Welcome Future Business Leaders of America 1983

These had to have been the fastest 3 days of his life.  Josh was finally beginning to feel as if he were coming into his own.  Iowa would never be big enough to hold him again.

Which seemed a great irony.  Iowa gave off almost nothing BUT a feeling of vast space.  Oceans of flat cornfields and bland, one-story ranch homes sprinkled with a few lonely clutches of office buildings (all, too, single story), strung together lazily with a few dangling stretches of interestate.

Whereas New York City, where he was now, literally was a concrete jungle.  The avenues and boulevards that wound warily around the shadow of sky scrapers, glass office towers and enormous public buildings of every description buzzed with non-stop traffic, foot and vehicular, had to been 24-hours a day.  If these buildings themselves didn't have some vital, throbbing presence, you could certainly never shake the feeling of it--the strangest, most exotic looking characters would burst upon you, through you and past you before you even knew that you'd turn the street corner.  Josh later wondered if he'd ever had a horizon of more than 20 yards ahead of him during that whole 3 days.  Yeah, THIS was where he was meant to be.  A place that could keep up with the pace of his ideas, vibrate with his own intensity.

But the moment the thought entered his head he felt a little ashamed of himself.  After all, the project that won top prize in the Future Business Leaders of America's "Business Plans of Tomorrow" contest was a GROUP rather than individual effort.  He hadn't flown in from Dubuque alone.  He, Emma and Waldo were a team.  True, the market quantification models, which were the main operational feature of the project were largely his creation.  Waldo was the computer guru who supplied the raw number-crunching power without which his own high-order calculations would be onerous and out of reach of the lightening-quick strike times that could render this thing a market buzzsaw.

And Emma . . . Well, inspiration counted more than as much as inspiration, Josh was pleased to concede.  A marketing whiz, it was Emma who fixed on the overall pitch approach, aesthetic form of the dealcraft.  She and Josh were complementary opposites; he the hard-driving mathematical realist, she the amiable marketeer with an almost effortless ability to please.  Y'know, in one way, that way, at least, her coming from Iowa had to be a real advantage--she'd be able to disarm people with such a guileless charm that Josh and Waldo's software would have been pitched, sold and installed in any one of the great Manhattan trading houses before the competition could get the ink dried on its RFS.

But guileless didn't mean 'gormless'.  Emma exuded a reliable confidence, not just a ditzy charm.  She was a brunette, not a blonde.  Beautiful, petite, and always dressed with a tasteful understatement just shy of elegant, she could have just made a passable Jackie O in another world.  And if things went Josh's way in THIS world, she might still have that chance.  Provided he had a moment to be alone with her.

Frustratingly, he hadn't.  Up until this point, anyhow.  Every living minute of their trip so far they'd been whisked from one engagement or sight seeing tour to another by Mirrah.  Mirrah radiated more than a little bit of glamour herself.  Maybe fourty-four or so years old, five-foot-four, maybe 110, 115, well-put together with immaculately coiffeured raven hair, Mirrah was the host, tour guide and, as Josh at first suspected, chaperone, that the FBLA had assigned them during their visit. 

On one hand it was flattering to have so much solicitous attention poured on, and maybe inevitable given the importance of the prize they'd just won, but it was also a little embarrassing.  As if the New York slicksters didn't trust the corn-fed trio of 17-year olds to stay out of trouble for four days in the big city.  But come on, the prize they'd won was for a BUSINESS PLAN, for Christ's sake.  He wasn't just some babe in the woods here, but a sophisticated grown man.

Mirrah seemed to catch on to this fact over time.  In fact, by the afternoon of that third day (a Friday), she seemed to have been completely sold, and even let her own hair down a bit.  He couldn't really tell for sure, because her unfamiliar East Coast accent was sometimes hard to make out over the noise of the busy downtown traffic, but he even got the impression that she was trying to tell a racy joke on a couple of occassions. 

It could have been his hyperactive imagination, though.  The heady atmosphere of Manhattan and the jostling, close physical proximity he'd had to this older but still exotically beautiful woman over the last few days could have been getting to him.  It was only when Mirrah, Josh and Waldo returned to the hotel from dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant, and run into Emma in the lobby, did he take notice that he'd been away from her nearly half their precious short time in New York.

