music: Tori Amos- Tales from the Choirgirl Hotel
Winter break is probably past its halfway point and I’m still in Boston. But there are plans afoot to get out of here. I’ve, however, had my hands full here. Three solid days of work on music, and almost exactly one year to the day of my first concerted effort at recording the resultant EP is nearing completion. I’ve pasted together a rough mix of all six tracks. While there is still a bit of patching and mastering and normalizing and stitching together, the infrastructure is in place and the bulk of the work is done. Pushing this project into its final stages was a big goal of mine for this break and it’s good to have something to show for all the time I’ve spent messing around with instruments, computers, mixers, and microphones. While I’d ideally like to rework sections of most of the tunes I have to draw the line sometime soon. This EP is not meant for public consumption on a commercial level-it is more a document for myself and my co-writer as well as something handy to give to people I might play with in the future. Many of the tunes push towards the sappy guy-with-guitar campfire cheese about nature and the open road. It’s to be expected considering I drove across the country this summer with a guitar, but in the larger scheme I’m not looking to make that sort of music. It was what we had to work with this summer, and it is what came out. Now that it’s down on an EP, it’s time to move on to a more full electric sound. More than anything else it feels good to get the six tracks of the Rivers and Roads EP out of my head and onto disc. I’m rollin’ on.
Get me out of this city…
Such a simple line, such a powerful sentiment. It’s a proclamation of discontent I’ve voiced on more than one occasion, and as luck would have it, my good friends happened to paste it into a song, the song that really made the rest of this music thing possible. With the penning of Gato Negro worlds opened up for me. Yes, I’m reaching, and perhaps even making good time. But after three solid days of work on music in my isolation chamber/recording studio/bedroom, I’m ready to actually get outta this city. An impromptu midnight trip to the Arboretum tonight was a nice appetizer, but I’m thirsty for more.
Last minute audible, made earlier this evening: Philadelphia for New Year’s with friends from my childhood. It will be great to see them, and it will also be good to hit the asphalt and drift for a couple days. I’ve been a little too boxed in here. I saddle up in THW-455 some time tomorrow and set out for points South on the current of the mighty I-95. And now I’ll have a soundtrack, one conceived primarily during travels in the same car, to keep me company on the quick pop down to the city of Brotherly Love.
My faculties for language slip at three in the morning. More from the road. I’m rollin’ on…
music: Tea Leaf Green- 5/10/03
Peet played it for me last Thursday and I promptly lost my potatos. We’ve been rocking it loud multiple times every day since. The song itself isn’t anything too mindblowing, but all things considered, Lapti Nek is a jam of intergalactic proportions. It also reveals the extent to which Peet and I are incredible dorks. No, really, we are incurable. Way beyond help. Along with a good proportion of the males born in the 1970’s and 70,000 Australians.
Have a listen. A free drink to anyone who can place the song without outside help. Another drink to anyone who can name all the members of the band.
(And for the true dork: lyrics and translation. Zorze zot.)
music: Brad Mehldau- Largo
Winter break is finally here. No school for a week and change, and given this monstrous gift of time I’m left dumbfounded as to what to do with it. I’ve been on the school clock so much this year that I’m not really sure how to use this time now that it’s completely mine. I’m paralyzed by possibility. I think I can now understand why prisoners don’t bother running away after a certain point, even if they know they can get away with it.
The past two days have been me simmering in my own depleted brain juices. December 24th and 25th are two of my least favorite days of the year, days I usually find myself in dark, brooding places, lost deep inside my own head. I definitely spent a good deal of time kicking around in my head for the past two days, none of it all that productive. The 24th is the designated day when I add a year onto my age, despite my getting older at a constant rate every day of the year. My birthday has been more a source of pissiness and foul moods than anything else-the bigger deal it is made the more unpleasant I tend to become. Last year’s birthday was more of a milestone occasion because, again, of those arbitrary numbers we attach to them that are still somehow meaningful. This year I was content to let it slide under the radar and it did for the most part. I fielded calls from family, finished the book I’ve been reading since this summer. A beautiful work about terminally ill children in inner-city LA, but a very heavy sombering one, which probably didn’t help things. Peet and I upheld our mini-tradition of going to The Sunset for beer and fried fare and then watching Lord of the Rings. There is comfort in familiarity, routines can be the best treatment for melancholy. I managed to avoid any really awful headwork this year and sort of slid through the day glazed and liquid. Just as well. I know I’m getting older. It’s going to happen anyway. No reason to celebrate that.
