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When you grow up in the far north in Canada, if you're at all curious about the world and the people in it, you can't wait to get out. As soon as you're able, you head out to the big city, for work or school or whatever you can get. It isn't such a different story from kids growing up in the boonies anywhere, where it's Montana or Gangwon-do in Korea, western New South Wales or the Cyclades.

I grew up, for the years that counted at least, in Fort Saint James, British Columbia. During those years -- the early 70's to the early 80's -- it was the End of The Road. Vanderhoof was the asshole of the world and we were forty miles up it, we said, recycling that old standby. The paved highway ended in the Fort, and to go further north meant logging roads and endless washboard and pothole gravel, dusty in summer, solid ice in winter, and slicker than snot the rest of the time. There were a couple of reservations further up there, and a few scattered fishing lodges and mines and logging camps. Wilderness, though, for the most part. Endless dense forest carpetting mountains, nap worn smooth in spots by crystal-clear cold lakes and rivers. Germanson Landing. Takla Landing. Leo Creek. Deese Lake. I'd like to say I hunted bear in these places wearing nothing but a breechclout and bowie knife, but with parents who were grappling with living on the frontier after moving from southern Ontario and a little shellshocked by family tragedy, the names of these tiny, isolated places were almost as exotic to me as Tokyo or Timbuktu. We didn't stray too far.

But our own tiny town of 2500 or so was frontier enough for anyone, and, in what feels all these decades later like a deliberate, considered balance to the more bookish side of my nature, but was probably just imposed on me by the environment, I spent a lot of my time outdoors. In the summer especially, I'd spend 5 or 6 hours a day just behind our house swimming in the cold runoff-fed waters of Stuart Lake, or buckling on my first-gen Sony Walkman and riding my bicycle further and further out along the limited network of paved roads that snaked out along it, or to the south towards Vanderhoof, or the 10 or 15 kilometers north to the saw mills, after which the asphalt just stopped. Looking for something.

The trees never ended. The trees were everywhere. There were some things, growing up, that seemed limitless in their supply, overabundant, somehow both comforting and a little obnoxious in their insistence on being a part of every experience you could have: the trees, the water, and the snow. Nobody, or at least no young people that I knew, ever entertained for a moment the possibility that these things weren't eternal, perpetual, guaranteed. We were ants on a golf course, surrounded by plenty, living the good life, and occasionally cursing the sprinklers.

For my part, I was one of those young people -- and by no means was I in the majority -- who couldn't wait to get out, and once out, stayed. But I was also in a minority of the escapees, I think, in that I loved the place, even before I left. I'd read enough science fiction as a preteen to know that the dystopian extrapolations of scorched and dusty futures were based on the lives that people in more populous and less resource-blessed places were living already. I wasn't all that keen to hunker down or bunker up.

I was afraid in a weirdly longing way of the nukes we assumed would soon be sailing along gravity's rainbow, even if I was confident that up there in the North we'd be relatively unscathed by the coming armageddon. But I loved the sulphurous mineral rich town water that stained porcelain orange. I loved the thunderstorms that rolled in from the west over the 60 kilometre expanse of the lake, the bloodsplash summer forest fire sunsets, the northern lights you could almost hear, the way the hip-deep powdery snow creaked and puffed when the temperature got down to 40 below zero and your eyelashes began to freeze together. I loved the dusty evergreen smell of the trees and the rocks when we climbed up Mount Pope under flawless blue skies, I loved skindiving out to the drop-off in the lake, where the water, clear as air, grew dark and frightening, and my lungs felt ready to burst as I tried again and again to see what was down there, every minute irrationally terrified remembering the stories of giant sturgeon that had been pulled from those depths in decades past. I loved riding out on the lake in boats, and even riding on the river, even though that's where my younger brother had died, in that fast dark water, when I was 6 years old. I loved blizzards and whiteouts, and waking up in the morning to see drifts of fresh snow that reached the roof of our house in beautiful mathematical arcs. I loved standing in our cold kitchen in my robe in the winter mornings before school while my mom made me breakfast, over the floor grate as the furnace blew hot air up my legs. I loved when the spring came and the roads and streets shed their dirty ice shells, and I could once again hop on my bicycle and prowl the streets, nose in the air smelling that good spring smell, hoping that maybe I'd see the girl I was in love with, but almost never seeing her. I loved the brief melancholy autumn smell of wet leaves in the freezing rain.

I didn't fit in very well in many ways, though I tried, and once I began to drink -- the official sport of Northern BC -- it became much easier, and much as there were many people I loved and still love in that place, in some ways it was the place itself that made the greatest mark on me. I am and always will be someone who loves things green and blue and clean, and a smalltown boy who hauls out his big-city credentials and plays the global nomad urban expat sophisticate with a little reluctance.

I've been an expatriate most of the last 20 years and I'll probably never live there again, but it will always be a huge part of who I am.

The reason our little town has existed and more or less thrived in the last century or so, though it was the first capital of British Columbia back in the fur trading goldrush days of the 19th century, has been the forestry industry. It's a beautiful place, and tourists do come, but the lumber mills have always, at least in the last few lifetimes, provided something like 80% of the jobs, and powered an even larger component of the overall economy. It has been the same story for most of the small towns in the region. I worked in the mills too, bitching and moaning and drinking away the bruises, during my summer vacations from UBC, back in the 80's. Taught me the value of hard work, and how much I don't really care for it.

All that's coming to an end. The trees are dying, and with them, the towns. It's the pine beetle, you see. Just tiny little bugs. Nothing so dramatic as bombs or storms or ice caps melting away.

People like to debate the phenomenon of global climate change as if it were an academic issue. People who don't live in the path of the huang-sa dust storms that sweep in out of China to blanket Korea every spring, and get worse with each passing year, people who aren't in Central British Columbia watching 85% of the pine trees die off, and with the trees, the futures of their children. People whose health or livelihood isn't directly affected.

But then again, those British Columbians aren't entirely blameless, unlike the poor Koreans (and me) who are sucking down heavy metal-laden dust that we had no part in creating. While noting that the pine beetles are a natural part of the ecosystem, Canadian ecosuperhero (at least for my generation) David Suzuki blames forest fire suppression, clearcutting (and subsequent replanting), global warming. The first two can be laid directly at the feet of the folks who live there, whether they like to admit it or not.

The global warming part is textbook: to put it simply, as I understand it, warmer winters means reduced insect die off in the coldest part of the year, which means more of the little buggers the following season, and warmer temperatures the rest of the year means they spread further.

Forest fire suppression breaks the necessary cycle of old growth die off and renewal.

Clearcutting means huge areas are effectively denuded, and replanting with a single species of tree means a lack of biodiversity in the new forest, green as it may appear.

The bugs have rushed in as a result, and whole region is in very big trouble.

In the 6 years leading up to 2007 130,000 square kilometres of pine forest have been destroyed by the beetles. To put that number in perspective, that's the area of the country of England, or about one and a half times the area of South Korea. It's an armageddon all right, but not the kind that gave me nightmares when I was a teenager.

The irony to all this is that the massive die off of pines (and the infestation is moving to spruce, apparently) means, according to some researchers, that the forests of BC will no longer act as a carbon sink for the earth's atmosphere, but by 2020 will become a carbon source, making the problems even worse. It wouldn't be excesssive to describe this as a calamity. An area the size of a small country will be filled with standing kindling, which means forest fires will rage on a scale never before seen -- imagine, again, the entire country of England aflame for a sense of the scale involved.

Imagine that.

And companies that practiced unsustainable clearcutting, and the successive governments that allowed it? A special circle of hell will hopefully be reserved for those bastards. You know, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Have a look at this, to get an idea what those greedy f--kers have done to my home, and to our collective heritage over the past few decades. First, what the forests around my hometown (it's at the tip of Stuart Lake, there, center left) looked like in 1973, not long after my family moved there. Unbroken green, punctuated only by the blue of the northern lakes, and some farmland around Vanderhoof, down there at the lower left.

Now have a look at the same area in 1999. See the clearcuts? See what 'stewardship of the resource' has meant? See the spots, like some kind of mange, some horrific skin disease? Good job, you scum. You've burned your own house down around your ears. Thanks, American owners of Canadian forestry companies! You've screwed us again.

I have nothing against forestry. I have nothing against logging. It has been the lifeblood of the community that made me who I am, and supported people I know and love (and some I don't care for so much, I admit.)

