Tripping over the p0rn

June 18, 2002 / / 10 Comments

Reading a thread at the SA forums tonight, which began with the question : “Did you ever find porn in the woods as a child?”
My immediate answer was “Yeah! I did!” And apparently dozens of other goons did too, leading to the positing of a magical Johnny Pornoseed who long ago in a more idyllic age travelled the byways of North America and charitably scattered dirty pictures in the forests for pubescent males to discover and cherish. Astonishing. Something I’d never thought about as a common experience, hadn’t really thought about in decades, but there it is : finding porn in the woods is something that many many young men have experienced.
And what a joyous, revelatory experience it is, too! Explains the fervor of a lot of Green Party members, I reckon.
One SA Goon said this, which is so evocative for me of my teenage hunger for porn :

Has anyone noticed that smell forest porn always has? Kind of musty, but unlike any other kind of smell in the world. It always smells exactly the same. The forest porn smell….
I will never forget the smell of rained on porn mags that have been dried up. For me, it’s the smell of porn.
What’s f–ked up though, is that to this day, my brain associates the smell of ferns with porn. No lie. We hid our rescued stash in a small cave that was hidden by a blanket of ferns.

The reason I talk about this, though, is because it reminded me of what I like to think of as one of my more amusing off-the-cuff comments, one of the proud random snapshots from my life that I like to remember when I’m in need of proof that I’m not a complete moron.
It was Edinburgh, Scotland, in the winter of 1998, I think. Me and Rick (of whom I’ve spoken many times before) and the Bearman and Stiffy The Magic Austrian were living in a B&B in Portobello, which is a grey concrete seaside suburb of Edinburgh (which we customarily referred to as Edithburg, just to be annoying), perched like a frozen dog turd on the southern edge of the Firth of Forth.
For some reason, while drinking the cheap Hungarian wine (‘Blood of The Bull’) that fueled my joyous and aimless unemployment at the time, I’d gotten it into my head that I was infallible at finding sexy bits in novels. I’d sit down with Rick or Barry and make them riffle through the book of their choice. I’d melodramatically stick my finger into the flying pages, and 4 times out of 5, stop the cascade on a page that contained some sort of sexuality. It was downright spooky. But an amusing party trick.
So. One afternoon we’re walking back from downtown Edinburgh, which was only couple of kilometres away, through the shortcut alleyway which bore a sign that designated it, colourfully enough, as the ‘Fishwives’ Causeway’. Some way along the narrow, high-walled, piss-reeking, dogturd-littered alley through which we meandered, I spied a flash of colour to the side, investigated it, and discovered it to be a Nudie Magazine. Huzzah!
Says I off the cuff, as I reach in under the vines to peel it off the asphalt, breathing deeply of that magazine-that’s-been-rained-on scent, unmindful of possible cooties : “Not only can I find sex passages in books, I can find sex books in passages!”
Much hilarity ensues, hindered only by the lack of a laff-track and rimshot.
Having actually written the little story down, I now realize how lame that comment actually was. I swear to god it was funnier’n hell at the time…
Proves, I guess, how deeply unexciting the day to day existence of being a World Traveller can actually be when you get right down to it (at least if you did your travelling with us)…remind me to tell you the tale of Ailsa the Hogmanay Girl sometime, just to balance things out.
So : you ever discovered woodland porno?

Now I'm going to have to think this over again…

June 18, 2002 / / 4 Comments

What Jeff has to say about Megnut’s article is very interesting, if a touch erudite for my beer-and-sausages self. Indeed, I wonder if those are the sorts of underpinnings from which she was working when she conceived the piece, and that I just missed the deeper nuances in my rush to poo-poo it.

Simply put, the structure imposed by the grammatical rules of timestamps, permalinks, etc., results in paratactic information exchange. Each day adds another level of and then. . . which had been largely lost in conventional hypertext documents. In hypertext, there doesn’t have to be a then, only rhizomatic patterns of connection. Blogging imposes a structure which makes hypertext more functional as a medium. The first generation “link blogs” are entirely paratactic, compared to the hypotactic, subordinating [dare I say tree-like] nature of first generation personal home pages. Hypotaxis was derived from print literacy. Link blogs are in essence far more oral and conversational.
[more]

If so, I owe her an apology. This, I can see flowering into something interesting. If the structure imposed by the grammar of blogging (as I think Jeff is describing the subject of Meg’s piece) does indeed move us back closer to the roots, to the orality of the storyteller as he tells the tale of the hunt, lit by the light of the campfire (my image, but the one that strikes me each time Jeff talks about this stuff), then I’m much more interested than once I was in the implications of mechanics.
Thank you, Jeff. And Meg, regardless of whether or not she was thinking these sorts of Big Thoughts when she wrote the piece, for giving us grist for this kind of discussion.
As my old pappy used to say : faskinatin’.