Today was a wasted day for me because I don’t celebrate Christmas and from my perspective the universe vacates for a day. It’s funny how people treat the holiday in this country: originally a pagan solstice rite, appropriated for reasons lost to the masses. I think it’s nice to have something to look forward to in the darkest days of the year (which is probably by design); the economic tie-in I could do without. And is there any religion left in Christmas, or is it just another Thanksgiving for Christians? Why cut down perfectly healthy trees? Jesus was born in the spring…regardless, the country more or less shuts down and I usually do too. I rooted through my stuff and filled a garbage bag and box with books, clothes, and bedding and took it to Goodwill, glad to be redistributing some of the stuff I don’t use. I spent a good chunk of the evening remixing some of the music I’ve recorded over the course of the past four months in hopes of assembling an EP before the new year. I paced around the apartment. I opened the fridge multiple times to find nothing new in it. I tried unsuccessfully to start a new book. I thought about all this obligation people place on themselves surrounding the exchange of gifts, and felt guilty that a few people had gotten me something and I hadn’t even thought about getting them anything. I wrote furiously for a while. I’m writing furiously again.
At least the 24th and 25th are over now. Every year I feel like I’m forced into a corner with myself for these two days and I wrestle hard. Sometimes I’ll have bouts of nostalgia in between rounds and feel the need to step back and marvel at all the things that have happened in the past 365 days before jumping in the ring again. None of that this year. This year was anesthetized with the shock of actually having time to myself. I’m still somewhat in shock; I find myself wandering about the house wondering how I could best spend my time, making mental lists of projects and errands that I don’t get to because I get distracted. I’m completely unfocused and generally useless to myself. A whole winter break of this can’t be good. I have to make something of this week, and badly. Usually I have big New Year’s plans and that structure usually helps me through things, but this year there is nothing. The past two days were going to be downers, given, but now that I’m through them, I can bounce back from the birthday/Christmas dip, get a good night’s sleep, keep the annual existential crisis to a minimum, and start making good use of all this time I’ve been given. Hopefully.
music: The Beatles- Rubber Soul
I got a call from an old friend the other day with the most unlikely of messages: “I was just watching MTV and I saw you on it.”
are. you. serious.
I have very little desire to be on MTV and would never go out of my way to squeeze my face on the screen of the world’s most notorious dictator of pop culture. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, how the hell my face ended up on MTV. My friend did the detective work for me: he traced it back to my college roommates.
I lived down the hall from Rami Freshman year. We became friends, along with Rami’s roommate and another set of roommates on the other end of the hall. I introduced the group to Josh in the cave of the Ratty one day. Josh was this other guy I met on the Main Green-he started talking to me because we were both wearing Phish t-shirts on the first day of class. Josh already knew one of the crew from back home, and quickly slid into the mix. The six of us became great friends and lived together Sophomore and Junior year, and split three and three for Senior year. These guys were my inner circle in college. Haven’t seen much of them since, unfortunately. Rami and Josh, always active with music, formed a band after college was over, and apparently been quite successful at it.
Their band is apparently catching the eye of some folks high up in the industry. Something For Rockets was featured on MTV’s You Heard It First recently, which is where my friend saw it. Apparently they had a three minute spot on the tube. Apparently all this is happening to my old college roommates, and apparently they did one of those brief histories of the band complete with pictures from college, in which I am found. So there you go. Rami and Josh on MTV, and me next to them, probably just outside the highlighted part of the picture. Modest schoolteacher lands two-second spot on MTV thanks to his outrageous and talented college roommates. I saw it coming. I’m not all that surprised, but I still find it hysterical to see these high-profile artsy shots of the two of them plastered all over the internet. And the long hair…I used to get such crap from them about my long hair…
All the best to my old buddies. While the creation of music is a worthwhile life pursuit (and theirs is of substantial quality), the pursuit of everything else that goes along with it is better left to guys like Rami and Josh. I’m content to smile at a distance, observe their path into the entertainment industry, and go to open mics and basement jam sessions. It makes me happy that they have stayed independent and still own their own art, that they produce and manage themselves. That they are getting the sort of media attention that they’ve been seeking is awesome. That I was unintentionally dragged along for a quick cameo on MTV is hysterical. Completely hysterical.
music: Charlie Hunter Quartet- Natty Dread
Blogging is becoming a hot topic in the news, and being one guilty of such a histrionic endeavour, I’m taking a particular interest in how weblogs are affecting how people (including me) live their lives. So much so that I’m going to devote a category of entries to the self-referential topic. I think that writing about it here risks an endless recursion, philosophically speaking, but whatever.