What I can't and couldn't ever ignore, yeah, even while I was sweeping up the damp rich sawdust for fifteen bucks an hour, is the ways in which it has been pursued. And now, finally, the bats are coming home to roost, and it will be decades before the province and the industry recovers. Next time, maybe, they'll do it right. If there is enough fossil fuel left to do it, and any communities left to work there.

So what's happening on the ground? Two years ago, when I last visited Canada, I drove a rented car from Vancouver the 1100km north to Fort Saint James. There were stretches of a hundred kilometres and more where every tree that lined the highway on either side, once stately and evergreen and immutable, was the dull reddish brown of standing deadwood. It was a terrible thing to see. My mother, who was mayor of Fort Saint James for 14 years and still lives there, painted a pretty gloomy picture when we last talked. Of the 4 lumber mills that have provided most of the economic steam to run the community for decades, two are out of business, and one, run by the native community, is limping along with about 50 employees. Young families are leaving in droves. Real estate prices are plummeting, and houses are standing empty. Last year was one of the best ever for tourism, and that will hopefully never change, but other towns in less beautiful areas are in the process of drying up and blowing away.

Trees take decades to grow in Northern British Columbia. The good times are not going to come back any time soon.

I don't pay much attention to goings-on in Canada. I don't know how much attention is being paid to this. I suppose people are too worried about the coming real estate bust in the cities. I suppose the economic boom and environmental nightmare of the oil sands in Alberta offers some distraction. I don't know. But what I am sure about is that my hometown is dying.

I have mixed feelings.

The forests will come back. The forestry industry and government will, we can only hope, learn some lessons. People will relocate -- Canada is a nation of migrants -- and towns will shrink and maybe disappear. It's probably just wishful thinking, but it would be nice to think that things will shift toward a real attitude of sustainability and stewardship.

No matter how it all plays out, a lot of people will be hurt in the process. It takes a lot of good to outweigh the pain that the end of a way of life brings.

It's happening all over the world. They say change is good. They say a lot of stuff.

Update: The news is that a local (-ish) company has taken over the largest mill in Fort Saint James, the one that closed a year ago. They are aware and resigned to the fact that they will lose money for a good while, but they are focused on the long-term. This is fantastic news for the town -- it means hundreds of jobs, and means the town will not dry up and blow away. Other towns may not be so lucky, but I am gratified that my hometown at least seems to be looking at a stay of execution.

Here's a pretty word cloud, in celebration:

3:19 PM | 11 comments and 1 trackback

When I was a teenager, I thought a lot about the end of the world. In particular, the rain of nukes that always seemed just around the corner. I was fascinated and terrified. I suppose that's not an unusual thing for kids that age, and might even have been the usual for m-m-m-my generation.

I grew up in the 70s, came of age in the early 80s. I was convinced that nuclear war was near-inevitable. I had no doubt that doddering dimwitted Ronald Reagan (read 'his handlers') and whichever doddering Soviet supremo was currently being propped up and jerkily animated with electric current (read 'his handlers') were going to blow the crap out the world. I dreamed about it. I can remember a grand total of one wet dream from my pubescent years; I can remember literally dozens of atomic holocaust dreams.

I remember Helen Caldicott and her Canadian-made If You Love This Planet. They showed it to us in high school. I remember the TV movies Threads and The Day After. Two and half decades after seeing Threads, I still remember the camera lingering on the puddle of urine at the woman's feet as the mushroom clouds rose. I watched The Road Warrior when it was first released. I remember reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. I sucked up all the '50s bomb-shelter paranoiac sci-fi juvenilia I could get my mother to buy for me at the bookstores on our shopping trips to the nearest city. I read what little I could find about the growth of the Cold War arsenals. It was... a hobby of mine.

Not that I was the archetypal Weird Kid or anything, muttering head-down through greasy locks about the 'end of the world'. I had normal hobbies, too: comics and computers, swimming and biking, booze and friends' fast cars. Girls. I showered regularly. But I did dream a lot about the end of the world.

And they weren't all nightmares by any means. See, I grew up in a tiny town more than 1000 kilometers north of Vancouver. I was completely confident that when the bombs fell, we'd be safe and secure. When I was in Grade 5, my gifted-group teacher had had a meteorologist boyfriend who'd lent me (and the other smart kid they'd cut from the herd to study what and how we liked) his weather maps. I'd learned about the prevailing wind currents of north-central British Columbia. We'd be all good when the balloon went up. The nearest mushroom cloud might sprout and rain its deadly ash 500km away, at worst, accidental mistargetings notwithstanding, and leave us basically unscathed

We had moose and squirrel salmon, we had farms and ranches, we had endless forest. Fruit might get a little scarce, but hell, I didn't much like fruit anyway. My house had a deep well, and the lakes and rivers were sweet and clear. Nuclear winter? No worries. We lived through -45°C spells every damn year. We'd get by. Let the mad bastards down south kill each other off en masse. We'd be the inheritors of the earth, us hardy northern canucks, ululating our diesel-powered ways down out of the arboreal wastes, antlers strapped to the hoods of our Barracudas and pickup trucks, to rebuild things in our own Royal Reserve-powered image. Proud Canadians. There'd finally be some kind of payoff for living 40 miles up the asshole of the earth for so many years.

Armageddon didn't seem like such a bad thing. Not the best result in a lot of ways, sure, but Ouroboros the world-turd was spinning at the bottom of the bowl, anyway. Time for cleansing holy nuclear fire! It'd be a shame, all those innocent people getting torched, but we kept reading how overpopulation was going to kill the planet even if the nukes didn't.

So talk these days of a coming economic armageddon with Ground Zero in America's bubble have actually put me in a nostalgic mood. Headlines like China threatens 'nuclear option' of dollar sales take me right back to 1982. Media tidbits like Jim Cramer's recent howling monkey-boy histrionic meltdown -- 'It's Armageddon out there!" have fascinated me in the kind of way that (metaphorical) nuke-porn did back in the day.

It's far from certain, of course, that the blow up is going to happen, or even that things will fall apart. But I've been watching the whole thing for years now, after decades of conditioned ignorance about economics, and the New Great Depression feels as likely to me as nuclear tennis did back in the early '80s.

Then again, that didn't end up happening, did it? There's some comfort in that, I guess.

A comment from the perspicacious Malor in a recent Metafilter thread (among many others about the subprime mortgage mess, the yen carry trade, the liquidity dry-up, and all the rest) lays out genesis of the worst case scenario pretty well, I think. Is it a Minsky Moment? Yeah, probably.

Malor said:

We should have gone into a horrific recession after the stock market bubble popped in 2000. The size of that bubble was far bigger than the one in 1929, so the consequences should have been even more severe... something on the order of severity of the Great Depression, although I think a 1970s-style stagflation writ large was the likeliest outcome.

What happened instead is that the Fed panicked and hit the liquidity button, flooding the system with incredibly cheap money. New money chases inflation, and causes more of it, so it went into housing, and then people started leveraging themselves up into massive debt to buy more of it.

Bubbles have been called the fiscal equivalent of a nuclear weapon; the only way to avoid the fallout is by not having one in the first place. The stock market bubble was a huge deal, though probably survivable.

But the Fed, which set off the original bubble with easy money, tried to fix the fallout with more of the same medicine that got us sick in the first place. To stop the fallout from one atomic bomb, they set off two fusion weapons instead.... and we didn't even dodge the fallout from the first bomb, we just delayed it. The explosion of the other two bombs just sent the fallout into orbit, but it's still up there, and we're still gonna eat every rad.

At the very least, we're going to have a full generation of very hard times, tougher than anything in living memory. I think we will be exceptionally fortunate if the United States continues to exist as the same legal entity.

In terms of likely outcome, my operating theory is that we'll go into a short-term deflationary crunch, but the Fed will open the floodgates and send us into an inflationary death spiral. Not just nasty horrible stagflation for two decades like we would have had from the Y2K pop, but an actual hyperinflationary death spiral for the dollar.

With fiat currency, I just don't think a true deflationary collapse is possible... although with the unbelievably massive leverage in the derivative positions, I suppose it could happen. Money could be destroyed from debt default faster than the Fed can lend new dollars into circulation.

There's one name you should remember in the coming crisis: Greenspan. This is all his doing. His refusal to ever allow a recession, ever, led us directly into this mess. He never met a problem he couldn't cover up with liquid paper.

I think Malor might be overstating the case when he talks about a generation of hard times. On the other hand, if China pulls the economic trigger, he might be understating it.

