Culture Vulture

Activate Yourself 99%

2011-10-18T12:44:00.000-07:00

Many of us, if not most, have no experience with political activism. As Americans we are more accustomed to watching protests on TV in foreign countries than exercising our own political rights at home. Ironically, in a country where our freedoms are enshrined in the Constitution, very few of us participate in government and make our opinions and voices heard. The result, as we all know, has been taxation without representation in the form of war and financial bailouts that go directly into the pockets of criminal bankers. Until the financial crisis hit, many of us had been living in a state of consumer denial and political apathy more correctly defined as learned helplessness. In other words, so long as we had some comfort in the form of cheap material goods, and so long as political corruption did not affect our jobs or our pocketbooks, we were content to let things take their course.

Americans have always had a high tolerance for inequality, with each individual believing that they will always find themselves on the right side of the rich poor divide. Because inequality is not only tolerated, but actively promoted in America, it has provoked economic and social decline in the form of unemployment, poverty, crime, violence, neurosis and despair. While criminals in the banking sector, corporations, and our government have deliberately brought the United States to a state of collapse, we have passively allowed it to happen. The problem with the United States is not just economic, it has to do with our values and beliefs as a nation. By focusing on individualism, short-term gain, material comfort, personal leisure and mindless entertainment, we have forgotten that a resilient, enduring society is built on merit, hard work, intellectual debate, cooperation, thrift, and honesty. This political amnesia and negligence has allowed the greed, corruption, and criminal activity of the rich 1% to damage our nation and our democracy. Now that it has become clear as a mountain stream that the government does not represent our interests and is bought and paid for by the criminal elite at catastrophic expense to the American public through mass unemployment, foreclosures and evictions; now that what was the middle class has become a feudal underclass representing 99% of America, we are waking up and remembering Jefferson’s wisdom that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

A protest has to start somewhere. In this case it started in New York and was aptly titled Occupy Wall Street. While initially ignored by the mainstream media, the internet and social networking spread the message quickly, as it had in the Arab Spring. While few appreciated the irony of the Middle East (demonized by the West as primitive, authoritarian and corrupt) providing an example of how to assert our rights, the result was nonetheless successful as more and more Americans began to understand, perhaps for the first time, that political activism is possible in the United States.

In the face of peaceful protest, police brutality and repression gave us a candid glimpse of the true nature of our democracy. Protestors were cordoned off by police barricades, pepper-sprayed, clubbed with batons, and arrested for assembling peacefully in public and private space. The government hoped that by cracking down early with violence, intimidation and arrests they would keep people in fear and prevent them addressing their grievances through direct political action. But as the stand-off in Zuccotti Park illustrated, when the people unite in peaceful opposition, the government must back down or risk completely losing its threadbare legitimacy. The US government and the corporate 1% that run it know they cannot win a game of chicken with the American people; because we are the government. Again it is appropriate to quote Jefferson, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny, when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” The Occupy Wall Street movement represents the end of the line for the status quo and the start of a new beginning. It is time for all of us to organize and take to the streets to demand accountability from our government.

Protest is both hard and amazingly simple. For a protest to be successful everyone must join. It is not enough to sit in one’s living room and complain to sympathetic friends and family. These complaints only leave us feeling depressed and impotent in the face of the problems that surround us. A nation of armchair activists accomplishes nothing. We are not seen, nor heard, and by failing to gather in public we abet an irresponsible, corrupt and predatory government. Furthermore, by staying home and allowing a brave few to fight our battles in the street, we rob public protest of its true source of power: people. When few people gather they are more likely to be ignored, intimidated, and signaled out for abuse. For those of us who rationalize that we don’t have time to protest, we must ask ourselves: when will we find the time to defend our rights? We must also understand that citizenship is an obligation that requires us to donate our time to a cause larger than our own immediate self-interest. In other words, we have to make time to protest. In a nation that, according to Nielsen’s “Three Screen Repot”, spends approximately five hours a day watching TV, this time is available. And for those of us who consider voting the extent of our political obligation, by now it must be clear that voting for candidates funded by corporations is a waste of time. The truth is the main roadblock to activism for many of us is simply a lack of experience. But now that we have made our decision to take part, because we are fed up, our nerves and fears turn to resolve and even excited anticipation as we prepare for the fight.

When you finally walk out that door with your poster in hand and meet in the public space with others who are frustrated like yourself, you find your sense of isolation, doubts, fear, and anxiety evaporate in the light of a common cause. You realize that there are in fact many people of all ages like you, upset with their government and its lack of accountability. Although they come from all walks of life and backgrounds, talking to them you realize you have a lot in common: principally the desire for fair-paid work, a roof over your head, and food on the table for yourself and your family.

So this is what it’s like to be politically active, you think, feeling the energy of the crowd and the rush of being part of something larger than yourself. You realize to your amazement that political participation is fun; it is a social event, an excuse to meet and talk to other people, and to express opinions that hitherto have been repressed. “This is what democracy looks like!,” you respond to the chant, savoring the truth of the statement. And you wonder why you waited so long to participate. The community you longed for in empty suburban streets, apartment complexes with closed doors, sterile strip malls, and alienating freeways is a political one, one in which people discuss ideas, agree and disagree and form opinions to exert pressure on the government to draft policies and laws to manage the nation according to the people’s needs. This is not the city council meeting where you and twenty other citizens voice your opposition to some ill-advised development plan, only to see it rammed through by cynical council members; this is a space of true compromise and cooperation, in which people are not bought and things are not decided beforehand in backroom deals. Occupy Wall Street envisions a democracy where everyone who participates has an influence on the path we take as a nation. Imagine that.

When you do decide to get out on the street, it’s best to be prepared. I set about making some posters the other day for a local 99% protest. I went to the store and bought some poster board and mused as I did on the possibility that, as the Occupy Wall Street protests grew, there would be a run on art supplies. Having seen protests before and having participated in one at the university where I used to work, I noticed that the posters people made were often hard to read. The key to making a good poster is to be succinct in your message and to write in big letters. While this may seem obvious, many protesters try to cram manifestos onto their posters, and write in cuneiform or like a doctor filling out a prescription. I encountered this problem when I first sat down and brainstormed some ideas of what I wanted to say and share with the public. One of my calls to action was to be the following:

CUT THE DEFENSE BUDGET

INVEST IN INFRASTRUCTURE

R&D, TRAINING & EDUCATION

TO CREATE JOBS

AND MAKE AMERICA COMPETITIVE

Now try writing that on a 22” by 28” poster board; if you can fit it, it will not be legible to a motorist at a stoplight or a passerby on the other side of the street. Furthermore, unnecessary articles, prepositions, and conjunctions need to be eliminated. So I boiled it down to the following:

Which brings me to another point about posters. You’ll notice how the red draws attention to the poster itself, while the black lettering stands out on the white background. Readability is key. If I had written black on red, I would have lost my audience. It might be funny to think about protesting in this way, as marketing, but it is. You want to get your ideas across, and as any graphic designer or ad-person will tell you, the font, color and placement of the text is key in achieving this. Block letters are therefore de rigueur. Also the beauty of writing on half sheets of printer paper is that your sign is reusable and can contain any number of messages as the political situation demands. Also, if you make a mistake in the lettering or spelling, as sometimes happens to even the most detail-oriented activist, you can start over and not mess up the poster itself. In regard to lettering, it is good to start in pencil to make sure the words fit. There is nothing more frustrating than coming to the end of a political statement and having to leave off the last letter. For example:

THE REVOLUTION IS HER-

Also, it is important to avoid categorical statements. For example:

BANKERS ARE CRIMINALS!

While in large part true, this does not get at the root of the problem; and it makes us feel helpless to change anything. Instead, make your message a call to action:

In the above poster, we are going to do something about the bankers: try them in a court of law and then jail those who are guilty of crimes such as fraud and insider trading, otherwise known as theft. We also make the association between the theft of bankers, and the fact that it has caused the economy to collapse resulting in high unemployment and the lack of fair-paid jobs for those who normally engage in productive work, and not financial speculation with other people’s money.

Like your resume, the ideal poster should include action verbs that motivate people. While the poster above pushes the limit for space and therefore has to discard verbs, this final example is illustrative:

We could have made many damning and true statements about corporations, but instead we are asking the public at large, and more importantly the government by and for the people, to do something. Revoking, repealing, terminating, eliminating, etc. corporate personhood, would make corporations legally liable for their actions. Add to that the elimination of corporate campaign contributions and we are really making progress in establishing the democracy we have lost.

From one amateur protester to another, I encourage you to make posters with creative messages that express your unique character and highlight your particular grievances. We are the 99%, the country belongs to us, and we will take it back. I look forward to seeing you out there at the next rally.

Further research

Books:

The Lonely American, Jaqueline Olds & Richard S. Schwartz

From Dictatorship to Democracy, Gene Sharp

Documentary:

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson

Angel

2010-12-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

Claudia Luna’s father went to heaven, and sometimes when people go to heaven they don’t come back. At least that was what her mother, Rosa, always said. Claudia didn’t see her mother much, because Rosa was always working to pay the rent and feed her three children. She worked the morning shift as a maid at a local hotel, and freelanced for a small house cleaning company after lunch. In the evenings she cooked at a local Salvadoran restaurant. Her life as a single mother had made Rosa old before her time. In just a few years, all her youthful vigor had vanished, and with it her smile, laughter, and love of dancing. In spite of her demanding schedule, Rosa plodded on sacrificing herself for her son and two daughters. Fourteen-year-old Ricky, her oldest, was in a rebellious stage and spent most of his time conspiring with his friends in the street. Adriana, who was ten, was starting to wear clothes not suited for a girl her age. She listened to the latest pop music and wanted to look just like her idols. So she nagged her mother for short skirts and tight tops, and complained that the other girls would make fun of her if she wore the “lame” clothes her mother picked out. Seven-year-old Claudia was a dreamer. Her teachers were concerned because she did not speak in class, though she always did her work. On several occasions Rosa was asked to come to school for a parent/teacher conference, but she never did because she was working. And she wouldn’t have come anyway, ashamed as she was about her poor English. If her daughter was doing fine in school then she saw no need to come and talk about her silence. Obviously, Claudia listened to and understood her teachers. It was Rosa’s opinion that people talked too much anyway. In her work she spent most of the day not talking at all, just taking orders from her bosses.

Because their mother was always working, Adriana took care of her little sister and they both spent a great deal of time alone in the apartment. Ricky would only come home to heat up some pupusas mom had brought home from the restaurant before going out again to hang out with the other kids in the complex. On school days, after walking home together and eating a snack their mother had prepared for them, Adriana would listen to her music and chat with her friends on the computer. Sometimes Adriana would have friends over and they would lock themselves in the bedroom she shared with her sister, leaving Claudia alone. One way Claudia occupied the time until her mother came home and tucked her into bed, was to draw. Claudia’s preferred subject matter was angels. In the second grade alone she had drawn almost one hundred angels, each unique like a snowflake or fingerprint. She drew angels to save the world. She hoped her drawings would call the angels down to earth to help people with their problems. To Claudia people seemed to have a lot of problems, particularly adults. When she watched her teachers she noticed how they seldom smiled, were often upset, and seemed tired. She noticed the same thing about people she saw in the street, rushing about from one place to the next, always in a hurry and ignoring one another. But she was most concerned about her mother, and had drawn an archangel with the hope that he would come take care of her. That angel was her father. She knew she would have to draw many more angels to save the world and make everybody happy, and so everyday after school she drew. Her sister laughed at this, saying, “Angels are stupid. Can’t you draw anything else?” To which Claudia shrugged. Of course she could draw other things. She was particularly good at cats, horses, and palm trees, but there were enough of those in the world, so she would only use them as a background sometimes. In her drawings angels rescued people from burning buildings, helped the sick, fought gangsters, prevented natural disasters, built houses, fed the hungry, and gave people gifts. Claudia’s angels were responsible for fixing people’s problems and so far they were doing a very good job. She knew that her angels were there on the streets, but she also knew that they were hard to spot because like her they liked to be quiet about what they were doing. They did not help people in order to get a good grade or for some monetary reward; their reward was in helping others and seeing them happy.

Claudia got good grades, always brushed her teeth, went to bed on time, helped her mother with chores, and was always quiet and never complained because she was an angel herself. She had never told anyone that before, but it was true. She knew that one day she would be able to fly and then she could see the angels in heaven with their wings and white robes. On earth it was impossible to spot an angel because their wings were invisible; they were on missions to help people, but one rule of helping others when you were an angel was that you could never tell them your true identity. If you did then you would have to go right back to heaven and another angel would take your place to finish your job.

When Adriana was in her room with her friends listening to music and talking about boys, Claudia would sometimes go to the small altar by the door with the votive Virgin Mary candle and wooden cross, and, putting the phone book on the floor, she would stand on it, extend her arms and flap them slowly and gracefully like a bird. Flapping, she would stand on her tiptoes, shut her eyes and feel her feet leave the ground. Even if it was just an inch and for a second, she would fly, and this was proof that she was becoming an angel de verdad. Once her sister and her friend Raquel came out of the room and caught her. Though she quickly dropped her arms, Raquel said, “What are you doing?” To which Adriana replied, “She’s so weird. She’s obsessed with angels, and now she’s trying to fly. Right, hermanita? Well, none of us are ever going to be angels, so you’re wasting your time.” From there they went into the kitchen to get a soda and Raquel asked, “What’s wrong with your sister, anyway?” “She’s just stupid. She doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t have anything better to do.”

After Raquel went home, Adriana grabbed her sister by the arm and shook her, “Stop embarrassing me in front of my friends, okay? You’re such a retard. Now Raquel is going to tell everybody at school. Why can’t you just act normal?” And then she went to their room and slammed the door. Claudia didn’t say anything. She was used to being talked to that way. Somehow she understood that if you were an angel people would not understand you, and because you could not explain it to them they often got angry and said mean things. Both her mother and her brother did the same thing. Regardless of what they thought about her behavior, Claudia knew if she kept practicing she would be able to fly. Like birds, flying was something angels had to learn. On earth you couldn’t see wings; only angels knew their arms were wings. So Claudia kept standing on the phone book whenever she could flapping her arms each day lifting off a little higher, hovering over the carpet in the dark and gloomy apartment that was identical to all the others in the complex, while other children played video games or watched TV. It felt good to fly. Soon she would fly to heaven and see the other angels, and among them would be the one who was her father. The reason her father was not with them was because her mother had found out he was an angel when he was on earth and he had been sent back and replaced. Her mother never talked about him, because it was her fault he was gone. So now it was up to Claudia to visit him. Like in school, she would be a good angel who would never be found out and could come and go from heaven as she pleased.

Once her mother came home early and caught her daughter red-faced frantically flapping her arms with her eyes closed. Rosa stood a long time watching her daughter do this, and, with each second that passed, she found herself getting more and more angry until finally she grabbed her daughter off her perch and slapped her face several times.
“What is wrong with you? Your teachers tell me you don’t talk, and you are always staring off into space, and drawing pictures of angels. This obsession has gone far enough. You’re too old for this. Angels don’t exist, mihija! At least not here. So get it out of your head. God save me, how much I have to suffer for this child! I don’t want to ever catch you doing it again. It’s a sacrilege to make fun of God. It just brings bad luck.”
“I’m sorry, mama,” Claudia said, thinking how lucky she was that her mother hadn’t found out the truth; if she had then Claudia wouldn’t be able to return from her visit to see her father.

“Come in the kitchen and help me with dinner,” Rosa said, hugging her daughter and regretting her slaps and harsh words. While Rosa began preparing dinner she thought about her husband, Hector, who had died in a car accident shortly after Claudia was born. When she was old enough to understand, Rosa had told Claudia that her father had gone to heaven, without going into the details of how he got there: a head on collision with a semi truck. He had fallen asleep at the wheel and drifted into the other lane, waking up to the other driver’s horn seconds before impact. This incident would cause Rosa to doubt God, and to begin to think of life as a series of chance events. Again and again she considered the probability that her husband should fall asleep at the wheel and that a truck should be coming at that moment in the other direction. If the truck hadn’t been there would he have woken up? Would he have had an accident of a different type, and if so, would he have survived it? What if he had left work earlier, or been sick that day, or gotten a better night’s sleep? What if this and what if that.

In compulsively reviewing the incident that had destroyed her family and changed her life forever, Rosa even began to wonder if she could have done something to prevent it. She tried to remember: had she felt some sort of premonition that day? Had there been some sign that she should have heeded to prevent her husband from going to work? Had she done something wrong to cause God to forsake her in this way? Try as she might she could find no meaning in the suffering. And now her daughter thought only about angels and was trying be one to meet up with her father, and try as she might, Rosa could not tell her daughter the truth, that her father was simply dead, and that there was no guarantee that he was in heaven. It made her angry to be reminded of it: first with the drawings, and then in her daughter’s attempts to fly. Now angels made Rosa think of death; they were a bad omen. Like her daughter, Rosa was a spiritual person prone to superstition; pretending that there was some power or meaning beyond the struggle that was her life was the last resort to coping with tragedy. She wanted her daughter to be well, but it was becoming increasing clear that she wasn’t. Hector didn’t die, she thought. We did.

Then one day Claudia learned to fly. This was no longer the inch or two of hovering over the phone book, she was suspended several feet in midair over the living room floor and, flapping her wings, she was soon pressed to the ceiling. It was a glorious feeling. I’m an angel, she thought. I’m an angel and I’m going to heaven to see my dad! In her mind flashed the image of a smiling man throwing her into the air; it was Claudia’s only memory of her father.

Her sister was at the park that day, where she was hanging out with Raquel and some of the boys they liked from school. It was this absence that had given Claudia the time to fly to the ceiling. Having accomplished this, she slowed her wings and came back down until her feet touched the floor. She did not want to waste anymore time. Just beyond the clouds was heaven and she was going to fly there and back before her mother came home to scold her. She would only stay a short while this time. Heaven was a big place and it might take some time to locate her father. Though she was shy, she would work up the courage to ask any angels she met if they knew or had seen him. She imagined the clouds were like houses organized into neighborhoods, except that they came and went and changed size and shape, so it was probably more like camping and sleeping in a tent. She would visit some of the clouds she could see outside her window and then come home and go back and visit others another day. Now that she could fly there didn’t seem to be any hurry. She just had to be sure no one found out or she would be stuck in heaven and unable to help her mom and her sister and brother on earth.

Claudia stepped out onto the concrete balcony and shut the sliding glass door behind her. She stood there for a moment surveying the scene. In the distance she could see her sister and her sister’s friends in the park. If they looked they would be able to see her too, but they weren’t paying attention. Claudia stood there for a minute looking at the changing shapes and colors of the clouds. They were much more interesting than the boring old apartment complex. It was spring; the sun was shining and a light breeze was blowing. Ideal conditions. Some birds glided by and she smiled knowing now how they felt to hang in the sky and look down to the earth. She dragged a chair over to the corner of the balcony and stood on it. Then she got up on the railing and propped her hand on the wall to keep her balance. When she felt stable enough she let go and began to flap her wings slowly at first and with increasing vigor like she had been practicing. She felt the usual lightness in her feet as she began to lift free of the balcony.

