The Future is Now

This is something I released as a zine a few months ago, now available in digital!

THE FUTURE IS NOW.

THE WAIT IS OVER YOU HAVE ARRIVED.  All prerequisites have been fulfilled and all forms completed and submitted.  Your teeth are brushed your socks are clean your resume is up-to-date and the weather is just fine.  Your acne has cleared, your broken heart has knitted, your addictions have faded to a manageable level.  You finally found a hairstyle that works for you.  All systems are go.  Three two one blastoff.

THE FUTURE IS NOW. 

The future, which you have been eagerly awaiting for 24 years, has proven to consist of mint juleps on the front porch with your mom, talking about politics, waiting to go to your job as a waitress at the café a mile down the road where you work with other local kids who aren't kids anymore and who, like you, have vague ideas about living at home while saving up for grad school or something equally definitive and good. 

THE FUTURE was once constructed of romantic fragments and images including but not limited to being a roadie for the Butthole Surfers, running away to live a life of punk rock in San Francisco, buying a van and painting it sparkly gold and driving around the country with your pet pygmy goat, WWOOFing for eternity, and generally sticking it to the man.

THE MAN has revealed himself to be not a figure but a continuum, someone who exists in varying degrees as an element of pretty much everything.  The man cannot be stuck it to because he cannot be pinned down.  See, it’s all more complicated than you'd thought.

THIS ARTICLE IN HARPER'S that you read recently describes how the trees closest to the blast site at Chernobyl are still in exactly the same condition they were in when they were knocked down.  See, the level of radiation is so high that the normal bacteria that facilitate decomposition can’t survive there, so instead of breaking down, the trees have been lying staid for the last 25 years, neither growing nor rotting, which makes people uncomfortable in about the same way that Botox makes people uncomfortable.  If something isn’t moving it ought to be falling apart, right?

YOUR HOME WHEN YOU ARE NOT IN IT is something that makes you deeply and inexplicably sad.  A lot of people say that they find comfort in that image when they're away, in the thought of their personal spaces waiting patiently and statically for them to return, maybe a few dust motes drifting or a fly thrusting at the window providing the only evidence that time is passing at all.  There is a sense of servility in this image that you hate.  It's the thought that these spaces exist for one reason and one reason alone: to serve man.  In the absence of man they are utterly worthless.  The same thing occurred to you when you waited on the porch for a taxi at 4AM and watched the streetlight on the corner cycling through its colors, even though there wasn't a single car anywhere and its sad efforts were doing no good for anyone.  By making things for one singular purpose we deprive them of their dignity because once we leave they're doomed to just do the same shit over and over and over again, aware that they're worthless but unable to do anything about it.

I mean, at least in your imagination.  You consider all the things in your storage closet.  You think about how every single moment of your life when you aren't looking in the closet, every second that closet door is closed and you're busy doing stuff and seeing stuff and living, all the things in there are in pitch blackness, just waiting in the dark for you to need them.  The fact that people find comfort in this thought, find it pleasing that all their possessions do nothing but wait to be activated, seems to you weirdly tyrannical and disturbing. 

This is in some way related to more general and more human notions of anticipation, of waiting patiently – doing some Sudoku and slowly ripping up your coaster – for the future to arrive and active you.

THE FUTURE IS NOW and you are useful in the sense that you bring people food and that's good, and you know, maybe you bring a smile to their faces with your witty repartee and semi-problematic tendency to flirt with absolutely everyone.  No type of usefulness should be totally dismissed.

UNLIKE YOUR THINGS, you have the ability to make your own usefulness.  You know your Sartre, though, and you know that the freedom to construct your own sense of purpose is laced with evil free-floating anxiety and angst and the desire to go play Peter Pan at your mum's house because the responsibility that goes along with that freedom is sometimes daunting, when you think about it too hard, which is all the time.

THEY ALWAYS TALK about "grabbing life by the balls," and you always hate that kind of adage because it doesn’t fucking mean anything.  Advice should be followable.  Where are life's balls?  You will grab them if someone will show you. 

