The Few, the Crowd, and the Priest

An old man traced by step by step

Long life behind and life still left

Through dusty streets bespecked with crowds,

Most bowed and humble. Fewer, proud,

Of colors bold and raiment new

Stopped to talk. Others could not pass through.

Others milled about. At last,

The old man found his own way past.

He bumped a proud man. Once he'd gone first,

Some followed. The people blocked had half dispersed

When the proud man drawled, “well, excuse me.”

His tone threatened, if sarcastically,

The, pretense dropped, “what's wrong with you.”

Said the oldster, “others needed through.”

Said the proud, “and I should mind the last, the least?”

Then he saw the oldster's clothes. “A priest?

You think you're above me, holy man?

My need for labor feeds this land.

My money's real. False, futile platitudes

Would leave this city unbathed, nude,

Unsheltered on unmaintained streets,

But I should mind to you, the least,

The fool who would make peasants king.

Your words lack both in legs and wings.”

The priest said, “I'm just tired, old.

You our labor, not our lives control.

In want of home, in want of rest,

We seek return to each our nests,

and in the moment, I brushed past.

Those few inches ope'd a way at last.

None of our best moments, I'd admit.

I'm half-ready to be done with it.”

“Well, I'm not,” said the merchant next.”

“I want you whipped for disrespect,”

He ordered the re-gath'ring throng.

Their murmured cry: “let him go on.”

Go on he did, though not away.

“I'm tired, yes, most tired of the way

Your kind use money as a leash

and tell us that it makes us free.

Without it, we would work to live.

Instead, we work for what you give.

We could be free, could be unlead.

Instead, we just pull you ahead.

You feed us, in the strictest sense,

A barest pittance, recompense

For years of work which you do not–

Then we're judged by what we've got.

How much time would we regain

If work was free, from coin unchained?”

The crowed, enrapt at hearing this,

Cried “burn this man! This man's a witch!”

Why I Write, Part y+2: Holding Onto a Dream

For almost half of my life, I held onto the dream of being a writer.  I wasn't born with the dream.  When I was four, I thought I was going to be a major league pitcher.  When I was six, I thought I was going to be a policeman.  At seven, eight and nine, I was a future quarterback; future fullback was my fallback.  When I was ten, though, at least part of me knew I was going to be a writer.

It started, as I assume the aspirations of many writers do, with a school assignment.  I was assigned to write a short story that took place in the American colonies during the period between the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War.  I ended up coming back to the teacher with a ten-page monstrosity of a thing that I have since lost.  If someone were to find it, I would not admit to being its author.  At the time, though, I loved it.  I may not be a natural storyteller, but I certainly had a natural urge to tell stories.

I assumed that everybody would write a lot.  Who wouldn't want to tell more story?  I was shocked when all of my classmates returned to the teacher with one-page stories.  Some of them might have been better.  Some of them were certainly more polished -- the ten-year-old version of me was simply not capable of adequately proofreading a ten-page story in a night or two.  Nevertheless, that story stood out in my mind for a long time.  I'm sure every one of that class's twenty-three protagonists had more story, and I was the only protagonist whose author would have bothered to tell it, given an extension on his due date.

So that was the birth of my dream of being a writer, born ten years after I was.  The dream came of age about when I started to.  That was the first time I decided what novel I dreamed of writing.  It was a science fiction novel, in my imagination, and in the beginning.  In my imagination, it grew into an epic science fiction novel, and then a three-novel saga.  Eventually, it became a very long, physical outline, which I finished and then promptly burned.  I wanted to get it out of my head, to make room for new ideas that weren't the cathartic fantasies of a twelve-year-old who grew up watching Star Wars, reading Animorphs, and skimming through the occasional Redwall novel for a change of pace.

The plan worked, eventually.  But there was something more important than an adolescent plotline that I needed to get rid of.  It was, oddly enough, the dream.  In junior high, I dreamed of being published by high school.  In high school, I dreamed of writing five novels by twenty-five.  Out of high school, I dreamed about being a professional writer.  In all of that time, I wrote a handful of song lyrics, a couple of short stories, some unsorted, disjointed chapters of a novel, a few introductory chapters of a second novel, and a very long outline.  I didn't sell any of it; I didn't try to.  Little of it ever left my own possession.  All totaled, it was not a lot of writing.  I probably wrote more for school in that time.

Of course, I was doing exactly what society tells us to do with dreams, which is nothing.  Hold onto them, like a four leaf clover.  Put them somewhere, but for goodness sake, don't take them out and do anything with them.  There are more important, unrelated, material ends to work toward.  The dream stays put away, thought of when one needs comfort after working ever longer and harder toward the world's material ends.  The dream becomes two dreams: it is the dream itself, and the hope that it will still be there when retirement rolls around.

When I was twenty-three, giving college the ol' college try (again), a switch in me flipped.  By that time, I knew rationally that I was a failure when it came to writing novels.  I had never even finished writing one, not for real.  Yet there was still some irrational part of me that dreamed that I was a novelist.