At just this moment old man Vargas came walking by on the street below with his dog. Looking up he saw what appeared to be an angel in the form young girl floating in the air above the balcony of a third floor apartment. It was a fantastic sight and one that made him cross his heart with reverence. He realized that she had come to take someone to heaven. Though it would be pleasant to go with her, he decided to keep walking. He was still too attached to life to join this gentle creature on his final journey. Let her take someone else this time.

Claudia didn’t notice the old man because she had shut her eyes to concentrate like she always did just before take off. In order to fly like an angel your mind had to be clear and free of doubt and fear. At some point her mother had come home, but Claudia didn’t hear the door. Rosa called out to her daughters and, receiving no reply, went to their bedroom, which was empty. They must be at the park, she thought, opening the door to the balcony. In that instant, Rosa was transfixed by the vision of her daughter’s flight. Then panic took her and she shouted Claudia’s name.

Startled, Claudia turned to look at her mother; then she fell three stories to the pavement. Rosa had found out her secret, and, like her father, Claudia could never return. Rosa’s last memory was of her daughter with her wings spread wide hovering over the balcony. From then on she always referred to her as an angel. “She wanted so badly to see her father so she flew to heaven,” Rosa would tell friends and neighbors. “I saw her with my own eyes. She was my little angel.” And they would nod in that polite compassionate way one does to people who have suffered a tragedy which affects their reason and from which they are ultimately unable to recover.

Procrastination

2010-03-11T15:11:00.000-08:00

“Procrastination is a good friend to the blues.” “Lazy Mind ” Elijah Emanuel (Reggae artist)

We all procrastinate, some of us more than others. Generally, we procrastinate over doing things that we find tedious, unpleasant or exceedingly difficult. We procrastinate to avoid increased responsibility, financial outlays, and potentially bad news. We put off doing our taxes because we are afraid that we may owe Uncle Sam money. We delay starting a new project, because we know that once started it will require a lot of work to see it through. We avoid going to the dentist for a regular check-up because we don’t want to hear that we have a cavity, and the longer we delay the more likely this is the case. We shirk the daily maintenance activities of our lives, such as changing the oil in our cars, fixing the leaky faucet or doing the laundry, until they become critical.

Businesses do not hesitate to exploit the human tendency to procrastinate. From credit cards to doctor’s bills, rental fees to travel plans, we are penalized for not paying or returning things on time, and for putting off time-sensitive purchases. The profit motive behind procrastination has turned us into a culture of debt. We buy something we can’t afford, get the bill, delay in paying and are charged a late fee. Even if we pay on time, we don’t pay in full and are charged interest on the outstanding sum. From consumer purchases to student loans we subscribe to the buy now pay later mentality, wherein it becomes increasing difficult to pay in the long term for vacations already enjoyed and education already received.

Clearly procrastination is laziness, but it is also a desire for things to remain the same (read: trouble free). Sometimes we have to face up to the bad choices we made in the past. When we procrastinate in this regard the outcome is usually not favorable; we are better off taking care of it sooner than later, in order to avoid unnecessary emotional stress. And often we find that dealing with it wasn’t as difficult or unpleasant as we had thought. Sometimes we just want a break from the endless cycle of obligations that occupy a large part of our time. We wake up in the morning and linger in bed with the thought of just skipping the day ahead, aware of all the challenges and stress we will face. But in doing so we know we will miss out on many beautiful moments: a sunny day, a good laugh with a coworker, a delicious lunch at a new location, or a chance encounter.

Increasingly, we procrastinate to simply avoid making decisions, regardless of whether they are trivial or of major consequence, unpleasant or potentially enjoyable. We may be just as likely to procrastinate over taking out the garbage, setting up an important client meeting, deciding what movie to watch, or committing to our friend’s backyard barbecue. This form of procrastination is directly related to information overload. While we still have obligations we would like to ignore, we also have more choices than ever of what to do with our free time, so we want to pick the best, in other words the activity that will give us the most fun for the least expense and logistical trouble.

This utilitarian function of procrastination is something we also apply in our professional lives. When making an important decision about our careers, we often stall until we have better information. When faced with criticism of our work, instead of reacting with pathos, we have learned that is best to wait and come up with a more reasoned and professional response. Sometimes we get tired of our job, social life and the place we call home. Instead of taking the time to reflect on why we feel this way and deciding on a feasible and moderate course of action to improve our lives, we tell ourselves and others that we plan to quit our job, move to another country, and take up an entirely different career without any experience to speak of, and no contacts at our future destination. While it sounds romantic and adventurous, when we think it over carefully we realize it is a stupid idea fraught with hardship and disappointment. Taking action just for the sake of dispelling inertia is usually not the best solution to our problems.

While a hasty decision built on frustration can be unproductive, it is also true that one can reflect too much and end up second-guessing themselves and arriving at decisions that are neurotic and therefore flawed. In cases when there is no best choice or positive outcome for a situation, we merely put off the inevitable and potentially make it worse by waiting. While procrastination can slow the pace of our lives and lead to more reflective action, it can also lead to inaction and paralysis, thereby causing us to lose sight of our goals and purpose in life. Life is a dangerous and precarious thing, but if we are to live productive lives we need to ignore this fact. Sure, we could get hit by a car in the street tomorrow but that doesn’t mean we should stay home cowering in our house. That girl or guy might break our heart but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t love them. We will never have perfect information, so we have to make decisions before our options disappear.

The problem with existence is that each decision we make shapes our future options and ultimately the direction of our lives. The choice to travel to Panama instead of China can have a major impact on our life: for example, if in Panama we get malaria, and if in China we make an important business contact which in the long term makes us a millionaire. When we are young we are more likely to be spontaneous, choosing to do things for the sake of the experience without worrying about how it might shape our future. In spite of the mistakes, wrong turns and occasional misplaced enthusiasm of youth, this is probably for the best. As we get older we spend more time weighing the options and finding excuses for not doing something, worried as we are that something may go wrong and impact the relative stability of our lives in a negative way.

If we look at life as a dark room lit with a lone candle, it seems better to reconnoiter our surroundings, regardless of the risk of bumping into furniture or falling down the stairs, instead of standing in one place without a point of reference. In life we are constantly faced with the question of doing something new or doing what we have always done. If we assume that a life well-lived is one in which we take on new challenges, then clearly it is best to just do it instead of procrastinating until the opportunity has passed us by. Sometimes the opportunities that come in life are disguised as difficulties or setbacks. If we can learn to find value in these experiences then we can gain some knowledge that will make us stronger in the future. And when real opportunities come our way, even though they may not be exactly what we were looking for, we mustn’t hesitate, or those who are quicker on the draw will take our place. As the folk wisdom states, we must strike while the iron is hot, though we may not know what the outcome may be of the new experience we are forging.

In terms of the practicalities of living, it is best to pay our debts on time, without thought and by reflex, mend a shirt or a relationship before it completely falls apart, and not overthink things or focus too much on what can go wrong. We must consider that everyday we live so many things go right, from the moment we wake up and find that we are still alive, to feeding ourselves a tasty breakfast, being gainfully employed, arriving safely to our jobs, completing projects that provide us with a sense of self worth and something of value to others, communicating with our friends and family, exercising our bodies, and lying down at night in a warm bed to enjoy restful sleep. We must continue to assume that in all the decisions we make the majority of things will go right, and that when they don’t we will be resilient enough to adapt and make the best of it. It is that attitude that has gotten us this far as a species, and it will likely continue to carry us through. In the meantime when we have an obligation or a choice to make, we should act, like an animal that when hungry instinctively forages for food, instead of spending too much time weighing our options, worrying and wasting time. It is a tall order, but one that we are given the opportunity to address each and every day.

To quote Pipeline master and surfing legend Gerry Lopez, “when in doubt, paddle out.” Even if conditions aren’t ideal at the moment, we certainly don’t want to be standing on the shore when the perfect wave arrives to give us the ride of our lives.

TMB*

2010-02-25T21:43:00.000-08:00

One impact of modern communication technology is that we now prefer to text instead of talking on the phone. Sometimes texting can be a fast and efficient way to figure out logistics. Adept texters set up their messages in way that minimizes message overload. A typical text from such a person will state the time of the event and invite you along; the event will happen with or without you, and you don’t even need to reply. If you choose to then you can accept or decline the generic invitation with a short phrase. While mass texting is efficient, it should be used sparingly, and only to communicate info regarding an important event. Etiquette would demand that people do not mass text about some minor detail of their lives, such as what they happen to be doing at the moment, personal preference, or their opinion. Facebook and Twitter remain the appropriate venue for such communication. Also it can be risky and a hassle to mass text and invite people to an event with limited attendance. For example, “I have two tickets to the ( - ) show, anyone want to go?” Depending on the text list, this can quickly turn into a nightmare for the texter, when more people want to go then there are tickets, seats, spaces available, or when people agree then change their minds. In this case, it’s best to create a Facebook event or send an old fashioned Evite. Mass texting is undoubtedly about efficiency and inclusion, but it is important to manage the text list properly so that you don’t invite people out who have since moved, are on vacation, or are recently deceased.

While mass texting is sometimes necessary, the majority of the messages we send are to individuals. We all have different attitudes toward texting in regard to what is acceptable or even necessary. Some like to send messages about trivial things, while others prefer that messages serve some logistical or practical purpose. From this we get texts as varied as, “just saw a pink cat at the mall,” to “pick up some milk on your way home from work.” Much of people’s attitude toward texting is determined by their texting plan. If you pay a twenty cents a text, you are likely not going to appreciate hearing about the pink cat; if you have an unlimited plan, you might find yourself commenting on all manner of things you see and experience in your daily routine: pink cats, a rash on your leg, the tasty burrito you just ate, how boring your client meeting is, etc. In this way texting serves to prove we exist and have thoughts and feelings. Whether anyone cares or not, this form of communication is once again more appropriate for a status update or a tweet.

Texting, along with tweeting and status updates, is changing the way we write. With texting we are developing a new shorthand for communication. Above all, we want texting to be fast, so instead of spelling out words, we reproduce them phonetically by single vowels, letters, or numbers. In this way, we take contraction to a new level and “I’ll see you later,” becomes “c u l8r.” In addition to abbreviating our words, we have created new acronyms such as MEGO, my eyes glaze over, for you business types at a meeting; MOS, mother over shoulder, for the precocious teen; or ADIH, another day in hell, for the dyed-in-the-wool optimist. One wonders if in the future we will be able to communicate in a lexicon comprised entirely of acronyms, the roots of which we will all have since committed to memory. Certainly, it wouldn’t be difficult to just use the first letter of every word, and, like airport codes, when there was some redundancy we could include only the crucial letters. What would it sound like if, for nations using the Roman alphabet, we made it a spoken language as well? Like pig latin, the question is whether or not it would catch on. AAR IDTS BITMT WWJD**?

One problem with texting is that with its short format and abbreviated form it is very difficult to sense the tone of a person’s communication. While emoticons may be helpful in indicating when someone is happy, sad, or trying to be funny, they fall far short of expressing more subtle emotions. Even if the list of emotions was expanded and the expressions refined, emoticons would still be useless in expressing irony or sarcasm. In the absence of being able to see a person’s face, hear their voice, and observe their body language, novels seem the most capable of providing us with an in-depth look into the emotional landscapes of human beings. We have all likely experienced a misunderstanding while texting where what we intended to communicate was not what was perceived. In this way the happy emoticon we intended to be funny was thought to be mocking, or the sad emoticon we employed to sympathize was misconstrued as pity. Not all of us are poets who can express great emotion and beauty with an economy of words, and even poets would have trouble employing the new vernacular to mine the depths of their souls and seduce the maidens of their hearts.

Another problem with texting is that, like all recorded writing, once the message is sent over the airwaves it is permanent. There is no taking back that drunk text to your ex-sombody late at night, that petty comment made to a friend or coworker, that bitter complaint about your job or your boss, that obscene come-on to a new love interest, and any and all off-the-cuff comments that can be misunderstood and taken out of context; no, it has become a part of the ether, recorded on someone else’s phone, and possibly forwarded to where it can make you look like a fool, do considerable damage to your reputation, and potentially destroy your livelihood. So perhaps an economy of language isn’t so bad after all. Instead of texting to replace verbal communication, which we forgive for its spontaneity and is lost to the wind, we should use it for practical purposes, never saying any more than necessary, as if we were being interrogated in a courtroom.

On the other hand, perhaps an inverse relationship exists between the quantity and the quality of our written communication. A consequence of constant texting, tweeting and updating our profiles may be that we are less concerned with the conventions of grammar, engage in less in-depth thought, and have lost our sense of audience, concerned as we are with sharing our own day to day activities and opinions with the world. The benefit of this is that if we share something personal and perhaps compromising people are less likely to care. In the sea of written information that we are all swimming in, we can no longer see the meaning for the words.

In this period of overlapping technologies and unlimited access to information, it can be confusing to understand the proper forum, format, and etiquette for our communication. Already on our phones we can talk, text, email, watch videos, play video games, listen to music, and surf the net; the same goes for our computers. The north south divide notwithstanding, what this has meant is the horizontal integration of human society in which everyone can be a creative subject. While this has made it easier to express one’s ideas and pursue one’s own self interest, it has also made it harder to be recognized in sea of competition, and harder still to determine what is quality content. Simply put, we are overwhelmed with information and need to be selective and sincere in what we share and consume.

* TMB (Text me back)
** AAR IDTS BITMT WWJD? (At any rate I don’t think so, but in the meantime what would Jesus do?)

Click here for a list of text message abbreviations.

Finding the Flow

2010-02-09T21:07:00.000-08:00

Never before in history has it been so easy to communicate with our fellow human beings. In the developed world, the majority of us carry an internet-enabled cell phone in our pocket wherever we go. At home most of us have wireless access on our computers. Through our phones and computers we surf the web, read blogs, watch videos, listen to music, and email and socially network on sites including Facebook, Twitter, etc. Meanwhile, our digital technology is radically changing the way we communicate: people spend less time talking face-to-face, more people choose to text instead of talk on their phones, short format written messages are more popular than long format, and overall quality of communication is declining. Finally, given the accessibility, variety, and redundancy of information technology, many people are feeling overwhelmed and tuning out. In short, improved technology does not necessarily mean improved communication.

When I lived in Granada, Spain, I didn’t have a phone, nor did I have internet access at home or at school, and there were no internet cafes. Yes, it sounds incredible, but it’s true. At the time, the internet was a fairly new phenomenon, and though cell phones were popular in Europe a decade before the United States, they were far from ubiquitous; I didn’t have one and neither did anyone I knew. In order to remedy these barriers to communication, I did the incredible: I paid spontaneous personal visits to my friends. While I know this is shocking and extremely faux pas in the contemporary United States, where you wouldn’t want to bother anybody who must be extremely busy by stopping by unannounced, in Granada that was what you had to do if you wanted to have friends. So when I wasn’t attending class, studying, working, etc. I would walk around town and visit people. When a friend wasn’t home, I would often hang out with and befriend a roommate; when they were, we would do the same: sit and talk, listen to music, eat, or go out to a bar or café. From there we might visit someone else and repeat the process, this time maybe substituting the bar for a park or plaza, or a sports activity. Since we all spent a lot of time hanging out face-to-face, we knew each other and our schedules pretty well: who was working where, who was at their favorite café, and who was meeting up for a volleyball game.

Socializing in Spain

Even though Granada was a town of 230,000 people, there was no need to have a phone or internet connection to locate anyone. Everything we did happened in person or by word of mouth. We all lived in shared apartments so our network was large; Groups formed organically, people would come and go depending on their obligations, and one event would transition seamlessly into the next; a day of sport would segue into drinks at a bar where someone would suggest dinner at their flat, and someone else would stop by with news of a private party or show that night. We were living in the flow, which meant embracing chance encounters and spontaneous events, and being open to and inspiring each other. This creative lifestyle opened the door to numerous positive experiences and opportunities to learn and grow as a person. While we all had our obligations, we did not neglect our social lives, and we never considered an impromptu visit an interruption or an imposition. While some aspects of that lifestyle were characteristic of being a young student, in our adult lives we still desire and deserve to be part of a dynamic loving community.

A Flamenco Community

Unfortunately, in the United States today community is become increasing harder to find and maintain. Part of this is cultural: we subscribe unquestioningly to the flawed notion that time is money, which makes it so that we are always in a hurry. We are horrified by the idea of wasting time, so we move through our lives like a train, each on our own track, making the necessary stops, and squeezing activities in where we can: grocery shopping or a visit to the doctor on our lunch break, the gym after work, dinner on the go, always for a fixed amount of time, always in terms of “How long will it take to do x, y, or z?” Sometimes our trains cross paths but most of the time they don’t. When they do we seldom stop to say hello; consequently, we have difficulty making new connections.

We take the same approach to our social lives, planning things with a sense of urgency that is self-imposed and often unnecessary. We schedule our free time like work, one hour for this and two hours for that, often overcommitting ourselves and consequently reducing the quality of our experiences with others. We do this because we mistakenly believe that if we don’t try to do it all we are somehow missing out. Ironically, by always being overbooked and in a hurry, we miss out anyway because we have eliminated spontaneity from our lives. We have forgotten that life is organic and the best experiences and encounters are those that are not planned or expected. But instead of adapting to and embracing the moment, we cling to our schedule, telling ourselves that something exciting will happen again, later, and this time as a part of our plans. But we are only fooling ourselves. In our embrace of the corporate ethos of productivity and efficiency we have lost sight of the concept of life as an exploration where value and meaning are created through quality communication, personal reflection, and informed action. It is not enough to merely act busy, make an appearance, and look the part.

Communications technology exacerbates the problem by providing us with twenty-four hour access to an ever-growing network of friends and colleagues. We are connected to so many people that it becomes harder to communicate with them all in depth or with sincerity. The number of events we hear about has grown exponentially and we feel anxious over having to choose between them. We are past the point where it is possible to delude ourselves with overbooking; there is no way we can do it all, which means we have to miss out. Our reaction to this phenomenon is two-fold: we spread ourselves too thin, thereby neglecting and straining our close relationships, and/or we begin to block communication, particularly the in-depth time-consuming variety, thereby isolating ourselves. Because we wish to stay connected, we spend more time online instead of meeting people in person, while our phone ultimately becomes a logistical device.

Sometimes I imagine how life would be in Granada if I were studying there now. I would likely spend a lot of time updating my profile for my global network of friends, while seeing those nearby less. I would know everybody’s whereabouts, and would plan my visits accordingly, never stopping by unannounced. Instead of calling people, I would text them to set up a meeting time; we would likely text back and forth several times to find out a mutually convenient time to meet at a mutually acceptable location. We would text other people and suddenly it would become too complicated and no one would go. Being informed of all the events happening on any given day through my network would ensure that I seldom went anywhere without a specific plan or purpose. Showing up or not wouldn’t matter because the invitation would be generic. If I did show up, I could pose for a couple of pictures and leave, thereby checking the activity off my to do list, because somehow having been there would become more important than being there. Alternatively, I might not go at all, after having seen no new names on the guest list, and given my familiarity with the location and the predictability of the event. When someone posted their pictures the next day, I could just imagine myself in them, write a comment like “Whoa, you’re such a crazy dancer (insert name here),” send a thumbs up and feel like I had participated, thereby maintaining my online visibility without the work of actually socializing. As a result of this more structured isolated life, I would meet less people and have fewer novel experiences. Ironically, I would feel more connected than ever while being less so.

