From The Papers: Further Amateurish Reactions To The World

Canada: The New United States, And Not In A Good Way

A climate meeting opened in South Africa on Monday, in the face of the upcoming expiration of the environmental commitments from the Kyoto Protocol. Against this backdrop, it is reported that Canada will announce a formal withdrawal from the accord next month. Really, Canada? What happened? I used to look up to you, both literally and figuratively. Oh, that's right, Harper happened. Trust me, Canada, being an international douchebag might look like fun from where you're standing, but it's not all it's cracked up to be.


College Campus Revolutions

UC Santa Cruz students and faculty staged a protest of the pepper-spraying of UC Davis students and proposed tuition fee hikes. Where to begin with this?

1) UC Davis needs to out and out fire the police officers responsible, but the question is, should it be done publicly, or should they be allowed to slip away into the night? A public shaming might trigger unfortunate responses, but would anything less than a public revelation satisfy the outrage over this particular episode? Either way, this incident must follow the officers should they attempt to apply for new jobs in law enforcement. I'm usually one to allow for extenuating circumstances and second chances, but there are no extenuating circumstances in this case, and therefore, no second chances.
2) As for the tuition hikes, yes, education is getting extremely unaffordable, and that's damaging to our society in so many ways, both in the moment and in the future. A photo of the Santa Cruz protest showed a chalked message that "Education Is A Right, Not A Privilege." Education should certainly not be only for the privileged few, but the question of whether it is a right is a little trickier. Much as one's civil liberties under the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, are always limited by the rights of others to not be harmed and not have their rights infringed upon, the right to education is heavily contingent on the availability of resources. The universal ideal would be free education for all, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. Resources are needed. To use a physics metaphor, there must be potential energy in order to create kinetic energy, and life tends towards entropy.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for resources, but going after the UC Regents may not be the proper approach. The regents certainly deserve criticism, and it is all well and good to make them sign a pledge that they would fight to raise taxes on the wealthy, close corporate loopholes and and end Prop. 13, but that's no more than a symbolic action. This is certainly a strong message and a coherent plan of action, but it should be targeted at Sacramento.

It is also an issue of national significance. Our priorities are wrong:instead of corporate bailouts, the money should be reinvested in education. Let the free market determine what corporations succeed; corporations that fail should dissolve and try again with a new model. Meanwhile, if we invested in education, we would be spurring the growth and development of a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs, creating actual 'job creators' and qualifying people to fill those jobs.

What? Another Herman Cain Allegation? I'm Shocked. Shocked.

The AP describes 'an explosive allegation' in which a Georgia woman said she and Herman Cain had a thirteen year affair. Really, at this point, I think it would be more explosive news if someone came forward and said they had NOT had an affair with or been harassed by Herman Cain.

Cain denied it, but a statement from his lawyer did not repeat a denial, but instead basically said that the public and the media had no business snooping into the details of consensual conduct between adults. In general, that's true, but when you are running for president, you are no longer quite the same private individual, and your judgment must be called in to question. Whether or not he had an affair is not really a major issue except between Cain and his wife, but harassment allegations are an entirely different ballgame. Especially when you imply that God told you to run for the Presidency.

On a purely political level, does one's past mean that one can't be an effective leader? I would say no. Look at Bill Clinton. But it is important for us to be able to respect our leaders.

So yes, it is theoretically possible that Herman Cain would be a good president. But no, he wouldn't be. He's just crazy, and kind of slimy.

How The World Has Turned

A gay softball organization has had to pay an undisclosed sum of money to three players who were disqualified from the 2008 Gay Softball World Series because they were perceived to be too heterosexual, as they were bisexual.

First of all, I had no idea there was such a thing as a Gay Softball World Series. I think that is spectacular.

Second of all, I don't know why, but this strikes me as really very funny.

Google Can Change The Past

I had a bit of a shock last night, thanks to Google. I was working on my NaNoWriMo novella, and my protagonist was about to do some late-night webstalking. For verisimilitude, I decided to see what it was like, to pay attention to the process. I typed in the name of my closest friend from when I lived in Santa Rosa, a boy I was friends with from kindergarten through third grade, when we moved to Montana.

The first mention of the name was in an article from UC Berkeley's newspaper in 2000, talking about the star of a game, whose friend, the same name as my friend, had died the previous September of heart failure. I kept looking, and I found a mention in a Santa Rosa City Council meeting from 1999 of a closed session in honor of someone by the same name, a former Teen Council member who attended high school in Santa Rosa in the same time frame I was attending high school in Montana.

I kept looking, found obituary records listed from Sonoma County, but I wouldn't be able to see the details without paying money to various sites. I'm not going to write his name, because I didn't keep in touch with him or his family after moving away, so I feel that it would be wrong to write his name here. Let's just say that his name and his nickname were unique enough that I'm pretty sure this was him.