What I really meant to say was…

June 17, 2002 / / 26 Comments

No, I’m not recanting my earlier lambasting of Meg for that article folks are talking so much about. Although in true wonderchickonian fashion, I tacked rather heavily into the tradewinds of hyperbole – hard ‘a port, Mr Qeeqeg! – and it’s entirely possible that my surprise and disappointment at reading a piece quite devoid of blood and juice, in tandem with what may fairly be described as my impatience for this efflorescence of creativity to mature…well it’s possible that my rain dance was a little, shall we say, intemperate.

Starting at the unforeseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like it, sir.”
“Avast!” gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a dog, sir.”
“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I’ll clear the world of thee!”
As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle.

Over at Jonathon’s, where Meg responded to his excellent translation and elaboration of my rant into calm and well-crafted English prose (thanks, mate!), one of Jonathon’s other guests has weighed in on my bare-breasted, blood-streaked ululation :

The arrogance and hyperbole astounds me. The weblogging “community” would do well to learn some humility as they go forward into this bright Utopian future he describes.

I responded :

f–k humility, let’s dance.

For a split second after I pressed the submit button, I regretted that a bit, but now, as I sit back with my cup of green tea, it’s growing on me. So much so, I think I’ll make it the new tagline of the week.
Why on earth should I be humble? How is that going to help anyone? It’s a dance, my friends, and if you don’t care to join in, you can help call the tune. If you don’t care to do that, well, pour the drinks or something, while the rest of us whoop and holler and kick up our heels for the sheer joy of it, for the pleasure of creation, of comradeship, of life. Humility just doesn’t enter into it.
Not for nothing do I have this quote on my little website :

“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!”

Although that paragraph was written almost 70 years ago, if you replace the word ‘book’ with the noun of your choice [hint], you can perhaps see where I’m coming from, or where I’m going, or something.
But I’m getting off track again, as I so often do.
I do not begrudge Meg her mild fame or her position of influence, or any of the other people who make up the oft-derided, oft-denied, semi-imaginary ‘a-list’. And nor, when it comes down to it, do I disagree with much of what Meg had to say, because, at the end of the day, it was pretty mild stuff.
Where I do part ways is at pretty much the same spot as Shelley and Jonathon : the tools, the technology of it all, the minutiae of the format, these are not the common ground from which the communities and friendships and creative ferment that blogspace is fostering spring. This, to my mind, is a dangerous misconception that will ensure that what we are doing remains on the sidelines of the new mediaspace, a diversion of the geek and the technofetishist.
The fertile common ground is the common ground we share as humans : our creative urge, our need to find like-minded people, our need to challenge ourselves and others, our need for play and conversation, our fascination with the New.
Now I sound like a freakin’ hippy here, so I’ll add in to that list ‘our need to argue, to engage in combat, to breed divisiveness and segregate ourselves into tribes over infinitesimal differences of opinion or lifestyle’.
But the tools? The tools are just tools, for goodness sakes. Meg says, over at Jonathon’s :

… what I was trying to do in my article was simply point out that we can’t define this thing based on the content we’re outputting…

I understand that she was talking about the format, dumbing it down for non-bloggers and the non-technical (I mean come on : is there a single person who has ever had a blog who needs the concepts of permalinks and posts explained to them?) But my argument is that we can, we must define this thing based on the ‘content we’re outputting’ (and that phrase reminds me that she was the director of development for Blogger, because the mechanical sound of it reminds me of all the coders and business types that I used to work with in Sydney at HyperGlobalMegaNet, who were good and kind people, but not precisely, uhh, lyrical), not on the tools, or on how it’s temporally arranged or permalinked.
A couple of things seem pretty clear to me : one, that the article was written for non-bloggers. It talks (in simple terms, yes, but nonetheless) about technical things, that dollars-to-donuts, your average web-user already knows and understands about blogs, and your average non-web-user doesn’t give a rat’s ass about, or even understand. Or want to, for that matter. So what audience is it intended for? I’m uncertain.
Two : the article is written by a technologist (who is certainly more than that, and is not a one-dimensional cartoon, and is from all accounts a really nice person, but) : someone who seems to apprehend what’s happening out there through the lens of technology, of Product Development.
I’ve worked with folks who do this. Some of my best friends do this. But this is not the kind of article that’s going to excite anyone. And it’s not likely to even interest people who don’t already know what a blog is and what it looks like, anyone who’s not a technophile already. “Permalinks? Datestamps? What the hell is this geeky crap supposed to mean?” would be Joe Sixpack’s response, I’d say. It strikes me as odd that the outpouring of praise for Meg’s piece comes from the very webloggers who already understand intimately and work daily with the very concepts she painstaking explains. Have so many people lost sight of the fact that the vast majority of humanity just doesn’t give a sh-t about blogging, and probably never will? But at the same time, that same majority loves poetry and music, stories and songs, all manner of art and craft. But they don’t care about the technology, even if we do. And we already know a blog is bite-sized, permalinked and temporally arranged.
Jonathon said :

