Advertising Communitarian-Style

May 9, 2005 / / 7 Comments

I’ve just found out that the supercheap hosting at Dreamhost deal I was pimping a while back is still going on. Cool.
Basically, it goes like this. There’s a 777 promotion code that allows new customers to sign up for DreamHost’s cheapest plan, which normally costs $9.95/mo, at $0.77/mo for the first year. All you need to do is enter 777 into the promotion code box on step 5 (after you enter your personal information but before you enter your credit card number). After the first year, if you re-up, you will pay the normal price of $9.95/mo paid one year at a time for the same plan.
I’ve been using it since February, and it’s been great. If you need hosting, give it a go. This is what you get for $10 for the year:

  • 120 GB/mo bandwidth,
  • 2.4 GB disk space,
  • One free domain registration (.com, .net, .org, or .info),
  • Hosting for up to 3 domains.
  • MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python, SSH login, mail, webmail, mailing lists, and access to raw Apache logs.

Your total outlay for domain and hosting is ten bucks. Not too shabby.
All I ask is that if you do sign up and use the promo code, and you want to give me a hand with my own hosting costs, you use my ID stavrosthewonderchicken as your referrer, or just click through this link (a cookie will be written, I assume).
Full disclosure: I’ve read in some places that there are a few folks who have been unhappy with Dreamhost. All I can say is that it’s been perfect, powerful, and hassle-free for me so far, and none of the people I’ve referred have complained to me about anything. Also, since I first signed up, I’ve directly referred 41 people, and secondarily referred 14, and have made $100.73 from those referrals, which is almost enough to pay for my next year’s hosting at full price. Not riches, certainly, but a significant chunk of change, for me.

Hammers, Falling

May 3, 2005 / / 7 Comments

I’ve been thinking about dying again. Not that I’ve any intimations of impending mortality or anything, particularly. I’m as hale as I ever have been. My body is a good, strong vehicle, and I take reasonably diligent care of it, even if I am prone to taking it out for a venturi-clearing race around the nearest dirt track once in a while. Blowing the carbon out of the valves, all of that. Still, strong as it is, a wayward bus would squash it flat, and we rarely see the buses until it’s too late.
We’re all going to die, this I know. The far-flung remnants of my tiny, tattered tribe of blood-kin can attest to that. Shit happens to the best of us, and in the end, some random syllable of DNA gone squirrely, some unhinged bomber or drunk driver, some chicken-barracks virus or opportunistic infection emboldened by years of exposure to low-level antibiotics, some bus with our name on it, something‘s going to do us in.
This woolgathering I’ve been doing was hammered home by yet another piece of bad news from the folks this morning. Following on having their fishing lodge business being foreclosed on by the banks, on being made homeless but for the kind assistance of their many friends, and having to reinvent themselves and their means of livelihood in the 7th decade of their lives, the next hammerblow has fallen. Can’t get a break, my family.
I’ll let this bit from my mom’s email speak for itself:

On the 22nd I got a call to phone home. [Stepdad] had been in an industrial accident and had been taken to the [the hometown] hospital by ambulance. They wanted me here ASAP. I called the hospital and they told me he was being rushed by ambulance to [the nearest city] with head trauma.
In to town by 10 a.m., picked up the truck and the dog and was told he had been hit in the head with a 4 ton come-along chain and was in pretty bad shape. Go home and call [the hospital]. [They’d] done a Cat Scan and called in the Lear Medivac and flew him to Neurosurgery in [next biggest city, about 500 km away]. The doctor in [the nearer city] said go NOW! (so you know what I was thinking )
Got folks to look after the horses and dog, packed and headed for [the bigger city] (9 hour drive)the next morning.
He was a mess! He took the hit near his temple and was thrown back through scaffolding and over a wall. I almost didn’t recognize him; they couldn’t touch him because of the pain , blood all over his head and coming out of his ears, head swollen up like a pumpkin, oxygen up his nose, I.V., catheter. He was on morphine and nerve blockers to try and stop the pain. His brain was swelling and they were afraid his neck was damaged.
He knew me but was in and out all that day and the next.
So I got a room and settled in. He’s had two more CatScans, two blood clots on his brain and a bone chip floating around in there, cracked cervical vertebrae and still on the big M and nerve blockers but they let me bring him home last Friday.

So, shit. Happens. And it never rains but it pours, like they say.
I hope he’s going to be OK. He’s a tough old bastard, and he’s pulled through things like this before. There’s nothing I can do but hope, I suppose, here on the other side of the world.
When my own personal train comes barrelling down the track, I don’t expect I’ll have much warning about it, any more than my friend Rick did a couple of years ago, any more than my bro Barry did when he almost died a while before that, any more than my stepdad did last week. So I’m going to put some dead man switches in place, I think, here and elsewhere on the web. And I’m going to write about what I’d hope might be done for me, to me, and about me, after that inevitable hammerblow falls.
Just not today.

