The serpentine highways reach into the city like surgical tubes feeding the city's heart. A body under constant operation.
The highways are riddled with shredded scraps of tires from 18-wheelers. The truckers they are are molting this season.
The blood of the city pours out onto the city's freeways and thoroughfares: night-time revelers, the homeless and the beggars. Credit receipts and cash pass hands like a bad word: potent restriction. And the city's blood, its people, mill about who, when, where, and how.
The ebb and the flow of a city, its people, their actions, a life. The city, a metaphor for you and I, going about our business, in a world we didn't create, into a night that conceals us forever.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Defining the 'internet'
I read this in an article titled: "Web giants to deaf consumers: go away"
Tell that to all those men, women, and children in 1995 who still asked questions, who frowned at the prospect of the internet, who still knew how to put the damn thing down.
Like a dog, it keeps jumping up: into our laps, into our hands, onto our faces, into our minds.
What's next for this internet? That seems to be up to the technologists and the technology-savvy multi-stakeholder bodies.
A definition exists for this kind of power: technocracy. Simply put, expertise becomes the means for attaining power and influence in a technocratic society.
The internet was a clever end-game run around the normal channels of power, influence, and information sharing. Its impact should be clear. It killed jobs, consolidated professions, and blurred the distinction between media producer and audience. Now we watch child stars come apart in under 140 characters over the course of weeks. They stitch together a patchwork of web appliances and applications to document and broadcast their madness, their faltering grasp upon consensual reality.
And the web was supposed to bring us together? This much was clear from the start; its power lies in its ability to arrange data. In as much as we participate as data, data which is meaningful to us, we can arrange our lives in a way that gives us control over our web experience.
To make your web experience meaningful, to give it control you set up what is called a 'feed.'
Upon what do you feed? Experience? A sense of being there through a friend's update? A handle on your "diaried" life through multi-media self-presentations?
We've arrived at our knack, our technology. We've arranged our world in such a way that we don't have to experience it, as it is, without pretense, preparation, obsessive self-selection. No, we're experiencing a world managed by our choices, the choices we make about how we use our devices. We live in self-demarcated information ghettos.
That's fine; we live in ghettos of our decision making. We could conceive of our lives prior to the web as simply a web of activity that we engaged in on a relatively permanent basis. Structurally there is no difference because this is what we've always done. The only difference is that we've grafted this technology onto our lives, which shapes the patterns and the content of our activity. And because of it and its interface design we get stuck in these charmed loops of obsessive watching, checking and rechecking, waiting for a response, to so much graffiti, so much mail, so much video, so much music, so much information, so much interaction, so much.
It's obsessive. It's compulsive. It's what we get when we marry the technology that a technologist conceives with an application that makes the businessman happy. The data they want to collect we gladly generate through our choices, all of our choices, clicking about, swiping and swirling about, our interfaces, each generating some data point, assessing some worth, some value, some thing.
But we've since left the first decision behind, sometime between 1995 and 1999. Then we could have chosen, wholesale, whether or not we wanted to participate. So many have arranged their lives around this web of technology and inflated multi-format self-promotion that a sea change has already occurred. Now we simply make decisions premised upon the always-online reality that we accept. And we've so arranged our world that we don't see outside our creation. Our attention is permanently tethered to the gadgets we use and the habits they purposefully generate then support.
This is the world of the technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend. The musicians, the artists, the thinkers, the philosophers, become wrapped in the din, just more information. The technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend get to define the internet through legal briefings. And a Swiss playwright nailed it an internet century ago.
The Internet Association rushed to eBay's defense, filing a friend-of-the-court brief saying the web is far too complicated to accommodate disabled people.I spent many years reading definitions of the internet, of computers, of technology. In those years I ran across a few gems. One, by Swiss playwright Max Frisch, explained technology as:
“The Internet is complicated, and its technical inner workings are regulated not by any government, but by a combination of individual technologists and an interconnected web of technically savvy multi-stakeholder bodies that have overseen the Internet’s evolution from the beginning,” the group argues in its brief.
“the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”I've read a great many things, mostly from the early days of the web, when then-surviving journalists in their then-surviving field spent time writing about and forecasting what the future with the web may hold. And after all that smoke cleared I recall, very vividly mind you, what one of my professors and mentors just audibly screamed from within the room where I had completed an oral defense.
"What is he going to do?"It's complicated. This much I know. I live in its shadow. And because I made an academic exercise, an academic pursuit out of understanding contemporary trends in technology I am in a sense rendered obsolete by my role. This internet does not confer degrees for your interpretation, your research. No, if you can successfully launch campaigns using its many software components then you earn yourself a place in society. But if you question it, if you try to define it then you're simply being reactionary.
Tell that to all those men, women, and children in 1995 who still asked questions, who frowned at the prospect of the internet, who still knew how to put the damn thing down.
Like a dog, it keeps jumping up: into our laps, into our hands, onto our faces, into our minds.
What's next for this internet? That seems to be up to the technologists and the technology-savvy multi-stakeholder bodies.
A definition exists for this kind of power: technocracy. Simply put, expertise becomes the means for attaining power and influence in a technocratic society.
The internet was a clever end-game run around the normal channels of power, influence, and information sharing. Its impact should be clear. It killed jobs, consolidated professions, and blurred the distinction between media producer and audience. Now we watch child stars come apart in under 140 characters over the course of weeks. They stitch together a patchwork of web appliances and applications to document and broadcast their madness, their faltering grasp upon consensual reality.
And the web was supposed to bring us together? This much was clear from the start; its power lies in its ability to arrange data. In as much as we participate as data, data which is meaningful to us, we can arrange our lives in a way that gives us control over our web experience.
To make your web experience meaningful, to give it control you set up what is called a 'feed.'
Upon what do you feed? Experience? A sense of being there through a friend's update? A handle on your "diaried" life through multi-media self-presentations?
We've arrived at our knack, our technology. We've arranged our world in such a way that we don't have to experience it, as it is, without pretense, preparation, obsessive self-selection. No, we're experiencing a world managed by our choices, the choices we make about how we use our devices. We live in self-demarcated information ghettos.
That's fine; we live in ghettos of our decision making. We could conceive of our lives prior to the web as simply a web of activity that we engaged in on a relatively permanent basis. Structurally there is no difference because this is what we've always done. The only difference is that we've grafted this technology onto our lives, which shapes the patterns and the content of our activity. And because of it and its interface design we get stuck in these charmed loops of obsessive watching, checking and rechecking, waiting for a response, to so much graffiti, so much mail, so much video, so much music, so much information, so much interaction, so much.
It's obsessive. It's compulsive. It's what we get when we marry the technology that a technologist conceives with an application that makes the businessman happy. The data they want to collect we gladly generate through our choices, all of our choices, clicking about, swiping and swirling about, our interfaces, each generating some data point, assessing some worth, some value, some thing.
