Bowie In An Elevator

One of my few brushes-with-famous-people was with David Bowie.

It was the second week of September, 1983, and he was playing at the Coliseum in Vancouver. I’d just started at UBC, and was drinking rather a lot, as was my wont. One night there was a mixer at Place Vanier with free booze, and me and a friend of mine who I’d graduated with and who was also a freshman at UBC took great advantage of the freebies (white wine, for some bizarre reason, as I recall, something I’d never really gotten inebriated on before).

It was pouring rain that evening, as usual, and when the mixer shut down, I was, in young wonderchicken style, just getting geared up. But being underage, finding more booze was going to be a challenge, so we decided to make the trek across campus to Gage Towers to find her older brother, the theory being that he could hook us up with some more grog.

As we passed in front of the computer science buildings, I got it into my head to do the Gene Kelly routine from Singing in the Rain, and sing and splash and swoop around the light poles a bit. Predictably, my blood-alcohol content rendered my swooping a little less graceful than it should have been, and I ended up breaking my ankle.

Next morning, I woke up in my dorm room in my clothes with a monumental wine hangover and a somewhat hazy recollection of the night before. Reeking, disoriented, with a throbbing right ankle that felt about the size of my head. My mother, who was visiting Vancouver to see I’d settled in, and her sister, who’d come to visit with my mom, were knocking on the door. I can’t say they were all that surprised. At least Mitzi — yes, my friend’s name was Mitzi — wasn’t there in the bed with me, too.

We went to the campus hospital, I got strapped up and given a pair of crutches, and we went to the Bayshore Hotel, where they were staying, for breakfast. I was feeling about as physically bad as an 18-year-old can.

The elevator stopped on our way up to my mom and aunt’s room. I could smell myself, and it wasn’t pretty. I was staring at the carpet, swaying, sweating, and trying desperately not to throw up, but noticed more or less in my peripheral vision two very large black-suited men and one much smaller blond man get on.

We got off on my mom’s floor, and as we did, I realized that the little fellow was David Bowie. The realization took long enough to percolate through my hungover brain that all I had time for was a double-take, wobbling on my crutches, enough to turn and meet his eyes and smile, and get a smile back.

I believe that he was a nice fellow because of that smile, ’cause man, if I’d had to stand in an elevator with my sodden, reeking self that morning, I’d have been rejoicing the moment I got off.

This first, memorable experience of my university career turned out to be emblematic of the next 5 years. UBC was a lot of fun.

Making Do

I was tightly wound when I was a teenager. I’d been a fat kid, which kind of ruined my self-confidence back in the days when that wasn’t as common as it is these days, and I had a step-dad who had his own problems and wasn’t really a subscriber to the self-image boosting regimen. And I had acne that literally scared people, I think, at least until years later, when the docs put me on accutane and damn near killed me with the stuff.

I was big and strong and well-put-together, smart and funny and creative, sociable and athletic and geeky all at once. I really should have gotten laid a lot more than I did, looking back on it.

But, like most teenagers, I had a crippling case of self-consciousness and a brain that worked overtime, and that self-reinforcing combination conspired at least part of the time to auger me into the dirt. Still, I came through OK, more or less, and look back on that time with much fondness.

One of the ways that being constantly stressed manifested itself, other than the facial irruptions, was nearly-constant low-level stomach pain. I think, though I can’t recall exactly, that the small-town doctors in the small-town hospital in my small town diagnosed me with stress-induced ulcers, at least incipient ones. After flipping a coin, which was the usual way of doing those things, unless there was a freshly killed chicken available. And not taking into account that they’d destroyed my digestive system with tetracycline for something like 4 years straight. This was also back in the stone age before there were any of the preventatives, palliatives, and treatments for proto-ulcers so easily found these days.

I think they sent me home with a hearty, bluff, South African ‘relax, you’ll get over it, son’ or something equally useless. And another scrip for antibiotics. You may get the impression I have some bitterness towards the medical profession. I think that would be a fair assessment.

So I self medicated. What I’d found was that Eno Fruit Salts, the Alka-seltzer-esque powder that people tended to take for indigestion or hangover queasiness, cooled the fires in my belly, at least temporarily. A tablespoonful in a tall glass of cold well water, wait until the fierce bubbling had reached its peak and then down it, breathing deeply through my nose to get that crisp waft of salty CO2, and I had a few hours of sweet surcease.

Of course, this was also back in the day when nobody really knew that salt was bad for you, or worried that each dose of this stuff carried a couple of grams of sodium with it as well.

I inevitably developed a taste for the stuff. Everyone else I knew hated the taste, drank it only in the deepest hungover despair in hopes of relief. I loved it. I started drinking it just because I liked the taste, even once I started to grow out of the awkwardness of my mid-teens, get lean, lose some of the worst of the rococo facial carbuncles, gain confidence, and leave behind the constant stomach pain. And by my late teens, I’d started boozing, and a nice tall glass of delicious Eno in the morning cut the worst of the cobwebs. I’d seen the old-timey ads that called it a ‘liver-tonic’, too, so I figured why not.