That prior day, Thursday, Josh'd realized that the clock was ticking and tried to get a little time alone with Emma.  The best he figured he could do without totally showing his hand was to send Waldo and Mirrah off on a diversionary sight seeing trip to the Statue of Liberty while he and Emma grabbed a quick lunch at the hotel restaurant, saying that he'd wanted to coach her through her portion of the presentation they would be giving on Saturday when they would formally accept their prize.

So far so good, but Josh made the dumbass move of actually bringing an outline of the presentation down to the restaurant.  When some beefy old dude and his niece in the next table overheard them it was all over.  This fellow introduced himself as Schuyler Van Houten, local sponsor of the FBLA who would be compere-ing the event on Saturday.  And from there Josh's plan went off the rails alltogether.

Maybe he was a bit harsh in describing Schuyler.  Yeah, he was old, maybe 45, 50, and a little more beef than hair these days, but he did seem like a nice guy.  He bought them a round of beers. Very decent of him, didn't even ask their ages although technically he probably should have.  It was probably a sign of his respect for their achievement and business acumen.  Though that was a double-edged sword, too--turned out Schuyler was a 25-year marketing man himself didn't need any prompting to launch into a lecture on that topic, full of tips and pointers on Emma's pitch.

Emma ate it all up.  What else could she do?  As the team's marketing expert that was her job, if not to please the FBLA audience generally, at the very least this specific man.  So Josh was glad when he caught a glimpse of Waldo and Mirrah returning to the hotel lobby.  Making his excuses, and allowing the two to continue their marketing dissertation without him as a superflous third wheel, he rushed over to join the others.

And so he hadn't caught sight of her since the previous afternoon.

What is like unto a manne who hath not musicke?

"What is like unto a manne who hath not musicke?"

"'Tis like unto an chimeney whose flues art constructed of air,
And which perpetually draweth forth the cold stinging darts of Boreas,
Piercing deep the fleshe with many nasty brutish rends."

Inez Delgado (Part I)

Inez is the most glamorous woman I’ve ever met. The first time I saw her, my eyes nearly dissolved.  Her clear emerald eyes exude an uncommon warmth and kindness, shining as they do from the perfect, heart-shaped contours of a gentle olive face. I was enthralled from the very start. It was like I was shipwrecked and washed ashore between elegant, high arching brows and the soft, kind flesh of her lips.  I imagined those lips had the flavour of some sublime tropical fruit that only the lucky ever hear mention of, let alone get to taste. I never wanted to leave.

Yeah, I’d been around beautiful women before, such as passes for beauty in these cold northern places. My mother could probably have been accounted as an exemplar of the type. As I recall it, she had long loosely curling red-gold hair, a smooth porcelain complexion, a long swan-like neck and dainty, regal features—a small button nose set between the carefully filigree of her patrician mouth and a pair of arresting black eyes. I don’t remember those days well, but when I think back on them I think mostly of them eyes, how cold and dark they were—like some bottomless, wet, dark bog hole out on a cold winter moor. You’d spend weeks getting over the chillblains if you stumbled into’em.

But no. No two ways about it. Inez’s much more beautiful. In fact, it seems entirely wrong to use the same word to describe them both—“beauty”. “Beauty” should be warm, kindly, gentle, loving—that sort of word shouldn’t be tossed around recklessly. It shouldn’t be cast off as a second-hand stopgap when you don’t have the wits to recognize the merely artful, tastefully composed or well-put-together.

Inez was beautiful in the truest sense of the word. I remember when she was first introduced to the troupe. Caught us completely offsides. Mr. Irving burst into the green room like a 20-lb grapeshot. “Allright you bloody apes, shut yers gobs and listen up!” His displeasure could be the difference between dry gaffs and warm meal for a month on one hand and slogging it out in the cold slurry of Whitechapel, so it normally didn’t take much for him to get our lot’s full attention, but he seemed to feel the need to drive his point home more physically. So as I happened to be nearest the open side of the door as he entered, he gave me a cuff to the lip for good measure.

“Allright, listen up. There’s going to be some changes here to the programme. I’m in the middle of negotiating a new house lease, and there’ve been some concerns voiced in the council about the tone and tenor of our little production here.”

Irving paused a spell at this point. While you could feel a palpable apprehension tighten around us, and eyes darted frantically looking for an acceptable target (especially Frank’s eyes, that f*cking c*nt). No one was daft enough to speak up.

