“Unexplained mass sponge migration.”

15Sep09

Believe it or not, but I’m not dead.  Some other stuff happened, as it often does, and I moved the blog.  If you like to catch up with me, and solve the mystery of my lost year, please visit here.

Thanks,
AJ

Filed under: Apocrypha Now, Lame Excuses   |  Leave a Comment

Robots.

08Oct08

Robots: Killing humans since 1979!

Just wait ’til we have Skynet.  Am I right?

Filed under: Strange and Unusual   |  2 Comments

The customary summer break?

14Jul08

I’m taking a little vacation from the web, but I’ll back one day.  Soon I will be posting about the hidden costs of “green” behavior, why I still love “The X-Files” (they named the second episode about the black oil aliens after me, you know), and another magazine-based essay.

Until then, please remember that the Vatican said it was a-okay to believe in aliens.  Just in time for “I Want to Believe,” too!

Filed under: Lame Excuses, UFOs/Aliens   |  Leave a Comment

“Real Simple,” Real Sad.

23Jun08

I have subscribed to “Real Simple” magazine twice, and both times I let the subscription lapse rather than renewing it. The first time I wasn’t really sure why I let it lapse — it just seemed the thing to do. I figured out why the second time. And I won’t be subscribing again.

“Real Simple” makes me sad.

“Real Simple” is a journal of depravity presented as a reasonable, helpful aid to daily living. If you don’t examine it closely it seems to consist of innocuous, even “inspiring” material: Stories of women who have overcome great odds (or, more frequently, given up “stressful” careers to be stay at home mothers), organizing tips, and simple recipes. Sure, it sounds good (in a way), and it damn sure looks fabulous (in an understated, muted sort of way). But it’s horrible, and empty, and most of all, sad.

The last issue I read had an article called “Organize Me.” It outlined the clutter in one woman’s minivan, and then the solutions used to corral it. It seemed normal enough, but it made me cry — and organizing articles rarely provoke such emotional response. The woman in the article wrote “permission slips and thank-you notes while in the car pool lane.” Her whole purpose in the organizational process was to “get more done while [she was] in the car.”

This woman practically lived in her car. She spent so much time shuttling from place to place all day long that the objects needed at each place could not leave the vehicle, since there was no down time between trips. Her kids did homework in the car. She charged her laptop, phone, and PDA in the car — and one could assume that she used them all in the car, too. And sure, they did a great job of putting all of the clutter into a more manageable system, and a system that seemed easy enough to maintain.

But did anyone ever stop the woman and ask her if all of these activities were necessary?

How far away from work or her children’s activities does this woman live that makes her car a second home? How many activities do her children participate in? Was this really a good time to go back to school for a master’s degree while still working and shuttling everyone around all the time? Couldn’t her husband take over some of the child-schlepping if his wife’s education was really a priority?

As I read through the article, I was overwhelmed by a sense of emptiness. This woman’s life is considered completely normal. Her children’s hamster-wheel existence is normal. Her husband’s absence is normal. All of these things are expected and normal. Many people reading that article took away helpful tips for their own two hour commutes, I’m sure.

I took away a sense of despair so palpable I wept.

Another article in the same issue, called “The Happiest 15 Minutes of My Day,” had single page profiles of five “real” women who explained what daily activity they enjoyed most. They ranged in age from 26 to 42, but all save one (whose favorite time was picking up her children from school) stated that her happiest time was the only brief part of the day that she spent alone: Pre-dawn dog walking, a solo morning jog around Manhattan, drinking tea after both husband and children were asleep, commuting home. Actually, the commuter apparently spent most of her time alone, as in her profile she said, “When I get home, I’ll pass by my husband on his way out to work the graveyard shift…but the dog and cat will keep me company.”

It just made me sad.

There were articles on “[pulling] yourself out of a bad mood,” getting a workout in 15 minutes, and an article that showed how to arrange bland furniture in bland rooms — articles for frenzied beige people, pretending to simplify their lives by buying more, doing more, feeling less, and pretending that everything is perfectly okay.

I don’t want any part of that.

