Struggle for the legal tender

That's what's happening on the surface, a hustle for a buck, but underneath everything is paid training to be focused on the moment. This is not easy for me as 12 months of pondering infinity have left me weeks behind the present moment. I'm mentally in Utah looking for a place to park in a butte filled area near Salt Lake City, slowly dodging pot holes, looking for birds and wildlife and finding hundreds of shotgun shells and computer husks. Are we lucky the earth is big so our carelessness is hard to notice or are we careless because the earth is so big? Anyway, that's where my consciousness is and the only thing that's good for is the careful analysis of human (my) experience. It's philosophy if I'm able to write a treatise or manifesto that revolutionizes man's. If I am unable to do this then it's called daydreaming. Emerson had a line that I stole for my screenplay (It was in his "Oscar" monologue) "The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life ... life passed through the fire of thought."
I set it as a slow transition from Emerson at his Unitarian Church in Harvard giving the sermon...to Thoreau getting a canoe ready in Concord with Emerson's words echoing in his head as he stares at his reflection in the river. A bit polyanna, but a guaranteed Golden Globe award.

Anyway, I took this statement personally, as a challenge to walk through those same flames. How else could I call myself a philosopher? Impossible. Another quote that I read early on and has figured on my journey through the fires is from Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
I took that as a challenge too and it's been 20 years since I decided to examine my life and walk through the fires of thought. Two decades. My findings are as slippery as fine sand. How can I explain them when I can't control them? The other influential concept is from Ignatius in Confederacy of Dunces. He speaks often and highly of cultivating a personal worldview that is ever evolving from new experiences. The worldview is basically his conceptualization of the ideas put forth by Socrates and Emerson, that a person is responsible for self examination and reflection and self criticism. That a man's entire moral and social code must be generated from within.

Another book I incorporated into my fantasy was "The Razor's Edge" I read it before the Bill Murray movie came out and everything by Somerset Maugham is excellent. It's a very good study of wanderlust. It also predates Into The Wild by many years and I'm surprised it doesn't get referenced more in discussions about Chris McCandless. I don't think it's a perfect comparison but there are elements there that fit. It was about the sole pursuit of truths. I wonder sometimes if reading books by Thoreau and Maugham shaped me or if they just reinforced and refined my own self image as a seeker of truth and wisdom. I will ponder that.

Anyway, defining ones moral code is easier written about than accomplished. My own book set in Santa Cruz is an attempt to not only extend these excellent concepts, but to demonstrate the disastrous consequences when one takes them too seriously, or when one dismissed them entirely. It's a groundbreaking approach that will break my spirit if it doesn't kill me first. But it's the culmination of a 20 year research assignment. It's my manifesto.

As Ignatius learned, eschewing social norms while living in normal society is just a terrible idea and leads to awful confrontations. And god help you if you actually succeed and replace most or all social conventions with some patchwork worldview based on books and songs you like. GOD HELP YOU.

And yet, (and this is the kind of question that makes me fuck up the most basic task because it can never be answered without constant consideration) WHAT ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO DO? Do you adopt WHAT IS simply because IT IS? Or do you make a thorough investigation of your self and your surroundings and come to scientific or philosophic conclusion as to your conduct? If you answer that it's best to go along with the status quo then what is that saying about our autonomy? And if your pondering results in a personal incompatibility with society then you are also fucked.

And another dynamic I'm looking into is the difficulty in being unbiased TO BEGIN WITH. Like, no matter what conclusion you reach it will not be scientifically or philosophically based, but more inclined to stem from early, suppressed, almost innate learning that could easily have been implanted because of an article in Time Magazine or an episode of Sesame Street. So what the fuck? Is it all futile? Can we never be fully responsible for our habits and worldviews? Is Big Bird our philosophical patriarch?

These are difficult questions and since I'm at work right now I can not go further into detail. This whole time I was supposed to be organizing boxes of shoes but I thought it was more important to sneak into the boss's office and use his computer to type this essay. If I didn't do it now then I might forget all these fine details and formulations. I mean..what? Oh. Shit. Here comes the...fuck. I just got fired. Here come the security guards. God damn it! Why does this always happen to me? Fuck! I only have two more seco...