I was confronted with an audience this weekend. I became hyperaware that people read this thing because they brought it up in conversation to my face numerous times, and it was more than tmo saying that “I read it on your blog.” Which is fine and good, I guess; writing publicly was and is a conscious choice on my part. But to have a realtime conversation about this forum sort of disrupts the code of anonymity that I as writer and you (yes, you. Good evening.) as reader adopt given the media involved. Most of these conversations were between me and people I know: those in the anize circle, my mom and sister, my friends. To those who know me already, this weblog is a tool of some sort of substantial communication, a portal letting them peek into some of my thoughts and allowing them to develop a more robust picture of just who this David Taus is. I initially started with that hope and intention, and to that end things have been successful. But things have sprug from that into unexpected directions. To those that have not met me in person or know me only incidently, I can only guess that this light reading here is nothing more than biography, nonfiction in the most consumable and immediate published form to date.
Because of a self-aware entry I did a couple weeks ago, I found myself in a conversation this past Saturday with someone whom I had never met face to face before. At some point in the conversation she alluded to something about me that I can only imagine she read here, and I didn’t quite know how to handle it. Not that it was uncomfortable or even awkward, because it was neither of these, but more that I just didn’t know how to handle it. It is unfamiliar interpersonal territory to have some relative stranger know things about you that are normally reserved for a closer circle of friends. This is the nature of putting oneself out there for public examination, I guess. I am not afraid. In some ways it can be good, allowing a quick bypass of small talk and facilitating more substantial conversation. In a lot of ways, though, it is an unexplored social phenomenon whose implications have not had time to be played out. We humans have operated socially for so long off secondhand opinions and information about others (“I asked my friend what their friend was like…”) but now that we can get it straight from the source the rules of the social getting-to-know-you game are being upended in favor of something much more reliable and direct. I’m left wondering what conclusions a stranger I might meet draws about me based solely on the content of this website, how much I was researched, and to what extent the other would allow me to know what they think they know about me.
Luckily the person with whom I was speaking this weekend is an overwhelmingly positive human being which made the whole experience strangely flattering as well as intruiging. At one point, after getting a look that said something like “I know about you more than you realized, and I can empathize” I said something about her having an unfair advantage over me in this conversation, as I had not read up on her thoughts beforehand. Part of me would have liked nothing more than to pick through her brain at my own leisure, more of me thought the better of it. And on purely clinical grounds, a small slice of me was left wondering how that sort of insight affects interpersonal interactions and social tendencies. (That it is possible, even likely, that she is reading this at this moment adds an impossibly delightful twist to the whole situation.)
The media has started to pick up on the blogging phenomenon. It’s an amazing cultural practice; never before have so many had access to such intimite information, and never before have so many been willing to put that information out there for public consumption. It might even be a powerful enough force to change people’s actual behaviors when not mucking about in cyberspace. This from this week’s New York Times Magazine (p. 24):
As weblogs proliferate…the boundaries between public and private are being transformed. Unconstrained by jourrnalistic conventions, bloggers are blurring the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions and changing the way we date, work, teach, and live. And as blogs contine to proliferate, citizens will have to develop new understandings about what parts of our lives are on and off the record.
Blogs are not going away any time soon. I’m curious to ride the blog wave for a while and see what happens with what I decide to put out there. It’s clear to me, however, that deciding to take on a project like a weblog demands a certain set of parameters to be set by its author. Those parameters can be as narrow or as wide as one wants, but they must be clear. For my own sake, I am in the process or reconsidering just what I want to have happen with this enormous amount of virtually unedited written word. I do know this: I am more than comfortable putting some of my thoughts out on the table in plain view, knowing my audience ranges from family members to friends of friends to complete strangers to students of mine. I am incredibly aware of my own parameters in using this forum, I am incredibly aware of how I do and do not censor myself, I am now more than ever incredibly aware that there is an audience, that people (you included) are reading. Every word is intentional, every step deliberate. While this is a healthy picture of who I am and what I’m about, it is nowhere near the whole picture. To have had an actual source of human feedback about what is written here is more than a psychological curiousity, it is a reminder about the nature of this specific undertaking.
My musings on this topic are overwhelmingly intellectual, and I’m willing to use myself as subject in my own experiment. I’m more than happy to give you material for research. I’m more than happy to give you the interpersonal advantage should we ever meet. The only thing I ask of you, though, is that you are aware that what you know about me from your internet research is not the whole story. Apologies if this spoils your biographical eye. I’ll stop this and leave you to your own judgements, which you are more than entitled to have.