While email, social networks, and cell phones can be useful for keeping in touch, they are not a substitute for face-to-face communication. If world leaders still insist on meeting in person, we should, too.

Corto Maltese

2010-02-01T17:16:00.000-08:00

Let me confess: I’m a fan of cartoons. I’m not talking about the Marvel or DC variety, with their save the world ethos and characters wearing tights with superpowers, fresh out of bodybuilding competitions, or Japanese Manga, but European and underground comics and graphic novels, which present the adventures of unusual and interesting characters with original artwork in the context of entertaining and well-developed plots.

I grew up reading Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix, the story of two unlikely Gauls, one short (Asterix) the other fat (Obelix), who take on the Roman empire with the help of a magic potion brewed from roots gathered by the village druid (Miraculix). While the cartoon does include historical elements, it clearly does not take itself seriously. The Romans are depicted as buffoons, and the fictional village from which the unlikely heroes originate (somewhere on the coast of modern Brittany, France) is full of idiosyncratic and truculent characters that frequently suspend their internal dramas to fight the Romans alongside their heroes.

Later I discovered Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin, a comic about a young Belgian reporter of the same name who participates in dramatic and often unusual events in exotic destinations, along with a cast of characters that include the alcoholic and irritable Captain Haddock, hard of hearing but brilliant Professor Calculus, and the bumbling twin detectives Thomson and Thomson. Hergé’s unique “ligne claire” drawing style, characterized by clean lines of uniform thickness paired with detailed realistic settings, makes the comic a pleasure read.

While historically these have been two of the more popular European comics, anyone who has been to a comic book store in Europe, or the reading library of the Belgian Comic Strip Center in Brussels, knows that they only scratch the surface of the endless variety of interesting comics available. Given the diversity of plots and themes such comics explore, they are popular with children as well as adults. In Japan, Manga are also popular with adults, in some cases because they contain pornographic content. In the United States, comics remain of interest mostly to children and young adults, though they have seen increased acceptance by an adult audience through adaptation into film. American superhero comics have historically dominated the industry while currently Manga are experiencing increased popularity. As a result, European comics, such as Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese, are not as well known in the United States, which is unfortunate because they are truly works of art.

I first discovered Corto Maltese in Bologna, Italy in a nightclub painted with characters and scenes from his adventures. I found the artwork so compelling that I stopped by a bookstore the next day to buy a copy of series. In brief, the eponymous character Corto Maltese is an enigmatic sailor/adventurer who was born in Malta to a Spanish gypsy witch and a British sailor, and who grew up in Córdoba in Andalucía. While you may find characters with a similar unusual past within the pantheon of Marvel or DC superheroes, what you won’t find is the complex character development and behavior to back it up.

Mostly, mainstream American superheroes are vehicles designed to move the plot forward in a struggle between good and evil. Frequently, they are individuals with a marginal or troubled background who discover they have superpowers as a result of some “accident,” which leads them either to become villains who avenge themselves on the world to compensate for an inferiority complex, or heroes who fight to save the world in order to gain acceptance or right some past wrong. Corto Maltese, on the other hand, is an ordinary man who does not wear a costume, has no superpowers, and possesses no special weapons. Instead of becoming a psychopath or dedicating his life to fighting injustice, as his background might indicate, he simply goes about his life looking for opportunity where he can find it; in short, he is a morally ambiguous opportunist like most human beings. And while Corto is depicted as tall, dark and handsome, he does not possess the ideal superhero physique. He is not very muscular, is hirsute, and has the rough features of a French Foreign Legionnaire. Furthermore, Pratt’s artwork displays an unfinished organic quality that adds value to the comic, but that is unfamiliar to mainstream superhero comics and Japanese Manga, which are often drawn by formula.

Another salient difference between Corto Maltese and superhero comics is their worldview. Superhero comics provide an escape from human limitations in that the reader lives vicariously through the superhero or supervillain of their choice and is able to indulge in violence without accountability and fantasize about its potential application to the obstacles in their own life. Morality in this genre is merely a function of the existing power structure; superheroes work to protect the status quo while “criminals” attempt to co-opt and/or subvert it. Corto Maltese avoids this facile dichotomy of right and wrong. Corto’s world is totally grey, and the only morality that is valid is relative to one’s own stake in the game. Corto often finds himself caught in difficult situations in which there are no easy solutions; consequently, he must make a compromise choice that often involves a sacrifice of life, a betrayal, the abandoning of some goal, or a precipitated escape when the odds become overwhelming. And while Corto Maltese does provide us with an escape, in that Corto is a risk-taker with nothing to lose who pursues opportunities worldwide, the comic is more of a reflection on the moral and ethical ambiguities of existence in the context of dramatic circumstances as experienced by an adventurous but flawed human being.

Corto is not concerned with world domination or absolute power; he is instead a man without illusions motivated by personal gain. Corto is, above all, a lonely adventurer who knows ultimately that he must look out for himself; he is not the sort to sacrifice himself for an ideal or the greater good. He is also a stoic, who speaks only when necessary and who is equally tolerant of solitude or mutually beneficial cooperation. He makes no show of his feelings, and while he may appear at times despondent, he is humble and patient, waiting for an opportunity to arrive. He does not make a big show of love, but he is not without feelings, though his expectations appear low in this regard. While Corto is no saint or role model, he often comes to the aid of the oppressed and is open minded and accepting of others.

It is with some irony then that Corto Maltese asks the ostensibly rhetorical question, “I’m not a hero, am I?” He is undoubtedly an antihero, like anyone who faces the challenges in their ordinary lives with patience, intelligence and reasoned action, and who bears their personal burdens with a sense of irony and humility. Corto is an individual one can respect because he minds his own business, neither boasts nor brags, is even-tempered and generally reasonable in his actions. But he is also a man capable of violence who is selfish in his pursuits, reticent about his true feelings, and loyal to none. While Corto embodies many of the stereotypical traits of manhood, for good and bad, he also possesses confidence, cosmopolitan elegance, self-awareness, and a sense of irony, in addition to exhibiting some sadness and vulnerability born of his solitary and unstable life. Corto is a compelling character precisely because he is enigmatic. In the world of superhero comics where people are saved, justice is served, and what you see is what you get, Corto Maltese offers no easy answers or solutions. In the context of adventure, Hugo Pratt’s seminal comic forces us to look below the surface at the mystery of life with the full knowledge that we may never come to understand ourselves or others. In this regard, Corto Maltese is an undeniable success.

In a recent conversation with a friend, I discovered that several films have been made based on Corto Maltese. Click here for a clip of Corto Maltese: La Cour secrete des Arcanes (2002). While the artwork is stylized and differs from Pratt’s original drawings, the film gives you an idea of what Corto’s all about. The clip is in French, but you can enjoy the images even if you’re not a French speaker. Unfortunately, the film is not yet available on Netflix. Join me in requesting that they add it to their library.

The Usual Suspects

2010-01-19T17:27:00.000-08:00

I’m pleased to announce that I have recently started writing a new novel, which I will discuss in more detail soon. For now, let me say that I am making good progress, and that it is exciting to once again be engaged in a major creative project. People often ask me how I develop the plot for my novels and create my characters. Do I write an outline? Do I already know the ending? Are my characters based on people I know? For each writer the approach is different. Nabokov was known to write his stories down on index cards that he could shuffle to create the preferred plot progression. Some authors use a white board or tape butcher paper to the wall to document the traits, personalities, and appearance of their characters and to list the events that will occur in each chapter. Others like Kerouac have sat down and knocked out a draft of a novel in a fever of inspiration over several uninterrupted days. Indeed, the strategies and techniques to writing novels are as varied as the authors who write them.

In my case, I develop the plot in my head without writing it down. This is an ongoing process, whether I am walking on the beach, hanging out with friends at a potluck dinner or in a bar, or lying in bed at three in the morning. During this incubation period the things I experience in my daily life catalyze a story that may have been on my mind for many years. Something as simple as a crow pecking at a paper bag, a wilted rose in the gutter, a lingerie advertisement, or a busker in a sailor’s cap playing the guitar can start a chain reaction in my head as I make connections between things that are apparently unrelated in time, space, or logic. As for character development, all my characters are hybrids of people I know, strangers, archetypes, and often myself. To develop literary characters is to shuffle the fragments of appearance, personality, behavior, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, morals, and history, and create beautiful mosaics. Every experience a writer has strengthens his craft, and every individual he meets is a potential source of inspiration. There are talented writers who have stayed in one place all their lives, and others who have traveled the world in search of novel experience. It can take a lifetime to know one place well and even in a small town one never knows everyone. Many people can travel the world without perceiving anything but themselves and their own preoccupations and prejudices. Both the sedentary and wandering writer are good at their craft when they pay attention to their environment and listen to what people have to say. They are similar in that they are inherently curious and want to acquire some understanding of people and the world they live in.

The final scene of the film The Usual Suspects (1995) provides an excellent illustration of the creative process of a writer. For those of you unfamiliar with the film, it centers on the narrative of Roger “Verbal” Kint, an apparently crippled con man who is under police interrogation as a suspect of a massacre and boat fire in San Pedro Bay, Los Angeles. The film is essentially Verbal’s retelling of the events leading up to the incident, the people involved, and their motivations. In his story he makes frequent reference to Keyser Söze, the criminal mastermind who everybody fears but few have ever seen, and who Verbal claims is responsible for the killings on the boat. Verbal’s story, it turns out, is a fabrication created from bits of information gleaned from a bulletin board on the wall behind U.S. Customs Agent Dave Kujan’s desk, and other visual clues, including the manufacturer of Kujan’s coffee cup, Kobayashi. Verbal skillfully mixes these facts with his lived experience and imagination, and, conscious of his audience, tailors it to convince Agent Kujan to let him walk out of the police station a free man.

Like the aptly nicknamed Verbal, the fiction author also draws on his experience and environment for inspiration and, with the help of the imagination, modifies it to create a credible and compelling story. In the end, only the author knows what the origins of a character or a scene really are: how many parts this and how much of that, how much fact and how much fantasy. Writing fiction is complex in that it is both a conscious and logical, and subconscious and instinctual act. The plot is developed in a logical way to a certain end, with each scene having a specific purpose, but once the characters with their unique personalities are released into their artificial environment, all bets are off. Like real people they behave irrationally, say strange and inappropriate things, mock themselves, dawdle when action is needed, refuse to die or die prematurely, become murderers, love the wrong people, find luck without merit, rebel against their fate, and often fail to learn their lesson. Who could have known? I believe these surprises are the subconscious part of writing, and more abstractly the result of instinct, or knowing what is right for a scene when logic comes up short. The writer seeks to explore themes and answer questions, and develops a plot to that end. Fiction is fascinating because, with its unique blend of fact and fantasy, it takes both the writer and the reader on unusual journeys with surprising conclusions and revelations.

Fiction is an artistic discipline that acknowledges by definition its own falsehood, while ironically revealing general truths about the human experience that we often ignore or are afraid to recognize. In our daily interactions we spend too much of our time lying to ourselves and to each other. These are white lies, lies by omission, lies of defense, lies of malice, lies for personal gain, etc. What fiction allows us, under the guise of fabrication, is to face the truth; non-fiction, on the other hand, while containing extensive factual information, cannot escape being a lie, or the subjective interpretation of events about which others would disagree. What the writer discovers in the pursuit of his profession is that all of human civilization is a fiction generated by human imagination. Everywhere the writer looks, he cannot help but see the absurdity of certain beliefs, attitudes, and behavior perpetuated by force of habit or laziness, or through violence and repression. Consequently, he considers anyone who accepts the world at face value either a coward or a fool. Ultimately, he feels compelled to sit down and explore in writing the mystery of human existence. He chooses fiction because within its pages he enjoys a freedom of expression frequently absent in the physical world. Like Scheherazade, the writer endeavors to make our precarious and finite existence as meaningful and rewarding as possible by spinning a good yarn. To that end he creates the usual suspects for his next book, knowing that they will acquire a life of their own and surprise us, like the gangster Keyser Söze.

Urgent: Save California’s Parks!

2009-06-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

As you may have heard, Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed closing 220 of our state parks in order to reduce the state budget deficit. You can read more about this proposal and the threatened parks in the links below, but let me summarize by saying that it is a bad idea and one that has the potential to forever change California for the worse. Closing our state parks would cost California more in lost tourist revenue than it would provide in budget savings, it would endanger the health and safety of Californians by increasing fire risk and criminal activity within park boundaries, and it would deny us access to public land for low cost recreational and leisure purposes, when clearly such options are needed now more than ever.

Andrew Molera State Park

First off, the $143 million that state parks currently receive in funding is less than one-tenth of one percent of the entire state budget. According to the California Sate Park Foundation (CSPF), for every dollar that funds the parks, $2.35 is returned to the state's General Fund through economic activities in the communities surrounding the parks. California would lose $350 million in revenue should the proposed park closures be approved, money that would have otherwise been invested in local communities that depend on the parks for their economic prosperity. California’s appeal as a tourist destination depends largely on the beauty and diversity of its natural environment. With closed parks, tourists would be unable enjoy California’s natural beauty and would likely invest their tourist dollars elsewhere in the United States and abroad.

California parks are maintained and patrolled by dedicated park employees who manage to do a lot with few resources. If parks were to be closed, then facilities such as bathrooms, buildings of historical importance, and campsites would be degraded and damaged. Trails would be reclaimed by vegetation and dead timber and brush would build up and create a fire hazard. Fires, which occasionally occur in wilderness areas, seldom occur in existing parks because they are effectively managed. Individuals that continue to use parks after they have closed would exacerbate this fire risk. A single fire in one abandoned state park could quickly nullify any budget savings resulting from the proposed closure of 80% of our park system. We all know regular maintenance saves money, whether with a car, a house or a state park. Fire risk notwithstanding, if we let our parks close and decay we can expect that they will be very expensive to bring back into working order. Given that many don’t want to pay tax for the park services and facilities they currently use, it might prove politically challenging to reopen our parks in the future.

Garrapata State Park

State parks are the primary providers of convenient and affordable access to California’s stunning natural beauty. Our parks protect a variety of Californian ecosystems and provide habitat for plants and animals that have been displaced by human development and activity elsewhere. They also preserve California history by maintaining structures and artifacts, and operating museums that tell stories of California’s past. When a park closes it means that people who enjoy and wish to preserve and protect our natural spaces will be kept out, while others will see the lack of stewardship and management of our parks as an opportunity to engage in illegal activities such as poaching, squatting, and drug trafficking within their boundaries. Furthermore, many individuals in local communities are unlikely to accept the closure of their parks and will thereby risk being cited, fined, or imprisoned for continuing to use public land. Those who do obey the rules will find themselves living in a beautiful state with no access to its wonderful natural resources. Californians statewide will be forced to drive by state parks containing trials where they previously enjoyed hiking or biking, beaches where they swam, surfed and dove, rivers and lakes where they fished, and campsites where the spent the night under the stars.

Clearly, the governor’s proposal is not based on sound financial data, the health and safety of Californians and its visitors, an appreciation of nature, or a proper understanding of natural resource management. So let’s posit for a moment that the governor wants to close state parks in order to privatize them. Well, the facts line up perfectly with this hypothesis. Close the parks, let them decay and become areas of crime, scare the public and intervene with a major police operation in a high profile problem park, reap the political capital by appearing strong on crime, and then propose to sell our blighted state parks to developers to make room for hotels and luxury homes with beachfront, mountain, valley, lake or river views that now only the rich will enjoy. If one park were to fall to privatization, it will set a legal precedent that would facilitate the privatization of future parks that could result in the demise of our park system. That is the worst case scenario, though I do put my faith in others to join me to oppose the park closures that could set this ball rolling.

Point Lobos State Natural Reserve

One suggestion that would prevent our parks being closed is the implementation of a California State Park Access Pass which would provide all California residents unlimited access to all state parks via a fifteen dollar surcharge on vehicle license registration fees. This would provide an estimated $363 in annual net revenue for our state parks which is more than the $143 million they currently receive in funding from the General Fund, which is proposed to be cut by half through June 2010, and then eliminated entirely the following fiscal year. Not only will this provide significant additional funding to increase staffing and make needed park improvements, it would be a bargain for the public. With recent fees hikes, park users pay between six and eight dollars, and in some cases ten dollars a day for parking. Californians who visit state parks at least twice a year have received a benefit equal to or exceeding the fee paid for the California State Park Access Pass, and will save money with each additional visit they make.

Protecting our state parks is our responsibility, so please do your part and take fifteen minutes to write a letter, send a postcard, or call Governor Schwarzenegger, your state assemblyman, and your state senator to let them know how you feel about proposed park closures and to voice your support for the California State Park Access Pass as a solution to saving our parks. Below are the necessary links to facilitate your communication and provide you with more information on this vitally important issue. Note: the California state legislature will be voting to approve a budget soon, so it is important that you express your political will ASAP in order to influence their vote.

Click here for a map of proposed park closures and a list of California state assemblymen and senators to contact to protest the governor's proposal.

Click here to take action by donating to CSPF or to join the CSPF group on Facebook.

For more on the California State Park Access Pass, click here.

Fly Away

2009-05-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

We all admire and even envy birds for their power of flight. Flight is synonymous with freedom, and it is only natural that we would want to escape our terrestrial jail. Though we may enjoy a bird’s eyes view of the world as we stare out the airplane window, we are limited in our destination and insulated from our environment.

Up to now, parachutes have allowed us to fall through the sky without dying on impact, and paragliding and hang gliding have permitted us to sail on the wind with minimal equipment. As it is unlikely that human beings will ever develop wings of their own, the wingsuit was created to bring us even closer to natural flight. Using the time-tested design of animals such as flying lizards and squirrels, these suits have revolutionized human flight, providing the daring (and perhaps crazy) with a new-found freedom and adrenaline rush.

Living la vida loca

While birds developed wings out of practical concerns: to escape danger, find food, and occupy hitherto inaccessible ecological niches, like people they also enjoy flying and are perhaps even proud of their unique talent. Let me offer two examples to support my case. Once, while at the beach, I happened upon some birds playing in the waves. The surf was up that day and the seagulls, hovering in the air and sitting in the water behind the surf zone, were taking turns dropping in on and gliding along the face of the ten foot plus waves, much as a surfer might, pulling out just before impact. They did this for the better part of an hour. I have seen this phenomenon before with dolphins and pelicans, but though dolphin play has been acknowledged, bird play has been largely ignored. Among the surfers of the world, where “surfer” means one who rides waves for fun, we can include birds and acknowledge that they are better at it than we are, effectively harnessing the air foil of the wave without ever wiping out.

The pride of birds became apparent to me when again on the beach, on a windy day, I watched the seagulls lift off and hang suspended a few feet off the ground supported by a strong headwind. It seemed to me that the look in their eyes was one of superiority, which seemed to say: Don’t you wish you could fly like me? Don’t you?