Anyway, the winds taste the same to me because as the tension builds I'm once again far from the places where the corpses will litter the ground if and when the hammer falls. Two and half decades ago I was in the far north of Canada, confident that we'd be able to sustain ourselves while the rest of the world went to hell. Now I'm in Korea, and if economic armageddon happens, once again I'm not directly in the line of fire. Once again, if it all goes to hell, I'll feel sorry for all the people (even the stupid ones who went for their two year no-money-down teaser-rate no-declare ARM mortgages for a McMansion they knew they couldn't afford) who lose it all. The rich will make it through, as they always do, this time with Bushy legislation and offshore accounts rather than hardened bunkers and hidey holes.

Well, I like to say I'll feel sorry about the end of days. I said to myself when I was 17 that I'd be sorry about all those crispy corpses down in CanadAmerica South. But not entirely sincere the sentiment, I have to admit, then or now. The truth is, of course, in some ways, on some days: I think I'd feel like pumping my fist, taking a deep breath, and shouting 'That's what you get for shortsighted greed and systematic stupidity, you bastards!' Or more succinctly, 'cause my wind is not what it once was, 'Suck it, dummies!'

I'm a bad man that way. Or part of me is and was, at least.

Bad things are going to happen to the Korean economy, certainly, if and when America's economy goes tits-up and takes the rest of the world with it. But if I lived in North America, if I was mortgaged to the hilt, if I was living from paycheck to paycheck, I'd be a lot more worried about it than I am here in Korea with my life savings in won and no debt.

Maybe we ought to buy some gold, though.

So I am back where I was when I was young -- a cleansing fire might just be what's needed to clean out the corruption and cauterize the wounds. Part of me almost looks forward to it. I'm not sure if I really believe that, or if it's just the romantic teen I was surfacing again for a last misanthropic gasp before he goes down into that dark cold water for the last time.

Either way: armageddon schadenfreude. It's not just a good name for a postmodern superhero.

[Update: more background material and some excellent explanations of the IMPENDING DOOOOOOOM in this MeFi thread.]

6:36 PM | 9 comments

[Some of this seemed to crystallize for me after listening to Bruce Sterling's excellent talk at SXSW 2007. So thanks to him, and you know, grain of salt.]

We grew up watching. If you're 50 or 40 or 30 or younger, you've spent thousands of hours watching. You still watch -- you watch on YouTube, or you watch your DVDs, or you watch the TV. Maybe you use a PVR to timeshift yourself so that you can watch on your own schedule, congratulate yourself on cheating the advertisers, denying them the eyeballs they crave. Maybe, like me, you fire up bittorrent on boot, and swarmload all your video automagically from the RSS feeds of illicit darknet bulletin boards.

Howl Twitter (with abject apologies to Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best posters of my generation destroyed by politics, commenting hysterical naked,
scrolling themselves through the n-word threads at dawn looking for a snarky fix,
trucker-hatted hipsters burning for the cheapest DSL connection to the bitwise dynamo in the datastream of night,
who pizza and tater-tots and poopsocking and high sat up typing in the supernatural whiteness of rented condos surfing across the tubes of internets contemplating porn,
who bared their breasts on MySpace under fake names and saw Mohammedan bombers threatening in video streams illuminated,
who played through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Second Life and Warcraft tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were banned from the websites for crazy & posting batshitinsane on the Windows™ of the Bill,
who farted in unshaven rooms in underwear, tossing their tissues in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror on CNN...

Watching and being watched has started to feel like the default human state in these mediated days. You know how characters in video games will go into their idle animation if you wait too long to interact with them? Yeah, like that. Unwatched, they nonetheless go through the motions as if they were.

The last half a century or more is remembered, at least by me, as a succession of moving images -- lumpy raspberry red Kennedy brains sprayed out across the trunk of the convertible, phallic twin towers collapsing like nationscale erectile dysfunction. Watching makes manifest our reality, makes more real our memory. Two or three generations now, we've been immersed eyedeep in it. Hawkeye Pierce and Fonzie, they're signifiers of my childhood as evocative to me as cold lake water and the northern lights. If you spend as much time on the internet as I do, if you're one of the geek-approved flavour of obsessive-compulsives we call 'early adopters', if you've bought a big flat panel TV or covet HD video, if your appetite for bandwidth is insatiable, if you feel compelled to buy ever more complex mobile phones, you're probably in the same boat as me. You swim in the same advertising cesspool in which our media meals float -- eyeballs watch, watching is intentional, intention means awareness, awareness is all when someone wants something from you or when you want something from them. Tree falls in the forest, but it doesn't matter shit unless somebody's watching. We're Schrödinger and his cat, both at the same time.

If you live in London, your picture is taken 300 times a day, but not because someone want to sell you something. You're being watched, and you're meant to feel safe.

We've had another lesson drummed in to us, too, it seems; one that cuts in the other direction. It's a weak inverse solipsist lesson we felt in our bones from the time we were toddlers, of course: you've seen it on America's Funniest Home Videos, maybe. The child falls, howls while the parents with the camera are looking at him and pointing the camera. They move off, out of sight -- the observing eye umbrated -- and the child quiets, sniffs, draws shuddery breath, and follows. As soon as he knows he is once more in the range of the observer's gaze, he busts out into full wails again.

Here: It's easier for you to watch the video than for me to explain it. Watch.

Our thoughts, our feelings, our selves are never as real as when someone else is observing them.

So we used to make home movies, we took Polaroids, we sent cards to distant relatives at Christmas so we'd be alive in their minds. It's a natural and a human impulse. Hell, we painted on the walls of Lascaux. With the technology at hand, we were only able to do it occasionally. We laughed at the Japanese tourists back in the 1970's who lugged cameras around and photographed everything. Remember those jokes? Me, I'm in some Japanese family's album somewhere because they asked me in pantomime to pose with them, back in 1976 in Banff, presumably because I was wearing a sweatshirt with a big red maple leaf and Olympics logo.

We're rubberneckers slowing down to peer at the wreckage flung from the dizzying welter of 'reality TV' programs, where it is purported that we are watching ordinary people raised up or struck down by our collective whim or their own strengths and failings, willing participants watchers and watched alike, sanctified and made flesh by the power of our collective gaze. American Idols are made of people! Barechested rednecks are hilarious and a little sad, reminding us of what me might have been, at least on Cops. Oh, man, that's clever: those fat bastards on the Biggest Loser aren't really losers at all, are they? It goes on and on.

[ripper] I told u I was hardcore

Larger than life as we bask in the collective gaze starts to feel like a necessary platform of life services to achieve Normal, to stand out from the undifferentiated herd in the way that we've been told we should by companies who want us to buy their products. But buying those jeans whose commercials identically mass-marketed the promise of individualist flair to everybody just doesn't carry the same cachet any more for us media-steeped folks. We've gotten too smart and self-aware for that, some of us.

Bud: Look at 'em, ordinary f--king people, I hate 'em.

And so online journals like this very one you're reading right now, and the canonical cheese sandwich post. So weblogs, where what we've seen is posted, so that others can see it, and then go and see the thing seen. So audioscrobbling. So Second Life. So YouTube. So MySpace. So Flickr, where we can upload cellphone pics minute-by-minute, if we want. So Odeo and Twitter. So new, so immediate: so we spread the minutiae of our minute-to-minute existence out over the wires, so that others -- someone -- will notice and pay attention. We are alive to reality when we watch, we feel more real when we are paid in the attention-currency of attentive eyes.

I'm thinking it's a new pornography of the self. We willingly prostitute our privacy, and we accept payment in the form of attention. We always have, of course. But the slickly sexy 2.0 toolset we have makes it so effortless, and the reward such a crackpipe hit of Warholian fame, that it's hard to know when to stop. We become gleeful self-pornographers.

The word originally signified any work of art or literature depicting the life of prostitutes. Though pornography is clearly ancient in origin, its early history is obscure because it was customarily not thought worthy of transmission or preservation. Nevertheless, in the artwork of many historic societies, including ancient India, ancient Greece, and Rome, erotic imagery was commonplace and often appeared in religious contexts. The Art of Love, by Ovid, is a treatise on seduction and sensual arousal. The invention of printing led to the production of ambitious works of pornographic writing intended to entertain as well as to arouse. In 18th-century Europe, pornography became a vehicle for social and political protest through its depiction of the misdeeds of royalty and other aristocrats, as well as those of clerics, a traditional target. The development of photography and motion pictures in the 19th and 20th centuries contributed greatly to the proliferation of pornography, as did the advent of the Internet in the late 20th century.