But we've since left the first decision behind, sometime between 1995 and 1999. Then we could have chosen, wholesale, whether or not we wanted to participate. So many have arranged their lives around this web of technology and inflated multi-format self-promotion that a sea change has already occurred. Now we simply make decisions premised upon the always-online reality that we accept. And we've so arranged our world that we don't see outside our creation. Our attention is permanently tethered to the gadgets we use and the habits they purposefully generate then support.
This is the world of the technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend. The musicians, the artists, the thinkers, the philosophers, become wrapped in the din, just more information. The technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend get to define the internet through legal briefings. And a Swiss playwright nailed it an internet century ago.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Page views
Keywords, search terms, bot algorithms.
These have contributed in varying ways to my blog reaching almost 5,000 page views. Sadly, few human eyes see the pages. Few human minds comprehend the narrative journeys. It's just the OCD of a virtual computer spinning in some cloud somewhere on this planet.
As I reach 5,000 page views I need to remind myself that among those views only a few were achieved by people, looking for something on a topic that this blog addressed. Few visits were perpetrated by people willingly clicking on a search engine link to my page. I'd put those in the 250 page view range.
I'm a blogger for bots, an author for algorithms, a star for software, a host for hyperlinks. Foremost, I'm here, unemployed, staring at things I've done, wondering what they amount to, and the internet equivalent of cockroaches infest my work.
These have contributed in varying ways to my blog reaching almost 5,000 page views. Sadly, few human eyes see the pages. Few human minds comprehend the narrative journeys. It's just the OCD of a virtual computer spinning in some cloud somewhere on this planet.
As I reach 5,000 page views I need to remind myself that among those views only a few were achieved by people, looking for something on a topic that this blog addressed. Few visits were perpetrated by people willingly clicking on a search engine link to my page. I'd put those in the 250 page view range.
I'm a blogger for bots, an author for algorithms, a star for software, a host for hyperlinks. Foremost, I'm here, unemployed, staring at things I've done, wondering what they amount to, and the internet equivalent of cockroaches infest my work.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
"it sends a message"
I read an influential book by an equally influential rhetorician named Barry Brummett. The book was titled, "Rhetorical Homologies." In his book, Brummett describes what rhetorical homologies are and how they shape our thinking, action, and understanding. One of the more engaging uses of his analysis is in exploring the ways that warfare and rhetoric were practiced through history to find the homologies that existed between them.
Firstly, a homology is akin to an analogy in suggesting that one experience or object is like another. The only additional requirement is something structural, such as a sequence of steps or the types of subjectivities furnished by an activity or relationship existing in both areas. These form the homology that exists between the two distinct entities or experiences. Brummett continues by explaining that homologies are a formal resemblance or "a pattern found to be ordering significant particulars of different and disparate experiences" (p. 2). These formal patterns shared among disparate experiences have a deep structure. That is, they are behind empirical (observable) reality. They derive their rhetorical power by offering or suggesting a course of action. In other words, if one were to experience a homologous relationship between two experiences the resolution to act chosen in the presence of one experience would resemble the action chosen in the presence of another.
By analyzing the structural similarities between warfare and rhetoric through history Brummett develops a blueprint for homology research. In this analysis he finds compelling connections between communication--message sender, message receiver, and the means of message conveyance--and warfare technology. Each broad era of rhetoric had an attendant theory of communication, which suggested how messages and meaning worked and the nature of the relationship between two interlocutors. As each model of communication or rhetoric changed so did the predominating means of warfare. One necessarily did not follow the other. Instead, rhetoric and warfare shared deep structural relations. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke elaborates upon these relations when he describes warfare as a "perversion of community" in that warfare and communication both require that its participants coordinate the meaning of each act. And so warfare, in its then-modern sense of nation-state versus nation-state, is premised upon a set of rules for knowing when and how to conduct war. These occur through formal declarations, which are a subset of the communication, broadly defined, which has modeled similarities with the methods of warfare.
Technology changes our battlefield relationships, specific to how we wage it. Simply, the means through which we attack and kill our enemy are mediated by a technology, be it through the dispatch of an enemy at close range, using a stiletto or lobbing lead slugs at an opponent at gunpoint. Similarly, prevailing technologies and philosophies inform how we view persuasion and how we practice it. During the Renaissance era, rhetoric was part of a classical education whereby one learned the aesthetic conditions for persuasion and used these in much less public spheres to influence others. Likewise, warfare in the Renaissance era was a personal affair. Prior to the pitched battles of a later era, politicians and their operatives dispatched their political foes by knife at very close range.
By the time we reach the modern era, warfare is organized around the musket and the rules of probability. The prevailing form that this warfare takes is of two opposing forces marching in formation to maximize deployment efficiency and spread as each army launches salvo after salvo of bullets at each other Likewise, at this time rhetoric--communication theory--saw each of us as individual minds to be influenced through the telepresent actions of a communicator, forming the right message to reach its target. Like the muskets on the battle field, the messages in this sphere had to be aimed and strike their target in order to persuade.
And so we reach the abrupt end of our journey only to see this relationship between the gun and persuasion still practiced. When people adamantly proclaim that killing sends a message they are invoking several rhetorics all of which coalesce around a subjectivity furnished by the wielding of a gun. First, a dead body is undeniably real and consequential to most of us. Using a dead body as a way to convey the consequences of one's actions hammers that point home as forcibly as can be done. That is, if one were to set the individual and his/her body as the standard target for persuasion, putting that target on the ground in a pool of its blood is an ultimate 'no.' Invoking that dead body as a meaningful and unambiguous message is a rhetoric of reality. It also performs for the gun wielder a subjectivity couched in a philosophical and legal view of the indivisible subject, its inviolable rights to liberty, and the attendant freedom to protect this liberty and this subjects property through any means, including the gun. The second rhetoric relies upon that homology defined above. Except now it has reached its logical and final conclusion. When the bullet finds its body is when the message has been sent effectively.
Now, I only brought this up because so many invoke the need to 'send a clear message' to whomever it is: the enemy nation, terrorists, criminals, and so on. And so many see the gun and the dead body as a means to 'send' this 'clear message.' This was applied to a hostage situation where a deranged man held a child at knife point only to be shot point-blank in the head by a police officer. My question became, "how do we send a 'clear message' to the deranged, to those who do not always have a grasp on the reality that you and I share?" The chilling answer suggests a very strong bias toward the gun wielder to subject an interlocutor to his meaning. This logic of the 'clear message' isn't being sent if most of us resort to the ultimate act of violence under great psychological stress. Much like the insane person, those of use under duress or under the influence or both are not thinking about the consequences so much as we are absorbed in the moment when the conclusion to send a 'clear message' comes to us.
So what?
