Wednesday, July 31, 2002 6:59 PM

Joe Goes to Cyberland or The False Recognition of the Camino Real.

This Monday I set myself the onerous task of exploring cyberspace. It turns out, after a quick search in my soul and a perusal of my spirit, that I have to look at me first. What else is new?

I find it a sad thing that the advertisers have taken over the World Wide Web. (Need I say gentle folk that I do recognize the advertiser in me?)Most web pages that you go to are either trying (some terrifying attempts) or succeeding (I haven't decided which is worse) at looking like whiskey adverts in a slick magazine. Plenty of content all of it wrong headed all of it for ill use. We are told and trained at an exceedingly young age that to succeed we need to sell ourselves. Those web pages are the far reaches of that childhood instruction. It’s a hard world and we have to sell not only ourselves, but our football team our college our family our home our company and now our web page or NO ONE WILL PAY ATTENTION TO US! Or perhaps worse give us a pat on the back and introduce us into their club.

I think that eventually we can get to this place of people visiting us, applauding the magnificent work that we have placed before them, showering us in vague phrases of dubious praise. I am, in short, not entirely opposed to the notion. I just truly really and in all sincerity with all the veracity I can muster, straight forward and frankly, honest injun, don't believe it is a place to start. It is a shaky platform. It is going over to the "dark side" (Look what the hell happened to Anakin Skywalker, no, not when he makes it to the dark side, when he shifted back to defend his equally left handed son and choose to look like a pale worm instead of a splendid tyrant. Bête Bête where is my beautiful Bête!)

I spend my life in preparation. I practice the guitar each morning with fumble fingers and a groggy head. I then electronically scribble in my journal hoping that some wonderful nugget will be mind from the massive store of fact and feeling that influences my muddled thinking. I dig at ill formed and less that lucid (illucid? A new word for the growing grants of geekdom) computer programming, mathematical, musical and foreign languages. I read incessantly and obsessively. Eventually I became deeply troubled by my apparent lack of achievement. What was the purpose of all this preparation? Whither goest thou, my fragile psyche?

Then in a Zen hissed fit it occurred to me. Preparation is life. At least it is my life. The preparation seems progressive although it may not be. The preparation seems like a path though it well may not be. The preparation seems like that which comes before, but it is not. It is instead, the goal. I know that this mystical kind of ritual stuff has been thought and said before, but that didn't make it any less startling to me. The Gospel formulated according to the cup of Joe.

And so I begin to glimmer the gleam of my approach to cyberspace, www, internet, technological nightmare, whatever we decide collectively to call it. Start the process. It is all preparation. The produce of this procedure will grow, shrink, look better, look worse, hold your interest, bore you to tears, displease, please, gain your admiration, gather your disgust. But it is important that it is there, bare, with all the cracks, fissures and disjoints evident. Throbbing, potential. It will be the Lackzoom Web with all our hopes and aspirations and foolishness and wisdom. What I hope you never see is a little icon of a construction worker with a jack hammer and a sign over a wooden carpenters horse close at hand that proclaims "Pardon our dust this page is under construction." I hope that our site will be under constant deconstruction. Constant reconstruction.

I guess I'd like to make it hard on those damned advertisers.

Monday 7/29/2002 5:38 PM

Clean mind, clean body, take your pick.
Attributed to Elvis

Never put Descartes before dehors.
Cannot possibly be attributed

Lousy as I am at a reasonable facsimile of reasonable argument, I find myself once again embroiled, like a chop blazing on a charcoal grill in the universe of discourse that concerns itself with hypertext, Dub Dub Dub and our burgeoning technological marvels. Scratching my head and other perhaps less appropriate nether portions of my body, I contemplate the spirit filled electronic void that passes itself off as cyberspace. And come up all doe eyes and blank.

I decided that I would single handedly embark on the creation of a hyper novel. Wouldn’t it be neat, I thought, if all my parenthetic expression could be placed in some sort of text box available at the click or passing over of a mouse on some underlined or gaily colored text? That was all that was on my mind, really! But as I started to write I realized that in hypertext chronology or whatever organization that I could manage to design control is more in the hands of the receiver, (in this case you) than the sender (in also the same case me). You would not, for example, necessarily read this sentence because you could choose to drift off to some other portion of my hyperuniverse before I could hyperventilate. It gave me pause which has turned to full stop.

I thought I would take a look at the literature of hypertext and see what was going on. Off to WWW (Dub Dub Dub. It has been pointed out that it is actually faster to say World Wide Web than Double U Double U Double U, certainly ironic and more pointedly indicative of the state of cyberhyperspace.) And I found a welter of confusion. Robert Coover is writing, among others, a hyper novel. There are even such works electronically published. (Don’t want to sound too cheap here, but the $25 fee was too much for my poor, and I do mean poor, mind and its physical manifestation the bank account to pay).

Then I looked for hypertext editors or writing systems figuring that method would become evident in the use of the software and essentially came up with web page editors. Since I already use both Dream Weaver and Front Page to develop (isn’t that a pretension way to put it) my company intranet and parts of the Lackzoom Web, I decided to look at the proffered demo software and was to a program disappointed.

Then I looked at books. Printed pages of materials. Hamlet on the Holodeck is one, The Unfinished Revolution another, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace a third. The arguments of all lead back to that old French guy Descartes and the Mind Body split. Tired and gloomy I plotted it in four extended Cartesian dimensions and out popped the devil. Seems that many people look on Cyberspace as a place where spirit, long left ignored in our scientific objective glance at the cosmos, shines. I’m not so sure that they are all wrong.

Pearly Gates points out that we, in cyberspace, have and become avatars that guide, like angels, like Dante’s long bearded Virgil, out beyond our midpoint residence in the Great Chain of Being, physically midway between heavenly and animal out to where the stars hang in spirit filled luminescence.

Lost lost lost am I. In a maze of CAT 5 Cables and DNS Info. Unable to bridge my network at home with my network at work with the network of the world. Crashing whole systems of bits bytes words writ in XML C++ HTML ActiveX Perl Unix Linux XP CGI PDQ LSMFT. It all seems like it should be easier. I just, I cry, want to write! Or Do I?

Wednesday, July 17, 2002 5:55 PM

Modulate whose frequency?

Thirty years ago I became involved with a listener sponsored radio station here in the Pittsburgh area. Call letters: WYEP-FM. It is on the air to this day at 91.3 FM instead of 91.5 FM on your radio dial. It is quite a different station. Not passing judgment. The trade off was that the station must sound more acceptable. Simply survival. People are more prone to pay during the pledge drives. It is far, however, less dangerous to listen.

Don't get me wrong here. In the early days even I had a hard time listening. Our politics were boorish. We thought we were revolutionary. Our social message, then deadly serious, now, still serious, seems quainter, like watching in all its embarrassing retrospect, Woodstock, the Movie. Our programming skills amateurish. I am certain that in the halls of "professional" broadcasting the high “pros” laughed at us. More probably ignored or were unaware entirely of our existence.

Eventually, in a move that still puzzles me, I was appointed (hired I guess) Program Director of the station. This came with some very serious disabilities, not the least of which was a drastic non-living wage. The most of which was ultimate responsibility for the duties of the job with very little authority to carry them out. Sound like a political position? You bet! I abhor politics on almost every level. Instead of a system developed to preserve rights in a social context, real politic serves as a wedge for most abusers to pry their own ideas and ways with whatever tools or power available. If it doesn’t work hit it with a hammer. Do I sound bitter? Perhaps! I hope I will never be in such a position again.

BUT

when it worked you never heard the like.

Two grade school on friends (they became my friends as well) one a newly discharged Vietnam Vet, the other a clever musician with a genius for finding and playing appropriate music, produced an impromptu show each morning, 10 AM to Noon. Audio snippets of historical and current events mixed with musical snippets, classical hep, nostalgic rare and topical music in as tasteful a montage as I have ever heard. The very juxtaposition filled the air with meaning and depth. That radio program was lived in that time for that moment. If you were not there to hear it, you missed something significant.
There were black shows, gay shows, feminist shows, political shows; ethnic shows one following the other. Mostly saying the same old thing in the same old way, but all capable of rising above the thrall and all definitely exposing a voice that had all but been cashiered out of the broadcast band. As you can tell, the thrust of WYEP was mostly to the far left of center. Which makes it even odder that I became the leader of the air. I eschew, close to disdain, all political messages. I consider definite purpose in the art of radio as pornography. (James Joyce makes such a claim about the nature of pornography and what it serves in The Portrait of An Artist As A Young Man. I subscribe to it.)

I believe in the Art of Radio. In those days I could feel it strumming through me. The Tribal Tom Tom. You bet! I envisioned the radio dial as a geography, swoop from peak to gorge as you glide from low AM or FM to higher frequencies. It is a constantly moving landscape. Not only did it move as you moved in space from city to city but it changed in texture with time. I wanted WYEP to both fit into and disrupt that geography. I wanted it to explode mountains and then rebuild them, cause gorges to fill with torrents of water, move with sometimes swift violence and sometimes gentle determination.

My tools were the people who sat in the control room. It was my style to set them in place and then let them create as they would. I demanded only that creation. The problem was that I could not remove the poseurs. The Board of the radio station was all powerful, it consisted of listening subscribers, working members, staff and some community wonks. It met almost weekly. It made decisions with a socially cautious group mind. It left the staff powerless and ineffectual. "What gives you the right to throw me off the air?" one of the untalented who got the crook of my thumb would ask. I'd explain my criteria. Reach through your Brother Love DJ image. It is indistinguishable from the music that blares out 8 Track machines from the candy apple red Mustang at the corner of Forbes and Craig, out of record players in placed in the windows of college dorms. Forget the soft midnight DJ voice and use your own. Over and over I’d make the points, thinking that someone was listening to what I was saying or what the station was playing. And then without mercy, without thought, I would be overruled. I simply made it harder to get on the air. I worked the system, learned to buck it and eventually I left. Not in a hail of protest but in a whimper when a new General Manager was hired. We agreed. A Dios!

The station languished. Some people stayed and put forth tireless and thankless effort. It is out of Oakland on the South Side and prosperous. On the air. Plays a lot of alternative rock. I guess I was wrong about the 8 Track college dorm thing. WYEP sounds to me pretty much like everything else. There are a few charming exceptions.