“Right.” Mr. Irving dropped his register to a lower, more measured cadence. “So you see exigencies of the situation before us.” He drew a sharp breath into his nostrils and continued. “Therefore and to wit I have made the necessary alterations to our programme of entertainments. Henceforth we shall build our reputation primarily on our long-standing tradition of bringing the Classics before the denizens of this metropolis—Shakespeare, Jonson and the like. That will entail some personnel changes.”

I felt a warm ripple of blood wash through my face. I couldn’t help it. I was probably, what one of only three, four or five of us who could read in the whole f*ckin’ troupe, let alone had any acquaintance with them gentlemen. That gorilla Frank would be a memory in a month or so. But I couldn’t let Frank or any of the others see me grinning like an eejit, least of all Irving. So I turned me head to the wall.

And as I did I caught the first glimpse of Inez that ever I did, standing a yard or so behind Irving in the gallery. At first just the shock of the gallant electric-blue silk dress she wore. But soon I caught a frisson off her delicate lilac perfume. The blood started to surge again to the back of my skull, and my heart began to beat wildly as if its vibrations would draw a tune from the very floorboards.

I can’t recall Mr. Irving’s precise words of introduction beyond that, but suffice it to say that he was putting us on notice;  there was to be a New Programme in the Lyceum henceforth, and This Gentlelady would be our Featured Attraction. We would be challenged to Find Our Way on Board or we would Find Our Way Out. She was an accomplished interpreter of . . . But when Ms. Inez Delgado stepped forth from behind that door, all talk on that account became superfluous, really. She took notice of me immediately (must have been my split lip), stooped down with a sigh and embraced my head with a loving, merciful caress. I melted into the butter of her soul completely.

Hearts in Darkness: The Approach (part I)

String theory holds that our cosmos is an artifact of a vibrating mass of innumerable subatomic threads, chaotically tangled and roiling about one another in 11-dimensional space in such a manner as to suggest the physical laws with which we are familiar .  In fact, or so the theory goes, our cosmos is only one of a limitless number of such artifacts in the universe, and that this would be plain to us had we but the perceptual resources available to allow it.  In short, there seems to be no truly empirical reason why rain has to fall downward or why old gate posts have to swell and crack in humid summer heat--it's more or less a matter of perspective.

Not that the choice of our perspective is a purely arbitrary matter.  After all, we are each and everyone supposed to be the collective products of an inconceivably intricate tapestry woven from cords of individually invisible quarks.  To pick away carelessly at even the smallest of these threads could conceivably unwind the Whole Shebang into an incompressible tangle of gibberish and bring on Armegedeon--or at least madness.

And perhaps there lies the appeal of one of mankind's Weirdest mental obsessions:  "Conservatism", a confused social and political philosophy whose mantra is, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it,"  but in practice usually tends to do something like, "Throw out the baby instead of the bathwater." Some profess to believe that continuity, not innovation, is the best guarantor of ideals like social equality and economic efficiency.  To its fiercest proponents, Conservatism isn't just a perspective or a strategy--it's a moral principle.  Maybe the moral principle, the only thing that can keep The Madness at bay.

Taken entirely on its own terms, it does have a certain compelling logic.  The narrowing of focus inherent in Conservatism does imply the freeing up a vast amount of cognitive bandwidth--bandwidth the average punter might find much more productively employed in the conduct of business rather than contemplating airy theoretical arcana like "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"  Many have pointed to the conservative Midwestern and Southern U.S. heartland as a shining example of the divine favour which inevitably rewards adherence to Correct Principle, Narrowly Defined.  This is how We beat Polio.  This is how We won WWII.  This is how We became the Most Powerful Nation on earth.

This formulation solidly demonstrates the 3-C's required of any good advertising campaign: Concision, Concreteness and Congratulations.  Which must go some way toward explaining the popularity of the philosophy, especially given its notable blind spots.  Its articulation is typically deficient in or missing all together at least two other Big C's:  Completeness and Consistency.

Of these deficiencies, Completeness is the least interesting to me personally.  It usually comes down to an uninspiring exercise in shooting statistical fish in a barrel that is as little fun for me as it is effective in making an impression on persons already committed to view the world in Conservative-coloured glasses.  I could point out the obvious fact that most of the developed world reduced incidences of polio to less than 0.35 per 100,000 of population at roughly the same as the U.S.  Indeed, none other than the Godless communist regime of the former Czechoslovakia was the first to scientifically demonstrate eradication of the disease in 1960.  And if that didn't impress you, I doubt you'd assign any particular importance to the production and strategic military advantages afforded the U.S. during the Second World War by its relative geographic isolation from major combat theatres.  Even less would you be inclined to consider the significance of China's #1 ranking in terms of foreign currency reserves. Facts are of no concern to the True Believer.  So I'll skip the "blah-blah-blah, fact-fact-fact"; I'd just be boring the both of us.

