The Aerie
A helpful troll came by tonight - probably on the heels of a comment I made on the Huffington Post - to remind me that my blog is out here and awaiting further entries.
I'm still without work, although I have mentally moved from "on the shelf" to "unemployed," although there is still an outside chance that I'll get called back to the last workplace.
Meanwhile I'm working on some other possibilities and trying to maintain a positive attitude, despite being called some kind of loser by a very cool, very suave fellow who posted with a fake AOL e-mail address until I pointed out his IP was from Comcast, whereupon he switched to a fake Comcast address. Now THAT'S integrity worthy of Mark McGwire!
One of his comments, which really, really cut me to the quick, was that "nobody is reading" this blog. Now, I know that's not strictly true since my comments are sequentially numbered so I know how many have been posted, but I also know that it's Richard and Carrie and a couple of other die-hards subscribed to my RSS feed who are my primary readers now that my mother has died.
But the fact is, I don't post for people to read me. If I did that, I'd certainly post more often, and post higher quality content. No, I post for ME, because (as I said in an early post someplace ten years ago) this is as close as I'm ever going to get to a diary. Sure, I like when people read my entries, but that's frosting on the cake. The fact is, this is an online diary for me first and foremost.
And it's very valuable. Reading old entries, there is much that I have forgotten from merely ten years ago. Slices of daily life - my OWN daily life - that would never be called to mind again if I hadn't blogged them. And then of course there are my posts about Steve, Joe, my dad, Ralph, and Karen, those who have died. I go back from time to time and read those, or even forward them to people who knew them.
So thanks for the comments, fake-AOL-Comcast-commenting-troll-dude, but in fact I know that I'm shouting into the abyss. We're ALL shouting into the abyss. It's the human condition.
Now if you have any more comments to make, make them quick, or they'll have to wait til tomorrow morning 'cause I'm going to bed. And I don't want to wake up to two dozen "Oh, decided to not post my comments now, huh?" style entries waiting in the comment queue. If you've ever had to delete hundreds of viagra comments from your blog, you'll understand why I approve each one manually.
I think Mark McGwire is a good role model to today's youth. He demonstrates that when you do something wrong, and when it's painfully obvious to everyone involved that you ARE doing something wrong, and when everyone tries to pretend you're NOT doing something wrong, and when you even testify before Congress that you're not doing something wrong, and when you make huge profits from doing something wrong even though everyone is pretending you're not doing something wrong AND pretending they don't know that you're lying about it, well when it becomes safe to do so, and when your brother is writing a book about the time that you and everyone else were colluding to pretend you weren't doing something wrong, THEN it's good to admit you were doing something wrong, both to clear the air, and also to promote sales of the book.
Because that demonstrates integrity.
Not for the first time, I copy a comment from a discussion thread as a blog post. In this case it's not MERELY laziness, but also the fact that I've posted this comment over and over again and I thought it was about time I consolidated it here on my own blog to refer back to later.
The issue is that I repeatedly read posts complaining that the news "isn't doing its job" or somesuch nonsense. Some "respectable" news agency (that is to say, nobody expects anything of Fox) posts some biased and/or incorrect information, and everybody screams Oh How Could They Do That!?
The problem is, the news is NOT the news. How do I know this? Simple: if the news were the news, then whenever someone made an egregious factual error, or when a news reporter editorialized or slanted a report, they would suffer a consequence. They do not suffer a consequence, in fact the most egregious broadcasters are often the most successful, therefore the news is not the news, Q.E.D.
Due to the abandonment of anti-trust legislation, and the infiltration and overthrow of the FCC by representatives of the broadcast industry, news, and in fact all the media, has become pure statist, corporatist propaganda. The news is not the news: the news is now the communications division of the parent corporation which owns it.
Modern multinational corporations are replacing the State as the primary institution of governance. They buy and control the media, they buy and control the Congress, and they empty the public coffers of the old governmental system into their own banks through fraud, anticompetitive practices, and as we saw in late 2008, simply by purchasing the legislation to make it happen.
The media is the marketing division of the corporations, the news is the communications division, and Congress is the political arm. These organizations are largely free of taxation and regulation, they are usually controlled by a few wealthy and powerful individuals from the same socioeconomic class that owns every other multinational corporation, and their primary activity is converting natural resources into wealth in their pockets as fast as they possibly can. They are immortal, amoral, answerable to no one, antidemocratic, and extremely conservative. They pander to the population with token and modest social liberalism while maintaining an autocratic economic conservatism. And they play race off against class to keep the lowest classes fighting each other, and attention off the abuses of their own class. They are usually able to get a good portion of the lowest classes to fight their battles for them, even if the lowest classes end up working against their own best interests.
