Cheap Salty Taste

It has felt like a long junk food binge with the news cycle being what it has been the last few months.  I spend more time than I should reading about the rantings of an idiot.  Then I read about what other people have to say about this idiot.  He says something horrible, his fans roar, people are aghast.  This leaves a cheap salty taste in my mouth that stimulates me to look for more.  I scour different news sources for another Chicken McNugget.  What’s he going to feed me today?

We’re all consumed by this unhealthy frenzy.   I sense the hardening of our national consciousness clogged with the accretion of so much Trump crud.  I know Trump crud isn’t healthy.  But Trump crud sates my need to know he won’t win.  The feeding frenzy was initiated in earnest when, after the Republican convention, polls suggested he was at parity with Clinton and had just as good a chance of becoming president.  The republic was issued a challenge.  Our body of government would either be strong enough to withstand a tyrant or it wouldn't.  His daily exertions with the bellows, conjuring flame upon all that is descent, this is a call to action.  And this should keep the republic healthy.  This is what it was designed for.  But I want to watch to be sure he is engulfed by his own conflagration and we properly defeat this tyranny. 

Two months later, much fatter, much less intellectually healthy, it appears clear that Trump, barring something dramatically unforeseen, will not have a chance to win the election.  And now it appears clearer than ever with his latest campaign shake up, that this will be just fine for DJT.  This, and us, are merely a springboard for new heights of self-promotion that he will now orchestrate.  This article by Neal Gabler in the New York Times has stuck with me.  I think its’ powers of explanation, are rather remarkable.  Trump, in much the same way that he approaches casinos and towers, used the edifice of the Republican Party to promote himself.  Later, on November 5^th, he will dispose of the thing he ruined, and break ground on a new project.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/opinion/campaign-stops/to-trump-even-losing-is-winning.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

As Gabler suggested, Trump’s motivation in running, was not to lead, nor to legislate, but rather simply to promote himself.  He has succeeded wildly.  And he will likely spin up an entirely new media production enterprise to promote his birther-like tantrums against Clinton, and whomever else he chooses, for as long as it keeps him in the news.  The idiot’s voice, the voice of course, unbridled mendacity, will have a loud and lasting prominence in the village square.  This is a self-perpetuating cycle, a strong dose of preservatives for his solipsistic pseudo agenda, ensuring a long, staple shelf life of a personhood we should not be bothered with consuming. 

All Gone

Not long ago I mentioned buying a 1TB external drive to back up the computer which my daughter needed to her school.  We got that backed up.   It used less than fifteen percent of the space on this drive.  Some people have old cars up on blocks in the back yard.  I have old an old Mac on my shelf that has a ton of photos and music that are not properly backed up.  Some day it won’t start up any more.  This MacBook Pro I’m working on hasn’t been backed up in half a year either.   And though my daughter isn’t happy about it, I tell her data to move over make way for mine.  (I’m quite aware that it all should be backed up in the cloud and that this would be cheaper and easier and real time and I thank you for those reminders.)

Regular readers might recall that my computer hasn’t had a functioning screen for two month’s now.  To see anything, I have it hooked up to a separate screen that is much larger and feels large, staring at me now as I look at it and type, while my fingers move about somewhere else.  Seeing everything so large I adjusted the screen saver so photos would rotate in and out.  Coming in at television scale, they are striking and given that I now had all my photos on one drive I could set up something I've long wanted to do: put it all together so that the last fifteen years that digital photography came and went all day before my eyes.    

Getting eighty-thousand photos on to my machine wasn’t difficult.  But getting the iPhoto software to process them all proved especially time consuming.  My old workhorse frequently hung and had to be restarted.  There was the ever pressing fear that a six-hour process would be killed in the fifth hour by an unsuspecting family member who hopped into the drivers seat here.  (Thank you, once again, well noted.  I should update my OS.  This would invariably make it all faster and easier.)

Crude though my preparations may have been, I met with success.  I now have a decade and a half of photos that float in and out and television scale into my view when the computer goes idle.  I have, of course, brought everyone else in to stare at it with me.  I generally sit and watch for a few when I return from the bathroom.  There it all is, the life you’ve captured, all gone. 

I wrote this a moment ago in an email to a dear friend with whom I was discussing old photos of New York from the 1970’s:  I'm up posting a few blogs and selfishly, perhaps, I know that through volume and regularity, I have captured a particular version of what I see in photos, as well, and assume that though most are random and middling for now, they may one day narrate something that aches because its gone. 

Orwell Loved Typewriters

A first: thumb tapping a blog post on to my phone.  There was no laptop available for me for this afternoon.  Normally I'd be typing something out in the back of cab, all ten fingers working away happily.  I'd reckon my full ten finger typing is, three to four times as fast. Using two thumbs it's all rather tedious as well so I need to rest more often.  I frequently consider bailing on the idea. altogether.

Will full finger typing become an anachronism in a post smart phone, intuitive dictation era?  People like me who insist on a full keyboard will winnow fewer and fewer. Who cares, I suppose. Some people, like Orwell loved typewriters and they seem monstrous and unforgiving to me.  And so the qwerty keyboard will no doubt look to someone who'll write by speaking or indeed, thinking.  

