Whose Shake Is This!!?

There is too much instant communication and not enough time to contemplate or enjoy it. There are too many things to know and too many things to do and still nobody seems to know anything. There are too many mechanisms and too many gadgets and none of them are the right sort of gadgets that we have any control over anymore. If I had a hammer….a simple real hammer, not a hammer that is glorified staple gun or a working man’s Ouzi, but a real solid Craftsman hammer that I can hold over the head of the ten-penny nail of reason in my little fist of fury, I would drive that nail deep…drive it like a stake into the heart of the vampire world in which we dwell.

Both technology and temperament conspire against us, or, me. The unlimited world in which we live…the wired and wireless universe…is no where near as limitless and boundless as we’d care to believe. Communication which should be more expansive since any fool with a machine can reach a audience unimaginable in the Police Brutality Days of the late 60′s and early 70′s, is actually taughtly controlled by the vehicles we most commonly use to communicate. Twitter limits me to 140 focking characters or less. Not 140 words, 140 characters. Useless as a turd unless you’ve been arrested on visit to Azerbaijan, or have fallen down a crevasse after being chased by a polar bear…then it’s useful I suppose. But too many people ((that’s the REAL problem with the world, there’s just too many people and they’re no damn good)), find a urge to tell the world that they’ve got a boil on their bum. Facebook is even worse. You get to see the pictures. There seems to be some limits to the amount of characters as well. And while Twitter’s fascist chokehold on communication is fairly benign, Facebook seeming knows no bounds. But I’ll save that prize number 12 for another day. Sorry Malcolm Gladwell and those of short attention span with too much of the wrong sense of time on their twitching texting hands, with ME you have to do all 2,500 words, pictures, and the 2-10  minute musical outro.

There are no shortcuts to actuality. I found this out a long time ago when I attempted to program a computer to write poetry. Unlike some of the computer geek types at the time who took it way too seriously (and still do), I wanted to embrace the machine world and bring a new and terrible poetry to life. So I devised a program in FORTRAN, of course, and banged away at the punch cards as though I were some college boy/man prodigy flogging his way through The Goldberg Variations on a Bosendorfer piano. A world, well…a little world, more like a satellite of Mars than a satellite of Jupiter…of words and phrases and other utopisms filled numerous boxes of cards. And when the punchcards were fed into the IBM 1620 in Green Bay and sent off to the Univac mainframe in Madison and the machine was set in motion, the idea was that poetry would emerge as though the machine were a modern day Walt Whitman or William Blake or T.S. Eliot. The conceit was that the machine would have a (programmed) mind of it’s own. The machine was writing the poetry. The random, mechanized, aggregation of words, verbiage, phrases would have a brave and terrible beauty all their own. The problem, ofcourse, is that the machine DID have mind of it’s own….a mind that wandered into some nested DO loop never to return. When, in my strange powers employ, the machine found it’s way out, the epic realization on my part was that while the machine had a mind of it’s own, it clearly had no soul.

Now it would be nice if I could just look at Facebook and Twitter and say, “That damned machine!!”  But unfortunately, it’s people, not machines. As they say, accordians don’t play “Lady Of Spain”, people do. Now maybe those people know something I don’t know. But unless what they know is the meaning of John Dryden’s poem Absalom and Achitophel, I guess I just don’t want to know. And meanwhile and meanwhile and meanwhile from MY stupid Twitter feed, me and my 12 followers and my 8 followees….some dude wants to fight Shaq, Yoko Ono babbles about changing the course of reality by interception, and Justin Townes Earle wears earplugs when flying to drown out the sound of the low rent suits. I’m with Justin Townes Earle on that one, the low rent suits.

But enough of this shite…let’s get on with the other shite… the motorsports and the football and the beer.

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Somewhere, there is a Dreamland where everything is perfectly clear. There is sufficient and essential information, but not too much information, and the language used to express it is crystalline and eloquent and truthful. In that Dreamland, we are informed, enlightened, and more richly entertained because we take the time to savour the richness of it all. Savouring the richness of it all, after all, is the reason time even exists.

Unfortunately, the world we live in is naught that Dreamland. The signal to noise ratio has become precariously askew. The is too much information that is increasingly superficial and ultimately uncommunicative. It all become mere verbiage. It is a frightening prospect…to dive into a morass of verbiage where depth that does not exist. There is so much of it everywhere…from the fascism of Facebook to the puerility of Twitter to the constant thumbing of text-message jargon to the increasingly hysterical infotainment that masquerades as journalism. Words are everywhere, pretending to communicate, but falling so far short of their quixotic notions that someday I’m afraid words will lose their power to communicate, and more frighteningly, words will lose their charm.

I suppose I’m guilty of this as well, but I try very hard not to be guilty. I joke about never letting the facts get in the way of the truth. But I hope I’m broadcasting a clear signal. And I hope that you can seize back the time that our world is constantly stealing from you. Time is all you have and if you don’t take that time to savour the world around you, if you constantly hurry from one little thing to the next little thing, if you are too busy to take the time, then you will lose and may have already lost, more of the wonderful world around you than will ever accomplish in it.

The only real place were speed is needed is at the racetrack. So step on the brakes…ease off on the throttle….slow down, in other words. Welcome to Dreamland. The speed limit here is strictly enforced, by RADAR!!  26 miles an hour, chumplin. No faster.

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I’m almost tempted to borrow a technique or two from the late, great Edgar Rice Burroughs that was used to great effect in many of his novels. such as Beyond The Farthest Star where, the words of Tangor were automatically typed before his eyes as if by ghostly hands; or as in Lost On Venus, where the words and experiences of Carson Napier came to him telepathically and Burroughs’ only role was that of a mere scribe. I sort of like that little conceit. It’s charming and ancient and if what I write is not to mine or anyone’s liking, I can blame it all on ghosts.

With the World Cup final approaching, and by the time this is read by some or many or anyone, the carnage of that beautiful game will be in the books, I thought a few ghost stories would be in order. It’s a summer anime tradition—either telling ghost stories around a campfire, or a kimodameshi–or both. It should be another of those laws of anime, but apparently isn’t.

But I’m fully capable of conceit without resorting to one. So what I tell, what little I will tell, will no doubt be more than ghostly or ghostlike….wispy and immaterial….hopefully reveal the soul of something, but more likely the words will wander around like zombies until someone clubs them (or me) in the head. Here we go.

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Silly Season is finally over. There is a less than a day to go…23 hours and change as I begin writing this, ’til the start of the Daytona 500. And as I write some of this, Danica Patrick’s quest to save NASCAR has begun in earnest with the Drive4COPD 300 Nationwide race at Daytona. But tomorrow, the green flag drops and 43 drivers tee it off at the Daytona 500.

However, the fairways looks a bit different than last year. Over the winter, Silly Season reared it’s silly head and some big names in NASCAR have for all intents and purposes disappeared forever. Sponsors like DeWalt, Jack Daniels, and Jim Beam have fled the sport. Teams have merged and remerged and re-remerged as vastly different entities. It’s really been hard even for me to get my arms around all this and get up to speed for the 2010 season.

Most of the usual suspects are still around, but some of them have found themselves in suspicious circumstances…

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