There is no more landscape on the radio dial. Owners like Clear Channel Sound have brought a sound to radio across the board that is close to what the universe will sound like near the ultimate increase of entropy. Undistinguished, undifferentiated, no signs of struggling life or intelligence.

I can't wait for the cycle end. I want to see Rebirth. In a roaring flashing Big Bang!

Monday, July 15, 2002 6:37 PM
Adventures in Lawn Bowling

Saturday afternoon roughly one pm. I parked in front of the lawn bowling courts at Frick Park. The area surrounding is a posh inner city neighborhood on the south side of Penn Avenue which separates the drive-by black neighborhood of Homewood and the yupped-up money of Point Breeze. The city at this divide is a constant study in contrast. Black and white in every polemical sense of the words.

There was no one around. Chirping birds, wishing whispering wind. I walked the distance around the chain link fence that encapsulated the lawn bowling courts to a small shed building with the name Frick Park Lawn Bowling Association on a sign. People skirted me with dogs on long leashes and plastic bags in their hands. I noticed a white paper announcement behind the links of fence giving the hours of operation. Saturday, but I was an hour early. I drove over to East Liberty in search of books at the Goodwill.

I returned with a passel of Ross Thomas in my trunk. I parked in almost the same place. At the far left court a man and a woman, Isabel and Hank I later learned, were heavy at work. She was weeding around the gutter and while, he with an electric drill attached to about one hundred feet of orange 12/3 extension cord was peppering the green painted boundary board with holes. I sat on a park bench, Pocket PC attached to the extended keyboard, and labored in Pocket Word trying to physically describe the place. Twice the keyboard slid off the notebook in my lap and I contented myself with observation in the hot sun.

There are three courts each one hundred and twenty feet by one hundred and twenty feet. Left, Center and Right. Left and Center are manicured grass. Right is wild grass in a much more chaotic state. Each court is separated by a black-top island strip the length of the court and roughly five feet in width bounded with a foot high concrete curb that drops to the field of play. There are three two sided park benches evenly distributed across the strip. A resting place for players and spectators. Around the entire perimeter of the two manicured courts was a gutter. The far left court looked and I assumed had been abandoned. I was only partially correct.

A bearded man in a red ball cap and a woman in gray shorts and a white blouse shook the locked gate that was closest to the park bench where I wilted. "Do you have a key?" she asked him. He shrugged. They walked around to the opposite open gate. Soon another woman, dressed for game, tan shorts, tan blouse, opened the locked gate with a key and walked across the court. A final women player arrived.

They all gathered while the workers pulled and whirred. "Oh, no," said weeder woman, “you can play today." And they all disappeared into the shed. Out they bounded with satchels full of equipment and moved into the middle of the center court. First they stuck number boards into the ground by the gutter to indicate the lanes in which they were playing. The two men were playing singles. I heard them say. The four women, doubles.

Someone flipped a coin won the toss and threw the small white colored jack ball. Another walked across the court and centered it on the lane. Play followed. Each player alternated rolls. This was different. Bocce, after the initial two throws, the person furthest from the "puleen" (pallino) throws until he exhaust his store of balls trying to get closer.

The women playing doubles had sixteen balls (later I found that they were called bowls) at the end of play. This is also a change from Bocce. When you play doubles in the Italian version, there are still only four total balls on a side. I concluded from my recent excursion to the discount sports store that lawn bowling is a more expensive sport.

Four young people walked into the court. “Hey,” said Hank, “do you have your Bocce balls.” One of the girls held up a white net beach bag with bright yellow and green balls. “They’re not really Bocce balls she said. “Well, you can play over there.” Said Hank pointing to the far wild court. “We can show you how to lawn bowl, if you want.” I moved close to the fence, the young people huddled and listened. Isabel went to the shed and came back with an 8 ½ x 11 paper hand out describing the Lawn Bowling League and the activity. One of the women, Annika, showed them the bowls, pointing out that they weren’t round. Hank looked at me and said “You’re allowed to come in a watch.” I did.

They were all lovely people. The young folk moved away to the far court and played a casual game of Bocce in the wild grass. Not making nearly enough noise for my money. Annika., slight Swedish accent, handed me a bowl and showed me that it was biased on either side and that you rolled it in down the middle. Isabel explained that there was a large logo and a small logo and the bowl was manufactured to break toward the smaller logo. Hank beamed across the court and said, “I guess you can tell we love this game.” You could. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t play it.” And for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out either. I stayed for an hour or so and watched. Shook hands with everyone when I left. “We’d love to have you join us,” said Isabel.

I read the flyer later that night. Most everyone, it says, who bowls is under sixty. Dispelling the rumor that it is a game only for old codgers. Isabel explained to me that it was a national organization and that they traveled to Connecticut and New Jersey and that although last year’s finals were in California that they were going to take place in August in good old Frick Park this year.

But I kept looking at that wild court. The game of lawn bowling is gentle and gentile. Thought about stern old Dago guys in the alley. It would be drinking tea instead of slopping grapes. Thought about the light of the hot afternoon sun. Remembered the darkness encroaching, chasing shadowed men more deeply into shadows.

Maybe next year.

Saturday, July 13, 2002 8:28 AM
I know that I yam and yam that I know.

I went out last Sunday in search of a Bocce set. Thought, if I'm going to be mentally involved in this game for a time then I should probably try some physically finessed action. Figured, well, it'll probably cost around $40.00 which is too much for the frivolous side of my budget and hoping it would only be around $20.00. I also vowed to get down to the lawn bowling courts over at Frick Park this coming weekend. Research says my brain. Research! I am nothing (quit the cub scouts twice before my twelfth year), if not prepared. At least, know something of what the hell you are writing, expostulates my creative writing teacher.

Creative writing class ninth grade. "You can only write what you know," said Mrs. Whatever-her-name-was-that-vanished-from-me-after-all-these-years glibly. I thought it was stupid then, confirming that if I could only write what I know I would spew out about a page and a half and before the necessity of moving on to something else. I know that wasn't her meaning, but it is always my initial negative reaction to a rule or a guideline. I am a very contrary person. Whatever it is I'm against it, remains the ruling script in my life. Sometimes it is even helpful.

But there is a problem with this knowing thing. An old Stan Freberg cartoon where a person comes across a struggling artist, who looks terrible, takes one look and says, oh, you've suffered too much. My life has not been full of suffering. I am a suburban guy in a middle age struggling from pay check to pay check in middle America just middlin’ along. I have not been to war. I have not been part of a holocaust. I have not seen abject poverty. I have not ...well, it's all been ok really. So in the suffering department, other than a load of guilt I carry around for acts that seem not even all that related to me, I lack the "artistic temperament". I conclude from Stan and others that I just suffer too little.

I am not particularly driven. I wish I came home every evening and just wrote long tormented passages of passionate prose or poetry. Instead I eat some dinner, take a glass or two of wine and write for an hour and produce some broken dreams that seem never to get done. I will not bother here with the growing list of projects which I am far better at conceiving than completing. Hey, maybe this is a “life of quiet desperation.” No?

The other problem with this epistemological dilemma is that what I know is relatively uninteresting. For example, I toyed with the idea of a novel called simply, Mechanical Refrigeration. I liked the idea of it being confused with a text book and I may (just one of the projects) even write it some day. The problem is that when I start to write it, it seems very uninteresting. Either I know this subject too well or I don't understand its charm or my depth of knowledge is every bit as shallow here as elsewhere. Perhaps I should suffer on the spit of thermodynamics for a century or two.

It really is ridiculous, I now suffer and despair because I don't suffer and despair or know enough. Doesn't seem legit to me. Could I exist in an unheated garret with these superficial miseries? Perhaps I should cut off an appendage and proclaim undying unrequited love to some woman. Carry her scarf in my back pocket so that…wait this is getting far too erotic and complicated for my simple brain.

I went over to one of the sports sales stores that reside behind the mall and seem way more interested in clothes than sports. They had exactly two Bocce sets. One for $20.00. But it was called a beginners set, had pictures of children playing on a lawn and plastic hollow balls. Next to it was, of course, the set that I wanted. I picked it up, proud that I had the muscles to do so, for I am sure that Olympic Weight lifting champ Paul Anderson (shows when I paid attention to sports last, eh) would have had a hard time raising that set in a spiffing wooden box to eye view for examination. 80 bucks!

Always the smart shopper I went to a discount store and found a set for even more money. America can provide a cruel shopping experience. How can I possibly write about Bocce when I have not played Bocce? How can I play Bocce without having a set of Bocce Balls? Thus, thrust high on the horns, I hang watching the world spin around.

July 10, 2002 6:00 PM
I land on the moon

The People’s Park flap was gone almost three months. Chain link fence contained the place. The Manson family was driving around the town before going to LA on a rip. The Barb and the Tribe were passed out on each corner and down on University Ave peaches and penumbras were sold out the aisles of an all night grocery. It was July. It was the twentieth. It was 1969. And when Armstrong blew the line 240,000 miles away, my new wife and I were trudging up the stairs, carrying meager boxes and suitcases to Phil and Kay’s apartment at the Pacific School of Religion.

It took a couple weeks to get established. An apartment rented from Landlord Elmer over on Ashby, round the corner from the Black Panther National Headquarters. Two apartments down from the nightly concert given from Country Joe McDonald’s balcony. Five blocks from constant turmoil and riot control.

Came the looking for jobs. Andrea got one first at the Bank of America main office at the far end of the Tenderloin, home of P. Giannini. I cleaned an occasional movie theatre, applied to run a newspaper clipping service filled with chattering Hispanic women clicking scissors across a table, talked to one of the large grave insurance companies that abound across the Bay Bridge. Walked Hammett’s dark streets in a tie and sport coat. Out of place in almost every world that San Fran exhibited.

I would find solace during this period of unemployment, in two places. Ocean side San Francisco in Golden Gate Park there was a bandstand filled with empty concert chairs. I would read and dream between unemployed appointments. In Oakland, I would go to Lake Merritt, blue water mid city with small sailing craft tacking, finding the wind. A ribbon of tar macadam around the lake, and gentle grass covered hills into the park.

