Bill Clinton quotes Ken Wilber at World Economic Forum

Check it out, via Vince.

Back.

It's not quite Eden, but we're not quite human either, so it will do. And thus the writer returns to the birthplace of his species: the urbane, kosmopolitan human. The cataract his ethnic stock once flooded through in search of new rough lands to overdevelop. Frontal lobe of the ur-mind, a stock market of style-stories spit out each morning in new shapes to be reeled back in new strange decadences each nightfall. The throbbing window canyons and slivers of cobblestone painted ashphalt thick. 8 million small hearts pumping 8 million big hearts through an even bigger Heart; an apple, a lady in love with liberty, a shark's jaw of razorblade thoroughfares, erections so tall they cloud the heavens in electromag and smoke. And in this center -- in this heart -- another love, a troubled one, a hopeful one, a synthetic sound-sculpture of late-night phone calls made real, the hot flesh correlate of that which is often just a photo, a letter, and an idea. Like the city itself: bigger than the vast nation it crowns, folding in on itself in a labyrinth of frustrated passions and haystacks made of wire and grit. Into you I cast myself, once again for the hundredth time, to be made and remixed anew in your image, the image of the saint, the image of the leper, the image of the subway map and the tokens tokens tokens jangling in the old cracks where the new dust has fallen... into you.

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I'm Trying (Song for Honest Objects) - REVISED

Another Garage Band disasterpiece by yours truly. A rude person might re-dub it "I'm Trying (to Learn to Sing)", but not me: I simply layer the vocals 4 or 5 times over, mess with the pan and the effects, and try not to completely fall on my face:

Here it is -- NEWLY REVISED 1.26.06: trying.mp3

Lyrics:

I am a Scud missle skipping off a dune into the sand
I am a tractor trailer driving for the wives in two lands
I am the very computer with a black and green screen
I am a yellowed map in Harlem with a failed development scheme

I am a grease trap festering in late summer sun
I am a foxhole buried up with uniforms and guns
I am a broken paparazzi cam with only three pix
A fervid Creationist's mutating fist!
But baby...

Chorus:
I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying now to earn my keep
Justify the breathe of every molecule
Never take more than I need

I am a pair of Skidz pants in a mall in '92
I am a cracked pint glass filled with stale microbrew
I am a dorm room sofa with a pledge's puke stain
I am a sports dome stadium in a town with no rain

I am a server in a shack never plugged into the 'Net
I am an autographed guitar with a string and one fret
I am a family room silent from the sound of no kids
A relationship failing on a wind-swept cliff!
But baby...

Chorus

...this also had a bridge involving "lobster traps" and "pink fly swatters", but I ran out of time.

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DEMO: She Wears the Pants (excerpt)

Here's another one ya'll, this one a bit more rockin'. It also happens to be the first one to feature my brother on back-up vocals during the chorus. Click here: "She Wears the Pants". Inspired by David Brin's The Postman" (the original novel, not the movie) and every Amazonian I have ever known. The basic story is that civilization has collapsed, the narrator is the last hope of humanity, and the Amazonian will beat the crap out of anyone that gets in his way.

Lyrics:

She... she wears the pants / And I've got some books
She's my escort on a long and dangerous trip across the land
But she... she's got a spear / And I've got a poem
She defends the finest things in life she doesn't even understand

Chorus:
But she don't know a thing I'm sayin' now to her
But she feels my horizon inside
It's the fate of a new world

So we... came to creek / defended by trolls
Willingly illiterate and dripping in the finest of gold
But she... she summoned the wind / put me in a hole
Tore down a tree, and beat them limb from tiny limb.