But like any addict eventually does, I started amping things up. My version of the speedball was Eno added to Club Soda. That glass would positively erupt with bubbles, and drinking it down was thrilling. Sweet, salty monkey on my back.

In later years, when I started travelling, I stopped drinking it except as a rare treat, wisely I suppose, because all that sodium just can’t be good for you. But in the last 10 years or so here in Korea, I’ve missed it, mostly because like anyone else, I miss most the things that I can’t get. And there ain’t no Eno in Korea.

A year or so ago, though, it was finally possible to buy soda water — sparkling mineral water is what people call it these days, I guess — here in Korea. A domestic brand, the first, I think, and the big Home Plus store they built a few years ago not far from our house stocked it. I was thrilled, because I don’t drink Coke or any of the other sugar waters, but I do love me some bubbles. But something was missing.

Fast forward to a month or two ago, and my wife, along with a bunch of other vitamins and supplements, ordered a container of pure, pharmaceutical grade Ascorbic acid — Vitamin C — because she hates taking pills.

I don’t know what struck me, but entirely by random one Saturday afternoon while feeling a little under the weather from my customary Friday-night-at-home beer adventure, I poured a glass of soda water and mixed in about half a teaspoon of the ascorbic acid.

Holy crap. It was like tasting home again. Thirty years since I drank the stuff daily, and a couple of years since the last of the bottle I’d brought back from my last visit to Canada had run out. It tasted almost exactly as I remembered Eno used to, right down to that certain added fierceness to the effervescence.

And the best part? No sodium, at all, so my borderline blood pressure doesn’t cross into the Old Man Danger Zone.

I am a simple man, and it takes very little to make me giddy with glee. I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you about this one thing that did.

Fuck You, Canada

I say this as a once-proud Canadian: fuck you, Canada.

Stephen Harper and his brigade of destroyers, again? A fucking majority? What could you possibly have been thinking, Canada? What the hell is wrong with you?

I know you’re not completely stupid, Canada. In the half of my 45 years that I lived there, I met lots of people who weren’t stupid. My mom, who’s mayor of my hometown: she’s one smart lady. But I’m not going to ask her if she voted Conservative. I fear her response would break my heart.

I don’t want you to apologize to me, Canada. That would be silly. But it will be heartbreaking when you come to me weeping, with fresh bruises across your face, because you believed him when he said he wouldn’t hit you any more, and you went back. Again. For the sake of the kids.

I don’t want to feel a tingle of schadenfreude when I see the smoking, cratered economic wasteland after the Great Real Estate Disaster that is coming, Canada, your people shambling and blistered, draped in scorched rags, clutching the tattered paperwork for your 40 year mortgages, or for you to learn a lesson about greed from that.

I don’t want you to be the nation I so loved when I was a boy, the country I was so proud of.

I don’t want you to wake up and realize that by emulating the worst, you become the worst. America’s so exciting, so vibrant, they have the best drugs and the shapeliest fake tits, the shiniest teeth and the porn, have you seen some of that crazy porn they make down there? And the great big servings of curly fries? Holy shit! Everybody loves America, except that Bin Laden creep, and hell, they finally took him down Rambostyle, right? So all aboard the USA train!

Those boring frigid Scandinavian countries, where they have the highest standard of living, the best education and health care, the lowest infant mortality rate, even — who needs all that? Who wants to be like them, all dour and shivering and strong and secure and beloved, when America! is just next door and has that flashy car and gold tooth?

I don’t want you to look in the mirror and realize you’ve become a disappointment, an also-ran, a minor-key sidekick to a lumbering misguided giant, a mockery of the great men and women who built you. I don’t need you to understand that the toxic Network News American Political Buzzword Culture that has colonized your media and infected your discourse has distracted your people and corrupted your leaders and is destroying you. I don’t want you to embrace the principles that made you great. I don’t want you to take a step back and think about what kind of nation you want to be, and then live up to those principles.

No, wait, what the hell am I saying?

I want all of those things.

But it looks less likely with every turn of the screw that I’ll ever be seeing them.

My Name Is Wonderchicken, And I Have A Problem

No, it’s not the booze. Been 5 months since I had a drink. Not the ponies, or the ladies, or the intoxicating, forbidden allure of naked living room dancing, though I have been known to indulge in the latter from time to time.

No, I am addicted to making ever-more-elaborate websites: the twisted desire that is killing the youth of today.

Actually, no, that’s not true. The youth of today are telling the world what they just dug out of their nose on Twitter, or Farmvilling their way to true friendship on Facebook. But more power to ‘em, I guess. I was drinking rye and falling off the tops of fences at their age — not notably nobler pursuits.

Anyway, without further old-mannery, here’s the latest Fun Internet Thing from Wonderchicken Industries™: Gamefilter.net. Share and enjoy.

Nerds and Otaku and Geeks, Oh My!

I just read Patton Oswalt’s Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die, which I enjoyed, and I’ve got something to say. Several somethings, in fact. As I set out, I’m not entirely certain what those somethings are, but I’m sure we’ll have some fun finding out.