Which is not to say there’s no place for an explanation of the mechanics of weblogging: tools, posts, links, time-stamps, permalinks… But wouldn’t it be better to leave those prosaic details for later? And to start by mapping out an imaginative vision of the medium’s potential?
To focus attention on the magic and mystery of blogging. To acknowledge (paraphrasing Burningbird) that the key to weblogging is people, not a format. To admit that—five years on—we’re only just starting to realize what might be possible. To stress the communal nature of the activity. To celebrate the amplification of meaning that occurs when smart, creative people collaborate. To invite newcomers to join a grand adventure, a networked version of Hesse’s Journey to the East.

This is what I’m talking about. What I’m trying to figure out is who the piece was intended for, and why. It doesn’t really seem to serve anyone’s needs, and perhaps this is why I reacted so strongly. Meg says, again over at Jonathon’s, “I tried to look beneath the content to the tools and format that enable us to make connections.”
I understand where she’s coming from, and I respect that, but I think she has it ass-backwards. I’m a technologist too, or at least I used to be, and I am as certain as I’ve ever been about anything that you need to look beneath the tools and the format to what she calls the content, and what I think of as the people. A blog is not a container for content, or the product of some cleverly designed software tools : it’s a person. That’s the bedrock of this thing we’re building.
Meg also says “I wasn’t saying that’s all there is to blogging, I was just saying that’s one piece of it,” and of course she’s right, and it was my mistake to imply, if I did, that that’s what she was saying. It would seem that Meg and many others around the traps do feel that what she wrote about is the most important piece. I would call it the least.
I’ll also say, for what it’s worth, that my ranting of a couple of nights ago was meant to stir a little reflection, and not intended as an attack on anyone. I get carried away sometimes.
It was arrogant and hyperbolic indeed, in the same way it would have been if I hand-edited the HTML and uploaded it with a command-line FTP client.

Doppelganger

June 17, 2002 / / 3 Comments

Holy crap. Zeldman looks an awful lot like I did 10 years ago or so. Right down to the biker jacket…
Neat. More pics of members of the Cabal™ can be found here. I like pictures. There were some surprises there for me – some of them folks look nothing like I’d expected.
Just in the interests of disclosure, here’s an old snap of me in my biker days :

Not really. Although I did once own a motorcycle...

Never one to give offense, me.

June 15, 2002 / / 15 Comments

There’s praise a’plenty. And some canny marketing too, methinks. Oh, yes. But I’ll weigh in as well, since that’s what it’s all about, right? Here… We. Go!
How tedious is this, how perfunctory and lacking of any sense of the mad, wild spirit of creativity that is tearing through the souls of (fill in the names or pseudonyms of your favorite bloggers here)? Sorry, Meg, but this piece strikes me as soulless, by-the-numbers, and regrettably keen to dumb things down as much as possible, custom-designed for Big Media to understand and quote it. Calculated to be Just what the Market Wants. My ungracious guess is that it’s just what the publishing industry would like to read, before the Blogroots -related book comes out. Antithetical to the spirit of what so many of us, you included, I thought, were doing…
(And almost as uninspiring as the radio appearance recently of another blog luminary, which, I’ve got to say, was one of the things that resulted in my lament a while back about how deeply I’m being disappointed of late by some people in the blogosphere for whom I’ve developed a sort of lame-o superheroesque respect.)
Take a breath.
If you people, you A-listers, you pioneers (and I bow in respect to the Old Blog Guard, but some just don’t seem to get the New, in much the same way, ironically enough, that Old Media don’t seem to get La Kottke or whatever archetypical high-traffic blogger that they happen to pick out of their very small grab-bag when a url is necessary for street-cred in their latest in-depth analysis), if you can’t muster the juice to sing a soul-stirring song about this beautiful web of voices we’re collectively weaving, then I suggest you step the hell back, and point your fingers to those of us who can summon the muse and weave the hymns that will bind the New Tribes together.
[Edit : I’ve just suddenly become aware that this piece was written for a Techo Journal, and that my guns-blazing attack may be Quixotacular. Nonetheless, I’ll fight to the f–king death arguing that the defining aspects of my writing here (or Golby’s or AKMA’s or Shelley’s or Jonathon’s or Eeksy’s or that of multitudes of others) are not Time Stamps or Permalinks. Lead, damn it, or get out of the way.]