Demo #2: Midwestern Mediterranean

My thanks to everyone who checked out the previous track ("Blood State") and provided feedback. Bear in mind, again, that this is just me on guitar with Garage Band on drums and effects: what you're missing are the 8-armed drum poundings and backing vocals of my brother Chris, and the rock-solid bass genius of my man Ollie (we'll get them on tape in due time, along with lead guitarist-in-training Sean H.). In the meantime, check out my second shitty I-made-this-in-35-minutes-and-no-I-didn't-bother-to-tune-my-guitar-or-even-try-singing-well demo, this one an excerpt of our elegiac tragi-comic ballad "Midwestern Mediterrenean", which describes the situation of growing up in an ascendent Right-Wing town (Midwestern) where the Inquisition has just been reinstated (Mediterranean). Hope you enjoy (don't worry, it's brief)....

PS
And to you nay-sayers, all I gotta say is: if Rick Moranis can record a country a album, then yours truly has every right to record what are essentially blogs posts with generic chord progressions, no?

Another Positive Use for Blogging

There's something positively heartwarming -- if not voyeuristic -- about What is Michael Eating? which details (right down to the Diet Dr. Pepper and peanut butter cups he had on 11.19.2005) a young man's quest to eat healthier and lose 100 pounds (to go from 350 to 250 -- he's at 304 right now). Almost makes me want to start a blog to keep track of all the blogs I read, with screen shots of each one. Almost.

Garage Band is Only Scratching the Surface

My recent experience in using Garage Band to create amateur(ish) music has shown how alarmingly easy it is to make professional-quality, multi-track recordings from the comfort of your own laptop. While the majority of Garage Band output thus far most likely falls in two categories -- faithful replication of historical genres (rock, blues, country) or the effects-heavy atonality of technoid dance music (house, urban, whatever) -- I'm wondering what hybridized, wholly novel forms will emerge once users get over their love-affair with the ability to "sound just like a real band!". Garage Band, in this light, ranks as one of the most ironic misnomers of the millenium: no garage band in history has had dual access to both such pro-quality sound and the freedom of nearly infinite tracks and push-button editing.

As a musician, I'm discovering just how easy it is to layer tracks, hop between genres, and juxtapose sounds in ways you once needed about $4000 in DJ equipment to even attempt. This flexibility will lend itself to a high rate of mutation, issuing in a whole new language of shifting musical meta-forms which could quite conceivably defy comprehension. Add one's personal live recording to the mix, and you've got the capacity for a personal custom orchestra pit at the touch of your fingers. Given music's ability to catalyze powerful emotions, it's a bit like putting guns in the hands of every third Mac user, isn't it? And the fact that it takes about 68 seconds to mixdown a track, convert it to mp3, and post it online is even more interesting: has anyone really acknowledged what a revolution this is? Forget blogging: what about democratized recording?

As a writer, I'm already drooling with the prospects offered by Garage Band. No longer interested in just "sounding like another band", I'm almost compelled to wonder: how could multi-tracked, meta-genre recording be used to tell a story? What if I made up a band and told their story through song? A blogger concept album? Prog-rock for Doctorow phreaks? What if you took on the characters of a whole new musical genre, overdubbed NPR-like commentary, and went wild with a hoaxed musical movement? What if you invented a fictional genre, posted it online, and spawned a dozen or more AUTHENTIC copy-cat bands?

Scratching the surface, I'm telling you.

Winter in Buffalo

The question is always the same:

"Buffalo New York? How could anyone live with all that snow?"

"That's why they live there," you always reply.

If there is anything that characterizes the Western dog-nose of the New York State shape more than high-ranging annual snowfall, it is bureaucratic incompetence, greed and corruption, the inability of a post-NAFTA economy to get some wind back in its lungs.

Recall, now, the winter of 2001-2002, when somewhere in the range of 7 feet fell on Erie County in a matter of days. For you to return to the iceberg region, having spent the holiday in warmer climes, was something like being slingshot to the moon in a sleeping bag: streets were silent save for the gravel crunch slushing and backwards beeps of the county snow blowers, 15-foot white walls cordoned avenues from storefronts, and a wicked silver light shown through the half trees at the park, where divots the depth of human bodies plummeted to the frozen tundra far below.

