United States Presidents Acquire a Staff Infection

This is a pun. The staph indicated by "staff" is staphylococcus aureus, which is the cause of staph infection. A staff infection is when the people you concede to including on your cabinet as President of the United States for securing votes and campaign contributions represent entrenched special interests that have been occupying cabinets since cabinets have existed. And over time those cabinet positions have been verily guaranteed as a formality of being allowed to state one's desire to run publicly and most of all legitimately.

This is our time

The wounded skeletons are tapping at the glass. This is the soundtrack to our destruction. To imagine a landscape in ruins and to imagine a life are two disparate entities. "Remain calm and carry on" is an old adage told by a proud people to maintain their dignity through flagging moments of insecurity, destruction, war. What is it that we tell ourselves in this time? We have become complacent upon interactivity as a means of passing the dead time that now encompasses our life. We say nothing outside of the usual pathological flinging and screaming that defines a perfectly atomized hominid zoo animal separated from any meaningful context by a wall of alien onlookers.

"What are you?" he says.

"I am a casualty of consciousness." I reply.

I am self-sufficient

I found an old book of poetry that I wrote. This is the final and only one worth sharing due to its brevity and wit.

I am self sufficient.

I can cook for myself.

I can clean for myself.

I am self sufficient.

I can pay my bills.

I can balance my paycheck.

I am self sufficient.

I can love myself.

I can comfort myself.

I can hold myself. 

I can talk to myself.

I can fool myself ...

that I am self sufficient.

Old Things

As if it isn't obvious by now, I am virtually unemployable. My schooling prepared me for no discernible activity in today's workplace. So many letters from potential employers and employment screening departments have indicated this much in writing. In a letter dated July 13, 2016, Bryan Boeckelmann, Manager of Recruiting and Examination for the City of Saint Louis writes: "I regret to inform you that your experience and training does not meet the Minimum Qualifications for this position." In a letter dated September 20, 2011 the Human Resources Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory "has determined that your experience and/or educational background are not the best match for this position."

I recall a brief moment after finishing the oral defense of my comprehensive examinations toward the fulfillment of my Doctorate of Philosophy in Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder one of my advisors, Doctor Bryan Taylor, audibly shouted from inside the room that I had just exited, "What is he going to do?"

What am I going to do? Apply as I might, find brief moments of need from others as I do, I get by, just barely, but I get by. So Monday, August 29, 2016 I helped a childhood friend remove some wood lath and trim from a home built in Saint Louis in the late 1800s. In an upstairs closet where I had just removed some trim, two items shined like gems amid the rubble.

The green tinkertoy tab has been identified as coming from a Tinkertoy, Giant Engineer #155 set from Questor Education Products Co., which was produced in the 1950s. The picture, likely a yearbook photo or some other photographic memento, came from some time in the 20s through the 40s, judging by the sepia-toned patina of the photo. But if this is not natural yellowing of a photograph over time it could possibly be a much older photo. Sepia toning began in the 1880s, but the commercial availability of photographs on photographic paper for the context in which this photograph was produced was probably a 20th century advent. It would make little photographs like this the nigh-ubiquitous mementos of childhood, children, and other loved ones that would end up in so many small lockets and other collector's paraphernalia.

The image of this child came from a city home near the inner ring that defines the first stage of city development, i.e., out from the city center to the west terminating at Jefferson Avenue. Houses east of Jefferson are some of the oldest remaining structures in the city. Slowly, and piecemeal these homes are renovated, torn down, mysteriously burned and memories of what once was disappear. The photograph of this girl reflects a different demographic for the city's urban core at the time that it was taken. Most likely, her parents or grandparents were recent emigres from Germany. Her father likely worked at one of the many manufacturing businesses around the city. The Anheuser-Busch brewery is within walking distance of this home, so he may have worked there as well. Time, technology, and automation separates us from the world in which this girl lived or the world in which that Tinkertoy tab was played with. All we have now are conjecture about the fragments from the past that fall behind walls and become entombed in their own makeshift time capsules.

In essence, I just work for whatever I can get. Yesterday it was for a free lunch and the payment of a parking ticket. Finding things like this and leveraging what non-marketable skill I have for describing what I see is all I do now. Sad lot that I've become at times like this. As I've noted countless times before, I dug that hole. I dug that hole because conceiving of myself in a job depressed me like nothing else. It depressed me so much that a professor for a Business and Professional writing class I took during my undergraduate studies inserted a brochure for mental health counseling available on campus into my writing portfolio. I have no more to add to that discussion. I have to deal with a Social Security Administration that could not effectively stop payments to a dead person and is holding me accountable for their mistake 18 months later.

Attempting a Pre-Socratic fragment

"People are made from truth." 

 - attributed to Jason of Collinsville 2016 C.E.

The Booleans of Computer culture

Clicking an available button does not constitute a "dislike." The two opposing representations of taste available under a Youtube video are a programmer's attempt to map an expression of human interests onto the most basic of logic functions, i.e., an "on" or "off" state. So where we click within two available image maps routes information to one of two lists that is updated to reflect that click. Therein lies the rub. We never push through the machine's skin as we register our participation. Instead, the computer mimes an efficaciousness sufficient to satisfy a human interpretation of interaction by way of a cause-effect chain. 

a prison for one

These four walls.
They protect me from the world.
These four walls.
They protect the world from me.