A ‘blog of Tej’s about his new mobile phone habits got me started on a tangent, and I thought I’d repost my response here. Thus:


Yesterday I was walking down the street and this woman walking the other way was having an extremely animated conversation with Unseen People (via her mobile phone).

And then I realized that the best way to deal with people who hear voices is to give them a mobile phone. They can just wander around and say shit all day long, and no one will care as long as they’re holding a phone to their ear. It could be a prop phone. Something small and black and vaguely phone-like. Tell them to pretend to dial before talking to the Voices, and they’ll obtain instant social acceptability. As long as no one listens in.

Mittens The Cute Kitty

Speaking of scary people: The American Christian Militia

“Our guvmint doesn’t care because it’s so corrupt. Bill Klinton murdered 763 people with his bare hands while he was in office. It’s true. I heard it on talk radio. What’s more, he killed my “little soldier”. Private Johnson doesn’t stand at attention any more ‘cept at wierd times like when I’m watching my gladiator movies..

“Please join me as I try to take my country back.”

Watched last three episodes of ‘The Prisoner‘ last night on DVD. Oh, but the cold war was fun, wasn’t it, kids? It put a mindfuck on all of civilization, that conflict did; showed us all how capable we are of being insane.

What struck me about it (this time; every time I watch it something else strikes me) was how completely it deconstructs cold war attitudes (the show was produced starting in 1966, and aired in the US as a mid-season replacement for ‘Gunsmoke’). The prisoner’s goal is to outlast not just his captors, but also their own paranoia, and thus the cold war itself.

Many in the world have outlasted the cold war attitude, but many haven’t. Current leadership in the US gives me little hope, but another generation will be along shortly to wrest the reigns of power away from the fearful. Hopefully.

What the show illustrates is that in order to effect meaningful reform, everything has to be shaken up. The last episode in particular, where three different forms of revolution are portrayed. Youth rebellion and reform from the seats of power are shown as ineffectual, while the prisoner’s individualism is rewarded and yet marginalized. Society has no place for such an individual, except as leader (an offer the prisoner rejects, sort of).

Another thing that struck me is that this series represents a language of liberation. It’s a story you can talk about in terms of mental, emotional, physical and spiritual liberation, which implies that the mechanics of all forms of liberation are the same, just in different contexts. If you begin in one place and move towards liberation in any of those realms, it would seem, you can’t help but arrive at liberation in all realms as a side-effect.

Just some thoughts.

More Windows adventures:

The Windows computer, I got for free. It was a gift from a friend. It’s a P166. It can play MP3s or browse the web, but not both.

Windows 3.1 for workgroups came with the box. The monitor I had from a long time ago, for another junker computer. The CD-ROM drive came from the same friend as the computer, a little after the fact (if memory serves). The mouse, and the Win98 update software, I found at a thrift store for a grand total of 5 bux. My friend Droo, who I don’t see nearly enough of, donated the memory (for a whopping grand total of 64M in six sticks) and the 10/100 NIC. He’s one of those people who, like me, has a bunch of spare NICs laying around for no apparent reason.

Anyway. The story. I went to get lunch today, and it started raining. So after lunch I went into the computer store next door to stay out of the rain. I kind of needed a mouse to replace the thrift store find, since it’s old and clunky and actually has a ball inside.

Poking around in this store, I found a smallish mouse with a retractable cord. Now, I find it extremely easy to resist the marketing wiles of mouse makers. I got an iOptiJr for my Mac, because it’s an ass-kicking mouse, not because it’s clear and has color accents you can switch out to coordinate with your hairstyle. But the retractable cord…

You open a hatch on the side of the thing and that’s where the USB connector lives. You pull it out and it stays. You tug it again and it goes back in. This is, to me, brilliant. For some reason.

I buy the thing, barely able to justify it (I don’t really need a mouse, but, now that I think about it, my iOptiJr’s cable sure is cumbersome when I’m on the road…)

Yay. Delight. Happy mouse, happy Homer. I go home and plug it into the Windows box. It works immediately. Yay. I think, ‘I bet there’s a kickass driver for this thing on the Kensington web site…’ It turns out there is, but the ass it kicks is MINE. If it ain’t broke don’t innovate, is the story from Kensington. Their installer breaks halfway through the process, which leaves my computer in a state of mouse limbo. I restart with the old PS2 mouse, and Windows recognizes it as new hardware. Heh. Windows doesn’t keep drivers around? It kills them, erases them when they’re not in use?

I notice other stuff, too. The mouse pointer is always snapped to the first button on the window, which annoys the frak out of me. I try to run the Kensington program to configure the mouse, but it puts up an alert box telling me there’s no Kensington mouse present, and of course the pointer is snapped to the OK button.

I try to kill the Kensington driver, but IT WILL NOT DIE. Five restarts later, the pointer is still snapping to the button. I try both mice. I try either mouse. I try program uninstall, I try install/remove hardware, I throw stuff in the trash, er, recycle bin, at random.