And inside, the people.

Inside their rancid wood duplexes and old stone houses and 70s-themed cement skyscrapers, the people were given over to modest activities. TV-watching. Tea-drinking. Rice-eating. With so many continents of snowfall standing between home and food service station, apartment complex and neighborhood bar, decadence was an afterthought: There is no drunkenness, no expensive cheese and no wine parties when your means of transportation have all been sealed shut in a frigid glue of dagger flakes.

But there was contemplation. A vast silence filled the void of non-life, with orange clouds whispering overhead and a deadly chill assaulting the few brave lips of those who went to walk in the liberated thoroughfares.
The occasional one-man armada of a tank-like road service vehicle would sometimes break the white freezerburn with a heatless explosion of urgent yellow lights, but mostly, we were cold.

And this was when the real things emerged.

When you were on your last slice of store-bought bread, when the last of the Labatt six-pack had dripped its way past your chattering teeth, when the realities depicted on TV and the surrealities depicted in the books you read no longer dealt with the prevalence of the uniform frigidity outside, you shut them off and shelved them and looked out the window, out at the six-inch triangle of unsteamed glass where the still birch branches grazed the bowing power lines and the circle-webs of ice lit by the streetlights stared back at you like they knew your name.

And it was in this overwhelming oppression that you noticed, first as a small spark in a well of dead logs, but then as a raging conflagration inside of your entire being, that this Hoth-prison of urban glaciation had made you free. You may have been on unemployment, you may have been an alcoholic, you may have been overweight and had ugly clothes and only a few friends that barely cared about you, but you realized with great humility that it too would pass, that the follies of human interactions webbing you into this dreadful circumstance -- the greed and the stupidity and the self-interest --were powerless themselves in the face of a winter storm's winds.

The winds are called Alberta Clippers, and they whip down from northern Canada across the Great Lake Ontario and onto the vulnerable shores of Upstate En Why with the fury of a space gale unleashed, roaring comets and cosmic dust made cold, their flagellations a welcome stigmata on we, the people in the down comforters.

Rerouting Writer's Block

It's not like me to have writer's block, least of all on a Saturday night when I should be doing far less productive things. You would think that the slightly rebellious thrill of not going out in a rancid rich college town like this would be enough to send me leaping into the barricades of linguistic productivity: not so. After 4 or 5 failed attempts, I figure the only way I'll post something tonight (as is my sorta-goal for this year, much as it was for last: write something every day, even if it forcefully consumes eggs with a slurping sound) is my tackling the issue head-on. I am bored, and my writing bores me. Writing itself bores me. What does not bore me is reading, and I've been doing a lot of it: Corey Doctorow, David Foster Wallace, Dan Simmons, Joan Didion: these people are pros. What right have I to even open my mouth in this global party where the most literate get to write for food money, and I should be content combining color-shapes and word-forms in Adobe Illustrator?

Anyways... writing. What's it all about? I sometimes fancy myself a sci-fi writer, and I can often and easily fall into the laziness of sci-fi mindset: improvise as you go, drop a lot of gadget names and unexpected combinations, and profile characters with strange, inhuman motivations and ways of speaking and methods of building super-shacks to live in (see, I just did it: "super-shacks"). Sometimes I write in order to feed myself with "intuition nutrition", the feeling you get when a written piece just "clicks", when you are writing what feels right, and not just what you think you ought to. I often feel that I ought to live up to my reputation of a "New Age Hunter S. Thompson", applying my wacky forebrain skills to the remote disciplines of Central Colorado: yoga, odd diets, Dianetics, collisions of meditation and praying and intentions and the color purple-aqua and all the rest. It would be so easy to lambast crystals, to mock incense, to complain about incense and to compose odds to the shit/foot odor smell of musty old meditation cushions (or is it beans? fiber-foam? Rice crystals? Yogurt condensation).

