. Let's think of an alternative.
I see it as a sexual relationship. I see a psychosexual connection between our activities in relation to nature and nature's own actions upon our body. We are natural organisms. Nature passes through our bodies, and our range of psychosexual behaviors focus on these passage ways. The mouth, the anus, the penis, the vagina, all connect us to natural concerns such as rhythm, pollution, and cleanliness.
If our connection to nature has a pyschosexual profile then the dominant trope is sadomasochism. We're either inflicting pain and hurt upon nature or it's visiting that same pain upon us. An endless cycle of give and take occurs. Nature negates our comfort, and we oppose this negation through the construction of microenvironments. Boats, cars, planes, our homes are all microenvironments through which we attempt to keep some things out. We attempt to live upon the earth on our terms. Only occasionally do we have to endure the discomfort and dangers of extreme cold and heat. We almost always have a microenvironment to which we can retreat.
We fuck the environment and get fucked by the environment.
I see it as a sexual relationship. I see a psychosexual connection between our activities in relation to nature and nature's own actions upon our body. We are natural organisms. Nature passes through our bodies, and our range of psychosexual behaviors focus on these passage ways. The mouth, the anus, the penis, the vagina, all connect us to natural concerns such as rhythm, pollution, and cleanliness.
If our connection to nature has a pyschosexual profile then the dominant trope is sadomasochism. We're either inflicting pain and hurt upon nature or it's visiting that same pain upon us. An endless cycle of give and take occurs. Nature negates our comfort, and we oppose this negation through the construction of microenvironments. Boats, cars, planes, our homes are all microenvironments through which we attempt to keep some things out. We attempt to live upon the earth on our terms. Only occasionally do we have to endure the discomfort and dangers of extreme cold and heat. We almost always have a microenvironment to which we can retreat.
We fuck the environment and get fucked by the environment.
Monday, July 12, 2010
a place to write
I just need a place to write. I need a place where I can legitimize my connection to things, the world, people. I suppose other activities exist, which help solidify this connection. I chose writing, or writing chose me.
Some activities, when deeply engaged in them, reveal the secret of invention. Kairos is a word that notes how events are gauged from the vantage point of the not-so-distant future. The occurrence of events and the actions, which set these events in motion, are incidental. Yes, we may gauge an effect in our actions upon our immediate world. The world also pushes back in its casual revealing before us. This idea is nothing new, and I'm certainly not sure why I'm rehashing it in a lighter format.
I need a place to aim. I need a place where I can focus my energies into a workable semblance of creativity. I hang my ideas on words, in their arrangement, their spoken cadence, the meaningfulness for me. What is it that may bring another to read my words are unknown to me. Even if they find intrinsic appeal, it's a foreign experience.
I generally hate me. I am always directing scorn at my appearance. So much have I done this that I wish myself invisible in social settings, by erasing my body from its own native sociality. This has the effect of mystifying my own secretions and excretions. In wishing me gone, I've come to view the parts of myself that I cannot wish away as pathologies. They confirm my fundamental lack of control.
I ache for a deep friendship. Two bodies touching, trusting one another. Yet I cannot accept my own body. This complicates relationships because my pathology spills over into a general grouchiness. I vacillate between closeness and distance. I become irritable. I burn with desire, then I burn with hate. I am a ball of tightly wound emotions. I stand alone. I walk alone. I eat alone. I remain ethical and moral in my vacuum. With nothing to test me, nothing to tease me, nothing to tempt me, nothing to please me I remain inert, a dusty relic of my flourishing humanity, my hygge, my happiness and comfort among others. I eat alone. I wash my own dishes and my own clothes. I pick up after myself alone. With no one to complain and no one to complain to I do what I please when I please. I have utter freedom and no wills to oppose, no human laws to break by living alone. I like being alone. I enjoy its confirming absence. Some embrace the oneness of it all. I embrace the none-ness.
