Living First Person

[Crossposted from Full Glass Empty Clip] It’s 1977. I’m 12 years old. It’s a gorgeous Northern BC summer day, one of those glorious fleeting perfect days that are all the sweeter in the frozen north, because the memories of mud and slush barely fade before the leaves have already begun to turn again. Utterly pure blue sky, sun warm on the skin, grass a deep impatient green, a light breeze off the lake that is so invigoratingly packed with oxygen and piney perfume it might as well be aerosolized cocaine. I’m playing third base, it’s what we’d call little league if we called it that in Canada back then, I’m just beginning to feel the awkwardness of adolescence, but the sheer pleasure of being alive and standing on that dirt under that gigantic bowl of sky on that day is more than enough to let me ignore my self-consciousness. I’m a big, strong kid, and even if I’m more bookworm than jock, I enjoy sports.

One of the kids on the other team strikes out, and our gang begins to jog back to the chickenwire fence behind home plate for our time at bat, where there are a few parents hanging out, maybe drinking a beer or three in the sun. I get about three or four loping steps along the baseline before my left leg folds up, with no warning whatsoever, and I go down into the dirt. I try like hell to get up, but my leg just doesn’t seem to want to bend correctly. I don’t remember it hurting as much as I remember being confused, trying to figure out why my leg suddenly didn’t do what I told it to do any more, and then horrified and embarrassed, when my stepdad came out onto the diamond, picked me up, and carried me off.

Turns out that I had Osgood-Schlatter syndrome. I was just growing too damned fast, apparently, and bits and pieces of me couldn’t keep up. The dumbass semicompetent smalltown doctor told us that I’d have to have the left leg put in an ankle to hip cast for six months, and then the other leg — once again, ankle to hip — for another six months after that.

That was pretty much the end of sports for me, at least team sports. That was the beginning — after that long, itchy year, when my first my left and then my right leg emerged, atrophied, pale, and, to my horror, looking like a limb grafted on from a much smaller, sicklier young man — of my lifelong habit of riding bikes with my headphones on down empty highways. And that summer, when the doorway to baseball and swimming and many other things I loved closed, at least temporarily, that the door into computers and the games you can play on them opened. When I learned that it was possible to go places without actually going anywhere. That was the summer my parents bought me my first computer, a TRS-80 Model III.

Nerds and Otaku and Geeks, Oh My!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sobriety

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

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

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

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

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

I miss beer something fierce.

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

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

Turns out not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ape and The Snake

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

LOLifornication

[Update: I'd just like to say that after watching the first season that that Californication show is pretty much crap, with only sporadic flashes of not-suck. I won't be going back. I've got to guess it's either written by committee or by dartboard, because it veers from well-written to laughably bad, seemingly at random. Too bad.]

I’ve been downloading and cycloptically watching the new series Californication because a) David Duchovny amuses me b) he plays a hard-drinking writer c) the pilot episode was so blatantly and manipulatively packed with prettily wobbling breastflesh that, well, yeah and d) the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Shut up, I still like ‘em, OK.
Since then, sadly, the per-episode count of nipples’n'bottoms has dropped precipitously, perhaps because Australian grannies spit the proverbial dummy (but then Austrlian grannies aren’t really the target audience, here). Or, more likely, the sexy sexoring was just a cynical out-of-the-gate attention-grab ploy. So it goes. The series hasn’t lived up to the promise of the pilot, but it’s something to play up in the corner of my monitor while I’m metafiltering or fiddling with design stuff. Lets me vicariously be that guy that I’d already tired of actually being by the time I was 30, but who I still miss, sometimes, a bit.
Anyway, all that’s preliminary to a plot thread from a couple of episodes ago that left me scratching my head a little, wondering if either I was out of touch with what’s actually happening to the language in America, or if the writers are.
See, Duchovny, playing boozehound and improbably-lucky-with-the-ladies author Hank Moody, is impelled into spasms of disgust and despair at the decline of Culture (the backstory being that he is blocked, thus drunk, and whoring himself out to a corporate blog for cash) when one of his recent conquests actually says ‘LOL’ out loud. In, if I recall correctly, barefaced unironic response to some bon mot he comes out with in the sack.
Do people actually say LOL now? Out loud? (And by people, I mean, you know, adults.) Do kids even do it? Am I that old?
See, the thing is, I’m almost willing to believe it, because listening to the quite entertaining Totally Rad Show podcast the other day, Alex, whose giddy wordplay I usually enjoy, came out with ‘[Name of somebody] FTW!’
FTW means ‘for the win’, for those of you even crustier and more clued-out than I.
But he didn’t actually say ‘for the win!’, he said ‘FTW!’ ‘For the win’ has three syllables, even after a dozen beers. ‘FTW’ has five. The combination of vowels and consonants are bumpier and harder to say. It just doesn’t make any goddamn sense.
WHAT DID YOU SAY MY CATS ARE NOT FREEBALLING GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN YOU KIDS WHO TOOK MY MEDICINE OH MY ACHING BUNIONS
I don’t know. I guess I’ll just go and have a nice glass of Metamucil or something.