We live in an era of 'message sending.' Most of it is impersonal. Does our penchant for sending 'random texts' or flaming anonymously offers us a suggestive new horizon for the gun? Maybe ours is an era of remote violence, where the gun shot is not heard by the person pulling the trigger. People have bullied people online to suicide. The United States has used drone aircraft to target and kill enemies. Sometimes, people with guns shoot randomly at strangers. This sort of homology falls apart as a clear message. Errors creep into the system. The heat signature of bodies in the drone's sensor array may be misidentified. Maybe the person being targeted for random violence is saved by a ricochet only to have that bullet strike another? There is no clear message just more error, more randomness. Chaos enters this universe of sending clear messages. Now, we want to deputize ourselves through conceal and carry legislation so that we can send one clear message to any perceived foes. Gun in one hand and cellular in the other; we've reached the tail end of our homology.
Firstly, a homology is akin to an analogy in suggesting that one experience or object is like another. The only additional requirement is something structural, such as a sequence of steps or the types of subjectivities furnished by an activity or relationship existing in both areas. These form the homology that exists between the two distinct entities or experiences. Brummett continues by explaining that homologies are a formal resemblance or "a pattern found to be ordering significant particulars of different and disparate experiences" (p. 2). These formal patterns shared among disparate experiences have a deep structure. That is, they are behind empirical (observable) reality. They derive their rhetorical power by offering or suggesting a course of action. In other words, if one were to experience a homologous relationship between two experiences the resolution to act chosen in the presence of one experience would resemble the action chosen in the presence of another.
By analyzing the structural similarities between warfare and rhetoric through history Brummett develops a blueprint for homology research. In this analysis he finds compelling connections between communication--message sender, message receiver, and the means of message conveyance--and warfare technology. Each broad era of rhetoric had an attendant theory of communication, which suggested how messages and meaning worked and the nature of the relationship between two interlocutors. As each model of communication or rhetoric changed so did the predominating means of warfare. One necessarily did not follow the other. Instead, rhetoric and warfare shared deep structural relations. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke elaborates upon these relations when he describes warfare as a "perversion of community" in that warfare and communication both require that its participants coordinate the meaning of each act. And so warfare, in its then-modern sense of nation-state versus nation-state, is premised upon a set of rules for knowing when and how to conduct war. These occur through formal declarations, which are a subset of the communication, broadly defined, which has modeled similarities with the methods of warfare.
Technology changes our battlefield relationships, specific to how we wage it. Simply, the means through which we attack and kill our enemy are mediated by a technology, be it through the dispatch of an enemy at close range, using a stiletto or lobbing lead slugs at an opponent at gunpoint. Similarly, prevailing technologies and philosophies inform how we view persuasion and how we practice it. During the Renaissance era, rhetoric was part of a classical education whereby one learned the aesthetic conditions for persuasion and used these in much less public spheres to influence others. Likewise, warfare in the Renaissance era was a personal affair. Prior to the pitched battles of a later era, politicians and their operatives dispatched their political foes by knife at very close range.
By the time we reach the modern era, warfare is organized around the musket and the rules of probability. The prevailing form that this warfare takes is of two opposing forces marching in formation to maximize deployment efficiency and spread as each army launches salvo after salvo of bullets at each other Likewise, at this time rhetoric--communication theory--saw each of us as individual minds to be influenced through the telepresent actions of a communicator, forming the right message to reach its target. Like the muskets on the battle field, the messages in this sphere had to be aimed and strike their target in order to persuade.
And so we reach the abrupt end of our journey only to see this relationship between the gun and persuasion still practiced. When people adamantly proclaim that killing sends a message they are invoking several rhetorics all of which coalesce around a subjectivity furnished by the wielding of a gun. First, a dead body is undeniably real and consequential to most of us. Using a dead body as a way to convey the consequences of one's actions hammers that point home as forcibly as can be done. That is, if one were to set the individual and his/her body as the standard target for persuasion, putting that target on the ground in a pool of its blood is an ultimate 'no.' Invoking that dead body as a meaningful and unambiguous message is a rhetoric of reality. It also performs for the gun wielder a subjectivity couched in a philosophical and legal view of the indivisible subject, its inviolable rights to liberty, and the attendant freedom to protect this liberty and this subjects property through any means, including the gun. The second rhetoric relies upon that homology defined above. Except now it has reached its logical and final conclusion. When the bullet finds its body is when the message has been sent effectively.
Now, I only brought this up because so many invoke the need to 'send a clear message' to whomever it is: the enemy nation, terrorists, criminals, and so on. And so many see the gun and the dead body as a means to 'send' this 'clear message.' This was applied to a hostage situation where a deranged man held a child at knife point only to be shot point-blank in the head by a police officer. My question became, "how do we send a 'clear message' to the deranged, to those who do not always have a grasp on the reality that you and I share?" The chilling answer suggests a very strong bias toward the gun wielder to subject an interlocutor to his meaning. This logic of the 'clear message' isn't being sent if most of us resort to the ultimate act of violence under great psychological stress. Much like the insane person, those of use under duress or under the influence or both are not thinking about the consequences so much as we are absorbed in the moment when the conclusion to send a 'clear message' comes to us.
So what?
We live in an era of 'message sending.' Most of it is impersonal. Does our penchant for sending 'random texts' or flaming anonymously offers us a suggestive new horizon for the gun? Maybe ours is an era of remote violence, where the gun shot is not heard by the person pulling the trigger. People have bullied people online to suicide. The United States has used drone aircraft to target and kill enemies. Sometimes, people with guns shoot randomly at strangers. This sort of homology falls apart as a clear message. Errors creep into the system. The heat signature of bodies in the drone's sensor array may be misidentified. Maybe the person being targeted for random violence is saved by a ricochet only to have that bullet strike another? There is no clear message just more error, more randomness. Chaos enters this universe of sending clear messages. Now, we want to deputize ourselves through conceal and carry legislation so that we can send one clear message to any perceived foes. Gun in one hand and cellular in the other; we've reached the tail end of our homology.
Friday, June 28, 2013
?que haces? - What do you do?
When people ask me what I do for a living, I reply.
"I am a professional eraser."
Monday, June 17, 2013
run, run
I wish I had gotten that job, the one in Kalamazoo. It all comes rushing back. I knew then what I know now, how important it is to run, to hide, to get away, to start over, to redefine.
It all comes rushing back in. I cannot escape a feeling, a definition, a form, an outline, of a life that I've created out of the habits of mind and the habits of body. I stalk, I listen, I live by the footsteps overhead.
I tried so hard before to shake it and working day in, day out, spending the weekends with a perfect diversion helped. But it's back. I lost that job, and my diversion had lost its luster slowly but certainly as a feeling more powerful came rushing back in.
Lust.
I cannot think of a better word. There's no logic behind it, other than that which I put towards my stalking, my spying, my watching, my listening, my planning, my life lived around the patterns of another life, hers.
Stop it. Fill a life with diversion, activities, projects, anything to keep me busy. This feeling is unfair to me. It's overwhelming me. I wanted that job. I gave it a good effort. And I lost it to a PhD from the Ohio State.