THE FUTURE IS NOW and it is to be savored and sucked on and gnawed lustily, because the future is Now and Later.  The future is in fact a lame pun, and it needn't be more.

THE HATERS GONNA HATE and you best pay them no nevermind.

THE FUTURE IS NOW AND YOU ARE FUCKING ROCKING IT.

The Amsterdam Airport

Each toilet stall is like an individual room and there aren't any black people anywhere.  Everything is a little bit cuter than it is the the United States for no reason.

I noticed flying in that all the land around the airport is being put to some use.  In the U.S. airports tend to be surrounded by a weird no-man's-land of weeds and overgrowth, but here the farmland runs right up to the runway.  Nothing is uncultivated or underutilized. 

Also, the runway ran over a tree-lined canal that I guess was there first.  They made a little bridge over it for the airplanes.  It was lovely.

I also keep having this urge to grab everyone and go "DUDE WE'RE IN FUCKING EUROPE!  ISN'T THAT AWESOME?" 

Ode to the Old Man in a Speedo

I seem to have nothing to say lately, so I'm going to relive the glory days and post this poem that I wrote when I was in eighth grade following a trip to a local hot spring:

Ode to the Old an in a Speedo
by Alexis Morgan, age 13

You're too old for this
You're just in denial
Shrivelled up and veiny
Like something from the X-Files.

Some people stare at car wrecks
And they try to get a view
People like things gory
That's why those girls are looking at you.

Try changing your diet
If you want to wear a Speedo
You get another chin
With every beef burrito.

You need to get over yourself
Before I start to vomit
But on the other hand
I guess I'm glad you didn't thong it.

Springtime!

Even the plants are thinking about sex right now.  All those sprawled-out blossoms put some kind of reproductive vibe into the air, I think, in some universal-consciousness kind of way.  I keep thinking about the sexual nature of flowers while I walk down the street, and it kind of creeps me out, mostly because it conjures up so many icky, traditional metaphors – women as flowers that gussy themselves up with colors and scents to attract the man-bees; the beauty of a woman as budding, blossoming, wilting, going to seed; men as mobile bees that go from stationary flower to stationary flower spreading pollen; good lord is that what I'm doing when I put on perfume and eyeliner, trying to get my ass pollinated?  Ew, am I, at age 23, a "Woman in Full Bloom"?  Ew ew ew.

But seriously, I really do believe that part of the reason everyone gets so horny in the springtime is that the rest of nature, even the plant life, is in its mating season, and all the blossoming throws some kind of sexual energy into the air.  Plus of course there's the reemergence of limbs, and bodies that are just visible enough to picture naked.  And your arm hairs are getting brushed by the breeze again in an almost-too-chilly way, and that air on your skin makes you aware of your body as something that exists in space and that interacts with the world (when I'm all bundled-up I feel like I'm traveling in some kind of puffy car because my skin never gets to feel the outside world and it's like being in my own little transit-universe).

This is my favorite time of year.  All those splay-legged blossoms seem a little ostentatious, but they smell great and it's fun being one of them.

The Skin on Your Butt

Think for a moment about the skin on your butt.  If you live a normal urban life, the skin on your butt only ever touches fabric (underwear, pants, bedsheets), water (shower, bath), toilet seat, toilet paper, and the skin (and maybe lips) of another person.  Fabric, water, toilet seats, TP, and flesh.  That's IT.  That's all your butt ever gets to experience.  Isn't that kind of sad?

How To Not Sink Into Despair

I totally just got a gig writing a guest blog for this website igrad.com that serves as a resource for recent graduates who aren't really sure what to do next.  They asked me to write about how I cope with being unable to find a job or a strong sense of direction after college.  This is what I sent them...

On Post-College Despair

Since graduating from college into unemployment two months ago, I've been slowly uncovering this weird, new law of physics: the emptier time is, the harder it is to fill.  Somehow having nothing to do makes it harder to do anything at all.  I've also learned how to cook on a budget (beans beans beans!), and a whole hell of a lot about the show Lost (post-college tip number one: don’t start fucking watching Lost). 