Consistency, however, is a far more interesting matter.  Because here is where we see the weft wind back to be warped, if I may return to philosophical implications of the String Theory analogy with which I began.  This is where we can see some of history's more intriguing characters engaged with their fellows on a for-real, human scale basis, rather than see them as the marble-sh*tting Olympians their PR people would like us to see.  Presumably the subject is more free to be himself or herself in less formal encounters where a reduced level of scrutiny may be expected, and they are therefore less constrained by the expectations of an image conscious public.

Therefore, here, in the coming weeks I propose to publish a series of imaginative exercises examining the darker corners of the hillarious practice of down-home Conservatism, showing how its obsession with holding tight to a poorly articulated principle often leads to a shabby fraying of at its moral tethers.
Of course, like anything else, my selected approach does bear some inherent constraints.  Unless the subject in question is Josh Harris or a completely tactless idiot, there is going to be a real dearth of reliable, multiply sourced accounts of intimate moments upon which analysis can be conducted.  Judgments will inevitably have to be made with regard to the sufficiency of the event's documentation, reliability of witnesses, existence of aggravating or mitigating factors, and the consistency of the demonstrated behaviour with the subject's broader reputation.  Judgments.  Subjective judgments.  Ergo dependent upon imagination.  Which seems fair play to me, as the zeitgeist has more or less demanded as much by its refusal to indulge in more critical analysis of the statistical evidence.

But that doesn't mean that I abandon notions of fairness and objectivity altogether.  Far from it.  Instead I invoke as guiding spirit in conducting such reviews, as indeed I would in any rigorous evaluation, the famous "Conservation of Energy" law of physics (i.e., "energy can neither be created nor destroyed").  In order for a person to achieve the minimum psychic equilibrium necessary to conduct his or her affairs in a coherent manner, I believe there must be an ordered provisioning of emotional resources among the basic motivating drives.  Those drives are classically defined as Logos (rationality), Eros (instinct for love, life) and Thanatos (violent aggression, compulsion to irrational risk-taking).  In short, I believe that there are so very few instances of absolutely pure good or evil to be found in our world that emotional compensation is a virtual necessity. 

Even highly partisan advocates of social and political Conservatism must recognize this to be the case.  For every closeted gay preacher advocating homophobic legislation à la George Rekers, an adherent of Conservatism could probably point out a politician simultaneously supporting womens' reproductive rights and conducting an extramarital affair à la John Edwards. 

Before moving on, however, I must digress a bit and say that in my view these particular cases are NOT moral equivalents.  The one is NOT exactly bad as the other.  There is a very real, undeniable difference here:  The first man is intent on punishing others under the very same laws he himself has no intention of keeping; the second man is surreptitiously taking a liberty which is in no way inconsistent  with the liberties he publicly advocates for others.  The first man is a hypocritical scumbag while the second is merely an uninspiring coward.  BIG difference.

The first subject I have selected for analysis, Pat Nixon, was chosen by an almost serendipitous happenstance, a chance encounter with a bizarre Rorschach Test of a photograph that left me not only howling with laughter, but full to bursting with the questions that have become the foundation of the formal aproach to moral analysis outlined above.

NEXT WEEK:  "What do you get when you cross a Lawrence Welk groupie with a quart of gin?"

Excerpt from overheard conversations (part I)

One day as I strolled along the strand, I noticed an attractive, well-tanned young couple about six or seven paces ahead of me.  I saw the young lady, in a playful flower-print chemise lean on her young man's shoulder and say:

Young Lady:  "You know what I like most about you?"
Young Man:  (Modestly)  "What's that?"
Young Lady:  "It'd be real easy to get over you."

Winter Nights (part I)

And there opened before me a high arch-ed proscenium divided vertically into three roiling cloudmasses, roughly equal in proportion and vehemence to the others, each contending with its neighbour. In the east and the west swelled great curls of inky black vapour attempting but never quite succeeding to overtake the space dominated by the centremost cloud--a confident bank of translucent mist that ebbed and billowed rhythmically with a warm, golden light.