This is the world of the 21st century. It’s about time we faced it clearly and honestly. It’s about time we stopped wringing our hands and bemoaning the fact that “the news” just doesn’t measure up to the news of our grandpappy’s day. There IS no news, there is ONLY propaganda designed to control the population, and with that mission in mind, it’s not a problem for the chyron editor to label a disgraced Republican as a Democrat (http://tinyurl.com/n6jc82 for one example of many). He or she will not be punished, and will in fact likely be rewarded.
The news is dead. Representative democracy is dead. And yes, civilization IS on the verge of collapse, because the multinational corporations care much more about quarterly profits than they do about what will happen to Europe when Greenland melts.
So I'm "on the shelf" right now. I was brought into this contract with the promise (and the rate reduction) that this was a two year opportunity, only to discover that, well, yeah, it COULD be two years, but FIRST they had to sell the client Board on their proposal to completely rewrite the client software.The client hasn't signed, and the prior contract expired, so here I am at home.
On the other hand I have a paper to write by next Friday, so what the hell. I'm working on that.
I'm also trying to get to the gym, but I'm waiting for my son to get ready to go, and pretty soon I'm just going to have to go on my own. Then, work on the paper!
Well here it is, the Tenth Anniversary of my blog. There are a lot of hard-to-believes out of all of this. It's hard to believe that I've been blogging (admittedly on-and-off) for ten years. The think I've learned most of all from blogging is that I forget A LOT of what goes on in my life. Some of my blog entries, even entries that aren't all that old, describe situations about which I can summon no recollection whatsoever. I mean, sometimes I can grasp the hint of a gestalt from those times, something that says "Oh, yeah, I remember I was under a lot of stress working at that job," even if there are no specifics. However, other entries summon NOTHING, and cold have been written by a stranger.
Another tenth-anniversary realization - my babies have grown up! I know, but it's hard to believe. During the years that they are young everything seemed so stressful and so endless, it never seemed like it would end. And now? Now the twins are home for the winter break and I'm so grateful to see them, but I know each evening playing Scrabble, each hug from my daughter, each insightful comment from my oldest boy is a BONUS, an EXTRA, and that I've already squandered the majority of our days together. I know the future offers great things, but this tenth anniversary I'm so aware of how much I've let slip through my fingers.
Another tenth-anniversary revelation - how lucky we are. I'm ten years older and so is my wife, and yet we're both still healthy, we don't have a lot of gray, and she's still as beautiful as ever. Hopefully in another ten years we will be even healthier. Maybe (maybe!) we'll even be grandparents by then...
For the future, well, lots of plans, little time. I have to finish the paper I'm procrastinating on by writing this. Then I have to figure out if I'm going to take another class next semester or take the semester off to attend to other projects. I'd like to reprint Mitlanyal with corrections, I'd like to finish my Tekumel novel, I'd like to work on some projects for the Tekumel Foundation, and I'm not sure if I can do those while working and taking a college class.
And as always I'd like to do a little more blogging than I do. Given that my first entry was in January 2000 and my second was in April, it won't be hard to improve upon that record, at least. Facebook has certainly eaten into my blogging time, just as it has eaten into some of my other time too. The one thing I've learned from ten years of blogging is that if I don't do it, I forget things I won't otherwise remember. That's both good and bad - there's nothing wrong with forgetting stuff and nonsense, which seems to be the majority of what I record here. Yet also there is a value to remembering the little things, the good times we have as a family, the ideas that otherwise would flit in and out of my brain like fruitflies. And I'd like to add some advertising on here. Just the other day I got a mysterious $60 from Amazon because of my book links, so clearly I'm missing an opportunity for some easy money someplace! Whaddaya think, how about some pop-ups that play sound files saying "You have already won!"
Okay, maybe not.
We'll see where this ends up going. Maybe in ten years I'll be living on a boat and sailing the world. Maybe I'll be a grandpa handing poopy babies back to my kids to change. Maybe I'll be dead! You never know. Best to avoid looking too far back or too far forward. Best to enjoy what we have when we have it.
And with that wisdom, let's begin the second ten years...