– Have really got to start to crunch on the papers
– Need to clean the pad up
– Need to build next Alamy submission out, it’s here, it just isn’t ready
– Need to do a bunch of paperwork that I’ve been putting off
– Need to develop healthier living habits
– Blah, blah, need, need, too much minutiae in modern life

—

I’m sort of down that over the last few years there are a lot of fun holidays that I don’t really share with anyone anymore. For example, Hallowe’en. Here’s a holiday for kids. It’s innocent, relaxed, autumnal. Adults always turn into a wannabe BDSM party or a theme booze-up. Bleh. That destroys the spirit of the thing for me, it’s mean to be light and enjoyable, not cynical or bitingly funny.

Dear God, as an American I’ve had enough of cynical and bitingly funny. I’ll be glad if I die having never encountered cynical and bitingly funny again. I want fluff. Give me fluff!

yeah. absolutely.

good night, world.

I need to sit tight. That’s all, gotta sit tight. Booya.

But this piece on American fascism needs to be read by everyone.

I am on emotional autopilot. Really October of 2006 has been one of the most emotionally draining months I’ve ever lived through, and it’s not even half done yet. I feel like I need to lie low and not go out on any limbs for a while.

2006 as a whole hasn’t been a joy ride, but at least now I’m in NYC and hopefully things will start to stabilize. I sort of think they already are. But it’s hard to tell. It’s always hard to tell.

—

I’ve been thinking more about what I said a couple of posts ago. I might need to stop blogging. Every seed of a good idea ends up in a blog post here or elsewhere, instead of in a book or in a paper. On blogs, it doesn’t work for me. I’m old enough now that I start needing things to work for me.

For another quote to be added to my “quotes” file. Ummm, not that I’m such a big nerd as to have a quotes file. (But I don’t have many from Warhol yet, so this one has to go in.)

“They always say time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself.”

I’m 31. By now I should be able to figure out how I feel and act on it confidently. Instead, I’m completely lost. I have no idea. Absolutely no idea.

I feel guilty. That’s how I feel. 🙁

I was looking back at my blog for ’03-04.

I think I write better when the result is in italics. I can’t possibly explain why or give some kind of rationale. It just seems to me to be so. I feel more sincere when I am writing in italics.

So I often accuse myself at my lack of productivity. I should by all rights be a more prolific writer, particularly given the passion with which I approach several facets of history, politics, and social thought. Only I’m not.

My entire professional publishing career is in trade nonfiction, meat grinder stuff.

Where is the moxiejo going?

To blogs. I participate in several major “blogs” (more appropriately called interactive news sites if you ask me) and my posts are among the most visible there. I engage in long threads of debate and often end up rated very highly. It is in such forums that I spend myself. I make good, persuasive arguments about technology, society, marxism, the future, and the past. People compliment me and quote me in future items, ask me questions that I’m able to answer.

But I don’t profit from this in any way, and my real name isn’t attached to any of this in any way. Ergo, I am contributing a lot but receiving nothing in return. There isn’t even a consistent entry point to a comprehensive archive of my “thought” as such.

Is this where we are going? Are the thinkers of the present and future doomed to sow their oats anonymously in cyberspace, with little hope of financial reward or fame? Not that I seek these things per se, in fact I’m generally opposed to them.

But at the same time, I must eat. And I claim to be a writer. If all of my writing energy is going to very good work that pays nothing and is entirely anonymous and thus not available for resumé work, am I still a writer? And more to the point, is there still a point to my being a writer?

Is there some way for me to leverage my “work” online of the last ten years? the posts and discussions are, by and large, still accessible. I suppose I could try to turn them into a book, but they’re really much more interactive than that and the copyright implications would be multiple and manifold, since nearly every blog claims ownership of anything posted there.

—

New models, new problems.

One thing is for certain: I can’t stop participating. I feel as though I can do much more good by engaging in discussions on a personal, interactive level with an audience of thousands of Web viewers than I can by writing books that will sit on a shelf and seem impenetrable and insurmountable even to most readers that buy them.

I’ve no doubt I’ve made a bigger difference by participating in major blogs over my lifetime than I ever could or will by publishing.

—

P.S. everyone: comments are back.

As are extended entries with stuff “below the fold.”

I won’t bother to mention why I disabled them in the first place. It wouldn’t mean anything to anyone anyway.

—

So I keep wondering whether this is a good avenue for me to use as a mechanistic approach to the creation of larger works. The problem is that a big part of what motivates me in writing, what drives my thought process, is interactivity. Or rather, reaction. I am very good at criticism. I excel at giving a persuasive, sound, theroetical discussion in response to someone else’s wrong-headedness.

I am rotten at pontificating as such, which is really the thrust of traditional publishing, for all intents and purposes.

—

What I really need to do, clearly, is stumble my way through to a Ph.D. so that I can teach. Then I can engage in this sort of thing on a continuous basis (albeit verbally) in a classroom setting, and potentially be as useful to society as I am now on the blogs.