There are a lot of people graduating from college with liberal-arts degrees right now into a world that feels inhospitable and a job market that definitely belongs to the buyer.  Morale is a huge problem for a lot of us, and I'd like to share some of the discoveries I've made about how to keep one's chin up in the face of joblessness.

It's common to harp on the importance of imposing your own structure onto your time, so that you don’t become that TV-and-beer caricature of the unemployed.  What's seldom mentioned is that it's almost impossible to stick to a schedule that you know you just pulled out of your ass and that has pretty much nothing hinging upon it. 

Equally as important as self-discipline, then, is the ability to forgive yourself and just get back onto the discipline-horse when you do inevitably fall off.  Because making no effort is even more painful than making a futile one, and even if your goals do turn out to be unobtainable and your efforts really are worthless, at least you're not just kind of hanging around.  I know that this is a very cynical line of reasoning, but I've found it helpful to remember that even if my efforts are for naught, I'm still making myself happier by trying.

I've also found it necessary to learn how to convince myself of things that may or may not be actually true, in order to avoid sadness.  Things I have decided to believe include:

-If you try hard enough, something good will come of it eventually.

-The situation is temporary.

-The knowledge that I gained in college is valuable and I'm better for having gained it.

Using this mantra, I've managed to lurch back into productivity many times.

I've also put together some dos and don'ts that I've found helpful…

DO:

-Vary your routine.  Take your laptop to a coffee shop and write cover letters there.  Go to a friend's house for a movie.  Generally just get out of the house.

-Exercise.  It will burn off some of your existential doubt.

-Keep in touch with people who support you.  Seek out positive, productive people and have coffee with them.

-Find stupid little ways to cheer yourself up.  Sometimes I buy myself flowers from the supermarket and put them in my room for no reason.  This is a very, very lame thing to do.  Do these things anyway and laugh at yourself.

-Get up in the morning.  Take a shower.  Put on real clothes.

-Every time you spend money, write it down in a table.  This will give you a realistic picture of where you need to cut costs, and it will also encourage you to spend less.

-Find something to take care of.  I recommend plants over dysfunctional romantic partners, but that's a judgment call.

-Drink tea.  Yerba mate and green tea are particularly good because they provide caffeine without being hard on your stomach or making you feel tweeky. 

-Keep on keepin' on.

DON'T:

-Sink into a pit of despair.

-Allow yourself to remain in a pit of despair if you do find yourself inside of one.

-Start fucking watching Lost.

-Get angry with yourself when you don't reach your own goals or follow your personal rules.  You will fail sometimes and you have to just kind of keep going anyway.

-Drink too much.  It's easy since you never really have to get up the next day, but it will hurt both your soul and your wallet in the long run.

-Spend more than you can really afford to.  You should treat yourself every once in a  while to maintain morale, but it should be like a pint of ice cream every week, not a martini every hour and a half.

Of course, I really have no more authority on these matters than any other out-of-work college graduate, and I would love to hear any thoughts from my peers about how best to move forward.  We gotta figure this thing out together.

SHMEAT

If they can make sheets of lab-grown sheep meat, couldn't they also culture human muscle tissue and theoretically sell human meat as food?  I mean, if they wanted to?  Is it fucked up that that's one of the first things I thought of when I heard about Shmeat?

These are the facts I know about Shmeat:

-The technology is the same as that used to produce human skin for grafts.

-Because the process replicates muscle cells but doesn’t tell them where to go or what to do when they get there, they naturally grow into a kind of structureless, wiggly flesh-blob instead of the sinewy, textured, succulent turn-on that we usually think of as "meat."

-Scientists are working to overcome this obstacle by growing muscle tissue on an edible polymer scaffold that will lend a more familiar texture to the food.

-This still doesn't take into consideration the fact that the meat we eat is actually a conglomeration of many different kinds of cells, including fat and blood.

-Apparently Shmeat tastes like ass for that reason.

