Everything is just a bit surreal right now. It’s likely to remain that way for at least another week or two, while the holday season is on. I can’t wait to get back to “real” life, to the things that actually matter to me and that dictate what actually happens to me the other 50 weeks of the year.

The holiday season is this strange little bubble that, no matter the original historical genesis (whether pagan or Christian), has now been co-opted by capital. Nearly everyone has been convinced that this two week period represents the ultimate test of our social network’s caring for us; the abundance and personal desirability of the gifts we are given are the measure of the value that others place on us.

Therefore, from the converse perspective through which we understand most of our relationships, each of us is during this season saddled with the unenviable task of having to conspicuously consume (i.e. buy nonessential and/or unneeded gifts and trinkets in quantity) in order to properly value all of the relationships that we wish to maintain in the coming year, regardless of the strength and character that such relationships have enjoyed during the actual personal interaction of the previous 50 weeks. The living of each relationship over time, the communication and mutual history, become unreal and unimportant, while somehow a completely extraneous gift — that includes none of our own actual labor (not physical, not intellectual… wholly produced by a third party, from idea-genesis to marketplace), and that has enjoyed no previous context with its recipient whatsoever — becomes the real and imporant basis of future interaction and emotional security, coloring the potential of the relationship for months to come, perhaps even permanently.

I mean, how does this happen?

Okay, so I know. But that doesn’t make the rhetorical question any less powerful. In short, capital has us all in a vise-grip; we have all accidentally and implicitly agreed to spend money we don’t have on gifts that people truthfully wouldn’t buy for themselves (otherwise they already would have), and to attempt to successfully choose as these gifts products which represent the identity-aspirations of the recipient and the socially constructed meanings that they wish to attribute to them, simply in order to maintain, or at least not completely fracture, relationships that were perfectly fine only a few days earlier. And if we succeed in properly demonstrating the value of and our committment to the relationship with a well-chosen gift, chances are that the party most enriched is not the recipient of the gift at all (who is likely to toss it aside with all of the others in the coming twelve months, the gift itself being unimportant anyway and merely an artificial material representation of the measure of your regard — after all, they are doing the same thing that you are), but rather those at the upper echelons of capital, who are happy to accept the massive tributes that we as an entire population thus offer to them, and that we can ill afford.

Advertising… it’s an amazing thing. It can break years-long relationships over split-second decisions about unsolicited and trivial (yet mandatory) gifts — gifts that actually represent our voluntary donations of time and labor (i.e. money) to the filthy rich — under the pretense of somehow enriching those that we care about, even though nearly all of them could probably have used the money and time spent choosing the gift more than the gift itself. We all participate because we all share in the insecurity that advertising constructs for us about our relationships (“Does he really care? You’ll know he does when you get XYZ…”), and we all thus want to be reassured that our relationships are intact — and so we wait to receive such material reassurances from others while we struggle to purchase them for others, everyone completely ignoring the very real relationships that the gift exchanges presuppose!

And what’s more, thanks to advertising, to the Darwinistic forces of the free market, to the reproductive and hungry logic of capital, all of our holidays are increasingly this way: bubbles of media-constructed unreality in which we pause the normal expressions of our selves and lives in order to pay tribute to capital, while risking our social identities and networks by linking the flows and units of capital exchange to the reservoirs of emotional energy that we depend on in such relationships, in place of the actual relationships themselves and the emotions, as-actually-recently-experienced, that they embody.

God, we’re stupid.

—

To put it another way, I should be able to maintain relationships with my friends and family based on the things that we have in common and the communication, history, and episodes of care that we have shared in the past and that we expect to share in the future. I should not have to continually and carefully choose and purchase goods that I can’t afford, produced by a marketplace that isn’t otherwise connected to me, in order to fuel these relationships and keep them “healthy” (note use of “scare quotes”). Too bad we have all been enculturated to connect care to consumability, to connect emotional regard to material exchange value. But there’s a reason we’re this way… there’s a reason people feel let down, disappointed, or even unloved unless their friends and family buy them the right shit at the right times.

