Dum vivum, vivimus

While we live, let us live.

I can't take it anymore. I can't keep up my joyless plodding participation in the drab, colorless work
situation I am presently in.

I've quit jobs all my life. Many jobs, I've hated so much I've quit them really early. Some I've hung on
to and quit when I couldn't take it anymore.

But I've never regretted quitting one shitty job. I've never regretted walking away from situations that
destroyed my capacity for pleasure and hope. Financial crises may have ensued, but I believe the
sensation of regaining access to the part of me I can stand, made up for it.

Scream Scream Scream

This time of year is always the same. There's just nothing to do. We sit around all day, doing the Jumble or trying one more time to read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Once in a while someone goes to the store for sticky buns. The mind wanders like a mote. What to do?

There's crocheting. Not just fun but useful. Or volunteering for Meals on Wheels. The point is not to just sit around. Go for a walk, keep active, otherwise you'll stiffen up. Not only physically but mentally. Lying on a blanket reading or thinking is fine, but not in excess. The blood should keep flowing lest the body atrophy. Flex the hands now and then to improve circulation.

Sebastian Bach, famous rocker, guest starred on The Gilmore GIrls last night. Wow, is he showing his age. His face used to be beautiful and feline, almost feminine in its chiseled prettiness. Now it's sort of puffy -- still handsome, but more conventionally manly. He still has that waist-length heavy metal hair and a huge, vigorous body that was always arresting to watch because of its capacity for menace. And he did attack a little musician on Gilmore Girls. He threw himself on the guy just like he was 22. Salute, Sebastian Bach!

Hail to Thee, Blithe Spirit

It's hard to live. This has been noted throughout time. At a Brecht Forum workshop on Marxian (not Marxist mind you) economics I went to on Saturday, it was suggested that a lot of our stress, quarreling, depression, divorce and other ills, are due to overwork demanded by the capitalist system.

It flashed into my mind that my parents got divorced during a period of relative prosperity, and their emotional distance had little to do with too many hours at the office or tension over how to spend my father's salary.

Virginia Woolf never worked a day in her life and she was depressed 24/7.

Anyway, I'd never stand in the way of a Marxian revolution -- in fact I'd work for one, if such a thing didn't seem so far-fetched as to be a dream.

Speaking of dreams, yesterday, my companion and I went for a walk after a long lie-in because a noisy overhead neighbor destroyed our early-morning sleep. We decided, as usual, to go to the Gowanus Canal but for the sake of novelty, I chose an unfamiliar route. It was unseasonably warm, with crisp leaves scuffing the sidewalk, intense sun slanting into our eyes, a few gold leaves still clinging to the trees. But we were both feeling fried from lack of sleep, constant busy-ness and the sense that even running as fast as you can, you can't keep up. We felt as brittle as those dead leaves.

The street I'd chosen turned out to be ugly and bare. I kept waiting for the funky little houses of lower Cobble Hill/upper Boerum Hill to reassert themselves but instead we were in a gully of neglected property and low-income housing. Squinting against the sun, we saw a small group of people on the sidewalk ahead of us. A stocky woman dressed all in white, with such a deep voice I thought she might be a man, was talking loudly and brandishing a bottle of Miller Lite. She seemed to be staggering slightly and wanting attention. "Nothing will happen," I told myself, but as we reached her I saw her hand was reaching up to tug childishly on her puffy white underpants. "How come we can see those?" I wondered confusedly, then realized she had hiked her skirt up around her waist. Then to my amazement and horror she yanked her underpants fully down and leaned over, her giant puffy ass thrust out in our direction. She was exposed so completely that every detail was visible and instantly etched onto my consciousness like the worst Diane Arbus photo you've ever seen.

Dream image: someone shoving their naked ass in your face. But this was real. Somehow the ugliness of the street had come to life in that contemptuous gesture. It was like I'd guided us straight into a physical manifestation of the darkness that was bothering us anyway. We walked on with our mouths open. The sun blazed on, unfazed.

Intelligent Design?

