Odd in Nod

Pleasant Scenery Piece No. 62

The new luscious elms leaves swayed gently in the chill easterly breeze.  The light of the soft orange setting sun cast pensive dappled shadows which played on the street beneath the wizened neighborhood trees.  These playful fancies of leafy illumination were energetically paralleled by the joyful kinetic expressions dancing across the freckled faces of local kids.  They laughed and shouted boisterously to each other; the snap snap snap of bicycle playing cards snapping in bicycle spokes overwhelmed the whispering ruminations of the overarching stand of elms.  The ageless trees could wait for quieter afternoons, but for the snappy riders the end of spring would be permanent. 

The Telloff Breakers

Today a professor started an argument with me in class. The details aren’t important, but I’ll sketch the context. I asked him to clarify an apparent inconsistency in an assignment, and he became upset, highly defensive, and said that I was making broad judgmental, authoritarian statements and interrupting his lecture. He went on and on. He drew me out to say more, then skewered my for continuing to argue. I have been in college for several years and have never had this experience with any prof. I don’t know what his deal was, but it made me sufficiently upset to get chewed out in class that I came up with strategies to use if someone gets in your face in a public setting. (By the way, if you want help with these strategies, consult a jerk.) A good telling off involves a few key elements. 1. A declaration of a social breach. 2. Like a story, it has a beginning, middle, and end. 3. Emphatic speech which is fast, loud, or both. 4. The implicit acceptance of the person getting the bad end that he has to sit through it and listen. 5. The angry person has to build up momentum and maintain it long enough to assert the social breach from more than one angle. For example, “Hey, you can’t take my watch!” is not a telling off. But, “Hey, you can’t take my watch! Who the hell do you think you are?!” is. 6. Authority. The aggressor has to have the authority to make the claim. Think about a smoker parent telling off a kid for smoking. That’s an easy one for the kid. This authority exists in the mind of the aggressor, the receiver, and the witnesses. So if someone is telling you off, here are things you can do to defuse him. I am putting these in order of psychological impact on him rather than “debate-team-style” correct argument. Successful argument is not the goal here. The goal is to f*** up the other person’s attempt to slam dunk you socially. The bedrock of all of this is calmness on your part. If you yell you validate the argument. 1. Make the person seem emotionally out of control. (This works best in public because civilization requires adults to control their emotions. The audience believes that it’s okay to be wrong, but not to be uncivil.) No matter what his tone is, say very very calmly for contrast, “Don’t yell at me. That’s not okay. You are obviously upset, and until you are able to control yourself, I won’t participate in this exchange.” (This breaks elements #2, 3, 4, and maybe 5.) 2. Re-center the argument on the person’s psychology. (This works best in public because civilized culture expects adults to handle their own problems.) Interrupt. Say calmly, “I don’t know why you’re so upset about this, but it’s obvious that this is really about some other problem in your life. I don’t know what demons you’re fighting here, but please don’t take them out on me.” (This breaks 2, interrupts 3, breaks 4, 5 if you’re fast.) 3. Break his momentum. Interrupt as soon as possible and say, “Wait, what?” Then interrupt again and say, “Take it easy, you’re not making a lot of sense right now.” Interrupt over and again, “I’m trying to understand what your saying, but I’m having a hard time.” If he’s speaking quietly (unlikely) say, “What? I can’t hear you. Speak up so I can hear what you are saying.” If he’s speaking loudly, say so. If he’s speaking quickly, say “Slow down, you’re not making sense.” Then use strategy 1 or 2 above. 4. This is the last resort. Deny the breach (#1), implicit acceptance on your part (#4), and the authority to give you whatfor (#6). Do these things by arguing on the merits. Only do this if you are sure the facts are behind you and the person is willing to acknowledge their validity. Sometimes you will be right, but the person just wants to vent, so trying to convince him of your rightness does nothing. Unless you can smartly and devastatingly point out a gaping flaw in his argument, use 1, 2, or 3 to break momentum, redirect the argument, and undermine context and authority. Exit! If you use 1, 2, or 3: Say, “Let’s continue this when you are in control of yourself,” and take control by leaving if possible. If you use 4 successfully, then do a victory dance or something. However, it’s probably better to do the same control exit before the person picks up steam again or does some other negative thing. This is all geared to be intensely annoying to the angry person. So don’t do this stuff to your boss or any person who has something you need unless you’re ready to lose those resources. In some circumstances you’re just on the wrong person’s turf. His turf (the office, the classroom, his house) makes him powerful, so try to preclude confrontation in his arena. Some of my greatest victories have been avoiding a person’s historical patterns of conflict or just keeping my mouth shut.