Why construct a religion, a daily routine out of identity with the none? That would be peeling back the onion. I don't think many want to get deep with themselves or contemplate the things and the nothings they echo in song. I sit alone, not wholly understanding of my religion nor am I much of a good follower. I'd be the first to erect the laws and the first to break them. I dig deep, and still I cannot embrace the meaninglessness of life. I cannot necessarily accept the tranquility of life's maddening unraveling of my own beliefs. Over time, we lose this battle and then we die. It's a strange way of bringing the nothing into one's life. My grim reaper, my harbinger of the encroaching chaos that will envelop all of us in the end is in my harboring this fugitive called nothingness. It's the outlaw in this story, and while I feed it it pays no kind favor back. It's motives are incidental, and I better watch my step around it. It will destroy me in the end. All I can do is to lean how to avoid getting caught in its tango. It's a dance I will never win.
I'm thinking of a woman I know who is perfectly unattainable and also unavoidable. My throat is tight from anxiety, longing, and stress about her familiarity. I fear judgment. I fear the evaluative stare of others. It's character is hidden within the datum of interaction mostly cobbled into the nonverbal actions. The body once again reveals its hand in this dance between things. We are all things, and I place such undo emphasis on significance. But my poetry is just a distraction, window dressing for the real identity, the thing-ness and otherness of one another and of oneself. This thing-ness promotes an awareness of a there-ness without offering an explanation for existence. I am somewhere in a room. Shame shoots through it like a ray of light, and from this light cast upon my presence I extract meaning. I cannot explain myself. I just am, and for that alone I am ashamed.
Some activities, when deeply engaged in them, reveal the secret of invention. Kairos is a word that notes how events are gauged from the vantage point of the not-so-distant future. The occurrence of events and the actions, which set these events in motion, are incidental. Yes, we may gauge an effect in our actions upon our immediate world. The world also pushes back in its casual revealing before us. This idea is nothing new, and I'm certainly not sure why I'm rehashing it in a lighter format.
I need a place to aim. I need a place where I can focus my energies into a workable semblance of creativity. I hang my ideas on words, in their arrangement, their spoken cadence, the meaningfulness for me. What is it that may bring another to read my words are unknown to me. Even if they find intrinsic appeal, it's a foreign experience.
I generally hate me. I am always directing scorn at my appearance. So much have I done this that I wish myself invisible in social settings, by erasing my body from its own native sociality. This has the effect of mystifying my own secretions and excretions. In wishing me gone, I've come to view the parts of myself that I cannot wish away as pathologies. They confirm my fundamental lack of control.
I ache for a deep friendship. Two bodies touching, trusting one another. Yet I cannot accept my own body. This complicates relationships because my pathology spills over into a general grouchiness. I vacillate between closeness and distance. I become irritable. I burn with desire, then I burn with hate. I am a ball of tightly wound emotions. I stand alone. I walk alone. I eat alone. I remain ethical and moral in my vacuum. With nothing to test me, nothing to tease me, nothing to tempt me, nothing to please me I remain inert, a dusty relic of my flourishing humanity, my hygge, my happiness and comfort among others. I eat alone. I wash my own dishes and my own clothes. I pick up after myself alone. With no one to complain and no one to complain to I do what I please when I please. I have utter freedom and no wills to oppose, no human laws to break by living alone. I like being alone. I enjoy its confirming absence. Some embrace the oneness of it all. I embrace the none-ness.
Why construct a religion, a daily routine out of identity with the none? That would be peeling back the onion. I don't think many want to get deep with themselves or contemplate the things and the nothings they echo in song. I sit alone, not wholly understanding of my religion nor am I much of a good follower. I'd be the first to erect the laws and the first to break them. I dig deep, and still I cannot embrace the meaninglessness of life. I cannot necessarily accept the tranquility of life's maddening unraveling of my own beliefs. Over time, we lose this battle and then we die. It's a strange way of bringing the nothing into one's life. My grim reaper, my harbinger of the encroaching chaos that will envelop all of us in the end is in my harboring this fugitive called nothingness. It's the outlaw in this story, and while I feed it it pays no kind favor back. It's motives are incidental, and I better watch my step around it. It will destroy me in the end. All I can do is to lean how to avoid getting caught in its tango. It's a dance I will never win.