Listen a this:

"In order to create intelligent user interaction, Tom is working on an intelligent interaction architecture that ensures that aspects of intelligence, such as context determination and interaction management, are understood by component technologies and applications. The goal for this architecture is to create an intelligent use interaction capability so that end users can accomplish their tasks with minimal yet powerful interactions. In Tom's vision, a user can delegate tasks to their computer systems and devices by stating general goals. For example, arranging a meting with a coworker will no longer require users to query the user's calendar and the coworker's calendar, and find an available conference room. Instead, the underlying intelligent interaction program will handle those details and only involve the user when needed."

That first sentence alone is a miracle of technological jargon, yet it's comprehensible, I think because it was written by a Brit. Their minds are clearer than ours. I'll address the reasons for that in another post.

Anyway, re the project referred to in the above pgh, it blows my mind that we're working so hard to save such small, unimportant amounts of time. In fact, it seems to me that arrangements like this don't save time at all -- the computers may choose the time and place for the people, but confirming it will have to be done by people, or rearranging it, and in any case even if "intelligent user interaction" gets so sophisticated that those things are done by the computer too, ultimately, the meeting has to be done by the people.

Which is the biggest shame. Who cares about scheduling? It's those meetings that should be done away with by sophisticated technologies. They're the biggest time wasters, not the moment when you go, 'How about Wednesday?'

This is all symptomatic of a trend to perfect aspects of life that aren't bad at all, while neglecting to address giant problems that are malfunctioning dreadfully, like food supply to poor countries, or the ubiquity of liars in government.

This is neither a funny nor mawkish post, but I wrote a good one yesterday and then hit a key and it disappeared. I was disheartened. I don't mind continuing in the overheated tone I started in but it actually was threatening my health to be that emotionally invested, so I'm scaling back a bit, I'm "bringing it down a notch."

I Can't Be Held Responsible ...

for how hard it was to name this blog. To my amazement, someone had already beaten me to "Mawkish for the Nonce" from Lolita. Fzzt! I was looking forward to writing a lot of mawkish posts in which I indulge my most stridently sentimental side, because I try to suppress it rigorously in the rest of my writing. (The truth is it noses in far more often than is comfortable. )

But now look! "Titular Head." What does that suggest? Will I write an endless series of posts about my sense of having no innate authority? Will I just keep reasserting my feeling of not-as-good-as, for the blogosphere's delectation? I mean, I might. I mean, why not? But it would have been more fun to be mawkish. I think I will subtitle my blog: Mawkish as I Want to Be.

On the mawkish front: Today my brother-in-law emailed me that some Buddhists he was recently meditating with had a very light, unconcerned attitude to dreams -- they regard them as unimportant remnants that can be shrugged off in waking life. He gave me that parable about someone watching a beautiful bird in a breathtaking evening sky and then the bird shits on their head. That's very Buddhist. It was in response to my writing about a dream that was really bothering me, which I had over the weekend. I dreamed I was in a car, in the driver's seat, but it was in a river and I was floating slowly backwards. "When will it stop?" I wondered in the dream. Then some rocks appeared and it gently hit them and stopped. But in the morning I felt depressed, as the dream seemed to signal something dismal about my going backwards in life. Not according to my brother-in-law, who kindly wrote to try and get me to shrug it off. This and some other kind emails brought tears to my eyes (mawkish alert).

My first blog post! What else shall I talk about? I could ramble all day, but is that a good way to treat the blogosphere? Let me open the discussion up for questions. Do you ponder your dreams, prying through their imagery for answers in your life, or do you shrug them off?

One more thing. The Buddhists may have a good approach to living, one that leaves them less tormented than us multi-addicted, stress-casualty Westerners. But I've wondered how that attitude -- of yin/yang, everything should be balanced, nothing in excess, don't be too up or too down -- how that translates into art. How can you write if you're so balanced? I know there's a good answer to this but it's something I'm genuinely curious about. Where would the novels of Saul Bellow, to name only one, be if he didn't understand and beautifully render the neurotic excesses of unhappy Westerners?

Oh blogosphere. I'm so happy to be here. I love each and every one of you. Blogs, bloggers, blog readers, blog site maintainers. I love you.