Zero Sum Mind

George Carlin Hivemind

2008-06-24T09:29:00.004-06:00

The Internet, the blogosphere, the mainstream media - THE HIVEMIND - all of it delivered a diverse and interesting selection of perspectives yesterday.

You can stroll into Fark, Digg, Metafilter, Linkswarm...anywhere, and find a massive thread with bummed out fans trading insights.

There were easily 10,000 or so articles in the MSM and more in the alternative and Web-only media. Here are a few I thought were neat. If you know of something that should be noted, let me know.

IRONY ALERT: Note how almost every one of these stories censors his material - especially the holy seven: SHIT, PISS, FUCK, CUNT, COCKSUCKER, MOTHERFUCKER and TITS.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Time
How George Carlin changed comedy forever

New York Times
Short and sweet column

New York Times
Jerry Seinfeld guest column

CNN
Observations from some other comedians

Los Angeles Times
Retrospective

The Independent
Exploration of censorship and Carlin's role

Newsweek
Kevin Smith remembers Carlin

Houston Chronicle
Carlin was essential listening for multiple generations

Reason
The cunning linguist

Huffington Post
Genius, hardworking motherfucker

Blogs/Cyberculture

Psychology Today
Carlin's Last Interview

Metafilter
Collective list of everyone's favorite quotes

The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Speech
They are holding a special conference

Boing Boing
Announcement with links to 1978 Supreme Court case and more

Avant Trash
Uses of the seven dirty words as a memorial - mentions Patton Oswalt's take on this

The Feed
I like this one, because it comes from the youngest generation of fans

Enjoy those porkchops, George

2008-06-23T06:48:00.004-06:00

I am deeply saddened by the loss of George Carlin.

He was the source, the wellspring from which all of modern comedy worth listening to originated.

If you start to rant about something banal or aggressively stupid, or you begin to lament the decline of western civilization, you will often find yourself retreading in the places George already explored on stage.

Most comedians are forced to find new ways of presenting the subject matter, knowing they can't top Carlin, they have to find separate but equal angles on the same material.

Even George had to come up with a new way to do his live show about a decade ago - over the last thirty years he had pretty much summed up everything - and, his new act was experimental and almost disturbingly strange.

Throughout my life, he has always been out there, pessimistic and cynical and wonderful, slapping sense into all of us.

My wife and I saw him live one time. It was great, the crowd loved him. We loved him too.

I feel like my favorite uncle is dead. He will be missed.

Link to AP story about his passing
Link to George Carlin's official Web site
Link to Wikipedia entry on George Carlin

Speared

2008-06-06T07:25:00.006-06:00

If I was less idealistic, I'd be in jail right now.

A few months ago I was propositioned by a major American publication to head out to the backwoods of Mississippi and harass Jamie Lynn Spears.

I didn't know shit about Brittany Spears or her sister at the time other than what one could glean from ten seconds here and five seconds there on television as I flipped channels.

I learned the pop star's sister, who was attempting to dethrone Hanna Montana as the next whoretart role model for pre-teens, was pregnant. Her boyfriend wasn't part of the celebrity world, just a pipe fitter and working man's son.

So, when I was asked to blend into Jamie Lynn's small town, knock on doors in the dirt road community where his parents live and visit a long list of former school mates - all with camera in tow just in case, I retched.

Still, I begrudgingly accepted the job because it was offered to me through the recommendations of former professors who I didn't want to disappoint. It had some career-boosting allure as well.

I got all my gear together, all my research, all my maps and lists, and headed out.

About thirty minutes into my drive I just couldn't shake the sense that everything I was doing was counter to who I believed myself to be, to what I wanted to become.

I turned around and called the editor. He was astounded and pissed. He told me I had to agree not to tell anyone who sent me on the mission.

I've never felt bad about my decision, although for me it certainly cut off an entire chain of possibilities.

But then, yesterday, I read an article about how another gentleman was offered the same task, accepted, and was arrested for harassing those people out there in Liberty, Miss.