Capital is our teacher. Capital makes the books, the films, the brochures, the movies, funds the schools and thus pays the teachers, dictates fashion, constructs our range of choices, names products (and thus nearly everything in our reality), etc. In short, capital is responsible for producing the entirety of the culture which has produced us. Is it even possible that the uncritical emotional self would have any foundation other than capital or its henchmen, whether in pure or sublimated forms (i.e. consumption)? The more cynical among us might even say that, given the opportunity to construct the emotional-intellectual mechanisms of potential engines of consumption (i.e. us), capital as feedback-mechanism could almost have a certain tendency toward what in sentient beings would be regarded as “vested interest…”

—

For any conservatives I know that are now complaining, let me put it to you this way:

It’s about Jesus and togetherness and charity?

Then why do you spend weeks or even months buying frivolous shit[*] at Wal-Mart when there are living beings starving to death, freezing in the streets, and dying in discretionary wars? Why are you not spending the money on charities and the time volunteering?

Because you’re a hypocrite, it’s really about something other than Jesus and you know it, as is evidenced by your behavior — though it’s convenient (for capital’s interests, at least) that the public dialogue (i.e. capital, once again) should urge you to continue in denial, lest you be tempted to critically examine the motives behind your behavior (and thus possibly change said behavior, to wit, consumption).

* Unneeded shit that is produced unsustainably and exploitatively on the coming end of its lifespan and that will end up in landfills on the going end.

—

I’m tired. I’m going to bed. Merry Christmas y’all, whatever the hell that means.

Right now in life I feel just a little bit isolated from everyone. Some of this isolation is of my own creation, yes, but some of it proceeds from the ennui that I feel anyway whenever I try to connect myself to the broader social world. I am never comfortable; I am never relaxed; I am never quite right. My center of gravity is always somewhere else, sometime else, in a place that I can’t quite visualize or grasp. Everyone and everything are foreign, unheimlich.

The sense of homelessness and of not being understood is always strongest during the winter holidays. Every New Year since 1999 has been strange to me. That year was the year when I was forced to realize that there is no continuance or coincidence between childhood and adulthood; once you truly experience the latter, you are forever disconnected from the former, and from all of the emotional foundations that it implies — safety, security, understanding and understoodness, familiarity, tradition — disconnected, no exceptions. Once you see behind the curtain, you can’t ever have faith in the wizard again.

But I do want to have a home again. I am longing, I think, to “put down some roots” somewhere, as a friend once described it, and create a life for myself. A real life… not adventures and accomplishments… just a mundane existence — a place to be myself, for a long time to come.

This country makes me absolutely ill sometimes (i.e. today). You know what, Mr. Bush is right. Some people do hate freedom. I hate freedom. I hate that people have the freedom to blow buckets and buckets of cash on things that they don’t want and food that will just kill them anyway while they smile about bombing the shit out of civilians in an impoverished country they’ve held under sanctions for years and years. This season and all this shopping just make me sick.

Meanwhile, my computer is dying. Like, seriously dying. This sucks, becuase it’s my livelihood (well, what little livelihood I’ve got). Plus, I’m wasting altogether too much time trying to save it instead of hanging around with the people I came to visit.

Suck.

I hate waking up with a stuffed head, a sore throat, red eyes, and a cough. Damn high-altitude low-humidity 10-degree-with-snow weather…

Bleh.

My PC may be dying again. I’ve ordered a laptop cooler. We’ll see what happens.

I sometimes wonder what I’m doing. Life = suffering. Remember that, me. I have seen and done a lot in my day, I think. I’m in transition again. I wonder what’s next.