I'm thinking of a woman I know who is perfectly unattainable and also unavoidable. My throat is tight from anxiety, longing, and stress about her familiarity. I fear judgment. I fear the evaluative stare of others. It's character is hidden within the datum of interaction mostly cobbled into the nonverbal actions. The body once again reveals its hand in this dance between things. We are all things, and I place such undo emphasis on significance. But my poetry is just a distraction, window dressing for the real identity, the thing-ness and otherness of one another and of oneself. This thing-ness promotes an awareness of a there-ness without offering an explanation for existence. I am somewhere in a room. Shame shoots through it like a ray of light, and from this light cast upon my presence I extract meaning. I cannot explain myself. I just am, and for that alone I am ashamed.
Friday, July 2, 2010
looking up the winners
The winners are the people that completed their degrees. I'm one of the losers. I looked up one of the winners today. She works in Denver. She does statistical modeling for some company called Corona. I'm sure she lives comfortably in the city with the purported best dating scene for 20-35 year-old singles. I wouldn't know much about dating scenes, although my last date was when I lived in that area. Muncie, Indiana was certainly not a place to find a lady or even to settle down. As I've noted before, a brown aura hung over that town. I'm still stained.
My aura is dead. It fizzled out. As I've said, I'm one of the losers, and I live eternally in the penumbra of my past failures. I cannot come to terms with my quitting, nor could I come to terms with my finishing either. I was in between. Now I barely get by, and it has its romantic or exciting moments. Mostly though I find myself cooking up deranged fantasies and living by them. I find reasons to remain alone. I find reasons to alienate my few friends. My cat moans endlessly, and I continue to ignore her. That's my life. I scribble into this little diario on occasion but have nothing truly life-changing to say. Here was my recent insight.
People laugh at my jokes for reasons unknown to me. I make the jokes for reasons that are known to me, but their appeal for others is unknown to me. I accept that they are a mystery to me and the in-between I bridge with a joke is a mystery. I'm giving up my jokes. I'm in a sour mood and I sorely want a life make-over. I want to get serious, get a job, and move the fuck out of this place. I don't care where I go. I just want to head somewhere else. I need to mix up my life, and acquiring a job would help me do so. I've used this excuse before. I told myself in November that I had some writing plans. I've written 0 sentences in completion of those plans. Six months in and I've nothing to show for this year--another wash in the sand, another fragmented kelp frond cast into the surf, pocked with cigarette filters, drowned in the echoes of last night's party. Why do I write? Why do I propose? I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. Even my half-sister's hopes for my employment have gone unanswered. Nothing. I haven't talked to her since she came into town and treated me to a brunch at Casa Gallardo. That was a pleasant moment. Now I stand here, no prospects, and a cryptic message that went unanswered. "My boss wants you to do something." Then I called her back on the wrong day and she never returned the call. I know what her boss wants me to do, get my shit out of her inbox.
I look up the winners because I'm not one of them. They're the context for my own sorry text, a tear drop serves as my period. A frown functions as a quotation. A moan fills in for the vowels and a sob for the consonants. I stand around wondering why every time that I get this way nobody wants to entertain it. They just tell me to suck it up and shut the fuck up. I want to stab a fucker in the heart for trying to tell me how to live my life. I live it how I please, and I've resigned to living alone because I refused to have any affinity with the dupes and the sleepwalking wounded that surround me. I'm not sleeping. I'm well awake and scared shitless like a mouse in a sticky trap.
I write myself in circles and seek out those who write what I wish I could do for myself. I sit down with any project and lose all interest in the doing. There's a measure of anxiety that accompanies the act of writing for an audience, be it a teacher or a panel of experts on a topic. I'm a phony. I'm a fake. I'm speaking into the air. Is there anyone there that understands my snowflake unique bullshit tripe of a message? I wished that girl in the audience did. Man, she was so beautiful to perceive. Her friend, a panel member, was a bit rough at the edges, and asked me the time. I guess that was her attempt at having me behold her. I beheld her mind. She was all rough otherwise, but like a busted up looking tin can, the contents remained glistening and nutritive. She had ideas, not botulism. She's gone now too. I'm certain that she has her PhD and either lives stateside or moved back to that country that her accent revealed as something Eastern European.