But parodizing the New Age is too easy, not to mention pointless. These people are, more or less, harmless, and they're not hurting anybody, and it's... well, too easy. Way too easy (have a I said that enough?). Besides, there's a certain wisdom to the old saw of "reconnecting with your body", and it's something the sci-fi/post-cyberpunk/super mega whatever writers don't do enough of. Doctorow is brilliant, of course, but his humane extrapolations of post-scarcity economics and file sharing and online gaming and the techno-singularity and nanoboticals -- while entertaining -- leave one with the sort of arid impression of: "well, cool idea.. now what?"

It's that "now what?" that drives me. The sci-fi writers live way up high in there heads, refusing to touch the ground, whereas the "literary" writers -- those neo-realists who place soulfullness and pretty descriptions of places and really believable (read: safe) human interactions as their raison d'etre -- are all too grounded. What, I wonder, might be a hybridized trans-alternatiive be? Must sci-fi be so much about downloaded consciousness and instantaneous space-travel and AI run amok in the souls of the continentally resigned?

I've often thought that missing ingredient for post-Snow Crash science fiction should be esoterism (see above list), but now I'm not so sure. It seems like the true future poetics are not to be found in technological extrapolation, nor twinkling re-imaginations of mystico-magical systems and forethought: sometimes I think it's in the roots of trees.

Let me explain.

What seems (and I can only say this based on my limited readings within the genre) to get overlooked in these heady days of WiFi file-sharing reputation economics is another, also-hyped hi-tech strand: bioengineering. Rather than the continuation of this arid screens-and-keyboards hypermediated name-dropping culture, I wonder if the direction we're headed in is something more orc-like: fusion with the trees, a download into plant consciousness, a rewiring of our priorities to take in the sensate limitations and extended ultra-dull lifespans of our vascular cousins.

Lest one think I'm getting all Terrence McKenna on ya'll, let's extrapolate this further. Any psychedelic notion of "hidden realities" or "ulterior forces" is henceforth boring -- just as rocket-finned spaceships and psychic transponders and memetic gene-shufflers. Instead, we look for our speculations in the ultra-mundane, in the things so beneath our vision that they (the things) would do well to plot an ambush. I'm talking about parking lots, sewer drains, the road gravel left behind by melted dirty snow. I'm talking about soda cans for god's sake.

But this is not a call-to-arms for "fiction about recycling": I take energy from the hyperstitional frenzoid idea of "hooking up with the physiosphere. The iron molecules in my body are calling out for the earth's liquid molten core: maybe it's time to heed that whisper.

Indeed, it is suchly the case that both the New Age hoo-dooery and the sci-fi buzzflashing lead me cold and dead, as does the hope that the aforementioned lots and drains will come to wake me in the night with their plans and conspiracies. The slogan I've taken on from now on is "if it can be defined, it bores me", and I pine to write myself into the corners where I haven't a clue what I'm doing, and am just as mystified (without being confused, I should point out) as the reader is. Life is a great mystery, which the New Agers and sci-fi folks take great pride in attempting to debunk (whether it's by going within, or going forward, respectively) by their delineation of coherent narratives and prophesies.

But it ain't like that, but nor is it a confusing chaos-jumble of shifts and fluctuation: those are all definitions and defined, but what I want to write is:

At Last! My Band Records...

Yes, I've finally mustered up the motivation to commit some music to a Garage Band track. Here's an excerpt from our "Blood State", 2 minutes of amateurish, badly-realized glory. Please note that it's just me, my guitar, and a mic, plus a load of canned drums and effects-- to get the full Salamone Brothers experience (which includes bro Chris doing a far better job on the skins and backup vox, along with Mr. Ollie R. doing the professional/Canadian thing on his white-bodied electric bass), you'd of course need to come to our next basement party (scheduled for mid- to late-February, hint hint Kismet). Thanks for readin' ya'll!