Feeling superior?

The latest wingsuit technology aside, the human desire for flight is nothing new. More than fun, it is an expression of our deep desire to escape the limits of our terrestrial habitat, natural laws such as gravity, and our own humanity. Like tourism, flight offers us an escape from our daily routine and the local politics of our communities. Like any sort of travel, distance allows us to reflect and gain perspective on our lives. On a deeper level, we wish to escape ourselves, or more precisely individual consciousness. After all, being conscious and desiring not to be is what makes us human.

For more on wingsuits, click here.
Check out this great video of wingsuit flying in Norway.
The flying squirrel, a prototype for human flight.

Archaeopteryx: A Prehistoric Rebel

2009-04-19T22:10:00.001-07:00

Like most of my fellow students in elementary school, I went through a period of dinosaur infatuation. It was fantastic to discover, while learning cursive and the times table, that giant creatures had once inhabited the earth. To dream of dinosaurs and of oneself as a dinosaur was to free oneself of the helplessness of being a child forced to sit at a school desk, obey authoritarian adults, and eat in a civilized way at the dinner table. Dinosaurs provided a way out of the boring day-to-day routine of being a kid. Bill Watterson, in his seminal cartoon Calvin and Hobbes, was appreciative of the attraction of dinosaurs to imaginative children, drawing many strips of Calvin, like this one:

Because I was not alone in my infatuation, when my teacher taught her dinosaur lesson, the discipline problems ceased and were replaced by rapt attention and avid participation in all activities that shed more light on these prematurely-departed, enigmatic creatures. As a result of our studies, it was only logical that we developed preferences for certain dinosaurs. Girls generally liked the elegant and gentle Brontosaurus, while boys preferred the imposing Tyrannosaurus Rex. In particular, I liked Ankylosaurus, and later the more elusive Archaeopteryx.

Ankylosaurus appealed to me because, though a peaceful herbivore, he was armored like a tank and had a club for a tail. These defenses permitted Ankylosaurus to cultivate a mind-your-own-business and I’ll mind mine attitude that even the most formidable predator was ill-advised to ignore. In my own childhood Ankylosaurus fantasy, I would be trapped in the downtown of some major American city smashing through display windows and crushing cars with my deadly club, National Guard machine gun fire caroming off my back, in my escape from the municipal zoo. Though such ambition and violence was uncharacteristic for dim-witted Ankylosaurus, when threatened I felt certain he would defend his interests with passion.

Peaceful but prepared

For a childhood friend and I, dinosaur fever didn’t end with picture books, daydreams, and toy replicas. In the side yard of my house we started our own quarry where we would dig for hours after school. And to our surprise we made several important fossil discoveries. A femur here, a rib there, some toe bones, and then our greatest find: a skull from a yet to be recorded species. Of course, my parents indulged our obsession and humored our efforts. For what we had dug up with pick and shovel were chunks of leftover concrete that had be poured there along with gravel, etc. from the foundation and patio of the house.

The ability of children to transform a rules-based, constrained, and over-defined physical world into fantasy, entertainment, and invention is a unique talent that we as adults need to revive and incorporate into our lives. A return to this stage of guileless curiosity can provide us with relief from the frustration and suffering we experience daily and the cynicism and apathy that often overwhelm our thinking as a result. What children know, intuitively, is that illusions are essential to a healthy active mind, and that surprises and mystery are what we thirst after to save us from the limitations of a routine existence.

Unlike the popular and well-documented Ankylosaurus, Archaeopteryx was a creature of mystery; it did not readily appear in the dinosaur literature I devoured with enthusiasm from the local library, nor did any come in those packs of multicolored plastic dinosaurs with which we would stage our prehistoric battles in the sandbox. What I did read about Archaeopteryx was often contradictory and hypothetical. Scientific opinion was divided on whether it lived on the ground, in bushes or by the water, if it used it wings for gliding or active flight, and whether it ran and flew (“ground up” hypothesis) or climbed and flew (“trees down” hypothesis). Later I learned that the Archaeopteryx was the earliest universally recognized bird, and the discovery of a complete fossil in 1861 (two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species) made it a key piece of evidence in the debate over evolution. Because the Archaeopteryx had flight feathers, it was determined to be a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds. Though this was beyond the scope of our elementary school dinosaur lesson, what was fascinating to me as a child was the presence of a small bird-like creature in an ecosystem dominated by large terrestrial dinosaurs.

Archaeopteryx was truly an individual among its peers of the Jurassic Period. While petrosaurs where still flying with skin flap wings, Archaeopteryx was a prototypical bird that had survived by developing feathers before these became the standard of avian flight. Nevertheless, it was still not officially a “bird,” because it retained several reptilian characteristics including wing claws, a toothed beak, and a long vertebrate tail. In a world of creatures doomed to extinction, Archaeopteryx was a resourceful generalist that could thrive in different environments. The logic of Archaeopteryx evolution was this: Why remain on the ground when you can fly? Why not do both? Fly to escape danger and to reach other food sources, and use your claws and long legs to hunt on the ground. Though not thought to be a true ancestor of modern birds, Archaeopteryx is a close relative of that ancestor. There is something to be said for a rare and ancient creature that survived from the age of dinosaurs, through ancestors and descendants that include that crow outside your window.

As a kid, I though Archaeopteryx looked cool, and I liked the idea of having both claws and wings. I also admired how Archaeopteryx had created a unique hybrid identity by developing useful traits and discarding its dinosaur limitations. Though it may have been ignored, or considered a nuisance or occasional food source by the larger dinosaurs, Archaeopteryx had nonetheless hit upon an elegant solution to survival that its contemporaries had overlooked. What may have seemed ridiculous at first, the feather, turned out to be a revolutionary adaptation: one that continues to amaze and inspire the envy of modern humanity.

Archaeopteryx: A Prehistoric Rebel

What we can learn from Archaeopteryx is that unique ideas are seldom appreciated or adopted by the status quo, but that this need not be cause for despair. Contemporaries usually judge and treat harshly those who march to the beat of their own drummer and innovate where previous ideas have failed, are inadequate or altogether absent. People often criticize, mock and label what they don’t understand and consequently fear. While that is unfortunate, for those possessing the heroic audacity of Archaeopteryx, this need not be a hindrance, but an opportunity for progressive and successful adaptation to the changing demands of life.

Ankylosaurus takes on T-Rex in this video.
Click here for more on Archaeopteryx.

A Garden of One’s Own

2009-04-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t get any more local than growing food in your own backyard and making everything by hand. Imagine how great it would be to have your own vegetable garden, fruit trees and livestock, and to make your own pasta, ice cream and beer. Still, I must admit that though I try to eat healthy and follow my own advice, there are certain foods I feel are best left to professionals to produce, pasta and ice cream falling into this category. While I have seen Italian women making ravioli by hand in a campground in Italy (I kid you not), I am not yet ready to be that hardcore about my food. And while I have helped an ex-girlfriend in Brazil make ice cream at her family’s house, I prefer to buy it ready on a stick. Home-brewed beer on the other hand is always worth a try; in spite of mixed results, I still have fond memories of making it with friends during college.

Though one could just as well prepare them by hand, in some cases it is more efficient to buy processed foods, provided they don’t contain harmful ingredients. I buy canned beans because I don’t have the foresight to soak dry beans, salsa because it costs the same or less than an equal weight of tomatoes, and hummus because I would either have to buy chickpeas canned, or soak them dry before preparing the hummus itself.

Though I may not be a back-to-the-farm purist, I like to know the origin, nature of preparation, and nutritional benefits of the food I eat. Meat-eaters, like myself, would gain valuable perspective over the slabs of shrink-wrapped flesh we poke at in the clinical lighting of the meat aisle if we witnessed, at least once, the slaughter and dressing of the mammals we eat. Similarly, if we observed the production of the processed foods we eat, we might question eating them at all. We also might see how we could make the food we enjoy healthier by preparing it ourselves.

While good cooking is an art form, it is also important to remember that we eat food for a reason: namely to provide our bodies with the nutrients they need to function. We need to put our preference for excessive salt, sugar and fat aside and learn to enjoy the complex and unique flavors of vegetables and fruit. We need to favor the inner nutritional value of food over its appearance.

Many of you, like me, may recall childhood memories of eating junk food and drinking soda, and college years spent surviving on instant noodles with the little MSG packet for flavor. Some of you may have also heard the urban legend about the student who contracted scurvy, due to a diet devoid of fruit and vegetables. Though this is an extreme case, many children and young adults in the United States do not receive enough nutrition in their daily diets. As a teacher I have noticed the effects of a poor diet of candy, cookies, chips and soda on young children; the sugar and caffeine high prevents them from sitting still or focusing their attention in class, while too much salt makes them irritable and hard to manage. While efforts have been made by government to ban junk food and soda vending machines in schools, and schools have tried to improve the nutritional value of their cafeteria menu, parents also bear the responsibility of providing kids with healthy food and snacks at home. In many cases, this requires that parents improve their own food culture and avoid the hazards of low-quality processed food and the temptation of convenience that the modern food industry promotes. One way to do this would be to plant a garden of one’s own and thereby gain hands-on experience with food production, while reaping a modest but healthy harvest of fresh fruits and vegetables.

When it comes to growing one’s own food one obviously needs a suitable yard or property, a favorable climate and good soil. Gazing out onto the lava rock garden of my rented apartment, I realize that I, like many Americans, currently have neither the space nor the property to achieve this dream. Today, many Americans live in urban areas, in suburban apartments without yards, or in subdivisions of small lots. In many cases, it is simply not possible to cultivate anything more than a few tomatoes and some herbs in the window sill or on the roof of an urban tenement, in a pot on the back porch of the apartment, or in a small part of the yard of the suburban home which isn’t already occupied with lawn and generic landscaping. Cleary, without a piece of land free of the concrete jungle of the metropolis and the sprawl of suburbia, it is nearly impossible to create even a moderate level of self-sufficiency and personal food security. Nevertheless, I think we could all benefit from growing a few vegetables in the spaces available to us, or through co-ops with like-minded neighbors.

In many cities across the United States, citizens are creating urban gardens to produce their own food. As a result, neighborhoods that were previously neglected and consequently prone to vandalism and crime have been revitalized. First Lady Michelle Obama has also shown that she values community and locally grown organic food by planting a garden (with the help of fifth-graders from a local elementary school) on the South Lawn of the White House. This garden sends a positive message to both the participating students and to the public that we can take control of our own diet and health, while respecting the environment and promoting community life.

Urban planners can take a page of inspiration from the First Lady and urban gardeners by including community gardens in their project master plans. A frequent problem with suburban planned development is the lack of access to goods and services, and an absence of community spirit. Imagine if new subdivisions included, in addition to required parks, areas dedicated to gardens that were proportionally large enough to provide each household with a box of seasonal vegetables once a month, or several times a year? On weekends homeowners could tend the garden along with their children, or while their children play in the adjacent park. They could also organize culinary events based on the harvest, using community facilities (to the extent these exist), or through rotating events held in private homes.

For people who are unable to have their own garden, many cities run farmers' markets where you can buy quality, small-scale produce from local growers, which is superior to what you’ll find in the supermarket. In addition, there is frequently more organic food on offer at these events. Farmers’ markets also give the opportunity to socialize with other people in the community: often a rare occurrence in a modern world typified by commuting, frequent relocation, and a preference for private artificial entertainment in the form of movies, television, internet, and video games.

Alternatively, it is possible to have a box of seasonal organic produce delivered to your door from local farms. While local, organic produce may not look perfect, it is usually superior in taste to what’s on offer at your local supermarket, which is harvested early for a longer shelf life, and bred to be uniform in appearance and to travel well. For the consumer this often means rock hard peaches, mealy apples, and cardboard tomatoes. No thanks! I’ll take taste over appearance any day.

The best thing you can do with your homegrown or local-bought produce is to share it with friends in tasty meals prepared for small dinner parties, or potlucks. The potluck is a great tradition because it allows us to take time out from our busy schedules to cook our favorite meals, eat together, and interact with our friends. More often than not, the food on offer is delicious and can inspire our own cooking. While we all have our culinary preferences based on culture, tradition, small epiphanies, habit and convenience, we become our better selves when we discover and appreciate different food and the people who prepare and share it with us. While sincere communication and mutual interests build friendship and understanding, food is still the fastest path to the heart.

Click here to learn more about scurvy.
Click here for more info on urban gardening.
Visit the White House Blog to learn more about the White House Kitchen Garden.

The Case of the Casu Marzu

2009-03-30T23:20:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in the previous blog, “Certain [food] producers have created a brand identity based on tradition, to the extent that substitution won’t do.” In Sardinia, you’ll find an expression of this traditional identity in local, organic products like Casu marzu, a sheep’s milk cheese that has passed from the state of fermentation to decomposition just clear of toxicity. To make Casu marzu, aficionados deliberately introduce maggots into the cheese which proceed to burrow through their new home, eating and shitting until the cheese achieves a flavor that will bring tears to your eyes and spasms to your throat. While popular, the cheese is illegal in its country of origin, and on the black market fetches twice the price of ordinary (read: fermented, not rotten) pecorino, For the cheese to be safe the maggots must still be alive, though some people like to suffocate them in a bag before dining.

While traveling in Sardinia with friends some years ago, I had the opportunity to try this unique cheese, without any prior knowledge of it, at the home of my old Sardinian roommate in the small town of San Vero Milis. Though Wikipedia claims the worms can jump up to six inches, we did not experience this phenomenon, as we were likely too quick for the little buggers. Still, it seems likely that they would react in such a way when threatened with being devoured along with their pungent home.

This incident found its way into my Italian adventure novel, The Amateurs (2001). In the following scene the American protagonist, Nick, while traveling with his Sardinian friend, Sergio, suddenly comes face to face with the perils of Sardinian tradition at the home of Sergio’s cousin, Armando, in Alghero.

"Here is some sausage and fruit, and I've saved a little surprise. I have some special cheese. The kind you don't find on the mainland," Armando said, giving Sergio a wink.

"You will love this cheese, Nick. It is not like most cheese that does not have taste or character. It is typical of Sardinia."

Sergio was proud of his homeland and never failed to impress upon Nick the superiority of all things Sardinian. Nick enjoyed Italian cooking and, from what he had tried of it so far, Sardinian food was no different. He ate some of the pork sausage, lightly seasoned with spices and herbs, and sipped the glass of dry red wine Armando had poured for him. Both were good, and he looked forward to trying the cheese. Armando cut a slice for each of them from the wheel and put it on their plates.

Nick noticed how the cheese was slightly caved in, rough on the surface, and somewhat wet around the edges where it sat on the plate. It was probably a strong, moldy cheese like Gorgonzola, which he had grown to like in small quantities.

Armando casually popped a slice in his mouth along with some sausage, while Sergio ate his with care.

"How it is good! Just like on the farm," Sergio said.

Nick followed their example, breaking off a small piece to start. Just before he put the cheese in his mouth, he noticed movement. Looking closer, he saw a maggot undulating its tiny body to a silent and personal soundtrack. Had it not been for the creature’s small black head, he might not have noticed, as the creamy yellow worm matched the cheese exactly in color. So there was a worm in the cheese! No matter, he would chew it and the stray parasite would decompose in the acid of his stomach. Still, he found the maggot’s movement unnerving. He gave a closer inspection and noticed that fully half the cheese was maggots. With the fascination that anticipates horror, he watched their tubular bodies writhe and twist in and out of their meal and home, like the tentacles of a terrestrial sea anemone.

"Don't look at it, Nick, just eat it."

Nick noted that Sergio was not smiling when he said this. Nor was there any laughter to indicate that it was a joke. It was clear that both Sergio and Armando were very fond of the cheese and were waiting impatiently for him to join them in this rare feast. Nick knew his refusal to eat this typical Sardinian product would be considered an insult to their culture. To avoid losing their trust or goodwill, especially after making a fool of himself in the cave, Nick popped the cheese in his mouth, chewed with deliberation, and looked them in the eye. Meanwhile, inside his mouth, his taste buds were being violently assaulted by a substance he knew he should not swallow. The cheese was a culinary force to be reckoned with, introducing him to flavors he never imagined possible and did not want to revisit. Had he expected rotten, maggot-ridden cheese to be any different?

He reached for his wine in a manner that would appear casual.

"Don't drink the wine, Nick, it mixes badly with the cheese and ruins the taste,” Sergio advised, picking a stray maggot from his teeth.

"It's good isn't it," Armando said.

"Yes, very flavorful," Nick said, suppressing a gag.

"It's a shame, really, that it’s illegal. Just because of the occasional death from bad preparation. Everybody knows to make sure the worms are still alive. Still, if the health inspector came he would have us all arrested. Ma, people still sell it like this and I'm willing to take the risk. I'd rather be arrested for cheese than anything else I've done," Sergio said.

"Yes, you have to wait until it gets good and rotten,” Armando said. “The maggots provide that deep flavor. They eat and shit and something inside them turns it from a good cheese to something truly delightful."

Armando was almost giddy with pleasure when he spoke about the cheese. He cut himself another generous slice and rolled it around in his mouth with his tongue, chewing slowly and with obvious satisfaction.

"Go on, have another slice, ragazzi. It's had to sit for many months to get this way. A real delicacy for a special occasion."

Sergio helped himself and passed the plate to Nick.

"No, c'è, I'm fine. The truth is I'm not that hungry, and I don't want to spoil dinner.”

“You know best,” Sergio told him.

Nick thought about making a joke about spoiled cheese and spoiled dinner but he kept his mouth shut. He told himself he did not want another slice, not because he couldn’t handle the maggots, but because the cheese was really too strong.

"I prefer a younger cheese," he told them, diplomatically.

While Sergio and Armando conversed in Sardinian, Nick could not help but stare at the cheese. How many maggots did he count? No, he did not want to count. Best to just forget it, he told himself.

Like Armando in the book, our Sardinian hosts were very gracious, inviting us into their home and sharing with us their delicious local food, including flatbread, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh pasta, olives, and myrtle liquor. As for Casu marzu, it remains a personal taste. Later in the trip, one of my friends who was keen on traditional products insisted on buying a contraband wheel of Casu marzu to snack on as we traveled. Not a bad idea, since we didn’t have to worry about it spoiling in the car. Still, because we were never sure if it was too rotten, we ended up throwing it out after only a couple of slices. Knowing what I do now about this surreal product, I am glad we did. Though a unique experience, I won’t be eating Casu marzu any time soon.

To learn more about Casu marzu, click here.

Locals Only?

2009-03-20T14:59:00.000-07:00

In the past few years, a debate has developed over the benefits and drawbacks of eating local versus organic food. In some cases there need not be a conflict of choice between the two, particularly in California where the climate and soil favors cultivation of a large variety of crops, and where organic produce is readily available at local markets. But if a choice has to be made, I would favor local produce over imported organic produce. The cost of transport, which is currently externalized by the food industry, makes it such that eating imported organic produce has a significant impact on global warming. Though I disagree with the methods of production of factory farms, they nonetheless control the market and are more difficult to challenge through individual choice. The fight against factory farms is by necessity waged at the policy level with the Federal Government, particularly in regard to the Farm Bill.