I’m a little uncomfortable with it as a semi-serious piece of word stuff, and with the inevitable ensuing Metafilter thread. Underlying everything is an assumption that goes for the most part unquestioned: that nerds, or geeks (or otaku, but to hell with that, William Gibsonisms notwithstanding

The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.

because I’m weary so weary of the appropriation and repurposing of poorly-understood Japanese words) are to be defined by the cultural products they (possibly obsessively) consume. It’s the common usage, sure — we talk about star wars nerds and comics nerds, about gaming geeks and movie geeks. We’ve wired into our brains a default mode where a nerd is someone who nerds out over some New Bauble, and a geek geeks out about their Precious Thing. We’re a little too accustomed to defining ourselves by what we consume, which is just what The Business of Entertainment wanted. Except for that whole part where we can get almost anything made of information these days without really trying. Or paying.

Patton frames it as the end of cultural scarcity, of that which was hidden being revealed, of the death of a certain degree of cultural outsider self-worth being eroded by the internet. When it was harder to get to those obscure bands and movies and comics and all the rest, the idea is, the honest work of digging down to those rich veins of geek gold was something in which pride could be taken. Now, when the nuggets just litter the digital ground for anybody to pick up, the noble labor doesn’t seem so noble. Or at least not as laborious. A fundamental compensator for the social downsides of geekery has been knocked out of play at the same time as the tribes of the ’80s suddenly became nations.

Defining the geek or the nerd through the obscurity or scarcity of the cultural detritus they cherish doesn’t work very well when, like Patton, it’s Star Wars merch and mythos they loved, either. There wasn’t much more ubiquitous and mainstream than Star Wars in the late 70s and early 80s, even in my frontier village. Hell, George Lucas practically invented the crass movie-merch tie in. Then again, he’s right about comics back in the day — the trip to the corner shop every few weeks to check for new comics when I was 10 or 12, turning that metal rack and wondering how many my mom would let me buy was a cherished and exciting ritual. And music — well, let’s just say that the one store that stocked records in my hometown, the K-Mart, didn’t stock a lot of The Clash, let alone more obscure stuff. Without radio other than CBC, the world of new music was entirely closed off, and when a friend lent me a vinyl copy of London Calling that he’d gotten in Vancouver, back when I was 16, I almost exploded with the love of it.

The K-Mart did have Monty Python records, though. I didn’t realize that there even was a television program, and it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I’d seen all the episodes. And there were bookstores in Prince George, a couple of hours away, where I could and did buy science fiction novels by the dozen, until I was 15 or so.

So there’s that. There is truth to the idea that back in the days of the turn of the ’80s (now nearly as far in the past as the end of WWII was to me then, a realization that makes my heart thud for a few seconds like it’s pumping crude oil), especially if you didn’t live in a city, even more so if, like me, you lived far far off in the hinterlands, the very scarcity of music that wasn’t disco, of movies that weren’t mainstream, of pretty much anything that you couldn’t find in the tiny book corner of the Hudson’s Bay, well, it made all those things more precious, in part because it took work to get them. And that work set you apart, gave some measure of pride and feeling of superiority, and inclined you to try and find other people to share those precious artifacts with.

My experience may have been different, because there just weren’t enough kids at a given age in my hometown for ironbound cliques and subcultures to accrete. With 50 kids in my class, and so maybe a total in the entire town of 150 or so with a three-year age span, almost everyone was a little from column A, a little from column B, and a little from all the rest.

But I’m not sure that any of that has more than just a degree of overlap with geekery or nerddom. Patton talks about Geek Culture as if it were a thing that existed in the 1980s and has mutated into something new now, and I reckon (perhaps because of my isolation, I admit) that we’re talking about two different things Then and Now. Was there an actual geek subculture back then? There were geeky and nerdy individuals, yes, small tribes, sure, even larger collectives (I remember when my mom took me and a buddy to my first science fiction convention, when I was 13 or so, I think), in the larger cities, all collecting around different emergent cultural nodes.

I think that an enormous range of personality types, from the obsessive and borderline autistic all the way to the hypersocial, nonconformist artsy type got shovelled into a huge pile under the geek/nerd rubrics, because they were, basically, different, not just in the things that amused them, but the way they related to those things, and the ways they interacted with the Great Everyone Else. There was a wild spectrum of subcultures, and the cost of entry to each in the unwired world was high enough that it was hard to partake in more than a couple of overlaps. There were weird hybrid metalhead D&D players, or stoner AV Club members, but not as many as there might have been. Subcultures were siloed.

What about today?

We’ve lived through a few decades in which popular culture has been infantilized, because that’s where the money was. It led, until the early part of the 2000s perhaps, to a cultural hell from which some are now emerging, wiping the ichor from our foreheads, but in which most folks are still eyeballs deep. But now, because it’s all free, and if not always legal, at least available, and it’s the young people who have the skills to get to it… well, there’s not as much money there. The entertainment economy is a sinking Titanic for an increasingly large segment of the population, and it’s just these days tipping to the vertical — the air pockets will blast out through the stern, and it’ll sink faster than we can imagine. But that’s just fine, because those of us who know how (yes, the geeks and nerds of old, at least the ones who emerged from the chrysalis of the last 20 years) will find a vast, rich field of flotsam, and we’ll build rafts, and it’ll be better than before.