Andrew Returns to India

Check it out, Cohen returns to India. Way cool free jazz raga courtesy his own band, Unfulfilled Desires (an unwieldly mouthful of a band name thankfully made up for by the gentle grace ease of the post-contempo muse-attack toonz). Say what you want, these guys (the WIE peeps) do nice presentations.

The Man Who Can't Be Photographed

This is f--king unreal.

By the way, besides my neighborhood pal Devon, is anyone else reading this blog these days? Just curious yo....

Latest Essay on Writing: Velcro Fiction

It's been a while since I've updated my other blog, but here it is, the 6th installement in my so-called Book About Writing: "Velcro Fiction". Like most things I write, it started with a vague concept and title, and then I had to spend the rest of the essay trying to figure out what the hell it means, which took the usual wild unexpected turn.

The Tedium Patrol

Hector slopped the mop and wet down the floor again. Remaining puke niblets coasted into the drains. The cafeteria was empty.

He thought it was empty.

Robert J. Dunnadenny was in the bathroom adjacent to the empty a-la-cart station. He was on his knees, and his heaving innards were in the middle of a fourth turning of the Wheel of Nausea.

Hector knocked on the door.

"Meester Dunnadenny?"

"Yes?" Dunnadenny said between his fingers.

"Meester Dunnadenny, are you hokay? I can send for zee 9-1-1 if you wish."

"That won't be necessary."

Hector stood at the door for a moment longer, then shrugged and pushed the mop bucket further along the cafeteria wall. Another pile of Dunnadenny's vomit coated the peeling green latex paint of the display wall where the children showed their seasonal artwork. Tiny chunks of fruit Jello were sprayed across a spread of 3rd-grade thanksgiving drawings rendered in magic marker and traced hands.

Dunnadenny paused over the bowl, hoping the quakes had subsided. This was the third time this week he'd coated the cafeteria in sick. Principle Jurgenson had asked him to take on sick leave, but he refused. The kids needed him, but more importantly, the economy needed him.

When he was sure the day's nausea had ended, he pulled his cell from a khaki pants pocket and quickdialed his wife.

"Yes honey?"

"It happened again Sheila."

"Oh darn," she said in the sing-song voice he fell in love with fifteen years before that moment. "Are you coming home?"

"Yes."

It was a lie.


****


At 3:36pm, he was pulling out of the school parking lot. Hector was operating a push mower across the tiny strip of grass in front of the gymanasium. Dunnadenny gave him a wave, but Hector did not respond. Dunnadenny saw that he was mouthing the words to the iPod plugged into his ears.

Stepping into his car, he felt a slight static shock as he gripped the maroon plastic steering wheel.

"Are you ready Robert?" came the voice from the back seat.

Dunnadenny could feel the hard plastic tube poking from the headrest into the back of his neck. Mr. Gonzalez was the other end of said tube, punctual as usual.

"Of course, Mr. G."

Dunnadenny pulled out onto the traffic circle. A lone half-sized school bus was parked by the Kindergarten wing, and a line of students with pink and green lunch boxes was lining up alongside of it on the curb. The slow kids.

"Look at those fuckers," said Gonzalez. "They have know idea where they're headed."

"Today or in general?"

Gonzales did not respond. The plastic tube dug deeper into Dunnadenny's neck.

Soon they were at the loading dock behind the Pick-n-Save. The garage door was enormous for such an establishment -- Dunnadenny estimated it to be around 50 feet wide by 70 tall. The dock area dwarfed the actual storefront by a ratio of 3-to-1, the largest such ratio on Commercial Ave.

As they parked the car in the shallow pit in front of the doc, the plastic tube directed Dunnadenny out of the car, up a set of stairs, and onto the dock itself. Gonzalez whispered a command into his wristwatch, and the massive garage door began pulling itself upward with the sound of groaning metal wheel on rusted tracks. Dunnadenny was ushered inside, where a pair of hands grabbed him by the wrists and pulled him into the dark.