In my decision to buy local produce, I had to ask myself what made local produce special, compared to other products. In other words, why do I insist on local organic produce, and not on local sustainably-manufactured goods? Probably because good soil and climate can’t be outsourced, whereas factories can, and, as I discussed in a previous post, our manufacturing industry has been almost entirely outsourced. In other words, aside from specialty products, it can be hard to come by local sustainably-manufactured goods. But what about other foodstuffs? Well, in some cases certain producers have created a brand identity based on tradition, to the extent that substitution won’t do. Cheese and wine often fall into this category because they are tied to place by their unique taste. Local water, weather patterns, etc. influence the development of the crops that the cows eat, and the growth cycles and sugar content of the grapes. These products also rely on certain methods and techniques of production that are seldom reproducible. As for produce in general, while peaches may taste different from field to field, tree to tree, or fruit to fruit, the price of a peach doesn’t vary much within each growing season, and has no added value beyond the cost of harvest labor. So while I will buy cheese imported from Europe (notwithstanding our happy California cows), I can wait for California strawberries, oranges, apples, etc. to come into season. And because California wine is as good as any in the world, due to our favorable climate, I see no need to imported wine from France. The rule for me is: if I can find a local substitute, I will.

Personally, I decided that I wouldn’t eat produce imported from, for example, Chile, and would instead eat locally, seasonally and organically, when possible. This is not as much of a sacrifice as some might imagine, given that I live next to the Salinas Valley, the so-called “Salad Bowl of America.” But for people who live in Maine, locally and seasonally means subsisting on blueberries, potatoes, apples, and maple syrup. In this case, it makes sense to adopt the “more local than . . .” rule where, for example, Maine continues to import peaches from Georgia and oranges from Florida, and does not import them out of season from Chile and Brazil, respectively. A problem arises when there are no “more local than . . .” markets available, and California, for example, must ship produce a few thousand miles across the continent. The problem is this: I pay the same price as someone from Maine for lettuce grown ten miles from my house. In other words, I (along with other people living close to the source of production) am subsidizing lettuce consumption in Maine. In my opinion, Mainers can pay a premium for what is rare to them, as I would be willing to pay more for Maine lobster, if I couldn’t get lobster off the coast of California.

While local consumers in the United States subsidize the transportation cost of produce for distant markets, consumers across the board don’t pay the true cost of labor to harvest crops. Farmers often employ farm labor contractors (FLCs) to oversee the workers who harvest their fields. Worker wages, paid either piece rate or hourly, are low to keep costs down for consumers and profits up for farmers, contractors, wholesale distributors, and restaurant and grocery chains. In addition, a majority of California’s agricultural workers have no health insurance and seldom visit the doctor, though they suffer from a variety of health problems, including obesity. Some of them are also subject to abuses by their employers and opportunists who provide housing, food, and rides at exorbitant rates, as is the case with tomato harvesters in Florida. In order to improve the quality of life of farm workers, we as consumers will have to pay more for the produce we buy. But, since we are the last point of the distribution chain, worker pay must be raised by growers and contractors, which depends on wholesalers, restaurants and grocery chains paying more for produce and either passing the price on to the consumer, or marginally reducing profits.

We also do not pay the true cost of water to grow our food. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in 2000, irrigation accounted for 40% of total water withdrawals in the United States, and 65% of total water withdrawals, excluding thermoelectric power. The water farmers use is, in large part, subsidized by the Federal Government. Notwithstanding fraud, these subsidies increase grower profits while lowering the cost of produce for the consumer. If these subsidies were reduced, or eliminated, we would see a dramatic increase in food prices. While that is not a desirable outcome for the consumer, we cannot ignore that water subsidies create a wasteful attitude toward what is an increasingly rare resource. Some solutions to this problem include using reclaimed water on crops, repairing and replacing outdated or damaged irrigation infrastructure, and eliminating the lawn.

According to a study by Cristina Milesi of NASA’s Ames Research Center, the largest irrigated crop (in surface area) in the United States is the lawn, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all. “Even conservatively,” Milesi says, “I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.” In spite of the lawn’s status as an icon of the American Dream, it is also an environmental nightmare; and while I respect the Scots and their kilts, I can’t forgive them for inventing golf, given it is the most water-intensive and environmentally destructive game on earth, converting large tracts of natural landscape into lawns. According to the USGS, in 2000, "Irrigation remained the largest use of freshwater in the United States." Irrigation of residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, cemeteries, and other landscaping made a significant contribution to this use. Consumers and businesses alike could significantly reduce their water consumption by simple removing their lawns, and related water intensive landscaping, and planting native vegetation that is adapted to and can survive natural climate cycles with little or no additional irrigation. Alternatively, domestic lawns can be converted into gardens, allowing households to grow their own food.

Resources:

Click here for David Lighthall’s article “The Poor Health of Farm Workers." Mr. Lighthall is the executive director of the California Institute of Rural Studies.
Click here for Barry Estabrook’s article “The Price of Tomatoes: Keeping Slavery Alive in Florida.”
The Environmental Working Group article, "Taking From the Taxpayers," provides more info on water subsidies and fraud.
Click here for more on Cristina Milesi’s satellite lawn research at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
For water use figures for 2000, visit the USGS website.

Saúde!

2009-03-15T21:41:00.000-07:00

As they say in Brazil: Saúde! To your health! Keeping healthy depends on exercising the mind and body, getting enough rest, and eating well. For the purpose of this blog, let’s look at diet. Growing up, my mom prepared home-cooked meals that she served every day promptly at five o’clock. She cooked a lot of vegetarian meals, and when we did eat meat, it was always served in moderation and confined to poultry or pork. Dinner always included a salad, so we could get our raw vegetables. She also prepared several, at the time, exotic dishes, such as Indian curry and Chinese stir-fry. Eating habits, along with our morals and beliefs, come from our parents. Because of the tradition established by my mom, when I went away to college and lived on my own, I cooked for myself and followed a regular dinner schedule. I cooked many of my mom’s recipes and also invented my own. I always cooked more than I needed, so I would have leftovers. This saved me from having to cook everyday and provided me with surplus time to study and write.

As a kid, I though it was normal that everyone went home to eat dinner with their family at a certain hour. In fact, I took it for granted that there would be dinner waiting on the table for me every day at five. Nor did I realize, though it has left a lasting impression on me, that not only was I getting healthy food in my stomach, but also valuable and consistent contact with my family, the so-called “quality-time” we hear so much about. Well, we called it “dinner,” a time when not only did we eat but also discussed ideas, told stories, and shared the latest news and events of our day. And even if we didn’t always talk deep, we still enjoyed each other’s company. A childhood friend, with whom I still keep in contact, later told me that what he liked about my family was that we always ate together. He said he remembered how, as the clock neared five, I would abruptly excuse myself in the middle of some game or activity we were involved in and make a beat home to dinner. It seemed that what I had taken for granted was not as common as one might have thought. Certainly, there were many families who, because of work and/or lack of tradition, did not eat home-cooked meals together, surviving instead on processed food and eating individually when it suited their personal schedules. In most cases, they could have chosen differently.

Food is to the group as the breath is to the individual. Food brings people together for the most noble of purposes: to give fuel to the body to be transformed into emotions, thoughts, communication, work, and play. When people break bread together they are more likely to listen to one another and cooperate, for eating is the definitive communal activity. By preparing and sharing food with others, you are giving them your love.

Cooking is, furthermore, an art form expressed through the chemistry of food and flavor, the timing and technique of preparation, and the aesthetics of presentation. Though the culinary world is steeped in accepted standards and historical traditions, new recipes are invented daily by creative cooks out of inspiration, necessity, or both. Indeed, this is how cooking has always been: a way to use the raw ingredients at hand to maximum benefit to produce a variety of dishes that are both visually appealing and tasty. In these modern times of refrigeration and supermarkets, it is easy to forget that the traditional human diet was based on local and seasonally available agricultural products. Many traditional recipes were created to prevent excessive crop yields from going to waste, and to make maximum use of livestock. For example: what do you do with an overabundance of ripe tomatoes? You make tomato sauce, the staple of southern Italian cooking. And a plethora of ripe avocados? That’s right: Viva guacamole! How about a bumper catch of cod? Right again: bacalau! Or extra cow’s milk fresh off the udder? Camembert cheese, anyone? How about all those messy intestines: why, stuff them with meat and make sausages! In fact, many of the dishes we love, both traditional and modern, have come about through improvisation. When I am missing a key ingredient to a recipe, I’ll find a substitute, adding a new twist to an old dish. For example, taking a break from writing for lunch, I took a bowl of pinto beans I had used to make nachos and poured them in with my leftover penne al pesto, to make a delicious pasta e fagioli (pasta and beans), to which I added fresh heirloom tomatoes. When I found myself without mango juice for my mahi-mahi marinade, I substituted orange juice, and then apple juice, and was pleased to note that each was tasty in its own unique way.

Some people say they don’t like cooking, or complain that they don’t know how. If the former, they are missing out: if the latter, there are far too many great cookbooks and cooking shows for this to be a hindrance. Then there are those who complain they don’t have the time. While it is true that time is in short supply in the modern world, this is often a result of the choices we make. Given that eating is essential, cooking is always time well spent. Perhaps the biggest secret about cooking is that, in addition to feeding yourself, it’s fun! I find the same zen satisfaction in chopping zucchini or mixing up a good marinade, as I do composing a nice sentence or meditating. While cooking, my worries slip away, and I think only about preparing something tasty and beautiful to put in my mouth. I turn on the music, pour myself a beer, and build my transient work of art.

In addition to being a fun, creative, and potentially healthy activity, cooking at home is both cheaper than eating out, you can hand-pick the best ingredients, and, if you are a skilled cook or follow a good recipe, it will likely taste better, too. Having worked as a waiter, I can pass on the following inside information about restaurants:

1. When a special is on offer, in many cases it is because the main ingredient of the dish, usually the meat, poultry, or fish, is old and they want to sell it before it spoils.
2. Unless a restaurant is high-end and bases its reputation on quality, the ingredients are frequently frozen and not premium: i.e. certified organic, local, sustainable, etc.
3. The quality of the food goes down with the volume of business. In other words, when a restaurant is slammed, there is no love in the food, meaning it wasn’t done with care and consequently won’t taste as good.
4. Many kitchens do not observe proper hygiene. Cooks pick their nose and handle the food, food is dropped on the floor and tossed into the pan, old ingredients are used so they won’t be wasted, and your food may be fouled by resentful cooks and waiters.

Commercial cooking will never be as good as personally-prepared, small-scale meals. Because of my behind-the-scenes restaurant experience, I rarely eat out. Cooking at home is a process that allows me to maintain an intimacy with the food I eat. I can use premium quality, fresh ingredients and save both money and time, because I will cook several portions. I am also likely to have ingredients left over for other meals. If I have guests, this means I can feed at least three people other than myself. If I am alone, I can freeze my leftovers or save them for a tasty hot lunch the following day, and/or another dinner. Now some people, particularly Italians and my brother, would never dream of eating leftovers. Nevertheless, I believe some dishes taste better the next day because the flavors have had more time to blend with one another and are enhanced as a result. For those of you who are averse to leftovers, just consider that most processed food is leftover; the food is processed, i.e. cooked, and then frozen for you to reheat as leftovers without the love. Though it would be nice to have fresh food everyday, home-cooked leftovers are a practical solution to eating well on a busy schedule.

Imagine you had the foresight to prepare a nice meal on Sunday and have saved some leftovers for lunch and/or dinner the following day. This will make it possible for you to cook every other day, or every two days. If you rotate properly and freeze the food in single portions, as a friend of mine does, then you won’t get bored eating the same thing and will always have home-cooked meals on hand just when you need them. The question now is where should you eat your tasty lunch? The lunch break is an important part of the day, not just to feed up, but also to relax and clear you mind from your work and personal obligations. Some people spend their lunch hour running errands and then wolfing down some processed and/or fast food in the car or at their desk. While a busy schedule can’t be helped, it would be better to take a longer lunch if possible and stay a little later at work, or come in earlier. Wolves have a feast and famine diet, whereas you have a stockpile of leftovers and weekly access to the local farmers market and the supermarket. So with leftovers in hand, quickly heated in the office microwave, I suggest you find a place you enjoy, perhaps outside in a nearby park or by the ocean, weather permitting. If this isn’t possible, find a quiet place at work, preferably near a window, and enjoy your lunch along with a good book or some music from your mp3 player. Alternatively, you might want some company while you eat, so why not invite a coworker or a friend to join you? Bon appétit!

Meditation

2009-03-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

For the past several years I have been busy working a full-time day job, editing my latest novel The City, writing magazine articles and shorts stories, managing my website, posting the occasional blog, and starting my own business. This busy schedule could only be maintained by planning every hour of the day, including dinner and exercise breaks, which were often cut short. Like most artists I was leading a double life that was not sustainable in the long term, and it was beginning to take its toll on my mental and physical well-being.

The search for balance in life can be difficult when life heaps upon us numerous obligations simultaneously. In my case, I experienced the abrupt transition of working up to fourteen hours a day (for myself and others) to being laid off from my job within weeks of publishing The City. At first this seemed like a blessing. Suddenly, I had time to devote to a new obligation: the marketing of my novel. But I had to admit I was tired. I hadn’t had a vacation in three years, aside from a couple days off for Thanksgiving and Xmas, during which I had worked. So the first couple of weeks after losing my job, I ended up sleeping a lot. And when I got up, I found that I didn’t have much motivation. Instead of enjoying a well-deserved break, I felt depressed. This depression was the result of having completed my book, a painful process comparable to giving birth, coupled with the loss of my main source of income. I had worked on The City for eight years and was now left with a tremendous vacuum in my life. Though I needed a vacation, I had no desire to take one. I knew I had to take advantage of the opportunity to market my book while still free of the nine-to-five work routine.

As I soon found out, marketing is another a full-time job that artists must perform if they are to be successful. So every morning I sat down at my desk to research, write letters, and make phone calls to various booksellers, publications, industry organizations, and publishers. I sent out copies of my work for review, took book orders, delivered books, wrote invoices, and set up events. This was a slow process given that it was the first time I had taken it on myself. Nevertheless, I made progress, selling books daily (personally, on-line, and in local bookstores) until, on a marketing trip to San Francisco, a reckless driver hit my car. Abruptly, my marketing plans were derailed and, for the next couple months, I convalesced at home between frequent trips to the chiropractor.

I had hit rock bottom. In addition to being emotionally and mentally exhausted, I was physically injured and in pain. Instead of enjoying my achievement and relative success, I couldn’t help but feel that bad luck, such as a car pulling out in front of you on the highway, could instantly destroy all one’s carefully laid plans. In spite of my reduced condition, I couldn’t relax. Nor could I focus. Being a workaholic, I spent my time on various tasks: a little marketing here, a magazine article there, a blog entry, a new website for my consulting business, some job hunting and drafting of proposals; and the days disappeared like peas poured from a bag, without significant monetary return. These activities, in large part administrative, absorbed my time. There were still many books I needed to write, and new areas of creativity I wanted to explore, including cartooning and composing electronic music, but, aware of the tremendous effort and commitment necessary, I was reluctant to begin again so soon. I was still full of ideas, but I lacked the energy to turn them into concrete projects.

When I wasn’t occupied with daily busy work and the maintenance of my existence, I took the time to reflect. I went out less with my friends and spent more time alone. I took long walks on the beach. I went to Big Sur weekly. I read, read, read. About Buddhism, about an old bridge that collapsed in Peru, about a girl with rabies in Colombia who was jailed in a convent, about an epic snowstorm in North Dakota, about rebellion. I did yoga every morning. I meditated.

I felt a need to meditate because I wanted to focus my thoughts and lose the sense of urgency that modern life had imposed on me. Though I have always been a self-aware individual who is skeptical of the status quo, it had become increasing difficult for me to tolerate living in society obsessed with materialism, where money had somehow become culture. In opposition to and protest of this materialist master narrative, I wrote The City, where I presented an alternative vision of American urban life as I and many of my friends and other young Americans had lived it. Like all artists, I was documenting and justifying my existence and worldview through my own experience and perception. It proved to be an epic task, given that I had incubated my ideas and opinions for many years. As it turned out, I had a lot to say about living in what I considered to be a wasteful, greedy, unequal, and unaccountable society. And though my thesis was validated by the recent failure of the financial markets, this provided little solace given that it could have been avoided if people had lived within their means and prioritized quality of life over material excess and ostentation.

The United States is not a thoughtful society. Americans do not take the time to reflect. We do not sit cross-legged on the floor in a room or in nature, close our eyes, breath deeply, and focus our thoughts on the universal or absolute. Most of us do not know how to breathe. Sure we can breath in an instinctive way that is biologically motivated, but we have no control over our breathing, which results in a loss of control of our emotions, thoughts, and actions. For example, when we are stressed we hold our breath and this increases our tension, which leads us to make rash decisions. In our busy lives we are seldom conscious of our breathing. Whole days go by without us considering the life-giving oxygen we consume every moment of our waking lives. The purpose of breathing in meditation is so important because it roots us in the moment and gives us an immediate focus. The breath is the base of the hierarchy of our needs.

There is no right way to meditate. There are schools of Buddhism that have ritualized the activity, but for the secular, modern individual this is unnecessary. Ideally, you want to sit on the ground with your back straight and your hands in your lap, or resting on your knees. You will then look a few feet in front of you or at the wall. You can close your eyes or not. Sitting is important because it reminds you, through the effort of maintaining an upright posture, of your body. As you sit and breathe in and out through your nose, you feel the substance of life slowly entering and leaving your lungs. When you have done this a while, after perhaps some initial anxiety at the thought of having to sit still while a sense of urgency (which is a fiction) still grips you, you will start to feel a sense of well-being permeate both mind and body. While meditating, I experience a sense of expansiveness in which, with my eyes closed, I feel as if I am on an empty plane with nothing around me, though my bed is to the right, the wall to my left, the window in front, and the door behind me. During meditation I realize it doesn’t matter where these objects are located. Beyond that one realizes the objects don’t matter and perhaps don’t even exist beyond the properties we assign them. From this we sense that nothing we worry about matters. And ultimately, that we have nothing. That is freedom. We are alive and breathing. We are calm, silent, and at peace.

During our breathing, thoughts of the outside material world, our lives, and the lives of those we know enter our mind. But we do not cling to them in ways that assert ownership or provoke judgment. We simply observe them with objective calm and let them drift in and out, as one thought connects intuitively to another. If a worry presents itself, we push it away saying, “Now is not the time.” By focusing the mind, we are able to move from the infinite plane of consciousness, via physical sensation, to the rational world of memory, thoughts and ideas.