A Wee Drop of Whine

June 14, 2002 / / 5 Comments

Time for another Wonderchicken Laundry List Of Annoying Things About Living In Korea© :

  • Local elections are being held today. This is good, because for the last week or two, every time I’ve walked to the subway station I’ve had to run a gauntlet of literally dozens of people bellowing ‘annyong hashimnikka’ (‘hello’, basically, in formal mode), bowing and chanting in unison the name of their candidate and his number on the ballot. There’ve also been roving A/V trucks with airbrushed posters of these grinning bryll-creamed bribe-mongers roaming the beehives, stopping several times a day, and declaiming over their tinny loudspeakers to the mock-ecstatic, worshipful rent-a-crowd the marvellous things they’d do for the community if we’d just vote for them. I assume they’re passing out ‘Vote For Me’ envelopes containing money, too. That sort of thing happens here. If one of those pinstriped, corrupt jackals promised to get rid of the omnipresent piles of reeking garbage and institute a city ordinance banning the horking of phlegm at every third step, I’d worship the bastard. Not likely, though. Too busy making plans for large-scale graft.
  • Five times, today. There is an intercom built into every apartment in this beehive. A special one, with no controls, volume or otherwise. What it really is is an outercom, I guess. You can’t shut it off, or even turn it down, and at predictably inopportune moments (which are best left undescribed perhaps), this tiny speaker will fire up and one of the guards in the guardhouse down by the parking lot will begin to yammer on endlessly (in Korean, of course) about the o-ring vendor that will be in the parking lot for the next 17 hours, just in case you really really need to buy some washers, now don’t forget, that’s O-RINGS and you know that reminds me of a story….I’m waiting for one of these guys to get liquored-up and start singing un-turn-offable karaoke into each and every apartment in the complex, until a certain fierce-looking foreigner stomps into the guardhouse, wrestles him to the floor and gently pummels him into sweet silence…My relatively peaceful day has been interrupted five times already by this demonic device.
    That’s enough for today. Just had to vent a bit. Thanks for listening.

    • Worth it?

    June 12, 2002 / / 3 Comments

    I’ll think I’ll stick to the Fart Jokes and Wacky Tales henceforth. Might be best to leave the Big Thinkin’ to the Big Thinkers, yeah?
    My tragic flaw is that I’m not clever enough to figure out if I’m being made fun of or not. And I hate like hell to be made fun of, ya know?
    Edit : Like the big drunken boor that I pretend to be but secretly am (Mossman is really made of Moss, how boring is that?), I’ve sent abusive and angry messages to someone (psst..that’d be AKMA) because I thought I was being made fun of. My outrageous and pathetically demonstrative response arose in its entirety out of my sad and deeply personal unresolved childhood hurts. I apologize, sincerely, a thing I’ve been doing in response to blood I’ve drawn or hurt I’ve inflicted since I was a young man.
    How many times can an apology be offered before it becomes a mantra? And how f–king sad is that?
    I’m sorry, AKMA.

    Daypop goes the chicken

    June 11, 2002 / / 8 Comments

    I’ve made the Daypop Top 40 (#32, rocketing upward, screaming like a mechanical weasel strapped to a solid fuel booster), and I haven’t the faintest idea why. (Other than my good looks, debonaire manner, and staggeringly huge bribes, of course.)
    How nice for me. Can I have my A-List Secret Decoder Ring Now*?

    *nah, I didn’t think so.

    Identity

    June 11, 2002 / / 1 Comment

    [Further to my not-terribly deep musings about anonymity here and this discussion linked here…]
    AKMA is toying with thoughts about identity, integrity, accountability, and anonymity. I know I am probably getting into water that’s deeper than that in which I normally care to wade, or hotter, or something, but let’s press on my mental zit and see what pops out, shall we?
    He says :

    I started with the premise that “identity” functions as a principle of continuity. That is to some extent a constructed principle; I’m not the same person I was thirty or even fifteen years ago, not by a long chalk.
    […]
    At the same time, what about people who decide (for plausible or pernicious reasons) to cultivate more than one “identity”? That is, what about people who deliberately disrupt the continuity that ordinarily characterizes our identity? When a blogger chooses to keep his or her “real name” concealed, so as not to be associated with the observations contained in the blog, he or she may be evading accountability in a way that warrants criticism.