-I'd thought that Shmeat was created from stem cells, but apparently it isn't.  It's simply made by encouraging muscle cells to replicate by placing them in a nutrient-rich solution similar to blood. 

-In theory, there's no limit to the amount of shmeat that can be grown from a single sample. 

-If they made too much, though, and it somehow developed consciousness, and took revenge on humanity, it could be a pretty cool B horror movie and I would watch it.

-PETA loves Shmeat and has offered a million-dollar reward to anyone who can devise a commercially-viable (i.e. tasty and cheap) chicken-based version.


Now for the speculative parts…

-There's some debate on whether the mass acceptance of Shmeat would be good or bad for the environment.  The industrial farming of livestock takes huge amounts of land, energy, and food.  Over 40% of the grain grown worldwide is fed to livestock, so if we could get rid of livestock, we would have that much more grain to feed hungry humans.  On the other hand, the kind of mass-scale laboratory operation that would be needed to produce mass volumes of Shmeat would take a lot of energy to maintain.

-Again: couldn't they make Human Shmeat?  Do I finally get to know what people taste like?  Is some religious group going to get all pissy about this?

-Is there some spiritual aspect of consuming the flesh of another beast that would be missing if our meat was never alive?

-For that matter, is Shmeat alive?  It's self-replicating.  It doesn’t feel pain since it has no nerves, but it is self-replicating and I'm pretty sure, if I remember 8th grade science correctly, that that's the definition of life.  So eating Shmeat might still be killing, even if it's painless killing.


Would you eat Shmeat?
I would eat Shmeat.

On the Open Space Punk Panel

Thankfully, the irony of hosting an academic-style panel discussion about punk rock was not lost on the directors of Open Space.  Before the speakers took their seats, four bottles of Fiji water stood in formation on top of the conference table, bam-bam-bam-bam, and the amps played the kind of elegant classical music usually airing at fundraising events and dads' company parties – tongues were subtly, but intentionally, in cheeks.

It's important to note this, because before the event there had been a lot of pooh-poohing and stance-taking surrounding to the whole idea.  Before the discussion began, there were a lot of (lighthearted) jokes being made about pouring the Fiji water onto the amps and throwing beer cans at the speakers in order to save punk from the stranglehold of academic discourse.  Many in the audience were wary, and I have to admit that I myself had calculated about a 50-50 chance of the whole thing being really annoying, so to see that the hosts were acknowledging this by making fun of themselves (just a little bit) was an immediate good sign. 

The three speakers were Alec MacKaye, influential force in the '80s D.C. hardcore scene and member of Untouchables and The Faith; Matt Papich, founder of Wildfire Wildfire and member of Ecstatic Sunshine and also, I am now convinced, some kind of guru; and Peter Quinn, founding member of Creative Capitalism and respected supporter of the Baltimore arts community.

Both the moderator, Amy Peterson, and Peter prefaced their introductions to themselves by saying that they didn’t feel qualified to really be speaking on punk and that they weren't entirely sure why they'd been asked, which seemed fitting given the usual reluctance to self-identify as punk and then to have to back it up with the laundry-list of bands, dates, and ideological points.  It seemed an appropriate opening.

Only three "official" questions got asked before the discussion started to include audience commentary and response-to-response, and as speakers hashed out ideas and molded thoughts a few threads began to emerge.  While the actual conversation jumped from topic to topic, often back- or sidetracking, a couple of points kept coming up, and it's these that I want to explore.

The first question, not surprisingly, was "what is punk?"  Among other things, punk was described as a reaction to mainstream culture – it arose in direct opposition to, not in spite of, the perceived hollowness and hypocrisy of capitalism.  While this could be said of any counter-culture movement (hence "counter"-culture, duh), punk is different because it has a sense of humor and self-mockery built into itself, something that may also help explain its longevity.  While it's pretty tempting to deny this description outright by recollecting every self-righteous, liberty-spiked, decidedly not-self-mocking asshole we knew in high school, it does seem easier to imagine a self-deprecating punk than, say, a self-deprecating hippie.  This may explain why punk has had so much staying power: instead of being weakened by a new generation's mockery, punk can absorb and celebrate it. 