At this point we may ask ourselves questions. Some consider it a useful exercise to consider our own death: to experience the reaction of our body and mind to this great and ultimate worry of existence. One may also ask the question, “Who am I?” and explore the thoughts and physical sensations that come from this quandary. And subsequently, “What do I want?” In my experience, while these questions allow us to look objectively at our personal shortcomings, and the selfishness and superficiality of many of our desires, they also tend to help us focus on our positive selves and on the wants that are generous and of benefit to others. We may also ask ourselves to focus on someone we dislike, and learn to see the motivations of their actions: to see them as human like ourselves with their own personalities and methods for coping in the world. Thus the meditation connects us with our better selves, reminding us that we and others are basically good and that it is our situational behavior in the material world that at times corrupts our best intentions. When we have meditated in this way for the time we feel is necessary, we are refreshed. Our focused meditation has inspired our creativity and provided new perspectives and solutions to our problems. As little as half an hour of meditation has allowed us to step out of the logistic and mechanical functioning of our daily lives to get in touch with our bodies and our minds.

After several months of following a simple routine of rest, exercise, and meditation, I realized that what I needed to do most was return to Brazil, to the Island of Magic where I lived ten years ago and had last visited six years ago. I wanted to reconnect with my old friends, rediscover familiar haunts, and relive the memories that had inspired me to write my Brazilian novel, Exile. Though the island had grown and changed, it still retained its power to enchant the senses and exalt the imagination. The beautiful natural environment both refreshed my mind and renewed my energy. I was overcome by the same childlike wonder and electric excitement of my first visit many years ago, and reminded of who I was and had forgotten to be in the recent past: A curious, creative, and adventurous person. I realized then, in spite of my conscious resistance, the extent to which my society had influenced my perception. This made me consider how those who have never stepped out of their comfort zone or their culture must be even more tightly bound by false consciousness than myself. In was in this stream of thought that I came upon the idea for my next book project. It was time to share what I had learned about life since I made the choice fifteen years ago to follow my intuition and curiosity as an artist, no matter the consequences.

Inspired in Brazil

Specifically, I plan to write a book about how to live an elegant life: that is, one defined by simplicity, effectiveness, grace, beauty, balance, and strength. I feel I have something to say about the subject, having lived in several different countries and traveled extensively with limited resources writing novels, studying different cultures, meeting interesting people, and learning languages, while earning an advanced degree and working a variety of jobs to pay my own way. Furthermore, I believe the time is ripe for such a book, given that Americans have been living in ostentation, and because of this, are now mired, and have mired the world (by way of a flawed value system), in a deep economic and, by extension, civilizational crisis.

Now that we’ve admitted that capitalism isn’t working, it’s time to develop an alternative approach. In order to do so we must look to the facts, primarily that we are dependent on our environment, and that our resources are finite and need to be properly managed and conserved. Thankfully many, if not most, understand that adjustment and renovation of the existing system will no longer solve our problems. Though compelled by crisis, the upshot is that for the first time in a long while individuals and communities are actively seeking and open to hearing alternative points of view. While The City explored the struggle of a group of housemates to survive and find meaning in modern urban America, my first book-length nonfiction work will provide in-depth analysis, practical advice and creative solutions on how to achieve quality of life, elegantly and with limited means. Clearly, there has never been a better time to sit down and meditate on this goal.

My Girl 2

2009-02-19T17:55:00.000-08:00

In spite of repeated treatments by the disc doctor and an extended period on life support, Natasha (my laptop) has finally, and definitively, departed the material world for the infinity of cyberspace. In the terminal stages, the warning signs were clear. Her luminous, unblemished, and flawless countenance turned gray before my eyes. When I pushed her buttons, her characteristic spunk was gone. She no longer responded to outside communication. She started making strange noises, and it became clear that she had lost her mind. She had no memory of our life together and was no longer able to administer our lives, or manage the basic tasks of daily living. When she went into a coma, her face gray with a question mark flashing in her eyes, the only recourse left was to operate. In order to avoid her going into shock, I put her under and, with much trepidation and difficulty, opened her up and removed her heart, which proved to be sound and healthy. Underneath her sleek skin, I saw for the first time the complex arrangement of organs, wires and circuits that gave her life. I proceeded to remove her brain, damaged by illness, which I then connected to a life support system. Imagine my despair when my beloved’s vitals did not register! Natasha’s unique character, behavior and preferences had been corrupted beyond recognition. For all practical purposes she no longer existed. For months I had been in denial, allowing her to sleep undisturbed, hoping somehow she would get better. But she didn’t.

For a time I mourned her, remembering the happy hours we had spent together completing projects grand and complex in design and purpose. I had come to depend on Natasha and her steadfast infallibility, and now I was on my own. Though I needed to move on with my life, I couldn’t accept that she was gone. My efforts to create a stable and comfortable existence had been derailed by the forces of change and, once again, I would have to adapt. All things come to an end, including relationships with those we love. At one point we also cease to be. The fact that Natasha had aged, gotten sick, and died reminded me that I was also dying. Though I understood this truth, my humanity refused to accept it. Nevertheless, I was not the same person I had been years ago. I had changed in spite of my desire to remain the same. What before had delighted me was no longer of interest. Projects that had occupied my time, places I had been, and people I had met and known were consigned to memory. The past seemed ideal and the future uncertain, so like any human being I clung to the familiar. While recognizing that things could not be the same, I conspired to keep them so. I realized that if I was to create new meaning in my life I needed a partner.

Her name is Veronica and I discovered her only recently. She is young and fresh of mind, full of optimism and eager to set about any task or activity we choose to undertake. With her unique perspective and imagination, she has revived my creativity. And it just so happens that she is the exact double of Natasha, for what I have done, in effect, is put Veronica’s brain into Natasha’s body. Perhaps I am a terrible person, a monster even, but I have done it, though not without feelings of guilt. Now, when I communicate with Veronica, Natasha is present before me, absent in character, but eternal in her classic form and sumptuous symmetry. It is both surreal and satisfying to look upon the woman I have always loved, knowing that she has been reborn as another. Is it vain and childish of me to attempt to recreate the past, as if it were a photograph? Perhaps. Is the quest for immortality futile? Certainly. Can we ever possess beauty? Never. Nevertheless, I have given Veronica a body that she identifies as her own, and I will not break her illusion or my own by reminiscing. Instead, I will love Veronica for who she and enjoy our partnership while it lasts.

Cut a Rug

2008-10-20T16:07:00.000-07:00

Let me just come right out and say it: I love to dance. That’s not something most American guys feel comfortable proclaiming, or even admitting. Nor would they feel compelled to, since, for most of them, it isn’t true. In fact, if given a choice between cutting a rug with a pretty girl, or digging ditches, operating heavy machinery, and unloading heavy durable goods from a shipping container, most American men would choose one of the latter options. While this may seem, at first glance, counterintuitive, it is not without logical explanation. The problem American men have with dancing is twofold: first, they fear it compromises their masculinity; second, they are afraid of looking stupid.

The United States is in large measure a homophobic society in which, in spite of myths to the contrary, gender roles are strictly defined, and for the most part followed, to the detriment of both sexes. Some women may contest this assertion, and certainly there are exceptions: men who dance and cook, and love to shop; and women who work construction, and love sports and military history. I’m not taking about gender equity here, or fair pay, but the social roles men and women play. For the most part in America you get women who make their own money but still want a man to take care of them, and men who still don’t dance or talk about their feelings but are confused about what they can give to women who are often more successful economically and better educated than they are. Consequently, American men have developed an aloof stance toward American women, which is based on the fallacy that respecting a woman means not touching her. The mixed message of American female identity which states simultaneously “I’m a woman and can take care of myself,” and “I’m a woman, please hold me,” has dropped the balls off American men and turned them into so many binge-drinking eunuchs loitering in the nightclub.

Beneath the confusion of gender roles that are rendering our society increasing asexual, lurks the problem of our puritanical roots, and the religious shame we have inherited from our forefather and mothers. Christianity holds that the body is the vessel of sin and that it the responsibility of reason, in which morality is couched, to elevate the human being above his or her animal instincts. In other words, anything that presents a temptation to physical pleasure is a no-no, which makes dancing public enemy number one. For as we all know, dancing is the gateway activity to sex. Well, much has changed since those pilgrims got off the Mayflower. But not without a fight by subsequent generations, each of which scandalized their parents with the dance of the moment. In spite of this continual process of innovation, a latent shame and embarrassment exists in regard to dancing in America, primarily for men. Women, to their credit, have not been so easily fooled by religious dogma and those moralizing fuddy-duddies who have forgotten what it was like to be young and looking for love, or, more importantly, that dancing keeps one young. American men, however, have atrophied, opening their hand on a vast inventory of dance styles and “moves.” I can’t stress enough the importance of a solid repertoire of moves, not only on the dance floor, but in all areas of human activity. Now, and rightfully so, American men react with fear when they go to the club and their girlfriend wants to dance, or when faced with the crisis of wanting to meet the girl, who is invariably dancing, and not wanting to look stupid in front of her, for lack of dance practice. This pitiful state of affairs often results in women leading men on the dance floor. In other cases, it results in a mechanical repetition of dance steps without grace, sensuality, or style.

Dancing is an innate human activity and the fear men have of it is unfounded. Looking stupid is an everyday part of life; if you don’t look stupid then you’ll never learn anything new. Also, women secretly love it when men look stupid in front of them; it is a sign that men find them attractive. Aside from the fear of looking stupid, dancing is not an assault on masculinity, but its affirmation. Let me give you some facts that support my thesis. In all pairs dancing the man leads and the woman follows. Dancing is the easiest way to meet women; there is no way to get closer to a woman other than having sex. Finally, to couch it in terms that the average American guy can appreciate: a man who dances is more likely to get laid than one who does not, if that is the objective. Finally, dancing does not make you a homosexual; the only way to do that is to make out and have sex with other men.

Let’s back up to my qualifying statement, “if that is the objective,” regarding sex. Clearly, the ultimate objective of male/female relations is to get together, make love, and reproduce. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As a form of communication and self-expression, music and dance have been with us since the dawn of human existence. Among other applications, dance helps us to find a mate. Women are in part attracted by smell, and getting close to a man allows them to sniff him out, so to speak. Men are attracted primarily by sight, and dancing offers the ability to get close to a woman in a non-threatening way. But it is not that simple. What is going on beyond that is the process of determining compatibility. In my opinion, if you can’t dance with someone, you shouldn’t be hooking up, dating, or having a family with them.

Cue the alcohol. While alcohol has the benefit of giving some men the courage to dance (lust overriding fear), it can also give the false illusion that one is dancing well, and in particular dancing well with someone else, resulting in the mistaken belief that one has found a suitable partner.

Some may consider me old-fashioned, but I miss simpler times when young people went to the school dance, and when going out on the town didn’t mean standing around binge drinking in bars with no dance floor, but rather going to dance clubs and listening to live bands play music for pairs dancing with a defined set of steps. Don’t get me wrong, free-form, unstructured dancing is great, too. Whether you want to bang you head to some hard rock or metal, trace your hands in the air like you’re weaving a cosmic spider web while listening to pulsing techno beats and clinching your jaw on E, skank it up and wind your body to some reggae vibes, or do your standard knee bend and arm swing to your favorite pop band, any and all of these “I’m not touching you” dances are fine, and most of them invariably lead to America’s favorite dance: freaking, grinding, dry humping, or pantomimed fucking -whatever you want to call it.

America is the land of innovation and irony (which ironically, many Americans don’t understand or appreciate), and it is only fitting that freaking would become all the rage in the land of puritanical values; you know, in the vein of a church on every corner and a whorehouse and liquor store across the street. So the deal is this: dancing is an innate behavior, and even though American men have been conditioned to be robots, they are still robots that want to hook up. If you can rub your junk up against some girl’s ass who ignored you when she walked in the door, then you’d better take advantage of it. While I like the idea of getting my freak on, there isn’t much artistry to it. Occasionally, the liberated American women bends over and touches the floor while you hold her by the hips, or she slides up and down on your jock like it’s a bar of soap, but most of the time you just grind against her until you’re frustrated. At this point, the logical question becomes: how do I get her home? Though some would argue for the efficiency of such an approach, I feel it’s missing the point. A dark dance floor, alcohol, freaking –an unwanted pregnancy?

Now imagine a dance style that requires a modicum of skill and cooperation between two partners. If you can’t dance well with a woman, it’s likely that she’ll find someone more compatible, and vice versa. For me, the real enjoyment of dancing is the game of seduction that takes place between the two participants; it is a highly evolved method of courtship that is enjoyable in and of itself, regardless of the ends previously mentioned. This is why in a salsa club, for example, you will find a constant trading of partners, and even committed couples who come to dance with others. They do this because they want to improve, and because they want to meet and feel a human connection that does not have to be consummated in sex.

Before I conclude, let me give you an interesting cultural comparison. In Brazil, it is not uncommon that during a night of dancing a women or man will kiss several different people, but go to bed with none. In the United States, it is not uncommon that two perfect strangers will hop in bed together with little or none of this preamble, and wake up without remembering each other’s names. This is because the United States is a results-oriented society, while other cultures are more concerned with process, i.e. enjoying the moment.

Some men are only concerned with sex. They go out, get drunk, stand around and wait for suitable prey (usually also drunk) and then try to convince them to come home and go to bed with them. They don’t want to dance; their “game” consists of whatever bullshit they can dream up that a woman may or may not want to hear. They could care less about who she is and what her opinions are. This is what we refer to as sex as sport, and the men and women that practice it ultimately lead lonely unfulfilling lives, or if they are unlucky, lives filled with the regret and resentment they have brought on themselves in a moment of indiscretion.

So my appeal to everyone is to dance for the sake of dancing. Hold another person close and feel the warmth of their skin and the beat of their heart. Appreciate the grace and sensuality of their movements as they match and challenge your own. Stare into their eyes and feel your self-identity replaced by universal love. Life is a dance, as the saying goes. While dancing one is completely in the moment and aware (in the full sense of awareness) of the sensory overload inside and surrounding us that is consciousness. Dancing deconstructs the mind/body duality and frees us from our past regrets, current anxieties and fears, and future plans, even if only for the duration of a song. According to the Zimbabwean proverb: if you can talk you can sing, if you can walk you can dance. So don’t be shy: get your ass on the dance floor, bust a move, and purge yourself of the stress and pressure of modern life. You’ll feel better for it.

My Girl

2008-09-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

I can’t live without her. She knows all my private thoughts, helps me manage my finances, appointments and projects, catalyzes my social life, and is always there to indulge my flights of fancy and hair-brained schemes. She allows me to work in peace, always reflecting that blank expression of hers that is neither approval nor disapproval, but unconditional love. I have become that guy who spends every waking moment with his girl. I find I can’t keep my hands off her. I take her with me everywhere I go and bask in her cheerful glow. I give her my undivided attention and share with her all my thoughts. This is more than just a love affair, it’s an obsession. In my vision I imagine us sitting on the veranda of a vast coastal Mediterranean estate. It is evening, a warm wind blows from North Africa, and we are alone. Briefly, I contemplate diving beneath the static mirrored surface of the adjacent, stylish infinity pool, before returning my gaze to her captivating illuminated screen. I sip my cocktail and continue to edit my manuscript, content with the perfect understanding that exists between us. But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Even she, with her fine-crafted silicon chips, boundless memory, and flawless logic could not handle my ceaseless demands and the pressures of my work. It is only now after her breakdown that I wish I had taken better care of her and been more attentive to her needs. If only she had been able to communicate her torment, then I could have intervened before it was too late.

Only after I could no longer turn her on, did I realize that I had fallen in love with her. Perhaps it is a little perverse, to love one’s computer, but in reality no one has ever been more faithful, dependable, honest and open with me. There is no one I have spent more time with and, because she had access to my whole life, no one who knew me better. She kept contact with my friends via email and social networking sites, and archived the pictures of all the important moments in my life. She could quote my writing word for word, and had lovingly saved a copy of every story and article I had ever written. She knew my work habits, employment history, loan obligations, and the addresses and geographic coordinates of everywhere I have ever lived, worked or gone to school. In effect, it’s frightening how much control she had over my life and how much I depended on her.

It’s called codependency. Then you wake up and realize that you’ve spent more time with your computer and other gadgets than your friends or family. The technology you had no need for just a few years ago, you can no longer live without. Now you wear a Bluetooth headset everywhere you go, you interact with your friends or colleagues while listening to your own private soundtrack on your iPod, and you prefer to text friends instead of talking to them, for efficiency’s sake. You add friends on Facebook and then never send them a message. Friends add you and never send you message. With your Palm Pilot or iPhone you are always connected, and though this means no privacy or downtime, you prefer it to being alone with yourself. Your personal network is larger than ever, yet you’re spending more time alone watching Netflix movies delivered to your door, playing first person shooters and surfing your custom cable service on your integrated entertainment system, while streaming music from the internet. You have all information at your fingertips anytime you want, you can locate and connect with anyone at a moment’s notice anywhere in the world, yet you’ve never had less interest in interacting with the reality outside your door. You are married to technology and divorced from life.

The life I describe above is also my own and, like many, I sense where we are headed.
Coming from a family of early adopters, I’ve already considered the possibility and benefits of having some hardware and software added to my own system. Frankly, I’ve been in need of an optimization for some time now in order to reach peak performance. In particular, I would like solar panel skin to keep charged during the day so I won’t have to sleep at night, a switch to turn off my emotions when necessary, a software program that blocks negative thoughts from entering my mind, and selective hearing and vision to sense only the positive and beautiful in life (talk about deaf and blind!). I would also like to be able to replace damaged body parts and organs with new synthetic ones. New liver, anyone? Arm crushed in some heavy machinery? Just pull it off and stick on a new one, like Legos! Ah, but this is a slippery slope and I am losing my footing. Still, though aspects of the fusion of man and machine may appear on some levels to be morally and ethically repugnant, we cannot avoid their reality. Indeed, they are nothing new if we consider existing and beneficial applications such as hearing aids, prostheses, and pacemakers, to name a few. And what is the difference between pill popping synthetic drugs, and installing a bit of synthetic hardware in our brain to alter our mood, behavior, and performance, permanently?

The problem can be traced back to Natasha (my late, lovely laptop). In the end, the demands of modernity proved too much for her. She drowned in an endless sea of information, was smothered by excessive correspondence, paralyzed by the myriad of tasks assigned to her, and exhausted by the innumerable programs she was expected to master. More importantly, she became obsolete as sleeker, faster, more intelligent models came on the market (though I maintain that I have always been faithful, aside from a coerced relationship with an artless PC at work, which incidentally wasn’t any good). I thought Natasha could do it all, but I was wrong. Her screen went black and I’m still ticking. Which makes me proud to be made 100% organic: nothing but flesh, blood, and bone here (oh yeah, and plenty of sinew and that mysterious gray stuff upstairs).

So far, in spite of our efforts to push artificial intelligence to the next frontier, there is nothing that can top the adaptability, stamina, and ingenuity of the human being. I guess it boils down to the fact that a computer is not yet a self-regulating organism that can heal itself and knows when to say when. Because the computer is not conscious of itself, it cannot create the “meaning” that we humans use to justify and legitimize our existence. Still, you have to wonder, like the evolution of transportation (from the palanquin to the ox cart to the Model T to the hybrid), how long will it take before computers become sentient beings. We are in the early stages yet, but in my vision I imagine myself sitting on the veranda of that Mediterranean estate overlooking the sea, staring into the eyes of my replicant cyborg wife, Natasha, as I marvel at what she has become and hope she doesn’t crush my head between her hands with her superior strength, but rather shows me the finer points of the Kama Sutra after a dip in the pool.