Which lead to lawn bowling courts and the myriad of retirees that played the day long. They were not the loud and sometimes drunken with all the spirit and passion of the men that I remember that played bocce in the alley behind my Carver Street house. The game only nominally resembled Bocce. The idle old folks were gentile, with supreme expressions of bliss, self satisfaction and awareness as they would roll the ball on a manicured grass lawn. It was cucumber sandwiches and tea contrasted to provolone, mortedella and wine.

As I sat there, day after day, newspaper, marked with irregular black penciled circles, on my knee, Chandler and Hammett (both recently discovered in the mystery section of the Berkeley Library, highly recommended by Berkeley denison Anthony Boucher in article from an old mystery magazine) on the bench next to me, I started to recognize this undistinguished mass of older folks as individuals. I could only give you as I write this, a high fictional account of those personalities, a choice I leave for another writing. Clouded feelings that linger in my memory, made somewhat more vivid by a glass or two of blood red Cabernet and feverish typing.

They would kneel, close to the ground on mats and examine the lay of the courts. Like a golfer reading the break and speed of a green. Then stand, bending deeply and roll the biased ball down the lane, striving to place it as close to the jack as possible. Hardly a cry of triumph, just a small smile that followed the gently swaying accurately placed body English that surely must have affected the course of the bowl. I sat outside the fence on a park bench and they never paid me much mind. Concentration on the game was intense. I longed for inebriated yells as I watched, howls of disapproval, a victory dance followed by vicious gulping swallows of grappa. None ever came. But they eventually won me over. Expressionless, liquorless, focused, they rolled game after game. Men clothed in green pants, yellow shirts, women with their hair pulled severely back wearing plaid culottes that bared no danger. White buck shoes and tennis sneakers. The court, carefully short cut grass surrounded by a perfectly wood framed gutter. The wind blowing genteelly against an American flapping flag, sails snapping on the lake, which was surrounded by high rise senior apartments on the far side hard against the four lane boulevard.

I shake a fag loose. Feel the heat and smell the orchids in General Smallwood’s hot house. Take a sip of his brandy. I reach. One small step for a man.

Monday, July 08, 2002 8:52 PM
Lawn Bowling to you, Boules to the French, Bocce to Me

Take me back O! gaming muse to the alley of a hot summer evening behind my childhood dwelling at 33 Carver Street, Larimar Avenue District, East Liberty, Pittsburgh, USA, World, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Universe, World Without End Amen. (Thank you, Stephen Daedalus). Old men, at least to my young brain, would move from the helpless humidity sweating their back porches and sweet smelling coolness of grape arbors out into the black cinder heat of the alley. This alley was at best an avenue of careless lumps, bumps and holes. Car traffic had, over the hard years, caused a massive mountain crest midway and ruts deep enough to swallow half a 1950 car wheel. When those old guys congregated, black pants, white shirts, gray whiskers and liquored, it became a Bocce Court.

I remember them as dour, stern, serious guys. I remember the passion with which they treated these nightly matches. It frightened young me that someday I would have to join such an adult world. Where game was high drama and serious as murder. Games are games; I shrug, now, dismissively. My life is a game. The thought of entering such intensity, witnessed as a child so many years ago leaves me weak kneed and panting. Perhaps it is a fault. It seems like it when I insecurely tick off all the slack solutions to my problems on a sleepless night.

I wish I could remember their names, their faces. I know that they did not come from my father's generation but my father’s father’s. Maternal grandfather died when my mother was young, paternal when I was still cutting teeth. Having little direct connection is the probable reason I remember them as shadow.

By high mystery, akin to what I witnessed in the mass on Sunday, somber Latin rising with the blue incense to a reproduction of Michelangelo’s touch in the dome, they broke into teams. Those who were waiting in the wings to play would line the side of the alley, leaning against fences that were held upright by green vines and dragon popping flowers, would drink basement prepared wine out of unlabeled bottles and jelly glasses. They were a wonderfully boisterous expletive included, albeit in some dialect regional Italian, crew. Some of their bocce balls were made of wood, some of steel, taken I guess from Homestead or Braddock Works. They were not the modern gaily colored red and green with yellow lines balls that are shelved at We Are Sports stores, but a murky brown or gray dark with dirt, age and use. Camouflage in the alley. I could never distinguish one team from the other.

Opposing teams would either toss a coin or play mora, that rock, scissors, paper staple of Italy, throw out a number of fingers, one through five, against an opponent who would violently thrust a digit count at your midriff. You both cry out an amount that predicts the two handed count. Italian number words would be sung out with a cadence, Cinque, five, would become Cccchhhhinnn Kwaaaayeee! and instead of ten, dieci, deee-aaaaaa-chi, but the cognoscenti would yell Tutti, all. To this day this distinction between dieci and tutti is how I know if a veteran or relative new comer is playing. The winner would throw the pulleen. I know now that this small object ball, called the jack in more Protestant circles is properly named the pallino. But these guys threw the pulleen.

Placed with rolling care in that precarious humped street the game would begin. Volo, the air shot, with back English so that the ball would hit, cause damage to the opponents position and stick close to the pulleen, against Puntata, the rolling shot better suited to a manicured lawn and in desperation, raffa or smash shot, all the explosive force of a hand grenade, lobbed or thrown overhand. Not much finesse, but powerful collisions. I am sure that this is how Enrico Fermi got the idea to split the atom.

The truly wonderful thing is, as I sit here in the backyard typing, I see that it is Bocce at the neighbors this Monday evening. There are loud guys over across the orchard, white tee shirts, bellies extended over their belt buckles, black or tan slacks, yelling as they play on the posh Bocce court built by my Plumbing Contractor neighbor. Earl just scored a point, I heard the yell. I probably should walk over, behind the vegetable garden next to the tar paper, wood window and two-by four shed, in front of the carefully high stacked grasshopper winter fire wood and the swing that delightfully flies out over the forest valley below.

I just threw out my right hand.
Tutti!

7/1/2002 6:50:07 PM
Is this a doddering old man I see sniveling before me?

As I sit here typing TV news is telling all residents of Penn Hills (where I live) that the East End Rapist, armed and dangerous, this morning after a police chase, has ended up in one of the woods hereabout. Keep your doors locked. And your eyes peeled.

The office of Home Security has asked all Americans to look out for anything peculiar. We are on high alert during the 4th of July holiday weekend.

Two truck loads of coils are being shipped to a job site in Cleveland Ohio at least a week early and with little goddam notice. Surprise!, I’ll cry when I awaken tomorrow and tell the crew of unprepared workers to look out the window and figure a way to get those nine 3000-5000 pound babies across the dock and into the safety of the presently empty cold produce-to-be cooler.

At another job site we managed to receive a common place across-the-line reduced voltage start 150 Horsepower Electric Motor instead of the more rare and more difficult to find part winding start 150 HP Electric Motor. It only costs money to fix it.

I nearly stopped at a stop sign in Wilkins Township over the weekend and was sorrowfully given a $95.00 ticket by a young crisp crew cutted law officer, who was, he said, letting me off easy because it would not carry the three points against my license and insurance. The people in the neighborhood were complaining about horribly careless drivers.

Because I paid via electronic transfer, my cable internet line provider, which apparently can not receive electronic transfers (cash them, of course, just not log them) shut my connection off until I emailed (at work via the DSL line there) proof that I had paid them.

We added two computers with the Windows XP Professional operating system and I have spent the past week scaring up drivers for printers, print servers, scanners, cameras, DVDs CDs, upgraded software, and, by gum, two optical mice and one damaged keyboard.

My laptop keyboard developed alien typing syndrome, wherein anything typed on the right hand portion of the keyboard came up as those interesting ASCII symbols that must be of use to some one on Aldeberan. Tech support in Houston called to let me know that I had left the key pad in a locked position and that everything worked fine once they pushed the Pad Lock Key. Bad I am, but I pushed that key many a time and the damn thing still wouldn’t work. What? The air trip and rumors of Middle Eastern terrorists, scared the thing into proper operation? I’m afraid I’ve just become another stupid tech support story.

My VPN (Virtual Private Network) at home will not recognize my Virtual Private Network at work. Oh, yes, it worked for a day or two just long enough to give me the flush of hope. I am almost never home so I have to figure it out or figure some way to call the bastards during the day. Beam me over, Scotty. Uhh, on second thought is that teleport beamer configured with some network card. Remember the fly? Ugh, all those intermingling fly and human body parts.

So I am bent, beaten and bewildered this week. Where is the young Joe who used to laugh in the face of danger? Who made naked love to his wife in a park atop Berkeley while the East Bay Slasher was impaling people weekly in the dark? (It was my wife’s idea, honest. And now that I saver it, not a bad one.) Where is the young Joe who used to laugh at electronic gadgets and give them a sharp tap with a very large hammer until the blasted circuitry either worked correctly or was toddled off to the gadget bone yard? Where is the young Joe who used to ridicule the high panic of news reporters who have nothing better to do than to feed and make us all crazy with fear? Where is the young Joe who used to drive in the face of the worst winter blizzard or drive without care through summer monsoon? Who used to take the garbage out in the morning?

Here. I guess. Just older. Not as stupid. Not as much to prove. More cautious. Mature! Still it would be nice to lose a little of the fear that manages to bind me and brings with it unhealthy dollop of paranoia. Or maybe it’s just the weight of this week. Who did me more harm the rapist of the policeman? The terrorist or the TV news anchor? Is it worse, if I am victim or perpetrator?

I’ll take off my clothes, if you take off yours.

6-17-02 7:04 AM Monday
Ebi no idaina saigo desu!

Don't we all feel really deep down inside us that there is a samurai warrior struggling to take over and discipline our poor sorry sick attempts at learning and living? Speak for myself? Okay, I will.

At varying times unaccountably my life’s passions run hot on this subject or that one over there. So, in my workplace at the end of the day at the end of the week, when I announce to my colleagues that I am going to spend the weekend watching Japanese movies, the head shaking begins. Sure, I say it just to provoke the response. Joe is in cloud cuckoo land again. Not really I reply to the collective ghostly smile, you should try it, a quick trip to Edo and times east.