We went in for ideological reasons, not due to any real threat. “Major combat operations” are over, there is no war as far as the Pentagon is concerned, but casualties continue to accelerate. The number of killed or wounded United States troops now approaches 19,000 and the number of killed Iraquis alone, excluding wounded, exceeds 100,000 according to the latest from Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Mustansiriya University Baghdad. (Although as an aside, I can just hear the Republican Christian Gooddoers now: “You’re trusting numbers from a Baghdad university? That’s a joke. Everyone knows those sand niggers are primitive evildoers who can’t learn. A sand nigger university study. Well La Di Da.”) The same study says that a clear majority of Iraqi civilians blame the civilian carnage on the “Coalition of the Willing” (read: United States) troops, and that same majority wants us gone now.

President Bush suddenly says, in contrast to what he has said for the last eighteen months, that things are not going so well in Iraq after all (I guess that’s what happens once elections are over: candidate confessionals). Powell now says we should be prepared for additional years of heavy troop deployment in a combat zone. But of course, we’ll stay the course — while soldiers get blown up by civilian suicide bombs and tell CNN that the key is to set your jaw, appear strong at all times, and always have your weapon loaded and ready to shoot at civilians who may be about to deploy ordinance. At the same time, the “insurgents” are now running PR campaigns and distributing videos to the embattled, willing, and increasingly cynical majority of the Iraqi public, telling them (quite believably, given a patriotic or nationalistic streak even half as strong as the one that seems to pervade the United States these days) that it is the duty of every citizen to fight this western occupation.

Meanwhile, our alliances with other Arab states are suffering, because if we do eventually give up on maintaining a puppet Iraqi cabinet and allow the Iraqis a legitimate national election in the post-Saddam era that we have created, it will be the Iran-friendly Shia majority of Iraq that dominates and wins the election, and they will immediately join Iran in the nuclear-proliferation-against-the-United-States-and-Israel game.

So, as has already happened once too often in United States history, the powers that be believe that we have to win, this time in order to halt the spread of a radical, anti-western, nuclear-friendly ideology — a halt which will thereby preserve the stability of the area (because we won’t then have to continue to threaten it) — and we can only win by continuing to combat the majority of the civilian public, who we can simply re-label as “insurgents” if they happen to have the balls to defend themselves against The Greatest Military The World Has Ever Seen.

Once again, we have to kill the village to save the village… from us. History repeats itself.

Okay, folks, I’ll make it simple for you. This is another Vietnam, barring the one decision that could change it all for the better, right now, today: we could do the right thing and withdraw as soon as we recognize the catch-22, as opposed to doing what we did in Vietnam (and what it looks like we’re going to do here) — kill civilians for years and years while we try to think of what else to do, determined not to lose face or admit mistake or wrongdoing, determined to somehow discredit and replace (with McDonalds and department stores, no less) the identity ideologics and political sociologics of an entire non-white citizenry that we petulantly (and nervously) find to be foreign and distasteful.

Busy day. Finally wrote and sent a shitload of cards too late for anyone to get them. Sent off packages, did some last-minute shopping of the “we’re doing XYZ and figured you’re pitch in” sort of thing. Cooked a lot of garlic, which is good, because I think I’m getting a cold — all the recent travel and exposure must be catching up with me.

I miss my girlfriend and her smile.

I was listening to some conservative radio and had to laugh at the “atheists vs. Christians” straw man. The host explained that he only sees crosses on top of one or two hills around Los Angeles, meaning that the other hills are all owned by the atheists already, and bemoaning the fact that the atheists now apparently want all of the hills. The conservative view is apparently so narrow (in keeping with George Bush and his “good” vs. “evil” trope) that there are nothing but Christians and atheists in it anymore. Everything on Earth fits into one of those two camps: things with crosses = Christian shit, things without crosses = atheist shit. No wonder the conservatives are so “terrified” of everything… They’re surrounded by atheists! Atheists everywhere!

Naturally, he also mentioned communism two or three times. Atheism = communism = terrorism = liberalism = environmentalism = Europe = SAAAAAAAAAAAAAATAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN. (Hiss, hiss, smile, wink. I’m an evil satanic atheist. All I eat is French bread and French fries and I have a picture of Kofi Annan in my wallet! Waa! Hisssssss!)