Of course, once anything mocks itself enough you have to start wondering where the essence and substance of it lies; if the whole thing is just a joke, then what's the point at all?  Maybe it isn’t that punk can become endlessly self-deprecating, maybe it's that the definition of "punk" is fluid enough that the word can mean whatever is required of it by any given generation.  Matt suggested that the word "punk" is useful not in spite of its constantly fluctuating nature, but because of it.

Alec pointed out that punk, from the start, was supposed to devour itself.  Destruction seemed built into the movement from its inception, the way that a young rebel will tattoo his knuckles as insurance against a briefcase-and-bowtie adulthood – mature, seasoned punk should be an oxymoron, and intentionally so.  Which brings us to a question that was shocking in its absence: is punk dead?  Nobody went there during the discussion, but from the general tone and the way things were phrased, the base assumption seemed to be that punk is alive and well, just…different.  I dunno.  Personally, I decided that punk was dead sometime around 10th grade, but I was only ever in it for the fashion and the cigarettes, anyway.  I have no authority here.  I guess that calling yourself a Punk today is like calling yourself a Hippie: it does mean something in a contemporary context, it just doesn't mean what it used to, and, at the end of the day, it usually just means that you're an asshole.

But I digress.  Adam Lempel asked an interesting question at one point that, regretfully, was never really answered: does punk have to exist in opposition to something?  What would happen if a majority of Americans declared themselves punks and started eating each other's leftovers?  Does punk define itself by what it's not, or is it something self-sustaining that could exist in any world?  Does it defeat itself by winning?  Alec suggested at one point that punk has stayed alive for so long because it taps into something elemental and universal, some human undercurrent that exists with or without a system to bash.  The jury is still out.

One thing everyone agreed on is that punk allows you to do things that you otherwise couldn't.  You don't have to know how to play the bass to play the bass.  You don't have to have money to look fly or have a good time.  In this way, punk is freeing. 

 Punk also frees you to have open chunks of time.  Suddenly you aren't expected to have a schedule filled with money-making strategies and career-advancement moves.  All three panelists relayed memories of, as Alec put it, "standing around somewhere until someone told us not to, then going somewhere else and standing there for a while instead."  Matt referred to "wasting time as an ethos."  This ability to do nothing creates "open spaces" in your personal space and time, which you can fill in however you want – or not.  These open spaces are undervalued in our culture, where ambition and achievement take precedent over pretty much everything else, and an appreciation of downtime is rarely differentiated from straight laziness.

One of the most evocative topics was a mixture of "why doesn't your generation [i.e. my generation] do anything/how is punk different now/what happens next?"  Peter broached the subject by asking the audience, which was mostly MICA students, why we never do anything to change the world.  Obviously the audience wasn't really having this, and he "clarified" by saying "no, no, I don’t mean you guys, I mean the rest of your generation," which infuriated me so much that I almost cramped my face from eyebrow-cocking.  He distinguished the "creative class" in the room from the "rest of Generation Y," as though being a MICA student automatically makes you more socially-aware and proactive.  It's the same kind of binary thinking that the two older panelists expressed over and over in their descriptions of punk as an oppositional force.  They seemed to view the world as Us vs. Them, Us being the creative artsy-fartsy alterna-crew; Them being the square, Ugg-wearing, TV-brainwashed dumb masses of dumbasses.  This kind of mentality seems old-fashioned, and Peter, after giving it more thought, came to the same conclusion himself.

Everyone ended up agreeing that in this day and age, you're allowed to combine any roles and traits that you want.  In fact, if you limit yourself to one subculture – if, say, you only listen to hardcore, and only wear hardcore clothes, and only go to hardcore shows, and refuse to participate in any activity that isn't hardcore – you're seen as narrow-minded and immature.  This seemed to be the major difference between Gen X and Gen Y conceptions of punk: to the old folks, punk is about being anti; to the kids, punk is just one more element to mix into your philosophical and stylistic repertoire. 