****


Sheila had stayed home for the day caring for Bobby Junior. He had come done with a stomach bug the week before, and had been laying face down on the couch in the TV room since Sunday night. Sheila called every doctor in the phone book trying to set up an appointment, but not a single office in town would see the Dunnadenny kid.

"Mom," called Bobby as she was putting another medi-pak in the microwave,"when can I do my homework?"

"When you stop puking Bobby. I can't have you puking on the text books again -- do you know how expensive they are?"

"When's dad getting home?"

The microwave rang. The medi-pak was ready.

"Soon," she said as she stepped down into the den and placed the pak on Bobby's freezing forehead. The bluish hue of his skin had diminished over the course of week, but his shivering had not. He was ensconced in a thick nest of blankets -- every unclaimed afghan the family owned -- and was had two space heaters piping hot electro-air at him like sentry suns.

"I'm so cold," said Bobby.

"I know honey," she said. She wanted to lay down next to him, to warm him up with the heat of her own body. But she knew she could not. To make up for it, she leaned over the couch to toggle the thermostat. She pushed the "up" arrow, increasing the desired temperature from 88 to 90 degrees.


****


"Well, Mr. Dunnadenny," said Gonzalez, "how's it been? Any better? Still shivering?"

"Look," said Dunnadenny, "whatever point you guys are trying to prove, you've proved it already. You even got my kid sick! Give me the fucking antidote!"

"All in good time, my friend," said Gonzalez, stroking his thick black mustache as he rocked back and forth in the cheap metal folding chair. Gonzalez was sitting to Dunnadenny's right, and another man was to his left. The other man held the plastic tube aloft and said nothing. In the center of the room, between the two men, sat the dog.

It was puppy-sized Golden Retriever, but had the exhausted eyes and mangy furry of a full-grown adult. It panted, staring at Dunnadenny with expectation. Just then the door to the back room opened. Dunnadenny looked up to see into the room, but it was closed before he could see beyond the figure now entering the front room.

The man was huge, possibly seven feet tall, with steel blue eyes, closely-cropped sand-colored hair, a pink polo shirt partially untucked, and a huge pair of blue Dockers bulging with thick leg muscles. In one hand he held a pipe, and in the other, a sheaf of blank paper.

"Greetings, Dunnadenny," said the man, his outsized voice bouncing from the ceiling of the garage straight down to strike Dunnadenny in the crown of his skull. He felt his toes shake in the cheap white running shoes Sheila had bought him for New Years, many months ago.

The two men at either side of Dunnadenny stood at attention, saluting with ham-sized brown fists. The man with the plastic tube handed the tube to the giant, who brought the open end of the tube to his nose, sniffed it, and set it aside on a brushed steel table, otherwise empty said for a pink neon plastic chew toy for the dog.

"At ease, boys."

Gonzalez gestured to the man to take his chair, but the giant remained standing.

"I'll make this very simple," said the giant, peering down at Dunnadenny with gleaming white teeth, his incisors shaped to the sharpness of inhuman fangs.

Dunnadenny looked up at the man, and thought about something Bobby said to him that morning, as they stood above the toilet bowl side-by-side taking turns throwing up: "Are we dying, dad?"

"You are not dying Dunnadenny," said the giant. "We've administered a slow-acting 'agent' to your system, which will be rendered completely inert once we get what we want."

"And what do you--" began Dunnadenny.

"Information," said the man, "pure and simple information. Specifically, we want information about one of your students, a Mr. Rex Rexroth."

The Rexroth kid was the 5th-grade troublemaker. Two months ago he'd forced Dunnadenny to throw a desk across the classroom after Rexroth had stolen bologna from Sally Jermaine's three-tiered sandwich and put it on the rim of the Teacher's Toilet.

"What for? What kind of information?"

"That's what this paper is for," said the giant, holding the sheaf of blank printer paper up to the light, followed by an expensive chrome-plated ballpoint pen he'd pulled from his back pants pocket.