I think we’ve been duped, to be honest. Several different things have been happening at the same time over the past few decades, and at the same time as the world is completely different, it’s just the same, and will ever be, for most. I think that part of Patton’s problem (which, I’m sure, he’s mostly joking about) is mostly that, like me, he’s a bit old now, and it’s hard to view the way of things through new eyes.

So what’s happened? Well, the Business of Selling Entertainment Products has gotten bigger, meaner, and more sophisticated. Cool-hunters track down the latest youth trends and their corporate masters commoditize them as quickly as they can. Advertising has become a terrifyingly exact science, and arrows in to tickle our lizard brains with ever-increasing accuracy. We are at the same time more sophisticated in understanding how the marketers manipulate us, and less resistant to being manipulated, because most of us have given up. The price of etc etc is eternal vigilance, after all, and that’s hard work. We know that television news has become a business more than a service, that advertising pays for it, that viewers are needed for higher ad sales rates, that conflict and drama, manufactured or otherwise, brings viewers, and so the news transforms into formalized drama and artificial conflict pumping, and we don’t really care.

We talk unironically about how clever or amusing or just plain wonderful the latest TV ad is, we scarcely notice, and even applaud, when a much-loved song is bought and used as the soundtrack, which was a shock and affront back in the day. Suggestions that ubiquitous advertising can be a pernicious influence are regularly met with derision by otherwise smart people who argue that ads are somehow a service that support precious freedom of choice, and drive product innovation and improvement. We watch democracy become a contest between which candidate can muster the bigger war chest and spend the most on advertising and image management. We accept that lobby groups and corporate campaign donors have more influence on our elected representatives than the citizenry does.

Form has taken precedence over function. The ritual of consumption, the kabuki drama of news telecasts, the hollow ceremony of democratic participation; we focus on appearance over result, we put our feet onto the dance-school-floor outlines over and over again, believing that the result has to be different this time, and it almost never is.

In case the thrust of what I’m saying here has gotten obscured: many dollars are spent by increasingly effective advertisers, marketers and public relations shills, by companies and governments and every other entity who wants something from us, whose ability to finger the proper chords in our brains have spiralled skyward to keep pace with our collective ability to resist them. I don’t think this is a good thing.

That’s the first thing that’s been happening. Some days it seems like most people in the developed world don’t know, don’t care, can’t be fucking bothered that the process, deliberate or otherwise, of herding us into positions of collective consumerist impotence is nearly complete. It’s too much work not to trust what The Famous and Powerful and The Companies tell us. Just getting by is hard enough these days. The news fails to explain why that is and how to avoid getting trapped into debt slavery, and all the while the credit card ads pander to our cupidity, the latest gadget tempts, and the politicians further marginalize anyone who isn’t rich enough to buy their way clear. News outlets get consolidated into megacorps, opinion becomes fact, and we’re talking about whether the latest coked-out starlet is going to jail or not. The media, the entertainment industry, has been complicit. No conspiracies, just the eternal chase for the almighty payoff.

People outside the developed world have more important things to worry about, of course.

But there’s been a countering trend of a sort, a backlash that would have been impossible without another large and important thing that has happened. That’s your swell pal the internet, and the internet has, of course, changed everything. Patton’s Everything That Ever Was — Available Forever is coming. It’s almost here. I can smell it, and it smells like hot plastic. And it’ll be great, at least until there’s a bout of solar turbulence or the magnetic poles of the Earth flip again or something, and the world’s magnetic media gets wiped.

We’ve all had enough of the utopian internet-will-fix-everything wanking that almost exclusively occurs — surprise — on the internet, from me and from everyone else. I won’t bother; either you’re with me that having information access to Everything Everywhere Always is a good thing (with many possible unforeseeable consequences for us as a species), or not. But I do think that the new skills that we’re developing, even us old bastards, the ones that wired youth take for granted, have changed the landscape.

And a new kind of schism has developed to replace the simple geeknerd/normal polarity switch from the 1980s and earlier.

There are still a lot of people out there who belly up to their media buffet, who suck down the advertising blandishments, who consume their culture in much the same way as most people did 20 or 30 years ago. It’s just more-ish, and spicier. And the factories that pack the feed pipes are happy to keep the sluices running, as long as there are dollars to be made. For lots of folks, digestion generally happens without an excess of critical thought, without worrying too much about the why or how of it: with an underlying assumption that because it’s there, somebody must have decided that it must not be bad for us. I understand the impulse: who doesn’t want to switch of their brain sometimes and just coo and nurse from the Ellisonian glass teat? I don’t begrudge most folks their habitual blitheness; I envy it. It’s what we miss from when we were children, when we believed we could trust and accept everything our parents told us as unalloyed truth, because unalloyed truth is a comforting thing. It’s the impulse that leads many to religion. It is human nature.