Short Essay Contest: Are we Microsoft Serfs?

Definitions:

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Microsoft was ranked as the third largest company in the world, following PetroChina and ExxonMobil. It is also one of the largest technological corporations in the world. Many of its products have achieved near-ubiquity in the desktop computer market. The ensuing rise of the stock price has made four billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees. Microsoft employs 30,000 people in its headquarters alone. The number of employees devoted to the sale, development and service of its products would number in the hundreds of thousands.

Serf: noun
1. a person in a condition of servitude, required to render services to a lord, commonly attached to the lord's land and transferred with it from one owner to another.
2. a slave.

In 500 words or less please formulate a pro or con argument answering the following question: Has mankind become Microsoft Serfs?

The winner will receive a personalized certificate of achievement from The Oggy Bleacher Philosophy Federation. This contest is open until it is closed. Submit your essay in the comments section below. Oggy Bleacher will judge the essays based on persuasiveness, creativity and revolutionary modes of thinking.

New Menu item!

Head Chef Oggy Bleacher of Cafe Bella has just added a new menu item. This is a fresh butter croissant sandwich with or without cheese and avocado. Fried or scrambled egg and sliced deli ham served with fruit salad (not pictured). All for the low price of $11.95. Summer only! Get it while it lasts.

Oatmeal

I think Hobo Joe in S.F. is taking the pictures that should go with the long captions I'm writing. If there's an illustrator who wants to take a crack at this description then have at it. I tried to take his advice and describe what the surroundings are but I got off track. It's so boring to talk about what things look like. How many times does Bukowski describe his apartment or car interior? Or this foggy Richmond (?) scene with the cypress trees and piss stained concrete. The NASCAR sleeping bag pulled out of one of those clothing donation boxes, the five gallon bucket for sitting and also bathing. See the baby carriage on the bottom for shorter trips to the aluminum depot? It takes military precision to survive like this.


The men and women are assembled underneath the plastic awning waiting for the oatmeal to arrive. This river of humanity is a western Ganges with the ashes still loose on bones not yet burned among lotus flowers, twisting between rotten 4x4 posts instead of concrete columns. The rats are hiding from the sunlight and the dogs are sniffing in the piles of wet clothing, snuffing into the feces and urine soaked cardboard near the fence line for the central nest of the rats. The dogs know the source is there in the ivy hidden with the roadside trash and dog shit and flat tires and car parts. The dogs can smell that hot nest of quivering rat flesh but they can’t get through the fence and into the ivy to eat the rats without catching a fat kick to the ass. So the dogs take their frustration out on each other in the muddy yard near the bodies wrapped in plastic, the ugly mouths chewing on chicken bones, cracking the femur of a chicken for the marrow and tearing at the fatty skin with their yellow teeth. There on the muddy field the dogs run until they hear their master call from the parking lot or sidewalk.
The traffic on Highway 1 rolls over the wet pavement in slick paths, old cars and new cars, intent on a destination, a purpose and destiny. The rain falls into the mud and the rats sleep soundly. The picnic tables are cleared of resting junkies and someone finds a week old newspaper with the comic section. Everyone has a favorite comic and the punchlines are exchanged and repeated.
“Garfield is a funny fucker,” says a bearded man. “Garfield makes me laugh,” he says without laughing. He hardly ever smiles because of his awareness of his missing teeth, teeth that were once white and straight and admired by women at the drive-in theater where he worked. He wasn’t always a crippled man hunched over comics on a dirty picnic table, awaiting oatmeal at a homeless shelter, but his past has been washed to the ocean and obliterated by time’s great hammer. He’s tired because he didn’t sleep enough, maybe two hours of sweating in his sleeping bag. He sold the majority of his pain medication so he can’t move without a spasm of pain in his back that radiates to his neck. The doctors say it’s a bulging disk and though the pain is almost unbearable he can’t stand the idea of hands on his spine trying to straighten him, to push the bulging disk back where it belongs. The physical therapists either look through him like a mechanic at a set of faulty brake calipers or else try to humanize him and miss the mark, reduce him to a bundle of nerves and stock footage memories, so he does not go to physical therapy. His hands throb. His legs sting like his veins are filled with battery acid. He scratches at the dry skin on his thigh but only enjoys moments of relief before the crawling sensation returns. He looks around to see that no one has heard him. He is invisible here among the destitute. On the downtown street, when he tries to walk to the post office to see if the general delivery has any messages from his son, he mostly ignores the young couples in their fashionable clothes who ignore him. He knows he is a dead person now and can never recover his status. There is no money for it and he has no desire. His self-destructive habits mortgaged his future and now the balance has to be paid. He is relieved when the pain in his back is so severe that he can’t think about anything else. The doctors say he is also diabetic, whatever that means. Good, he thinks. Good. He’ll die and that will be it, but in his heart he knows his death will come slowly and in expanding stages of grotesque helplessness like the men he’s seen at the veteran’s hospital. They have their game shows and funny papers and impotent flirtations with the nurses but they don’t die, they live until they die and there’s a big difference. Better not to think of it. Better to live in the sepia-toned football memories and after school pool games, back-seat passion, or what passed for it, bleachers in the winter, dugouts in the summer. He can’t quite picture her face but he’s close enough to the shadow lover in his past that the rat dung nearby doesn’t bother him.