I’m still young, but I know my days are numbered
1234567 and so on
But a time will come when these numbers have all ended
And all I’ve ever seen will be forgotten
Won’t you come
To my funeral when my days are done
Life’s not long
And so I hope when I am finally dead and gone
That you’ll gather round when I am lowered into the ground
When my coffin is sealed and I’m safely 6 feet under
Perhaps my friends will see fit then to judge me
Oh when they pause to consider all my blunders
I hope they won’t be too quick to begrudge me

[Update: Broken vertebrae, blod clots and a bonechip in his brain, but he’s soldiering on. In agony, but he’s got the Serious Drugs prescribed. Doctor told him point blank a couple of days ago “I never expected to see you alive again.” The good news, such as it is, is that we’re talking about Canada here, and so his medical care is costing he and my mom literally nothing, and because the accident happened at work and was not a result of anything but bad luck, he is receiving workman’s compensation. Things could be worse, I suppose. Thanks for your thoughts, folks.]

Emulating God On A Budget

March 30, 2005 / / 17 Comments

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 monetization, 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.]

Whoring For Fun and Profit

March 17, 2005 / / 5 Comments

I have thought, like so many seem to be doing lately, about slapping up some ads on the ‘bottle. I’ve called those who do so ‘blogwhores’, of course, and told them, in my inimitable and charming way, to ‘f–k off’, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t seriously considered pasting a couple of ads for Viagra on my own nubile butt and hustling a few johns down on blogstreet. I don’t claim to be consistent, except in the byzantine recesses of what’s left of my mind.
I still agree with Dave Rogers when he says that the much-abused blunt instrument ‘authenticity’ is the difference between speaking the truth, and trying to sell it, though. And I still think that money, lovely and fleeting and delicious and sexy as it is, turns everything to sh-t.
I even, all a-chuckle, submitted the ‘bottle’s URL to Google’s adsense program, expecting all the while the response I eventually received: “You’re a dirty dirty man, and you use dirty words, and tell filthy, violent, scatological stories about yourself and certain venerated public figures, and you’re just generally not the sort of person who writes the sort of happy bibblebibble that we want to encourage, because we don’t do evil, you dirty sh-theel.” That may be mildly paraphrased, but you get the picture.
I was thinking at the time — despairing that I wouldn’t be able to scrape up the dosh for another year’s hosting and positively trembling with horror at the prospect of depriving you all of the magnificence of my maunderings — that I might pop those googleads into my archive pages, where nobody in their right mind deliberately goes beyond a week or two after posting, anyway. I could even get fancy and whack ’em into divs that wouldn’t display unless a certain period since posting had elapsed. If, of course, Google inexplicably decided that I was clean enough to make the grade. Which, of course, they didn’t.
But it struck me today, after ruminating a bit about Shelley Powers‘ recent decision to throw up ads (which I’ll never see, because I block ads as a matter of course), that we’re looking at the advertising Ouroboros here. Google eating its own tail. Or sucking its own dick, but that doesn’t let me use clever mythological allusions, now, does it?
I would estimate that 99% of all of the hits that my individual archive pages receive, once they fall off the front page, are from searches, generally for such tried and tested combinations as ‘bottle f–k’ or ‘korea f–k’ or even ‘beer chicken f–k’ (don’t ask). The vast majority of these arrive from Google itself, or from one of the search sites that license the googlengine. If I threw up Google ads on those pages, the only people that would see them would be googlenauts, who’d presumably launch themselves back out into googlespace riding the googlead booster rockets, lured by the promise of bottlef–king or whatever they were in search of in the first place. Google is creating its own customers for a service that it sells.
Does his remind you of anything bubbly and evanescent and doomed? It does me. It’s either pure brilliance or utter chicanery. Maybe both. *scratches chin contemplatively while gazing off into the middle distance*
Look, I’m not one to turn up my nose at FREE!! CASH!!, but I’m still on the fence about this ad thing, and if I can find another way of doing it that doesn’t support and encourage advertising scum (have I made that clear yet, that I think, Hicks-like, that advertisers are the sh-tstreaked tapeworms of commerce?), I will. My recent Dreamhost signup drive was quite a success, for example — more than 40 people got cheap, kickass hosting for 10 measly bucks, I made $60 out of it, and if half of them stay on for another year at Dreamhost, I’ll make enough to pay for my own hosting next year. Win-win, all around, and there’s no whoring of anyone, for anything, involved.
Then again, whoring sounds like such fun sometimes. I like fun.
Update : Jonathon says some interesting things, and well, as always.
Update 2: See also Google transforming ads into ‘content’. Evil, I’m tellin’ you. [via]
Update 3: boingboing, ka-ching ka ching.