It is also one of the reasons for the spectacular crash of the housing industry in America, and the global economic tremors and aftershocks that continue, four years later: Americans believed that they were being told true things when their president trumpeted the ‘ownership society’, when the TV told them housing prices always go up, when their bank or mortgage company said that a zero-down ARM was a safe thing to do, that interest rates would stay low forever, and so on.

It’s sharks all the way down, and once we start, we are doomed to endlessly jumping them. The lies are fractal, they’re self-similar at all scales; perception beats reality, spin über alles. Unless you read even a few Important Internet Opinions to try and triangulate the truth.

There is a smaller group who have learned to be suspicious of ads, suspicious of corporations, or banks, of governments, of anyone trying to sell them something, who have met the increasing sophistication of the Marketing Mind Worms with their own more sophisticated defenses. These people have always been with us, but they are increasingly marginalized as out of touch, soft-headed crypto-hippies, or co-opted by batshit insane groups like the Tea Party in America (who at least ask some of the right questions, like how and why a bailout of the banks benefits ordinary people, but come up with wildly wrong answers, because the few voices they choose to trust have themselved been co-opted by oligarchs and liars).

There is an even smaller group — but large, and growing — who have taken to the digital world like a wonderchicken to the bottle, who have meta’d themselves bootstrapwise into an entirely new kind of human. And they don’t give a damn where their Stuff comes from; if it’s quality it’s grist for the mill, even better if there’s some nerd cred to it, and they might drop some dollars on it. If not, who cares — it’s free, anyway, and mockery of the mainstream is good fun. Like the nerds and geeks and dorks and dweebs (and other highschool epithets from the 80s) they may have odd, arcane interests, they may be creative, they may have 1000 friends online and none, or 1000, in real life, they may be gamers, they may feel some compulsion to edit Wikipedia or, ahem, build websites, they may be porn-addicted or furries, they may be /b/tards DDOSing Mastercard, they may be your freaking grandma, but they are connected and less and less inclined to apologize for their little obsessions and passing fancies. They share entertainment interests with everyone else — they watched Avatar, they played Call of Duty, they get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert — but they’re as likely to give you a quick dissertation on Serbian film directors or the provenance of the 8-bit-inspired art design in Minecraft as an opinion about Glee.

There are growing numbers of people — some motivated by resentment at being manipulated, some by the media garbage that they are given to eat by the Big Producers, some by the new availability of everything, everywhere, legally or not, some by contrarianism and sheer cussedness, and some, sure, by a deep and abiding otakularity — who aren’t the good customers of the entertainment industry they once might have been. Their viability as ongoing revenue streams, to borrow the language of our corporate masters, has been compromised.

They aren’t, in other words, the Norm-Minus geeks of the 80s (no matter how much we want to romanticize nostalgically about it, the epithets meant just that), they are Norm-Plus. Sure, there are the basement-dwelling masturbators and the odd and halting and otherworldly, and there always will be. But who would have thought that the first real info-war of the 21st century would be launched by 4chan /b/tards against credit card companies over online release of ‘secret’ government documents? Not me, but I find it thrilling. Anonymous are, for better or worse, a vanguard of the new nerds, the geeks, and they are at one and the same time no different from grandpa geeks like me and an instantiation something entirely new that has supplanted the old categories.

Let me give you a little Bruce Sterling, from his recent piece on Julian Assange and the splendid Wikileaks saga:

While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, his too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.

He didn’t just insult the captain of the global football team; he put spycams in the locker room. He showed the striped-pants set without their pants. This a massively embarrassing act of technical voyeurism. It’s like Monica and her stains and kneepads, only even more so.

Now, I wish I could say that I feel some human pity for Julian Assange, in the way I do for the hapless, one-shot Bradley Manning, but I can’t possibly say that. Pity is not the right response, because Assange has carefully built this role for himself. He did it with all the minute concentration of some geek assembling a Rubik’s Cube.

These are the new geeks, the new nerds, the empowered, the proud, the connected. The world has changed. And geeks and nerds are no longer merely about consumption and fetishization of obscure (or mainstream) cultural products. It’s not odd or geeky these days to be into Doctor Who, or to have an opinion on whether Han shot first. Pretty much everyone old enough does. It may have been a badge of subcultural achievement to be a role-playing gamer back in the day; now it’s just one of the things that people do. We identify with a spectrum of tribes, and we carve out our own identity in doing so.

There’s no need to kill Geek Culture — it barely exists as a thing anymore, and it’s dying of senescence at about the same rate that middle-aged guys like me and Patton are dying off. A new paradigm breaches the amniotic sac, lifts its bloody head, and wails. The new Gnerds arise!

Sobriety

It was back in September, and the Korean doctor was running the ultrasound wand back and forth across my lubed-up abdomen, shaking his head and looking stern. “Patty Ribber” he repeated, three or four times, pointing at the monitor, on which I saw nothing but the usual indecipherable patterns of amorphous grey blobs. I nodded like I knew what he was saying, which is my usual strategy. After nearly 15 years since I came to Korea, I’m still not that great at parsing things out when I’m in an unfamiliar situation.