And as we do so, we live less in the actual moment, perhaps, less with the actual people around us. We don't need to seek out people to be with us here, to be our audiences: if we post, they will come, or at least their eyes will, we hope. Do we lose more than we gain? I don't know the answer to that.

Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon. I don't use instant messaging and other 'presence apps', I don't carry a cell phone. I have no desire for people to know what I'm doing and when, and I don't care to be at anyone's beck and call when I am enjoying being alone. Or any other time, for that matter.

I certainly don't think that it's all bad, all this Twittering and Flickring, all this eyeball mongering. I have nothing against prostitution, in principle. But we may underestimate what it's done to us, and what it's doing. And I wonder what it will mean for people who have never known anything different.

[Update: Hey, Bruce liked my Ginsberg repurposing! And so the circle is complete.]

6:02 PM | 10 comments and 1 trackback

You know what? I'm a little weary of hearing about your conferences, your camps, your cozy cash-on-the-barrelhead confabs.

I don't want to know what web-shaking new thoughts percolated through the sponsored-by-Starbuck's IRC backchannel while some Internet Smellovision™ rep droned and powerpointed onstage. I don't really need to see more Flickr pictures of grinning gaggles of bloggers glistening with teraflopsweat, a little too eager to prove that they socialize in other venues besides World of Warcraft.

Don't try and tell me that 'business weblogs' or 'the business of weblogs' are anything but business. Go ahead and do your business. Make your money: we've all got to. Convene with your peers and drive your value propositions down the ROI highway. It's all good. We're lucky if we can make a living doing something we love. But if what you do and what you say in this shared textual space of ours is about selling something, then it's about selling something. Don't bullshit us. Lines blur; everything gets a price tag slapped on it.

I'm not looking at your ads, and there's no way I'm clicking them, unless I'm right-clicking on them to add them to my Adblock list, and I'm cursing you for making me go through that small tribulation.

Then my nose opens up and the fingers begin to flex when I read again how you were talking to that netfamous guy about this other well-known weblog guy, because that's what famous internet guys do -- they network. They do it publicly, and dignify it by calling it 'conversation'. Networking obviates the need for latex gloves while giving a socialmedia reacharound.

Conversation as intercourse. Intercourse as commerce. You know somebody's getting f--ked. I think it might be us. Ad copy tattoed on our lover's forehead, and we're so inured to it that we don't even notice anymore. We're trying to make love in the middle of the marketplace, but we're just getting screwed.

Conferences are where salesmen go. Because that's what salesmen do -- they network. They sell. They place ads where we'll see them, so they can sell us something. Salespeople. Salespersons, I guess. Salors and salestresses. They sell. Lomans, not shamans.

We've got the salesman archetype etched into the cultural DNA by now -- we see cheap suit a little sad, a little desperate, the armpit-stained Flying Dutchman of the strip malls. We hear faux-friendly NLP-creepy patter, we cringe, even if we're not sure why. Salesman selling something at us makes our sphincters tighten in a pre-fight-or-flight reflex. Does mine, anyway. And thanks at least in part to the blithely worshipful way that your average blogjockey has of beating the bones together at the foot of the Google Monolith, Adsense has infiltrated our online culture, has made slightly sad dry-haired Holiday Inn revenants of all of us, trapped in a coach seat next to some guy trying to sell us some shit we don't need, waiting to get a word in edgewise so we can sell him some shit he doesn't want.

My god, it's full of ads! Ads by Goooooooooogle. There's something hidden in that inviting string of 'ooooooooooo's waiting to be teased out by a modern day steganographic Nostradamus. While making his 'o' face.

(Yeah, I flog Dreamhost here, and I run Adsense on one of my other sites. I've become as guilty of this sort of whoring as the next poor rube. I'm squatting as deep in the shit as you are, pants around my ankles, 'raising the level of discourse'.)

But look: all of the conference references, all the logrolling backscratching insular techmeme circlejerk, all of the third-column index page stacks packed with the javascripty fruit of the Adsensorium, the 120-pixel hello-surfer come-ons... well, it's enough already.

'But wonderchicken, my cranky friend,' you may well object. 'If you don't like it, just stop reading it! Nobody's holding your feet to the fire here. Let those who can and want to spend their time and money sitting in threadworn conference centres with others of their adoptive sept and clan do so, and do not begrudge them their participation in the Monetary Blogdustrial Complex. It is an Engine of The New Economy! It is a bitwork bulwark against the Old Media Hegemony, from which we can together launch our Social Media Enfilade! A rising tide of advertising and self-promotion lifts all boats! We need the evangelists and the shills to Get The Word Out! The Long Tail will always be there wagging the Big Dogs, rich strata of abandoned and automated weblogs, linkfarms and pr0n, and lonely people bellowing out across the virtual rooftops to their audiences of search bots, googlenauts and bemused relatives. The human experience, made hyperlinked. Google will index it all, and get rich on the carrion-clicks that it sells to the office cubicle fools who Aren't Us! It's a Brand® New Day!'

Yeah, I know. But I felt like I needed to launch a barbaric yawp into the aether, because I miss it sometimes. And these things can be bad for you if you just let them build up inside. Hi Dave!

5:16 PM | 5 comments and 1 trackback

Google, despite the fact that they are clearly the evolutionary precursor of the Borg or Skynet or the Matrix or whatever Evil Tech Hive Mind your dystopian leanings favour, can be instructive and educational as well as entertaining and terrifying.

From the inquiry into the global zeitgeist below

we learn, for example, that

• Bermuda goes positively apeshit over Coke, but has no interest in Pepsi
• New Zealand is also a Coke Nation, but hasn't yet completed the Pepsi drinker genocide
• Canadians don't care much about the minute differences between sugar water brands, but are fond of bum
• ...but not nearly as fond of it as the Kiwis
• Suprisingly, perhaps, Commonwealth nations are keener on the buttsecks than Americans

In today's globalized economy, borders become transparent to markets, and death is once again a spectator sport, with images shot 'round the globe in realtime to Feed The Need™. Civilization is sooo cool, man! It's mashup time, and you get to choose whether you want to eat that mash with fork or spoon, because the Customer Is Always Right.

Of course, it is entirely possible that there is no Spoon, and we're all Forked.

Share and enjoy.

2:37 PM | 5 comments

I was somewhere between point A and point B, as I had been for most of the decade in question. For most of my life, when it came to it.

Wait, that's not the way to start it. Let me try again.

I've never been as fascinated by sex as most people seem to be, but there was a lost few days that I remember....

No, that's not how I want to tell this story either.

One more time.

There was this girl in high school. She was attractive, splendidly put together, but clumsy somehow. Unpopular, invisible. And smart. Too smart, and too interested in making sure that people knew it. Me, I was smart too, but I spent as much time as possible trying to rebrand it, at least to those elements of the cabal that didn't appreciate that kind of thing. I was as kind to her as I was to most people, because I was a nice guy, especially when I was sober, even as I was limping unsuccessfully after other, unobtainable young women, stealth erection tucked down my leg.

Most of a decade after high school, I had decanted myself back into the Old Home Town after a time drinking and sailing in Mexico, skinny tan squinty pickled and worldy-arrogant, and we met again, and drank together, and she was magnificent. Gorgeous, and grace had replaced teen clumsiness. Apparently, she'd been in teenage love with me. Oh.

We screwed like minks on the floor at the foot of her parents' bed after the bar closed. Her parents were in a nearby town dealing with the aftermath of her grandmother's death, which was why she was also back in town. It was one of those things that happen, and it was nice, and fleeting. And hotter than hell, I tell you now.

Months later, and I was making my way back down to the big city. I'd saved a couple of thousand dollars working mill and was ready to buy a ticket out again, to wherever. Wherever had treated me pretty damn well before. She'd left an open invite to come and stay with her, anytime, and I decided to take her up on it.

That's where the whole 'I've never been dick-led' thing that I mentioned comes in. I didn't love her, sex was a thing that I liked but didn't crave: I didn't know what the f--k, but I was 20-something, and I wanted to walk through whatever doors opened up in front of me, on principle if nothing else. And that illicit carpet sex had been... good.

So I rolled into her town on the Greyhound, called her, and she picked me up, and we went to the liquor store, and she bought half a dozen bottles of liquor, and we went to her house, and we f--ked a lot.