I'm not going in to the details of my emotions, because I'm still not quite sure what to think. It's weird, and sad, to think that if this is indeed my friend, that during all these years that I've occasionally thought about him and remembered the last time I saw him--a summer visit to Santa Rosa when we met to watch 3 Ninjas at the theater and wondered what he was up to--well. I even glanced down the street where he used to live a few months ago when Marina and I drove past my old school in Santa Rosa.

It's strange. I hadn't tried to contact him in all these years. I have no reason to think that his parents would remember me. For some reason, his name came to mind last night when my protagonist was searching to see if his dad--supposedly dead of cancer--was really dead. And what Google gave me instantly altered my perception of the last twenty years. It didn't alter it in an earth-shattering way. Obviously when it has been twenty years since we've talked, it wasn't going to have the same impact as it would have if I had been in contact with him all along. But still . . .

Marina asked me about him, and I told her about the games we played when we were kids: Karate Kids, Bazooka Boys--neither of which were video games, just roleplaying games we made up like Calvinball--games with Micro Machines. I remember sleepovers at his house and watching him swim for the local swim team. It brought back a rich fold of memories, like when we would sit in the car on the way to school in the morning and sing songs from Today's Special, an old Public Television show in the 80s about a department store mannequin who would come to life. I remember the Peanuts collection he bought me when I moved away.

Maybe this is a sort of immortality bestowed on us by the Internet, and Google, for better or for worse. It was just a couple of snippets that I found, here and there, but it added up to something of fundamental impact. I don't know if it means that I should have tried harder to stay in contact with him. Sometimes people just grow apart. But it's strange, and weird, and it seems to argue that it is more than just cliche that you should keep your friends close.

Will it change my life? I doubt it, although I now kind of want to go to Santa Rosa, to see if I can find some record or copy of an obituary, some more detailed encapsulation of what happened. I was tempted to email the high school that he was linked to in the City Council report, to see if I could figure out if it was indeed him. So it probably won't change my life, but I'm sad.

It's a cliche, and maybe trite, to say goodbye to someone I didn't really know anymore. Nevertheless, good-bye, N.

Santa Cruz Solitude: Ocean Evenings

As I walk near the ocean on West Cliff Drive, the college kid strolling with his girlfriend asks me if I have a cigarette to trade him in exchange for some weed, as if cigarettes were harder to obtain.

The ocean. The ocean is our god, a vast and measureless presence, measureless to our eyes if not to our science. At twilight, you see fifteen or twenty surfers, just waiting, just floating between waves, all looking in the same direction, out to sea, waiting for one last silent, steely, stately wave to carry them aloft, a slowly-building swell that rises from the depths. Their vigil is a quiet one.




And another man sits on the cliff, silhouetted against the sun, curled over a book, motionless.





Still others gather in their rusted trucks and vans, smelling like pot and talking of inner dramas and profound adventures of the micro kind.

And just like that, the weight of the work day has fallen from my shoulders, and I can breathe quietly and deeply, filled with a moment of stillness, cold and clear like an ocean wave.

Adventures In Novellaing, Um, Novellating? Writing A Novella? Darn.

So it is National Novel Writing Month. I chickened out of it last year, rationalizing that I wanted to focus on writing short stories that I could try to submit for publication. All well and good, but I still haven't submitted, although I have a couple pieces just about ready to go. This year, then, I decided to do it. But then I forgot all about it until November 1st, so I went into the project with no plan.

On the surface, this was a good thing, because I could just start writing and playing and seeing what happened, and hopefully cross the 50000 word threshold with something that superficially resembled a plot. To make it totally liberated, I decided to write a fantasy story, ala George R. R. Martin, since I just recently finished A Dance With Dragons. I had an intriguing opening dream sequence, and a troubled protagonist with a haunted past that included a monastery. Monasteries are gold when it comes to fantasy stories.

But then the trouble came after the first few days. I wasn't able to write much due to a frenzy at work, thanks to the National Bank Transfer movement that saw a massive surge of inquiries and applications for membership with the credit union. And then when I did write, all that happened was that the hero had a bad dream, looked out the window, and then ran through city streets until he got to the gate. I tried to inject some soldiers going door to door, but it all fell flat. It was like Myst, in that the character was just walking around, looking around. I never did get the hang of Myst. I was never much of one for computer games that I couldn't win easily.

So I decided to go back to the old tried-and-true method of writing about obsessions, such as my obsession with why someone acted they way they did that one time. After all, no one is really going to read this, so I might as well use it as a repository for psychological speculation. Now, all of a sudden, I cranked out 1500 words in just a couple of hours.

Encouraging stuff. I'm sure there is a profound lesson here when it comes to the mysteries of writing, but I'm not sure I have time to explore it as of yet. On to 50,000 words!

Ads For Blogs: A Call For Thoughts

A call for feedback from my readers. In this age of digital publication, it seems to make sense to allow ads on my blogs--not on LiveJournal, but on Blogger. It would potentially allow me to actually earn a little money from my online writing, which would be nice. The trouble is, I've always felt uncomfortable with that notion, because it seems like a passive mode of getting money, almost unethical, because it isn't like I would have gone through the trouble of submitting writing and getting it published. I still feel a little guilty for the money I earned from the now-defunct Themestream.com.