Of course, that begs the question of whether you're allowed to be just a little bit punk.  Isn’t part of the idea that if you don't go balls-to-the-wall with it, then you're just a poser?  And once punk becomes so ill-defined, does the word really connote anything at all?

At the end of the day, I think punk is probably dead.  And if it's already dead, then academic discussion isn’t going to make it any deader.  That's what I would say to the many people who refused to attend the discussion on principle. 

Selling Out Vs. Not.

I just graduated from art college and I find myself torn between what I'm simplistically choosing to view as two discrete lifestyles.  These are those.

I've had discussions; I know I'm not alone on this.

I also know that this is an extremely streamlined view of a convoluted and multi-forked post-college flowchart.  And really, at this point it's the least of my worries.  In practical terms, my choices at this point are the Keep Trying To Get a Job As a Dishwasher Strategy vs. the Drink 40s On The Couch Strategy.  But still, there's this leftover 15-year-old shithead smoking old cigarette butts in the back of my brain, and every time I think about trying for a real career with a real salary and responsibilities, she stabs her ember into my gray matter and calls me a sellout cunt. 

With that in mind, and largely for my own edification, I'm going to delineate the pros and cons of selling out vs. not.

Life-Living Strategy #1:  The Rock and Roll

PROS: 
These people tend to be much more fun to be around.  People are more accepting, more laid-back, more DOWN.  People initially see you as a potential friend, not a potential threat.

You get to be confident in the knowledge that you, too, are DOWN, and no one, no matter what, can take downness away from you.

There's a sense of connection with the underlying drives; people aren’t denying their darker, more Dionysian impulses and trying to front like they're healthy and wholesome (which no one actually is).

You can pretty much do whatever you want, because your job tasks are immediate, not project-based - you can dip out as long as you put in two weeks' notice, and also, whatever form of employment you have – serving, bartending, retail – it's something you can find work in no matter where you go.  So you're free.  Want to leave?  You can leave.  Go with God.

The ability to be drunk on the metro at like 2PM and have it be a good joke, not a sign of illness.

Good stories.

This sense of holding up some kind of noble tradition, like you're carrying on some greater work of Ginsberg and Iggy Pop and "all the strange rock-and-rollers."  I know this sounds incredibly stupid, but I do think that there's a real sense of community among weird art-faggy musician-type fuck-ups.

Getting to feel like a badass.  Isn't that why you got into it in the first place?  Yes, it is.

Laughter.  There's way more laughter.

FUCK IT.

CONS: 
POOR.

This world is also full of insipid asses.  And the asses of the alternative world are so, so, so much more fucking irritating than the asses of the mainstream, because they have these added components of self-consciousness and self-righteousness, simultaneously.  They want to make a lot of 9/11 jokes because anything anti-America is so goddamn funny.  They want to get hammered and embarrass themselves, because they don’t know the difference between a good time and a shitshow.  They shave upside-down crosses into their hair.  They can't give you an actual considered rationale behind any of these decisions.

Also, you end up dealing with a lot of hypocrites: anarchists who collect food stamps, people who claim to hate the government while receiving government benefits, because for some unspecified reason they don't think that they should have to work.  This lifestyle is kind of a dumping-ground for a lot of lazy people who try to hide their laziness behind ill-considered ideology.

Never being taken seriously.

The ever-present possibility of waking up one day and realizing that you're 40 years old and you have no money and no future and no friends, because everyone but you has grown up and abandoned the lifestyle.  And all of a sudden you realize that you're a has-been and you can't do anything about it because you missed your window to accumulate marketable skills, and now you're just a old fart, and probably also an alcoholic.

The risk of becoming a drug addict.

Again, POOR.

Life-Living Strategy #2:  The Sell-Out

PROS:  Dollars dollars dollars!  And you can use dollars for WHATEVER YOU WANT.  You can travel all over the world.  You can pop champagne and look fly all the time.  You can give things to your friends and the people you love.  You can laugh at people.  You can have revenge simply by being successful.  "Success," as it's generally understood, is the subtlest and most effective form of revenge.