This swirl of pride, relief and amusement is a new emotional stew for me - tastes great.

Return

2008-04-02T11:59:00.005-06:00

So, I took a sabbatical, a break, a repose from one aspect of myself, and in that time I absorbed some left hooks from the world of journalism and the real world beyond it.

This blog wouldn't have been worth reading, so it sat here untouched for a while. I plan to completely overhaul this blog in the coming weeks so it will be leaner, easier to navigate and built to play nice with all browsers.

While I was away, I tried a hallucinogenic entheogen called salvia divinorum. It is, I fear for a short while, completely legal.

What follows are two accounts of my time with the plant:

Downtown, there is a shoddy old gas station a block from the city high school. It looks used in the way general stores do in old photographs. People are just as likely to walk away from the pumps with gas cans in tow as they are to pull away in a car. The bleached signage advertises products long failed.

Inside, the Frito-Lay man was working his PDA and restocking his wares. Within, the store felt like yellowed teeth. The contrast between the sagging doors, the dust-bearing cinder-block walls and the sharp, focus-group-researched logos and packaging felt like a little one liner, the kind you nod at rather than laugh.

I was on my way to work, and I knew this diversion would make me late. I approached the shopkeep with gusto.

"The man at the head shop told me you sell salvia."

The old man behind the counter wore a lot of brown; more clothes than body, he responded to me as if we were talking about an overflowing toilet.

"Salvia?"

I nodded.

"Yeah." His voice trailed off.

A short wall near the counter divided the beef jerky and corn chips from a small area where a man with stringy blond hair and a deeply-stained NASCAR T-shirt read the fine print on a urine test cleanser kit.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"In my office," the clerk said.

He seemed exhausted with our exchange, so he went through the potencies and the prices before I could prompt him. I told him what I wanted, and money changed hands. I left for work with a gram of salvia in my laptop bag.

The day passed.

As the sun burrowed into the treeline, my wife and I prepared. She would be the sitter; I would be the explorer, the psychonaut.

She sat in a papasan chair across from my location on the couch. I bought a short, tiny water pipe and a butane lighter. The chemical I was trying to get into my brain vaporizes at a much higher temperature than THC or nicotine, only a white-hot flame will do.

I started with a few crumbles. The salvia looked and smelled like tea leaves ready for steeping. I smoked and waited, increasing the dosage each time.

At half-a-bowl, the effects began to come on. Language has its limits, but with the increased range provided by metaphors I can try to put you there.

It comes on like molasses rushing in from the sides, enveloping you and warming your organs. My head evaporated, it seemed, as if I were a candle, wafting into the rafters. Then, the feelings subsided.

As I increased the dosage, I hovered near the edge of hallucination. This process felt like masturbation, coming close to the edge and backing down over and over again. I could feel where the border was in the way I would if I were feeling around in the dark for a doorway. The edge, the amount I would need to smoke to get the desired effect, had been established.

So, I filled the bowl to the top and smoked it all.

Before I could exhale, the neurons in my retina betrayed me, and the electromagnetic fields were no longer being rendered into the familiar signals I had learned to interpret. Objects began to parallax scroll, shifting planes slid into depths and shallows.

I told my wife it had begun, and I fell into the couch.

Everything in my living room white or cream-colored, the walls, floors and ceilings, began to alternate into reds, greens and blues like the beating cilia of a jellyfish bathed in diver's lights. Everything in the room not of this color became continents of the Earth viewed from space. My wife was still my wife, but in a bowl floating down river rapids. She waved to me, and hysterical laughter blasted out.

I tried to communicate, but I felt as if it was garbage. My wife assured me later it was clean and coherent, but in the experience I was certain I had lost the ability to speak.

Then, metacognitions began to be affected. I had the sensation I was with many people. Imagine being on stage at the Apollo, but with your eyes closed. I couldn't see anyone save my wife, but I had the distinct impression I was not alone. Then, my brain started to write a story around that impossibility the same way it will in sleep as the pons fires random signals into the ether. I felt as though there were three planes of existence, one a cartoon world where I was tripping, another where my wife was inserted digitally like a live-action character in an animated film, and a third made up of an invisible audience watching the whole affair.