In this age, however, when people can self-publish material intended for direct sale to e-Readers, etc., is it more acceptable to try these alternate methods of capitalizing on something in which I invest a considerable amount of time? The tricky thing is the need to develop a privacy policy, apparently, advising readers that Google AdSense may put a cookie on their browser to target the ads they see. That makes me a little unsure. For all the people who have taken the time to read what I post, do I really want to make them deal with that question?

I'll pursue the application process for Google AdSense, but in the meantime, I would love to hear thoughts from people as to whether this is a terrible idea or not. Would it discourage you from reading the blog?

Thanatopsis: Look It Up. Trust Me.

Santa Cruz is life. Seriously, it is a garden of light and water and sun, a creche for relaxation. Despite an intensity at work that's rather brutal, I'm feeling liberated and free of late. In part, this is because I've completed a trifecta of whale sightings: this year I have seen a blue whale, hundreds of grey whales, and now in Santa Cruz, multiple humpback whales. These are the three types of whales that I remember people talking about on the California coast when I was growing up, so they have a special significance for me. There is something that feels surreal about seeing whales, dolphins and otters just offshore. It feels like I'm stepping outside the Matrix, seeing something real without comprehending the enormity of it at first.

Santa Cruz is also creativity. Today is November 1st, the start of National Novel Writing Month. I had forgotten it until a friend on Facebook reminded me today. That could be a good thing, as now I can start with absolutely no preconceived plan or idea, just write and write and write. I feel inspired by the atmosphere here; so do many people, I would say, like the man who parked his car along West Cliff Drive, overlooking the ocean, so he could sit in the driver's seat and play the flute, or the men with bongo drums--you see a lot of men with bongo drums here; there must have been a convention and everyone forgot to leave at the end.

(Speaking of life, creativity, and digital art, here's a plug for my friend Tsu Fu's videography site, which looks to have the potential to grow and foster other artistic endeavors. Full disclosure: quid pro quo means I tout his site, he touts my blog. Sounds fair to me.)

So with all this life and creativity bubbling around like a fountain, naturally I've decided to write about our culture's preoccupation with death.

I didn't necessarily intend to write about death when I first started mulling this blog. I wanted to write about the whale hat trick, among other things, or the fun of Halloween--I gave out candy for the first time ever, and I made a point of making all the teens and pre-teens and college kids say 'trick or treat' before they got candy, which I think makes me awesome rather than cranky. I could have written about going trick or treating with Marina, her sister and brother-in-law and nephews, and the fun of hearing a three year old start to be able to say my name with enthusiasm.

But the omens were all there. The fates want me to talk about death. A couple of days ago, my dictionary.com app sent me a word of the day of thanatopsis. That is just a cool word, and I've been wanting to find a way to work it in to conversation or writing somehow, someway. Then today in the bookshop in Santa Cruz, I saw a graphic novel collection of Captain America Reborn. Not only did they kill him off last year, but apparently they have resurrected him; I didn't read the whole thing, so I could be wrong. If that wasn't enough of a sign, when I walked home, I saw a broken Captain America shield in the gutter:





Halloween costume remnant or a sign from the muses? I'm going with the sign from the muses, because signs from muses accompany a tumbler of bourbon better than do costume remnants.

Also, I bought the new Terry Pratchett novel today. The title? Snuff, of course.

So is the fascination with dying heroes a new thing? We killed Superman and resurrected him, of course. I also saw--but didn't glance at--another graphic novel about the death of Peter Parker.

What does it mean that we write and embrace stories where superheroic icons die? The rebirth factor is clearly because we love to think our heroes are strong enough to come back from the dead, because that is pretty bad-ass--no disrespect intended, but don't we kind of see Jesus as the first superhero in this context? Buffy the Vampire Slayer came back from the dead twice, and she pretty much set the bar for awesome heroes for the new generation, with a little bit of a dark edge.

But why do we need the heroes to die in the first place? To have a sense of high stakes? Don't we have that sense already with our own fragility? Do we kind of like to see heroes with feet of clay, or fallen heroes? That would explain the success of tabloids.

I'm not even going to go into the fact that the French call an orgasm le petit mort. What's that about?

I guess that the only conclusion I can come to without going to the effort of actually doing research or thinking about this blog for more than fifteen minutes is that pop culture is a filter for the things that we are all preoccupied with, and we are all preoccupied with death. Which seems weird to me, given that there are whales and dolphins and otters out there to see. But then again, now that I've seen all three types of whales, I do kind of want to see a great white shark in the wild, which may seem morbid, especially in the light of the recent shark attack near Monterey, and which no doubt is unfair to the great white shark, which is misunderstood, blah blah blah, and I say blah blah blah in the nicest, not-undercutting-at-all sense.

The fundamental point I'm trying to make is: it would be awesome to see a shark in the wild.