None of these appeared in any way to be stronger or weaker, faster or slower than the others; and one sensed that, so far as any awareness or intelligence could be ascribed to them, the darkness of east had no acquaintance with or awareness of the darkness of the west, and vice versa. They frenetically struggled simultaneously against the calm confidence of the central light but they did not struggle together. For a long time I watched, and none made any appreciable inroads against the others that were not immediately countervaled by corresponding concessions. Each sortie was quickly and inevitably followed by a retreat, every sharp-edged curl disintegrating quickly into the background as an incoherent mass of thousands of individual transparent droplets.

Below such a sky lay a snow covered winter tableau, ringed by pine trees of fantastical height and focused upon a warmly lit building in the middle distance. It was not a private dwelling, although a few sparsely scattered homely cabins, more dimly lit, did float in its orbit. It was a gathering place of some type and built in a sober style that announced neither pretension nor its opposite. About three stories in height, each marked by a row large rectangular windows and neatly made of an inoffensive beige brick. A wide and tidy set of steps four or five courses deep led up to its shining glass vestibule.

From where I stood there seemed to be an easy flow of steady human traffic both into and out of the building. Curious, I made my way through the crowd to discover the exact nature of the transactions conducted here. And as I drew nearer, the pleasant rhythmical hum and human register of their voices gave me to understand that some sort of provision was being distributed here, though I could not detect any discretely intelligible words or phrases.

As my first footfall sounded against the barren concrete of the steps, I looked up to see about three metres away an attractive red-haired woman approaching. She was strikingly got up in a dramatic ensemble of leopard-spotted fur, a long coat and short skirt, with silky black stockings accentuating her shapely legs to good effect. She led a hungry-seeming jungle cat on a stout metal chain.

Inishuntuss (Part I)

Jo, Bo and Den were having the best day ever. Small as it may have been (from the low hollow on its easternmost point, even a small child could see the glimmer of sunlight play off the sea lapping on the western shore), the island seemed like an endless funhouse to them, ringed with warm, sandy beaches, hemmed on its northern end with gently swaying grassy thickets which gave way to a range of densely skirted hollows cool with the shade of friendly trees, crowned on its southern face with a mighty rolling hill that suddenly gave way to a stunning cliff face, bejewelled with flashing strokes of brilliant quartz-speckeled limestone.

But they didn't really set out with any intention on fixing mental boundaries over the place. After all, since the warm dry weather seemed pleased to oblige, they felt had any amount of leisure to playfully pad about. All morning and late into the afternoon they strolled, ran, trotted, sauntered, loped, rolled, sumersaulted and lept from place to place like spring-loaded toys, surprising themselves equally with their own folly as well as the island's own kindly maternal playfulness. Jo loved the way that, when Bo rounded one particular shady hillock in front of her and beckoned, the wall of ferny leaves muffled and deflected his voice so as to make it seem that Bo were calling from behind her, a million miles away and in the opposite direction. Den was charmed by the airy brightness of another tree-rimmed clearing that seemed dozens of yards round, but was, in fact, less than a dozen feet in circle--and that reminded him so with a gentle earthy kiss on the forehead when she walked into the hill face she thought had been empty space!

The Island's sense of fun was infectious. Once, spying Jo as he ambled lazily round the hill beneath her, Den stealthily shimmied along an overhanging tree and loosed a shower of loamy mud over Jo's head. Jo shrieked like a boiled banshee at the unexpected shivvery coldness of it.  But Jo soon gave over to fits of hysterical laughter when she pelted Bo in the face with a gooshy glop of the stuff as Bo poked his head into the clearing to see what was all the fuss. Den couldn't resist either, and swung herself down from tree top and into the middle of the melee.  The three furiously flung dollops of doughy mud at each other in turn, until the soreness of their laughing sides and swinging arms urged a truce.

Catching their breaths, they knelt down beside a clear fresh running stream to slake their thirsts.  Then they calmed themselves and set to comparing notes.

Welcome Home (pt1)

A low steady rumble pervaded the place in a deep russet register that I at first took to be the sound of the blood rushing through my ears.

At some point I came to notice tiny daggers of dusty gravel pressing sharply against my back, and gradually I began to take sense of a million other tiny things in my surroundings: the searing heat, the individual rough-edged burrs of sand grains that bored into the flesh in the back of my arms, and the thick, humid air from which my weak and shallow lungs struggled to wring oxygen.