I felt it, it was as real as the keyboard under my fingers right now. As a biological system generating consciousness ordered into a sense of self, I had escaped into a new set of rules and reassembled order from chaos in a novel way. It was fun.

Before I could take notice, I was as sober as the moment I purchased the drug. It released me - the after effects were mild, then they were gone. I felt like I had touched the infinite and wanted a cigarette.

My wife and I talked for a while, then I went inside for another round.

This time, I fished out some cheap art prints, not wanting the walls and floors to dominate my experience. I sat between the bed and the wall with a Japanese woodcut propped up in front of me - a print of ladies walking in a snowy wood.

The smoke went in. The feeling rushed on. I exhaled.

The print did the same parallax shift as before. The layers of the image moving like panes of layered glass. I moved my hand, seeking tracers, but my entire arm formed a solid mass along the path of my movement. I laughed at this and tried to communicate, but this time the concept of language seemed far too complex to attempt. I abandoned it. I swung my arm around behind my head and placed it in my lap. Then I looked behind me, and sure enough, an arch of my arm flesh was suspended in the air.

I noted how odd this was, considering how I didn't actually see my arm make the shape. Within the experience I had the thought this was more than just my vision being affected. The thought processes leading to understanding my body's position in space had been so throughly altered, I believed my body had actually left behind remnants.

In the painting, the snowy trees became the veins and spongy white tissues of an organism, then I vaulted into space and saw them as snowy tundra cut by black rivers.

The room was gone. I was a child looking into a mirror above a set of drawers. My mother looked at me through the mirror, but it was not my actual mother, it was an proxy, the mother of the child I had become.

The room returned, and I was back in space looking at snowy plains. The plains became smoke. Billowing smoke from a distance, or pillars of creation from a telescope, I wanted to touch them. When I tried, my hand touched the plastic covering the print, and the trip ended. I was released. Again, I felt fruity for a minute, then I was sober.

I replaced the Japanese print with a Monet, equally cheap. I turned it on its side so it would be unfamiliar and abstract.

I immediately refilled the bowl and took three hits, rendering all of the contents into ash.

I don't subscribe to, nor do I have an unhealthy affinity for anything New Age, Aztec or made to appear like dolphins or rainbows.

Still, what happened next went beyond my scope of understanding.

I exhaled and looked into the Monet. It became a cornfield at noon.

Before me, an older man and his son rode a tractor through the field. They were moving in front of me, below me and to the right, and they were headed in my direction, but I was keeping distance in the sky, maintaining the same speed. There was no room, no bed - nothing but the vision and my role in it. I was who I became, there was no knowledge or memory of the me who smoked the salvia.

Who was I? Have you ever had the sensation in a dream you knew something about the plot or the strangers in the dream without any need for explanation? Say, you dream you are a chef. You may never see yourself in a mirror or prepare any food, but you have the understanding you are a chef and proceed without second guessing this dream knowledge.

I was a sun god.

I floated above the farmer and his son, soaring with my back turned to the direction I was flying, keeping pace with them as they moved through their corn field. My arms and legs were spread like Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, and I was translating the power and the light of the sun into the stalks. I watched over the humans, and swelled with pride for their work and empathy for their struggle. I loved them, and I loved their love for the corn. I bestowed my gifts upon them through my role as a sun god who influenced the growth of the plants they toiled over. I felt the unbroken chain from the work they did to the people who would eat the corn and never meet them, and I felt myself giving over my power all the way down that chain to the metabolic functions of people in the future.

All of this was without question and as real as any waking experience I've ever had. My memory of it is not like the memory of a dream where I can objectively see the dream world as thin and amusing. It is solid as any memory from that day. I slept and had dreams after this, and they seem like memories of dreams. This did not.