Things about Salt Lake City, upon coming back for the holidays:

– The metro is big and ugly
– I always forget how big and ugly
– There is not a single independent business in the city or burbs
– Everyone here says the D-News is the “chosen” paper
– But they buy the Tribune instead anyway
– The cold here is qualitatively different from in Chicago
– But I can’t figure out how
– THE CITY IS 100% WHITE
– GASOLINE IS @#$(*^(*#$ CHEAP HERE

Okay, that’s about it. I’m spending the day wrapping and making and trying to mail out cards, but I’ve reached a stage in my life at which nearly every address I have for nearly anyone is likely to be stale by a couple of years. Oh well.

What more can I say?

Strange. Life is strange.

I’m sitting here at midnight in Salt Lake City once again on a Sunday night. I’m one of those people who always keeps on running. No matter where I am, it’s never quite the right place. I’m one of those people who will be homeless forever.

I’m gonna go read social theory. I like social theory.

I don’t play games, nor do I get played.

and

I won’t be like all the others who studied to do something great and then ended up in IT anyway. IT is the new unemployment. Or maybe, IT is one step above unemployment, like installing VCRs anymore. Anyone can do it, but anyone who does is doing it because a) they got suckered into going to a technical trade college or b) they weren’t at the top of their game in whatever field they really wanted to work in.

That won’t be me.

I seem to be turning into a “driven” person in my old age.

Today:

– Wash a whole shitload of laundry
– Pack it all up
– Check the tranny fluid in the car
– Check the road conditions one last time

Tomorrow:

– Buy a Von’s sourdough loaf for the road
– Kiss girlfriend goodbye
– Drive to Vegas
– Drop $10.00 into slots
– Drive to Salt Lake City
– Go out to dinner w/family, who always does that

I am averaging over 400 pieces of SPAM a day. Yesterday I closed my computer and left the coffee shop at like 2.00 in the afternoon. Now it’s like 10.00 in the morning and I already have over 400 pieces of email in my mailbox, and only two of them are actual email, the rest are all crap.

On another note, I want to live in a place where everything is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If I feel like it, I want to be able to go and buy a new set of hard drive cables, an applie pie, and a set of tires at 3.14 on a Sunday morning in mid-February. Is there anywhere on the planet where this is possible? People always talk about big cities, but in my experience big cities aren’t all that much better about hours. Somehow I also wonder if this is compatible with my supposedly anti-capitalist stance.

Shit.

Oh well, you can’t be internally consistent all the time, unless you’re a mute Jesus or something.

On another note, there’s this whole California “thing” that I just can’t get the hang of. People here actually talk to each other on the street, and loudly — half of the time they yell — and they have these big smiles on their faces and run up and slap each other on the ass and grab each other and they say potentially insulting or touchy things, but they deliver them in such a way as to make clear that it’s a joke, and everyone gets it, and everyone talks as though everyone is familiar with everyone else.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, just making eye contact with someone not in your crew could get you beaten up or shot, and even half of your own people were jumpy all the time and ready to kick your ass. I don’t know if I can ever get used to this kind of social interaction. I know I’ll probably never be able to do it; it just feels strange and foreign to me. I feel more at home in the midwest, where everyone is just a bit more reticent and restrained and formal.

Okay, the academic interests and a small selection of writing samples are up. This leaves only two things unlinked on the front page of the site here:

– My resumé, which badly needs an update
– An excerpt (of as-of-yet unknown length) from my masters’ thesis
– The photo portfolio/gallery/whatever

The first will take an hour or two and will eventually be a PDF download. The third shouldn’t take too long, but I need to decide on which chunk to present. The third is a little more complex, since I haven’t yet decided whether to use my own gallery or just to point to my gallery at PhotoSIG.

Whatever.

Time, maybe too, to put in some of the final coding time that I need to apply to another site I’ve coded for someone, Veg Santa Barbara.

I think I’m done with the online bit for today, though. Short day. Time to read some CNN and maybe go downtown later. Two days until Salt Lake City departure.

Sometimes everything in life feels strange.