Alabaster

Today I busied myself about my industry, and my mind was in it.  At the end of the day, my thoughts came loose of the workaday world, and I became relaxed physically and psychically.  I let my mind be pliable and released myself to be touched and tossed by the flighty phantasms and spirited momentums of my subconscious.  In this state, I now open myself to the images that will visit me and I commit to commit them faithfully here. 

The ivory-skinned face of a green-eyed woman sees me.  Her cheeks are full, but her neck is delicate.  Her chin is round, but yields the necessary reversals of curvature that it does not overpower her reddened lips.  Shadows fall on her modest forehead, but are gently guided to dwell between her slender brown brows and play dimly on the sides of her nose.  It is straight, yet takes a bold angle of repose.  It passes calmly yet assertively south through the landscape, setting apart soft cheeks to the east and west.  In the far longitudes milky ears lean out gently if only to feel the breeze and catch sweetly spoken brief passions.  Her jade eyes hold me directly as the beginning of a smile catches her lips.  They sit slightly apart as if waiting for me to finish some witty sentence, yet she already anticipates the conclusion.  I am not speaking, nor is she listening.  Her image maintains its integrity before me, unchanging.  Minutes pass, and as her eyes look into me unflinching, I am visited by images.  They begin to work inside, while she waits outside.  To what purpose, I do not know.  I am enthralled, and the images visit me as follows:

As the sun sets warmly, orangely behind me I stand in a rolling, knolly green field of soft flowing grass.  My shadow wanders among dale and hillock as lumbering clouds obscure and then remove from the path of the dying light.  As I stand, lightning strikes the ground before me and does not cease.  A single column of blinding searing brightness stretches from my feet to the heavens and I fall before it.  I hold my breath so my lungs will not be scorched, but this is not necessary because I sense no heat.  I remove my hands from my eyes because the towering fiery pillar causes me no pain to look on, though it is brighter than any light I have seen.  I stand to my feet and See the Force of it as it reaches from lower to upper horizon of my sight.  At this close distance I cannot perceive its breadth, so it appears as a wall of brilliance.  I fall to my knees weeping as my heart unburdens before it.

The jade eyes call me back from between thickened lashes.  Subtle knowing joy gathers in the colluding corners of her crimson mouth as she looks into me.  She does not move, yet her expression is somehow galvanized by my ecstacy.  I return her gaze weakly, mortally, but am completely disoriented.  Her eyes capture me and I dwell, motionless inside and out.

In my suspension, I aware the sensation of falling.  I possess myself and do not panic, but wonder the dynamics of my motion.  Nothing is beneath me and I fall with increasing speed, but to what end?  All is inky black, except the images that fly by silently.  As I plummet, I pass the ghosts of people and places I knew in the distant waking place.  The immutable icons of their forms sweep by, conveying only the briefest representation of their substance.  My terror finds new birth and rises as I grasp at the straws of recognition, increasingly unable to know the familiar.  The deathly serious nature of my unwilling descent dawns on me as I lose myself mile by mile into the abyss.  Though I choke with fear as my mind unravels, I commit a single deliberate act.  I reach back in my memory to the earliest days of my life.  I recall a time when magic was possible, when so much stark reality was unknown, and adventure, mystery, and wonder reigned as the chief ministers to my soul.  By the light of their counsel, I cease to fall.  I once more stand before the alabaster face which marks no change in expression.  Even so, her skin gets smoother as if it were a lake of milk, and her pupils become blacker and threaten to swallow me. 

I choose not to continue, but I will carefully consider everything I have seen.

Ensconced

I entered my room and approached my desk.  A book lay upon it waiting for me.  I stood a moment considering the smoothness of its cover and the graceful curves of its art.  Then my fingers opened the pages of the book and I went easily into the word world.  When I had finished I folded a page over to promise my return to the dear story.

I approached my bed.  The bedclothes were laid upon it’s surface, pristinely placed.  After locating the edge of the covers, I peeled them off and entered the dream world.  Safely ensconced in warmth I would never have left, but the alarm clock sounded and pulled me out into the workaday world.  I folded a sheet over to hold my lost dream while I was away.