How far off is that?  I wonder as I write that.  Something that could capture thoughts and render them as text in real time. Like anything, at first they’d be crude and inaccurate and then, increasingly they’d be blisteringly accurate, hack-able, inescapable.  I've never heard of such a thing. But invariably it's being studied.  

The first iteration will probably map to mood flashes.  “I’m angry.  I’m very angry.  I’m laughing.”  But if you could sense these flashes it stands to reason that a more nuanced capacity for thought interpretation might yield to a capacity for thought capture, and thought rendering.  Perhaps monks with incomparable mind control could dupe the artificial intelligence, slowing thought to a nothingness or outwitting somehow, their own mind's voice.  But invariably they would be eclipsed by greater accuracy, power and speed, like old John Henry and the steam powered hammer.

If thoughts could be rendered in text in the moment they were conceived it would certainly be swifter by far than any typing exercise, but how the hell would you turn in off? You'd have to put it on pause to do any editing, whatsoever.   How could you signify irony?  And once thoughts were rendered, they would become "data" and if only for that second they will be "captured" in the future as all data will be backed up and archived instantaneously.  Analyzable in real time, everyone would be immediately guilty of thought crimes that could be verified and used as evidence.  

Thought capture, would be introduce a new era of immediate culpability of everyone.  Morals and policy would probably evolve too slowly to reckon with such a nightmare in time, lumbering behind the pace of innovation.  Free will might also prove an anachronism, caught in the webbing of spontaneous thought production. 

I note that I think-different when I type with two thumbs . . .

He Will Not Disapear

Up real early.  It isn’t really necessary, but this this election cycle I take the precious, early morning time scan not only the New York Times, but also the Wall St. Journal, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and then Slate.  What am I looking for?  I don’t really want to look at DJT’s face.  I don’t really want to sift through his mendacity.  But I do want more news on him.  I do want to read about another fuck up.  I fervently hope for a steady intensification of the downward spiral till all one sees is spinning orange top before it vanishes from the bowl.  And as it is certain that he will loose, it is certain too that he will not disappear.  We’ll return to the restroom to find him bobbing around down there for the foreseeable.

Working from home all day the bed is achingly near.  I’ve been up since 1:00AM, so now, mid day operates like early evening.  I know it’s coming and after lunch I quickly descend towards the arms of oblivion.  By the time I hear the kids outside my room again it is early evening and dinner is being served.

After dinner everyone else is tired and goes to bed early.  So I’m pounding away at emails, vaguely conscious of the fact that people may be confused receiving things from me at 2:00AM.  (I thought you said you were back in Beijing) Remarkably, for the first time since the spring, I think I am largely “caught-up.” Fleeting, but satisfying, in the way illusory moments can be.

I’m on a Donald Byrd kick for no good reason.  I think I just made my way here from a Hank Mobley kick.  In particular I haven’t heard the album “Live at the Half Note Café” in a while.  Somehow I associate it with time years ago in western Massachusetts.  I don’t think I would have been able to identify who Pepper Adams was at the time nor what it was he played in those days.  Though I do remember there was a baritone sax on the album and boy, he sure sounds good, anchoring the sound sound in lower register basement.

OK.  Time to return to the bed.  Can’t tell you how long this particular sleep session will last.  I sense I will be off kilter like this for a while.

                                                                                                                                                                                                         

  

Summer is Sacred

If I was a kid, I’d suggest this was a rip off.  If I was a kid, raised to think that August was sacred and September was when school started, that some time around Labor Day weekend you had no choice but to head back in to school . . . and then one year was abruptly told to show up August 15, for the first days of school, this would be a profound bummer and I would have complained with a fullness.  My kids started back up today, quietly having known for a while that the date was when it was and that it was immutable.  And I’m here feeling like its fall, even though its still mid (ok, mid-late) summer.  My wife noted, wisely, that the autumn had already begun in the Chinese lunar calendar.  But I can’t help it.  August 15 is still summer.  Even if I lived in Tierra Del Fuego I think I’d need to call mid-August summer.

They’ve come to thinking of it as normal though.  And they don’t seem to consider it a major compromise.  To be fair they will be getting time off at Christmas, Chinese New Year and spring break.  Chinese New Year was obviously irrelevant for us.  So they get more time off during the year.  Still, something about the summer, is sacred.

I dropped them off this morning.  They’d been up for hours.  They’re both as jet-lagged as I am.  I hope they make it through the day without hitting a wall.  I will definitely be taking a nap.  And I will be on a shopping mission.  Not for pencils or binders, but rather an external hard drive.  My younger daughter turns her old computer in for a new one today and if she wants any of the old material, she needs to make a copy.  I’m sure we have one lying around some where and I’m sure there is a much cooler way to do this in the cloud, but with only so many hours to go, till its all too late, I am heading over to the local computer store to find one. 

I feel like an oldster asking for a 500G external HD.  The smallest they sell is 1 Terabyte.  And this is a cool eight hundred renminbi.  I try to imagine my daughter’s frustration about loosing her photos.  And it isn’t the first time she’s specified that she needed a solution here.  I reluctantly pull up eight, one-hundred yuan notes and give them to the young lady behind the counter who confronts me with cautious skepticism, assuming I don’t understand not only the language and the culture, but anything about the technology, either.