Pitiful. Shameful. I opened up that folder, entitled "dissertation" and peeked inside. So much that I didn't look at, so much that I didn't write, so little of my effort expended on the right thing, and too much of it spent licking the wounds that I inflicted upon myself. I took a job. I hated that job. I ignored my work. I ignored my life. I slid into a routine of disavowal. I couldn't have done any good at the Kalamazoo job anyway. I would have been in a sea of guilt, self-doubt, self-pity, loneliness. I couldn't have replaced Helen. She wouldn't have allowed me to leave. When I told her about that job, she clung to me like a sad, sad little girl. She cried. I felt nothing, but the air of freedom and the vague expanse of a future that was completely new, new routine, new people, new environs, new municipal water, new state tax structure, and a new damn job. A job that, at the very least, didn't insult my education, but would certainly insult my ego. Why? Because I would dig my own hole. Teaching jobs are isometric exercises. The harder you push the harder you invoke one of Newton's laws. It exerts an equal force back on you. The harder you try, the more work you do, the less you are rewarded monetarily, and its educational value is utterly uncertain. Hard work doesn't come through that often. Helen sucked my dick that night, and I came in her mouth. She swallowed, and I learned that she enjoyed that little job, that job that she does, the one that pleases her man, the one that she will not let go. "We're on the same page" she said in so many ways. We danced one night to her records in an early 'date night' in her basement apartment bedroom. She pushed me on the bed, and I played the passive one. "You get me." She said. I can fool anyone.
Even myself.
There is no future. I just thought that an academic job at Kalamazoo would save me from this blue collar relic, this job fitting for a murderer, a criminal, an addict, an unprincipled and uneducated buffoon. And I'm stealing that guy's job. John Scoville told me as much. When he was laid off, he cussed and stormed out. He didn't say goodbye to me. He saw me as someone standing between him and a job. What a fool I am. I am too damn poetic, too damn ivory towered, and mostly too damn Ferdinand Bullheaded to pick a career, any career, and stick to it for a time fitting for a line on my resume. But who needs resumes anymore. Computers do searches using the logic of algorithms. I need keywords not experience.
Here I am, sitting at a coffee shop, feeling sorry for myself. Blacking out hours of my day because it's one that is done in secret. The rest of my day I prey upon visions of the object of my desire, snapping its picture, putting it on my computer, and jerking off violently to it, zoomed in, transfixed on the dissected object, which was once part of another person. Completely objectifying are my advances. I was told this, and it wasn't what I had wanted to do. She's a tough one to understand. She will tell me that she loves me, but she will build a life around the principle of ignoring me. Ignoring me to death.
I need to get out. I needed that job. I need a job. Mine has dried up. I had a good job. It was dirty, but I worked around the best, at a pace that wasn't too terrible. The best job I had was fabricating, handrail around a tar decanter. Man, I felt like I had some control, some authority. I simply was allowed to do all the heavy lifting and made sure that my two co-workers didn't have to work that hard. It was warm up there. It was cold outside. This was a perfect job. We had to wear respirators the whole time, and I loved that job. Looking like a bunch of MIG fighter pilots, we walked upon the tarred lunar surface of that tar decanter. And suddenly we were laid off. Then we were laid off again, and again, and again. And finally, after we picked up our tools, and cleaned up our half-finished projects, the mill shuttered our operation--a decision made a thousand miles away and it killed our job. I missed the great monetary gain and mental diversion that the job offered me. Now I go back down to the hall and put my name on the list. To find a job, to fill in for the job that I had, that I was willing to drop for a job in Kalamazoo, that I would have hated by now, but that still haunts me like a bad night, one that cannot be forgotten because it got my name in the papers and put another in the obituary. I didn't kill anyone in a drunken driving accident, but something about my life is an orchestrated tragedy. I would have engineered it as one, but I lack that degree. You don't need a degree to orchestrate. So many damn barriers to entry. So many damn degrees that I don't have. This writing may prove that I exist. It may prove that I can and do write. It may even provide a measure to my ability to construct compelling sentences. But it ultimately damns me because it's personal, it's taboo, it's too fucking self absorbed, and it's going to get me in trouble. I am writing a diary of my inner states on a publicly accessible web page. This is an allegory for our publicly viewed privacy, our socially networked, fame-measured existence before others. The technology mediates us in a way that adds some very consequential contours to our interactions--they can be searched, they can be found, they won't be forgotten.
Perhaps this Blog sealed my doom at that Kalamazoo job. My cynicism, my pain, my inner turmoil, my self-pity and self-doubt: these aren't good for a job interview. Jobs are public. The spaces one occupies at work are formal, deliberately restrictive, emotionally oppressive, and utterly central to making a meaningful existence, a life lived out of the purely fungible dollar that we earn, sometimes by the hour, sometimes by the job, sometimes by contract.
The dollar. It's something that I seek to have at a constant rate in my life. But what I seek more than the money is that which must be done in order to obtain it--work. Work offers me one thing that I need right now--a diversion, time spent away from underneath the clop, clop of feet, my sulking behind the blinds, my paparazzi tactics, my sickening and sick desires, unrequited love, twisting into objectify, violent lust.
This world; it's a collection of base desires, selfish motives, and stitched together, barely, just barely, by boogeymen, ideologies, laws, and the one consequence that motivates most--fear of losing control over one's body through incarceration or death. It's a fitting allegory for our inner lives, ones that we try to shape and control by replicating the very institutions that shape the way our bodies move, how our eyes see, what our tongues taste, and what our ears hear. We're in it, but we're so far from it. The mind is trapped. Our senses mock it. Our institutions give it the long-throw reflex of extant culture. But the reflexes, the nerves, the motor neurons, the associational network of synapses, are all so coextensive to the reality that makes us perceive any reality, and yet they could have any content, any whatsoever, and look similar.
I needed that job damn it. I wanted a new start. I have to run. I cannot outpace the demonic habits, the objectifying and violent possessiveness of my desires. And here I am, in the midst of it, hungry, hated, empty. Back on the list to find another job, something to keep me from remembering what I am running from. The continuous demoralization of clumsy work, getting my ass kicked by a knot, a bar, a weld, a bolt, a tool. I guess it beats getting your ass kicked by a not, a not thing, the positive object of negation, the category and essent preceding non-existence. Another set of clumsy words, another stab at existentialism for which I have yet to earn any chops, another bot-crawled screed about my sad existence, a sadness conjured by myself, a continuous and painful editorial board, damning me to exist in a prison of doubt, self-hate, and articulate awareness of my pain.
This, this labor, this painful trudging through self-doubt, it is my job. It pays nothing. It produces words like this. It births opportunities to think, to practice, to preach, to poetry. It pays nothing. It does something. It pays nothing. My stomach burns from hunger. The screen displays what my checking account holds; it dwindles. My confidence dwindles. My life; it's a job. My job is my life. My pay is my sadness. The work I do the poetry of contours, the contours of my mental states, my confessions piss out, my words never stop, my sadness continues day in, day out. I will not sleep well tonight. I will not sleep. I must get up early to get my name on the list. I need a diversion. I need to put my mouth on something. I need to quiet the voice of my pain, my doubt, my shame. I need to hold something, a tool, anything, to keep me from trying to hold her too close, once again, scaring her away.