Okay, so I’d already had a vexing morning. Aside from personal issues, I was all ready to go with a post about how much I hate this country and the 80% of its population that are Christian. About how the creationists continue to accuse science and scientifically accepted theories (or equate them with theology), using as a forum for these accusations those mediums and technologies that are available to them solely as a result of the application of the scientific method, responsible for giving them such marvels as television, radio, the microphone, the printing press, the mass-produced clothes they’re wearing and the mass-produced textbooks from which they learned to read and write in the first place… while all the while their theological methods of inquiry and divination have done little more than burn and maim thousands… none of whom, I was prepared to add, was ever exonerated by failing to burn when doused with grease and set alight over a bonfire.

In short, I was going to say that the Christians are dullards, simpletons, and most of all, hypocrites, members of one of the world’s largest negative cults and bound to a system of reason that compels them to accept as God’s magic those things which to non-Christians are well-understood tools and inventions… and more to the point, causes them to seek to destroy all knowledge that exists of how such tools and inventions came about and operate, or how to reproduce them or employ them for new ends in the future.

But now I’m not going to say that. I’m going to go on for a while about Jiffy Lube.

Here’s reason number one not to go to Jiffy Lube: they charge $60.00 for an oil change that you can do yourself for $30.00. But nevermind. Whatever. You’re running low on time and you’re in a neighborhood that you’re not too terribly familiar with, and you’re there, and you just want to fucking get it all done and over with.

But once they have your car in the bay, they won’t let you go. They keep coming back and back again, to upsell things to you… that you swear didn’t used to be broken on your car. They come in and tell you that you have four signal lights that need to be replaced, at a cost of $18.99 each. Those are the same signal lights that you just replaced a month ago yourself for $4.99 a pair. So you tell them that you’ll replace them yourself once again, you don’t want to buy theirs at $18.99 apiece. They go back out again.

Then they come in and tell you that your wipers are broken and you’ll need to buy new wiper stems. These are the wiper stems you just fixed yourself two months ago with your own hands. They’ve been working fine. But they want to replace them both at $49.99 each. No, you tell them, those you can fix yourself, too. They go back out again.

Then they come in and tell you that according to the guidelines supplied by your manufacturer, you need a $49.99 fuel filter, a $99.99 transmission service, and a $99.99 coolant flush. The car runs fine. Your fuel filter is obviously not blocked (and your emissions tests far exceed average scores). If you’re going to get your transmission and cooling systems serviced, you obviously aren’t going to do it at a Jiffy Lube — you’re going to do it at your car dealer. So you decline yet again. They sigh. They go back out again.

Eventually, quite a while later, they come back in and tell you that your car is done. They glare. You pay your $60.00 for four quarts of oil. And when you finally get outside and get into your car, you find reason number two not to go to Jiffy Lube: they have broken your window and door controls. Not just one of them. They have all been punched through, deep into the door.

You go back and mention it.

“What are you talking about,” they say, “the car was that way when you brought it.” Obviously, you’re trying to make trouble.

Fuck America, and fuck capitalism.

You pull out of the lot after your $60.00 break-the-controls service, and you pull into another lot also near where you’re staying (here sits the potential genesis for another rant that, thankfully, won’t be born after all). You fix your controls by hand, except one of them, which is not only punched through, but which has been cracked and will require gluing.

You can’t wait until you are far away from everyone and everything and driving in the desert by yourself once again, where you belong.

Broadcast creationism that defames science is hypocritical.
People are often willfully unhelpful.
Jiffy Lube breaks cars if you don’t buy their upsells.
Americans are selfish, stupid bastards.

Merry Christmas, you lot.

einstürzende neubauten / ich gehe jetzt
beck / little one
mazzy star / all your sisters
malaria / cheerio
led zeppelin / no quarter
bauhaus / king volcano
cult / brother wolf, sister moon
latif bolat / song for hiroshima

One more thing.

What am I doing?

It’s time to think. Luckily, I have it.

(Time, I mean.)