As much as I still wanted to be a writer, I absolutely did not want to be the guy who was completely deluded about his own abilities.  So when a professor assigned me to write an original poem, I latched onto that.  I enjoyed it.  I was, at least by the standards of undergraduate literature classes, reasonably good at it.  And unlike the novels, I finished mine on the first try.  I had to proofread it, and I wanted to make a few stylistic changes, but revision is part of the process; so is finishing, and in poetry, I could do both.

At that point, I latched onto the poetry, and I gave up my dream.  I told myself, "Jon, so far, you have no evidence that you can be, or ever will be, a great novelist.  On the other hand, if you keep writing, you can be a poet who really enjoys his writing, and doesn't have to beat himself up over a low word count.  Eventually, you could even write a lot of poetry.  If you decide to keep writing.  You could also keep dreaming of being a novelist, but where has that gotten you?"

I decided that it was better to be some kind of writer than dream about being more.

I got somewhere with the poetry.  I got much further and faster than I expected.  I started off pretty slowly, with a poem here, a poem there, maybe a few a week.  But I was actually writing, and now that I was writing, I continued to enjoy it, and I got better and better at generating and developing ideas.  Pretty soon, I was writing a lot.  A few people told me I was wasting my time.  More were supportive.  I didn't care, because I was too busy actually writing.

Once I started approaching, and once exceeded, one hundred poems in a month, I thought about the sheer word count I was producing.  At that rate, finishing a novel was feasible.  But what would I write?  Having disposed of the dream of being a novelist, I had no urgent need to answer that question, only an insatiable appetite to generate and develop ideas. As long as I didn't run out of ideas, I could afford to be patient.

My patience paid off.  Eventually, I had the right idea.  It was big enough to take up two hundred pages, and also limited enough in scope that it wouldn't spin out of control on me.  It had an ending, like my poetry, which seemed important.  I knew enough about the material that I wouldn't get bogged down in indecision or doubt or research.

Now all I needed was time and a deadline.  Starting in June,  I gave myself the last two hours of every day, guaranteed it to myself, and made an agreement (again, with myself) to finish by the end of the summer.  After writing the first two chapters, most of the ending, and an outline for the entire middle part, I revised the goal to sixty days.

Then, I wrote.  I lived for those two hours every night.  I looked forward to them while the sun was up.  I savored them when the evening came.  Most of all, I made them count.  I did what I had to do.  I kept doing it.  I would not be denied.  Some people told me I ought to be doing other things in the evening.  Others told me it was a waste of time.  I told them to shut up; I had a novel to write.

I wrote it.

I missed my deadline.  It took me 65 days to write my first novel.  I decided I was okay failing with a 95%.  It was a big step up from the nine years it took to not write the other novel.

I finished my second novel less than eleven months later.  I'm no longer a guy with dreams of being a novelist.  I'm a guy who writes what he wants to write.  Some people still tell me it's a waste of my time.  There are people who tell me that I spend too much time and energy on something that isn't making me any money, or that I don't plan to market.  They say it's no way to get ahead.  Some people tell me it's antisocial to spend so much time on a solitary, occasionally isolating, pursuit.  They say that I need to come back and live in the real world with everyone else.

I tell those people to shut up.  I have a novel to write.

This Is The Original Purpose of This Blog (In Pathos Form)

Blind the Soul

We paved over our months and our hours

The same time we covered the forests and flowers.

The calendar directs our time

With lights and signals, man-made lines

That leave our fourth dimension lamed,

Though culture's not alone to blame.

The world – the wild and the paved –

Appears before us every day

Until, as though behind a cloud

The sights don't come through quite as loud.

Life's less than human, less than whole.

Routine and habit blind the soul.

Institutionalized

Your concrete jungle's stiff to rise –

No leaves or creepers, just straight lines.

The constant bustle holds them fast –

Planned obsolescence built to last.

Your money pays and takes its toll.

It's half convenience, half control.

The banks and buildings, roads and cars

Are really all the same thing – bars.

I Hate It

This post has nothing to do with the stated purpose of this blog.  I just need to vent.

My everyday social life is guided primarily by the principle that "indiscriminate niceness is overrated."  (Thanks, House.)  I really hate it when, to achieve my own ends or reveal an interesting fact in a discussion, I have to do something that makes it seem like I'm being nice to somebody I either don't know or barely know.  Sometimes I write poetry for people, even on request.  Unless you're my good friend, I only do it because I enjoy writing poetry.  At best, I'm saying you had an interesting idea for a poem.  A lot of times, I shed light on some fact or convention that seems to excuse a belief or behavior.  That is almost never the reason I do it.  I do it because facts and old conventions of writing are interesting.  So I have to choose between making an interesting point or not giving a false impression of myself.

