Thursday, May 17, 2007

The Death of a Hero, the Birth of a Monster

Last night the Jeep was not dead, but certainly it was in critical condition, and struggling on much like the guy you occasionally on TLC with the knife in his head. So many problems. Overheating. Not shifting properly. Then something shit out that made the battery stop recharging. I realized this at about 11 last night as we left a town called Big Timber, and I had to U-turn and rush back. We found a room in this crappy hotel called River Valley Inn (where the river was, who knows) and were checked in by an old lady with pink-tinted glasses. Amazingly, even that strange little hotel had wifi, but I was to tired and concerned to post anything.

But there was some light to the tunnel - the Inn, as it turned out, was directly next to a Uhaul place. So we woke up at 7 and went over to find out if we could get a truck and tow the Jeep. Which they didn't have - but the guy was nice enough to charge up the battery so that we could get to the next town, which had a larger Uhaul place. We were set up for a 17' truck, pretty big, but whatever.

But go big or go home, right? We arrive and find out that they already promised the 17 footer to someone else, so they hook us up (for the same price) with a 24 foot super-mover. I mean, the thing is almost a semi-truck. And so much room inside we didn't have to stack a single thing, plus we put the bikes in. Then we hooked the Jeep up to the tow dolly and hit the road with our fatass truck.

Of course we couldn't get going without on more thing going wrong - one of the fenders on the tow dolly was broken and flapping around, so we went to a Uhaul place to get it repaired real quick (it's just a piece of plastic). Unfortunately the mechanic who did the job is a complete and total idiot who is unable to even properly deal with pieces of plastic, because as soon as we left the Uhaul place the part of the fender containing the light came right off. Yea, bolting things down is HARD. But I didn't care at that point. We duct-taped what we could and drove on.

It's actually a lot of fun to drive, except for being horribly bumpy. But it's nice to be able to look the truckers in the eyes for once, although I can't help but believe that they think Uhaul trucks are nothing but impostors, manned by civilians, of all things!

The fatass truck hauled us through the mountains, which were beautiful. Now we're in Washington, at a place call Ritzville which consists of three hotels and a McDoanlds. The best western we're at is actually pretty plush for a interstate hotel, big fridge, microwave, pool+sauna, and really big continental breakfast complete with waffle maker.

Tomorrow, to Portland! Finally.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Oh Great Plains, You're so funny

We're in South Dakota now. The going has no exactly been easy so far. The engine has been running hotter than it should because of the trailer which is...not that big of a deal yet but when the gauge is getting close to the red it isn't a comfortable feeling.

The big problem was the fucking win. Trying to drive the Jeep and trailer through a 25-35 MPH headwind was like trying to keep a box of rocks afloat with a box of rocks. That trailer is the least aerodynamic thing ever. Luckily the wind did let up as we drove out of Minnesota, which allowed us to go faster and made the engine run cooler as well.

Now it's almost time for the mountains.

The Great Plains seemed to be the strangest portion of land ever created. The entire way through South Dakota and Minnesota I've seen over and over strange advertisements for 'wall drug', including everything from T-rex to cracked out roosters. Also there was the giant sculpture park, featuring the 'world's largest bull head'.

Well, here we go again.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

That is it

I had my last final exam today, and that is it. No more undergrad. It's over. Fin, done, CYA FUCKING LATER.

I'm note sure how to feel about it, if I should feel anything about it. I'm not really looking forward to the graduation ceremony because I hate ceremonies in general. It is difficult to act excited for me, and I'm not really excited about graduation. Moving? Sure, thats exciting, that's interesting. Getting a diploma, however, is not.

Not to mention the heat is going to be sweltering in those black robes.

I've been preparing a few stories to send out after the move. I'm not sure how this is going to go. I've never sent my stuff away to be published except for the campus literary journals, which are far less formal and intimidating. All the creative writer professors at some point have given the students their obligatory 'It sucks' speech, in which they try to introduce us to the fact that most journals get 10 or 20 or 50 times as many submissions as they'll ever publish. And there is another small catch - virtually none of the journals a starting writer can submit to pay. Oh well. It's not like I thought I was going to graduate and write as a career. But sheer mass of submitting is overbearing. Sending out manuscripts to 50 journals in the hope you'll get a hit is not going to be fun. I like writing less than organizing what I've written.

But, it must be done!