    Here, before we even get to the parts that I wanted to talk about, I have to stop, scratch my noggin, spit and ponder a bit. There is something to be said, certainly, for the idea that ‘identity functions as a principle of continuity’. I understand this to mean that the primary persona that the world-at-large identifies as me (and mark that word ‘primary – I want to come back to it) exists and is generally agreed upon as a result (if not in whole, at least in part) of the fact that it has been to some degree consistent over time. In other words, people have certain well-founded expectations and assumptions about me based on the behaviours I have publicly exhibited over time, and are reasonably safe in basing guesses about my future behaviour on those observations they have made.
    This public identity is unitary and unique – the very word ‘identity’ seems to point to that. And this is as it should be : if we could not make reasonable guesses about the behaviour of the people with whom we interact, if we were totally unable to predict their actions and reactions, we’d be in a fine mess, now wouldn’t we?
    But it seems to me that the leap from this to discussion of integrity, accountability, and anonymity misses an important step. I am strongly drawn to the idea that we harbour a multiplicity of selves, of personas within us, any one or more of which may be our current interface to the world, rather than a single ‘identity’. I’m reminded of the quote from Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares Jonathon used back in February :

    Well, said Dr Cardoso, it means that to believe in a “self” as a distinct entity, quite distinct from the infinite variety of all the other “selves” that we have within us, is a fallacy, the naive illusion of the single unique soul we inherit from Christian tradition, whereas Dr Ribot and Dr Janet see the personality as a confederation of numerous souls, because within us we each have numerous souls, don’t you think, a confederation which agrees to put itself under the government of one ruling ego. Dr Cardoso made a brief pause and then continued: What we think of as ourselves, our inward being, is only an effect, not a cause, and what’s more it is subject to the control of a ruling ego which has imposed its will on the confederation of our souls, so in the case of another ego arising, one stronger and more powerful, this ego overthrows the first ruling ego, takes its place and acquires the chieftainship of the cohort of souls, or rather the confederation, and remains in power until it is in turn overthrown by yet another ruling ego, either by frontal attack or by slow nibbling away. It may be, concluded Dr Cardoso, that after slowly nibbling away in you some ruling ego is gaining the chieftainship of your confederation of souls, Dr Pereira, and there’s nothing you can do about it except perhaps give it a helping hand whenever you get the chance.

    I’m not sure if I’m willing to go all the way to ‘Confederacy of Souls’, but hopefully you see what I’m getting at here.
    Now, although I will grant that continuity is a principle of identity, I’m not sure that ‘identity’ is the scab we need to pick at here. Taking as seriously as I do the possibility that there may not be a singular me as much as a multiple one, AKMA’s connection from ‘identity’ to ‘integrity’ feels tenuous to me.

    I’d like to make a connection between “identity” and “integrity,” so that I can work with that stipulated continuity as a lever on ethical problems. […] That would go along very nicely, so that “integrity” could stand both for “morally reliable behavior” and “personal coherence.”

    It’s possible (or, given my track record, likely) that I am misunderstanding, here, in which case see! look at my ass hanging out there in the wind!, but, like Jonathon, the me-as-multiplicity explanation meshes better with my lived experience than any other. I am a boozy wild-eyed country-boy, yes, but I am a reasonably urbane univeristy professor as well. I am a tender and considerate husband, but a merciless opponent to those who attempt to harm to me or mine. I am an occasional misanthrope who donates to charities. (I am the wonderchicken!) I am a multitude, integrated better on some days than others.
    Am I displaying less ‘integrity’, in the sense that I think AKMA is using it, when one of those people that is me is temporarily to the fore, as opposed to another? For some people who know me there is more continuity, for example, in the ‘stavrosthewonderchicken’ persona, which first appeared on Metafilter in November 2000, than there is in the ‘Real Me’, the corporeal one, which has lived here in Korea since August 2001.
    Are these two people identical? No, not precisely. But then, none of the ‘souls’ swarming within me are coterminous at all points, either. There is overlap, there are spiky bits that stick out and poke you in the eye, if you’re not careful.
    The question becomes : is the ‘wonderchicken’ subsumed within the ‘real me’, and if so, which ‘me’, or vice-versa? Or is stavros just another of the continuous, predictable, real elements of myself, the one which is my primary interface to the web, in the same way that ProfessorMan is my primary interface to the world at work, and AngryGuy is my primary interface with people who try to f–k with me?
    The next question that pops up is : does the fact that I do not use the name that I was given by my parents, in my writing here and elsewhere make me ‘anonymous’ for the purposes of my interactions with people on the internet, in any real sense?
    I don’t feel that it does. Although AKMA is right to suggest that “we may want to take a few minutes to ponder whether pseudonymity doesn’t involve ethical hazards that we conceal when we take them for granted,” and to observe that pseudonymity opens a door for “the malevolent blogger who uses pseudonymity as a device for trolling, flaming, baiting, and generally propounding outrageously offensive codswallop†”, I suggest that these behaviours, like any others, would through their continuity over time lead to an ‘identity’ every bit as valid as the one that the Evil Blogger used in his or her real, corporeal, life.
    Of course no one would be listening by then. If an Evil Pseudonymous Blogger blogs on a website and there’s no one around to read it, does it still make a sound?
    † I’d just like to mention that I love the word codswallop. It sounds so dirty…