Even after convincing myself that I really was still alive, it took what seemed like another five minutes to finally coax my eyelids open and take a real measure of the place.  They felt as if they'd been sealed shut by some gruesome paste of dried blood and mucous, and they only gave way when I clawed the goo away with the hard edge of my filth-encrusted fingernails.  Slowly I brushed away the last irritating granules of dirt from my lashes and waited patiently while a cool, soothing bath of tears washed over my burning sclera.  Finally the trhobbing of my temples subsided, and my eyes darted about for clues.

I was apparently in the shadowy corner of a small, rough chamber hewn from the living rock, separated from the rest of the room by a small stoney ridge approximately one meter high.  I could perceive a strange irridescent red light burning from over the limens of that ridge from my supine position.   Not sure what to make of this odd circumstance, or the fact that the low droning rumble around me had not subsided but instead seemed to have quickened slightly and passed perhaps a meter or two behind me, I waited what felt like another five minutes before summoning the courage to roll onto my chest.

As I did so I heard a great dull crash, like the sound of hollow splintering wood or bone.  Stopping immediately I held my breath, silently inventorying my person for any trauma and tried to identify the source or at least the location of the person or thing making this noise.  I was okay, but no dice on reading that sound.  It had been too sudden and I had still been too disoriented to take any reliable notes.  There was no sign that whatever or whoever made that dreadful noise had passed, but I couldn't hold my breath forever, and that began to weigh upon me.  At some point I decided that my lungs held less than another minute's worth of breath in them, and I started to silently count to myself.

". . . Fifty-one one-thousand , fifty-two-one thousand, fifty-three-one thousand . . . ".  Suddenly I was startled by the sound of what seemed the sandy grinding of heavy feet pivoting and tramping away into the distance.  I couldn't help myself and gasped for breath just as I heard what I imagined to be the violent slam of a thick, rusty door about four meters ahead of me about four meters ahead of me.

I had no idea where I was, who or what was here with me or whether my current efforts at movement had been noticed.  I simply froze myself into place, struggling to take as low, light, and shallow gasps of air as possible while I tried to make a more complete auditory survey of my surroundings and bracing myself against some type of assault.  But none came, and slowly I noticed that the low continual rumbling that surrounded me since I woke now appeared  distant and muted, barely perceptible.  I decided that most likely what or whoever had been here earlier was gone and that I was alone in a closed room; or if I was not alone, I had at least I was consciously being allowed the opportunity to recollect myself and arise.  More likely I was alone.

I crawled up on my haunches and leaned againt the rough stone parition, glaring over its edge into the wild scarlet room before me.  I was alone.  At least now I was.  A set of course swirling tracks lay in the dark sand floor below, extending from a stoud iron-cladded door about four meters away to the centre of the chamber.  But they seemed to give little indication of the way of their making or who or how many or what size of person or thing may have made them.  I fruitlessly traced and retraced the path of these tracks with my eyes trying to imagine how and when they had been made when I noticed a pendulous dark object intruding on the upper periphery of my vision--a hanging stalagtite about  half a meter in front of me. 

Wherever the hell I was or whatever the hell was going on, one thing was clear:  That "recommended dosage" language was a bunch of bull.  There is no "recommended" anything when it comes to Ibogaine.

For Sale or Rent

Spacious buildings, located in smart north western Athens suburb and convenient to downtown bus and Metro stations as well as local schools and shopping.  Fashionable 250 metre-afzelia wood driveway with sporty Calatrava-designed retractable rooves.  Three olympic-sized swimming pools, one indoors. Comfortably furnished with over 30,000 personal seating units.   Asking price:  9 billion Euro or best offer.


See, Chicagoland?  Sometimes success is its own punishment . . . .

www.geostadia.blogspot.com/2010/03/greek-tragedy-of-olympic-proportions.html

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1036373/Abandoned-derelict-covered-graffiti-rubbish-What-left-Athens-9billion-Olympic-glory.html

www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/will-greece-be-an-olympic-winner.aspx

www.oaka.com.gr/article_detail.asp?e_cat_serial=001003001001&3_cat__id=132&e_article_id=142

Zombie Love

Ah-hemm . . . Well . . . [scratching nape of neck diffidently] . . . Well I suppose I do have some egg on my face!

Seems that "New Moon" movie far outpaced my most generous allowance for it--over $707 million gross!

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=newmoon.htm

To be quite honest, I kind of poo-poo'd the whole thing. In fact, I literally and outloud said that the producers themselves had poo-poo'd the whole thing out their cloacae. I really just could not grasp the appeal of it.