Love and Loved

I Love:

1.  How the keys of the keyboard stand in ranks as soldiers at attention.  If I strike them nothing good comes of it.  But if I am thoughtful and deal gently with them I may gain access to a treasure of some value.
2.  The grit of paper between my fingers and the smell of books.
3.  The curve of the common lightbulb.  These will be gone soon to be replaced by the new spirally efficient type.
4.  Driving a car.  The sooner we forfeit this privilege, the better because people are not quick and their judgment is flighty like the birds and the weather.
5.  VHS Tapes, Cassette Tapes, CDs, DVDs.  The idea of producing music by mechanical action is vulgar in the new order of media and will be shortlived.  All art in the near future will be produced without physical action except at the necessary point, the speakers.  Eventually, not there either.
6.  The physicality of money.  (Not money itself, regarding roots of evil and so on).  Money will always persist, but soon the record of its possession will not be asserted by the existence of “crass” objects.
7.  Newspapers and magazines.  You have my point by now.
8.  Looking at a computer screen.  This will be replaced by special glasses that convey the same image, but do not restrict the viewer to one location.  (This continues the motif of the termination of physicality).
9.  Holding my hand open in front of my face.  It is so obvious!  A post with sticks radiating from it.  This seems an obvious solution to the problem of how to manipulate the physical world.  However, look deeper.  How to supply it with nutrients?  How to make it nervous and regenerate itself?  How to move one part of it and not another?  This simplicity is born of unequalled brilliance.
10.  The time we live in now, the day before the most powerful technology we have breaks its wrath on our soil.  It feels inevitable and nothing will be the same after. 
11.  Sitcoms from the 1980s and how little they joke about divorce and masturbation.
12.  Sitcoms from the 2000s and how much they joke about divorce and masturbation.
13.  Feeling smart because I know more about computers than my parents.
14.  Knowing the importance and fragility of friendship.
15.  Knowing the importance of boundaries: learning to assert them, and recognizing when other people are asserting them.
16.  Not caring about the stuff that doesn’t matter, like tripping in front of a girl.  That took some time to learn.  Nevermind, I still haven’t learned that one.  Rest assured ladies, I step as smoothly as ever.

I Loved:
17.  Riding my bike up curbs and off curbs.  Playing “follow the leader” on my bike.
18.  Playing Nintendo till 10 and thinking I had been up late.
19.  Later in life, playing Nintendo till 2 and thinking I went to bed early.
20.  When I was little and my grandfather gave me a dollar every time he saw me.  He said, “A young man has to have some spending money.”
  I was four or five.

21.  When toy stores used to sell toy guns.
22.  Having sleepovers.
23.  Being babysat by older women.  They were powerful and mysterious and hot.  Ah, forbidden love.
24.  Feeling smart because I knew more about Nintendo than my parents (the poor fools). 
25.  Being part of a network of kids made kin because we knew more about video games than our parents,
26.  Thinking I could do stuff that MacGyver could do (or I would be able to someday).
27.  Believing in the magical notion of “cool”.  Now I know that everyone farts, cries, and dies. 
28.  When adulthood was powerful and mysterious. 

Forget that!  I here drop my wistful tone and redefine adulthood as powerful and mysterious!  Let the world be my neighborhood, and my motorcycle my bike.  Let my fortune be my allowance and cookies and pizza be my dinner (as they are).  Let my fond remembrances be my mother’s arms around me, and Shakespeare and Seinfeld provide my bedtime stories.  Let my former babysitters take me to bed, hopefully demanding no pay.

Rachel Owl

Prelude: I have never liked writing by free association. It’s chaotic and nuts and I always feel like writing #&LOVE(#&#JERK@@(&*$(&*ASS&*(#@&(*@)*HI THERE(@*&() which is not amusing by the third paragraph. However, I wrote a stream of consciousness tonight. I’ll explain why at the end. This is written about the robot shown in the attached picture. Here’s the piece which contains no typographical errors:
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Death smash and metal wrath. Pink cheeks and red lips that I want to drink deeply the brown hair, so brown, smooth neck, white collar eyebrows Rachel Owl the robot, the android in all of us. The feminine beauty so mechanical machinelike the man in the machine. Smooth skin magical simian love reaches back so far into the depths of time. The stars shine deeply, knowingly down on us all through the ages. They’re so far away they twinkle in our mortal eyes. So many things we don’t know.

The unquenchable sadness, I know exactly what she sees when she stares into the distance, I am with her. I know her. It’s not even about sex her lips are so red, she’s so sad.

Her nose is straight and smooth and her face is just standing there in front of me so flat, so expressive, hiding nothing I can see into her. She is alone in that picture that is two dimensional and dead, but it lives through photons spraying out of my monitor. I see it I see her. I hear the music and write the words. The curvature of her ear was articulated directly, written by some poet that I cannot know or describe. I am cut off from him, but I can know him through his creation. Rachel Owl is beautiful and beauty. She is something else, something entirely different. She is the best of humanity and if they were all her I wouldn’t care. She sheds mechanical tears, but her sadness is more real than ours in its mechnical representation. The salt content of machine tears. We are dissolving into our technology and she is the most reasonable outcome.