I've also been thinking about making a zine. I don't know about what. And I don't think it is important what. I just feel like it would be a good creative project for me to embark on and eventually finish. It would give me something in my hands that I've made from start to finish. And I'm sure as I populate it with meager content and attempt to make it not look like shit I'd learn a few skills. I've been pretty impressed by some of the zines in the library. There is something instantly interesting about them. Perhaps its the fact that a zine can, like a magazine, be picked up, read, and put down - you don't even have to look at it again, ever. But chances are that in that 5 minute timespan you have read a story that you'll remember.

And Portland has tons of zine resources. This is why I wanted to move to Portland. They have everything I could ever want.

Okay, thats all.

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Naked Chicks

According to CNN, 18,000 people stood naked in a square in Mexico City today. Check out this website (NWS).

More than a Pound of flesh

I'm amazed that this guy had found so many people willing to pose nude at once. I didn't really expect that this would be possible.

I'm also amazed at the photos. They strike me as incredibly frightening. With 3000 naked people all lying on a street, the boundaries between each person becomes almost impossible to define, so it's not so much 3,000 people but just a quarter-mile stretch of pure flesh. This is what a holocaust looks like. Just bodies, exposed and indistinguishable.

RDIKLUS

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2007/05/03/news/top/news02_impeach_bush_plate.txt

That's an article talking about how a woman with a vanity license plate "MPEACHW" is being forced by the state of South Dakota to remove it because someone complained. This is all well and good, it is standard practice for vanity plates to be recalled at a moments notice, mostly because the government doesn't like the possibility that it will have to take credit for endorsing an offensive message. However, the recall on this plate is worthy of some additional controversy.

Why? Well, her plate is a political message. And while even that would not hold as a valid defense because the plate is in fact state property, the issue has become complicated because many states have taken it upon themselves to create special plates for certain groups - and these plates often support a political view. The environmental plates have been a predecessor to this, and have existed for a very long time. Now, states are allowing other sorts of plates, such as Indiana's plate which declares "In God we Trust" or the plates now available in many midwest states which say "Choose Life". Other possibles include the Support Our Troops and the Secure (state X) plates.

These plates are obvious endorsements of a political view by the state. The state is using these plates as a means of political speech, much like the "MPEACHW" plate this woman had on her vehicle. The question then, is - whats the difference? The only difference seems to be one political message is endorsed by the state, while the other was chosen by an individual. South Dakota's decision seems to indicate, then, that the state has a right to speech which the individual does not. This is clearly bullshit. If the state has set the precedent of letting political messages on its property, then individuals should be able to use political messages on the property, as well. To argue anything else is clearly a violate of free speech, since the individual in this case would not be allowed to express a view which the state is allowed.

I hope that this goes to court, honestly, because it clearly wouldn't stand, and maybe, just maybe, we could get all those bullshit "In God We Trust" messages off plates too.

Friday, May 4, 2007

An excerpt

The stones which lead out into these waters are built heavily on Kristeva’s Approaching Abjection, the first chapter of Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Abjection is a concept of a nameless other, and by its very definition it is resistant to definition – I will define it, for purposes of simplicity here, as something that is understandable only as other. Early in her book, Kristeva says that it is “The spasms and the vomiting that protect me” (Kristeva 3), describing the abjection of food as a “basic” form. She later speaks also of the corpse, which is the ultimate form of abjection (it expels the self, and so we try desperately to expel it) and other examples – all of them are united by the common bond that the abject is that which is expelled or rejected. She also briefly talks of the “exile”, the deject, who exists as the abjected, who “strays instead of getting his bearings” (Kristeva 8). These, I believe, are two sides of the same idea – to abject, I argue, also means to be deject. While to abject is to get rid of an other, the other is rarely something indefinable: the concept of the abject cannot be bound, but the abjected often has a corporal form, be it food, a person, or that which was a person. To abject, then, is to deject another, to turn the other into a stray – but since that other, once dejected, is not a mere something but an object, a ‘real’ item rather than a concept, the person who abjects creates two categories: I and the Other, and to abject is to automatically remove oneself from the possibility of the other, and thus deject oneself from whatever the other may be.
I'm so hungry, I could eat half of congress.

Thursday, May 3, 2007

GOP Debate

Romney is young-looking and well spoken, but I'm not clear where he stands, and his mormon past will hurt. Still, he has points for appearing less ancient then the other front-runners.

Giuliani moderate positions will turn off the hardcore base but will help bring back a middle ready to shun mainstream conservatives.

Thompson for some reason is pulling very well.