"We want you to write down every single memory you have of this kid, starting with the ring of the school bell on the first day."

There was a pause. The retriever was still panting.

"Ok..." said Dunnadenny, deeply confused.

"Well?" said the giant. "START ALREADY!"

He dropped the sheaf in Dunnadenny's lap, followed by the pen. The giant then handed the plastic tube Gonzalez, who held the tube to the back of Dunnadenny's neck as he began writing.


****


Sheila was in the kitchen again when Bobby began moaning.

"What's wrong honey? Do you have to throw up?" she called.

"No," came the reply. "I'm just bored."

"Do you want me to rent some more movies? Get some more games? Do you want to hear another CD?"

"No," said Bobby. "I don't want to escape anymore."

Sheila dropped her dishtowel, put a carton of milk back into the fridge, and reentered the TV room.

"What do you mean, honey?"

Bobby's eyes were closed, but his forehead was furrowed in the deep concentration she'd seen him manifest while practicing his trombone.

"I don't want to escape anymore. I don't want to watch TV or play games or listen to anything."

"Why not honey? You're sick, you should do something to keep you occupied. You don't just want to lay there all day. Isn't that boring?"

"No."


****


"Very good, Mr. Dunnadenny, very good."

The giant was scanning the sheets of paper Dunnadenny had already written out. He estimated he'd filled about 100 sheets, front and back. It was getting late, the little slits of daylight emitted by the closed garage door had long gone to black.

Dunnadenny put the pen down and looked up at the giant, but Gonzalez shoved his gaze back down to the paper.

"You're not done yet," hissed Gonzalez.

"Mr. Dunnadenny, we are tracking a very disturbing trend amongst the youth of your school."

"You don't say," said Dunnadenny. "And just who the fu--"

The tube shut him up.

"Let's just say we're a group of concerned parents," said the giant from gleaming teeth.

This was true, at least on Gonzalez's part. His son Leron was in the 6th grade, and he had a little girl in 1st.

"You see it here, on your page 63: 'Rex tapped his foot on the floor three times. He stood up to go to the bathroom, touching each chair on the way to the back of the room. I could hear him counting under his breath: 10 chairs, 11 chairs, 12 chairs.'"

Dunnadenny shifted in his chair, but kept writing.

"Or page 22: 'Rex was checking himself in the mirror again, counting his buttons -- he had 8 -- and picking lint from his shirt. The other children had their heads wrapped in their learning visors, earplugs firmly jammed in their eye sockets, hand stimulators vibrating them, learning cockpits shaking up and down. But Rex was standing still, standing up, counting the hairs on his head. Then he would sit on the floor, and just breath. Not doing anything, just breathing. It was driving me crazy.'"

Dunnadenny put his pen down.

"What's the trend?"

He ignored the tube prodding him.

"WHAT'S THE TREND!?" he demanded.

The giant's smile didn't lose a single gleaming tooth.

"Tedium," said the giant. "Our kids are becoming fascinated with tedium. It's as though the more high-density interactice learning immersions we throw them into, the more they turn to the world of the boring to escape."

"They are becoming stim-shy, in other words," added Gonzalez from behind his tube.

"Preposterous," said Dunnadenny, "it's only been a few isolated cases. We had a 4th grader crash his spin cycle to stare at the brick wall during recess last year. This past June, another kid refused to get up off the grass when it his turn to enter the Biodome holo. His entire class was entering the consciousness of a pack of army ants, but he was content to sit and stare at the security fence."

"These are not isolated instances," said the giant, pulling another sheet from his backpocket and holding it under Dunnadenny's nose. It was a print-out of a three-dimensional graph showing "Instances of Banality Ingestion" on the X axis and "School Semesters" on the Y axis. He noticed a sharp increase over the last three semesters.

"This is nothing short of sedition," said the giant in a flat tone.