Beavering Away

March 12, 2005 / / 6 Comments

It is true that I haven’t been writing much of anything of late, but I have been beavering away at various other projects; slapping together code and design ideas in my own haphazard, ill-organized and only occasionally successful style. Throw it against the screen and see what sticks!
I have these phases, when my beer-battered brain (mmm, beer batter) produces more squirts of pleasure-juice when it’s kept busy writing code as opposed to deathless prose. There are also times, of course, when the my brain is happier just sitting there in my brainpan marinating. Those times actually tend to outnumber my brief flurries of productivity. So it goes. My brain is my second favorite organ, like Woody said, and I willingly aquiesce to its frequent outlandish demands and coddle it after its temper tantrums.
I’ve got a couple of projects of my own that I’m fiddle-farting around with, including a redesign of the ancillary pages here at the ‘bottle, a separate Korea-centric site, and an all-singing, all-dancing Wonderchicken Industries™ Portal site as a free service to all those who just can’t seem to get enough of all things miraculous and fouwl.
Just off the presses, though, is a showcase site I built for ‘drinking buddy J’, my American friend and neighbour, who I’ve mentioned a few times here. Though no longer my neighbour — he’s girded his loins and left the comfortable Employment Womb that is Korea Inc, while remaining in Korea — we still enjoy sinking a few litres of beer together, even if it has to be virtually, via Skype. Did it last night, in fact. My head hurts.
So, anyway, J is an outdoorsman of great enthusiasm and no small erudition, and the set of foreign, English-speaking flora and fauna experts in Korea is a very tiny one indeed. It would probably be no exaggeration to say he’s one of, if not the, English-speaking authority on freshwater fishing in Korea. If you’re into that sort of thing, he’s setting up a guiding service as part of his new, self-employed life, and I recommend him wholeheartedly, even if I’m not personally all that big on the whole ‘fishing’ part of fishing.
He’s also a freelance writer, with a long and respectable series of publications to his credit, something I envy enormously. Of course, I am far too lazy and insecure about my skills to try to emulate that with any real diligence.
Wonderchicken Industries™: Waiting For The World To Beat A Path To The Door Since 2001.
So go visit him, have a look around. There are still a few rough edges and nailheads sticking out here and there, but I’m quite pleased with how the site came out. If you’re into fishing in Korea at all, well, drop him a line. Even better, if you work for a print publication that might be interested in buying some writing on the Korean outdoors, he’s your man.
Of course, if you work for a print publication that might be interested in buying some writing on pretty much anything else Korean, well, I work cheap. *nudge* And I’m usually unruffled by editorial excision of 90% of my uses of the word ‘f–k’. Usually.

Moving

March 1, 2005 / / 6 Comments

The move to the new server is underway, and although DNS propagation is a bit sketchy, everything seems to be working pretty well, with one exception.
I used the very cool Typemover plugin to speed things along, and although it did its job, somehow trackbacks have become decoupled from their associated entries. I can see the entry list fine, and the trackback list is still there, but it looks like the key field between the tables has gone kablooie, since no entries have the associated trackbacks against them.
Does anyone have any ideas how to fix it? If it involves messing with the database, I’m prepared to do so, but my SQL is rusty at best.
[Update : OK, so what I think I need is an Update statement that will fix the ‘trackback_entry_id’ field in the ‘mt_trackback’ table (which begins with 413 and ranges upward) to match up with the ‘entry_id’ fields in the ‘mt_entry’ table (which begins at 1 and ranges upward), if that is indeed the correct key relationship. Unfortunately, I don’t know what if any other dependencies may exist, so I’m hesitant to go in and try it myself. It’s probably just that, but if there’s anyone out there with a more detailed knowledge of the data structure, I love some guidance. Also, like I said, my SQL syntax is rustier than hell. Anyone?]
Any suggestions would be appreciated, as would any reports of general site-move weirdness.
Thanks!
[Update the second: the move seems to have gone off without a hitch, other than the trackbacks issue. I’m in codemode at the moment, messing around under the hood and designing the sites for some new projects, so please let me know if something’s broken here. Thanks again.]
[Updated update: I’ve switched over to the very cool Feedburner for my XMLery. It should just work seamlessly; I’ve updated the autodiscovery code and am redirecting requests for the old Atom, RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds. This post will be the last one that updates those files, so you may need to switch if the ol’ bottle starts to seem even quieter than usual. This is the feed URI now if you want to hop on to that manually.
Bloglines is the only service that seems to have hiccupped so far, near as I can tell, but that may just be temporary. I’ll be feedburnerizing the Coasters sidebar linkblog too, soon. [Update to the updated update: done! I also redesigned the index page, finally]. As always, bug reports are welcomed.]

Messin' With The Pod People

January 28, 2005 / / 16 Comments

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

Barry - Paris sunrise - edit.jpg

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

Bird, Mountains

January 7, 2005 / / 16 Comments

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.

ubcview

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 fuck 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

I wish that I could push a button
And talk in the past and not the present tense
And watch this lovin’ feeling disappear
Like it was common sense
I was a fine idea at the time
Now I’m a brilliant mistake

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 shit. A fucking 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 fucking 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.