All things are 'no' things. They are overdetermined by their 'not this'-ness. I'm a 'no' thing to any other thing. Things are things. That's the only symmetry a thing shares with another, the logic of naming. The thing will always buffet any attempt for the word, the logos to shape it. All the logos and the thing can do in concert is to motivate my own attitudes concerning the thing, its moral character, its consequential nature.
My aura is dead. It fizzled out. As I've said, I'm one of the losers, and I live eternally in the penumbra of my past failures. I cannot come to terms with my quitting, nor could I come to terms with my finishing either. I was in between. Now I barely get by, and it has its romantic or exciting moments. Mostly though I find myself cooking up deranged fantasies and living by them. I find reasons to remain alone. I find reasons to alienate my few friends. My cat moans endlessly, and I continue to ignore her. That's my life. I scribble into this little diario on occasion but have nothing truly life-changing to say. Here was my recent insight.
People laugh at my jokes for reasons unknown to me. I make the jokes for reasons that are known to me, but their appeal for others is unknown to me. I accept that they are a mystery to me and the in-between I bridge with a joke is a mystery. I'm giving up my jokes. I'm in a sour mood and I sorely want a life make-over. I want to get serious, get a job, and move the fuck out of this place. I don't care where I go. I just want to head somewhere else. I need to mix up my life, and acquiring a job would help me do so. I've used this excuse before. I told myself in November that I had some writing plans. I've written 0 sentences in completion of those plans. Six months in and I've nothing to show for this year--another wash in the sand, another fragmented kelp frond cast into the surf, pocked with cigarette filters, drowned in the echoes of last night's party. Why do I write? Why do I propose? I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. Even my half-sister's hopes for my employment have gone unanswered. Nothing. I haven't talked to her since she came into town and treated me to a brunch at Casa Gallardo. That was a pleasant moment. Now I stand here, no prospects, and a cryptic message that went unanswered. "My boss wants you to do something." Then I called her back on the wrong day and she never returned the call. I know what her boss wants me to do, get my shit out of her inbox.
I look up the winners because I'm not one of them. They're the context for my own sorry text, a tear drop serves as my period. A frown functions as a quotation. A moan fills in for the vowels and a sob for the consonants. I stand around wondering why every time that I get this way nobody wants to entertain it. They just tell me to suck it up and shut the fuck up. I want to stab a fucker in the heart for trying to tell me how to live my life. I live it how I please, and I've resigned to living alone because I refused to have any affinity with the dupes and the sleepwalking wounded that surround me. I'm not sleeping. I'm well awake and scared shitless like a mouse in a sticky trap.
I write myself in circles and seek out those who write what I wish I could do for myself. I sit down with any project and lose all interest in the doing. There's a measure of anxiety that accompanies the act of writing for an audience, be it a teacher or a panel of experts on a topic. I'm a phony. I'm a fake. I'm speaking into the air. Is there anyone there that understands my snowflake unique bullshit tripe of a message? I wished that girl in the audience did. Man, she was so beautiful to perceive. Her friend, a panel member, was a bit rough at the edges, and asked me the time. I guess that was her attempt at having me behold her. I beheld her mind. She was all rough otherwise, but like a busted up looking tin can, the contents remained glistening and nutritive. She had ideas, not botulism. She's gone now too. I'm certain that she has her PhD and either lives stateside or moved back to that country that her accent revealed as something Eastern European.
All things are 'no' things. They are overdetermined by their 'not this'-ness. I'm a 'no' thing to any other thing. Things are things. That's the only symmetry a thing shares with another, the logic of naming. The thing will always buffet any attempt for the word, the logos to shape it. All the logos and the thing can do in concert is to motivate my own attitudes concerning the thing, its moral character, its consequential nature.
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