Suddenly, the corn and the farmers returned to the confines of the painting. Then, the corn/painting fanned open into the shape of a seashell, and I had the urge to tell my wife what happened. Laughter set in as I started putting together a potential sentence.

The corn fanned out again, this time on a horizontal plane that traced the path I intended to take to get to my wife who sat behind me on the bed. I followed the path, and looked into her eyes.

Then, another metacognition conundrum began. I realized how difficult it was to speak and split into another self. Again, this was just a feeling, nothing visual. This second self found the first self amusing, so I split again. This third self tried to tell my wife about the second self's amusement over the first self's attempt to explain. Then, I felt the urge to split again and realized this was more of a chore than a fun/enlightening experience. I abandoned it and returned to the painting which was now the inner lining of a pulsating uterus made of paint clouds in a pool of water. The clouds were immense - the size of cities. I had the intense urge to return to my wife and explain what was happening. The corn, the three selves explaining, the clouds of paint, all of this escaped into a beige sphere and floated above me. I leaped (in my mind only) and grabbed it. My feet left the ground, and I turned to my wife.

"The person who tried to talk to you earlier was not the true me," I said; she nodded. "This is the real me."

She said my arm was up as if holding on to something.

I let go of the sphere, and the trip ended. Within a few minutes I was as sober as I am now.

Afterward, I called some people and talked about it for a while. I got sleepy as the night aged on, and I went to sleep. There were no side effects, no hangover-like effects. Nothing. Just the experiences and my perfect memory of them.

ACCOUNT TWO

We drove out toward the campground for about half an hour.

Our part of the country is saturated by flora; in the summer and spring it is a great green garden of pine needles and kudzu.

In the winter, those same needles accumulate as short dunes of brown and yellow. Everywhere the trees go naked or orange or tan,while the lawns remain the color of old glass Coke bottles. The fields resist and sway, stalwart and olive.

A campground in such a place seems unnecessary, but people with land tend to be closed-minded relatives or territorial militants. So, we traveled late into the night to a place where we could start a fire and sit near a lake.

I had obtained the most powerful dose of salvia yet. So high, boasted the package, I doubted the authenticity of it. Two companions sat with me – my wife and a fellow psychonaut who had taken the drug with me several times already.

We chatted for a while, grabbing fistfuls of pine needles from the ground, spreading our fingers like rakes until we had a woolly mess of it under the logs. We foraged for pine cones and added them.

When we had provoked the fire to a satisfying height and brilliance, we prepared the materials. We worked out the details of who would do what. We waited for a warden to drive by, checked to see if anyone was on the lake, and moved on.

My friend offered to go first.

He took a long drag as I applied the flame. Smoke rolled through the cheap water pipe for about five seconds, and then he motioned. I took it from him.

He leaned back. I told him ten seconds had gone by. He emitted a neutral grunt. For the next seven minutes, he giggled and guffawed. When he was able to talk, he told us he had been in a city of rotund, slick-skinned humanoids for at least a day. He smoked again later, but when he returned he had little to say; explanation, he offered, would be pointless.

I packed the bowl, and drew the chemicals from it with flame.

After I was sober, I realized I had not ingested enough to get past the edge. Salvia after a light puff gives you a tilted, anesthetized feeling in your scalp and mouth. You feel fruity and euphoric, but you can tell you aren’t going to spiral into the infinite.

I was at the cusp. The fire, my friends, the slivers of tree and ground catching light, all of it wisped away, curling and bending, evaporating and shimmering in pastels. I had the intense intuition my wife and my friend where somehow conspiring to get me fucked up, despite knowing exactly what had just happened. It was an errant emotion, some monkey thought revived by the drug. But, I still knew where I was and who I was, so I knew it was going to release me soon.

I smoked a cigarette and talked about what was happening until the syrupy feeling subsided.

I knew from experimenting you could smoke again as soon you come down to go even farther out than the initial trip, so, as I smoked my cigarette, I packed the bowl.

This time, I supped slow and steady, drawing in as much as my lungs could bear, paused, then did it again, then held it in and handed off my paraphernalia.