    Daehan Minguk

    June 10, 2002 / / 4 Comments

    It’s about an hour and forty-five minutes before the World Cup match between America and Korea begins in Daegu.
    The Korea Herald is reporting that about 150,000 Red Devils (supporters of the Korean team) are expected in the Gwanghwamun area of Seoul, near the US embassy.

    “The police are worried that citizens might throw things into the embassy or set the US flag on fire if Korea loses to the United States or if one of the US players angers Korean supporters by taking a so-called ‘Hollywood action’ or exaggerated gesture, similar to the incident involving US speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno during the 2002 Winter Olympics.”

    So let that be a warning to you, you Imperialist Yankee Footballers : no exaggerated gesures, or we’re gonna trash your embassy!

    Slicin' up eyeballs

    June 9, 2002 / / 5 Comments
    Got me a movie
    I want you to know
    Slicing up eyeballs
    I want you to know
    Girlie so groovy
    I want you to know
    Don’t know about you
    But I am un chien Andalusia
    I am un chien Andalusia
    Wanna grow
    Up to be
    Be a debaser

    via bottomdwelling, Mena Trott relives Doolittle a song at a time.
    Edit : Also from the same fine iNtarwEb publication, “What Are You, Drunk?”

    The study is filled with similar facts, usually highlighted with scary italics like the ones found on Ed Wood movie posters: ‘Frequent binge drinkers were 10 times more likely than non-binge drinkers to have driven after drinking alcohol.’ Okay, but I’d also bet that frequent binge drinkers were at least 100 times more likely to tell you they love you. Man.

    I Sing The Body Electric

    June 7, 2002 / / 14 Comments

    While reading the recent posts from Mike Golby about the struggles with alcoholism buffeting his family, as well as being struck both by the bravery of his candor and the lucidity of his prose and wishing there were something I could do to help him in his dark times, I got to thinking about my own long and deeply intimate relationship with the booze, about the times I’ve been called an alcoholic, by myself and others over the years. This is hopelessly self-indulgent and journally. I thought I’d share, because that’s what it’s all about, right? I beg your forgiveness. Blame Mike for starting me on this train of thought.

    Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but it only lasted a couple of days?
    Do you wish people would mind their own business about your drinking?
    Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another in hope that you wouldn’t get drunk?
    Have you had to have an eye-opener upon awakening during the past year?
    Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble?
    Do you need a drink to get started, or to stop shaking?
    Have you had problems connected with drinking during the past year?
    Has your drinking caused trouble at home?
    Do you ever try to get “extra” drinks at a party because you do not get enough?
    Do you tell yourself you can stop drinking anytime you want to, but you don’t stop?
    Do you have “blackouts”?
    Have you ever felt your life would be better if you didn’t drink?