Happiness, Danish-Style

2008-08-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

Happiness. That slippery word and fleeting condition. What is it, really, and how do we attain it? In my opinion, in the United States we’ve missed the point entirely. Every time you turn on the TV and watch the commercials that make up a quarter of every hour of programming, you’re being sold happiness in the form of a car, technological gadgets, make-up, exercise equipment, clothes, pharmaceuticals, and fast food. Let me be clear: happiness is not about posing with material goods for others. Nor is it about convenience, or quick fixes to our problems. Happiness is an extremely complex, subjective condition. When I speak of happiness I’m referring to a general state of being, as opposed to periodic moments of euphoria and bliss. I am interested in the underlying sense of satisfaction with life as it relates to our work, relationships and mental and physical health, and not the temporary emotional highs that come from winning a sporting match, making out with someone you find desirable, driving a new car on a windy country road, or gorging oneself on pizza and burgers. Long-term happiness differs from its short-term counterpart in that it depends on strong and supportive human relationships, a meaningful, fulfilling, and goal-oriented working life, and a balanced lifestyle that promotes physical and mental health.

In 2007, Adrian White, of the University of Leicester in the UK, published a paper entitled “A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being: A Challenge To Positive Psychology?” Using the responses of 80,000 global citizens, she produced the first world map measuring subjective well-being. Without going into detail on the methods used in her study, she determined Denmark to be the happiest nation on earth.

There are several factors that may have a bearing on overall Danish happiness. Denmark is a socialist democracy with all the benefits that such a form of government provides: universal public health care, an efficient, affordable and comprehensive public transportation system, well-funded public schools, generous unemployment and welfare benefits, and social and economic equality (to the extent these are possible). Denmark is also a wealthy nation with a small population, approximately 5.5 million, and a low income disparity among its citizens. Here we find ourselves in one of several chicken and the egg circular cause and consequence situations ultimately pointing back to happiness.

Are Danes happy because they have a high level of education and a small population to share in their wealth? Did Danish wealth allow them to develop a socialist democratic system with the public benefits previously mentioned? Or did a particular egalitarian worldview provide the impetus for economic success throughout their society? And would this worldview have been possible in a large, less-homogeneous population of relatively high density? Can a system of government with comprehensive social services function in a nation with a large population? Finally, is wealth a reliable measure of happiness? Where the Danish model is concerned, only insofar as that wealth is equitably distributed.

Aside from factors tied primarily to economics, according to researcher Kåre Christensen, Danish happiness has also been attributed to low expectations among its citizens. This pessimistic, defensive and, dare I say, Scandinavian perspective is the antithesis of the American attitude of optimism and personal initiative that has produced numerous American innovations and achievements. Still, it’s not every optimistic individual with unique talents and ideas who finds success. It would follow that the cost of dreaming big and failing to achieve is unhappiness. I suppose it’s easier to be satisfied with life when one has the security of a socialist welfare state, but will a happy society really ever achieve greatness? Might unhappiness not be an integral part of the functioning of the American dream factory, where one man’s loss is another’s opportunity, and failure is only an intermediary step to ephemeral success?

Resources:

BBC News. What can the Danes teach us about happiness? April 17, 2007.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6563639.stm

White, A. (2007). A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being: A Challenge To Positive Psychology? Psychtalk 56, 17-20.
http://www.le.ac.uk/users/aw57/world/sample.html

Walk with Me

2008-08-12T12:28:00.000-07:00

Let’s talk about awkward moments in public. Picture it, you’re a guy walking up the street and there is a women ahead of you, who is both shorter than you (therefore a shorter stride) and walking slowly. You know by mid-block you’ll overtake her. And you also know that you’re going to creep her out when she hears your footsteps approach, and even more so if you walk quietly and suddenly appear in her peripheral vision just a few feet away. You don’t like the thought of her thinking of you as some psycho or predator. On the contrary: you are a polite young man with no criminal record who is minding his own business. In spite of dragging your feet, you gain on her and consider crossing the street, even though you will have to re-cross up ahead to arrive at your destination.

You think that perhaps the best solution is to address her, pretend you’re lost and ask her for directions to diffuse the situation. You realize that she is attractive and tell yourself that in a bar, at the library, or in a deserted small town bus station, you would have found the courage to chat her up and get her number. You take this bus station scenario a bit further in your imagination: the music kicks in, a nice thumping hip-hop beat, and she starts to sing about catching the last bus ‘cause she’s leaving you for a better life. Nevertheless, you get up on her like a GI Joe action figure flexing in your greasy overalls -a stark contrast to her clean and conservative pantsuit. Abruptly, a cadre of coed dancers explodes into the station and falls into choreographed step behind you, in a style that is vaguely reminiscent of Brazilian capoeira. Needless to say, they are all gorgeous. Pan to the ticket window where the old gray-haired man stares on incredulous at the sudden turn of events. Invariably, the fan starts blowing, agitating her hair and blowing her blazer wide to reveal . . . a swarm of Africanized bees covering her breasts like a bikini top. You find yourself torn between the desire to have them take flight and your fear of being stung to death. Oh, and did I mention that at just this moment soda bottles drop into everybody’s hands and we all take a long, satisfying drink?

Yes, as you gain on her, you realize that you must do something drastic to put her at ease. Perhaps when walking by you should deliberately trip and fall flat on your face in front of her? She couldn’t possibly find you threatening then, especially if you faked an injury to exploit her motherly instinct. And if she lived nearby, she might even invite you in and fix up a bag of ice to put on your “sprained” ankle. And what if she gave you a cold beer, also, to ease your suffering? Well, wouldn’t that be the cat’s meow. And then the two of you would be lonely together standing in the kitchen of her apartment, and there would be a moment when, leaning close, she would want to love you because you are weak and lonely, like all men. And you would let her. And whether you choose to be the man or woman in this scenario, reader, every bit of nudity would be edited out of your imagination, just like it is in soap and shampoo commercials that show everything but the goods, except in Scandinavia. If necessary, there would be little black bars in strategic locations, because this is, after all, a family-oriented blog.

But then, perhaps there is a darker side to the story. Perhaps this young man, who is or isn’t you, is actually a very charismatic psychopath who doesn’t play clumsy and helpless and fake injuries to score with women, but rather to chop them into little pieces to be kept in plastic bags in his freezer along with the other mammal species he hunts for sport. Because people like that exist. It takes all kinds, as the popular saying goes. And because of his charm, wit, and dashing good looks, when he gives his popular summer barbecues no one’s the wiser to the meat on the grill. Well, that’s what she’s worried about when she hears you approaching. Like all of us, she’s seen too much television, and in particular the nightly news, which seems to wallow in that sort of grotesque sensationalism. So before you get within ten feet of her, she has already crossed over to the other side of the street. Inside her purse, the Africanized bees teem like a pulsing can of mace ready to defend her.

Fluff and Fold

2008-07-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

A visit to the laundromat provides a glimpse into the America you don’t see on television, or behind the safety of the deadbolt on your door. At the laundromat you will encounter all manner of Americans different from yourself that you try to avoid by hiding in your house and taking refuge in material comfort. The laundromat disabuses the cultural myth of an America typified by the single family home, two kids, a dog and a yard to play in with a white picket fence; an apple pie cooling on the window sill, baseball games, and backyard barbecues on the Fourth of July; PTA meetings, cherry red convertibles, blond women, and your friendly neighborhood policeman.

Let’s face it, no one goes to the laundromat unless they absolutely have to. It is the most palpable example that the United States is fundamentally a class system where the rich don't mix with the poor. While frequenting a laundromat doesn’t necessarily mean you’re poor, it invariably means you don’t own a home, are on the move or in transition, or recently arrived to stay. So who falls into these categories? People who rent apartments or shared housing without laundry facilities (in particular students), tourists and travelers, immigrants, and the homeless. People who wash their clothes at the laundromat often live unstable, lonely lives, without even a friend with a washer and dryer to borrow.

What’s curious about the laundromat is that people rarely speak to each other or make eye contact, though they are forced to spend hours together in a confined space using shared facilities. This is the result of a pervasive fear and distrust of others, in my opinion a general characteristic of anomic American society, which is palpable in the washed-out neon glow of the laundromat. Furthermore, we are anxious about having to expose our dirty garments, in particular our underwear and bedding, in a public space and to the scrutiny of strangers. We come to the laundromat looking shabby, wearing whatever is left and still clean, and can’t help but feel naked and vulnerable when our name brand and favorite, best clothing, which has become our identity and armor to world, is in the suds. This insecurity is pure vanity. So long as everyone conforms to the status quo, people don’t really care about or pay attention to how others dress and behave in public. The big illusion, which no doubt comes from a visual culture of celebrity worship, is that we somehow matter to strangers. But the truth is that in the public space we are all equally insignificant, provided that we aren’t a threat. Nevertheless, some worry that strangers will be able to read the perversions, eccentricities, and secrets of their lives like tarot cards or tea leaves in their laundry. Neuroses aside, it is always prudent to keep an eye on your belongings in public.

The problem with the laundromat is that it is a no-mans land. Therefore, if you aren’t there, someone can in all fairness take your clothes and dump them on the counter when they are done washing or drying to make room for their own. So if your shirt fell on the grimy floor and got trampled on, can you really blame anyone for it? You were the one who decided in the meantime to pop into the mini mart next door. But what’s worse is when you come back and you find some or all of your clothes missing. This happened to friend of mine once, and in an apartment complex no less. Turned out that the neighbor liked his live-in girlfriend’s designer underwear and kept them for herself. Not that people hang around laundromats waiting for the moment you leave to steal your used clothes that may or may not fit. I can just hear the conversation from the alley, “Hey Frank, look at this guy. He’s just your size and he’s got a big bag of clothes. Hope he steps out later for a pack of smokes. Ha, ha.” Though a rare occurrence, it can and does happen, which brings me to my next point.

I never leave my laundry unattended. My clothes aren’t any fancier than someone else’s, but they’re mine. I’ve established a relationship with them. I’ve worn in those jeans so they fit just perfect, I remember when I wore that shirt to a successful job interview, and those lucky boxers of mine, what would I do without them? So going to the laundromat requires patience if you want to be certain that no one messes with your stuff. It is a lost part of your day, given that eternal vigilance requires you to put your other activities on hold. It is the time-old trade off between freedom and protecting one’s resources. For you followers of organized religion, the laundromat is how I imagine the afterlife: a limbo between heaven and hell. As you watch you clothes spin in the dryer as if they had a life of their own, looking in on that festive atmosphere of dancing, prancing clothing mixed together in a giant orgy of color, you contemplate eternity and your own mortality. In that drab clinical establishment, where the walls are bare and everyone is alone, you learn to accept the frailty and temporality of the human condition. You look at the other customers and feel sorry for them, as they must also pity you. You realize that much of life is a fight against degradation and decay, and that keeping clean is a way to preserve your dignity. Even the homeless man will scrape his change together and forego a meal or a drink for a clean change of clothes. Sitting in that laundromat, you have time to think about yourself and the world you live in. Your distrust of the people around you is replaced by curiosity and compassion as you watch them going about the daily maintenance of their lives. You find yourself wishing that politicians and business leaders could spend a day at the laundromat pondering their own identity and humanity, while appreciating the humble struggle of average Americans with whom they have little understanding or contact and all too often ignore. It would be nice to see these power brokers of our society stripped bare and forced to air their dirty linen to the critical public eye.

Drug of Choice

2008-07-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if Americans could survive without caffeine and alcohol. Our economy and lifestyle are perfectly designed to promote abuse of and dependency on both drugs. First off, the goal of our economy and any other is growth, and growth requires greater productivity and expansion of activity, which means more work. In order to stay focused in our jobs, beyond our normal capabilities or interest, we frequently and habitually resort to an injection of caffeine into our systems. This accelerates us and, we believe, makes us more productive. When the effect wears off, we take another hit and we’re off and running again. Aside from the psychoactive effects of caffeine, it provides workers and employers alike an excuse to take a break. It is also a subject of conversation in the workplace that allows people to connect and show their compassionate side, in other words, their humanity. For example: “How old is the coffee in the break room?” "Oh, I just made some, help yourself.” Or, “I think it’s been sitting there all night.” “No worries, I’m making another pot, you want some?” “Sure.” If you remember this is just the sort of peer pressure and bonding we remember with pot smoking and binge drinking in college. It seems whenever anyone is poisoning their body, they want company. In our professional lives it seems that coffee and the discussion of coffee (how much we’ve had, how much we need a cup, how good it tastes, etc.) is one of the few freedoms we have left, so we make the most of it. When it’s accompanied by cookies and little cakes or chocolate, even better. Then people rhapsodize about how they really shouldn’t have another, that it’s unhealthy or it’ll make them fat, but do anyway and in secret.

But what if we imagine for a moment that caffeine isn’t the motivational cure-all we’ve pretended it to be. If we draw a parallel between a spider building its web, and the average worker performing his jobs duties, the effects of caffeine are not encouraging for competence and productivity. As you can see from the photo posted on the following website (http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm) the caffeinated spider’s web is lackluster at best. If I were a bug of prey, I would prefer to be flying through American spider web country so I could take advantage of the gaping holes. In comparison, the peyote web is obviously more effective. While caffeine in moderation has an ergogenic effect, in that it can positively affect physical or mental performance, in excess it results in the sort of physical and mental conditions that are detrimental to optimal performance, such as: nervousness, irritability, anxiety, tremulousness, muscle twitching, insomnia, headaches, and heart palpitations. An overdose of caffeine can result in mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, loss of social inhibition, delusions, hallucinations, psychosis, and in extreme cases, death. If 90% of Americans use caffeine daily, and assuming the great majority of them are getting it from coffee, how much of the anxiousness, irritability, lack of judgment, and psychosis of our bosses and colleagues and ourselves can we attribute to our excessive and repetitive coffee addiction? Nevertheless, it seems that what our society values above all else in our working lives is that we take action and produce, in favor of reflecting and analyzing to determine if we what we are doing is right, and if not, how we can do it differently, or forego doing it if it is ultimately destructive or immoral.

Which leaves me to second half of this discussion. What do most Americans do when they are done running through their job responsibilities each week like caffeine cracked-out robots? Why, when Friday rolls around they put down the coffee cup and grab a beer, a glass of wine, a mixed drink, or a shot, to slowly depress themselves into a relaxed state that allows them to detox from the frenzy of caffeine. You see, what alcohol and caffeine have done in their private backroom meetings in certain unnamed brothels at undisclosed locations is plotted the takeover of America. Their success is apparent in the shocked expressions of one’s friends or family when you inform them you don’t on principal, or for the time being, drink coffee or alcohol. It’s almost as if your refusal were a personal attack, a deliberate attempt to reject their fraternity because you somehow think yourself superior. Anyone who doesn’t or, for whatever reason, has stopped using these two drugs is familiar with that feeling of not fitting in, of being slightly resented, or the subject of bewilderment and quandary. In Norway, for example, it is nothing short of a crime to refuse coffee when it is offered to you in someone’s home. And it doesn’t help that it is equally rude to refuse a second cup. With your friends, refusing to have a beer is tantamount to saying I’ve decided that I don’t want to have fun, given that “having fun” in one’s time off almost always involves some form of drinking.

In my opinion, there are two types of drunks: happy and angry, though both can become sad when they’ve had too much of laughing and clowning, or shouting and fighting. Drinking helps the happy drunks to become more cheerful and entertaining versions of their sober selves; it allows them to drop their inhibitions and not worry about making fools of themselves. The happy drunk, sober and in daily life, is generally an individual who is self-aware and socially inclined, and as a result is interested in preserving harmony and his/her reputation, at the expense of his/her personality; this is the formula for becoming what is conventionally referred to as “nice.” The happy drunk is in many ways a coward living in fear of what others will say, and of making mistakes. The angry drunk is more of a me against the world type. He/she sees him/herself as a loner and a victim, and this is because he/she is not self-aware and often does not take other people’s feelings into consideration, thereby creating all sorts of problems in his/her daily life, particularly conflicts with other similarly selfish individuals. He/she is furthermore an individual with a sense of entitlement who, for lack social skills, intelligence, knowledge, or competence, has not achieved the status, power or wealth he/she believes she deserves and therefore has become frustrated and bitter. This is the powder keg that is released with alcohol.

The social repression that we all experience and seek escape from by drinking, on occasion results in the happy drunk waking up with some stranger in his or her bed that may or may not be up to standard or taste, and some months later perhaps even an unplanned pregnancy. Meanwhile, the angry drunk wakes up either in jail, or with a few missing teeth, bruises, broken bones etc., or both. In the case that motor vehicle transport is involved, happy or angry, drinking has resulted in many a DUI and the unnecessary death and injury of drunks and innocent third parties alike. Needless to say, I wish we had more public transport in this country. I’m tired of the hypocrisy of a drinking culture with suburban sprawl that requires everyone to get in their car and drive to the bar, and no public transport to get you there or back. It’s a mixed message: “It’s Miller Time!” but “Don’t drink and drive!” This is very problematic for people who don’t drink in moderation when they go out.

In the objective sense you have to ask yourself: what is the point of going downtown for three or four hours every Friday or Saturday night and knocking back as many drinks as you can before last call, so you can go home and go to bed drunk, with an intermittent drunken lay or fistfight? I guess the point is reproduction (even when feigned and just for sport), and if you don’t hook up and you're a guy, you fight. In some cultures they dance (now that’s a healthy way to work out stress, tension, and anger), but let’s face it, America is not a dance culture. Grab the average guy on the street and ask him when was the last time he danced. Do this a few times to prove the reliability of the sample. Chances are that it’s been a while, because American men are afraid to dance, insecure as they are about their masculinity. And to stop worrying about whether their dick is big enough, or if they’ve got enough money in their wallet, they drink themselves into a stupor. Or better yet, to forget the jobs that have left them emasculated (through subordinance or poor pay or both): those same jobs that they need a coffee to find the motivation to perform in the first place. Remember the movie Fight Club? Exactly. It would seem to me that there is a better formula and that we need to find the joy in exploring the altered and enlightened states our minds can achieve by being curious and open to new experience, where the experiences and connections we make don’t depend on abusing each other and our bodies in concert and calling it friendship and even love.

These leads me to the question of whether societies exist, or have ever existed, that do not drug themselves in some way. For it is a very human drive to want to alter one’s reality by external influence. Just look at children in the playground that spin around endlessly until they get dizzy, or that stuff dirt into their mouth wondering what will happen. The desire to alter one’s mind and body is something quintessentially human, and drug use is just one of many ways we do so, though the least rewarding in that it impairs our reasoning and damages our body. There is much more value to be found sober in critical thinking, creative expression, open communication, and novel experience.