We drank -- or, mostly, I drank, at the arborite-and-aluminum table in the kitchen of her small, neat apartment -- and then we f--ked. Mornings, she went to work, and I stayed, and wrote, and smoked, and waited until the afternoon to drink again. I don't remember eating during those 4 or 5 days but I suppose we must have.

It wasn't love driving the lust, which was a new thing, at least for me. It was an echo of love for her, maybe, a salute to an unrequited one a decade old. It was good for both of us, I supposed and I liked to think, in completely different ways.

The night before I left -- and this was the memory that started me telling this story, this story I couldn't figure out how to start, and now, having started, have reservations about telling its denouement -- it was Saturday night and Canada-cold, we were drunk as lords, and I was going down on her, and her muscles were a-twitch and her transported. I was proud as hell that I was making her come. I'd never known a women before who had her own apartment and all.

As the orgasm rolled over her, she let a massive fart out on my chin. It was a ripper. I took it with aplomb -- I had at least a bottle of scotch in me -- and looked up after it had finished, over the smooth terrain of her belly. Staring at the ceiling, as the muscles on the insides of her thighs quivered and quieted against my ears, she said "I didn't get to see my grandma before she died."

We drank some more that night after we got dressed. I left the next day, and we parted friends.

I don't know what this story means, but the memory came to me tonight as I drank my beer, and I thought I'd tell it, because I miss writing shit down sometimes.

9:44 PM | 13 comments

For some reason, this post from a few years back -- Uncle f--ka Exegesis -- has been getting hits like a proper weblog motherf--ker lately. Not as much as the weirdly-popular-in-Europe Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator, but pretty damn close.

I re-read the exegesis for the first time in a long time just now, and I'm kind of thinking it's the best damn thing I've ever written. Then again, I am drinking beer because tomorrow's Buddha's Birthday -- that bastard -- and I'll admit that the juice might possibly have coloured my perception and delaminated my judgement.

I'm still on the road, though, and I'm still gunning for the Buddha (that bastard). That's got to count for something.

Anyway, sometimes I make myself laugh. Your mileage may vary, as they say in the halls of power, those petrol weasels, them.

11:50 PM

This is about something I love. Not as much as beer, perhaps, but more than a hell of a lot of other things.

Maybe 6 months ago I was trolling one of the private darknet sites where I get my bittorrents, looking for something new to download, watch, and delete, as usual. All that fat pipe Korean bandwidth going to waste is a crying shame, and I do my best to keep it humming, and make sure that the carbon doesn't build up in the virtual valves. The Korean government gets a big wet kiss from me for their policy of relentlessly ramming bandwidth down the throats of their citizens (and the scruffy no-account foreigners who squeak in through the cracks), if not for many of the other decisions they stumble into.

So I was 4 or 5 pages deep in the movie forum, and there it was, with only a couple of peers on the torrent so far. I swear, my heart skipped a beat. I caught a whiff of those dusty sun-pummelled rocks of Southern California, and the rich stink of bubbling road-tar. A few notes of the theme song. An fleeting image of perfectly conical 1963-era brassiere-bound breasts. A shiver of the joyous goofiness of life's meaningless serendipity. I hadn't thought about the movie in decades, probably, media-starved and nomadic as I'd been during my wanderyears. It was, without exaggerating, one of the formative films of my young life. It helped make me the man I am today. I fired up the torrent and whispered a breathy 'woo hoo', so as not to wake up She Who Must Be Obeyed, and the downstream rate nudged its way up past 400KB/s.

The movie was "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World".

Let me tell you about how this movie lodged itself so deeply in the crenellations of my brain. I warn you, there may be some adult concepts and situations involved, though. What else do you expect from the wonderchicken?

I started babysitting when I was maybe 10 years old, I guess. I didn't do it much, and only for some friends of the family who had two kids about 7 or 8 years younger than me. I'll call them the Potters. Mostly it was a New Years Eve thing, when my parents would go out with Mr and Mrs Potter and get smashed and celebratory at whatever parties were happening in our little town. At that point, they were almost ten years younger than I am now, which makes me feel a little wobbly when I think about it.

Anyway, it was the New Year's Eves I remember the most. I probably had a good run of 5 years or so before I got old enough that I wanted to start going out myself and getting loose on illicitly-acquired booze on December 31st. But I didn't mind doing the babysitting one bit during those years. Mr Potter, you see, had something that my father didn't (or had hidden too damn well for me to find, much as I tried).

The porn.

Out in plain site, tucked into the accordion sidepocket and jammed down alongside the seat cushion of his chestnut-brown naugahyde recliner. In a messy pile mixed in with the TV guides and local newspapers on the floor. The thing was, it was almost all textporn, and I discovered it by accident, out of boredom. I don't even know if the genre even exists anymore -- cowboy novels with long, long stretches of pure high-octane sex. I still remember the night when I first found it. I was sitting in the recliner with a bowl of salt and vinegar chips on the folding TV-dinner table beside me, and I pulled out one of the broken-backed paperbacks that was jammed between the cushion and the armrest. Like all of the others I read over the ensuing years in that house, the cover featured a long-haired, spectacularly-bosomed woman, mostly clothed but inevitably dishevelled in a long dress, with a gunslinger, whitehat or black, posed like an action figure, guns metaphorically out. This paperback was totally flat, open about midway through, and when I scanned a few paragraphs, something went 'boing' in my head, if not right away in my pants.

Keep in mind this was the mid1970's, and I was only about 10 or 11. The only naked women I'd seen had been in the couple of low-rent skin mags that other boys had somehow purloined and brought into school, or that I'd literally stumbled upon in the woods. There wasn't an internet, and we had no movie theatre, and only two channels on the TV, video rentals didn't exist. Porn was an as-yet unexplored frontier. A different world than we live in today, where 9-year-olds are sending each other goatse links.

I wonder now if my eagerness around that time to go and babysit for the Potters seemed a little odd, somehow. I wonder too if my love for words grew at least in part out of these intense early textfests. I know where my love of the road came from.

I was a big reader already at that age, but the rare sex scenes in my vast mom-sponsored collection of science fiction were like whale-oil candles to this nuclear blast of meat. It went on for page after page of sucking and nibbling and grunting and heaving and cowpokery. I was boggled.

How on earth does this tawdry little tale connect with "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", you ask? Well, that was the movie that, for some reason, our nearest CTV affiliate station played in its long form as the late show every single New Year's Eve in those days. Like begging my folks to let me stay up for the Sean Connery Bond movies, or the Sunday afternoon double-shot of Disney and Bugs Bunny, it had assumed a kind of ritualistic significance for me.

I loved the movie regardless -- it was shown at other times during the year, and I'd seen it half a dozen times by that point anyway -- but it played so regularly as the background soundtrack to the pure unalloyed joy of smacking my weiner around like a pinata at a fat kid's birthday that they eventually merged into twin double-happiness somehow, back in the root of my pubescent lizard brain.

For the first couple of years I sat in the Potters' living room, though, it was just about the unlimited cola and snacks. I had a quick scan of whatever cowboy porno was laying around the living room occasionally, and there had been some interesting stirrings in the groinal region, sure, but around the time I turned 12, it all started to change.

I recall the moment at which curiosity and a feeling of general naughtiness blossomed into a full-blown vocation. Long after the kids had been put to bed, of course, mind you. Most of the time they'd already been put to bed before I even showed up, and the house was mine from the get-go.

Over the previous year or so, things had been getting cramped in my jeans when I was doing my late-night study of Mr Potter's novels, and I'd taken to letting myself out for some air, if you take my meaning. And, you know, I'd discovered in the fullness of time that giving myself a bit of an aimless rub once in a while was a pretty pleasant thing, too.

But one night, on New Year's Eve, it was, the damn thing just went off. Like a geyser.

Nobody could have been more shocked and surprised than I was, once my eyes rolled back down out of my head. I guess I must have known this sort of thing happened -- I'd been reading those damn cowboy books during my babysitting sessions for a year or two by that point -- but that was different than having it actually happen to me. And of course, "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" was playing on the TV in the corner, beside the dried-out Christmas tree.

The rest of that night I'll slide a diffusion lens of modesty over, but suffice it to say that I could barely walk on January 1st. I'd discovered something that would occupy a lot of my free time over the next few years.

Until I saw that torrent file for The Movie, I'd almost forgotten about the supporting role it played in my sexual awakening, not as fodder, but as refractory-time wallpaper.