    I had an uncle Ron, who wasn’t really my uncle, but was the husband of the woman who took care of me when I was an infant, while my mother worked. About him (and about most of my childhood, if truth be told) I recall little but mental snapshots, with thick white borders and faded-to-sepia colours. In my mind, he has a perpetual 5-o’clock shadow, and wears the sort of white, sleeveless t-shirt with suspenders over the top in the hot weather that is iconic of the home-from-the-office man of the first two-thirds of the last century. If my memory serves, he had ruined his stomach with rotgut whiskey, and had taken to drinking his rye with milk. He was the first and only person I’ve known who did this. He was a kind man.
    I recall one evening, my parents were sitting with Ron and Nina and their linoleum-topped kitchen table, drinking, smoking. It must have been 1969, or 1970, or somewhere around there. I was about 5 years old. Everyone would have been about 10 years younger than I am now, but they seemed ancient, Easter-Island monolith old, to me. I was tear-assing around the place, as usual. Ron stopped me up on one of my laps past the table, and I jumped up on his lap. Curious about the pungent smells wafting around, what the small city of bottles on the table meant, and why everyone seemed so animated and good-natured, I pointed and asked. Some meeting of eyes must have happened over my head, because to the chuckles of the assembled, Ron poured out about a third of a water glass of rye and handed it to me.
    One of the few times I've ever puked blood was after a session with Captain Morgan. Scary, scary stuff.
    I took the glass from him, drank it down in about 4 swallows, then hooted in rough-throated glee at the gobsmacked faces around. I remember running around some more, less and less steadily, giggling at the gravitational anomalies that had suddenly manifested themselves, before settling myself cross-legged on the floor in front of their big console TV in the den, and slowly toppling over backward as the Flintstones flintstoned and the lights went out.
    I suppose, if one was to pick the very beginning of a love affair, the instant at which your eyes meet and those mental tentacles spring out and grapple greedily and invisibly with the object of your desire, well, that’d be it.
    A decade later, I was a pimply teenager in a tiny town in the deepest northern interior of British Columbia, a town where the only real option for entertainment was booze. I was 15 or 16, and I’d finished a 26’er of rye with a couple of my buddies in the trailer out back of Leon’s house. For some reason, we felt it necessary to make the trek to Brian’s house, a hundred metres or so up the alley. And over the fence. I recall with a seraphic clarity — though it was two decades ago and I was piss drunk — that endless moment of teetering atop the man-high wooden fence behind Brian’s house, then falling like a rock and landing on my head. The moment of impact was a revelation. It didn’t hurt, not a bit. I was so astonished by this fact, by the sheer wonder of it, that I sucked in the summer night air like it was rocket fuel, jumped up with mud on my face and laughed and danced and whooped like a monkey.
    My illness and pain the next day was my introduction to the wages of the drink.
    It was a good while after that before I had my first real night out with the boys and, guilty but filled with the wonder of boozy camaraderie at the end of it, hauled my ass into my parents’ kitchen by the watery light of a northern BC dawn.
    It seems like I’ve always been a drinker. By the time I was finishing high school, and had headed off to Vancouver for university, I had carved out an identity for myself, one that I came, I see now, from the marriage of a desire to stand out from the sea of small-town boors, to excel, to exploit the Big Fucking Brain I’d been gifted with and for which I’d been so lavishly praised, and the overwhelming desire to belong, to Be A Fun Guy, which seemed easy, and to Get Chicks, which seemed utterly impossible. In that tiny little town, the possibility of finding a high-school social milieu not intimately tied to the consumption of alcohol and the concomitant possibility of finding yourself a young lady with which to frolic pastorally and learn the ways of love, was, if not precisely zero, so miniscule as to be invisible. Which is to say: I didn’t get laid much, in those early days.
    It turned out that my ‘Uncle Ron Experience’ as a child had been prophetic, and that I was capable, through sheer animal robustness if not sheer force of will, of swilling oceanic quantities of liquor, and never ever devolving into headbutting, gutter-puking beast mode. At worst, go-home-and-sleep-mode, but always: under my own power.
    I was painfully shy as a teenager, until I found the drink. After the fencetop revelation, I consciously worked the booze and its magical inhibition-loosening properties, and zeroed in on people in a way I never had before. I was hungry, jesus I was ravenous for stories, for the meat of life. In a complete turnaround from my reticence to ever ask any questions of anyone, I would quiz people, girls mostly, about the most intimate details of their lives, and they would, without fail, tell me all. By the time I was in my early twenties, I’d heard so many personal tales of rape and molestation, of broken homes and familial violence, of harrowing pain and loss, and yes, of the horrors of alcoholism, that I sometimes felt like my eyes must glow in the dark. Times I felt guilty were few, because most of the people who spilled their stories to me eventually became intimate friends, and told me, at the gravel pit or the graveyard, how relieved they’d been to unload their burdens.
    There’s probably some sort of unpleasant pop-psychology term for the way I behaved back then, but it filled the hollow at the center of my soul with stories, and it seemed to help many people who later became friends or lovers to get over childhood traumas of their own. Booze was the tool I used to grant me the unselfconsciousness to get into people’s heads, and let them into mine. I loved the stuff.
    The drunk-on-life’s-joy, clever-though-smashed, writerly-but-boisterous persona worked well for me. I was popular, well liked, and socially successful. I had a group of close friends who knew me intimately, and trusted me implicitly, as I did them. I was reading voraciously all the while, and some of my favorites recommended to me a controlled madness that appealed, irresistably.
    These last couple of years of teenagerhood and first few years of university saw the first few times it was suggested that I was an alcoholic, though. I would, like any boozy university student, go on binges. Mine, being as closely married to the bottle as I was, were perhaps a little longer or more intense than most others. It was still a competition to me – I was King Boozer, while also determined to get the best marks in the hardest field, to be the best lover, the wildest madman, and write the best damn stories too. I wasn’t entirely successful, but it was enough. I did some astonishingly silly things while drunk: ledge-walking on the 17th floor, driving while blind, the usual array of bad judgement calls that reformed boozers trot out to show why they eventually stopped.
    Now, see this is the point in most people’s Tales of Booze where it all goes to shit, and they begin to outline their inexorable descent into alco-hell. I’m sorry to disappoint, but this didn’t happen to me.
    I thought long and hard about those first few accusations of alcoholism, coming as they did from friends, often after my more spectacular examples of bad judgement. Mostly female friends, for whatever reason. But I just couldn’t see it, to be honest. (‘The alcoholic can never see it’, came the standard rejoinders…) My drinking clearly wasn’t affecting my studies. (‘You just think it has no effect’, sang the chorus) I did do some stupid stuff sometimes, but life without some danger was not worth it, I reckoned, all Hemingwayesque. (‘You’re rationalizing your dangerous lapses in judgement’, tra-la-la) I sometimes went for weeks without a drink, and didn’t miss it at all. I loved being drunk, not shambolically, mindlessly drunk but playfully, lightheartedly drunk. But if I were asked to choose, and I was, a few times, I would always say in an instant that I preferred to be sober. A life of constant inebriation would be hellish – a life of constant sobriety less enjoyable, perhaps, but no worse for it.
    So I continued on in my boozy ways, graduating university and hitting the road. I’ve been wandering around the planet for more than a decade now, sometimes drinking, sometimes not. There’ve been a few times when I wondered if my drinking was unhealthy, or destructive, and stopped, effortlessly, for a while. Two decades after I started my career as an afficionado of the drink, three decades after my first taste of the stuff, I am happy, healthy, wiser, and if not especially wealthy, quite comfortable. Of the pure, heart-squeezing joys that I’ve felt in my life, those shivering moments of connection to other souls or to the world itself, many have happened when I was sober. Of the most memorable, ecstatic and monumentally fun moments so far, many have happened while inebriated.
    I weave the drunken threads and the sober ones together, and the fabric is all the richer for having both. My life would be infinitely poorer for being drunk all the time, but would be very much impoverished too were I never to taste the sweet madness that the liquor brings.
    I beg those of you who have made it down this far not to take what I say as in any way devaluing the stories from Mike and Mark and others about how much the liquor and the craving for it have damaged their lives. I mean no disrespect – just the opposite, in fact. I understand and respect their decisions to attempt to banish it from their lives : I’ve been close enough to the deceptive janus-face of it myself enough times to understand that as much as I feel it’s been a good thing in my life, it can be the Destroyer as well. Hell, it killed my father.
    I tell this fragment of the story in part because, as many mature and beautifully-written tales about the horrors of the drink as I see, I see very few paeans to it written by anyone other than drunken frat boys.