For starters, that whole "Ed-ward" thing seemed misguided from the get-go. How much response could a heterosexual woman actually expect from a dead man who insists on being called "Ed-ward"? And the face of the fellah they got to play him . . . Well, it sort of defies convential theories about the primacy of symmetry in the aesthetic experience. The promo photographs made him look like the doctor had delivered him with a corkscrew instead of a forceps.

But I was wrong. Nothing can be more plain to me now. Quite apart from the simple cash giving out from the thing, you'd be truly staggered by the sincere devotion of its legions of fans. "New Moon" websites, DVDs, magazine articles, fan fiction, beer coasters, the whole thing is simply OFF THE HOOK.

http://www.newmoonmovie.org/

Needless to say, as a man regarded as a media savvy-insider with a fair amount of skin in the game himself, this was cause for serious reflection. I really had to get a grip on the whole thing or get ready to face the reaper and throw in the towel alltogether. And after months of reflection and reading and re-reading popular media theory, I think I may finally have a response: Zombie Love.

Really, when you think about it, it's obvious. There could hardly be any other answer. The people have spoken clearly, and what the zeitgeist (pardon the pun) wants is to Romance the Revenants. It fits in perfectly with the historical trajectory of the interesection of economics and entertainment in our culture. When was the heyday of the classics of the horror genre? The 1930's and 1940's--the Great Depression, son! What was the subtext of the ur-mythos created by those films, the Draculas, the Wolfmen, the Frankensteins? That our shattered self-control and total submission to poorly understood and possibly monsterously inhuman forces within us is not only inevitable, not only understandable, but maybe even beautiful. Find the concept of being laid off humiliating? You won't if you can see the romantic appeal of a rabid fanged and clawed man/animal. Feel your human worth devalued by some silk suit-wearing corporate shill in Washington trying to deny you health care? Not likely if you can delight yourself with erotic phantasies of being fondled by a 400-year old corpse.

It's all so clear now, how did I not see it earlier? But it's not too late to make some dough out of all this. The news is still full of teabaggers and the like, modern-day angry villagers ready to storm the castles of their misapprehensions and let 'em burn, baby, burn! I have a meeting next week with some folks over at Summit to pitch a zombie romance thing. Yeah, I still have some details to hammer out yet, but that's not what these pitch sessions are about. They're all about the Big Picture, the Vision thing. I can see it all now, Angelina Jolie starring opposite Mitch McConnell. . . . But we'd better get some ice on him quick. The high heat of a Washington summer sure can do a job on a stack of stagnant braunschweiger.

Into The Desert (pt 1)

The pineal gland. A small, organic husk of uncertain function and evolutionary origin alleged to lay at the top of the spinal column, just behind the parietal lobe.


I say “alleged” because your average sober-sided, state board-licensed physician is almost obligated to slam the door in your face should you introduce the topic. If you care to make it your life’s quest, you could rack up hundreds of miles and spend months commuting from one sh*tty motel room to another, fighting the bean counters over stale greasy receipts for every single expense line item, and you just might be able to find one freak who won’t immediately set the dogs on you—a freak still technically meeting the statutory requirements to practice medicine. Pending any disciplinary hearings, at any rate.

Should you care to do so, I recommend that you start your search in the American Southwest. California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas. The fifty-mile perimeter around the border between the United States of America and Mexico is as much a mental or spiritual interface as it is a physical buffer. Here the hordes of blissfully fat and happy prefab McMansions of the nouveaux bourgeoisie subtly shading into patches of nervous lookalike ranch houses, gradually yielding to widely-spaced patches of desperate, rusty trailer parks, and ultimately collapsing before sparse collections of widely-spaced indifferent dusty shacks, incoherently scattered in the eerie desert, far from the office parks, shopping malls and factories that serve as the centres of gravity holding the Anglo world in orbit.

That’s where I found MY freak, in a tinny old Winnebago about five miles outside a town called Nogales. I couldn’t give you any more precise description even if I were so inclined, since the weedy dirt path leading to it is not heralded by any interstate exit ramp, not marked by any bright blue sign post, and scarcely distinguished by ruts of regular vehicular traffic. Even the reach of the telecom behemoths does not extend this deep; no towers in range--not enough fat to draw their interest. Your iPhone will register no geographic coordinates here before the keypad chokes on dust and the screen cracks in the 43º heat. That I was able to find Dr. De Selby at all is a tribute to the enduring appeal of filterless cigarettes, American corn whiskey and the inability of a truly exceptional man to conceal himself even in the wilds of such a lonely landscape.