I actually live a simple life. I take the bus to work, so I don’t have a minivan to organize. The happiest part of my day is when my partner and I cook dinner together, then sit at the table to eat together. I have time — for myself and others, plus time to develop new skills and polish old ones. My life is not usually hectic. And despite struggling with depression most of my life, I’m mostly happy these days.

I’ve made different choices than most people — deliberately — and I understand that. I don’t have children (and I don’t want to have them), and I have no desire to live in the suburbs. I don’t have a high-powered career, and I’m not likely to be “successful” by mainstream standards. But I have something the people in “Real Simple” magazine don’t have: Ease.

I don’t have to struggle every day to do a million things expected of me by others.

And I don’t have to read “Real Simple” magazine to simplify my life. Their version of simplicity is far too sad to be authentic.

Filed under: Apocrypha Now, Cultural Criticism, Print is Dead   |  2 Comments

We Played Tag Differently In My Youth.

23May08

Oh, dear. Evn has meme-tagged me with these instructions:

Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.
Tag five people.

Let’s see, the nearest book at hand is Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill, and although it pains me to turn to page 123 (as I am only on page 56 so far), I have done so, and here are the required sentences:

“As he went forward, though, he felt an anxious constriction in his chest. It was a little more work to breathe than he liked. He felt at any moment his hands would settle on Craddock’s cold, dead face in the dark.”

Huh. The writing didn’t seem so choppy in the beginning. I’m thinking it’s a suspense thing…

I’m afraid that I cannot comply with the “tagging five people” instruction…since I don’t actually know five more people with blogs! Living between meatspace and cyberspace does leave me out of some fun cyber games, I know.

So I have complied only partially. Can I take an incomplete?

Filed under: Humor   |  Leave a Comment

20th Century Requiem.

21May08

I read a lot of science fiction in my ill-spent youth, and a lot of it was truly bad. There were exceptions, of course, and several of those were penned by Arthur C. Clarke. Combining his novels and my affection for “Mysterious World” it seems natural that the man had a fond (though distant) place in my heart.

The news of his recent passing didn’t shock me — the man was very elderly — but it seemed oddly meaningful: Our last standing and still best scientific shaman is gone, and it seems to me that the 20th century might truly be over now.

Brilliant and dedicated to science (and the inventor of the telecommunications satellite, as many a voice over reminded me), Arthur C. Clarke’s novels tended to drift from the possibilities of technology to the metaphysical — a transition the 20th century mindset found interesting only on paper.

The technological advances of the 20th century led to a fit of exuberance — the pinnacle of the industrial revolution — in which we pushed every available boundary with no thought to the consequence. Rampant, unchecked growth was good. Science would save us all.

And all the accumulating evidence to the contrary was to be ignored.

Small outrages here and there held court for a time — like Silent Spring, or the hole in the ozone layer — but the accumulation of consumer goods and a growing tendency to complete egotism bound us to our increasingly sterile way of life.

A line from “The Ref” uses the phrase “playing with your inner-selfness.” That seems to me the exact theme of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. So many of us are fixated solely on “self-improvement” (usually of the most flippant kind) — regardless of the state of our community or commons. What began with the “new age” has morphed into people so self-aggrandizing, they can’t even be bothered to stop at stop signs. Screw baseball — running roughshod over everyone who isn’t you is the new national past time.

We have to find another way — some way out of our current dystopic fractured existence of self-loving/self-loathing. Isn’t it time to finally lay the ills of the 20th century to rest? We may well be on the edge of a great change, a huge societal deviation from our current linear path that we can’t avoid (if the effects of global warming and peak oil come on suddenly and sharply, for instance). We need to choose whether we fall into a New Dark Age, or a New Renaissance. Unfortunately, I am a child of the 20th century, and as such, I am a pessimist. You needn’t be, however. They say that the Death card of the tarot deck is only a card of dark mourning if you cannot accept change.

The 20th century is finally over. Will we mourn and move on? Or will we throw ourselves on the lowering coffin, howling and rending our metaphorical garments?

Let’s choose while we still have a choice.

Filed under: Cultural Criticism, The New Dark Age   |  3 Comments