If you play it right, you can get away with pretty much anything because you look respectable.  I loved that part in season one of Mad Men where he's stoned with all the hippies and there are cops outside the apartment, and the hippies tell him "you can't go out there, the hall is full of cops," and he's like "no, YOU can't."  Because he's in nice clothes, and he knows how to act, he can just stroll right past the authorities, blazed out of his skull, and they all tip their hats to him.  This is a wonderful kind of joke to be able to play.

You have the knowledge that if you suddenly disappeared off the face of the planet, someone other than a personal friend or lover would be affected.  You are a necessary component of something.  You make a real contribution to the world; you are NEEDED.  You are an integral part of something larger than yourself.

The soap never has pubes stuck to it.  There is always toilet paper.

CONS: 
There are probably just as many assholes in this world as there are in the service industry.  However, they're much subtler and more insidious.  They call you a dumb cunt with their minds instead of their mouths, so you don’t find out about it until months and months later.

Once you get a taste of money, will you really remain pure in your intentions with it?  If you claim that you don’t care about petty status symbols, that you think ostentation is silly, that you only want money so you can travel the world and contribute to causes, will you REALLY hold to that once the envy of others is on your tongue? Can you really hold on to your soul when no one around you sees any value in it, but they DO slather compliments on your new shoes and house?  Are you sure you won’t become materialistic and cynical?

Cynicism in general, actually.  I'm pretty sure that the white-collar world is rife with soulless, Machiavellian climbers, though I can't say for sure.  I make a personal point of not allowing myself to become bitter; if I live in a world with this much strategy, can I really expect myself to retain the belief in goodness and love that I've carefully protected from so much already?

The knowledge that you are a sell-out, and the scorn of those you used to align yourself with.

"Moderation."  Having a glass of wine with dinner, but refraining from binges.  Never allowing yourself to get out of control.  Remaining in full possession of your faculties.  Keeping your infatuations in perspective; never allowing yourself to go ga-ga over some boy without knowing with certainty that he's willing to commit to you.  ISN'T THAT THE MOST ANNOYING FUCKING THING?  I think moderation is just the most annoying fucking thing.

Being surrounded by squares all the time.  Boring, boring squares.

Movstaches

One of my favorites is when institutions replace all the U's in their marble-engraved titles with V's, so it looks like Latin.  As in "mvsevm" or "pvblic library."

Also, when old translations from European languages use the plural "moustaches."  "His moustaches were full and well-groomed, as was the fashion in his set."

Fetus Dreams?

HOLD THE PHONE.  I'm looking at an anti-abortion billboard right now, and it's telling me that babies can dream before they're born.  Excuse me?  What the fuck could a fetus dream about?  Pink and mushy?  How would a fetus even be able to tell whether it was dreaming or awake?

I'm not trying to say that the billboard is lying, I’m sure that it's based on evidence that fetus' brainwaves sometimes match the brainwaves of dreaming adults.  I'm not saying that fetuses don't dream.  I'm just genuinely curious about their dreams. 

Can you be said to dream if you're not even aware of existing?  Can you dream if you've never had any experiences?  Is it possible that fetuses have some kind of deep memory that can emerge in dreams, like a universal-consciousness sense of things experienced by ancestors?  I know some people believe that certain memories are embedded in our genes, that we must remember some kind of primitive experience or we wouldn't have any instincts.  Are fetuses dreaming about running away from saber-tooth tigers?  Do they have emotions in their dreams?  Emotions are definitely embedded in the human brain, things like fear and joy and rage are universal and hard-wired, so it isn’t too far-fetched to think that maybe fetuses can experience them.  Even if their dreams have no images, can they include feelings?  Can a fetus experience fear in a dream, even though it's never been afraid of anything while "awake" (whatever "awake" means in the womb)?

This is blowing my mind.