Finally, for some reason, it works. I did the same thing over three times, and it worked the third time. Windows voodoo. I curse at Bill Gates and his kerjillionaire status built on MISERY.

And then I recall: I’m in this for $10 plus the cost of the mouse, which I can use on my Mac anyway. And everything’s OK again.

Though I’m pretty sure I’ll be staying with the iOptiJr.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my last ‘blog.

To put a finer point on it, the sense is that I’ve almost won the 100 meter race.. I’m in first place and I have a substantial lead.. Except that when I get to the finish line, I stop and stand there, staring at the tape without running through it. And then someone else does and I act all surprised, as if I could never have forseen that I’d lose.

This is what it means to be me. There’s no career in racing for me.

And sure, this ‘blog and the preceding are a kind of pity party, in a way, but I’m trying to just see it. To just look at it and watch it. To watch my mind work and somehow not be infuriated as it just stands there at the finish line, while everyone else is gaining.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how alike people are. We prefer to think of humanity as diverse, and it is if you measure it along certain dimensions that are guaranteed to give you a diversity of measurements. Mostly, though, the main difference from the norm you’d find in any given random human relates to malfunctioning biology.

I don’t want to sound like a eugenicist, because I’m not. I don’t think that the disabled aren’t human beings deserving of everything a human being deserves. No. I count myself as disabled, and that’s not what I want for myself. I’m just saying that if you look at everything you can measure about humans, you’ll find that being an ‘individual’ is actually a normative behavior; ‘being an individual’ is something everybody does. The quest to be distinctive occurs within the context of average-ness, and within the relatively rigid confines of social acceptance. The truly non-normative, the ‘broken,’ stick out like a sore thumb and provide the exception that proves the rule. Their ‘individualism’ (some might say ‘mental disturbance’) doesn’t occur within social contexts. It occurs within the context of damaged mental or emotional ability. These are the true pariahs. Not mere social outlaws, but threats to the biological roots of social convention itself.

I feel like the non-normative exception, not just in that few people can relate (because who really can relate, anyway?), but in that I know that by any measure, I’m far, far from the middle of the bell curve that is the human experience. Nothing personal; it’s math.

I’m the lonliest man in the world, and I have mathematical proof. Hah.

Anyway. The 100-meter metaphor continues thusly: Some part of me seems to always decide at some point that the goal of a given endeavour has changed. In the race example, the goal was to win, but now it’s to observe the tape on the finish line. My goals are out of sync with those of the rest of humanity, it seems. And to make matters worse, I can’t explain them to you; I can only understand them in terms of how different they are.

Maybe one day I’ll get this figured out.

Tell me what it means that I feel this way:

Nothing comes together. All the parts are in place, the plan has been made, the intention is clear, the dominoes are all lined up. But they never fall. The actors stand there on the stage, lines memorized, meaning to put on a play. The clouds hang in the sky, meaning to precipitate, but the land remains parched. The sun is stuck at about 8pm, in the twilight position, neither night nor day, the end of a beautiful sunset that never was, the beginning of a clear night that never will be.

Courtesy of ebay:



…of all the shallow stuff he gave up so you had food on the table.

“Here, dad. I thought I’d get you this die-cast sports car because I know you’ll never be able to afford a real one. Thanks for college, by the way!”

Do you know why Bill Gates wears glasses? I’ll tell you. It’s because the Arial SUCKS.

This is one of many reactions to my recent foray into the world of Win32. Some others include:

“You mean the setup program won’t allow me to re-partition this linux drive?”

“Geez, I knew it would restart a few times after installing.. but THIS?”

“The driver is RIGHT THERE!” (points to file icon in opened window)

“Well, I certainly have my pick of gnutella clients…”

First bike ride in approx. three months today. Maybe four. Four’s too depressing to think about; we’ll say three.

My body laughs at me. The hills laugh at me. The wind laughs at me. Seattle is beautiful, and it’s better to laugh than to scowl.

Took me forever to get warmed up. Like, 15 miles’ worth. Back at home now, I can feel the energy; where before my body was laughing at me (truthfully, it was a scowl, actually, at that point), now it’s confused about whether or not we’re still exerting ourselves.

I stopped to rest at a park with a baseball diamond. Across the field, some homeless folks were having a sort of homeless picnic. A couple of them got into a bit of a row, yelling at each other and pushing each other around. I had been lying on a bench. I got up to look, and, independent of all that, decided it was time to split.

There was a homeless-looking guy about to steal my bike from right behind me. He was just approaching where I had been laying, and when I turned around and saw him, he looked mortified. Another disheveled guy behind him turned around 180 degrees and sauntered away. The first guy turned to watch him go, as if he were a little child abandoned at the grocery store. “Where’d my pal go?” he slurred to himself as he watched his compatriot vanish. I hopped on my bike and rode past him to the sidewalk and the street.