I hate my job. I hate being me. I hate. I am hate. Run. Run until you collapse, and hope you run far from the thing that defines your existence.
It all comes rushing back in. I cannot escape a feeling, a definition, a form, an outline, of a life that I've created out of the habits of mind and the habits of body. I stalk, I listen, I live by the footsteps overhead.
I tried so hard before to shake it and working day in, day out, spending the weekends with a perfect diversion helped. But it's back. I lost that job, and my diversion had lost its luster slowly but certainly as a feeling more powerful came rushing back in.
Lust.
I cannot think of a better word. There's no logic behind it, other than that which I put towards my stalking, my spying, my watching, my listening, my planning, my life lived around the patterns of another life, hers.
Stop it. Fill a life with diversion, activities, projects, anything to keep me busy. This feeling is unfair to me. It's overwhelming me. I wanted that job. I gave it a good effort. And I lost it to a PhD from the Ohio State.
Pitiful. Shameful. I opened up that folder, entitled "dissertation" and peeked inside. So much that I didn't look at, so much that I didn't write, so little of my effort expended on the right thing, and too much of it spent licking the wounds that I inflicted upon myself. I took a job. I hated that job. I ignored my work. I ignored my life. I slid into a routine of disavowal. I couldn't have done any good at the Kalamazoo job anyway. I would have been in a sea of guilt, self-doubt, self-pity, loneliness. I couldn't have replaced Helen. She wouldn't have allowed me to leave. When I told her about that job, she clung to me like a sad, sad little girl. She cried. I felt nothing, but the air of freedom and the vague expanse of a future that was completely new, new routine, new people, new environs, new municipal water, new state tax structure, and a new damn job. A job that, at the very least, didn't insult my education, but would certainly insult my ego. Why? Because I would dig my own hole. Teaching jobs are isometric exercises. The harder you push the harder you invoke one of Newton's laws. It exerts an equal force back on you. The harder you try, the more work you do, the less you are rewarded monetarily, and its educational value is utterly uncertain. Hard work doesn't come through that often. Helen sucked my dick that night, and I came in her mouth. She swallowed, and I learned that she enjoyed that little job, that job that she does, the one that pleases her man, the one that she will not let go. "We're on the same page" she said in so many ways. We danced one night to her records in an early 'date night' in her basement apartment bedroom. She pushed me on the bed, and I played the passive one. "You get me." She said. I can fool anyone.
Even myself.
There is no future. I just thought that an academic job at Kalamazoo would save me from this blue collar relic, this job fitting for a murderer, a criminal, an addict, an unprincipled and uneducated buffoon. And I'm stealing that guy's job. John Scoville told me as much. When he was laid off, he cussed and stormed out. He didn't say goodbye to me. He saw me as someone standing between him and a job. What a fool I am. I am too damn poetic, too damn ivory towered, and mostly too damn Ferdinand Bullheaded to pick a career, any career, and stick to it for a time fitting for a line on my resume. But who needs resumes anymore. Computers do searches using the logic of algorithms. I need keywords not experience.
Here I am, sitting at a coffee shop, feeling sorry for myself. Blacking out hours of my day because it's one that is done in secret. The rest of my day I prey upon visions of the object of my desire, snapping its picture, putting it on my computer, and jerking off violently to it, zoomed in, transfixed on the dissected object, which was once part of another person. Completely objectifying are my advances. I was told this, and it wasn't what I had wanted to do. She's a tough one to understand. She will tell me that she loves me, but she will build a life around the principle of ignoring me. Ignoring me to death.
I need to get out. I needed that job. I need a job. Mine has dried up. I had a good job. It was dirty, but I worked around the best, at a pace that wasn't too terrible. The best job I had was fabricating, handrail around a tar decanter. Man, I felt like I had some control, some authority. I simply was allowed to do all the heavy lifting and made sure that my two co-workers didn't have to work that hard. It was warm up there. It was cold outside. This was a perfect job. We had to wear respirators the whole time, and I loved that job. Looking like a bunch of MIG fighter pilots, we walked upon the tarred lunar surface of that tar decanter. And suddenly we were laid off. Then we were laid off again, and again, and again. And finally, after we picked up our tools, and cleaned up our half-finished projects, the mill shuttered our operation--a decision made a thousand miles away and it killed our job. I missed the great monetary gain and mental diversion that the job offered me. Now I go back down to the hall and put my name on the list. To find a job, to fill in for the job that I had, that I was willing to drop for a job in Kalamazoo, that I would have hated by now, but that still haunts me like a bad night, one that cannot be forgotten because it got my name in the papers and put another in the obituary. I didn't kill anyone in a drunken driving accident, but something about my life is an orchestrated tragedy. I would have engineered it as one, but I lack that degree. You don't need a degree to orchestrate. So many damn barriers to entry. So many damn degrees that I don't have. This writing may prove that I exist. It may prove that I can and do write. It may even provide a measure to my ability to construct compelling sentences. But it ultimately damns me because it's personal, it's taboo, it's too fucking self absorbed, and it's going to get me in trouble. I am writing a diary of my inner states on a publicly accessible web page. This is an allegory for our publicly viewed privacy, our socially networked, fame-measured existence before others. The technology mediates us in a way that adds some very consequential contours to our interactions--they can be searched, they can be found, they won't be forgotten.
Perhaps this Blog sealed my doom at that Kalamazoo job. My cynicism, my pain, my inner turmoil, my self-pity and self-doubt: these aren't good for a job interview. Jobs are public. The spaces one occupies at work are formal, deliberately restrictive, emotionally oppressive, and utterly central to making a meaningful existence, a life lived out of the purely fungible dollar that we earn, sometimes by the hour, sometimes by the job, sometimes by contract.
The dollar. It's something that I seek to have at a constant rate in my life. But what I seek more than the money is that which must be done in order to obtain it--work. Work offers me one thing that I need right now--a diversion, time spent away from underneath the clop, clop of feet, my sulking behind the blinds, my paparazzi tactics, my sickening and sick desires, unrequited love, twisting into objectify, violent lust.
This world; it's a collection of base desires, selfish motives, and stitched together, barely, just barely, by boogeymen, ideologies, laws, and the one consequence that motivates most--fear of losing control over one's body through incarceration or death. It's a fitting allegory for our inner lives, ones that we try to shape and control by replicating the very institutions that shape the way our bodies move, how our eyes see, what our tongues taste, and what our ears hear. We're in it, but we're so far from it. The mind is trapped. Our senses mock it. Our institutions give it the long-throw reflex of extant culture. But the reflexes, the nerves, the motor neurons, the associational network of synapses, are all so coextensive to the reality that makes us perceive any reality, and yet they could have any content, any whatsoever, and look similar.