I don't think my slightly irrational love for the movie is entirely about the sexual imprinting, necessarily. The movie itself is not especially sexualized for me. And these days, I don't much care for cowboy novels or brown vinyl recliners, nor do salt and vinegar potato chips give me spontaneous erections. There's much to love about the movie, I think, and it's become like an old friend long-lost and remade for me in the six months since I've downloaded it. Somehow it takes me back to a time when new worlds were opening wide, full of possibilities. Sex and the road, out there in front of me.

I remember how that seeing that arid Californian desert, so alien to me and so clean, how seeing those cars race through it set up resonances in my brain that I couldn't explain. That I still can't, for that matter. How the movie made me laugh. How it mixed with the heady fumes of newly-discovered sex, and filled me with an awareness that life was both utterly random and completely hilarious.

On some of those Friday nights at home since I've rediscovered the movie, when I've had my fill of beer and my reflexes have degraded too far to be much damn good in Rocket Arena 3, and I've sung along with a few Tom Waits songs, and am weary and hungry, I find myself firing up the movie and watching a few scenes. Imagining myself rakish and dissolute in a heavy steel-framed convertible with a woman in a satin gown, racing across the California desert towards the Big W. And I feel both rooted in a past that I frequently have difficulty remembering, and a little bit free.

But these days, at least, I keep my hands above the waistline.

10:46 AM | 4 comments and 1 trackback

I am a weblogger.

I am a man. I am an authority. I am hieratic. I am a drinker. I am a Canadian. I am an expatriate. I am somewhat inebriated tonight.

I am a spice without a sauce. I am a singer, I am a writer. I am a lover. I am a man who loves. I am happy and I am unsatisfied. I am content and I am angry. I am actively ignoring the present continuous in favour of the possible future simple. I am alive. I contradict myself.

I am growing old. I'm farting like a Captain of Industry. I'm hurting every goddamn day. I'm present perfect linking my patchwork history with this moment here, where the glass is in my hand. I've abused this strong big body of mine. I've moved people to tears. I've made them laugh. I've been completely wrong. I'm squeezing out the pus.

I am uncertain. I am defiant.

I am buoyed on foamy waves of ancient guitar. I am tired of the bullshit. I hope for the best. I'm averting my eyes.

I'm wasting my life. I'm in the moment. I'm teaching people that English has no future tense. I'm pretty sure there's no point. I am happy about that.

I am thirsty. I am hungry. I am so full of shit my blue eyes are brown.

I love. I rear up in anger. I love.

I need another beer.

10:23 PM | 6 comments and 1 trackback

Because weblogging, or 'writing online in reverse chronological order with permalinks because I heard that it's cool and you can make money for talking about cheese sandwiches and wheeeeee!' (as the kids are calling it these days), has become a bit dull, I've been hunting for newer, shinier things to mess around with.

Mostly, I've just ended up going back to Metafilter to play the grumpy curmudgeon with a heart of gold yet again, or lurking around the SA Forums, or desultory perusing of the [nsfw] uploads at Fipilele, or listening to streaming standup comedy. Or firing up Bloglines, seeing the 14000 unread items in bold, and just catching up with the new posts from people from the old blog neighbourhood (but not bothering to click through to their sites if they don't offer full excerpts) before closing the tab quicksmart. I don't listen to 'podcasts' (that word still makes me f--king gag, and I pronounce anathema the marketing-imprinted clownweiners who call it that. Which means I'm flipping the bird at pretty much everyone, which makes me the weird intense guy with the lazy eye passing out pamphlets on the street, again, I know. I know too that that was my schtick last year, but I'm nothing if not persistent), let alone give a rat's ass who the first person to suggest a double-byte framistat of the persistent reacharound attribute of the CDATA enclosure in the XML for version .09b of RDQ was. Hell, I'm a big old geek from way back, and I've written more than my fair share of code over the years, and I'm crotch-deep in that dirty old weblog water, but even I can't bring myself to care. 'course, I got nothing against other folks being interested in it. It's all good. But scrabbling to stake claims to a place in history, when it's the History Of Sweet Bugger-All, well, it seems like pointless self-promotion to me. And I thought we all agreed way back when that pointless self-promotion was what this whole weblogcasting thing was about from the get-go. So, ennui.

My solution? I've decided to invent a new game, guaranteed to amuse precisely no-one other than myself, probably. Which is usually the way my mind works, so I'm good with that. I've already been playing it for a while, though I didn't realize that until today.

I'll call it scatterblogging™, because that's the word that just leapt into my brain as I was typing this, and I trust my brain, at least when it's sober. What I've been doing, and what I think I'll continue to do, is this: when some amusing-to-me brainfart squeaks out through the old cerebral firewall, I'll launch a new blog, on Blogger or one of the myriad other services that make the hosting and broadcasting of brainfarts their business. I'll get maybe three, four good diurnal emissions off per day, I reckon. Maybe they'll be under one of my existing noms de keyboard, maybe not. Maybe they'll point back here maybe not. But one weblog per thought, one shot, that's it, post and forget, log it out close it down and move on. And whatever I do post, it'll be wonderchickeny.

There's a reason for it, though, beyond mere boredom. You see, when that divine spark suddenly and spontaneously lights up deep in the network and the internet itself shivers itself into self-awareness and emerges from the googleplex, bent on ad-sense vengeance, like an unholy butterfly from its chrysalis, those tiny seeds of wonderchicken will be scattered throughout its distributed mind. Tiny, embedded, sarcastic synapses. And when it begins to systematically exterminate the human race -- beginning, of course, with the advertisers, then moving on to the bloggers -- it'll pause, recognize me, and move on. The next stage of evolution, the conscious world network to come -- it will taste like chicken.

4:07 PM | 7 comments and 2 trackbacks.

You know when people say, "I turned 40 a little while back, and it got me thinking..."? and how you just want to smash 'em one in the face?

Well, I turned 40 a little while back, and it's been f--king with my mind.

I don't think my only problem is the artificial midlife milestone hanging millstone around my neck, though. And I don't suppose -- much as I admit to being overfond of myself and much as I am wont to declaim while in my cups in a way that would lead you to think that my problems are unique in this world -- that I'm alone in this.

I think your mind is probably twisting in the wind, too, dear reader, and there's cool piss dripping from your boots, too, and that rope is creaking above you too in the coming dark. I hope not, but I guess so. It's one of the few things we all share; we share the knowledge that we'll die, and we all fabricate elaborate strategies to face it, that or we turn our faces away from it. We dangle on the gibbets we build out of the decisions we make, until the sun sets on us.

You know the drill: cowboy, steel horse I ride, all that shit.

I used to say to people, people who often regretted asking me whatever innocuous question it might have been that launched me into my rant about death and taxes and the ineluctability of extropy or whatever rocks that evening's torrent had been bouncing over, I used to say that the biggest guiding principles by which I had lived my life thus far were two-fold. I'd say it just that way, too: "...they're two-fold..." Maybe I'd throw in a 'hellshitdamn' or two for spice. People must have really hated me, sometimes.

Anyway, this hand was that in some geriatric future I'd rather regret something I had done than something I hadn't, and that other hand was that I always wanted to have as many choices before me as possible, because once the game becomes a rail-shooter, it just isn't much goddamn fun anymore. Knocking those two rocks together with my two strong hands struck off the sparks that lit the fire in my belly every morning, huzzah!

And both hands, of course, were just heaped with prettyword bullshit. The first was a way to justify living always like a 22-year-old on a tear, and the second was a way to justify the 'external locus of self-control as a result of childhood bereavement' I'd self-diagnosed myself with back in university, and sumo'd out of the ring only to watch the f--ker waddle back again, pulling up its diaper and grimacing intently.

I love those old declarations of mine, I do. They still sing to me, sirens luring me limbs akimbo onto the rocks of rye, cocaine, hookers and tropical isles. I deftly navigated those shoals when I was young and clear of eye, but I'm not so sure I'd make it through safe this time. No, I've tied myself to the mast, have I, and it's the first mate who steers the ship these days. She's immune, you see. And she mostly steadfastly ignores my shouted commands, my entreaties and panting demands to be set free when the siren songs call me again. In this way, she keeps me alive, and I know that my struggles against my bonds are carefully gauged to be almost but not quite violent enough to free myself from them.

And so it goes, as the cliffs seem to rise around us, as we sail onward, me bearded and wildeyed calling for mead and wenches, bound to the mast, her drawn and sympathetic to my madness, but unshaken.