Cry Rachel Owl. Cry for the tragedy of all of it. Your cheek is red and smooth and warm and calm and quiet and breathing. Tears fall so so so hard I can hear them and I can see you and see you and see you… how did you make your hair go like that….they all should all women should make their hair so pretty. I see blue around your eyelashes and projecting lashes reaching out about your eyes conveying the inner mystery of womanness of darkness and sadness. Blush red and lip rouge, makeup and outline the most important things to make them seem noticeable and put them in practice. The emblems the outlines the icons the form and audacity of the endeavor of a woman’s face is almost completely astounding to me. The curve of the jaw bone so functional and definite yet completely necessary to the poetry of the framework of the face. Unyielding in an argument flexing defining the actions of the angry resisting mind yet playing the proponent when speaking the intonations of romance the words of love. To live by.
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Postlude: I hate explaining myself, but this writing warrants it. The picture I have attached to this note is of Rachel Owl who is a human-like robot in the movie Bladerunner. In the movie, she learns that she is not a person, that her memories are manufactured, and that she has a short lifespan. This concept inspired me to write this piece of freeflow which I did while staring at the attached picture of Rachel Owl. Understand when you look at this picture of the artifact “Rachel Owl” that it is not a person. This writing is my freeflow response to her beauty and her lack of humanity. Although it is 99.9% impromptu writing, I see in retrospect some note on the embrace of technology by our culture and a comment that as we step into the synthetic electronic world of technology we step away from the most sincere concrete enjoyment of each other that can only be experienced by the five senses.

25 Things About Me

1. I like open-ended questions.
2. Brushing my teeth makes me gag.
3. Of all fruits and vegetables, I only like green apples served cold.
4. I never met a pepperoni pizza I didn’t like.
5. I’ll be lucky if I make it to 40 (see items 3 and 4).
6. I’m so nostalgic I don’t pay attention to what’s happening now.
7. I dye my hair black because the contrast makes me feel definite.
8. By definite, I mean whatever definite means to you.
9. If I were forced to commit to live a certain number of years (in good health), then die, I would choose 300 because:
a. I want to see the rise of super-intelligent cyborgs, but not be their slave.
b. At that point I would have had all the thoughts my primate mind can have.
c. At that point I would have had all the experiences my personality is open to having.
d. Look before you leap.
10. My words fail me all the time; my imagination is great.
11. I wake up crying from a non-nightmare dream at least once a year, but no more than twice.
12. If I were God there would be another flood.
13. I am still learning to see the best in people.
14. I don’t believe in the devil. I do believe in my own evil and yours.
15. I have no sense of direction. None whatsoever. Where am I?
16. When I consider the universe, I get the distinct feeling that I am an amoeba in a petri dish.
17. I am unimpressed by people who tell me they have street smarts.
18. I never cross the double-yellow line that defines the carpool lane. I wish all rules were that easy to follow.
19. I always speed a little bit.
20. I feel cheated if a get a waiter instead of a waitress at a restaurant. I’m going to start politely asking to be reseated.
21. I’m well-read, but I don’t read very much.
22. High-Def TV and wine that costs more than $10 a bottle are wasted on me.
23. One time I let someone convince me not to give money to a homeless man because he might use it to buy drugs. I gave him nothing even though I knew he needed to buy food because he continues to live.
24. I don’t respect any art that I could reproduce in 5 minutes. Subjective schmubjective. It’s crap.
25. My favorite things are good food, beer, calculus, women, riding motorcycles, Christmas, women, reading/writing, music, and my family. (In no particular order).

Inauguration

What happened today was impossible.
No one under 35 really understands how impossible it was.
And that’s a good thing.

Beckon

Approach me and touch my face. 

Graze my cheek with your hand, and find the sky in my eyes.

By my breath feel the soul of  my affection for you. 

Be healed by my warmth, which is of my will.

Be calmed by my voice, which is its purpose.

Be housed by my body.

Know peace as you know me.

Clothes

Put on the best clothes you have every day.

When you see yourself in a mirror you will think, “Wow, I am looking great today!  I must be an important human.  Well-liked too!”  People around will see your fine clothes and indicate to each other that you are distinguished and noteworthy.  They will say things to each other like, “Hey did you see that gentleman’s cap?  It’s highly acceptable!” and, “Wow!  Check out her tall shoes.  She’s probably very happy and cool.”  Being thus enchanted with your appearance, local people will likely grant you wage money raises and sultry liaisons.  Needless to say, use these newfound funds and relationships to obtain more clothes.