The doc sat back down behind his desk while his disconcertingly attractive nurse wiped the lube off my stomach, and started talking at my wife, in the arrogant tones that Korean doctors favour. I was catching one word in three, as usual, but when she grabbed a piece of paper from a stack on the shelf beside her and handed it to me at his behest, and I saw the picture, “patty ribber” suddenly resolved in my brain to “fatty liver” and my blood ran cold.

“He says ‘no drinking for six months’,” my wife told me, unable to entirely hide the fact she thought that was a pretty fine idea.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” said I, and she gripped my arm and led me out of the room with the requisite bows of apology for my grumpy tone. I’m sure he was used to it. There was a big stack of those info sheets, and they were the only ones there. I think he may have been a crypto-temperance advocate, and every guy who wandered into his office got the same orders. Maybe.

It’s 3 months later now, and I’m half-way through my enforced period of teetotalling. This is the point at which people offer faux-hearty congratulations and that’s greats, and we all briefly bow our heads contemplating the ravages of the demon alcohol. Well, to hell with that.

I miss beer something fierce.

But that is not to say that I have experienced any withdrawal symptoms, physical or psychological, at all. I’m one of the lucky ones, thank goodness, who can turn the switch on and off at will, it appears. But I do miss it; I miss the fuzzy warm welter of mild confusion that came later after the initial rush of energy and mental acuity. The Joe Strummer Mystery-Train extended pees. I miss the inhibition of judgment and I miss getting outside my head once a week; I miss blowing the carbon out of the mental valves. But stopping has been the easiest thing in the world. I just stopped.

When I was much younger, my best and longest friend and drinking companion Barry and I used to worry about being, or becoming, alcoholics. The dread word. We drank a hell of a lot, 20 or 25 years back, we did, and we loved it, but many was the night we spent, drinking our rye, on a beach or bench somewhere, wondering to ourselves what being an alcoholic really meant, and whether we were in danger.

Turns out not.

After his health started to go a bit sideways a few years back, or maybe just because he was done with it, Barry started tailing off with the booze a bit, without difficulty. Until 3 months ago, I kept to a regular schedule for a good ten years or more, as I am a man of habit, and drank my beer each and every Friday night, until I was done, and had had enough. One time out of 8 or ten, I wouldn’t feel the thirst, or my wife and I were arguing and because I hate to drink when I’m not feeling happy, I’d give it a miss, or finish before my customary measure and call it an early night.

But stopping? Well, after 30 years of being hard at it, the first 15 of which it was hammer-and-tongs like I had something to prove: no problem whatsoever. Do I feel a little more mental acuity, more energy? Well, maybe: I’ve certainly been on a creative tear lately, relaunching old websites and creating new. I’ve lost 6 or 7 kilograms and feel pretty good. My lovely and overprotective wife is pleased. I suppose the point of the endeavour — to allow my overburdened greaseball of a liver time to regenerate — is a good and noble one.

But I said this, I recall, four years ago, over at Metafilter

It is interesting (and not without justification, certainly, given the problems that alcohol abuse causes) how the default response to the drink seems in recent decades to have swung from an appreciation of the wild, mystic revelry of bacchanalia to a primly moralizing disapproval. I think of it as a very American sort of attitude — in opposition to the more European or NE Asian attitudes toward booze — and find it fascinating.

A lot of it seems to come from the generation(s) — from kids up to some people in, say, their early 30′s, who often seem to think of alcohol as their parents’ or grandparents’ drug of choice, and therefore kind of lame — who have grown up in some senses Postbooze, in the decades during which the central cultural focus in attitude seems to have shifted from the celebratory and sacramental aspects of (alcohol) intoxication to the damage and the carnage, to the idea that a one who drinks is an alcoholic, that to be an alcoholic is to have a disease, and that those who drink without destroying their lives are condescended towards and granted the qualifier ‘functioning’, but are still ‘diseased’.

I don’t mean to judge either way — there is much to be said for the power of intoxicants, and alcohol may be the oldest one humans have used. There is also much to be said about the destruction that excessive alcohol use has wrought, and continues to wreak on individuals and families and societies.

Neither extreme tells the whole story. Each individual is different, and the balance between the exalted and the debased, between the bacchanalian reveler and the destructive and damaged addict is always fluid.

For my part, I’ve had more friends whose lives have been ripped to shit by cocaine (for example) than ones whose lives have been ruined by booze (though I’ve seen both), and I’ve some had friends who have bounced back from both.

and my attitude hasn’t changed. I know, believe, and understand that alcohol can and does destroy some people — many people.

But I am eternally thankful, given how much I love what alcohol does to my brain when I drink it, that I am not one of those people, and that putting it down for a while or for forever, though not something I’m enthusiastic to do, is not something I find difficult.

This site was named, all those years ago, as a vague gesture. Empty bottle because all of the contents have been drunk or empty bottle because there were none to begin with? Empty bottle as a wish for the future or a lament for the past? As a celebration or a warning?