Saturday morning, like Sanjuro Kuwabatake in Yojimbo, I throw a branch in the air at the crossroads of my movie shelves and it points to Ran, Akira Kurasowa's take on King Lear. That and the purchase of a newly minted DVD at the local Border’s. God bless the scope of the Criterion Collection. Anyone want my VHS copy? I watch the whole bloody business. Hidetora Ichimonji and his whole clan going to hell in a hand basket.

Which sent me, Sunday morning, scooping books by the pile, to find my complete works of Shakespeare. At last, volumes strewn willy-nilly on the floor, Faulkner’s Snopes leaning on Poul Anderson’s Flandry who sat on Nikos Kazantzakis’ Jesus, I came across one called the Signet Complete Classic Shakespeare and turned 1197 pages to King Lear, skipped the introduction and began.

Please do not get me wrong. I love adore, admire, dote upon, kiss the straw filled hems of Shakespeare, but Lear just leaves me confused. First of all, the guy is a dope! And possibly even more harsh in his judgments than my own father, who if he had split his kingdom in three would have left an 8' level, a non-functional DeWalt Radial Arm Saw and two very good steel shanked hammers. Somehow pop didn't feel the need to ask me and my brother about how we loved him before he passed on. Either he knew or he didn’t want to. I guess when you're rich and powerful and have a lot to leave to your progeny you get a little insecure. What? Lear didn’t know that Regan and Goneril (and what an unfortunate name that is. Won't find that on the Magee Women's Hospital Maternity Ward Bulletin Board as most popular name of the year) were sharper than a hounds tooth (I realize it’s serpent’s tooth, but forsooth serpents have fangs not teeth, and I can turn on a metaphor as good as old Will, and how much more sharp can you get than a snappy sport coat)? So, why was Cordelia his favorite anyhow and why couldn't he cut her some slack, although I'd have been more than a little ticked at her answer. I give you father the love you deserve and no more. Sheesh! I think all four were just a bad lot and happy that Shakespeare thought enough of us not to introduce the mother. She must have been a gem. Lear should have given the kingdoms to me. I’d have let him stay with a thousand knights. Just the kind of person I am.

Now to Kurasowa’s Hidetora (his sons were called Taro, Jiro and Saburo, but I’m okay with these monikers because the movie is drawn at least before the advent of the motorcycle and no matter how bad they sound, Count Dooku is worse) who fared no better and, to add just a more special oriental, yellow menace, touch, was cruel as well as stupid. How did these kingdoms exist with such morons at the helm? A lot of soldiers with fangs and hound’s teeth and big long swords or was it pikes, (I frequently fail at phallic symbolism) I guess. Please don’t make another mistake I love and revere the work of Akira Kurasowa, but it is hard to feel much empathy for his Lear who has blinded folk and killed parents and just plain acted kinda bad in his younger kingness. In the American version of the movie Lady Kaede who brought strife to the whole goddam Ichimongi family because Lear/Hidetora offed her family, would have been the heroine, instead of getting her head cut off in a splatter of blood against the wall.
There is probably a lesson here to be learned. Don’t watch Japanese movies on the weekend? How will Bill Gates or Larry Ellison handle their kingdoms when they grow old? Hand them off to virtual daughters who will then steal their intellectual property? Forbid them entry into their own west coast castles unless they have less than fifty programmers?

And my own kingdom (such as it is)? In three parts will consist of thousands of dusty books stacked in the basement and an overactive imagination. My kids can split each book in thirds and then talk to one another about the beginning middle and end. They already have the other part of my legacy. And Goneril, honey, it was your mother, not me. Yours truly, Joe Lear.
How honorably shrimp struggle as they choke to death! (Yep, the Japanese at the beginning thanks to http://www.muppetlabs.com/~netropic/japanese.html.)

Monday, June 03, 2002 7:23 PM
Time Regained

That was the peculiar title for a movie on one of the two independent movie channels. Was supposed to be “A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu” adapted for film. (Raul Ruiz's splendid adaptation of Proust’s .etc.blah etc says the TV Guide Guide). Variously and foreignly called A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Il Tempo Ritrovato; Le Temps Retrouve. As you can tell, if you have a soupcon of romance polyglot in you, a Franco-Italian production.

I know that many folks (far more picky and bright than I) are troubled by the translation of the shall we say, roman-fleuve, or shall we just say 6 or 7 or 8 parts depending on the amount of paper old Marcel ink stained from his bed, with the translated title: “Remembrance of Things Past”. I suppose it is a poor and plebian name for what is a textured and captivating work. Would you rather In Search of Lost Times? Like some Leonard Nimoy TV vehicle?

So my choices for freedom from this translatory and transitory yoke, seem to be, become a French scholar, make my point and get tenure. Make fun of a translation that I have no authority to challenge, or bumble along with C.K. Scott Moncrieff via Terrence Kilmartin. I choose the latter and happily find myself among the various ways at Combray evoked by the Madeleine or in my case a bit too much wine (a French grape I assure you) on my patio in the dying summer sun. Hat protecting the ever growing patch of skin on my head and sun screen number 1009 on my upper body and legs.

Still, one evening this past weekend I noticed Time Regained was next-up in the TV thousand movie channel line up. I fully expected some diverting and digestible bit of time travel nonsense. Instead a man who looked a mightily like Proust talked endlessly across a dinner table. I wasn’t in the mood and fell asleep and had dreams about Madame Defarge knitting a Terrible Tile while I munched a crusty fried cake covered with powdered sugar. The guillotine cuts the pastry into quarters and I offer it to the blood thirsty crowd. They turn down my bonhomie, singing I Get By With a Little Help From My Bread. Marie Antoinette comes out does a disarming pirouette and punches me in the mouth. I let them cut off her head.

I shudder awake. And think about Time Regained. That has got to be a lame translation. And what does it mean anyway? To regain time? And here comes Monday evening and I haven’t written in the blog for two weeks. And I think, wow, what about that tirade that I almost wrote. Temps Perdu, Mon Ami! And what about that priceless thought about the nature of the universe and the delicate petal (or is it pedal) of a crushed flower? Pas Retrouve, Je Cois. Sorry, nothing to evoke those moods and thoughts. Going! Going! Gong!! Well, Marcel, my basement isn’t cork lined and I am not writing this from my bed, but the wine bottle has a cork stopper and my bed is where I am headed in a short while. Shouldn’t that count for something? I sure hope they don’t try to translate Finnegans Wake into French. ALP it hurts too much missed Plurabelle and mister earwicker!

5/13/2002 7:42 PM
De gustibus non disputandum est?
Chaque a son gout?

I have been cleaning the basement. The basement is where I live, cohabiting the space with about ten thousand books, that tumble in waves over the shelves that I have built like water overfills a trough and falls to the land below. In this particular case, the cracked concrete floor.

I have heard various people give various opinions about the number of books that I have collected over the years, keep in mind that this is by no means my first collection, I have changed city and residence several times. With each move I turned over (sold, packed in boxes and given to Goodwill) mountains of poetry, instruction, popular genre, music, language, philosophy, science, philosophy of science, science of philosophy, Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, even the occasional Skinnerian, from pre Soaks to Sri Folks. I probably don’t have an original volume from an original collection anywhere.

The various opinions are often attacks. I don’t understand it! Did you read all those books, they say? Course not. Look, do the math. If I have say 10,000 books, entirely in the realm of possibility, lining the shelves, stacked on the floor, climbing up the steps, sneaking out the door, how long would it take to read them. Okay, if I read a book a day, which I do not, although I have on occasion read, two or three books in a day (and some grand days those were) I would read 365 books a year, right. So in three years, I would read, and let’s just round off for easy math (I could run this through Excel or MathCad and come up with 365 times 3 = 1,095 and 10,000 divided by 1,095 = 9.132420091 but that .133430091 (roughly 48 days in a normal year) of a year would just depress me, especially considering that I haven’t taken the two years that would encompass the leap of February 29) one thousand books. In a further effort to keep easy math, in three years I would read one thousand books, gives me some time to eat, sleep and watch a movie, have a conversation. Hence it would take me 30 years to read 10,000 books if I read about a book a day. I ask you? Have I read all these books?

So, I either answer, yes, every word or Do I look like the kind of person who would keep around books that I have already read? Or (somewhat more flawed and cryptically) Do you keep all the bottles of beer that you drink? Often my dumb yet blank stare answers a whole world of query.

I have been told that books: are my security blanket, that I love books more than I love people, or just plain that I am an idiot, this mostly from people who buy George Carlin’s tirade about all the stuff we accumulate, or would be Guru Gautamas that believe in a simple, bare, Shaker kind of meaningful existence. (There are, I think, only two or three Shakers left because their rigorous belief in celibacy has willed them out of existence, conversion, in this case, did not bring about a long line of being.)

It’s really a little more complex and a little more simple than all that. Books are my passion. I do thrill at them as objects, they can be pretty or gross or weighty or flighty. I do believe that you can judge a book by its cover. What the hell else do you have to judge it by? Contents? I only have 10,000 books in my house, how many are in the book stores, where we sip coffee and lounge in comfortable stuffed chairs or at the top of the concrete steps of the local library? How can you choose what to read? How can you judge what will move you or enlighten you?

Personally I have always preferred heft and smell to cover art, but it is all one and the same. I don’t want to go all mystical and goo goo eyed on you, but I do believe that some synchronistic relationship in the universe, that works with my five sense in synesthesia brings me to my choices in reading. Something integral works here for me. Like a hunter in touch with the forest around and abound, alive to all the sub and super sensual, who finds, with no direct knowledge the correct path.

I can also find missing things. It is easy really. You must look where they are. I can’t really say it any better than that although I admit it is an inelegant tautology. There you have it. What I need to read, the way in which I must amplify my intelligence, is placed in front of me, when I care to look, as surely as a bulls eye can draw an arrow to its center.

Now, let me see, if an average book has three hundred and fifty pages and each page has four hundred and thirty five words comprised of five letters then…Okay. The book that I will produce, that I have been working on for at least a millennium is the Book of Answers. It’s format will be like this:

Chapter 1 (pg 5-15)

Ex. 1 (a) Botulism
(c) Carborundum
(e) Haile Sellassie

Ex. 3 Abba dabba dabba said the Chippie to the Monk

And so on until all the answers are given.