Armageddon Schadenfreude

When I was a teenager, I thought a lot about the end of the world. In particular, the rain of nukes that always seemed just around the corner. I was fascinated and terrified. I suppose that’s not an unusual thing for kids that age, and might even have been the usual for m-m-m-my generation.
I grew up in the 70s, came of age in the early 80s. I was convinced that nuclear war was near-inevitable. I had no doubt that doddering dimwitted Ronald Reagan (read ‘his handlers’) and whichever doddering Soviet supremo was currently being propped up and jerkily animated with electric current (read ‘his handlers’) were going to blow the crap out the world. I dreamed about it. I can remember a grand total of one wet dream from my pubescent years; I can remember literally dozens of atomic holocaust dreams.
I remember Helen Caldicott and her Canadian-made If You Love This Planet. They showed it to us in high school. I remember the TV movies Threads and The Day After. Two and half decades after seeing Threads, I still remember the camera lingering on the puddle of urine at the woman’s feet as the mushroom clouds rose. I watched The Road Warrior when it was first released. I remember reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. I sucked up all the ’50s bomb-shelter paranoiac sci-fi juvenilia I could get my mother to buy for me at the bookstores on our shopping trips to the nearest city. I read what little I could find about the growth of the Cold War arsenals. It was… a hobby of mine.
Not that I was the archetypal Weird Kid or anything, muttering head-down through greasy locks about the ‘end of the world’. I had normal hobbies, too: comics and computers, swimming and biking, booze and friends’ fast cars. Girls. I showered regularly. But I did dream a lot about the end of the world.
And they weren’t all nightmares by any means. See, I grew up in a tiny town more than 1000 kilometers north of Vancouver. I was completely confident that when the bombs fell, we’d be safe and secure. When I was in Grade 5, my gifted-group teacher had had a meteorologist boyfriend who’d lent me (and the other smart kid they’d cut from the herd to study what and how we liked) his weather maps. I’d learned about the prevailing wind currents of north-central British Columbia. We’d be all good when the balloon went up. The nearest mushroom cloud might sprout and rain its deadly ash 500km away, at worst, accidental mistargetings notwithstanding, and leave us basically unscathed
We had moose and squirrel salmon, we had farms and ranches, we had endless forest. Fruit might get a little scarce, but hell, I didn’t much like fruit anyway. My house had a deep well, and the lakes and rivers were sweet and clear. Nuclear winter? No worries. We lived through -45°C spells every damn year. We’d get by. Let the mad bastards down south kill each other off en masse. We’d be the inheritors of the earth, us hardy northern canucks, ululating our diesel-powered ways down out of the arboreal wastes, antlers strapped to the hoods of our Barracudas and pickup trucks, to rebuild things in our own Royal Reserve-powered image. Proud Canadians. There’d finally be some kind of payoff for living 40 miles up the asshole of the earth for so many years.
Armageddon didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Not the best result in a lot of ways, sure, but Ouroboros the world-turd was spinning at the bottom of the bowl, anyway. Time for cleansing holy nuclear fire! It’d be a shame, all those innocent people getting torched, but we kept reading how overpopulation was going to kill the planet even if the nukes didn’t.
So talk these days of a coming economic armageddon with Ground Zero in America’s bubble have actually put me in a nostalgic mood. Headlines like China threatens ‘nuclear option’ of dollar sales take me right back to 1982. Media tidbits like Jim Cramer’s recent howling monkey-boy histrionic meltdown — ‘It’s Armageddon out there!” have fascinated me in the kind of way that (metaphorical) nuke-porn did back in the day.