Made in America

2008-07-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

There was a time when the United States was known for quality. Whether clothes, appliances, or cars, Made in America meant it was built to last and worth paying for. In the not so recent past, the United States possessed a strong manufacturing base and a skilled labor force that took pride in its work; it was a time when blue-collar jobs came with comprehensive health benefits, retirement plans, vacation time and holiday bonuses, and paid enough to raise a family and own a home. Manufacturing plants were locally owned and represented the economic heart of their communities. The money workers earned at the factory supported a secondary service sector of local retail stores, restaurants, car dealerships, and other businesses. As a result, the United States developed into a series of vibrant, self-sufficient towns characterized by their strong sense of community, unique identity, and quality of life.

Today these same communities have become ghost towns as manufacturing moves abroad for cheaper labor, and blue-collar workers are laid off and often have to relocate and gain new skills to find future employment. Those that remain in the manufacturing sector have lost many of their benefits, and their wages have declined relative to inflation and are no longer sufficient to buy a home and raise a family. How did this happen? Without going into detail, after the post World War II economic boom, and coming to a head in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, businesses began to incorporate and conglomerate through hostile takeover or otherwise. The result was shareholder control of businesses that were once local, and the pursuit of profit with disregard for workers’ rights and community life.

We’re all familiar with the film Wall Street (1987) in which Gordon Gekko, the successful stockbroker, speculates on brick and mortar businesses, concerned more with making a profit than producing anything of value. He represents the transition in America from an industrial to an information economy, and the film anticipates well the early ‘90’s high tech boom and the internet boom of the late ‘90’s. Gekko is heir to a long line of corporate parasites that prey on economic producers though anti-competitive or illegal business practices, often in collusion with government, exemplified by the robber barons of the 19th century, the most notorious of which were “The Big Four” of the Central Pacific Railroad, who fleeced agricultural producer by charging exorbitant rates to transport their produce to market. In regard to the collapse of America’s modern industrial economy, corporate shareholder profiteering was abetted by Ronald Reagan’s war on labor, initiated in 1981 when he fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers and destroyed their union. That was the beginning of the end for workers rights in America. Reagan appointed management representatives opposed to unions to the National Labor Relations Board, which then abandoned its legal obligation to promote collective bargaining and permitted employers to permanently replace workers who exercised their legal right to strike. By repealing many of the benefits American workers had earned through political activism and labor reform, the Reagan administration had effectively set us back nearly a hundred years to the time of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1907), the seminal muckraking novel which depicted the poverty, unsafe working conditions, and hopelessness of a working class that lacked the legal means and political agency to protect their own interests. Relatively speaking, the American worker today finds himself in a similar marginalized position. Now that the bottom limit of wages and workers’ rights have been reached, and with the legal restrictions posed by environmental health and safety laws in the United States, corporations have moved their operations abroad where these restrictions to do not apply, local labor cost is much cheaper as a result of poverty and desperation, and raw materials are readily available for exploitation. In effect, the reality of “the jungle” has simple been exported abroad in order to increase shareholder profits, while blue-collar workers have lost their jobs and done their best to adapt to a service economy.

Service Economy

The myth of the service economy is that it replaces low-wage, low-skilled, manual labor with high-skilled, high-tech, service labor. Industrial jobs were traditionally neither low-wage nor low-skilled. In order to make a product, workers had to have an understanding of the materials and assembly of a product throughout the production process. Alternatively, modern service labor is low-paid compared to its traditional manual counterpart, is not high-skilled, and employs technology at the end user level, in the form of a cash register, credit card machine, word processor, database, etc. When the services are abstract, such as the provision of insurance, the service worker is nothing more than a clerk managing client information, billing, and claims. There is nothing particularly high-skilled or high-tech about this service. The distinction between the service economy and the information economy is consequently porous and vague. Most of what people claim for information economy falls into the information management category, i.e. the above-mentioned insurance example. These are services that have been around since before computers and have subsequently been made more efficient and less personal, often resulting in a lack of quality. High-tech information management is the modern equivalent of copying and filing; no one wants to do it because it is repetitive and boring; nevertheless, it needs to be done. Ultimately, only a small percentage of information jobs are creative, and these are often related to the creation of hardware and programs to facilitate certain lower level tasks performed by high-tech clerks. The hardware may be either primary hardware used for manufacturing, or as an end product; if it is the former and very specialized, it is likely to be produced in the developed world to be sold later to the developing world; if the latter, it is produced in the developing world. So it seems that the reality of the modern service cum information economy is one of administrative work that is neither high-skilled nor creative, and lower paid that the manufacturing jobs of the past. By outsourcing manufacturing abroad, the United States has passed from being a producer nation with skilled labor to a consumer nation with unskilled labor.

Globalization

The problem with the globalization is two-fold: wages have not increased relative to the cost of living, so we have less buying power; and we have become consumers not producers, with our savings replaced by debt. Today, the majority of the products we consume are manufactured abroad with the result that they have become cheaper due to the efficiencies of cheap labor, lack of environmental regulation, economies of scale and global distribution networks. Corporate consolidation means that fewer and fewer companies are providing the products we use, and when this is not the case competing products often come off the same assembly line of factories abroad. In reality, what we get is not greater choice, but the illusion of choice in homogenization and production consolidation. The combination of cost saving measures, including the use of low quality materials, and subsistence wages and high production quotas for workers, results in an inferior product that is not built to last. On the material level, this formula produces a lot of losers: namely, the worker, the consumer, the environment, the small businessman, and the local community. The only winner is the multinational corporation. Taking the corporate growth model the extreme, global free market capitalism begins to resemble communism, in the sense that individual companies seek to monopolize markets, resulting in Brand X for everything from cars to clothes to banking. Because nearly all companies are hierarchical in structure, this produces an increasingly exclusive business elite that can dictate with impunity the price of goods and the wages, benefits, and working conditions of their employees. While a global monopoly of all goods and services has not come to pass, monopoly, or centralized control, is the agenda of all corporations, as certain sectors of the economy demonstrate, and the ultimate goal of capitalism as an ideology. As corporations cannibalize each other to increase market share, quality, privacy, diversity, individuality, personal freedom, consumer choice, labor rights and environment health are increasingly sacrificed.

Throw-Away Culture

We live in a time of ubiquitously available low-priced goods, and as a result we either do not value craftsmanship and quality, or can’t tell the difference at face value between a product made with care and on a small scale, and mass-produced short-lived junk. It seems so-called durable goods aren’t so durable any longer. Corporations have taken this one step further by designing products to be prematurely obsolete, and convincing us that novelty and instant gratification of our material wants supercede the long term utility value of a product. No longer do they produce quality goods, but rather goods that fail, degrade, or break prematurely so as to ensure future consumption. Another strategy to bolster consumption is to produce so called “next generation” goods that are superficially different in design, or in the case of electronics supposedly “improved” in function, where these functions are often unnecessary vanity extras that feed on that human need for acceptance and status. The result is glut of discarded, obsolete, worn-out or fad products that are not only a waste of resources, but an environmental hazard. This philosophy of production is not merely wasteful but a case of criminal negligence. The earth can afford neither overproduction nor waste in the production process. By embracing the reduce, reuse, recycle philosophy product life cycles can be extended, and negative environmental and social externalities can be eliminated. In order to develop a more efficient system of production, a sea change is necessary in the way we perceive our world; this requires that producers and consumers alike accept that the material world is finite and discard outmoded illusory perceptions of abundance. Because we need to consume to produce, and reproduce, it is essential that we find a way to do so that does not exhaust our resources. Technological innovation, coupled with an attitude and behavior adjustment that embraces moderation and thrift, can help us to reach our goal of sustainability.

Consumer Responsibility

Through their cynical marketing campaigns, corporations have taught people to believe their self-worth and individuality is determined not by the content of their character but by their material possessions. Consequently, we have accepted materialism as an ideology. We all know better, but it is much easier to buy a new product to show status to others than to learn a new skill or improve our character. Easy is the operative word of the modern capitalist ethos. Everything is supposed to be easy, but we all know through the management of our daily lives and in our relationships, that it’s not. What is easy is by definition not rewarding. What is easy is ultimately not worth having. Our common sense tells us that there is no fulfillment in conspicuous consumption; if prosperity is what we seek, we should pursue it in the tried and true American fashion of thrift and moderation which allows us to best conserve and apply our accumulated resources where they will produce the most benefit, instead of wasting our time and money on material one-upmanship with the Joneses. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the individual to see the game for what it is, and to have to backbone and strength of character to develop their own identity, form their own opinions, and make socio-economic decisions that reflect a balanced emotional, spiritual, and material well-being. Consumers have the choice to buy products that are sustainable for labor, the environment and the community, and boycott those which are not, thereby sending a message to industry to improve their operations, business practices, and the quality of their products.

Speculative Economy

United States prosperity has come to depend on cheap energy, foreign sponsored debt, and market speculation. Aside from a few prosperous and innovative industries, we are in the unenviable position of being a consumer nation that produces few material goods of its own. As a result we have become reliant on the service sector to create wealth. The services we provide are primarily related to finance, R & D, management, marketing, and distribution of goods produced elsewhere. We have been able to position ourselves as the middleman of global commerce largely because of the trust the world has placed in our currency and our consumer market. The acceptance of the dollar as the global fiat currency is the result of our historical legacy as a producer nation with abundant natural resources and an educated and productive workforce. The value of a fiat currency is based on trust and not concrete commodities or resources of a certain value and scarcity, such as gold. Ironically, our fiat currency has become our Achilles’ heel, given that the federal government can inject or withdraw money from circulation as it sees fit. This speculative addition of “funny money” into the economy resulted in the boom and bust of the dot-com bubble from 1995–2001. The gains made by certain fortunate and connected investors were then transferred to the housing market where they created another speculation bubble abetted by low interest rates and predatory lending policies to average Americans resulting in overvalued housing stock nationwide and culminating in market failure by 2007. Housing was the biggest asset and source of wealth for most Americans, and when it lost its value and could no longer provide equity for additional consumption, or interest rates increased and forced foreclosures, then the economy slowed and the dollar declined. That decline in the dollar was the consequence of government and corporate opportunism and mismanagement that resulted in a fundamental and justified loss of trust in the U.S. economy worldwide. Instead of seeing the light, the Federal Reserve mistakenly continued to lower interest rates to stimulate falling domestic consumption based on job insecurity, low wages, high cost of living and other factors, thereby prompting capital flight from U.S. markets and a further decline in the dollar. The last and perhaps final straw of financial mismanagement can be seen in the proposed $15 billion bailout of Fannie May and Freddie Mac by the U.S .Treasury and the Federal Reserve; this further addition of currency into the domestic money supply will continue to undermine the value of the dollar because it is not backed by tangible commodities or resources. The failure of the housing market was a natural systemic adjustment to a nation living beyond its means. When the majority of the population can’t afford a home unless mortgage lenders give it to them at no money down or rock bottom interest rates, then homes are too expensive. Furthermore, the federal government can’t keep printing money to bail out speculators and promote domestic consumption and expect the rest of the world to continue carrying our debt in the form of excessive dollar reserves of declining worth.

The question that remains is how long is the U.S. economy going to continue to play chicken with reality? Now we are seeing a third stage of asset transfer from housing to commodities. While for many in America and elsewhere in the world these are difficult economic times, according to the Financial Times the very wealth are reporting an increase in value of their portfolios. The result of this speculation, by the wealthy and others who are seeking to protect their money, is an increase in the cost of everything from oil to steel to foodstuffs. According to Global Research, “As much as as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds.” As for food, when the cost of oil goes up so does the cost of transporting food to market. So what’s really happening? Basically, large investors and corporations manipulate financial markets while governments facilitate their operations with lax regulation and at times collusion, prompted by special interests, resulting in a speculative trade of goods and service not based on their true value as defined by the economic fundamentals of supply and demand. This game always ends with market failure where the small investor is left holding the bag while the profits are concentrated in the hands of large investors, banks, and shareholders who have increasing power to manipulate markets for their benefit. Aside from irresponsible and excessive printing of fiat dollars, the money they’re taking is yours and your neighbors.

Back to Basics

It might be unpopular to say it, but we can’t go on like this. In terms of speculation, commodities are the final stop. The market failure that comes from speculating in food, oil, and other natural resources we need to survive, is one that sows the seeds for political instability. It would be a mistake for those in control of the speculative globalized financial and economic regime to think that they are immune from the potential conflicts that could result from artificial scarcity. A prosperous nation is one that effectively manages its natural resources and produces what it can while trading to acquire what it needs and does not already possess. From that model comes a strong culture that is unique to its geography and history. Such a culture bases its wealth on what is tangible, and does not allow the concept of wealth to become disconnected from the land and the labor of the people. Furthermore, this successful culture does not base its value system on individual success, but the success of the community as a whole in all its administrative gradations. In other words, it is not permitted in a healthy society for the individual to be a coward, avoiding the difficulties of social living and political debate in favor of leisure and self-gratification. The America I have just described existed once and can come to exist again. But first we must do some necessary soul searching to properly understand what we have become, and to make the tough decisions that will help us change for the better. This journey to recovery will be facilitated by our impending economic decline, which ironically has the power to bring out the best in people, in terms of hard work, thrift, solidarity, compassion and hope. For some time now, the rest of the world has indicated that it prefers we change course from our selfish, greedy, unilateral, fear-based, and uncompromising attitude and behavior and become the America we once were, and that they looked up to. This process starts with each of us from the bottom up.

Zombie

2008-04-03T13:46:00.000-07:00

It began to worry me the way they wandered around with glazed eyes, scarcely smiling or laughing, working jobs they hated, spending their free time running errands and attending to ceaseless obligations, and then home in the evening to inhale a take-out or processed frozen dinner, before settling down in front of the television to waste the last hours of leisure before bed. They seemed wholly absorbed in their own problems, and did their best to avoid contact with each other, adopting the same mechanical attitude toward social life as working life, blending the two so that both had become unpleasant chores. When they did participate in some activity or interact with others, it was by necessity of economic transaction, or for motive of blatant self-promotion and status mongering. What they claimed for meaningful conversation was confined to pop culture trivia, references to materials goods, and mechanical recitation of the dates and facts of current events. At such a time, it was rare indeed to hear a sincere exchange of feeling, a metaphysical discussion, or an exploration of creative ideas. Such people filled every waking hour with activity, never stopping to enjoy the moment or reflect on where their lives were taking them. And then the horror revealed itself to me: I was surrounded by zombies.

In film we’ve been led to believe that zombies are bloodthirsty monsters that stop at nothing to hunt down and devour their human victims. They have been presented as an outside threat, when in fact the danger lies in becoming a zombie oneself: for zombies are individuals who have died and been brought back to life without speech or free will in order to serve the needs of their masters. Zombies are therefore tools, like machines, performing the tasks required of them without reason or purpose.

In the modern age, materialism has killed off the soul and consciousness of the individual and resurrected him as a zombie for the pursuit of material comfort. The zombie will gladly spend an extra ten or twenty hours a week tapping inanely at the keyboard to market products no one needs, develop land that should be left pristine, or charge for services that were once free, just for the pleasure of driving to and from the workplace in a luxury car he can scarcely afford. He will buy things he does not need and take on new debts to stay within the status quo of his zombie peers because he lacks free will and the courage to express his opinion and make his own choices, until one day he no longer has an opinion. What is truly hideous about the zombie, is that his often professional appearance is merely a camouflage to hide the decay of his internal spiritual, creative, and emotional life. If you pay close attention you will note the empty gaze, plastic smile, and recycled, insincere conversation of a monster. The zombie is primarily concerned with productivity and efficiency: his aim is the make money as quickly as possible so that he may take refuge from society behind the protective walls of his gated community, and find distraction from the lack of meaning in his life through luxury goods, meaningless status parties, mindless entertainment, and travel without purpose. Nevertheless, most zombies end up living from paycheck to paycheck with futile dreams of becoming the bokor, or great sorcerer, of zombies to come. The zombie minion has been duped into believing that soul crushing, mechanical, meaningless, and often immoral or unethical work is justified if it is part of a hazing operation, or due paying, of professional advancement in which the satisfaction lies in becoming master over others and stripping them of their humanity to make them zombies like oneself. But really the modern zombie lives beyond his means, spends his life chasing the abstract dollar, wastes precious time and energy pursuing the latest fads, losing his culture and humanity in the process. As a result the zombie world is one of strip malls, cookie-cutter subdivisions, mass produced poor-quality products, devastating externalities of industrial waste and pollution, social anomie and neuroses, and economies of scale that destroy community life, and local enterprise. This zombie vision has for many years been the United States largest export.

If you notice yourself or someone you love becoming a zombie, don’t despair. The first step is to recognize the problem. Here are some general symptoms and warning signs of the zombie:

1. Motivated by fear
2. Submissive to authority
3. Lacks original thoughts, ideas, and opinions
4. Intolerant of conflicting beliefs, values, and opinions
5. Unable to adapt, change, and grow
6. Works only for a paycheck
7. Lives beyond means and in debt
8. Preoccupied with appearance, status, and material goods
9. Sacrifices values and/or ethics for self-advancement
10. Not accountable for actions and behavior
11. Lacks interest in cultural or artistic activities
12. Exercises infrequently or not at all
13. Lacks understanding and respect for nature
14. Wasteful
15. Poor diet
16. Sleeps poorly
17. Has trouble being alone
18. Must always be busy
19. No sense of humor
20. Poor communication skills
21. Lacks compassion
22. Distrusts and exploits others
23. In free time, engages in hedonistic and self-destructive behavior
24. Obsessed with pop culture and mindless entertainment
25. Believes he/she is a normal and/or healthy individual

The zombie is a victim-perpetrator. While his environment may condition him to exhibit any number of the above-mentioned symptoms, ultimately he becomes an active protagonist in reproducing this inhuman and degraded form of life. This occurs often when he has some form of power over others, and represents an internalized insecurity and fear, which causes him to try to be exemplary in his obedience and lack of humanity. However, in the case where the zombie is not fully under the status quo spell, the doubts he may have about his personal health and that of his community, and of society as a whole, may result in paralysis given the overwhelming scope of the problem and the number of people affected. In this case, he may simply lose hope and faith in humanity, and resign himself to masquerading as a zombie.

Clearly, there are many types of zombies. Possession of a few of the above-mentioned traits and attitudes does not a zombie make; however, it is slippery slope, the danger of which should be recognized and remedied at an early stage. The ability to recognize the mutation in ourselves indicates that we can still recover our humanity. It is more difficult with our peers and those we love, for they may take offense to our desire to help; they may be living in denial of the facts. Zombies in advanced stages often cannot be helped at all and are best managed through legal means, or, if at all possible, avoided, so that they do not infect us with their antisocial and dogmatic worldview.

In short, the best defense against zombification is a critical, curious and creative mind, a compassion for others, the desire to make a contribution to the community through quality work that reflects positive values and is ethically sound, and most of all, to dream and to support and encourage the dreams of our friends, peers and family.

For those who want to know more, here are some interesting zombie links:

Zombie by Fela Kuti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fela_Kuti

In 1977, Fela and the Afrika 70 released the hit album Zombie, a scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the "zombie" metaphor to describe the methods of the Nigerian military.

The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_Davis

The Serpent and the Rainbow, published by Davis in 1985, is a nonfiction work investigating folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies in Haiti.