I needed that job damn it. I wanted a new start. I have to run. I cannot outpace the demonic habits, the objectifying and violent possessiveness of my desires. And here I am, in the midst of it, hungry, hated, empty. Back on the list to find another job, something to keep me from remembering what I am running from. The continuous demoralization of clumsy work, getting my ass kicked by a knot, a bar, a weld, a bolt, a tool. I guess it beats getting your ass kicked by a not, a not thing, the positive object of negation, the category and essent preceding non-existence. Another set of clumsy words, another stab at existentialism for which I have yet to earn any chops, another bot-crawled screed about my sad existence, a sadness conjured by myself, a continuous and painful editorial board, damning me to exist in a prison of doubt, self-hate, and articulate awareness of my pain.
This, this labor, this painful trudging through self-doubt, it is my job. It pays nothing. It produces words like this. It births opportunities to think, to practice, to preach, to poetry. It pays nothing. It does something. It pays nothing. My stomach burns from hunger. The screen displays what my checking account holds; it dwindles. My confidence dwindles. My life; it's a job. My job is my life. My pay is my sadness. The work I do the poetry of contours, the contours of my mental states, my confessions piss out, my words never stop, my sadness continues day in, day out. I will not sleep well tonight. I will not sleep. I must get up early to get my name on the list. I need a diversion. I need to put my mouth on something. I need to quiet the voice of my pain, my doubt, my shame. I need to hold something, a tool, anything, to keep me from trying to hold her too close, once again, scaring her away.
I hate my job. I hate being me. I hate. I am hate. Run. Run until you collapse, and hope you run far from the thing that defines your existence.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Helping grandpa clean out the garage
Grandfathers are notorious for amassing the detritus of their past and carefully curating it in dens, basements, storage sheds, and garages. My grandfather dabbled in many of these categories, but his garage was his own to use and to fill with things he thought would be useful someday or were meaningful to him now.
In about 1993 I helped my grandfather arrange his tools and clean out his garage. There, I found many things that no longer existed in the 1990s. I spotted a cardboard tube with DDT powder for one's roses. I came across a crank-operated drill press that preceded its electric powered counterpart. My grandfather had painted in black in haste to protect it from the elements. In the rafters were seemingly endless stacks of "Popular Mechanics," mouse eaten, water damaged, and moldy. An old fishing pole and tackle box hung above a peg board containing various screw drivers, hand planes, and other common tools.
A motif to my grandfather's collection was collecting itself. I spotted countless Pringles cans carefully arranged on their sides above me. He kept these for storage. The same goes for all the Old Milwaukee steel cans. Each had its top removed to facilitate its use in holding wood stain and other such liquids that my grandfather used on a regular basis. In addition, he had numerous King Edward cigar boxes, each stacked neatly on a shelf with a label indicating what lay inside. He was a prolific cigar smoker and cigar chewer well into the 1990s when he abruptly quit after his doctor gave him a grave prediction if he kept smoking. He collected many tools, lots of half-finished projects, and scraps of choice wood. Each had a story that he was quick to share with me.
He once was the proprietor of a store; the building still stands across the street from his house. When he closed shop in the 1970s a lot of the left over merchandise ended up in the garage. In one drawer he saved a U.S. history pamphlet that a popular brand used as a seasonal promotion of its bread buns. Another drawer contained a slide rule, which he handed me to use, as if he considered me some kind of math wizard. Like others, he held a common misconception of intelligence as being automatically good at math. Fat chance. Or shall I say obtuse?
Like me, and like many of us, my grandfather attached many memories to the items that filled his garage. And it became a burden to curate all these memory objects, so he paid for my help in arranging things. In the process he shared many memories in story form as if each thing in that garage, no matter how dusty and forgotten still had significance. As tools many had lost their usefulness through the ravages of time and neglect. Projects like this were always fun to me. We shared a similar interest in moments from our past. We managed an array of objects that offered us access to that past. When he enlisted me to help clean out the garage, he invited me on an odyssey of recollection through objects in disarray. The story telling that followed each discovery was a way to put order to this material universe in the garage and to dust off the narrative universe that belched out in sometimes slurred words from beneath my grandfather's well-kept mustache.
Our first task was to dig through the unlabeled cigar boxes to find what lay inside. In one cigar box he had his picture ID from the 1970s. He looked much younger than he did that day. He had his tell-tale mustache, bibs, striped shirt, and a dark blue hat. Also inside I found a stack of small cards, political advertisements my grandfather had printed to support his run for ward alderman. At this time, Collinsville had an aldermanic system. My grandfather was the most famous man in Morris Heights, a small neighborhood perched on the bluff, overlooking the flood plain to the Mississippi. At the end of his street the neighbors could take in the Saint Louis skyline and watch the July 4 fireworks display.
As we dug through toward the back end of the garage I spotted a lot of large items. One item in particular was a very old jukebox. Next to it were various wooden projects, which turned out to be seasonal items, Christmas decorations. Among these was a piece of wood upon which were some large colored bulbs arranged in the iconic Star of David pattern. He told me that he wanted to put a star on the house one Christmas, and that this star was the easiest for him to design.
And that's the story I believe. He was a first generation American. He was a practical handyman. This decoration was probably from the late 1940s to mid-1950s when one thinks that people were less sensitive to the minute details of one's Christmas decorations. In this era and in this small town everything was DIY. Any string of colored lights would do, even if the leg of the cross was a bit shorter than its head. And afterall, my grandfather donated his money and his labor to create the Saint Stephen's Catholic Parish on a parcel of farm land in the town down the road. The priests were no strangers to coming over for drinks, handmade pizza, and poker after Mass at my grandparents' house. They were quite active in the Catholic Church until the end of their lives. My grandfather married into a large and materially successful Italian family. Anyone with a modicum of DIY and business sense could get ahead back then, and my grandmother and her sisters were riding a wave of largesse that their father's business sense afforded for them back in Abingdon, Illinois.
My grandfather did convert to Catholicism. His grandfather was a follower of the Orthodox Church who upon immigrating to a small mining town in northern Illinois remained stubborn in his ways when he found no congregation nor church where he could practice his faith. For my grandfather Catholicism was the 'next best option.' He married an Italian-American woman, and so his religious affiliation only grew with her and her sisters, their husbands, their kids, their jobs, their fish fries, the beer, and all of their collective culinary acumen.
One evening after cutting the grass my grandfather decided to chat with me about the family name. There, over a fish plate and some flavored drink, he told me that several generations back his ancestors had to change their name. According to the story he told, the village had 'too many Yasheko's.' And so his ancestors changed their name to 'Lesko.'
At the time I accepted this story at face value. Watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I learned that Worf's adopted parents were Slovak like my grandfather's biological ones. The writers and producers of this show used their understanding of Slovak culture to portray that the Klingon heritage of Worf and his Slovak parents were amenable. The original series modeled the Klingons after Cold War Soviet culture. To place Worf in an adoptive home of Slovaks appeared sensible to the writers and producers. The germ of an idea grew that perhaps my grandfather's story reflected the stubborn, pride-filled constitution that remained part of his family. Then I decided that the name was probably made up, perhaps on Ellis Island when my great-grandfather entered the United States. I ran with that one on a hunch, and a rather pedestrian observation of Slovak culture acquired through Star Trek's depiction of Worf's adoptive parents. I was young then.
