Never Worth Fightin' Over

I was scrolling through my variegated pictures folder today looking for an authorial headshot for Seek, the o-fish-l magazine for Brethren in Christ, which I seem to be one of these days. So the next issue will feature a little ditty by me, for the completists among you.

The Point: Whipping through the folder, I discovered a picture I loved so much that I saved it in case the internet breaks. I want to share it.

If ever you browse my links, you'll note one to Scarygoround, a web comic I pretty much adore. Scarygoround is a M-F comic about people in England who live in a town where supernatural and mildly horrific things happen a lot. I love the writing, I love the art, and John Allison draws fetching young women -- always lovely, but never cheesecake.

Here's the setup. The guy in this comic, Ryan, a career slacker, has decided to venture to the land of the dead to visit his deceased ex-girlfriend. He has just arrived.

Normally, an SGR comic ends with a quirky turn of phrase that sets up the next day's offering. This day was different. This day was suddenly, unexpectedly poignant. It makes you want to call someone you love. If I had a refrigerator I would put this on it. I wanted to share it with you, whoever you are.

The Mind Killer

I hear in the performance biz, that it’s good to feel a little scared before stepping onto stage, that if you don’t feel a little scared, you’re doing it wrong. I don’t think that’s true. I think people generally find fear an effective motive, and never find anything else to be motivated by, so they just use that one every time they’re about to take the stage – metaphor or not.

I hate this idea. I'm exhausted by fear. I'm annoyed by fear. I'm burdened by it way more than goaded. Like kudzu of the heart, despite scorched-earth efforts to kill it, I still have plenty. Every time I discover a new crop, I throw up my hands and scream. On the inside, I mean.

This is probably not a healthy way to look at it. I know the psychology line for this one: Fear is an emotion. Emotions aren't good or bad. They're just you. When you fight, you're just fighting yourself. When you accept the thing is when it begins to take its rightful place in your mind and heart.

Which is both true and oversimplified. But see, I don't want to sit still and practice breathing and find my center. I just want to be fearless.

There's more in time and space to motivate you. And way better.

Electric Mayhem Solo Album

Dude, we can totally grow new teeth now. Available to the public in two years. Reasonably affordable in maybe five to ten years.

Can You Picture That?

Groovy's New Tats

My car's name is Groovy. Very slowly -- like, glacier slow -- I've been painting designs on Groovy over the last few months. I have no overarcing plan. I wish I did, but the throes of this particular idea brooked no waiting.

Here are some pictures.





This is the roof. My main aesthetic is: circles. I like the happy accident of the house reflected. I am less fond of the bird crap I didn't bother to wipe off before taking the picture.

I've actually done more since I took this picture, adding a rectangle of all the scandalous things.





I think this is going to be ghosts in a rock band on a trippy yellow stage. However, it was going to be three other things before that, so caveat custodes. Here's a closer shot.




The paint I used for the ghosts was on sale. When I opened it, I found out why: The stuff was more putty than liquid. It congealed on my brush as I worked, so eventually I just started finger painting with it. For once watching paint dry wasn't boring -- it was a race against time.

Several minutes later, when it dried, it looked like I'd gobbed Play-Doh onto the side of my car. Yesterday, I sanded some of the thickness (and my fingerprints) off. The fullness of drying (not pictured here) has caused the paint to crack, so my ghosts have the yellow background peeking through cracks in their green bodies. I can't tell whether I like this yet.

Free Buffett!

I've been a Warren Buffett fan for a long time, as have all right-thinking people. It's refreshing to see heaping schooners of cash fail to create a monster. Gives me hope for the rest of us trying to coax camels through needles.

He says he's not ill, but mortality has clearly found Warren's home phone number and is calling at dinner time, because he's cashing out.

A lot of his $44 billion estate will be flowing out of the United States, since he's giving it to Bill and Melinda Gates. An AP news story reports that $20 billion dollars was sent to Mexico from the U.S. in 2005. People already complain about how that sucks money out of our economy. I'm just spitballing, but between Buffett and Gates, a couple of 2005s worth of money will be going to India and parts of Africa in the next few years.

Why are Americans okay with rich-people philanthropy, but not poor-people philanthropy?

I'm just sorry this didn't get done sooner. Buffett says in the interview that he wanted to keep the wealth in his high-compounding hands as long as possible, rather than spend it too soon and squander earnings potential. I guess so, but I wonder what pounds of cure would have been rendered unnecessary by earlier ounces of prevention.

My Favorite Deadly Sin

I’ve been reading productivity web sites in the last few months. Most recently, I’ve been reading www.stevepavlina.com, and for a while I left the page about how to become an early riser open in my browser.