Ok ok ok ok. Enough of this mirrorgazing. Next time: something more straightforward and unpointed. Good evening.
music: Miles Davis- In a Silent Way
Just got back from an extended weekend in Tuscon, AZ to help celebrate my sister’s graduation from college. It was an excellent occasion on many levels: a positive family gathering, good time spent with sister and cousin D., some time out in the deserts of the American West, some sunshine and warmth in the middle of December, good and plentiful food, a much-needed getaway from the cold, dark days of Boston, and even a trip to a national park. I got to see parents, grandparents, and aunt in a vacation setting as opposed to a home setting where more obligations grind away at the corners of the experience. One of the coolest things was to catch a glimpse into my sister’s life out there: her apartment (complete with central air, hot tub, and pool, and all for less than my rent here), her daily haunts, her town, and her friends. I was especially struck with her friends, all great people whom I would count myself lucky to have as friends. She’s done well for herself holding such positive company. I went out with her entourage last night and had a fun time with everyone (despite things running way past this old man’s bedtime), and it gave me pause on the plane ride home that A) I finally can count my sister as a social peer and B) some of her friends are closer in age to me than her. It also made me realize how my own social life here has atrophied-the past two times I’ve gone out at night have been in Arizona and in Milwaukee over Thanksgiving break. Pitiful.
The return trip today was rough, mostly because I realized again how extraordinary the regions are west of the Continental Divide. It could be that every time I have been out West I’ve been on vacation but there is something about that open space and natural beauty that makes things…better. I was able to let myself relax a little, and noticed that I wasn’t as tense and vigilant out there than I am out East. Even as the plane touched down in Boston earlier tonight I could feel myself getting tense, facial muscles contracting into knots and wrinkles, girding myself for the unfriendliness and the press of humanity. I’m having a hard time admitting to myself that I would most likely be less anxious, possibly healthier somewhere closer to the Pacific than the Atlantic because I’ve committed myself to being here for at least one school year after this one. But after this three-day weekend, much like the end of August, I’m catching myself in a dreadfully practical half-truth about my efficacy for Boston. This is something to keep an eye on over the next couple months.
The flight back East made for a quick and sweeping study of the incredible differences between the vast environs out west and the crowded, overrun Eastern Seaboard. Flying over the Southwest at 30,000 feet revealed a whole lot of land relatively untouched by humans. The landscape, especially in the Southwest, is almost larger than the experience of these midwestern eyes; I was able to see the stretches of desert, waterless, borderless and virtually uninhabited, the Rockies hundreds of miles in the distance, the seemingly innocuous agricultural patchwork of the Midwest, and finally the malignant spread of human impact I currently call home as we moved farther East. I find myself left in a second state of wide-eyed wonder at these human-impacted landscapes; that humans not only can create something as impossible as the leviathan nexus of Chicago, Cleveland, or Boston, but also that we would. Seems that those who choose to humble themselves at the feet of the overwhelming landscapes of the West have a better sense of place in the universe than we lemmings and rats out East.
There is more to say, but I’m due up in a couple hours for school, and I’m reminded that I have responsibilities outside myself. This weekend, while a wonderful release from my life here, dulled me to my the obligations to these kids I teach, and this constant stream of effort I’ve been expending for the past four months. It’ll take all of tomorrow to force myself back into the hypervigilance and emotional fortitude that teaching demands. I’m also stewing over some other thoughts I had this weekend that probably will get the once-over here in the near future. For now, though, basic survival mode takes precedence. Eat, sleep, teach. Usually in the reverse order, unfortunately. The short desert vacation is over, I have seen the mighty Saguaro cactus, contemplated the nature of geography and population, my sister has a college degree, we had a great weekend celebrating, and I am at once tired and proud.
music: Cake- Fashion Nugget
I strongly believe that of all our culture’s products, television is one of the worst. Yes, it can be an effective means of communication and a viable source of information. I know this. TV, however, is used more for the powers of evil than good. It is, as Franti puts it, ‘the drug of the nation.’ When reduced to its most essential form, television is simply a series of flashing lights and sounds that keep people’s attention long just effectively enough to ensure their brains are shut off and they are content to sit in a comfortable chair. It pacifies people, distracts them from the world around them, keeps them from getting too outraged. Yes, there are some good things on the tube, but when taken in its gestalt there is so much garbage floating over the electromagnetic spectrum and into people’s living rooms that a complete sacrifice of TV is more than worth it. I’ve personally made a choice to eliminate as much TV from my life as I can, and encourage those with whom I surround myself to do the same. Every week on Live Live I used to plead with listeners to turn off their televisions, get out of their houses, and go meet other like minded people at a concert. I preach the evils of television to my students every chance I get. (“what about the discovery channel,” they say..) The elimination of television from our society is one of my personal revolutions. Think, then, of the potential of my latest material acquisition: I received a TV-B-Gone from tmo yesterday.