Lamplighter bug

Gryllus luciferens. Insect, member of the family Gryllidae, formerly found in grassy regions within the Mesopotamian plateau. Varying from dark to light brown in colour, and similar in appearance to the common field cricket, but with longer wings extending to the end of its thorax. It is the friction from the beating of these wings that accounted for its most remarkable characteristic--the ability to spark the methane vapours emitted from its abdomen and maintain a highly luminescent flame. Hence its common name.

Referenced as early as 3,000 B.C.E. within Sumerian cuneiform texts as 'unam sampge' (i.e., 'seat of radiance'), this insect was commercially cultivated and highly prized for its illumanatory properties by the literate classes until about the 6th century B.C.E. when, amid increasing miltarism and political instability, certain kings decided that this literacy gaff had gone quite far enough already, thank you. No authenticated sightings of the lamplighter bug are known after the 1st century C.E., and it is now believed to be totally extinct.

This species may hold a unique position in the history of human domestication efforts. Not only is it one of the very few insects to have acheived a fully symbiotic relationship with man, but some commentators have hypothesized that it was actually the lamplighter bug that domesticated man, by teaching him literacy, rather than man who domesticated the insect.

Very few indeed . . .

Well a full week has come and gone since His Holiness released his open letter to the people of Ireland.

www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/letters/2010/documents/hf-ben_xvi_let_20100319_church_ireland_en.html

Lots of comments on it back and forth, some favorable, some less so.

www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0321/breaking4.html
www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0321/breaking3.html
www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/un-should-probe-popes-abuse-role-2114085.html
www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/popes-weasel-words-add-to-victims-pain-2108824.html
www.boston.com/news/local/massachusets/articles/2010/03/21/popes_letter_stikes_a_mixed_chord/
www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/world/europe/22ireland.html
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7069646.ece
www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2706994
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/22/pope-letter-ireland-abuse

One thing, though, that surprised me was the amount of attention some people gave section #4, about the secularized climate of society.  Some openly questioned the relevance of such a discussion in a letter ostensibly charged with assuring the public of the hierarchy's commitment to conducting matters in a more transparent manner.  I'm a simple man, so I won't claim to know about all that. 

But one thing the 'nay-sayers' can't deny:  There is very few 10 year-old orphans what are able to give a satisfactory account of Vatican II.

Reflections on a Shadowy Past (pt 1)

" . . . . But the spiritual dangers I have enumerated are not the only ones which beset the savage. Often he regards his shadow or reflection as his soul, or at all events as a vital part of himself, and as such it is necessarily a source of danger to him. . . . "

Sir James George Frazer, "The Golden Bough", Chapter XVIII, Section 3

 I hated that job. I hated it from to top to the bottom, from the East to the West, from the beginning to the end, from the inside to the outside, up one side and down the other and along each and every last of the 360 degrees of the compass and all of its constitutent minutes, seconds, radians therein.

Even in my dreams the loathesome voices of venal, mundane clients would crawl into my ears. The endless luncheons listening to blather. About their faded high school sport glories. About how they'd just discovered a "whole new paradigm" to "leverage latent workforce efficiencies". Constant vanities, petty politics, veiled intrigues. "Have you figured out why that other guy's calc's are wrong yet?"

But I was exhausted, broken and demoralized. As much as I loathed the very thought of having to sit through another board meeting trying to conjure a spark of enthusiasm from my flinty soul, it really felt like there simply was no other option. As I dragged my dead *ss from the bed and shifted my weight listlessly toward the bathroom for my morning toilette, I could only think about how the busy season was closing in fast, and how three other project managers had quit the previous week. Even if I had identified some other, more promising position, I didn't see how I could just up and leave the team at that moment. Somehow I would have to hold on, coast on the fumes, skillfully ride the oncoming currents and glide the crew to a safe landing home, like some wounded flyboy in a cheesey WWII melodrama.

Yeah, right. When I looked at my face under the pale light of the washroom mirror, I looked less like a young Montgomery Clift and more like a mouldering stuffed canary with mangey patches of missing feathers. And a pudgy one at that, with baggy eyes and wiry five o'clock shadow.

"Lord," I thought out loud as I stared stupidly at the shaving water spiraling its way down the drain. "I hate that f*cking job to my very soul."

"Amen." A hollow, tinny, echo-like voice from the mirror above me.

My guts sank to the floor.