I leaned back my head, closed my eyes, and the image of what I last saw remained suspended in my mind.

From here forward, my description gives no justice to the experience. It is like trying to explain what Beethoven sounds like by drawing in the sand with a stick.

Think of the random flitters of thought and image passing through your mind all the time. For instance, say you went to the bank early in the morning, then, at lunch, while having a conversation, you recall for a microsecond the experience of being at the bank. Maybe you see the bank, or see the transaction, or remember the clothes of the person in front of you – some arbitrary nothing. You casually and effortlessly delete the thought and move on, unaware of the act.

The image of the fire and the ground, my shoes and the trees, all of this hovered in my mind just as it appeared before I closed my eyes. The usually unconscious deletion of the image malfunctioned.

This fascinated me, the sudden awareness of the mechanisms of thought pruning. This is when I had a sensation, an intuition, of an entity. This entity was both me and not me.

Imagine a many-sided prism, you turn it one way and see blue, another way and see purple, another way and see gold. My usual self was one facet of such a prism.

Put another way, imagine a waterfall, or a curtain, or a veil, or a fog, and behind this obfuscation hides a mountain of being. An outcrop juts just beyond the mountain, the only portion visible outside the barrier, and that outcrop is the person who smoked the salvia.

This sensation was instantaneous, and it served to explain how I could be suddenly aware of thought pruning. It was as if I had taken a step back in the processing tree of my mind, and upon seeing some of the autonomic cognitions, was overwhelmed by both the architecture and the epiphany. The entity concept was soothing, albeit in retrospect it seems silly.

The entity/multi-self communicated to me how I must consciously change the form of the hovering image to remove it. With autopilot off, I had to take control.

So, I willed it into another image; during the transition, the fabric of the image became an infinite throng of ciliated light ribbons, hair-thin. I’ve seen these every time I’ve done salvia.

As it swirled and pulsated, it became a ‘50s era suburb with picket fences and lawnmowers. Also, the image was stuck sideways, turned 90 degrees clockwise.

The entity/multi-self seemed amused, as if this was a lesson. I had created the opposite of what I wanted from the experience, the iconic metaphor for banality, and it wasn’t even upright.

At this point in the experience, I had a realization if I could “see” thought pruning, then I might also be able to “see” the essence of the image. With my eyes closed, there was no data being converted at the retina, and the image of the suburb was not from memory. I wanted to zoom in and see it for what it really was. I wanted to see the hair-thin, cycling color ribbons for what they were. Somehow, this seemed possible and logical, like getting so close to a painting it becomes only daubs of dried paint.

To explain this, I need to posit another situation. Imagine you want to write a sentence referencing itself giving you a running tally of how many words are contained in the sentence so far, but it begins the tally before the explanation, and each time it explains itself it must begin at the end of the last explanation.

Jack is a big, brown dog; this sentence contains six words, well actually it contains eleven words, well now it contains seventeen, well now it contains…

Such a sentence can never finish because each explanation adds more to be explained.

Zooming in on the hair-thin, cycling color ribbons presented the same problem. As I imagined getting closer to them, more of them appeared to create the image of getting closer. It was an infinite recursion of thinking about zooming into them, and though I felt like I was getting closer, the image was being distorted by my attempt.

So, still tripping, I felt as though I had uncovered another secret. The ciliated color ribbons were some fundamental element of constructed visuals, stripped down. I would chalk them up to pure invention, but I see them every time. I can’t trust drug-induced epiphanies, but I know there is gold to be mined from these phenomena.

I could feel my body again, feel my persona. I roused and looked at my wife, who was ogling me. She said, “Did you just have a conversation with Socrates or something?”

Hearing real words, words that suggested something insane, was too much to bear. I said as much and returned to the tail end of my experience with eyes closed. This time, far more aware of my situation, I imagined taking the fire and molding it into a ball of embers. I imagined scooping it up, shaping it into a sphere and holding it. I told myself to remember, because it seemed poignant in the moment.