It’s a keychain sized remote control with one button: off. And it works on almost any TV out there. Genius.
I tried it, with great success, on the TV in the downstairs apartment. We went to Radio Shack and tried it out-success on the TV we pointed it at. The effects aren’t instantaneous; sometimes you have to wait for a couple seconds before the TV shuts off. Blockbuster has apparently shielded their sets or doesn’t use remote control sets. Same with Bally’s health club. I think that you have to be fairly close in order to use the thing, and you have to have it out, pointed at the TV you want to turn off. Stealth in-the-pocket usage doesn’t seem to be an option, but all things considered, the thing is great.
This is just one more tool used in the war against the idiocy of society dubbed culturejamming. I figure if we can get people to shut off their televisions long enough to wake up and smell the garbage then things might actually start to change for the better. Or we’ll have a mob of really angry and no longer pacified citizens on our hands, which might not be that bad of a thing. It doesn’t matter. Television has to go. With this new tool, I’m going to do my part and infringe on people’s personal liberties by turning off their televisions as much and as often as I can. And I’m gonna start with the meatheads next door. The nation may be safely bathed in that off-blue flicker for now, but thanks to the TV-B-Gone the good people of this country will soon snap out of their reality-tv-and-sitcom induced stupor and be forced to confront real people: their friends, their neighbors, and perhaps worst of all, themselves.
music: Martin Sexton- 4/15/2004, Iowa City, IA
We had an honors assembly at school on Friday. The students who made honor roll or high honor roll were recognized and stood up to receive applause from the staff and student body. It was a nice occasion, and I think it did what it was supposed to, that is, place an amount of social capital on getting good grades. I realized as I watched, though, that many of the students I had were kept from higher categories because of my class. A couple students who otherwise could have had high honors (all A’s) received a B in my class and therefore were kept from the highest category. And some of the students who otherwise had all A’s and B’s earned a C in my class and were kept from the higher bracket.
So what. Right? I’d tend to agree. So what. It’s a certificate printed out on the same printer used to print research papers and xeroxed. I’d tend to agree when construed as such, but after I thought about it I realized there’s more to it than that. Grades in school determine, more or less, life outcome. School is our society’s sorting mechanism; those who do better in school enter the job market at a higher level than those who do not do well at school. College graduates earn more, on average, than those who have not graduated college. same for high school. And college admissions hinge on grades in high school. I have a student who ended up earning a C in my class, the only C she got, and she wants to be a doctor. How is a C in biology going to look when applying to pre-med programs? Am I limiting a young person’s chances by giving them these grades? Am I, in part, responsible for their life outcomes? I consciously chose not to pursue medicine or politics for exactly this reason.
It is undeniably true that what we do today will affect our tomorrow. I can live with that as far as my own future is concerned. I can also live with the standards I set for myself. But now I’m in a position to impose these standards on over 60 young people and evaluate them accordingly. The standards are in part determined by the State, and I just an executor, but I’d like to not shunt off all responsibility. I’m acting autonomously for the most part as a teacher; what I deem important is the determinant of these students’ grades. And for the most part, they aren’t getting there. Two A’s, eight B’s, 12 C’s, 17 D’s, 25 F’s for the first quarter. Standards may be standards, but something else needs about how I’m doing this needs to be fixed. If I’m even partially at fault for these grades, is it fair to have these kids be evaluated by them for the rest of their academic careers? These seemingly small decisions I’m making really have that much impact on these kids’ futures? It’s a question that I’ve tossed around uncomfortably all weekend. It’s a tough thing to begin to reshape the way one goes about doing their job they do. I’m only beginning to think about how.
Perhaps I’m blowing it out of proportion. Perhaps the decisions I make and the standards I hold don’t noticably cast ripples into the future. But I don’t think so.
It is more than a job,
It is a commitment and an excellence in working with children
that will change, guide, and develop young lives.
You have a tremendous opportunity
and responsibility.