    Ten Things

    June 6, 2002 / / 13 Comments

    skallas seemed downhearted that there wasn’t a link, so I’ve written up Ten Things You Should Never Say To A Korean Girl (if you’re, you know, pursuing her). Note that I have said all of these things to Korean women at one time or another, basically because I am a Big Dummy.
    *drumroll please*
    #10. Your parents really suck.
    #9. I’ve had quite a few girlfriends..
    #8. You’re crazy.
    #7. Drugs? Well, I’ve tried a few.
    #6. Do your friends know about us?
    #5. I’d rather be happy and broke than rich and miserable.
    #4. Do you like dog meat?
    #3. I think I prefer Japan to Korea.
    #2. I don’t like children.
    #1. Is that a padded bra?
    Edit : big white guy has a more serious, but semi-related, story of his experiences here. It’s really nice to hear about the similar-but-different experiences of other waeguk-in/gaijin/gwi-lo once in a while.
    Edit the second : Also, Memoirs of an Anti-Geisha.

    To Live Forever

    June 5, 2002 / / No Comments

    An interesting recent discussion at MeFi. The last few days have been good, there. My favorite comment from the thread, courtesy of vacapinta :

    Each of us is an ever-changing chorus of voices, a small tribe of motivations, trying to advance their own desires. Nominally, one of those voices is in control but sometimes overthrows can occur as when we lapse into a cult or fall in love. A schizophrenic is not someone with “extra” voices”, it is someone whose voices have lapsed into anarchy.
    I also dont believe that this “self” can be so easily transcribed into a simulation. It is not mere pattern (e.g. neurons+connections) but is deeply embedded into its physiological container. Our minds have deep roots in the soil of this reality with its electromagnetic fields and quantum quirkiness. Any computer that can truly create consciousness and not some cheap simulation will have to be as algorithmically complex as the universe itself. This is not bound to happen anytime soon, if ever. When I die, I die. Death is the absence of change.