Hell, I don’t know, myself. All of the above, I guess. I just hope the liver bounces back, because come April 2011, I’m looking forward to my first beer with great anticipation.

Welcome to The New Old Emptybottle

*tap* *tap tap tap*

Anybody out there? Anybody left standing with an attention span intact? Any Wonderchicken Irregulars out there, hiding in the bullet-splintered woods, huddled in the snow and blood, waiting for what’s seemed like forever for the smoke and fog to clear, for this long international nightmare to end?

Well, I’m not here to make any promises, to blow smoke up any butts and extract sunshine. I’ve made promises before and broken them. I feel bad about that.

It’s not that I haven’t been busy, friends! I’ve been building websites at a rate of knots, including reworks of outsideinkorea and Wonderchicken Industries™ in the last few weeks, my busy gaming community is busier than ever, with well over 1200 members at last count. Just a few days ago, we made a $4100 group donation to ChildsPlay Charity, and I’m immensely proud of that.

But just the last little while, even though all of my creative juices have been directed to virtual barn-building (and repainting), I’ve been feeling the urge to make with the word-writing again. The old design of the venerable ‘bottle was kind of hurting my eyes, though.

So, this. Welcome to Emptybottle.org version Who The Hell Knows. Maybe I’ll even do some writing, once I’m done sweeping up the sawdust. But no promises.

Single Serving Site Alert

Just a quick note for those few, those brave, those patient who haven’t completely migrated to Facef*ck or ThighSpace or Twatter or whatever social disease network is the flavour of the moment, and still stop by or RSSize the ‘bottle to get an occasional taste of Grandpa Wonderchicken’s Old-Style Longform Bullshit.
A while back, one morning, when I heard that Kevin Rose (of Digg and the late, not terribly lamented Pownce) had a new Twitter-parasite site called WeFollow, I lost my shit (“You might follow, you tiny-dreamed weasel farts!” said I to myself, or something of the sort.) and bought a domain, threw up a WordPress site, wrote a screed and did a couple of photoshops, all before lunch. If I was that productive all the time, I’d be… well, I wouldn’t have the time for insane vanity mini-projects like that, I guess.
Still: here it is, the lastest addition to the burgeoning Wonderchicken Industries™ Network. Share and enjoy.

Hockey! It’s A Sport!

So I was hanging around at the Metafilter, as I do, and I was posting the occasional comment, as I do, and drinking beer, as I do, because it was a Friday night, and that’s what I tend to do on a Friday night.
Another guy, this Canadian guy, this guy who’d lived in Japan for a few years and eventually gone back to Canada, someone I’d identified with even though I don’t rightly know if I ever will actually go back to Canada, had said

At least it’s not hockey. What a stupid sport.
(Although these are my true feelings, to say this publicly in Canada is close to something like sacrilege, and I’m not exaggerating.)

So I got my shit all up in a righteous internet uproar and said (and reproduce here because I’d like to remember I said it, self-indulgent and shouty as it is):
I spent a decade or two of my post-pubescent life, times when I was actually in Canada at least part-time and it seemed to matter, telling people how much I fucking didn’t care about hockey, because, you know, that’s what a certain kind of guy does. But I’d sit and watch the goddamn game and drink a hell of a lot of booze and take whatever drugs were to hand and make inappropriate and often successful sexual advances at the desperately bored women who were hanging around unwilling having their own fun while the idiot rinktard puckheads got their stick on.
But I’ll tell you this: I fucking love hockey now, in retrospect, but only in the abstract because I love the idea of stupid toothless meatpuppets beating the living shit out of each other on the ice for the amusement of the Home Audience. I used to poo-poo all the Sport, oh dear, Maynard my Special Friend it’s so commmmon and tedious, I in latter days used to and still do wave a dismissive hand-back at the reality TV and the unreality TV and the fake pretending to be real pretending to be fake winking at the real, I did, I do, but you know what? these days I love it all. I love it all in equal measure to how much I despise it because I am absolutely sure that things, where ‘things’ is meant to be Our Collective Cultural Heritage A-squander, where ‘things’ is meant to be the inexorable ramscoop of the idiocracy screaming V2ey nose-down into the fake peatbog made of plastic turf and celebrity poop, it’s OK that it’s all turning to Entertainment and Distraction at a rate of (k)nots, and I get a Roma-rsonist frisson from tossing my cigarette butts and lighting support blazes out on the periphery hoping ring-a-rosy all burn down without me having to make a stand.
So, yeah. Hockey is stupid, duh, but you know what: the problem with hockey is that it’s not nearly as goddamn stupid as it used to be or should be, when the gladiators dropped glove and knocked pearly white teeths out onto the ice in a spray of blood. It’s gotten smarter since then, instrumentally more reasonable, disappointingly less savage, and that’s a cheat and a con and it’s more modern and marketed and less satisfying.
Fucking weedy reedy thinskinned worthless goddamn civilization we’ve built.