Tsunami

December 29, 2004 / / 9 Comments

I can’t stop thinking about this guy.
He’s dead now, this guy.

From news.com.au: 'Doomed ... The man struggles to keep his head above water as he is buffetted by the currents. His body was found a kilometre away / Hellmut Issels'

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.

Maxell XLII

December 20, 2004 / / 10 Comments

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

maxell_xl_2_90_c.jpg

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 fuckin’ 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 shit like that now, then you know how I feel tonight.

Thanks to project c-90, via Mefi.

Blogger Whores fcuk Off

December 2, 2004 / / 6 Comments

I thought I’d offer a balanced, reasonable perspective on this whole whoreblogger phenomenon that was so shocking a couple of years ago (remember that Raging Cow cockbucketry?) but is now barely a radar pinger.
Instead, here’s this.
With apologies, of course, to the Dead Kennedys.

Blog ain’t no damn focus group
Blog means thinking for yourself
You ain’t Zeldman with your css
When a shill still lives on your front page
Blogger whores
Blogger whores
Blogger whores f–k off!
Blogger whores
Blogger whores
Blogger whores f–k off!
If you blog to sell, get outa here
You ain’t no better than the journos
We ain’t trying to be media
When you ape that crap it ain’t democracy
[Repeat chorus]
Ten blogs praise war, what a man
You link each other, the advertiser wins
Stab your backs when the cash means all
Trash wonderchicken if you’ve got real balls
You still think banner ads look cool
The real sellouts run your schools
They’re bloggers, journalists and geeks
In a real blog putsch you’ll be the first to go
[Repeat chorus]
You’ll be the first to go
You’ll be the first to go
You’ll be the first to go
Unless you think

[If you actually are a whoreblogger, well, don’t take it personal, mmkay? Whores is folks, too.]
[Update] I had some more to say on this, over at AKMA‘s, to wit (or witless, as the case may be):

My objections to the idea — not so much my attacks on individuals concerned, which, I hope, are clearly just over-the-top screeds intended as much to entertain as anything else — are rooted in anger and contempt at the continuing Monetarization of Nearly Everything (with apologies to Tom Coates).
I am aware of the tightrope to be walked when talking about this kind of thing: it has become common received wisdom (which I trust less and less in these times) that those who argue that applying monetary value to something has the consequence of immediately robbing it of all real value are foolish hippies and incompetent idealists. It is de rigeur to ridicule them — of course they are laughable loons! How counter to the deepest streams of our culture the idea that money is anything but the highest measure of worth, or that adding value is not necessary the same as adding worth.
But I’m a great one for lost causes and tilting at ethical windmills.
It doesn’t bother me if someone makes the decision to use their web space to sell crap. They want to hawk Amway out of their apartment, that’s fine. They go and slap vinyl ads on their car, or tattoo the McDonalds logo on their childrens’ foreheads, well that’s their prerogative. Go nuts, I say.
But in the process of doing so, they haven’t lost my trust (which I may or may not have had reason to extend, at some earlier point) so much as diminished the possibility that we may ever agree in any significant way about the fundamental questions of value and of the good which dominate the way I attempt to live my life.
Which, in effect, may mean that the possibility of me respecting them for what they do (as well as, possibly, what they say) has leaked away. Not that they should really give a damn, but there it is.
Of course, all that is pretty much the extremity of the matter, which is where I tend to hang out, it must be said. In the case of Chris Locke, for example, I know that he’s been to the edge of the abyss, financially, and I don’t begrudge him his naked grab for a few shillings from whatever corporate scum he can shake down, and more power to him.
Less well do I know the circumstances of anyone else who deliberately whores out their personality for dollars — because, when in comes down to it, most of the currency of the blogoblogland minted until recently has issued from the forges of personality and talent, which has been fine and right — and I don’t begrudge them doing so, honestly.
[Hell, I put up a tip jar 6 months back or so, begging for a few bucks to pay for my next year’s hosting. Almost entirely killed my desire to keep doing this, though, that did, much as I appreciated the generosity of so many.]
But I do think that what money touches, money turns to sh-t. That may not operate on the level of individuals, or it may. I don’t know, and it’s almost certainly the case that no-one does. But I do think that to monetarize something is to lose sight of the true value of that thing.
So I’m waiting for the next Great Leap Forward I guess, me and Billy Bragg, marching off into obscurity, secure in the knowledge as we become irrelevant that at least we stuck to our guns.
On the other hand, I may just start blogging for dollars next week. I need the damned money.

Anger Is An Energy

November 23, 2004 / / 2 Comments

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.

I could be wrong I could be right
could be wrong
I could be wrong I could be right
I could be black I could be white
I could be right I could be wrong
I could be white I could be black
Your time has come your second skin
The cost so high the gain so low
Walk through the valley
The written word is a lie

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.

May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
Could be wrong I could be right
Could be wrong I could be right
I could be wrong I could be right
I could be black I could be white
I could be right I could be wrong
I could be black I could be white
They put a hot wire to my head
cos of the thing I did and said
And made these feelings go away
Model citizen in every way

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.

Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
Could be wrong I could be right
Could be wrong I could be right
I could be wrong I could be right
I could be black I could be white
I could be right I could be wrong
I could be black I could be white
Your time has come your second skin
The cost so high the gain so low
Walk through the valley
The written word is a lie

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.

May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
Could be wrong I could be right
Could be wrong
They put a hot wire to my head
Cos of the things I did and said
They made these feelings go away
A model citizen in every way
Your time has come your second skin
The cost so high the gain so low
May the road rise with you (Hey)
May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy

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.

GFY

November 18, 2004 / / 10 Comments

I’ve been writing these long screeds then changing my mind, stopping and starting and just generally mucking up my state of exquisite zen rage by second-guessing myself and revising.
Revising is just plain evil.
So here, in no particular order, are the hard black slippery cores of the three pieces I’m probably not going to end up writing.
To the Bush Administration (and ever single last one of you Yank bastards who voted for them) :
Go f–k yourselves.
To Korean men, one in five of whom (according to the Korean Institute of Criminology) purchase sex four times a month (thus making it a US$21 billion dollar industry, worth 4.1% of GDP) :
Go f–k yourselves.
To the whorebloggers intent on monetarizing this virtual place of ours (and thus turning it into a sea of sh-t) :
Go f–k yourselves.
There. That feels better.

Away Team

October 24, 2004 / / 1 Comment

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 magnificent symphony of colour as to take the breath away, beside a lake, in the mountains. Then proceed to allow those condos to become filthy, dim animal caves, poorly lined with stained, grafitti’d wallpaper, reeking and unkempt. Ensure that nothing works, and that the cigarette burns in the cheap plastic bog-standard yellow floor-covering are unconcealed by any furniture, other than the lumpy bed in one corner. Make certain that the rooms, while being as depressingly drab and horrible and dirty as possible, cost more than US$100 per night, because you know the f–kin’ proles got nowhere else to go. Laugh and laugh until you piss yourself, as the lucre rolls in.
2) Build tawdry eyesore asphalt chancres on the most attractive bits of coastline, buttress them with kiloton sprinklings of concrete tetrapods, and festoon the pleasure palaces gaily with buzzing, flickering neon and bellowing signage. Make sure there is plenty of opportunity for the whores to earn their trade, and make sure that tinny speakers howl out 24/7 the cookie-cutter ’80s K-pop that gets the housewives a-rockin’ while they’re getting drunk and trying to forget what their husbands are doing. Because this is the coast, and the view is spectacular, build a raw fish restaurant underground, and make of the walls vast aquarium tanks, into whose murky depths you can peer, hoping to spy the algaed, parasite-riddled beast that will become your lunch.
A moveable feast, Korea, a moveable feast.

Ship Of Fools

October 21, 2004 / / 5 Comments

I don’t know what the f–k. I think my brain has been frozen by monetarization, and my heart as well, not to mention my goddamn lilypad-fat keyboard-strokin’ fingertips. Sorry about that am I, faithful friends and supporters. Sorry, and silent, and scattered.
Fleeing from the money, I’ve scarpered around the curve of the globe over and over again over the years, running from the in-the-end unwelcome wealth thrust upon me, and now, since I’m paying for this site to be hosted, I have an urge to spit on it and walk away. I’ve finally found a way to pay to my host the last of the Paypal-imprisoned dollars I owe — the dollars you, my friends, gifted me with months ago — which is good news of a kind, perhaps, but it’s all a swampy money-tainted sh-tswirl in my mind now. Big red bar sinister ‘Keep out!’ as the favicon.
How f–ked up is that when you’re disgusted by the idea of posting to your own weblog? Pretty kinda ish, I guess.
So maybe that’s it. I don’t f–king know. I’ve had a few, and I’m talking sh-t again. So here’s a song. Rock over London, motherbasters!

Went to see the captain,
strangest I could find,
Laid my proposition down,
laid it on the line.
I won’t slave for beggar’s pay,
likewise gold and jewels,
But I would slave to learn the way to sink your ship of fools.
Ship of fools on a cruel sea,
ship of fools sail away from me.
It was later than I thought when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter, ship of fools.
Saw your first ship sink and drown from rockin’ of the boat,
And all that could not sink or swim was just left there to float.
I won’t leave you drifting down, but it makes me wild,
With thirty years upon my head to have you call me child.
Ship of fools on a cruel sea,
ship of fools sail away from me.
It was later than I thought when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter, ship of fools.
The bottles stand as empty, as they were filled before.
Time there was and plenty, but from that cup no more.
Though I could not caution all, I still might warn a few:
Don’t lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools.
Ship of fools on a cruel sea,
ship of fools sail away from me.
It was later than I thought,
when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter,
ship of fools.
It was later than I thought when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter,
ship of fools.