Many years later I quit my job. This was a few years back. Shortly thereafter, the economy quit me. My future took on something rather bleak, and I took to sipping beers and reading web pages. In the absence of my elder family, Google became a way to imagine a past through search. It was my adventuring companion. Through it, I could find answers and flesh out a story about a past I never knew nor ever really mattered. When you grow up within three miles of a highway on-ramp you find yourself bled of any cultural heritage as you absorb brand standardization and efficiency dining. That variation on the melting pot reduced the zealous pride of culture to a menu item or brand loyalty. In spite of all this commercialization and its effect on consciousness and identity I still had questions.
A name sticks with you for life. Its sounds are familiar; they call upon you in a crowded room. You learn each word first intimately, then you reproduce them mechanically for life. But a name can be alienating when you see it listed among a bunch of strangers who share the same as yours. When you do search for your name you mistake finding it for finding, perhaps, a long-lost doubloon. When I plugged my name into search, a world of meaning came rushing in. Maybe it was the beer or the suggestiveness of a hangover.
I learned that "Lesko" is the name of a town in Poland, which is highlighted on Jewish heritage tours for its centuries-old synagogue. I also discovered this pop singer from Romania, who shares my last name but none of my obscurity. I learned about a tribe of 'Leskos' that aligned themselves with Russia at some point in that region's premodern history. I spotted a Youtube video under my name, where a group of what look to be Eastern European soccer hooligans are yukking up and singing some boast replete with taking sides and ramming your body into the other side. The last one held open for me perhaps one morsel of understanding. My name had to do with place, perhaps.
What is in a name? I began to consider that perhaps this name meant very little here, among the experimental soybeans and TV-tray sitcoms. And elsewhere it could be simply a very basic unit of Slavic nomenclature. The suffix '-esko' is one of the more common naming conventions in that part of the world. But what of this other word, "Yashesko?"
That word took me one specific place: the Romanian Wikipedia page for a city East of the Carpathians, called Yash. Perhaps, '-esko' was a way in the past to assign people last names that tied them to a place. Could my ancestors be from Yash? What of Lesko then? Maybe this is the name reserved for those who have no place? But a town in Poland has that very name. "Yashesko pogromo" were the words I spotted on the Romanian Wikipedia page. Pogroms are visited upon outsider groups, ethnicities not native or alien to a community with an already self-described insider group. Pogroms often befall two groups in Europe: the Jews and the Gypsies or Roma.
Then I remembered something from my Aunt's own exploration of her heritage. She took a Bible that was the property of her grandmother, my Grandfather's mother, to a Slavic studies and languages expert. Upon a cursory glance he determined that the Bible was one common among the Gypsies of Slavic lands. This was my best and only lead in a long-odyssey to understand something about my heritage through a family name.
These kinds of journeys tend to be wild goose chases. Names change, and inheritance is a jagged form of self-affiliation. Armed with my information age tools I think I have found something unique to my own experience. I did none of the genealogical work, nor did I pay to gain access to its tools--a database of records. Instead, I let my imagination roam with a narrative stitched loosely across scattered details about a past that I never knew. And it could be best that I don't know my past. Those with a past that outshines their present find themselves taken up by the ghost of an ideology. They are set into a centuries old knee-jerk hatred of another ethnicity and engage in the symbolic guerilla warfare to become ontically prior to all other ethnicities. This is a leveling up game done at the nation-state level to have one's identity co-extensive with that of the nation's. It's a rather violent way in which one's ethnic worldview, as piecemeal and arbitrary as it may seem, becomes the one adopted by the coming generations of a nation.
Does a history need to be preserved if it requires this much violence to sustain?
In the game of chutes and ladders, names are chutes that send you back to the barren, theoretical landscape of ursprung identity. I was pleased to find a rather ambiguous past from which sprung one of many possible paths. I could choose to wander any one of them back.
No particular past beyond that garage offers me much purchase. My present is a vague collection of carried out plans and ritual self abuses. My future is a motley constellation of grandiose visions of self-worth and equally depraved avenues of ruin. And when I want to feel free to start over I can wander again, like the Gypsy that I am.
In about 1993 I helped my grandfather arrange his tools and clean out his garage. There, I found many things that no longer existed in the 1990s. I spotted a cardboard tube with DDT powder for one's roses. I came across a crank-operated drill press that preceded its electric powered counterpart. My grandfather had painted in black in haste to protect it from the elements. In the rafters were seemingly endless stacks of "Popular Mechanics," mouse eaten, water damaged, and moldy. An old fishing pole and tackle box hung above a peg board containing various screw drivers, hand planes, and other common tools.
A motif to my grandfather's collection was collecting itself. I spotted countless Pringles cans carefully arranged on their sides above me. He kept these for storage. The same goes for all the Old Milwaukee steel cans. Each had its top removed to facilitate its use in holding wood stain and other such liquids that my grandfather used on a regular basis. In addition, he had numerous King Edward cigar boxes, each stacked neatly on a shelf with a label indicating what lay inside. He was a prolific cigar smoker and cigar chewer well into the 1990s when he abruptly quit after his doctor gave him a grave prediction if he kept smoking. He collected many tools, lots of half-finished projects, and scraps of choice wood. Each had a story that he was quick to share with me.
He once was the proprietor of a store; the building still stands across the street from his house. When he closed shop in the 1970s a lot of the left over merchandise ended up in the garage. In one drawer he saved a U.S. history pamphlet that a popular brand used as a seasonal promotion of its bread buns. Another drawer contained a slide rule, which he handed me to use, as if he considered me some kind of math wizard. Like others, he held a common misconception of intelligence as being automatically good at math. Fat chance. Or shall I say obtuse?
Like me, and like many of us, my grandfather attached many memories to the items that filled his garage. And it became a burden to curate all these memory objects, so he paid for my help in arranging things. In the process he shared many memories in story form as if each thing in that garage, no matter how dusty and forgotten still had significance. As tools many had lost their usefulness through the ravages of time and neglect. Projects like this were always fun to me. We shared a similar interest in moments from our past. We managed an array of objects that offered us access to that past. When he enlisted me to help clean out the garage, he invited me on an odyssey of recollection through objects in disarray. The story telling that followed each discovery was a way to put order to this material universe in the garage and to dust off the narrative universe that belched out in sometimes slurred words from beneath my grandfather's well-kept mustache.
Our first task was to dig through the unlabeled cigar boxes to find what lay inside. In one cigar box he had his picture ID from the 1970s. He looked much younger than he did that day. He had his tell-tale mustache, bibs, striped shirt, and a dark blue hat. Also inside I found a stack of small cards, political advertisements my grandfather had printed to support his run for ward alderman. At this time, Collinsville had an aldermanic system. My grandfather was the most famous man in Morris Heights, a small neighborhood perched on the bluff, overlooking the flood plain to the Mississippi. At the end of his street the neighbors could take in the Saint Louis skyline and watch the July 4 fireworks display.