Monday, May 06, 2002 6:25 PM
The Great Frozen Food Chain of Being.

I had every intention of writing my CyberLogicus Philosphicum Part II here, but managed to screw myself into the ground so well, that I decided it was better to move on to other things until I could at least unstuff some of the fuzzy cotton that inhabits my thought and blocks my snapping neurons.

We had our usual Friday night Lackzoom meeting mayhem. Dean couldn’t get his phone to connect on accounta he never switched from Pulse to Tone on his phone service. His operating system and modem were having none of his Luddite backstabbing. So we never posted anything at all to the web site, our objective set back a week, hopefully less. We talked and planned. The more I tried to think about the fine psychological underpinnings of what we were doing, the more my mind began to resemble a neglected garage at a rummage sale. Yins are jist gonna hafta wait until I at least sweep the floor and pack some boxes before I open the doors again for business.

This left me high dry and without topic for this evenings turn at the Blog. Uninspired I went to the local supermarket to buy a Chicken Caesar Salad, (Yea! a Cowardly Caerar Romaine.I don’t think an anchovy passed within twelve miles of the dressing) and some fruit cut and encased in a plastic bowl, for lunch. I approached the final stages of check out. “Sir, do you have an Advantage Card?” (Dollar off the fruit it turns out) “Uh, yeah, just hold on a second.” It was buried deep behind a torn flap of the tanned cow skin that makes up my wallet. “Debit or Credit”, she asks, which plain confuses me because I have just told the damn machine, swipe, Pick ATM, Enter your secret code, I do. Why is she asking Debit or Credit? There are bad communications skills between the human check out clerk and the electronic check out device. “Debit.” I croak like a frog, even though I have assuredly chosen the ATM option. I am complex enough in this new cyber world to know that ATM is something that is at least akin to Debit. What, my brain scans, happens at the bank, between debit and credit. Am I making a terrible mistake? “Cash back?” she asks, even though I have already answered the blinking text question on the machine. No Cash Back. “Nope!” I say and feel for the twenty bucks in my pocket and wonder why I hadn’t just paid with it. Would she ask, “Silver Certificate or just paper not really backed at Fort Knox?”

As all this complex of finance was happening a guy sneaks up behind me in the line and I cannot help but look at what he is buying. The guy in front of me bought three small jugs of lime juice, plastic, green, the shape and size of a lime. I smile and think of the very clever people who have to sit at desks and come up with ideas for packaging. Lime juice, says one of them, why not make it look like a lime. Brilliant says another and off it goes to the plastic extruding machine.

So the guy behind me puts a cold rectangular box on the black check out belt. It says, and I do not make this up. Frozen Paws. Is this, I think, a delicacy from the Orient? Have Chinese or Vietnamese or Korean peasants taken over the frozen food plants, cut up dogs and cats, cooked and flash frozen their parts? Are Paws eaten in sports bars all over the far east in lieu of Buffalo Wings? In a strange way I can accept this. Alas it is not the case. What it says on the rest of the box is even more strange and horrifying to me. Frozen Doggie Treats!

My mind immediately denies the equation. I cannot even entertain what a Frozen Dog Treat would be. I ask people at work and they seem at ease with the concept. After all says Mary, I feed my dog ice cubes; they’re cheaper and less fattening than bones. I look at her with a look that says, you’re worried about the fat intake of your dog? But she is as oblivious to me as the Check out counter clerk was to the Check out counter machine. Sure, says Roger, at the place where I shop, they have a whole frozen food section devoted to pets. I begin to realize that I have become the alien.

I am cautious. Still no one seems incredulous. No one even seems slightly disturbed. If this is all a cruel joke on Joe, why is no one laughing. When, I wonder, did I miss this section of the world order? I begin to question if it really was lime juice in the green plastic lime-like containers. I’m scared to wander in the aisles of the supermarket. Will I end up in the Frozen Long Pig section? What next, I think; frozen chum treats for deep sea fish. Hold on Charlie, we really do want fish with good taste!

4/29/2002 1:03:31 PM

Prince Emleth did it where? with a what? when?

This weekend I purchased two books. Started even to read them. Hamlet On The Holodeck – The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet H. Murray and How To Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies. I had a couple different things in mind when I purchased them, but simultaneous reading of the first few chapters has given me a topic for Blog Articles for this week and maybe more.

Hyper-literature. There I’ve just made up a word. I’ll make up a few more before all this is through and misuse them as well. The misuse is how I thrive.

A warning shot across your collective bows. I am notorious for thinking that is far less than rigorous. Rigor does quickly to Mortis turn in my so very daft hands. Here is li’l ole me about to take on a topic that by all rights should have some proper Rigor for proper Study. I will, however take the low road and stick to the sloppy intuitive stuff that so suffuses and pleases my soul.

What then is this hyper-literature? Well, now, me pretty, that is precisely the question. Is it merely a literature that is enabled with the use of hypertext? What? Hypertext? Those words in a colored font and underlined that you click on to move you at warp speeds to a more appropriate place in the document at hand. Changes colors sometimes to indicate cyberroads you have traveled, cyberpaths you have blazed. The markings used as a part Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Maybe!

Ubiquitous is the HTTP!

Also find hypertext in Help Files. You get perfectly opaque and vile answers by clicking on the menu item that proclaims Help in the common user interface of most programs. Sometimes you can type in a direct English question like. Where do I find a blivet binder? Most likely you are perplexed because in the tutorial section of the help files you have just read a sentence that stated “The only way to copy a graphic target file to the email text box is by using a blivet binder.” “Where,” you swear as you type hungrily, “the hell is the blivet whatsis?” And get a very indirect answer that looks like this:
Blivet,
function.
word type
Show
Polymorphic
indigenous

And pick and click for want of a better notion the infamous blivet comma indigenous. Only to discover that a blivet, polymorphic or no, doesn’t seem to have any reference to binder. Here is the story, my fine friends; help (unlike its name and possibly its intention) is very little HELP!
Help files are the dark nightmare side of hypertext. Self referential definitions that chase us and themselves all around the Rosey until ashes ashes we all fall dumbfounded to the new Black Bubonic Rag, ohhh its sooo elegant!

Course, hyper-literature, uses hypertext! It also spans the entire blivet binder of media. It sounds, views, scans, will with a little prodding via virtual brass noses(so like the one that old Tycho Brahe wore around Uraniborg while he explored the heavens) smell, with one handed gloves, help us either to moon walk or to feel., with Lotta Lenya like (I loved From Russia with Love the Movie) stiletto boots let us take a swipe at Bond James Bond, while we drink a virtual stirred shaken satisfied and sacred martini (so dry is it that someone has opened and quickly closed a bottle of vermouth somewhere in the room).

‘Cause in hyper-literature we will be assailed and supplied by all viewpoints. Be at once Odd Job, James Bond, Auric Goldfinger and Miss Lotte Lenya and Ole Lucy Brown. Scary, eh? Well if you had any sense it would be! This is new stuff to be used only by the adventurous or if you’re anything like me, merely the brainless. I am so hopeless that I rush in where fools fear to tread.

For who else but someone lower on the chain than a fool, would want to work in a medium that lets the reader/viewer/audience/experiencer interact and challenge the very presentation itself. Yes, you can turn off the TV (Go ahead try it) Yes, you can nod off in the middle of the latest John Grisham (and it is especially good to sleep at the endings) thriller, Yes, you can switch from radio frequency to frequency, but you can’t mess with the flow! Yes, you can smash a CD (or a pumpkin) into a million pieces, but some recording company will still covet the royalties. You may not be there, mon frere, but like a good catholic mass, the liturgy beats on forever and ever whether or not you are or even care to be present.

In cyberspace you will shape the flow as much as the author will. Maybe in good cyberspace you will influence it even more. Without you, comrade, there is no flow. I believe that what is emerging is truly collaborative. In the best and the worst senses. Be wery careful, paraphrases Elmer, there are wabbits here.

Look at Blogs! Simulations, which I find ever more satisfying than games. Study as experience. Experience as study. Text, layer and subtext on the new nightly news. Will people of either or the same sex have long term sexual liaisons with unknowable long distance partners? Will babies be born of sperm captured in virtual passion shipped via Federal Express and placed in Petri uterus? Is it a brave new world? This manifestation of hyper-literature

I’m tired and I rail at the thought of any collaboration but I will take it all up precisely there in Part II. The Growing Menace of Cyberspace. Or In Vitro Veritas. Chapter II. What did this have to do with a Time Machine? How do I get out of this help file?

4/26/02 6:48 AM Friday

Another dream another time.

March of 1994 I took a class, 3 nights (10 hours) to become a competent person. There are those who say I failed, but I have the card in my wallet to prove it. It was an official Occupational and Safety Hazard Administration course and my competency was merely an issue of safety in the workplace.

The class, sponsored by the Mechanical Contractor's Association of America, Steamfitters Local 449 and The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 5 was held at the Sheet Metal Workers Hall Local 12 in Harmarville. Whadyu just say! A series of OSHA classes on 29CFR 1926 sponsored by the MCAA and IBEW for Local 449 & 5 & 12 at the SMWA Hall. How millennial, yet 19th Century!

Route 28, my most logical route for exit towards home in the Greenfield section of Pittsburgh was closed at the Highland Park Bridge. I had little choice, after a meal of some very green meat loaf with a bright red interior (oh, yes they fed us well) and three or four hours of very dull pointed regulations and procedures that I was responsible to know, but to take the Hulton Bridge and travel down the other side of the river on Allegheny River Boulevard.

When I was a child, Harmarville had been a place of grand recreation for my family. There was the Driving Range, the Pitch and Putt Golf course, the Drive-in Theatre. As a high schooler there was a perfectly disreputable pool hall with a cigar smoked back room poker game casted by some very tough coal miners shuffling cards and spitting. I hadn't any occasion to travel this direction for probably fifteen maybe even twenty years.

It was no real surprise when I picked up a ghost as I passed the only remnant left of my early days after the new 28 construction obliterated my world, an Eat 'n Park Restaurant. My car changed into a Root Beer and White '55 Buick and my old man kicked me into the back seat and took over the wheel.