The Ape and The Snake

The men who planned and carried out the bombings in Bali in 2002, the ones that killed one of my oldest and dearest friends (but only after he suffered with burns over most of his body for nearly two weeks) along with 201 other people, were executed last month.
You’d think I’d be happy about that.
Let me tell you a little story that may not seem to have much to do with this, but does, somehow, in a way that’s not entirely clear to me. Maybe in the telling, I can work it out a bit.
It was the mid-70s, I think, another glorious short clean summer in Northern BC, one of the ones that stay with me in my memory, and my aunt, uncle and two cousins were visiting us.
We had taken our river boat ten or fifteen kilometers up the lake, up to one of the rocky beaches under the ridge of Mount Pope, inshore from Battleship Island. We set up our outpost on a long expanse of thumb-size pebbles rattling under a broad unclouded vault of sky, stands of jackpine and spruce at our backs clustered beardlike around yellow stone cliff outcroppings. Clear deep dark green water, hot dogs cooked on whittled birch sticks over a fire pit. It was the kind of day that makes you feel glad to be alive, especially when you’re 8 or 10 years old and all is right with the world.
I remember at one point my cousins and I were ranging up the shingly beach, just exploring, when we came across the biggest snake I’d ever seen. It was glistening and black and in the water, and it took off like a shot as soon as it saw us, undulating frantically as it headed along the rocky verge, trying to escape.
We were curious, or at least I was, and we started throwing driftwood and rocks in its path, trying to get it to turn around, or slow down, so we could get a better look. I’m not sure, of course, what my cousins were thinking, but I don’t think they had any more malicious intent than I did. We were curious. The missiles we hurled at the poor beast got progressively larger and we got more excited, and the inevitable happened. One of the rocks or sticks landed square on the snake, and killed it. It uncoiled and floated, light belly up.
As we’d been hollering and chasing the snake, my uncle, presumable alerted by our excitement, had come up behind us just as the fatal stone did its work. All he saw was hooting boys killing an innocent creature.
He wasn’t furious, he was disgusted, disappointed. I still remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the look on his face. I don’t think anyone had ever looked at me like that before.
Several people have sent me links to news items about the execution of the Bali bombers in the past few weeks, and each time, I’ve had to tell them that I just didn’t know what to feel about it, much less what to think.
I find as I grow older that every year I am certain about less and less.
I’ve said to some folks who asked that although I do not believe that more killing is a good response to killing, if I were handed the gun, or set down in front of the switch behind the one-way glass, or just put into a room with the bastards, I wouldn’t hesitate to exact vengeance for the death of my friend. Pull the trigger, press the button, beat them with my fists. I’ve said to my friends that I am an ape masquerading as a man.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, I really don’t. It sounds good, I suppose, and I’ve always been about the dramatic pronouncement over the measured interpretation.
Is the world a poorer place without my friend Rick Gleason living in it? Yes, it is, and the same is no doubt true for the friends and family members of each and every of the other 201 people killed in the bombings. Is the world a better place without their killers living in it? I think it probably is.
We tell ourselves a lot of stories about ‘the sanctity of human life’. We seem to mean the lives of those we know and love when we talk about it, and that’s not surprising or wrong. We find it hard to care about strangers, and harder to care about strangers whose tribe is different, and even harder to care about those strangers who would do us harm if they could, or leave us to die without compunction. People get all misty about their Jesus and his injunctions to love one’s enemies and turn cheeks.
But we don’t really believe that human life, in the abstract, is sacred, even if we’re willing to go the extra mile and define what we mean by sacred, do we? Not really. We make war, we ignore the roots of violent crime and turn away, we spend millions on blood-fiesta movies and video games and tell ourselves that it’s about catharsis. The best we can reasonably claim to believe is that some human life is sacred.
We’re not bad people, of course, most of us. Actual, personal violence we find shocking, unacceptable, abhorrent. We are traumatized by the headless corpse behind the steering wheel sitting in the puddle of blood and piss in the twisted plastic and metal of the Friday night wreck. We’re dutifully frightened by the TV news items about violent crime that are intended to keep us dutifully frightened and at home watching the sponsor’s messages. But we do love our serial killers and the movies about them, we love our torture porn, we love our Schwarzeneggerian one-liners before the shotgun skullpop, even while we guard our vulnerable citizens against violence domestic and corporal and sexual and even emotional. We righteously and rightfully do our best to end the social conditions that allow such things to happen. And we support our troops. You know, if we have any. We compartmentalize.
I don’t think most of us are all that clear on these things, and I suppose I’m no better than anyone else.
See, if we admit that by executing those bastards, and we accept that violence has its place in our attempts to make the world better, we have accepted that violence has its place. This has consequences.
And if we’re not trying to make the world better, then we’re just acting out another episode of the woeful old Jehovahriffic vengeance.
I’m not against vengeance, though I’d rather be a man than an ape. I have to admit that there are times when I want to bare my yellowed fangs and rip out a throat and feel the hot pulse of blood wash across my cheek.
Thirty years later, having returned to the memory many times over the years, I don’t think I wanted to kill that snake. But I’m not certain that that was actually the truth at the time.