-YMCA Employee’s Handbook
music: Club d’Elf- 2/28/03
I’ve been told that I should sell Nalgenes for a living. I’ve been quoted as saying that everyone should be issued a grey wide-mouth 1000 ml lexan water bottle at birth. I’ve sworn by these water bottles for so long I can’t remember what things were like before I carried a Nalgene everywhere I went. Recently, thought, I’ve begun to hear a strong dissent to the unparalleled positivity of the Nalgene Bottle. The first came from an old friend of mine: “Trendy Nalgene water bottles made of Lexan polycarbonate resin can leach the potent hormone disruptor bisphenol-A, shown to have adverse effects on prostate development and tumors, breast tissue development, and sperm counts.” The second came from one of my students: for his current events in science presentation he chose to present an similar article (no doubt spurred by the fact that I drink out of my Nalgene every day in class). There are numerous websites issuing warnings about Nalgene products. Despite all this hooplah, the Nalgene Company claims the bottles are safe. But the warning shot has been fired; no doubt the water-drinking masses are growing more cautious.
This is certainly something that warrants further invsetigation for me. I’ve been drinking anywhere from 2-6 liters of water out of my nalgenes every day for the past seven or eight years. It is quite possibly the material object I use most often in my life. I’d like to look into these claims and studies a little deeper beofre I hang up the lexan for good. One of the common threads in all these warning articles is that harsh cleaning agents were uesd on the nalgenes that the rats drank from. I would guess that this had something to do with the results; it was a variable not adequately accounted for in the study’s design. Furthermore, a lot of these studies were not conducted with the express purpose of determining if nalgenes were responsible for chromosomal abnormalities and whatever else. Instead, such conculsions were offered as an explanation for error found in other studies. Researchers noticed elevated levels of these abnormalities in the rats and then deduced that the cause was the material from which their cages and food containers were made. I don’t think there has been a controlled, rigorous study of lexan and its potential to leech biphenols into water.
If we are to blacklist nalgene bottles, I think we’d better blacklist all the other things that cause damage to humans. We’d better stop eating produce sprayed by pesticides and meat treated with hormones. We’d better stop using our plumbing in the older parts of town for fear toxins leech through the pipes. We’d better stop driving our cars. We’d better turn off and smash all our cell phones for fear of brain tumors. And while we’re at it, we’d better extinguish the sun for fear of skin cancer. I think there is a healthy amount of paranoia riding under the surface of the nalgene scare; drinking from these bottles is probably no worse than drinking from the more disposable plastic soda bottles. Of all the things to die from, this is one that we shouldn’t worry about as much. Or maybe I’m just trying to console myself, make myself ignorantly blissful of the lexan-induced health calamity ahead.
music: Willy Porter- Falling Forward
Ever since I went home last week for Thanksgiving I’ve been thinking about who reads this stuff here. I know that some specific people tune in on a somewhat frequent basis and take in this drivel, but I’d imagine that a few unexpected folks have grazed upon the anize.org collection of navel contemplation. Possibly (hopefully?) people that I have never met and don’t know exist. It made me consider my own narcissism, think about why I decide to write here. Why not just in a word processor document saved to my hard drive? Why not in a little lined book kept in my sock drawer? Why not in chalk on the street? A chalkboard in some classroom in Boston? On the bathroom stall at the local pub?
A friend had a comment about blogs this past weekend: “They’re brutally public.” That’s the point, I suppose. I’m writing here because on some level I expect it to be read by other people. I write stuff here because I want to make my often-masked thoughts available. (Some of them, at least.) It’s better than talking to myself. At least I have the illusion of having someone listen this way. These are solitary, misanthropic days and blogging is an indicator of just how far the themes of postmodern life have come. I think, too, that the dialogue within anize is a good thing, although the org-anize’ers have been reticent as of late. And hopefully I have something of some value to contribute to this mess of a social experiment we call the internet.
In the end, though, I think we can chalk blogging up to vouyerism. Right in front of evesdropping, right behind reality television. We all like to stick our noses in others’ business when given the chance, especially when we can do it anonymously and without the knowledge of our subjects. So to that end, down comes the fourth wall. Briefly.
Good evening.
Hey, you. I picture you out there, mucking about in cyberspace, sitting slackjawed and drooling in front of your computer screen. You’ve gotten enough out of me. What have YOU been up to? What have YOU been thinking about? I’m a peeping tom, you see, trying to catch a brief but delicious glimpse of some other life. Hopefully that doesn’t make you too uncomfortable.