As we dug through toward the back end of the garage I spotted a lot of large items. One item in particular was a very old jukebox. Next to it were various wooden projects, which turned out to be seasonal items, Christmas decorations. Among these was a piece of wood upon which were some large colored bulbs arranged in the iconic Star of David pattern. He told me that he wanted to put a star on the house one Christmas, and that this star was the easiest for him to design.
And that's the story I believe. He was a first generation American. He was a practical handyman. This decoration was probably from the late 1940s to mid-1950s when one thinks that people were less sensitive to the minute details of one's Christmas decorations. In this era and in this small town everything was DIY. Any string of colored lights would do, even if the leg of the cross was a bit shorter than its head. And afterall, my grandfather donated his money and his labor to create the Saint Stephen's Catholic Parish on a parcel of farm land in the town down the road. The priests were no strangers to coming over for drinks, handmade pizza, and poker after Mass at my grandparents' house. They were quite active in the Catholic Church until the end of their lives. My grandfather married into a large and materially successful Italian family. Anyone with a modicum of DIY and business sense could get ahead back then, and my grandmother and her sisters were riding a wave of largesse that their father's business sense afforded for them back in Abingdon, Illinois.
My grandfather did convert to Catholicism. His grandfather was a follower of the Orthodox Church who upon immigrating to a small mining town in northern Illinois remained stubborn in his ways when he found no congregation nor church where he could practice his faith. For my grandfather Catholicism was the 'next best option.' He married an Italian-American woman, and so his religious affiliation only grew with her and her sisters, their husbands, their kids, their jobs, their fish fries, the beer, and all of their collective culinary acumen.
One evening after cutting the grass my grandfather decided to chat with me about the family name. There, over a fish plate and some flavored drink, he told me that several generations back his ancestors had to change their name. According to the story he told, the village had 'too many Yasheko's.' And so his ancestors changed their name to 'Lesko.'
At the time I accepted this story at face value. Watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I learned that Worf's adopted parents were Slovak like my grandfather's biological ones. The writers and producers of this show used their understanding of Slovak culture to portray that the Klingon heritage of Worf and his Slovak parents were amenable. The original series modeled the Klingons after Cold War Soviet culture. To place Worf in an adoptive home of Slovaks appeared sensible to the writers and producers. The germ of an idea grew that perhaps my grandfather's story reflected the stubborn, pride-filled constitution that remained part of his family. Then I decided that the name was probably made up, perhaps on Ellis Island when my great-grandfather entered the United States. I ran with that one on a hunch, and a rather pedestrian observation of Slovak culture acquired through Star Trek's depiction of Worf's adoptive parents. I was young then.
Many years later I quit my job. This was a few years back. Shortly thereafter, the economy quit me. My future took on something rather bleak, and I took to sipping beers and reading web pages. In the absence of my elder family, Google became a way to imagine a past through search. It was my adventuring companion. Through it, I could find answers and flesh out a story about a past I never knew nor ever really mattered. When you grow up within three miles of a highway on-ramp you find yourself bled of any cultural heritage as you absorb brand standardization and efficiency dining. That variation on the melting pot reduced the zealous pride of culture to a menu item or brand loyalty. In spite of all this commercialization and its effect on consciousness and identity I still had questions.
A name sticks with you for life. Its sounds are familiar; they call upon you in a crowded room. You learn each word first intimately, then you reproduce them mechanically for life. But a name can be alienating when you see it listed among a bunch of strangers who share the same as yours. When you do search for your name you mistake finding it for finding, perhaps, a long-lost doubloon. When I plugged my name into search, a world of meaning came rushing in. Maybe it was the beer or the suggestiveness of a hangover.
I learned that "Lesko" is the name of a town in Poland, which is highlighted on Jewish heritage tours for its centuries-old synagogue. I also discovered this pop singer from Romania, who shares my last name but none of my obscurity. I learned about a tribe of 'Leskos' that aligned themselves with Russia at some point in that region's premodern history. I spotted a Youtube video under my name, where a group of what look to be Eastern European soccer hooligans are yukking up and singing some boast replete with taking sides and ramming your body into the other side. The last one held open for me perhaps one morsel of understanding. My name had to do with place, perhaps.
What is in a name? I began to consider that perhaps this name meant very little here, among the experimental soybeans and TV-tray sitcoms. And elsewhere it could be simply a very basic unit of Slavic nomenclature. The suffix '-esko' is one of the more common naming conventions in that part of the world. But what of this other word, "Yashesko?"
That word took me one specific place: the Romanian Wikipedia page for a city East of the Carpathians, called Yash. Perhaps, '-esko' was a way in the past to assign people last names that tied them to a place. Could my ancestors be from Yash? What of Lesko then? Maybe this is the name reserved for those who have no place? But a town in Poland has that very name. "Yashesko pogromo" were the words I spotted on the Romanian Wikipedia page. Pogroms are visited upon outsider groups, ethnicities not native or alien to a community with an already self-described insider group. Pogroms often befall two groups in Europe: the Jews and the Gypsies or Roma.
Then I remembered something from my Aunt's own exploration of her heritage. She took a Bible that was the property of her grandmother, my Grandfather's mother, to a Slavic studies and languages expert. Upon a cursory glance he determined that the Bible was one common among the Gypsies of Slavic lands. This was my best and only lead in a long-odyssey to understand something about my heritage through a family name.
These kinds of journeys tend to be wild goose chases. Names change, and inheritance is a jagged form of self-affiliation. Armed with my information age tools I think I have found something unique to my own experience. I did none of the genealogical work, nor did I pay to gain access to its tools--a database of records. Instead, I let my imagination roam with a narrative stitched loosely across scattered details about a past that I never knew. And it could be best that I don't know my past. Those with a past that outshines their present find themselves taken up by the ghost of an ideology. They are set into a centuries old knee-jerk hatred of another ethnicity and engage in the symbolic guerilla warfare to become ontically prior to all other ethnicities. This is a leveling up game done at the nation-state level to have one's identity co-extensive with that of the nation's. It's a rather violent way in which one's ethnic worldview, as piecemeal and arbitrary as it may seem, becomes the one adopted by the coming generations of a nation.
Does a history need to be preserved if it requires this much violence to sustain?
In the game of chutes and ladders, names are chutes that send you back to the barren, theoretical landscape of ursprung identity. I was pleased to find a rather ambiguous past from which sprung one of many possible paths. I could choose to wander any one of them back.
No particular past beyond that garage offers me much purchase. My present is a vague collection of carried out plans and ritual self abuses. My future is a motley constellation of grandiose visions of self-worth and equally depraved avenues of ruin. And when I want to feel free to start over I can wander again, like the Gypsy that I am.
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