Being nice isn't that fucking interesting.  For the most part, I only like what's interesting.  Unless you're a good friend of mine, I'm not gonna be nice to you for the sake of being nice.  Don't think of me that way.  It'll only get you ticked off and thinking I intentionally deceived you.




And then sometimes I'm nicer than I ought to be to someone because I wouldn't mind having sex with her.  But I'm not really deceptive about that.  I say nice things about how she looks before I'm nice to her, which is as transparent as you're allowed to be without becoming awkward and repellant.

Tame Plants

This in reference to a previously asked question about whether or not certain hypothetical trees are wild, which I will not actually answer.

Though the wildness of those trees is something I have still not come up with a theory to solve, I do have a tentative description of tame plants, which do indeed exist.  Any plant growing in an environment in which it will not survive on its own, and which is kept alive by intentional outside actors, is a tame plant.  This may not be an exclusive definition of tame plants, but it is a subset of plants which are tame.  A colleague of mine brought up houseplants, which are certainly a good example.  My description originated with my own thoughts about lawn care.  We feed the grass, we bring it water, and we groom it.  It's essentially an inanimate pet, a fair analog for the "enslaved" class of pets like fish and insects, rather than communicative pets like cats and dogs.

Interestingly, lawn care is also strong evidence of human culture as one single hive, by way of the ridiculous lengths we go to in order to live in a superficially homogenized environment throughout what I would call the "macroculture" or the "superculture".  If we really lived in many hundreds of national or regional cultures, we would acknowledge that a grass lawns are a waste of time to support in much of the world.  The only one lawn care is good for, besides a few privileged species of grass, is the economy -- expected, as all encouraged behavior in a hive is to the benefit of the queen.

This IS the Original Purpose of This Blog

1. All “advanced” human cultures are a hive.

Our culture exhibits many characteristics that are found only in hive animals, including exclusive dependence on large scale harvesting and agriculture, individuals who represent replaceable parts in the society, rather than indispensable contributors, being awarded our means of sustenance by the culture overall rather than producing our own means for survival individually or in small groups, and living space that is both organized & regimented and awash in masses of other individuals with which we have few or no dealings.

1.1. The economy is the queen of the hive.

All of our work goes toward the benefit/growth of the economy. It sends us signals to entice us to work, called "money," "advertising," and "peer pressure," though encoded culturally rather than chemically. Thus, it occupies the role of queen.

2. Humans are psychologically unsuited for this lifestyle.

The only other animals known to live in hives are those with unintelligent, indistinct individual automatons. Just on its face, this seems like an unlikely or unsuitable lifestyle for a highly emotional, individuated, opinionated species like Homo Sapiens. Quite logically, humanity, for nearly all of its history, lived in various variations on family, pack, tribe or troop structures. In simplified, metaphorical terms, we grew up living one way and don't really know how to live in this other way. The formation of groups, cliques, fandoms, subcultures, political parties and gangs, each variously positive or negative, is an attempt to return to our native cultural structure by creating new tribes to replace those that were destroyed by the rise of the human hive.

3. Popular culture as a distraction

Regardless of any arguments about its quality as a whole, or that of any of its respective elements, popular culture's primary function in today's society is to distract us from the hive nature of our modern life, and to advertise and normalize it through fiction and semi-fiction in which salaried or wage work figures heavily. Its secondary function is to serve as an outlet for tribal tendencies via the formation of fandoms and subcultures, which may divide further into 'ships or cliques. Any other function may be valuable, but is certainly tertiary from a cultural standpoint.

3.1 Definition of popular culture

Politics, fashion, hobbies and sports also fall under the heading of The Distractions, because they serve the same primary and secondary functions.

3.2 Relative popularity of The Distractions

The Distractions can be grouped by their popularity, and this popularity will correlate very strongly with the potential commercialization of the particular distraction. Television, movies and music have the highest commercialization potential:  people pay for them, they are easily accompanied by advertising, and they are easily used to normalize the hive lifestyle.  There is actually a social stigma attached to not following these things.  Conversely, think of fanfiction:  one needn't pay to read or write it; advertising potential is minimal; unscreened individuals retain creative control, meaning the message can deviate significantly.  This sort of Distraction has a social stigma attached to it.

The Best Baseball Story I Ever Heard

This has nothing to do with the stated purpose for my starting this blog.

The best baseball story I ever heard was in a Sports Illustrated article about a little-known pitcher who had used steroids in the 1980s and 1990s.  The subject of the article was waiting out a rain delay in the clubhouse when the rain stopped and the team was told they were going to play that day.  Centerfielder Bernie Williams was excited by the prospect; the subject of the article, for whom baseball was just a job, much less so.  "You want to play?" the latter asked.

"Of course," said Williams.  "What else would I want to do?"

I found this so endearing that it is my very favorite baseball story, even though it's about the Yankees.  Williams articulated how I feel about class most of the time, how I virtually always feel about my writing, and how I feel about watching baseball more often than not.