We glided to the traffic light before the Hulton Bridge waited for the green and turned left. The bridge was at once in its newer solid concrete form and the more archaic clanking metal decked riveted steel plate frightening structure that my brother and I had proclaimed with little imagination but a great glop of fear the Clickety Clack Bridge. We knew with dead certainty that someday we would plummet mid-bridge into the pacifically flowing Allegheny. Our bodies, a statistic, washed up at the Point. I sighed relieved as we left the bridge surface and looked over at my brother who was asleep. My mother was gazing out the front passenger window and I could tell that my father was contemplating stopping at the Dairy Queen.

He decided against it and we tooled down Allegheny Road on the back side of the tracks in Oakmont. I could smell the fish and see the saw dust floors at Hofstot's. It has long since become a fancy restaurant and even the bottoms of Oakmont for all its light industry has become a desirable place to live. Friday's, my father, would drive down over the tracks and place an order with the bartender while he tossed down a beer and gossiped. I sat there high on a stool with a coke in front of me. Fish sandwiches with fish dwarfing the loaf of bread that was the bun. Four in a couple bags with an extra bag for the cocktail and tartar sauce, salt, pepper, plastic forks and knifes. My old man knew every bar and every bartender and every serving maid in Greater Pittsburgh. If I were stumble this day into almost any liquor selling establishment over the age of ten. Mention my name. I would be gladly greeted. Most likely served a coke in a cold old fashioned glass.

Verona! I couldn't resist driving down the back street where Billy Kay's Bar looking newer than ever was doing a landmark business. Fake ID (even when the picture was of a black one eyed toothless man) would bring you a quart of beer in a bag. My father scowled at me as we drove by an innocent looking store front that had served as a pool hall. He forbad me to go there and knew instinctively when I had hitched and visited the small pool room run by a black transvestite, who was tolerated for some reason by the densiens of that deep. I rubbed the mist of condensation from my breath off the rear window to see the first Pizza Shop, after a Junior High School dance, that had every served me commercial Pizza. Here was a place that even my mother’s great cuisine could not compete.

I knew my father was firmly in charge when the wheel turned strongly to the left on to Verona Road. I should have traveled straight down the river road.

William Penn School, the log cabin house that is the oldest structure in Penn Hills, Bobby and Jimmy Alcorn' house, the Fire Hall and playground, sadly Dr Ferguson and Joseph's Barber Shop with different business ensconced looked lonely and deserted A quick turn to the right would lead down to Green Oaks Country Club and Third Street.

We continued straight on. Della Salla’s Pizza (Strangest cheese in the world. My brother feasts when he comes up from Houston), the bus stop that I stood shivering winter days waiting for a ride to school, Strunk’s Superette that ran many a Super Market out of business across the street because Mr. Strunk ran a tab for the neighborhood families. "Joey, said my mother,” go up and get a pound of pressed ham, six pork chops and some ketchup. Yes, you can get yourself a Three Musketeers." She paid at the end of the week.

The Service Station next to the alley and finally at the top of Maple Avenue hill Sam Arno's Barber Shop. His wife Annette’s Drug Store and the Beauty Parlor, The Harmony Short Line Bus Stop, where my uncle picked up renegade business people and drove them to town, the newspaper box that had no lock (piece of paper stuffed in the chamber to keep the coins) and was a bank where we got funds for a Coke and a Candy Bar.

My volition gone, somewhere grumping, unable to resist, we turned right. Maple Avenue. Going Home.

Cimino's House, then Stewart's my father/my foot on the brakes. I pulled into the familiar parking place on the street in front of 1533 Maple Ave and it was all that I could do:
not to set the emergency brake,
not to turn off the engine,
not to reach for the keys in the ignition,
not to open the door
not to run up to the front door, insert the key
and be home.

The ghosts fled. I drove down the hill turned on to Third Street and drove to Greenfield.

4/24/02 Tuesday 6:36 PM

Pickman’s Model and the Terror Under the Stairs

I have a recurring dream. It takes place in the basement of the house that my father built and that we lived and grew in. My father was a housing contractor during the formative years of my life. He designed and built houses that were as remarkable for their interior space as they were prosaic for their outward architecture. A housing plan is a housing plan until you step inside one of my old man’s houses. Mr. Freud and Mr. Jung take note from your perspicacious psychiatric perches as this dream moves out from the superego into the transpersonal.

When I was in the seventh possibly the eighth grade, my mother's mother, you’ve glommed on to it, my grandmother, moved from her and my mother’s side Whittier Street homestead just a few scant blocks off Larimar Avenue in East Liberty, definitely T(capital)he N(capital)eighborhood, to our home in Penn Hills. 1533 Maple Avenue for which it still stands. Several years ago post my marital break-up, another dream for another time, I lived as a boarder of the present owners in the upstairs apartment for about a year. Full, you betcha', circle. Recursion! A journey from (as you shall soon see), the basement to the attic and back again.

When Grandma Serrao, so we called her to differentiate from Grandma Coluccio, came, she took over what had been my brother's and my bedroom, overlooking the backyard next to the unfinished patio. We moved down the stairs to what had been the game room. A larger and more cavernous underground hideaway. Gaily painted, red, green yellow, concrete walls, a large mural of a Mexican village with a Senor taking a siesta next to a crumbling wall. Adequately painted by the man who rented the upstairs apartment that I have more recently inhabited. A bar with a five foot bottle of 4 Roses Whiskey resting on a pink painted refrigerator. The dark glass jug was a trophy from a downtown Pittsburgh Saloon one happy New Year’s Eve. My father cut a slot in the cap. We used it as a penny bank until he wrapped the pennies one day and bought some real booze. We had access to the blond wood console record player that had a 78 copy of Hearts Made of Stone by the Chordettes, a Sinatra that spun Young at Heart and of course Julius LaRosa's incomparable Eh, Cumpari!, a tootatoot u saxophone.

On the far side of the room was a laundry room, very scary and full of strange gurgling noises in the night. I remember reading Lovecraft's Pickman's Model one lonely evening and never quite recovering from the frisson. Like a fool I opened the perfectly closed door to the room across from the closet under the stairs. My father cached his tools there. The door slowly creaked open. I flung my hand inward and quickly flicked the light switch and found…..I can’t go on it’s just too horrible! Nothing! An eight foot level that sits to this day in the garage next to me, a couple wheel barrows with a dried coats of plaster, wooden tool boxes with hammers, crosscut and ripping saws, plumb bobs and wooden planes. The concrete and shaved wood smell of a million buildings. Not a rat, not a big horrible face with large dripping fangs, nothing animate at all, except me as I shoved the door closed quickly in anticipation of grasping skeletal fingers and a low moan like the wind on a moonless October night. Nada!

Where were the frightful little bastards who make these chilling noises as I read? Dissatisfied I move on down the hallway toward the little office in the extreme rear of the house. This door is also closed. Why, is the door closed? It crosses my mind for about the tenth time that all the horrors in the all those films can be avoided simply by the act of walking away. Don’t go down the steps and the ghastly tentacle of whatever Boogey just won’t grab you. If you know the Creature with very sharp claws that likes to gnaw on folk inhabits the lake then damn well don’t go swimming. Better yet, hire John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, the movie would only last a few minutes but whatever primeval Thing that crosses from nightmare to real world would meet a very satisfactory end. Dumb, I open the door. Moonlight is streaming through the window fills the bottom of the window well. Some things are revealed

In a few years I will begin my book collection at the desk and book shelf situated on the side wall, stealing the backwater office from my father. Those who have visited my basement, damn I guess I still live in a basement, more recursion, can attest to the fact that the collection has grown. My desktop into this very computer has grown. Surrounded am I by myriad volumes, hard paged and virtual, some important some dead frivolous, all loved and hard won.

It is in this rear of the house back room that my dream always begins. There is a hitherto unseen half-sized wonderland door that I climb through. Follow a hallway that gives way to another door which leads to room after room of small treasures. Hallway after hallway that transfer to universe after universe. Treasures of knowledge, on I go endlessly following the discoveries learning by intuition the nature of all things. It is an integrating dream. I know from the sense of well being and health that I have on awakening.

And Pickman and his grisly model’s are after all just more literary pictures on the wall reflecting a perfectly dark and acceptable vision. At least until tonight.

4/22/2002 7:19:33 PM

How many princes of the guitar has God laid his finger on?

The first time I heard mention of Django Reinhardt was in 59 or 60 when I read From Here to Eternity, I became a Django fan without ever hearing a note. Prewitt and some of his musician friends talk in the barracks as they play the blues about this Gypsy genius of the guitar. James Jones (quick aside: I consider From Here to Eternity a prime example of “the” American novel that everyone claims, (sure Huck and Moby belong there too, who said there only had to be one)) tired to write a roman a clef about Django with a working title of, No Peace I Find. He eventually abandoned the idea. Jones through the doomed bugle player and his mates sparked anew a desire in me to once again pick up the guitar. It stayed dormant until the years following high school.

As I write I am listening to Nuages and looking at a CD cover with Django, hair greased back, receding hairline (God bless the bald I cannot help but say), cigarette in the right corner of his mouth punctuating his thin moustache, Epiphone arch top f-hole guitar on his right knee, left hand, small fingers resting on the two high strings in a fifth position chord configuration, right hand picking high E. Tweed suit and plain tie. Listen will you to the miracle of Honeysuckle Rose or Djangology.

My life lately has been honed and drilled down to an existence of early to rise (hardly ever a worm) practice (guitar, keyboard), learn (calculus, relative pitch, a polyglot of language) and write (this blog, Lackzoom, some stories) and of course that good old external prod, work (refrigeration) and early to bed (more healthy than I used to be, not a wit wiser and certainly my wealth is laughable (ask Uncle Sam). To paraphrase Dan Hicks, I worry myself. Where are the people? Where is the experience? Where is the recreation? Where is the relaxation? What is the quality of life? Weedhopper?

Forgive me if, as I blog, I dwell endlessly on the raptures of science fiction and the infinite beauty of the guitar. These things are major in my life, now and forever, Amen. I search my memory for significant things to write and finally settle in on the narrow span of my present diminished weltanschauung.

I have to face it and you (if you read on must put up with it), I am hung up on the guitar. I even listen to Tony Motolla and Acoustic Alchemy recordings. How queer and single minded is that? And Django I have been thinking about Django Avec Le Quintet du Hot Club de France. Le Jazz Hot!

