Manual

I love my laptop, no shit. But, whilst cleaning out the crawlspace, I found my old Brother AX-250 typewriter. Who knew, but Office Max still sells ribbons; so, I bought a couple of ribbons, and spooled up a blank sheet of paper, and...
Damn. We, as a generation of writing people, have gotten lazy. I totally forgot about manually setting tabs, about the importance of 'carriage return', and the lack of spell check and cut&paste functions.
BUT:
I'd also forgotten about the visceral joy of 'clack-clack-ding!' and actually having a sheet of paper with strike-outs all over it. It's closer to the heart-beat of writing shit, you know? No bullshit, no glossy-smooth-tricky-font-format crap. No facebook or email to distract you. No crutches. No safety net. Just you and a sheet of blank white paper and a world of unformed ideas.
Beautiful. No shit, beautiful.

Signs & Portents (a fragment)

I knew Doug was getting a little out of hand when he started sharpening pencils. He'd sit in the cubicle next to mine with a brand-new 25-pack of PaperMate #2 pencils and he'd sharpen them with this dinky little hand-held sharpener. He'd sharpen one down to a stub, neatly catching all the shavings in his under-desk trashcan, then he'd sharpen a second one, which he'd use doing actual work for maybe an hour. Then he'd sharpen that one down to a stub, and put a point on a replacement. Finally, about an hour before quitting time, he'd sit in his cubicle and sharpen whatever pencils remained in the pack, one after the other, down to the stub like a chain-smoker lighting one off the butt of the last.
One afternoon I stayed late to finish the end-of-month reports. The office was deserted except for me and Dwight, the janitor guy. I'd always liked Dwight because he was a totally grizzled old black guy that reminded me of every Mississippi Delta Blues stereotype I'd grown up with. I was sweating through about eight-thousand Excel cells and Dwight was methodically dumping out the cubicle shit-cans. He got to Doug's and paused a minute before dumping it out. "You see this shit?" he asked me. I just shrugged. "You watch this guy. Anybody does this shit is a little fucked in his head." I mumbled something about Doug having some personal problems at home.
On his way out, Dwight stuck his head back around into my cubicle. "Don't tell him I said nothing about his crazy shit. I don't need some crazy ass coming after me."
I'm not saying shit to Doug about Dwight, or about anything else. Dwight's right. That shit just ain't right.

J.S. Mill

Mill's On Liberty is the week's assigned reading, and I thought a few passages were worth relating here. Hope ya'll see the need for some modern-day Mill like I do.

"...the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind."

"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."

"It is not progress that we object to; on the contrary, we flatter ourselves that we are the most progresive people who ever lived. It is individuality that we war against: we should think we had done wonders if we had made ourselves all alike."

Keyboard

As this machine spills my words across these floors...

Urns and Stuff...

So I was writing a post on Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and here's what I thought about it.
I have to admit, I was a bit leery coming to Ode on a Grecian Urn. The poem is almost a punch-line, associated with doe-eyed young poets in white shirts with flaring sleeves, open at the throat, sighing heavy sighs. Despite my early days as a poetry junkie, I'd somehow missed Ode, so I came to it with some preconceptions.
First time through, it struck me as vaguely...not to use a fifty-cent SAT word, but...pedestrian. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the urn was wicked pretty and stirred some wistful longing in Keats. Okay, next.
So then, I was standing in the rain, waiting to pick the kids up from school, and made another stab at it. Very different reading the second time around.
It seemed to me that Keats saw the best things in life, frozen in time upon the urn, and the figures' eternal static postures reminded him that all those good things are so transient in real life. They are captured in the urn, but that's the only permanent manifestation of all the good things...when experienced, they are fleeting, and the urn serves as a reminder for all time that the good things are impermanent, and maybe that's part of what makes them so dear.
I suppose watching all the little kids rip-snorting out of class at the end of the day reminded me of Keats urn. They all grow up, and end up with mortgages and divorces and bitterness; but for that one moment in time, frozen in my memory, they were all six years old and wild for life.
*sigh*
Oh well. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
~Jack

Equinox

On the morning of the Spring equinox,
the day when twenty-four hours are perfectly
divided into precise halves of twelve,
The sun was shining in my eyes like tiny sharp needles,
driving into work.
That afternoon, leaving work,
the sun was in my eyes again, and I
squinted and bitched.
The glories of nature thus revealed wisdom to me,
mainly that I work too god-damned much.

Facebook

I was an early adopter of myspace, mainly as a chance to shamelessly plug my guitar playing and inflict my bad poetry on the world. Eventually it became a useless venue for either poetry or music, clogged with scammers and junior high pervs and just plain stupid shit.
So I came here. Here I can write whatever bad poetry and shit I like, and the world can take it or leave it without having to email me offers of slutty girls in my area and/or guaranteed penis extensions.
But my brother signed up for Facebook, I don't know why, and gmailed me an invitation. So I signed up, using the so-clever (infantile) pseudonym Jack Kinovalot. I lied about the last name, sure, but I was honest in my high school and college graduation dates. Why not, right?
Then I completed the registration process, and -kapowie!- up pops a page full of people I haven't seen since the late 80's / early 90's. I guess facebook is all about social networks, but this is more than I'd expected. I clicked through a couple more pages, somewhat taken aback by all these names and faces from so long ago: guy who kicked the shit out of me in junior high? Check. Girl who populated every masturbatory fantasy from 1982 to 1984? Check. And she got fat, and married a fat bald guy.
Every one of these picture/profiles had a link to "contact me!" and I almost did a couple of times. But then I got smart...I graduated high school and left town less than a week later and never looked back. So why start now? Mid-life crisis, maybe? Nah...when my mid-life crisis hits, it's gonna be all about heading west and holing up in a cheap cold-water apartment and writing God's Gift to the Written Word.
Anyhow, I digress. I didn't click any links, didn't kindle any old fires. Let sleeping dogs lie, especially when they're likely to be mangy and flea-bitten, right?