I don’t write here in praise of sloth, nor is this confession. It’s just admission. I am slothful.

I like the first definition of sloth best: a “disinclination to work.” I don’t consider myself lazy, or other synonyms for sloth. I’m just disinclined.

However, I am beginning to tire of sloth. If that sounds funny, good.

I have a couple of barriers to becoming less slothful. First, I must alter habits and mindsets that dispose me to do nothing rather than something. Second, and more insidiously, I don’t like productive people. They variously seem brusque, boring, materialistic, self-centered, and while perhaps not unfriendly, they don’t seem to want to hang out, to take time, to enjoy people and being where they are. Whatever they’re doing is more important than the people they’re with.

The first thing I feel confident I can overcome with time and application. Once I want it (and I am coming around to want it), I’ll pick it up.

The second thing I need to find some peace with. I don’t want to be a person for whom love is subsidiary to agenda. I don’t want something besides being where I am to take precedence. But being "productive" seems at odds with that mindset. I don't know how to reconcile them yet.

Lunchtime

Craigslist does not make as much money as it could. Like, $475M less than it could, sez the Wall Street Journal.

This article is from a couple of weeks ago, but it took me some time to put together what I had to say.

In Mr. Buckmaster's view, newspapers would be better off being a little more Craigslist-like: Go private, eschew Wall Street's demands for continually "goosing profitability" and give your readers what they want. Much trouble in the world comes, in Mr. Buckmaster's view, from losing sight of that essential goal.

After we've retired back to the living room for coffee, Mr. Buckmaster allows that the world is perhaps not quite that simple. When asked whether there's a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: "It's unrealistic to say, but -- imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?"

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. "Now, there's something wrong in the reasoning there," he admits. "You can't run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company" -- more points for understatement. "But still, it's a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible." As an end-user, I suppose I do, too. But there are no free lunches, even if Craigslist -- and the meal Mr. Buckmaster and Ms. Best provided for me -- sometimes seem to come close.

The article says Craigslist employs about 21 people, and makes $25M a year. It's safe to assume that money isn't split evenly among all the employees, but I bet nobody's doing badly either.

The idea that you look to be helpful, and make plenty of money (the Buckmasters live in a nice house, after all) but not as much as you could, is very like what I was talking about when I said we make the economy, the economy does not make us.

You don't take money just because you can. You take a generous amount and leave the rest, because there's just no good reason to have more.

Here's the new scheme: Rather than concentrate the money in a vicious oligarchy, a business takes a fair amount and leaves the rest for other businesses who are also taking a fair amount and leaving the rest. This increases the overall pool of viable businesses, which generates more work for more people, and lower costs on the goods and services that already exist (due both to suppliers taking less than they could, and increased demand).

It wouldn't even be communism. Capitalism would thrive because there would be less punishment for failure. You could recover from a business failure in a fraction of the time it takes currently. It seems counter-intuitive to capitalism as we know it that this would work, but it easily could.

The reason it won't is that a significant number of us won't buy into it. We don't even ALL have to buy into it. Some miserable number of us can still be greedy bastards. Maybe even a miserable majority can continue. As long as a significant minority are willing to run this way, we'll see the rewards.

There might not be any free lunches. But expensive lunches are entirely optional.

Misery Loves An Audience

I was listening to a They Might Be Giants podcast on the way home yesterday and it contained a song that is catchy, and at the same time, a little awful. If you are a fan of TMBG, you will know this is not uncommon.

Aside: People whose opinions I respect have subtly poo-pooed TMBG for years, declaring them “only OK.” I used to think, “There must be something I’m not seeing that makes them less than great, because I think they're great. But maybe they’re not.”

Then on the train I thought, "Hey, you know what people whose opinions I respect? Screw you! I don’t know what your problem is, but this is great stuff. It speaks to me, and it’s inventive, fun, and thought-provoking, which is just about the most I want from art.”

Return: In this song, Renew My Subscription, John Linnell sings a song about (among other things) taking medication for psychosis. Many first-person TMBG songs are not necessarily autobiographical. But as I listened to the lyrics I realized: If this is not rooted in something personal, then the guy has done hella research. And really, it’s probably just personal.

They go:

I saw the thing about the heartsick shut-in
thought that I should cut in
and tell you ‘bout how
it woke me from a lifelong daydream
while I’ve been aging
you wrote it all down
though I recognized the words when I read them
I know I never said them
to people out loud

One, this is about aging. Two, this is about self-recognition and expression. Three, I didn’t write down the psychosis part of this song. Download the podcast through iTunes to hear for yourself, or you can follow the somewhat complicated procedure through their site at TMBG.com. Or you could buy their Venue Songs album; the song is there too.

