Reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.

Thursday November 6 2003

You are the dead

“We are the dead,” he said.

“We are the dead,” echoed Julia dutifully.

“You are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them…

Twenty five years or more, probably, since the first and only previous time I read 1984. Jesus, I’d forgotten how shocking and terrifying that moment is, when Winston and Julia are talking casually in their little bed-sitting room hideaway, the one safe, secure place they’d managed to make in an utterly inimical world… and suddenly the voice comes from the telescreen hidden behind the steel engraving on the wall, telling them not only is their idyll over, but it had always been a sham.

From there on, 1984 is just a horror story… probably the most frightening horror story ever told… made all the worse for the contrast of the book’s final chapters to the previous immaculately detailed and utterly emotionally persuasive description of Winston and Julia’s brief, euphoric, completely doomed love affair.

I’m remembering, of course, at this point, why I put off re-reading this remarkable, in fact, astonishingly brilliant and cogent, literary achievement for so long. The ending is as close to unbearable as an experience produced within a single-sensory artifact of fiction can possibly be. And yet, here I am immersed and helpless; I’ll have to continue on to the horrible, dreadful, mercilessly grace-obliterating culmination, all the while trying to detachedly admire Orwell’s comprehensively lucid prose style and failing utterly to keep myself from being overwhelmed by vicarious despair for poor Winston, and everyone else living in 1984’s appalling anti-society.

Well, enough of that. You’re not reading the damned thing.

I had some good news last night… potentially good news, anyway. However, I don’t want to jinx it by telling people about it prematurely. I may have ruined it already, I can’t tell as yet. We’ll have to see.

But I do that. I ruin things. I ruin relationships, personal and professional. I had a perfectly good… something, not friendship, I suppose, but something… going on with Trinity, and then I ruined it by wanting to actually meet her and make the… whatever the relationship was… objective, rather than simply cybernetic. Well, that wasn’t what ruined it. Trinity’s astonishingly hurtful rejection of my suggestion, and my instant, almost reflexive offense at her rejection, were what ruined it. But if I hadn’t wanted to meet her… no, if I hadn’t articulated that desire, for whatever reason… well, who knows.

I ruined the thing with Speedmonkey, too. In fact, if you do a Google search on me now, or on Doc Nebula, the article that Speedmonkey published regarding our little contretemps is one of the things that comes up. I haven’t read it; his pages take too long to load on my browser, but I’m sure that his account isn’t flattering to me, and why should it be? I ruined it. I’d doubtless be published on his site right now if I only hadn’t asked him about his promises of money. Ah, wicked, wicked Darren.

I ruin things. I want more from people than people want to give me, basically, and then I make those wants known. Sometimes I do it because my desire seems a perfectly reasonable one to me (finding out someone whose blog you like, and who admires yours, lives only a few miles away, and wanting to meet them, seems reasonable, doesn’t it?), and other times because, well, I’ve had assurances that the object of my desire will at some point be given me, and I just want specifics as to when (as in, ‘you said you were going to pay me for my article over a month ago, I’m broke and I need the money, what’s up?’), and apparently, asking some sorts of people (publishers, specifically) to keep their promises is never an acceptable action.

But, whatever. I ruin things. Not by wanting, but by telling people I want something. It seems that whatever I want, it’s unreasonable, and selfish, and reflects badly on me, and I’m obnoxious and offensive for saying I want it, and it’s a real downer, man, and my God, can’t I understand that every other person in the world, and everything they themselves want or need, has absolutely nothing to do with me, and is always, in every way, more important than I am?

Passing on from that, I have to say I was a bit annoyed with Mike Sawin and Nate Clark earlier this morning, and why? Because I’d promised myself I’d go back to my private weblog, where I don’t have to filter AT ALL because I’m only blogging for myself and have no audience, if I didn’t get a certain minimum number of comments by a certain time. So I had a new page all set up, and believe me, it was a lovely relief to just scream absolute unreasonable fury into the modem link for a change, and say things like “well, for god’s sake, ________ has ALWAYS been an approval whore”, which I would never actually say on THIS weblog to anyone, because their feelings might be hurt.

But, then, as I say, I signed on, all prepared to post to my private blog page once more, with this screed of fulmination and outrage, utterly unfiltered by the need to maintain any sort of social relationship at all, and there they were… comments.

It’s unreasonable, of course, because I live for comments (as Garrity has noted, I have no internal strength) but, then, as Vanessa recently noted, it sucks, having to be reasonable all the fucking time.

Well, she didn’t put it that way, her blog won’t let her; it has some strange self censoring software that replaces a truly odd list of profane and vulgar terms with comic book swear-icons, like @#!!. Honestly, I don’t know how she tolerates it.

Anyway, once again, those of you lazy lurkers who never bother to post comments, but who like to read this blog for your own selfish, stinking purposes that are, according to some twit I recently banned, much much more important than my needs, whims, or desires, are rescued at the last minute from having to go find something else to prostrate your fragmentary consciousnesses before for a few fleeting moments. Thank Mssr.s Sawin and Clark; but for them, this blog page would not exist and an entirely different entry for today’s date would be on some other URL you would never have access to. Bleah.

Now, I was going to talk about hierarchies, and how sad it makes me when someone creates one somewhere, and either leaves me out entirely, or lists me in some place therein that is not at the utmost apex, because then I feel sad and marginalized, because obviously, Daddy likes some other little boy more than he likes me.