It’s far from certain, of course, that the blow up is going to happen, or even that things will fall apart. But I’ve been watching the whole thing for years now, after decades of conditioned ignorance about economics, and the New Great Depression feels as likely to me as nuclear tennis did back in the early ’80s.
Then again, that didn’t end up happening, did it? There’s some comfort in that, I guess.
A comment from the perspicacious Malor in a recent Metafilter thread (among many others about the subprime mortgage mess, the yen carry trade, the liquidity dry-up, and all the rest) lays out genesis of the worst case scenario pretty well, I think. Is it a Minsky Moment? Yeah, probably.
Malor said:

We should have gone into a horrific recession after the stock market bubble popped in 2000. The size of that bubble was far bigger than the one in 1929, so the consequences should have been even more severe… something on the order of severity of the Great Depression, although I think a 1970s-style stagflation writ large was the likeliest outcome.
What happened instead is that the Fed panicked and hit the liquidity button, flooding the system with incredibly cheap money. New money chases inflation, and causes more of it, so it went into housing, and then people started leveraging themselves up into massive debt to buy more of it.
Bubbles have been called the fiscal equivalent of a nuclear weapon; the only way to avoid the fallout is by not having one in the first place. The stock market bubble was a huge deal, though probably survivable.
But the Fed, which set off the original bubble with easy money, tried to fix the fallout with more of the same medicine that got us sick in the first place. To stop the fallout from one atomic bomb, they set off two fusion weapons instead…. and we didn’t even dodge the fallout from the first bomb, we just delayed it. The explosion of the other two bombs just sent the fallout into orbit, but it’s still up there, and we’re still gonna eat every rad.
At the very least, we’re going to have a full generation of very hard times, tougher than anything in living memory. I think we will be exceptionally fortunate if the United States continues to exist as the same legal entity.
In terms of likely outcome, my operating theory is that we’ll go into a short-term deflationary crunch, but the Fed will open the floodgates and send us into an inflationary death spiral. Not just nasty horrible stagflation for two decades like we would have had from the Y2K pop, but an actual hyperinflationary death spiral for the dollar.
With fiat currency, I just don’t think a true deflationary collapse is possible… although with the unbelievably massive leverage in the derivative positions, I suppose it could happen. Money could be destroyed from debt default faster than the Fed can lend new dollars into circulation.
There’s one name you should remember in the coming crisis: Greenspan. This is all his doing. His refusal to ever allow a recession, ever, led us directly into this mess. He never met a problem he couldn’t cover up with liquid paper.

I think Malor might be overstating the case when he talks about a generation of hard times. On the other hand, if China pulls the economic trigger, he might be understating it.
Anyway, the winds taste the same to me because as the tension builds I’m once again far from the places where the corpses will litter the ground if and when the hammer falls. Two and half decades ago I was in the far north of Canada, confident that we’d be able to sustain ourselves while the rest of the world went to hell. Now I’m in Korea, and if economic armageddon happens, once again I’m not directly in the line of fire. Once again, if it all goes to hell, I’ll feel sorry for all the people (even the stupid ones who went for their two year no-money-down teaser-rate no-declare ARM mortgages for a McMansion they knew they couldn’t afford) who lose it all. The rich will make it through, as they always do, this time with Bushy legislation and offshore accounts rather than hardened bunkers and hidey holes.
Well, I like to say I’ll feel sorry about the end of days. I said to myself when I was 17 that I’d be sorry about all those crispy corpses down in CanadAmerica South. But not entirely sincere the sentiment, I have to admit, then or now. The truth is, of course, in some ways, on some days: I think I’d feel like pumping my fist, taking a deep breath, and shouting ‘That’s what you get for shortsighted greed and systematic stupidity, you bastards!’ Or more succinctly, ’cause my wind is not what it once was, ‘Suck it, dummies!’
I’m a bad man that way. Or part of me is and was, at least.
Bad things are going to happen to the Korean economy, certainly, if and when America’s economy goes tits-up and takes the rest of the world with it. But if I lived in North America, if I was mortgaged to the hilt, if I was living from paycheck to paycheck, I’d be a lot more worried about it than I am here in Korea with my life savings in won and no debt.
Maybe we ought to buy some gold, though.
So I am back where I was when I was young — a cleansing fire might just be what’s needed to clean out the corruption and cauterize the wounds. Part of me almost looks forward to it. I’m not sure if I really believe that, or if it’s just the romantic teen I was surfacing again for a last misanthropic gasp before he goes down into that dark cold water for the last time.
Either way: armageddon schadenfreude. It’s not just a good name for a postmodern superhero.
[Update: more background material and some excellent explanations of the IMPENDING DOOOOOOOM in this MeFi thread.]