McCain is stuttering and old.

Paul would never get the nod, he was at the wrong debate I think, though if he had the clout of Giuliani going into this thing he might have done very well.

Everyone else is pointless.

I think Romney won, Giuliani close behind. McCain hurt himself badly.

It's a Prison Break!!!

The American Prison system is becoming a huge, bloated mass, ready go pop like a big gray towering pimple and spread criminals all over the world!!!

Okay, maybe not quite like that.

But it seems clear that the American system of justice is unsustainable. Our criminals often re-commit, we have many of them, and they are very costly. At some point the amount of money poured into it will become to much. This isn't a real threat right now, just like our defense spending, despite being massive, is also not a threat to the American budget. We just make to much damn money. But supporting programs with excess spending just because we can is a recipe for failure. It is not an adaptable system. If the country hits hard times and we can no longer support an expensive prison system, what exactly do? A country can't just release prisoners. They're prisoners. It may not have been a good idea to put some of them in prison, but once they're there, it isn't a good idea to suddenly release a great number of them.

As I see it, the American prison system has two major problems. First, the creation of criminals has gone out of control. This is not to say more people are doing things which are wrong - it is to say the state is saying more people are doing things wrong. The creation of a criminal is as much the responsibility of the state as the individual, because without the state in existiance to put people into prison and to enforce the law, the criminal does not exist (nor does the prisoner). Yes, people still do things considered to be wrong, but killing someone and being a murder are not the same thing. One is the action, the other is the title/label gained by the action.

Not that I'm arguing people shouldn't be put in prison for murder. But what about putting people in prison for drugs? Burgerly? Petty theft? Drinking and Driving?

The criminal is an element in society which is deviant. In many cases, this deviance is obviously unwanted. Murders and rapists are deviants from social norms who are dangerous and who most people would want to put behind bars. But deviance has many forms besides murder and rape, and America seems to have confused the criminal as a deviant for the criminal as THE deviant. Why in the world would we put people in jail for pot? People who smoke pot are not violent and at worse do nothing good for society. The black market for the drug stems from it's illegal nature, much like the ban on alcohol in the 1920s caused an alcohol black market. But people who smoke pot are considered deviant - and thus, America seems to think they should be criminals.

I'm not sure where this consider for deviance comes from, though I think generally that American is simply a more conservative country than many other western nations, and as such it both holds more actions as deviant and is more likely to punish them by criminalization.

The other problem with America's prison system is the American since of individuality and personal responsibility. Just because American society considers actions deviant does not mean prison is the only possibility. Certainly, the fact that the deviant portions of society can be rounded up into jails has a great symbolic effect in that it allows American to point to a sort of geographical feature which contains that which society does not want. Yet that does not have to be the case - a similar stigma could be applied to rehabilitation programs. People in drug rehabilitation are hardly considered to be the best society has to offer. But the prison system obviously prevails.

The reason, I think, is that Americans do not wish to take responsibility for the fall of others. It a very economical argument, actually - we're all responsible for our own welfare, and by looking out for ourselves, we actually increase the welfare of society as a whole. That is the basis of American individualism, an invisible hand which is not just economic but also social, promoting the best society has to offer through their own hard work and thus insuring that members of society have a reason to work hard. A sense of personal responsibility is essential to this idea. An individual, it is thought, is responsible only for themselves. Society had no responsibility to them - and also, that individual has only limited responsibilities to society. If you become homeless, no one should have to catch you - but you should not have to catch those who go homeless.

This sort of view on responsibility does not have any room for promoting rehabilitation. If rehabilitation was promoted, it means the society has a responsibility to keep people from being deviant, and to help them reform to the social norm. In America, that just doesn't fly. We don't want to reform people who fall - either they reform themselves, or they don't. Either way, Americans do not see it as their responsibility.

If America ever is to get rid of it's prisons, one of these two factors would have to change.

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Uh...

So first there was this. It is (ahem) porn, so don't click on it if you're in the middle of the library.


Then there was this:

"I've always thought that porn was really amazing abstract representations of human sexuality, something like a fever dream, but this just takes it to a new level. I'm impressed by how dehumanized and absurd this video is. Human sexuality has become not only alien to intimacy, but alien to the human as well. I admire the honesty of this othering of intimacy, but I grow deeply concerned for society as a whole."

The internet is a very strange place sometimes.
The last episode of Battlestar Galactica Season 3 is awesome. Just saying. All Along The Watchtower just popped up on my playlist and reminded me.