—

For those that thing this “useful to society on the blogs” nonsense is just that, as well as ecocentrism and insanity to boot… well… welcome to the 21st century. We, the movers-shakers-newsmakers will be happy to leave you behind.

We Americans, we are alone. True. Not only that, but we hate each other. Or more to the point, we betray and judge each other. I don’t know why. It’s the unanswerable question. Here I sit, typing on a PC. It’s one of my best friends, and it’s nothing but an empty blue box in which I talk to myself.

Sometimes I feel like I’ll be twelve years old forever. No matter how far I go, no matter how much I learn, no matter how many books I write, everything is still bewildering and ecstatic, trapped somewhere between wonderful and terrible, always.

—

Years ago, before I was done with my undergrad, when I was still just a young twenty-something kid, I set up a video camera on a tripod, took the screen out of my window, and filmed a full hour of snow falling in lovely, gentle flakes. I’ve never watched the tape, but I know that it will have recorded only silence, because I remember as I sat there watching the snow fall: there was no noise. Not anywhere. Not a sound in the universe. Just snow falling.

—

There are ways to live and ways not to live. I sometimes think I tyrannize myself for no reason. But of course there is always a reason, even if you can’t elaborate it. And let’s be honest: usually you can elaborate it, in a dozen and a half ways.

—

Is it possible to miss someone you’ve never even seen or met?

—

When you demand your freedom, do you ever get it? It seems as though the law of unintended consequences always takes care to ensure that you won’t arrive quite where you expected.

And how do you know when you’ve found what you want? How do you know what you want in the first place?

—

Hello, everyone. My name is Aron and I’m almost 31. I have a life that doesn’t look like any kind of life I expected when I was a small boy. I’m not satisfied with my life but so far as I can see there’s nothing I can do to make it better, only things I can do to make it worse. If I could spend the rest of my life taking pictures of snow falling, I would. If I could just be myself in this world, I would.

Maybe I still will. But first I have to learn how to be brave, how to be honest, and how to be happy, in that order, probably destroying everying around me in the process without meaning to.

—

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.”

I don’t check my process table all that often.

But today with my computer being particularly slow, I decided to do so and noticed that there were sshd processes being spawned in rapid succession. D’oh.

Long and short, I’ve been subject to coordinated dictionary attacks for days and days now. Who knows how much bandwidth has been eaten up by people trying to log in to my tiny little PC. I’ve disabled sshd, so that problem is now gone (it was the only open port on the system, and I don’t use it that often).

It just makes me realize how bad things are out there on the network to see 400,000+ login attempts in just a few short days. Of course, they never would succeed with a dictionary attack on me, since my usernames and passwords are not in the dictionary, nor are they common names.

So we consider that the war so far is at the $400bn mark and counting. Do the math with the 600k figure and you’re left with $666,666.66. It’s costing us two thirds of a million dollars for each of these 600,000+ dead Iraqis.

Can you say worst president ever?

See here, here, and here.

The number of Iraqi casualties as reported in a new study set to be published in the Lancet (a peer-reviewed medical journal) whose method compares a cluster-sampled pre-war death rate in Iraq vs. the current death rate in Iraq. This method counts the overall impact of the war: the increase in death due to disease, due to the reduction in medical care, due to the lack of electricity and fuel, due to homelesness, and all of the other “secondary causes” that the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge.

According to the Bush administration, if an American bullet kills you, then you’re a casualty of the war. If on the other hand your house is knocked down by a bomb, and you become homeless as a result, then catch a disease from stagnant water (because the plumbing isn’t working now) and end up dying from it (because there’s also almost no medical care left), according do the Bush administration you’re not a casualty of war, just a hell of an unlucky Iraqi.

This study corrects for that misguided definition of “casualty” by comparing the rate at which people normally die in Iraq (i.e. pre-war) vs. how many people are dying now that we are fighting there.

And the difference in the count is well over 600,000 since we invaded. Just over 3,000 dead American soldiers vs. well over 600,000 Iraqis. For every one American soldier killed, 200 Iraqis have to die. Think they’re all terrorists? Really? There are only 24 million Iraqis. This means that more than 1 out of every 40 Iraqis in the country has been killed by the war. Americans, what would you do if some foreign leader marched into your country with an army and declared that 1 out of every 40 Americans would be killed in order to “liberate” you from your own government?

Does anyone still wonder why they hate us?

P.S. Human Rights Watch counts Saddam’s victims at only 200,000 or so. Bush, in other words, is three times as deadly to Iraqis as was Saddam. Liberation indeed.

—

The upside is that if Bush “stays the course” until he leaves office in 2008, he has a good chance of joining the “million corpses club” along with Stalin and Hitler. Sich Heil, mein Führer Herr Bush.

Suddenly today I feel very alone in NYC.

Why this is so is anyone’s guess.

So now Republican state secretaries are busy printing ballots for the upcoming election with party affiliations reversed, showing the Republican candidates with (D) by their names and vice-versa. Simple, really.

Anyone who thinks that the Republicans won’t steal this election is simply mistaken.