PS: I’m comin’ after you ‘making money from blogging’ f–knozzles, if it’s the last thing I do in this textosphere. And I’m gonna talk about your magic underwear.
[Update : Note to self when posting drunk – in future, delete 3 out of 4 uses of all variants of the word ‘f–k’. Except f–knozzle. That’s always a keeper.]

Taking One For The Home Team

September 20, 2004 / / 7 Comments

So, I was at the bar on Friday night. This is a sentence that, in my dotage, is far less likely to pass my lips and fingertips than it once was, back when I was positively dripping with vim and vigour and fluids of a more bachelorly nature. But nonetheless, there I was, gazing somewhat blearily at myself in the mirror through the bottles, propping up the fake-mahogany with my buddy J. There was an impressively long line of empty bottles neatly lined up in front of us. I think the Korean guys like the empties left in front of them as a display of their alco-power, but that conspicuous consumption display tends to backfire when me and my equally thirsty drinking buddy, the livers who walk like men, come onto the scene. Shrug.
The gaggle of young women behind the bar are paid as much to be decorative as to actually sling piss, and station themselves right in front of you, whether you want them there or not. Orders. I tend to ignore them, after an initial smile to show I’m not entirely ogrish. It’s pretty clear, at least when it comes to old bastards like us, that getting pole position in front of the foreigners is pulling the short straw. The ladies do tend to make a valiant attempt to be hostessy with their few phrases of English, but the time is long, long past when I much enjoyed talking pidgin with bargirls, no matter how attractive they might be. Not to say that I wasn’t young and foolish, once. Thousands of young men around the world would be pouring over my seminal textbook, ‘Bargirl Bricolage and Soju Semiotics: The Ineluctable Modality of The Boozehound’ if I’d ever written the damn thing.
So we were tanking up, smoking, talking sh-t, enjoying the once-a-month concession to our younger selves our wives allow us. At the outer edge of my OB Lager-induced tunnelvision, I noticed a group of 4 guys sit down beside us at the bar, but J and I were deep in discussion about how cool it would be to be first on the ground when the Kimchi Wall comes down, as writers or otherwise, and I didn’t notice much other than that the guy beside me was Korean. He didn’t say anything to me, so I assumed, as one does, that he didn’t speak English, and ignored him after giving a terse nod.
Not long after, though, J announced that it was time to break the seal — I, as usual, had been peeing like a racehorse since the first friendly whissht! of escaping beer vapour — and wandered off to the toilets. Turning to me, the Korean guy said ‘How’s it goin’?’
In those few syllables, I knew not only that he spoke English, but that he fluent, and that he’d lived overseas for a time, or was maybe even a returnee. My English Radar is strong. Well, that and the fact that the three other guys sitting with him were all foreigners, and pretty clearly not the English teacher type.
So we started in to talking — and having a conversation in idiomatic, natural English with someone new is such a rarity for me that I was almost giddy with the strangeness of it (nutty expat syndrome ahoy!) — and I learned that he was the language liaison for the other three, who were Americans, a couple of soldiers and a contractor, and here at the deep water port in Sunshine City to expedite the transhipment of tons of US military equipment from Korea to Kuwait.
That may have been classified information, but we were all pretty drunk.
I was right, both about his English and his history. He’d lived in America and gone to both high school and university there. I asked him how he’d liked it, and he told me this : he went to high school in Illinois, university in Los Angeles, and he hated America. Those were the words he used. I suspect saying so wouldn’t have gone over too well with the guys he was with, but they were busy clumsily and loudly hitting on the waitresses, who, in the Way of The Korean Bargirl, tittered fetchingly while failing to hide the look of abject panic in their eyes.
I asked him why he would say such a thing, and he told me that while he was going to university, he worked to make extra money, in a relative’s liquor store. And that he’d been shot during the regular hold-ups. Twice.
This boggled my mind.
When he was in hospital, he said, he’d decided that he was leaving America as soon as he finished school, and not coming back. Not surprisingly. Now, I’ve been around the world a few times in the last 15 years. Been in war zones, been in all the worst places in dangerous cities all over the map. Even LA, one mad weekend on my way down to Mexico, when I heard gun shots in my friends’ Hollywood neighbourhood as we stumbled around, indestructible Canuck style, at 4 am. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone before who’s been shot. And this guy, this mild-mannered Korean whose parents sent him over to America to get out of having to do his military service, he’d taken a couple of bullets for the home team.
And now he was back home, getting paid to translate the crude pickup lines of his military colleagues to the girls behind the bar.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, a twisty-cruel just-so story, I imagine. I leave it to you to tease it out, if you’re so inclined.