You're telling me things

I wrote something.

Some people hated it.

Some people loved it.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with it?

I have this story called "Home Movie" which I wrote a few weeks ago and submitted to the campus student-run journals. They both published it, and I've recieved a few comments on it. However, I also shared the story on a creative writing forum where the promptedly tore it apart. I have to admit, I found their critques rather stupid - they appeared unable to comprehend what I'd written. Still, having all these different responses to something I've written, espically when opinions are so extreme, makes it heard to judge what I should do with it. If anything.

It's always judge to something you've done. Bias is obvious. In the five years since I first wrote a story I've been convinced that what I just made was the greatest thing I've ever done. Of course, a few weeks later when I've written something else, I suddenly become disappointed by what I'd previously written. Which tells me I need to practice more.

Lately, though, I haven't felt that. Which I think may mean I'm reading to start sending shit out to publishers so I can try and get something published in a FOR REAL literary journal. Not that I'm going to get paid for it or anything, but it's helpful for later one when I write my Great American Novel - you have to build street cred, right?

Maybe not. As I said in my first post on this blog, I don't my choice of career intersecting with my writing. Do I really want to come to a point where writing would be my JOB? Where I sit home all day and type?

I don't know - what would I write about?

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Gizmos and Wallygags


I just figured out how to put pictures on this thing, which is pretty cool. Otherwise I have nothing to report. With an apartment lined up half my stress is gone. Of course the other half is still there, but you know, I'll get a job SOMEWHERE (this of course means my job may not be the best for awhile...)

And I have nothing to rant about. Except for the fact that Guitar Hero II is hard and my arm hurts.

But my life just became a little better

We have an apartment in Portland. Hurrah!

Woe is the World

As I've had to do more reading about the current state of world economic affairs, I've started to come to a very depressing 'conclusion' - it seems that morally, we're fucked.

Here is the problem. It is clear that liberalization does not work for everyone, and it is also clear that liberalization has actually made the world less equal, and not more. The West thought that by spreading democracy and free trade - by encouraging people to make their own political and economic choices - that the world would become better off. It seemed to make sense, after all, it's worked very well for the West. Unfortuantly Africa and South America have not been advaced by liberalization, and the East Asian success stories have only be success stories because the state controlled their slow advancement into liberalization, and built effective industries along the way. I I believe that, due to the increasing inequality of the world, that liberalization is not a moral system. Free trade has never been free - the theory seems sound, but the more powerful countries load the dice by refusing to agree to any agreement which is entirely in their favor. There is, after all, no reason for the United States to sign a trade agreement with a much smaller country if the terms are not in the favor of the U.S. - the U.S. isn't going to sink because it failed to sign the agreement. But the smaller country just might.

The anwser, then, is for smaller countries to forget about free trade and start promoting their own interests through state-directed programs aimed at getting domestic industries on their feat, and becoming less dependent on foriegn investment and loans. Stiglitz's 2006 book called "Making Globalization Work" calls for these measures. The problem, however, is this - I don't think that state directed development is moral, either. East Asia state directed development to become successful - however, East Asia's period of development was also one marked by social inequality and repression. Park Chung Hee was not a nice guy, as far as I can tell - he often used the secret police to break up labor unions which threatened to strike because of low wages. China, another example of a state-directed economy, is also hardly a good example of moral government (if you haven't caught on, I consider democracy the most moral form of government). Also problematic is Brazil, which (although it eventually dropped the ball on it) used state-directed development to grow in the 70s-80s - a period of military dictatorship. The only example of a country which enjoyed significant development without some sort of dictatorship is India. I suppose that's hopeful, but India has also had some problems (some people are, rightly I think, wondering if it's democracy will remain intact), and it's growth, while good, was far from stellar. In addition, India has a population resource that other countries just don't have access to. So while the growth of state-directed countries like South Korea may have been stellar, I can't recommend it as morally sound.

So what do we do? What do we promote? Every time I say that liberalization needs to stop, in the back of my head I think - yea, but the other alternative may also be just as bad. The anwser, I think, may actually lay in America - it developed using protectionist measures while maintaining a democracy. But then again, America has always had access to a low-wage or no-wage labor force and had a huge amount of land to exploit. I'm not sure if slavery and immigrants are equal to the sort of labor repression seen in South Korea during its development, but the two could have something in common.

To bad I'm an Atheist - it'd be great if God could just waltz down and fix everything.