I started thinking about TMBG’s catalog, and realized that a lot of their songs, a whole lot of their songs, are about being alienated, confused, or mentally unwell. Even when they’re obviously talking about someone else (Meet James Ensor, Metal Detector) that person is still not your role model. Regardless of subject, their interest is in unwell people.

The music is fun. The lyrics are clever. And these guys did a children’s album, and they’ve got great senses of humor, and amid all of this, you can easily get caught in a life size smoke screen around the melancholy and disconnection.

TMBG’s first couple of albums were more nakedly unsettled, but it seems like they lived some life, and went through a period of trying different things. I recently heard on another podcast that they were returning to playing older songs on tours, songs they hadn’t played live in 10 years. Renew My Subscription reminds me that they may be returning to the cleverly crafted expressions of alienation and perhaps songs about genuine insanity from their early days.

Furthermore: I began to put that together with some other artists/writers/musicians whose work I’ve recently plumbed deeply enough to realize that even though their output is fun, they’ve got a layer of sorrow/anxiety/unrest behind it.

I’ve always worked hard at concealing my misery in creative ventures -– including this blog. No one wants to hear about how depressed I’ve been, I think. That shit’s depressing. And even the people who want to be kind instead of disparaging or noncommittal, few are helpful when they try. Some people’s help just hurts more. So keep that away from the light, right? Deal with it solo and just give them what they want to see.

But listening to my favorite band on the train I discovered: The art needs to be miserable if you’re miserable. If misery is the truth you feel, then you have to put that in there. Trying to avoid it makes bad art. More often, avoiding it means you don’t do anything at all.

Pest Control

originally written 5/20/06

Last night I bagged my second Volkswagen-sized cockroach of the season in my bedroom. It would be more accurate to say I “cupped” it, scooping it up in a big 32-ounce plastic cup. Then I filled the thing a third full of water, put it in the bathroom and went to bed.

I did this because this is how I used to kill scorpions. When I lived in Georgia, about every nine weeks (average) a tiny scorpion would get into my apartment and hang out. I didn’t even know Georgia had scorpions. Damn immigrants.

Unlike other bugs*, these scorpions did not care to hide under things. I arrived home from work, opened the door, and the scorpion had apparently done the complex geometry to discern the most open spot in the room. Even when I came in they never tried to hide, like they were too damn cool to scurry. They were pleasantly easy to catch that way.

I tried a variety of indirect scorpion-killing methods such as crushing and asphyxiation. Scorpions are tough bastards though. They don’t fall for the classics. Then I tried drowning.

Remember that hoary scorpion and toad story, where the scorpion cons the toad into carrying him across the river and promises he won’t sting him because that would doom them both? Then he does it anyway because that’s his nature? It’s true. Not the nature part. That’s a stupid moral. No, the truth is scorpions can’t swim.

Every scorpion I dropped in water sank like rocks. A few hours later, I’d toss the drowned corpse into the woods outside my apartment. That’s the circle of life.

Cockroaches, on the other hand, are swimmy little dudes. The one last night started freestyling as soon as he went in the drink, and kept it up for several minutes as I watched him. Then I went to bed. Today I got up and checked on him –- still going. There was tiny roach poop in the bottom of the cup, and his antennae were droopy, but still kicking like he’s on a Tony Little Gazelle.

Those must have been death throes, because a little while later he was in his personal Davy Jones’s Locker. According to scientific measurement, he swam for 13 hours. Then I flushed him down the toilet.

I would have thrown him out into the woods, but I want cockroaches out of the damn circle of life.

*The entomologically inclined among you will note that scorpions aren’t bugs. Keen observers will note I don’t care.

Taking the Brain Out of Brainwork

I started a new job yesterday. It’s a lot of things I want in a job. It's downtown so I can take the train to work. The dress is casual so I don't have to wonder if my tie matches. Most of all, the work is easy enough that I don't have to care much.

When I got home today, I had a freelance assignment due by COB on the west coast. So I spent a couple of hours, finished it, sent it. Then I had a rare feeling: the feeling of done. Not wondering what's due tomorrow, or what I forgot to do today. I'm free for the evening to do whatever seems like a good idea. And I'll feel that way tomorrow too. And then Thursday.

This loose liberty preceded my last burst of creativity a couple of years ago when I had the blissfully no-mind job of cell phone repairman. The less my brain thinks about work, the more it gets to think about art and comics and girls and... whatever seems like a good idea.

I've been trying to wander my way back toward that work ever since I left it to move to Philadelphia. It's too early to know whether this is that. But it's the closest I've been since I stopped soldering for a living.