Comedy Gold

September 6, 2004 / / 10 Comments

Man, I love them Americans. They feel so strongly about entertaining the rest of us with their comedic stylings, and we are all in their debt for keeping us laughing. The chutzpah, the testicular fortitude that they collectively show, out there on the world stage, walking the tightrope between hilarious self-parody and a collapse into a light-gobbling singularity whose gravitational gradient is so steep that even irony cannot escape. Bravo, I say!
The tension they so skillfully build in all the rest of us who hang on every faux-drunken swerve and stumble of their political machine is breathtaking. Those rapscallions. Teetering up there on the democracy highwire, introducing ramshackle, insecure electronic voting systems built on Microsoft™ Access© while they so nobly and selflessly impose American freedom and democracy on the Afghanis and Iraqis? Oh, eek, I can’t watch! Putting their dear leader up there on stage to praise the 10 million voters registered in Afghanistan, when only 9 million are eligible? The showmanship is breathtaking, and The Funny is debilitating.
Trotting out a frothing villain like Zell Miller to inflame the stupid, while retaining the option of distancing yourself (‘He’s not a Republican!’) should the spin from the assembled stenographers of the press turn ugly? Pure comedy gold! Did you see the look on that old bastard’s face when he felt the carpet being pulled out from under him? Classic, backslappin’ American pie hijinks!
Oh, you wacky yank bastards, how I love that you’d totter so close to the abyss to entertain us all. I wake up each morning frothing in my urgency to fire up my old PC and find out what new japery you might have unleashed.
The subtleties of the ways your leaders use words, my friends, while merely appearing to wield them like a simpleton’s club, claiming that they ‘don’t do nuance‘… simply magnificent. The way that you can collectively turn on an ironic dime, and allow a man whose family connections excused him from serving his country to shine the character assassination jocularity spotlight on a man who actually did. And the way that that fellow and his supporters let their foes just do it. Oh, it’s belly-laughin’ time, right there!
You Americans kill me. No really, you do. Not as dead as the 10,000 (30,000?) Iraqis, or the 3000 Afghanis, or the 1000 Americans, or the 100 ‘coalition of the willing’ (oh, dear, that’s a nugget of comedy pyrite there, too) members. (And never mind those 50,000 Komedy Korpses in the Darfur. They’re not dead from the hilarity apoplexy!)
A pretend cowboy President whose horses are rented? A constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage in a nation where half of all marriages end in divorce? An inner powerbroker circle of oil company gassholes and oil prices at all-time highs? A leader who claims to receive instructions from his god (or from ‘beyond the stars’, whatever that means), making offhand remarks about crusades? Invading a country that posed no threat, while the Norks built more nukes and threaten to turn Seoul into a lake of fire? Talking about corporate responsibility and pumping a few billion into your vice-president’s old company? Contracting out your warfare needs to the lowest (or best-connected) bidder? Running a gulag in Cuba, of all places? Torturing children in Iraq while proudly (if spuriously) proclaiming ‘no child left behind’ back home? Reducing the taxes of the richest, then making populist proclamations like ‘there’s no point taxing the rich because they just dodge their tax bill anyway‘? Osama bin who?
Your A-material kills, my friends. You rock.
You gotta take your show on the road.

Rudy Can't Fail

August 31, 2004 / / 9 Comments

Rudy Giuliani. Rudy f–kin’ Giuliani. I caught the last 10 minutes or so of his horrifying public deep-throat of his paymasters in the Fellato-drome as I was shovelling down my lunchtime bibimbap this afternoon. In the way of a good journalist — which of course we know all bloggers aspire to be, with ‘blog is to journalism as waffle iron is to pita bread’ our battle cry — I’m going to pretend that I watched the whole thing with rapt attention, rather than with one eye while I mixed a big dollop of gochu-jang into my rice.

What kind of man could this unhinged bastard be? That he actually believes the kinds of things he said, up there with his naked face hanging out, boggles the mind. It would seem, unlike the president whose steaming sidewalk turds he unhinged his jaw to gobble up — whether in the name of tribal solidarity, or clean streets, or merely because we live in a world where public fabrication in the name of self-preservation trumps the lives of thousands, I don’t know — that he’s not merely a stupid man. How could he possibly justify the audacity of the warispeace platitudes and outright howlers he lobbed out over the heads of the assembled herd animals in the pit? Most of the assembled groundlings, interestingly, appeared to be a little bemused and confused as they milled and mooed that there was a distinct absence onstage of naked Iraqis chained to the pillars or homos cruficied and bloody in front of the stars-and-stripes. Is it possible that the fog of bullsh-t that was emanating from this opportunist f–k up on stage was choking them, too? Perhaps not, but I’m eternally the optimist.

“As I stood watching the towers fall, I turned to Bernie, and I said, ‘Thank God George Bush is our president’.”