The trip ended; the anesthetized fruity feeling remained; it subsided. I lit a cigarette and talked about what I experienced.

They told me while under I said “but of course” and gestured. My wife’s question was encouraged by the act.

Later, I reached out and pinched at the air. Later, I brought my hands together and moved my fingers as if rifling through papers or counting money. Later, I said, “You must not forget. You must not forget.”

We doused the fire and packed our chairs and supplies. I put on a mixed CD of music from Quentin Tarantino films and punched into the ruins of the night.

IF YOU LIKED THIS ENTRY, YOU SHOULD ALSO READ THESE:

Flowers for Bill
Ruminations on Bill Hicks

The Value of Chewing Slowly
My 10 days with Hurricane Katrina

No One's Martyr
The life and death of Pat Tillman

I Am A Man
The state of the modern male

Fumbling for a Metaphor
My first flying lesson

1337 Katzorz
The sociological underpinning of funny cat pictures

Der Händedrücke Teaser

2008-03-23T22:37:00.000-06:00

My Mom's Turnip Greens

2007-12-05T15:12:00.000-06:00

In this, the fifth episode of "My Mom's Cooking," we learn how to prepare a mess of greens.

Greens with cornbread are the quintessential Southern/Soul food. Metaphors abound.

You see, cooking greens is the result of African slave influences mixed with American Indian influences applied to available ingredients. Poor people ate turnip and collard greens, and they still do.

What are they? Well, think of a big, fat, white carrot with its green, leafy portion attached. Now, imagine throwing it all in a pot and boiling it down.

Greens come in two varieties, turnip and collard. Collards are like lettuce. Turnips are the above ground portion of a root. For some reason, Southerners tend to call turnip greens "greens," and they call collard greens, "collards."

No word rolls off the Southern tongue with as much bent inward twang and beauty as "collards." Every dip and twitch of a mouth from the South is represented there.

If you didn't grow up eating greens, you may never acquire a taste. They are old South, and I have more friends who hate them than not. My wife hates both the taste and the texture. "It's like eating dirty socks," she says.

People used to eat what they could get their hands on, what was cheap, what was hearty and grew well. Greens are a nutritionally bounty too. Consider Poke Salad.

But, yeah, cooked straight with no seasoning, they might make you retch, and because they require a great deal of added flavors, every person's recipe is unique. My mother's greens (a simple recipe) taste completely different than my grandmother's (a complex recipe), or a local restaurant's or a friend's. One bite, and I can tell you who they came from.

So, with that, here you go:

Sinterklaas

2007-12-03T16:11:00.000-06:00

There is guy in a Santa suit at my local Wal-Mart. He says "Happy Holidays" while ringing a bell, presumably both out of some commitment to stay out of jail by completing several hours of community service.

A lady walked up to him with her daughter by her side and asked, "Why can't you say Merry Christmas?"

He responded with a nervous, "Ho, Ho, Ho." She moved along, Christmas ruined for the three of them.

In Mississippi, this is big deal again. Fueled by the overwhelming Fox News mentality of the region. Everyone seems to think outside, secular interests are ruining "The Reason for the Season" as holy rollers dutifully shop for DVDs and firearms, eyes glazed over above their sparkly Christmas Tree adorned sweaters.

I wish I could grab them one by one and explain how Santa Claus is a recent invention, as is the Christmas tradition.

Santa Claus started as a mispronunciation of the Dutch word, Sinterklaas, which in turn is a contracted form of Sint Nicolaas. Thus, he comes to our culture from the original Dutch folklore, which is rooted in Norse Mythology - not Christianity.

The Christmas tradition of a red-suited, gin-blossomed, diabetes-ridden Santa who lives at the North Pole and shimmys down chimneys is a convoluted, and mostly American idea.

He appears in many cultures in many forms, some of them ridiculously gaudy and loud, but the versions you see at Wal-Mart arose in America in the late 1800s. It was cinched when Coca-Cola started using him as a marketing tool.

Imagine a future where Ronald McDonald symbolizes Easter, egah!