Dunnadenny looked up at the giant again, but the smile had disappeared. The giant's hands were on his hips, and his hair was aflame with the harsh light of the single lightbulb hanging over his head. The plastic tube was burrowing into Dunnadenny's skull.

"We've noticed you've yet to try escaping us," said the giant, "Even though it's clear we have not secured you in any fashion."

"But the tube--"

"Is a tube," said Gonzalez. "It's harmless."

"See," said the giant, "we've intentionally placed you in this boring environment, with boring furniture, in a boring part of town, and threatened you with a boring weapon, to see how you would adapt."

"And?"

The giant's right hand reached back, and then returned with a vicious slap to Dunnadenny's face.

"TRAITOR! MURDERER!"

The giant was screaming. Flecks of spittle pelted Dunnadenny in the eyes. All he could do was yawn.

"It is YOU who've infected these poor kids with a tolerance for banality!" screamed the giant. "YOU who have turned them away from their rich dynamic full-immersion learning environments, from their CDs and video games and movies and masturbation and synthetic drugs and pornography!"

Dunnadenny didn't say a word. The louder the giant screamed, the sleepier he felt. Already his eyelids were drooping.


****


"Bobby, where are my magazines?" asked Sheila. Bobby was now sitting up on the couch, scratching an arm with that same furrowed brow of concentration.

"I threw them out when you went to the store," said Bobby. "There were too many colors and boobies and things to look at and quizzes and ads."

"But I wanted them! They were mine! You had no right to throw them out!"

"But they were boring!"

"What am I supposed to do when I'm on the toilet or waiting for a cake to bake or talking on the phone with your grandma Dunnadenny, stare at the wall?"

Tommy just looked at her and blinked.


****


Rex Rexroth was sitting in a sandbox with his little sister. Each time she molded a clump of sand into crude Taj Mahal or Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Potala with her sand molder, Rex would smash it down with a fist and hum in a low tone.

"Rex! You jerk! MOM!!!"

"Shut up Sally," said Rex.

On New Years Resolutions

Last year I went a little overboard, creating ten highly-detailed intentions initiated by a complicated esoteric ritual, followed by a round of banging pots and pans with a wooden spatula throughout my dank Boulder apartment (don't ask). Given that 2005 was one of my most productive years to date, and that I accomplished about 20% of what I resolved on Jan 1 2005, I'd say I got a little overzealous with my resolutions. The thing is, NYE is kind of an arbitrary marker to place in the middle of these unruly lives which spill over and around bank holidays like so much real water crashing through the careful planning on a model river. Phase A and Phase B do not sharply dilineate themselves around the borderland of champagne corks and Dick Clark banality.

Thus, I'll keep it a tad simpler this year. I resolve, based on the current patterns of activity and desire accompanying my waking life, to include the following in my activities for the coming Gregorian annum:

-figure out what the hell I'm going to use this blog for, and look into the possibilty (for about 5 minutes) of making money from it
-to write more and plan/worry less
-to get some recordings of the Salamone Brothers made to give to friends
-to sharpen a few written pieces up for, as a mentor of mine puts it, "collecting rejections"
-to play piano a bit better
-to get back into the whole health / hey I have a body maybe I should take care of it thing (to a sane degree at least)

... among other things. If you don't see me doing these things in say, 10 months, feel free to drop me a line.

Postscript:
Oh yeah, this recent quote by Syracuse professor and short story writer George Saunders is probably worth considering along the way as well (from this interview):

I think we can make this desire to be compassionate and tender [as writers] more practical. It seems to me that if a writer 1) pays attention and 2) tries to keep the mind free of preconceptions about what he wants the story to be about (or wants a character to do, etc.) -- then he will automatically move towards a story which is richer, more full-hearted, etc. In this model, compassion just means keeping yourself open to the possibilities of the story, which, in turn, means keeping oneself open to the possibilities of the world -- what's actually there, rather than what you want to be there.