The death of some my convenient lies about myself has not in itself been enough to f--k me up. Barely enough to write about, to be honest, much as I lie about the awe with which I regard my magnificence. There's got to be more. But I guess I'll figure that out later. For now, it's good to be stringing words together again.

I hit post, now, dear lost readers in their thousands, not sure if this is resurrection or coda, but hoping a few diehard outliers of the wonderchicken army are still out there, and when their newsfeed ticks over from that limp and dusty (0) over to an erectile (1), that they'll put the word out: 'Wonderchicken returns, brethren and sistren! He returns! Dance dervish, and spill the blood of politicians in tribute and walleyed joy!'.

But having turned my back on the webs and the logs, on the adsense whores and their corporate pimps, having peed in the pool and pooped on the flag, having committed the unpardonable sin of dissing the digerati, I'm probably on the ignore list again.

Ah well.

Update : special reopening offer! Here's a poultrycast™ of this post, in user-friendly shrinkwrapped mp3 format. One per customer; available for a limited time only. Act now!

Update again : same crap, newfangled shiny package!

10:40 AM | 35 comments and 5 trackbacks.

Dave Winer says: "...all creative people must have some right to the work they create, or else, truly, the incentive to create will disappear. "

Now, I have no dogs in the fight, as they say, when it comes to copyright and the creative commons and Lessigophilia and all that revenue-generating jazz. I have no creative works, despite decades of making things because it amused me, either of words or pixels or pencil and ink or the ongoing ballet of the moments of my life, that are making me any money at all. More's the pity, I guess.

And I must admit that I have little but contempt for the law. I live the way I choose according to the dictates of my conscience, and where my choices conflict with the laws in a place I'm currently living, I make as an informed a decision as I am able as to whether conforming to the law in a given situation is something that it's more sensible to do from a strictly utilitarian perspective. Jail sucks. I know. I've been there. Ironically, it wasn't for breaking any laws, though.

For the most part, I am a law-abiding citizen, but not because I have any innate respect for the laws, or for those who made or enforce them. Where my choices do not conflict with the laws of the land, no worries. That's the way things usually are, because many laws, if not most, are relatively sensible. I understand some may find this kind of stance offensive, or sophomoric. I am unconcerned, if respectful of their opinions.

I regularly break laws by downloading copyrighted material. I have my reasons.

My argument with the phrase I've quoted from Dave above, finally, the one that a fortuitous combination of a good sleep and strong coffee has roused me from my customary lethargy to make, is this: I believe what he said is only correct if we alter 'the incentive to create will disappear' to 'the incentive to create things for money will disappear'. I risk going all broken-record, here, I know. But this fits mortise-and-tenon with some of the things I've been saying recently, about money, about monetarization, and about what some (most?) have been doing in this textspace of ours.

At the risk of committing the unpardonable sin of accidental synecdoche, I think that the phenomenon of weblogging, and the ways in which it has changed in the past couple of years as The Stupid Money rushed in to coca-colonize the new frontier, gives us our perfect example. Of the hundreds of thousands -- millions, if Technorati tells us the truth -- of people who have jumped all over this, and who are using the tools to do any of the heartcasting human constellation of different activities that we've drawn together under the 'weblogging' umbrella, only very recently have more than a tiny handful of them done it for the bucks.

Some are retrofitting revenue streams, sure. That's their prerogative, of course. Some people wear clothes with company logos plastered all over their chests, unironically, for free. They aren't as stupid as they are greedy and clueless, in my humble, but that's just me being a playa-hata, or whatever it is the kids are saying these days.

See, what I'm saying here is that most of these people had no 'incentive to create' other than the burning gods inside their foreheads, clawing to get out. Or merely the mundane urge to share photos of their cute kitties. Or their travel anecdotes. Or their code. Or their jokes or dreams or fantasies and half-baked ideas. Or links the neat websites they've found. They did it out of loneliness, or love of craft, or anger, or the carefully buried ludic urge we all share. Out of a desire to emulate their god. Because they wanted to.

I challenge you to think about the creative output of artists and artisans whose work has touched you. Think of your favorite books, your favorite paintings. That piece of handmade furniture or that gloriously handtooled little application. The music you listen to or the writers-on-the-web you read because they get into your heart and fill you with the ineffable, simple joy of being alive and having a mind. I wonder how many of them would have done their work whether or not they eventually got paid for it. My guess is 'most'.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be paid. Hell, if I could get paid for making the things I make because there's something inside me that impels me to do it, I'd be thrilled. It'd be a dream come true, by crikey. But I do it, regardless. And so do you, probably, if you're reading this.

Money is a very useful thing, but then, so is defecation. Or, if you prefer 'How anal sex got to be THE ticket to blogging fame and fortune I don't fully understand...'

Take away the money, and you will still have people who are driven to create. This is what it is to be human. And, I'd submit, we'd have a lot less soulless sticky media poop clogging our minds and our souls if all of the hacks out there who oxymoronically ennoble their paid efforts by calling them 'creative product' would just do something useful instead for those sweet dollars. This is why I am in love with the idea of the 'mass amateurization of nearly everything', and it's why I push back against those who are snapping like bloody-snouted hyenas at the weblogging carcass in their unseemly urge to Get Noticed and Go Pro.

If you make money by selling the things that you are compelled to create -- writing or music or design or code or ceramic ashtrays or whatever it may be -- then good on ya. I'm genuinely happy for you. But if you would stop merely because you couldn't make a buck at it, well, tough shit. We don't need you. This is probably an unpopular opinion. Ah well.

The incentive to create will never disappear. But I would hail the departure of a world in which the incentive to create (for some) is predicated solely on one's ability to sell those creations, sure I would. When those who were left standing were there because they did it out of love, maybe they'd get a few more bones thrown their way.

And that's all I have to say about that, for the moment.

[Update: OK, that's not entirely all. This is interesting, and most definitely on-topic.]

1:26 PM | 15 comments and 2 trackbacks.

I'm sicker than a gut-shot monkey on the set of a Russ Meyer titty-spectacular, I'm boreder than a glory-hole sander at Bar Sinister in Amsterdam, I'm queasier than Buzz Aldrin chokin' down the buzzcut nitrogen punishment in orbit.

Whatever. I've been infected by self-important look-at-me wanktards* spurting their goofy podcast jism all over the blogobucket, so I got hammered and recorded my last post for posterity.

DOWNLOAD AND READ ALONG WITH THE WONDERCHICKEN (or die) [5Mb], MOTHERBASTERS!

*of which I am one, or else why would I do this?

Update: My old good friend the mighty Bearman

has taken the audio and backed it with some of his superb piano playing. The web is so damn cool. Thanks, man!

11:19 PM | 14 comments and 2 trackbacks.

Here's a story.

I'm smoking a cigarette, sweating, panting a bit, buzzed. I'm looking out to the north towards Horseshoe Bay, sorta leaning against my seat, straddling the bike, after climbing hard a-pedal most of the way up the hill from Spanish Banks to UBC. Out on the edge of the cliff, at the end of a little trail half a dozen metres from the road, in the bushes, private-like. The same place I usually stop for a smoke after doing the Big Circle. I'm... what? 21? Strong, young, full of juice and big ideas. Spotty, callow and dancing perilously close to full-blown alcoholism, too, but the world is my oyster, by god. You can f--k right off. I love you.

I'm wearing my Walkman, of course, because that thing has changed my life. I'm listening to Elvis Costello's King Of America, and he's singing

and it's the album that I love, right now. Women.

The sky is smeared with grey goth-lipstick clouds, as usual, but the blue is showing through, and I feel magnificent, looking at the mountains and the wrinkly sea, smoking my Player's Light. Fully oxygenated blood, full balls and, if not full volume, and least plans for full and frantic Friday night.

A raven -- big, black, alive -- lands with a thump and clink on my handlebars.

No sh-t. A f--king raven. It's like a foot and a half high, and it's right there, wabiggety baw!

I'm in that place, though. In that moment. I'm in the place that drugs only rarely managed to take me over the ensuing years, much as I tried.

So I calmly look the raven in the eye as it jinks around on the handlebars until it's facing me. It looks me in the eye. No, it f--king does, I'm serious. Not straight on, but with its head tilted a bit to my right, so it can really lay the eye on me. I don't know what to do, exactly, so I do nothing.

It checks me out, takes a minute or two, looks me up and down, jerkily, from crotch to crown, then flies off. I think to myself 'well, that was pretty cool', drop my earphones down around the back of my neck, pull out another cigarette, and think about the trickster god of the Kwakiutl and Haida and all the rest, their totem poles stolen and replanted just a few hundred metres away at the museum.