3:11

That's the amount of time the average visitor to the blog stays. I am not being realistic if I write something that takes longer than 3 minutes to read. Maybe I should say I'm not being realistic if I expect anyone to read more than 3 minutes worth of material. The urge to serialize my life comes and goes. Lately, the meetings with the placement services have been straight out of a movie where they lay their hands out in front of them and say, "There's nothing I can do for you. We'll keep you resume on file if something comes up." and their tone is like they've given me a terminal cancer report.

I've been falling asleep in my clothes with the radio and lights on lately. The Nat King Cole bio is good but it just reminds me of my lack of piano. He played every day for 6-10 hours and still had to struggle and play for $5 a gig. Then I'll try to get through Plan B and am only up to the shrinking polar ice caps. In 2007 researchers estimated there were 7 years before the climate change would gain more momentum than we could stop. It'll be hard to say if it is our fault. It's 40 degrees in mid May. Vermont just got a bunch of snow. The mid west always had flood problems. Is it because of coal burning energy plants? Maybe. Does it matter? Kind of. We won't know if we'll burn to death or create another ice age until it's too late. Half of the survivors will say it would've happened without 4 stroke engines, and the other half will say we caused it.

Also reading a book of testimonies about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. It's remote and seldom visited. I had my chance but didn't take a trip there with my roommate. I was crippled at the time and the disabled do not survive a winter in the Arctic Circle. The polar bears hibernate there and the exploration teams wake them up. Is it worth it? Am I a druid who would place the hibernation of a bear, a bit of biodiversity, over the comfort of man. Not every bit of energy goes into video games and McDonalds. Some goes to research cancer cures and develop other forms of energy. So, the bear may become collateral damage but eventually the oil will run out and we'll leave the arctic alone. Maybe we'll set some zoo raised bears loose. Reintroduce them like wolves to Yellowstone. It can happen. Is it specious to argue in favor of preserving ANWR? Do big white bears have priority simply because we read Winnie The Pooh books as kids? That seems fallacious and emotional. We need the oil, obviously, and it's not like we're harvesting it from the bear's liver. They'll just have to find another place to sleep. We can build them some caves and airlift them to an isolated area...and still get the oil. Or we can let them wake up and run away from their blind and helpless cubs. Their being blind and helpless doesn't diminish our need for the oil. And of the Indians living up there, we're not killing them, we're just temporarily altering their livelihoods. We'll airlift them food. Eventually, the caribou will return...just like the bison.

Ok, I'm out of time. My three minutes are up.

Fort Stark renovations continued today. We cut some Chokeberry bushes to reveal some native columbine flowers on the seaside hill. It was cold and windy but we were in good spirits staging rocks for a stone wall and dragging brush. They all want me to find work but mostly they are retired so it's not like they can help. Since there is no budget for dump runs we have found sink holes and throw everything in them. All of New Castle is a land fill so it's traditional.

The American Academy teaching job in Kuwait is only for women so I'm thinking of changing my name to Oggylina Bleacher and wearing a wig at the interview. No, I'm not desperate.