Retro-Blog 1977 (age 14): Nonsense, a poem in three parts

NONSENSE: A POEM

So He said to The Frog
"What is your name?"
And The Frog Said
"blerb"
with an exclamation point


          NONSENSE: MIDDLE PART

          So He says to me
          He says
          "blerb"
          with a question mark
          And I say to Him
          I say
          "Your existence means nothing to me!"


                    NONSENSE: CONCLUSION
                 
                    So He said to The Frog
                    "What is The Meaning Of Life?"
                    And The Frog died
                    period



[Editorial note 2015 (age 52): This was my first poem.  I have no idea why, at age 14, I became possessed of the conceit that I was a poet, having no knowledge of traditional or contemporary ideas of form, which may be obvious.  Nonetheless, every manual typewriter keystroke was deliberate, including line spacing and use of capitalization.  Many drafts were written and discarded.  I still like this poem.  I miss this early version of myself who had just discovered he could give himself unilateral permission to be creative, and to define what form it would take.  I'm very glad that, unlike most 14-year-old poets, I did not apply my efforts to nauseating love poems and songs.  That would come a few years later. 

By the way, Blogspot is taking random liberties with my line spacing and I am still trying to figure out how to get full control of the formatting.  My old-school HTML skills, in which the most exotic constructs are tables and the concepts of spans or CSS were as yet undreamt, don't help much with the way things are done here.]

Retro-Blog 1982 (age 19): I Have Always Been This Way

Hayward California, November 1982

I'm concerned and insecure about things right now

Not simply about comforts and finances

I'm confused about my personal value and worth

About the value of any human and all humans

I'm questioning what the concept of "value" means to me

Because right now I feel very worthless and very small

Very insignificant

And it does not feel good at all

It also does not feel right

And I draw a distinction there

Between subjective good and objective right

Although I cannot be sure that this distinction itself

is not wholly subjective

Once the frame-of-reference has been found questionable

the whole structure falls apart

This is what has happened to me

Why do I feel a need to feel worth and significance?

I doubt that I could even adequately define

what I mean by those words

And what of this need for happiness?

It, too, seems to exist somewhere within reality

Yet beyond definition

My intellect tells me that happiness

or a sense or an attitude of happiness

would only be possible if I were to close off

certain perceptions and avenues of inquiry and reflection

This state would not only be objectionable

But also quite impossible to maintain reliably

As experience has proved

It seems that the centralized “self”

and the homogeneous "all"

are irreconcilably variant concepts

A workable proof to the contrary would be most welcome

I desperately need it, in fact

Thus far, the joyless and inaccurate assertions of psychology

and the abstract and verbose mazery of philosophy

and the hypocrisy and silly self-serving

dervishing metaphysics of religion

have failed to provide anything of substance

[Editorial Note, 2015 (age 52): Among the few things to have changed since this writing is that now feeling worthless and small and insignificant feel "right" or "normal".  I don't know if I am more mature, more broken, or simply more adequately medicated, but I am no longer distressed by the idea that I am not God's gift to the world.  It is, in fact, comforting to know that I need not expect any more of myself.  As a further note to the imaginary reader about these retro-posts: they are not likely to be chronological, although sub-sequences of closely related materials may be.]

Living video past.

I have become somewhat of an expert at living in the past.  One decade in particular fascinates me most: 1993-2003.  I have a large collection of NASATV footage, both on VHS and digital hard drive recordings from that period.  I also have a large collection of mostly VHS Mystery Science Theater 3000, from that period, much of it with the original promos and commercials.  Finally, I have many complete evenings of Adult Swim from the early 2000s with no edits, unfortunately mostly in 320x240 mpeg1.  Much, if not most, of the VHS content has since been captured to digital.

I have a high capacity SD card dedicated to days worth of this programming encoded as mp4 in 320x240, and a tiny little set-top box that will play a selected directory in a continuous loop.

With my gradually failing eyes, at a distance of some 10 feet from the 32" LCD screen, it doesn't look much different than it did on the NTSC CRT screens on which it was originally viewed.

I also inhabit times in which I never lived.  The 1920s fascinate me in particular, and I have a pretty good collection of short avant-garde and epic scale motion pictures from that period, as well as a lot of the symphonic music of that time.  And the golden age of Warner Brothers cartoons, minus the most racist shorts, is as much a part of my life as if I had lived when they were made.