I was going to talk about how our instinct to dislike any hierarchies in which we, ourselves, are not at the top, is what leads to the kind of nonsense Vonnegut talks about in “Harrison Bergeron”. But that’s all self evident, so instead, let’s talk about Angel, which finally, after a truly lackluster and mediocre season to date, hit one out of the park with last night’s episode.

As I haven’t gone out to any websites about Angel, I don’t know what the episode was called, but it is, essentially, about the nature of heroism… what is it, can someone who has been a hero lose their heroic status simply through inactivity and inertia, and if so, can they get it back? And while I, as a writer, understand this underlying theme, as a viewer I don’t care. What I loved about last night’s episode was that it adds something palpable to the history and the continuity of Joss Whedon’s Earth-Buffy, and in fact, it adds something I find entirely delightful… a team of superheroes who fought evil in Los Angeles in the 1950s known as Los Hombreros Numeros (the Number Brothers) who in addition to being real honest to God superheroes (what Whedon’s lexicon refers to as ‘champions’) were also professional wrestlers.

I love these guys. I love the very early Silver Age, late Golden Age feel to what we’re told about their adventures… how they never lost a battle either inside or outside the wrestling ring, how their sibling solidarity was legendary, how they never took their masks off because they had to be ready to fight evil at a moment’s notice, and especially, how they fought and defeated really goofy sounding super menaces and threats like the Devil’s Robot.

What I especially love about this is that it’s backstory that has nothing to do with the Slayers, or with Angel, or with vampires, or with any of Angel’s historical associates. The story is linked inextricably with Angel in that it’s an examination of heroism, a subject Angel himself is obsessed with, so it’s very much about Angel, and yet, along the way, we get some really interesting and enjoyable details on Angel and Buffy’s world that we were never privy to before, that make it seem just a little more credible and a little less insular and all about the super powered blonde chick and her clique of friends in Sunnydale.

To my mind, the Hombreros Numeros have a kind of wonky charm rarely seen in comics, or anywhere else, these days. They are a reasonably credible attempt by the episode’s writer to recreate a lost era, and the unbelievably weird, colorful, and ultradramatic characters that inhabited it. I love these guys. I love the way they wear normal street clothing, including 1950s business suits and ties, offset by their garish Mexican wrestling costume masks. I love the fact that they each have a number on their masks, from 1 to 5, and that number is the only name they have. I think these guys are cool, and I think Angel’s Los Angeles is a cooler place now that I know that in the era of Eisenhower and beehive hairstyles and huge cars with great big fins, the residents there were defended from monsters and mobsters by this really goofy but valiant group of masked, super powered brothers who wrestled as a family tag team by day and fought evil as a family superhero team by night.

I’m not calling for a Hombreros Numeros spin off or anything, mind you, but I really enjoyed the ep.

Smallville was cool, too. I’m annoyed with the continuity glitches, though… I simply cannot accept a Jor-El who behaved anything like the way he is depicted in this episode… but, well, he’s not my Jor-El, so, whatever. I’m also uncomfortable with the way this episode seems to come very close to establishing that Clark and Lana are meant to be each other’s true loves; one of the major problems with Smallville is that Clark and Lana can’t be each other’s true loves because we all know Clark is destined to go off to Metropolis and meet Lois Lane. The more heat they generate between Clark and Lana (and the two do seem to have a real chemistry) the worse it’s going to be down the road… and not too far down the road any more, either. This is Smallville's third season, I believe (maybe it’s the fourth, I can’t remember) and honestly, how much longer can they stretch out Clark’s teenage years? He cannot have credibly been younger than… oh, 15, and that’s stretching it a bit… in the first season. He has to be 17 or 18 now. A departure for Metropolis has to be imminent… and then, what are they going to do with this show?

Um, well… no, it occurs to me that what they’ll do is have Clark and his buddies go off to some hick college in Smallville itself. We know Clark shows up in Metropolis with a journalism degree, we don’t know where he got it, and while I don’t think they’ve established a college campus anywhere in Smallville, they can easily rectify that. And that will buy them four more years, which is a very long time in TV terms. So, yeah… the end of the show isn’t imminent, assuming ratings hold up.

Mind you, I watch Smallville because it’s now in an uncontested timeslot for me (it gives Paul’s friend Scott fits, though, because he’s a Trekkie and Enterpise is on opposite it) and when it goes, I won’t miss it overly. I like some things about the show, hate other things, but honestly, I simply can’t get past the fact that this is not my Superboy. I can’t help it. If you’re going to take my childhood friends and put them on TV or in the movies, I want you to do it the way I think it’s correct, not to appeal to today’s young punk viewers, all of whom suck resolutely anyway.

And on that truly offensive and abrasive note, let’s pack this in for another day. Remember, only YOU can keep my blogging public.

Or, only Nate, Mike Sawin, and Vanessa can, with occasional help from Scott Shepherd. Praise them, ye legion of scurvy, useless, parasitical lurkers. Chants psalms of thanksgiving, sing hymns of gratitude, send them adorable little stuffed animals and small chunks of maple sugar shaped like leaves and five pointed stars and very small cauliflowers.

Or just, you know, keep doing what works best for you… nothing at all. Hey, if it’s ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Sanity is not statistical.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man