When I was a young kid my parents decided that I should play the guitar. I had two uncles worth of footsteps to follow. Actually they played the ukulele more than the guitar, but who was counting strings in that era?. Long days I would sit, wanting to go out and play in the cruel baseball game that unfolded outside my window. Twang high E to low E. I showed such talent and interest that my instructor showed up one day with an accordion and a new lesson book. I did, I can assure you with some supreme satisfaction, learn the beginning strains of Lady of Spain.

Django was a Romany, born in a gypsy caravan in 1910. He played the banjo, violin and finally guitar from a young age in dance halls and night clubs. In 1928 his left hand was disfigured in a fire. Although his index and ring finger still functioned, his two small fingers were twisted and fused. While he was bed ridden he re-learned and re-invented guitar technique. He learned to grip the guitar on the E-string with his little finger and the B-string with the next finger up, which may account for some of the chord formation and distinctive sound to his music. Go to www.lobsterfilms.com/loaz04.htm to see a Quicktime clip of Django playing.

When Segovia met Django the maestro was dazed by the playing that he heard. Segovia asked for a transcript of what was just played, Django laughed and said , Oh that was merely an improvisation.

This was the same Segovia who said of John Williams “A prince of the guitar has arrived in the musical world. God has laid a finger on his brow…..” Django and John My world turns on them. I don’t have much of the technique and musicality of either. Each morning I practice, early, a devotion. I choose to play with p-i-m-a my fingers instead of the pick. I cannot achieve the wonderful rhythms of Le Jazz Hot, but Bach and Sor come more readily to me after a run of various scales from Major to Mixolydian.

I think God was doing more of a finger shaking in my case.

4/17/02 Wednesday 6:56 AM

Don't you Sofis me!

I was probably fourteen, maybe fifteen. My old man and his crew, Betts, Sofis, and Barney were working on a remodel close to the corner of Elsworth and Negley. My muscles to this very day quiver when I approach that corner with that house.
It was summer. I was doing nothing which meant I had to go along to help rather than sit at home all the idyllic day and read the science fiction mags. Play first base, Big Klu, they called me even though I was a righty, down at the field behind the housing plan. Go swimming at Rosedale Beach, or at least stand outside the fence by the Barrel Roll and Slide and ogle the flesh.

I sat in the rear compartment of the wagon along with trowels, hammers, saws, paint and bags of 8, 10 and 16 penny common nails. The four of them forward. Talking construction. More likely babes and booze.

The house was a three story nightmare with a small garage in the rear. In that garage stacked neatly were far too many one hundred pound sacks of plaster, playing with my imagination, taunting my overactive brain. "You work with Sofis today." says my father. Sofis Pedersen was a big Swede of a man who spoke English with a pleasing accent that sounded more Irish than Swedish to me. His hair was sandy fine, tinted red and fully covered his scalp. When he worked he wore a white rimless plasterer’s yarmulke, white T shirt, white overalls that had more loops and pockets than a roller coaster. For my money he looked more like a baker. Man, could Sofis plaster. The old man's crew, funny names redolent of Scandinavia and Italy really were artists of their trades. They worked hard and never expected any less of me.

Little compromise in his tone, Sofis told me with that deceptive sweetly lilting voice to carry six sacks up to the third floor. Which I, grunting, moaning, sweating crying all the way, did. Out of that small garage, up the back porch steps, pass through the first floor kitchen, turn to the left hallway to second story stairs, up to a short landing and then a sharp turn and a very narrow set of steps to the third story attic where sat a plaster mixing box that looked like a flat everglades boat. Back down, back up. Six torturous trips.

Sofis meantime is setting up in the other room. There is metal lath covering the wall and ceiling in an elegant curve. He is preparing for the application of the scratch coat. He sets up a platform that pretty much covers the area of the floor of the small room and raises him to within inches of the ceiling. Me huff up down!

Trip six I fall to the floor and relax. Enter Sofis a mighty titan towering over my supine form "Fill them with water, Joey!" points to four empty buckets, "from the basement laundry sink." Up down four times more like Mickey in the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Buckets full, check, sacks stacked, check. Sofis instructs me on the intricacies of mixing water and plaster "Like your mama makes pasta." he croons and mixes. I am hungry for ravioli. (Rip goes the paper opening two bags) Make a hole, put the water in the middle (splash from the bucket), and mix (a hoe with a long handle) from the in out." I master it pretty quickly really. Like mama and pasta, I think. Sofis in the other room, "Bring plaster, Joey!" which I do.

He quickly scoops the perfectly constituted wet plaster mass, proudly presented in the dual purpose water buckets, that I been struggling to carry with two hands, single handedly onto his plasterer's hawk. A large square flat metal plate with a handle stuck in the middle. Raises the immense load to the ceiling with frightful ease, and pushes the entire yield into the metal lathing with terrifying speed. I am appalled. I look at the huge muscles of his arms which are just barely contained by his shirt. The bastard has the nerve to not even sweat. Suddenly, I realize I am in for a very long day. "More," says Sofis, "Joey!"

Oh that cry! "More, Joey!" I would mix, shuffle into the room, watch Sofis fill the hawk with the precious essence of plaster, lift it with one handed ease and make it disappear and become the first coat of the wall. "More, Joey!"

The horror! I got back to the mixing room, Sofis bellowing and singing. Only empty sacks, the plaster was three floors below and a back yard away. Sisyphus had to endure no more than I that morning. I would look at the sun as I toiled, an Egyptian Slave building a pyramidal tomb, willing the star to rise toward noon and lunch and respite. Praying for a tornado to haul me off the Oz. I spilled water as I climbed unable to stabilize the swirling liquid, blisters appeared in the webbing of my thumbs, broke raw and red. Cuts on my hands and arms and legs congealed with white plaster dust. More Joey More Joey! MORE JOEY! It became my mantra to alleviate the pain. The lathing sucked up the plaster; the walls looked the same as before, we're never going to be done, Sofis singing.

It ended. All earthly happenings must. Sofis did, Betts did, and my father did. (Barney, I can only assume, did) It wasn't even the hardest that I worked in my life. But it was a daunting trial by fire and somehow it purified me. Oh, I still ran like hell when my father was looking for me to help in the good old summertime.

I don't really shudder when I approach Elsworth and Negley. I look with pride and a deep stirring memory. The house still stands and for all I know the blood and sweat that I spilled to help mix the plaster, Sofis prodding, More Joey, singing my name with his soft accent, still echoes up that third story room.

4/12/02 6:51 AM Friday
Polished off 4/15/02 6:54 PM

Is there an aesthetic anesthetist in the house?

Rules. Can't stand 'em. Never could.
When I formulate them I am tapping out a code of behavior for someone else. People should follow their own codes of behavior. Hush now! I can hear your negating thoughts. What about crime what about traffic lights what about murder what about pollution what about grammar! I didn't say there shouldn't be ethical behavior. Just said, I can't stand rules, unless (I give you an out) they are intended as guides. Rules should take Virgil's Role in the Inferno (who wants to reside in heaven when all the interesting people have crossed the River Acheron with Charon for the price of a coin), or perhaps Mr. Myagi in Karate Kid. Wax On Wax Off Buddy!

All this talk of rules, ethics and such relates to the massive agita that people who write books about writing or painting or composing music or dressing a turkey or undressing a super model or building an outdoor barbecue pit, give me. The best know that the last thing you should do is pay attention to what they are proposing. And further relates to what Lackzoom Acidophilus in general and I, in particular, as we try to create our little web area in cyber space, are placing under the close scrutiny of considerable consideration.

WebPage Aesthetic 101
Tutorial Version 6.5.2a-30
1. Old form rules don't apply even as guidelines. Present web pages often look like magazine advertisements. After all, are not 3D deep shadowed graphics and glossy print the catchy order of the day? Now add a dollop of some flash animation to grab the attention of the flighty audience. Voila (Pardon my French especially when I can't find my way to the accent grave on the keyboard), a new form is born. The aesthetic is realized, the medium mastered. Possibly not!
2. The nature of the new medium is interactive and demands frequent change. That means rather constant work is required (Please take note you old time Protestant American Work Ethic Mavens). I am told that farmers come to despair at the fact that cows must be milked every day whether or not Ma and Pa want to take a trip over the two lane blacktop to the County Fair for the weekend or just sleep in. Behold the new bovine!
3. The "audience" doesn't have to pay attention to your particular sets of logic. They can manage the hypertext wormholes provided in any order they want, including forsaking you for the open arms of another cyberlover.

Faced with the above stated precepts, I give my thoughts about what Lackzoom Acidophilus is doing while searching for a web aesthetic in the new and possibly already passe (see accent missing aigu again) millennium.

We used to do a lot of radio both prerecorded and real time, when we were on the air circa 1974 - 78 at WYEP then 91.5 FM. Our idols were The Firesign Theater and Stan Freberg. Both used the audio medium in a wonderful manner. An environment was created in which the most adventurous and absurd actions could be described in very textured sound. One of the important aspects of radio, is put forth by Stan, (It is true that I can't describe his example very well in print. Get the picture?), He describes (the audio air full of sounds) a giant strawberry being picked up by several helicopters and then being dropped into the ocean off the New York coast. Finally, as it floats, covered with a frothy layer of whipped cream. "Alright! Now," says Stan (hold for proper emphasis)," do that on TV." Radio is profoundly different from TV. Much that would be visual is left to your rather rabid imagination. Part of what we are exploring is audio.

In our cyberspace, hypermedia, electronic messaging we can also provide the visual, static or moving images, with or without color, with or without sound. This isn't radio. This isn't sound recording. This isn't a live music performance.
It isn't writing. There is an inner depth of meaning and expression that can only be revealed with words, scenes, structure. Can't get it with radio. Can't get it with poetry which is different from writing literature. This isn't poetry either.

Movies, you have to reveal in images, which can be striking, but the weakest film contains a script that explains to you what the film images should be exploring. People, who opine that movies are about writing, don't close their eyes in the theater. Or maybe they do. This isn't the movies.