The practice of living in the past is often maligned as being intrinsically, fundamentally, wrong.  A weakness.

Let me be weak.  Let me fail at contemporary life in peace.  I am old.

I see little about the present that elevates in from the past.  I see very little difference of substance in the entire sweep of human history.  In varying places and varying times, cultural freedoms and excesses, adventure and discovery, which we regard as exclusively contemporary, thrived with an intensity that puts today to shame.

I have lived long enough now to remember several iterations of  "people were so dumb back then; we are so much more enlightened now", and I look at these times and this culture and I wonder, really?  Have you really come so far?  Some things have jumped ahead, while others have fallen behind.  Where, for example, did optimism go?  Where did any form of futurism other than the post-apocalyptic variety go?

Enough overly tired ranting from this old man.  I need sleep, and dreams.

The Illusion of Freedom (from Facebook)

For the second time, I have deactivated my Facebook profile.  The first time I was naive enough to think it was permanent.  This time, I wonder if I will have the resolve to actually request a permanent removal.

Out of some two hundred, there were less than five people with whom my Facebook interactions could be construed to be analagous to the interactions of actual friends. Perhaps another another 5 or 8 were analagous to acquaintanceship.

I am being generous.  To myself.

To maintain this much semi-regular human contact, I found myself fashioning a version of myself edited to be acceptable to what I perceived to be an increasingly intolerant and narrow-minded peer group.

This is what people do.  It is normal in non-Facebook interactions as well.

I do not object to it, I simply find it difficult and fatigueing, and I am not very good at it. 

An often repeated anecdote of mine is when my then-employer told me I had "an honesty problem", by which he meant that I was too honest too often and it was causing problems.

I don't work any more, thankfully.  I am not as sure how thankful I am that I no longer have non-Facebook human interaction with anyone other than immediate family, and even that is for a small minority of the hours in a given day or week.

All things considered, including past history, this is probably all for the best.

I did not remove myself from the synthetic society of Facebook in at attempt to force myself into participating in more direct human interaction.  I removed myself because, as mentioned, I was failing to participate in a consistently correct manner, and my failures, or more specifically the responses to my failures, were becoming more painful than I was willing to continue to endure.

The only additive behavioural change I am hoping for is more time applied to other kinds of writing, such as this blog, where I do not need to concern myself with who I might alienate with what I say.

I choose a public blog instead of a private journal simply because I cannot motivate myself to write without at least having a credible basis for imagining that I am writing to some kind of audience.  That sounds egotistical because it is.  I see no point in being apologetic about having an ego as it seems to be a fundamental part of being human, and a minimal requirement for believing that there might be a reason to proceed to the next day.   I suspect that many of the people who lose the will to proceed to the next day are people who have lost all perceptible sense of ego.

Thoughts from a hot day on the Toilet

Heat brings suffering largely of the mind, cold of the body.  Cold triggers an urgent and primal response, leaving little time for pondering the abstract.  Heat seems a physical manifestation of existential angst, sapping energy and stretching time, like a fever it turns the mind upon itself.

Statement Of Intent and Assertion Of Copyright

 As the delusion of having something about which I feel I must write is an increasingly infrequent affliction, I intend to use this blog primarily to re-publish prior works, most of which originally appeared publicly elsewhere, some of which will be newly transcribed from works which have not been previously published in electronic media, hopefully on a fairly regular basis.  I have not decided yet if I am to impose any kind of chronological or thematic order to any of this.

The boring but necessary:

Like many people, despite many check boxes checked, I have never read any of the "Terms of Use" agreements asserted by various on-line services.  I do not consider myself to be bound by any contract which I have not read.  I recognize that I am using resources that belong to someone else to publish my work, and I recognize the right of such entities to deny me service at any time.  I do not, however, relinquish my copyright in my works to these entities and regard my mundane ramblings to be my sole intellectual property, protected by the United States copyright law and any signatories to treaties with the United States which bind them to the same.  If at any time I choose to license any portion of my work to another party, such arrangement will be clearly indicated.

Additionally I assert my right to include brief quotations from the textual intellectual property of others within the bounds of the Fair Use provisions of the United States copyright law.  Further, I assert my right to produce and distribute audio and visual works which integrate portions of existing copyrighted works, also within the bounds of Fair Use.

The Second Wave

Sentence fragments by design.  Was looking for a suitable blogging platform.  Found I already started one over a year ago. All that time.  Nothing to add.  Maybe later.  Maybe not.