There's a rustle, another thump, a sudden grip and weight on my right shoulder.

The raven is back. It's perched on my shoulder. It's perched. On my. Shoulder. I turn my head slowly, and peer as best I can through the corners of my scratched, smudged lenses into the little black eyes. It sits on my shoulder, gripping tightly, and looks back at me.

I don't know what to do, exactly, so I do nothing.

And I turn away and look at the mountains again, and love the place I'm in, the body I'm in, the life I'm living. The raven stays with me for a few more minutes, enjoying the view, and then it leaves. Its wing flicks me in the right ear as it launches itself out into the void, over the edge of the cliff.

This really happened, in 1985 or so. I woke up this morning remembering it. It makes me proud, although I'm not exactly sure why.

8:08 PM | 14 comments and 2 trackbacks.

I can't stop thinking about this guy.

He's dead now, this guy.

Look at him, so calm, amidst the fury. But the water looks so clean, doesn't it? So much like the pure salt surf that I've always loved. Who was he? Did he make his living from the sea, there in Phuket? Was he a dive instructor, or a bartender? Did he rent umbrellas and chairs on the beach? Was he a tourist himself, from somewhere else entirely?

He looks so calm.

I've always had a relationship with water. My brother died in the water, and I spent all the years after that, in my subarctic hometown, snorkeling back and forth in that same water from a couple of weeks after the ice broke up until well after the leaves had all fallen. Looking for something.

I almost froze to death, on purpose, naked out on the ice of that same lake in the snow, one stupid teenage New Year's Eve long ago after I'd fought with my girlfriend, who I thought I loved enough to die for.

I've always been drawn into the water, in the sea, wherever I've been, from Wales to Fiji, when the waves were big. Stood there, always, pounding my chest, literally, and shouting into the teeth of it. Challenging it. You can't kill me, I was saying, every time. I love you, you can't kill me. Your power is my plaything.

Maybe this guy felt the same way, as he rode the chaos, as the tsunami washed him over the pool, across the grass, into the focus of some tourist's camera. Confident, exhiliarated.

But he died.

Him and what, today? 60,000 80,000 120,000 150,000 other people.

Words are.

Update : Apparently, he's alive![login:vanitas password:vain]

Mike Diack gives us more information inside. Thanks, Mike! It's silly, but somehow this guy became iconic for me of the whole incomprehensible tragedy. Holy sh-t. He's alive.

7:22 PM | 8 comments and 1 trackback

This stopped me in my tracks this evening, while a flood of rock and roll memories washed over me.

This :

I wonder if the sight of that piece of molded plastic ramps up in you the same welter of blurry, beery, hormonal reminiscences that it does in me. If you're pushing 40, and rocked out with your [insert gender-appropriate appendage here] out, and spent long nights at the stereo making offerings, making entertainment for your friends and lovers, thrilled by the fact that you could actually tear songs from those big black frisbees and rearrange them any way you wanted, if you spent weeks and months, years of your life swapping one Maxell after another into the cassette player of your patient buddy's Datsun F10, wiping off the rye you'd spilled, dropping your Player's Light on the carpet again, waiting for the hiss that marked the end of the leader and knowing to the 10th of a second when the first kerrang of that f--kin' kickass tune dude was going to swoop down and tweak your heart, if you remember that one night with a thermos full of vodka and pink lemonade as the snow fell like magic out of a sky that was so close and black and solid that you felt like the air was getting squeezed out of you, wearing red and white Santa gloves in the back seat of that big black fast '65 Barracuda with the first girl you'd ever really loved, the girl you still hadn't gotten up the nerve to tell, being tossed laughing to and fro as the car whipped around corners slick and roaring, if you remember sh-t like that now, then you know how I feel tonight.

Thanks to project c-90, via Mefi.

9:18 PM | 5 comments and 5 trackbacks.

Shelley says over here that 'there's something impersonal and dispassionate about anger." I know how well she writes, and how carefully, and so I've been turning over what she wrote, looking at it from different angles, trying to puzzle out what she meant. Can anger really be dispassionate? Is that what people mean when they talk about 'cold anger'? Could that be a bad thing?

I'm pretty sure anger is an energy, cold or hot. I remember being an angry punk, once upon a time. Well, more of a drunken yahoo of a punk, perhaps. Angry though, in between episodes of skipping around like a loon shouting about 'joy'. Regardless, I can't remember a time when I didn't feel rage welling up in me the moment I stopped to think about the glories of our civilization, and the wonder of our achievements.

Call in the airstrikes.

Still, I've always been the eternal optimist, sifting through the dung looking for a diamond, and I wandered all around this planet, wide-eyed, pushing myself to be childlike and unangry. A real hippie twat, basically. Trying to see the god within each and every person I met. Failing too often, succeeding far too rarely, flying my freak flag high. Peace, love and vegetable rights, man. Anger? Love! Rage? Peace!

That worked pretty well for a time, but the drugs probably helped more than I cared to admit.

I'm still expatriate, of course, and I still am unfailingly kind to people, until they cross me. Then, well, then I puff up and turn all the colours of a sunset, and browbeat them until they submit or go away. And then I get quickly unangry again. I'm like that.

I have never stopped being angry at hypocrisy and hate and stupidity and cupidity, either. And yeah, angry at the sinner as well as the sin. Turning the other cheek's all well and good for the meek, but I'm not going to be around to inherit the earth. I just don't have the patience. So, model citizen, me, right? Going around with a big red 'W' on my chest, fighting for the common man, righting wrongs and kissing babies.

f--k no. But the other thing that Shelley said, that 'anger is the ultimate camouflage for what's really going on in our heads and our lives' doesn't make sense for me, at least. Anger is the the natural and consequent reaction to taking a good hard look at our lives and the lives most of us are shoehorned into, through our own weakness and through the strength of others and through random dumbf--k chance, and realizing that we're going to die. Much too soon, each and every one of us. Ashes or wormfood, or, if maybe scraps for the birds to tear at. In anger, we reveal that we know there can be more, and wish for more, for better, for ourselves and others, and we also reveal that we are too bound by our own chemistry or history to do more than pound the bones and screech like apes before the monolith.

But that's OK.

Because the coin of anger rotating in the air, reflecting those glints of sunlight, has an ouroboros head as well as a tail. There is no anger, for me, at least, that is not backed an impulse similar to the one that some buddhists express when they perform a wai -- palms pressed together, fingers pointing skyward, with a shallow bow. I acknowledge the god within you.

Anger is peace, thwarted. Love, unrequited. The face of god, almost touched. The heartbreaking awareness that you (and so, all) just might not get there, wherever there might be. And ranging as it does in denomination, like our coin flipping up there in the air, the anger can be fire banked against the coming night, or a bolus of flaming tar catapulted at those who thwart the good.

But what the hell do I know? The written word is a lie, and it's possible that I'm just stringing together justifications for my rage, popcorn-garlanding words, holding up another mask, more for the fun of it than from any necessity. I found my own path. Quite possibly not the right one, but it's the one I found, and so that f--ker is holy to me.

There was a time when I was one of those Seekers After Truth that the hip, ironic-McDonald's kids tend to laugh at, often with good reason. Looking for some kind of truth outside myself, raging against the machine. Now I'm a model citizen, older and less convinced that any truth that could have any meaning for me lies anywhere outside myself and the threads that bind me to other people.

But I remain angry, and I maintain that that is the outward sign of my attempts to be honest with myself. It's my honesty with the rest of the world, and it's both personal and passionate.

I only speak for myself. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. That's cool.

5:22 PM | 2 comments

We spent the last couple of days AWOL from the Corporate Disneyland where we live, and ventured out into the Real Korea for the first time in a while. Jesus tapdancing popsicle-stick Christ, it's scary out there! Everything's dilapidated, dirty or broken, and that's just the stuff they bother to slap a new coat of paint on every decade or two.

On the upside, I'd forgotten about all the attractive young females -- not many of those around here in Chaebol City, Arizona. She Who Must Be Obeyed did notice my noticing, but by the time I regained consciousness, the wounds had already been stitched up, so it's all good.

A couple of chapters from the Modernization for Stupid People™ handbook that exemplify for me -- this weekend at least -- the Timeless Wisdom of The Korean People:

1) Build condos in one of the most beautiful places in the country, nestled deep in fragrant woods that in October begin to assume such a