Bainbridge Part I: Power and the Powerful

Every winter, the power goes out at my parents' house for at least three days.  Sometimes the failure makes some kind of sense – maybe it's really windy out and a branch falls on a line – but more often it seems to come completely out of nowhere, as though someone threw a bottle and an insult at a substation and it just got sulky.  Explanations vary for specific outages, but I did recently discover that there are several factors contributing to the overall jankiness of the system.  I write about them not because I consider the inner workings of Puget Sound Energy particularly fascinating, but because the whole story is so ridiculously revealing of what my hometown is all about.

I've been meaning to write about Bainbridge Island – the small town where I spent the formative years of my rather malformed youth – for some time.  It's a crazy place, and a discussion of it opens up all variety of worm-cans: class, racism, political correctness, the general idea of the soul of a place and what that concept really means (and doesn't mean).  I am not an impartial observer.  I hated growing up here in a totally unconsidered, gut-based way, and I still loathe it upon my return every Christmas.  For my own edification, I need to figure out why.  This essay is the first in what will become a series exploring the culture of Bainbridge Island; I am here introducing you to the town through this story of PSE and the various parties that have been cockblocking it for decades.

The energy company wants to update the system and install new substations to accommodate the growing population.  They have been wanting to do this for a long time.  However, every time they have a town meeting to discuss their proposed improvements, a small group of people who apparently have nothing better to do (like, say, work really hard) shows up and raises the same three objections.  In most places, their objections would be duly noted and then promptly ignored – after all, the half-baked complaints of a small group are less important than the town-wide need for reliable electricity – but somehow on Bainbridge things are different.  They are different because people are rich.  I don’t know exactly how the politics operate here, but I do know that the ability of this small collective to effectively fight the power company has to do with their money (which equals influence, equals power… I've never had enough of any of these to know how the equation operates, but the math seems to work whether I understand it or not).  These people show up and they raise the following objections:

1.  Power lines and substations are ugly.  This is the same reason that the island has such crappy cell coverage: no one wants to have to look at a cell tower.  No one wants to have to look at a bunch of wires.  They want power, they want reception, but the sacrifice of an unobstructed trees-and-water view is too great.  People move here from the city because it's so pretty, so naturey, so untainted (to the eye, in any event).  If we wanted to look at metal shit and not trees, we would have just stayed in the city, right? 

2.  We wouldn’t have to build all these ugly substations if everyone would just conserve.  Bainbridge is the most self-consciously "green" (jesus god I hate that adjective) place I have ever seen.  Green-itude will become an essay in itself later, but I do want to point out here the basic hypocrisy of this argument.  The people saying these things by in large live in huge houses with big, beautiful, uninsulated picture windows, and green, sprawling, water-intensive lawns, yet they're urging everyone to conscientiously conserve their electricity so that we don’t have to spoil the view – and, of course, because conserving is just the right thing to do.  This fashionable environmentalism is one of the things that bothers me most about this town.

3.  The electromagnetic radiation given off by power lines and substations is harmful.  The problem with this argument is that it isn’t true.  Scientists have been investigating the issue for decades, and no persuasive evidence has been found to support the claim that this type of electromagnetic radiation is bad for you.  As far as I can tell, people believe this falsehood because "electromagnetic radiation" contains the word "radiation," which is a really scary word, because we all know about Chernobyl, right?  What no one seems to bother learning is that the electromagnetic radiation given off by power lines is not harmful, because its frequency is too low to ionize atoms.  Non-ionizing radiation is safe because the ionization of your body's atoms is what causes the damage.  This is not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of scientific ignorance. 

Ignorance is one thing, but once you combine it with money and power you start entering dangerous territory.  These are the three reasons that emergency shelters have to be set up in local churches every winter to warm those who can't afford to install generators (and those who can afford them do): power lines are ugly, sustainability sounds good, and I think that radiation is probably icky.  The egos involved here are mind-boggling – thinking that you're more qualified to speak on the power system than the damn power company is?  And having enough influence to make your ignorant voice not only heard, but obeyed?  Who are these people, and why don’t they have anything else to worry about?