Comic books, visual novels, animations, TV commercials, TV infomercials, audio books, electronic books, grocery store food labels, MSDS forms, all have their aesthetic. Some even have a definite use. All have proselytizers hawking their revealed rules. I read and listen to what they say, I appreciate some of what they say, but I choose not to follow what they say. If some of it gets incorporated into my personal vision, that's okeedokee with me.

I hate RULES. Rules come at the end of process. At the end of the universe there will be one very pervasive rule. And I won't like it very much!

We thus arrive at the Web Page of Lackzoom Acidophilus. Several of us, all with differing visions, are collaborating. Makes it even harder doesn't it. The RULES given for work in this completely new medium are so desperately formulated by others that they must ignored. The government tries to censor, Recording Companies and Hollywood try to control, Corporations flock to be there to sell.

We are only doing this because it is life and death to us. Like all fun things must be.

We don't have answers. Rules pop in and out of existence like solar neutrinos in a tank of perchlorethene, bathing deep underground. Some even travel backwards in time.

The best of us know that the last thing you should do is pay attention to what we have to say.

4/10/2002 7:04 PM
“Of course.” said Cadrax, the three snouted Balovina GortWorm pointing a blasix cannon in the direction of the ottoliner, “I cannot let you escape into N-dimension.”

I have this problem and I would like to believe that it has nothing to do with Nostalgia Ain’t Being What it Used to Be. Or when I was a child I spoke like a man, now that I am a man I speak like a kid. Or I’m older and set in my ways. Or even that the failing isn’t mine but the failure belongs to:

Science Fiction!

What, you say, the hell is this all about? I hold that many of the littler pleasures that I encounter as I move through this day to the next, are precisely those non-earth shaking, seemingly inconsequential rather than life over death items that make living not only bearable but worth the living. Worth more than your work position, social standing, religious persuasion, ethical demeanor, bathing habits (I will however point out here that in my mind clean is better) and just about anything else you can petulantly point to as “important and/or meaningful.” In short, in the small matters lies my spirituality. Seeing, if you will,
a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
(Thank you, William!)
Always sweat the small stuff.

Where was I before all this heady poetical muck ... oh, yes... Science Fiction.

I love Science Fiction! Since the days of third grade at William Penn School when I took a trip with Tyco M. Bass and Eleanor Cameron’s Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet.
I have never returned.

You never found me as a pre-teen too far from an edition of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. I knew that John W. Campbell Jr. was the kind of brilliant editor that was there to discover me along with Heinlein and Asimov and Sturgeon. I wrote a story. It had, with little exaggeration, Scores of Bug Eyed Monsters (called BEM to let the cognoscenti know just how hip I really was), Beamers and Blasters. A thing that would attach itself to part of your spine and take over your nervous system, revealing your inconsistent behavior to only those closest to you, and one of the best Air Force/UFO battles of all times, flashing lightning and red blaster bursts while an evil saucer shaped intergalactic cruiser tried to fight it’s way against Earth’s obnoxious gravity. John W commented long enough to send me a form letter that thanked me and explained that what I had written was not quite the kind of story that Astounding Science Fiction could use. The fool! And then he changed the name to Analog Science Fiction. (It is still, Chilren, on the newsstand today.) I have long since figured that he was forced to change, because he rejected my story.

The problem.
I have recently renewed my waning interest in Science Fiction. (Periodically I have dabbled over the decades and have always read this and that, subscribed to a sf mag here and there, attended a convention or two). I walk into a bookstore. Approach the science fiction racks. Run my hands hungrily down the spines of hard and paper backed books. And I find….

Well….I find a lot of fantasy novels with guys and gals in chain mail hacking at a dragon with reptilian wings, or I find….dark stories of dark fantasy with dark things happening to really dark people who are in the thrall of their dark past. I move down the aisle and come across computer games that have become science fiction novels, followed by thousands of TV shows that have become science fiction novels, followed by movies that have become science fiction novels, followed by a cottage industry of books about the various incarnations of the Star Ship Enterprise and more yet about Hans Solo, Luke Skywalker, Lando Calrissian, Obi Wan, Yoda and Darth Vader. Seldom do I find what I am looking for. What I will call, for lack of a more cogent term, “real” science fiction. Oh, sure there are the classics repacked, more Heinlein, Sturgeon and Asimov than you can shake a stick at. And the military guys, who are always fighting BEM’s with Blasters (okay they are better than that, but conservative and about a wacky a contingent as you can find short of the green Berets.)

I have tried! Honest, I have read, Stephen Baxter into Greg Egan into Greg Baer into Ken MacLeod into Robert Sawyer into Nancy Kress into Catherine Asaro into Charles Sheffield into Connie Wills into .. well I have tried. They all fall short of satisfying my wonder. Some of it is the science. I hate many modern conceptions of the cosmos, they may be superior in theory but they lack poetry. The modern changing biological world just plain scares me silly. It smells more of Stephen King, it is more awful that awe inspiring. And I never believed in sociology nohow.

Look, the “classic” writers weren’t much when it came to creating superior literature. Most were close to inept. But they often featured a breathless view of the cosmos that rivaled guys like William Blake. Current writing has become more competent. Less sloppy. I just don’t care for the vision.

Tonight I will move on to Manifold Space (The second in a (so far) trilogy (please, I keep saying in a mantra, stop writing series and trilogies) by Stephen Baxter. Volume 1 Manifold Time - Great science, writing in need of an editor, and unformed characters. What’s to like so far?

Dr. Borthwick flipped the toggle switch on the massive Townsend p-brane generator and disappeared. Maybe John Jr. was right!

Monday 4-8-02 6:10 PM
I'll raise you two geeks and a nerd.

This is the first weekday of daylight savings time. It is probably 65 degrees (º) Fahrenheit (F) (being in the refrigeration business I am always scrupulous about my units) No shade or relief on my backyard picnic table. The sun is glowing at me in the East. It won't set for another hour or so. I hate, despise and otherwise don't care for daylight savings time. I figure, if I wanted to get up at three in the morning, I would just set my alarm clock for that very eerie hour. Last week my alarm said 4 AM when it clicked and spit sound at me and it was indeed 4 AM. Now it mocks me. Still says 4 AM, but behind the red lit digital dial, a massive smile on the rather cruel face of time. It snickers. “It is really 3 AM, sucker!”

I am a devoted person of the morning. I think the late night is reserved for reprobates, criminals and vampires. If you fall within the limits of my categories, well, I figure, you should probably find a way to straighten out your life. Nuff said?

Now that I have set the vituperative tone of this rather peevish post, I will move on to the other group of people (I know in my heart of hearts that you are all the same group, but I dare not let my prejudice show). Those who insist that it is better to write with a pencil than with an electronic keyboard. Those who spend inordinate times drawing lines on papers to make a schedule instead of using some (and I admit it) less than perfect piece of software. Those who have you fill out (been to a doctor's office lately) the same information of twenty disparate forms so that your writing hand that starts with a decent calligraphy (mine does not even meet that minimum requirement) soon shrivels your mitt into a withered claw.

Early in my computer experience the company I worked for used an accounting software that though low on the list of top thousand accounting packages, still soared above the best one-write system.. A woman at the front desk, who would enter data hour after hour, toiled mightily. One day I was talking to the guy who wrote that particular accounting software. He pointed out that with the wonder of the F8 key that you could save six maybe seven keystrokes. Well, hell, I thought that was just great. So I showed Diane. She looked at me like I was smiling from the other side of sanity. "No." she informed me and displayed the repeated the six key strokes with sure hard pecked vengeance, "it's much easier this way!"

This was my first peek into the unyielding world of all too human habit when referring to any change. I'm pretty sure what she was saying was, and I choice to be charitable here, instead of just flat out calling her dumb, ‘I have done these six keystrokes so many times that even though one keystrokes seems easier, it would take me an insurmountable effort to do something different.’

That thinking leads me to despair. But I can accept it. Instead she insisted when I repeated my observation that six keystrokes could not be easier to manage than one, that I was the one prone to idiocy. This thinking leads me to the other side of sanity.

So, you like to work at your typewriter because that is the way that you work with comfort. Okay! I can accept that. In fact, I'll go you one better. I just don't give a damn. Do it! All I ask is that you please try not to tell me that it is an easier way to go about writing. I spent many a dreadful day, with plenty of white-out and threw out many a soiled, pock marked piece of paper before I typed one that was acceptable. I felt that my time was utterly wasted. I wanted to write and create.

Use your pencils or pens, they are charming. I don't want to strip you of the pleasure of a long line gliding over a smooth clear sheet of paper. Just stop your yammering about how much better it all is than writing on a computer.

I am sitting on my back patio with my one month old Pocket PC, writing with a version of Pocket Word. Last year in the summer, I used my laptop. The pocket PC ids more easily read in the bright sun, it does not take a full three or four minutes to boot, it's battery charge lasts about ten hours, the laptop, at best three, I have innumerable books and articles stored that I can read when I tire of this writing and best of all when it begins to rain or I must move, I fold up the keyboard and put both it and the Pocket PC in my POCKET and move. This, I contend is better and is a definite improvement over the Poor Performing Palm Pilot with constant battery failure and not enough memory that I last owned.

This new technology is a marvel that continues to amplify my intelligence (and there are those who say it could use some mighty amplification). I don't much care about artificial intelligence, AI, but I do think that my salvation and perhaps our salvation will be in Intelligence Amplification, IA. This Pocket PC, my laptop, my desktop computer, my VCR, my Yamaha Keyboard, my toaster that actually browns rather than burns to a black cinder a piece of bread, the microwave that I use mostly for coffee and left-overs, my digital camera that saves me from going to the supermarket and waiting a week for the pictures that chronicle my life, all help make me a more versatile and interesting person.

Wow, this is way more of a soap box than I intended to climb upon. There are old ways that I revere. There are old times that I wish I could recapture. When I dream of time travel (I do more and more frequently. Time is definitely on my mind) it is with an eye toward the past. But the technology of the computer revolution disappoints me only in the fact that it doesn't advance more quickly. Moore's law just doesn't get it for me. (The amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year and a half) And a hearty, Hell Yes!, most of companies creating software are too blinded by securing their intellectual property, IP, and creating really boring acronyms, than by moving forward to far greater rewards.

Amen Brother!
Can I have an Oy Vey?