Really? Did you really do that, Rudy? And how, for the rest of your life, will be you able to live it down, if you actually did?
To Giuliani’s credit, perhaps, was the look in his piggy little eyes as he limped his way through his clumsy litany of weasel-sh-t doubletalk. You could see it, if you looked closely: ‘Help me!’ his eyes seemed to be saying, while his mouth continued to force words out around the mechanically-reclaimed Republican meat that was occluding it. ‘Let me the hell out of here! I’ve sold my soul and made a foul, demonic joke of my integrity, and the price wasn’t high enough! There’s no way back from this, and I’m nuts-deep in the toothy maw of the beast!’
But f–k him. He made his choice. He’s a force for evil now, whether or not he ever was anything but. He’s on the side of America! The! Great! America! Mom and apple pie! America! Freedom and equality for some! America! Commerce is honour! America! Hurry up and get those ovens finished, so we can get this Final Solution thing underway! America the proud torturers! America! With us or against us!
I have mentioned before that I’m against you, right, America?
Just so we’re clear.

Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy

August 27, 2004 / / 11 Comments

In the footsteps of Hotblack Desiato, I’ve been taking a month off dead, for tax reasons. Well, OK, not really for tax reasons. The Korean government treats me relatively well when it comes to hoovering up the monetary crumbs in my fiscal wake, and I have long been out of the purview of the long arm of Revenue Canada.
But I certainly have been dead, at least from the neck up. Occasionally during the course of the last month or two, as the caffeine rush has hit me, I’ve had a Brilliant Idea flash up on the Times Square text-crawl on the inside of my forehead, then just as quickly disappear, before I actually worked up the energy to write it down.
I’m not entirely sure why this might be, other than the damp lassitude that comes with the ‘monsoon’ season here in Korea, when the rains come and the whole country starts to smell and feel like the inside of a fat man’s underpants. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time rummaging around such places, mind you, but I got me an active imagination.
And I do have some theories.
The most plausible is performance anxiety. Since it became as certain as these things ever are that some of my offhand screeds were going to be included in the upcoming ‘Best of Web Writing‘ book (which should be finalized and ready to get magically transformed from bits to atoms in the next 8 weeks, according to a recent email from the publisher), I’ve felt a little weird about writing. Back when I was posting something every day — being a realio trulio weblogger, half self-promotion, half self-regard and half community-cheerleader (I know that’s three halves. I am large, I contain multitudes) — and I was pushing the thousand uniques a day envelope, with a couple of times the number of daily readers I have now, oddly, I didn’t think much about it. Just had a coffee or a beer or something, and whacked out some brainfart that was temporarily stinking up the room, to clear the air a bit. I imagine that many of those people who once visited the site now read it through the newsfeeds, and I may well have more readers than I did back then, but they are invisible to me, basically, and off my Pay Attention To Me Waaaah! radar.
I’m not sure if that reticence to dance in the spotlight for fear that it’ll just suck is a good thing or bad. Probably bad, because if you don’t write, you’re not a f–king writer, right?
Right?
The other thing that made my weiner shrink in the glare, authorially speaking, was this Flickr testimonial from my blogfather, Rageboy.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

I even sent the bastard an email that could be summarized with “Dude? WTF?” to inquire if he was just yankin my crank. He replied in the negative. Proud — astonished, is more like it — am I that someone I’ve respected and sucked up to for so long thinks so well of my stuff, but I think it pushed me over the brink into the ‘crikey how can I live up to that?!’ swamp.
Not to say that I’ve spent more time revising or rewriting any of the infrequent posts I’ve made in the last month or two, of course. Hell no! But I did cringe when I hit the post button, which has to count for something.
And not to say that I don’t bask in the praise like a puppy with its ear being scratched. I do. Don’t stop now!
My other theory about why it is that I’ve if not gone dry, at least had a dam built upstream somewhere, is that I’m healthy, by god. Rude, animal health. All bulgy muscles and efficient oxygen exchange. Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy.
I started working out, you see, for the first time in my life, about 7 months back. About 4 1/2 hours a week, weights and treadmill and stationary bike. My 39th birthday came and went a couple of weeks back, and I’m in better shape than I have been in my life. It pleases me, especially considering that given the lifestyle I enjoyed during my 20s and early 30s, I’d figured I’d be dead by now.
But I’m kinda thinking that the life of the mind might suffer in some way when the meat is singing. Has there ever been a Real Writer who worked out at the gym? I’m not talking foofoo yuppie reactionaries like Brett Easton Ellis or someone like that, here. I mean mad bastards, one of whom I have always considered myself to be. Hell, I don’t know. But the persona, writerly and otherwise, that I’ve invested so much time grooming over the past few decades just doesn’t marry up with sleekness and throbbing muscley health.
It’s not that I feel that much dumber, per se, it’s just that, for the first time in a lifetime of flesh-hating, I’m feeling pretty comfortable inside my skin, and at the same time, the locus of Me has shifted downwards a couple of feet.
Balance is good, they say. Maybe it’s just that while the changes underway in the ways my mind and body work together are consolidated, I’m off balance, and it’ll all settle into a new pattern eventually. Hell, I dunno (redux).
But like I said, maybe it’s only the weather.
Either way, I apologize for not writing more to those who like to read the meandering mental travelogues of the wonderchicken. For now though, let it be known that I haven’t been on a half-assed hiatus because I’m unhappy. Just the opposite.