Originally, he was a derivative of Odin, a Norse god who carried around a bag to capture naughty children, had little ravens as helpers, and rode an eight-legged flying white horse. Which, I must say, is fucking rad.

Over time, this guy became Sint Nicolaas, and the fellow with the red suit became de Kerstman, or the Christmas Man. So, the Dutch have two large white male Christmas mascots, each giving off a whiskey and peppermint vibe.

Our version of Santa is an offshoot of the man of Dutch folklore who became Father Christmas somewhere in the 1600s in England. He was a combination of the old image of Sinterklaas and a Pagan tradition surrounding a goat called the julebukk. The julebukk was a woodland creature who demanded gifts from children near the end of the year. Creepy, but hey, that's how Pagans kick it.

Before the 1823 poem that start's "Twas the night before Christmas," American folklore saw Santa as a fat Dutch sailor in a green suit, which sounds like someone children should avoid, much less offer cookies. It wasn't until 1885 he appeared as the guy with a beard, a hat, a red suit and black boots.

By the time Coca-Cola started using Santa in ads, the red suit was still one of many you might see Santa wearing. But, the ad campaign was so successful, and the colors so associated with Coke, the iconic image stuck.

His image, the workshop, the north pole, the reindeer, all of that came together in the 1920s.

So, you see, our version of Santa is a rather recent invention.

The celebration of Christ's Mass on Dec. 25 originated as an attempt to convert Germanic Pagans to Christianity. The festival and celebration was originally called Geol, the origin of that most funky of Christmas words - Yule.

Before then, Christians celebrated the birth of Christ on Jan. 6.

For about 100 years, many Christians really hated Santa Claus and the Christmas holiday because they felt it took away from the religious aspects of the time, and Protestants in the 1500s, as well as the Puritans in America during the 1600s, banned it. That's right, they canceled Christmas.

Modern Christmas is far more secular thanks to Roosevelt setting the date for Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November in 1939 in an effort to boost the economy by creating an end-of-the-year holiday shopping season. What a douche.

Since then, by design, Christmas has become more and more about consumerism than anything holy.

So, you add all this up, and saying "Happy Holidays" seems pretty inconsequential.

I imagine a future where, like Halloween, nothing will remain but the commercialized version of the holiday, and Christians will begin to dislike it to the point of banning its practice like they did in the 1500s-1600s.

More cider for me.

Internet Ressurected the Video Star

2007-11-01T11:58:00.000-06:00

There is a new commercial circulating where J-Lo performs about 30 seconds of her new music video in promotion of herself, her album and Rhapsody.com.

It irked me, though I'm not sure why. I mean, damn Jenny from the block, at least pretend your video isn't just an advertisement. Lie to me. (What am I saying? She does Pepsi commercials with Beyonce. She IS a product.)

A decade or so ago, all of my friends lamented the loss of music on Music Television, you know, MTV?

We had not yet begun to revile the state of popular music or come to the conclusion all members of younger generations were douche nozzles.

We were too callow to realize the whole time we had been watching commercials for products in between commercials for albums in between commercials for the network and its interests. MTV was one big marketing clusterfuck, and we just sat there.

We could have never foreseen a world where music videos could be summoned up at a whim, bending to our will instead of that of some distant programming executive shaking hands with record companies.

The immediacy and convenience of the Internet has a tendency to eat memories of a harder time, so to speak, a time when you needed patience and a VCR.

Back then, we kept asking each other, "What the hell, man? What is up with all these game shows and shit?"

Alas, MTV, the beacon of our youth, slowly became a channel devoted to pop culture instead of pop music. Jenny McCarthy rode in on a pale horse and poured a vile of Crystal Pepsi on the network.

Those great shows - "Unplugged," "120 minutes," "Headbanger's Ball" - all gone. Do yourself a favor and search Youtube for these shows. Lots of gems are out there ready to be mined.

Before then, for years, we lingered through all the saccharine mall jingles to watch a be-flanneled Alice in Chains toss their unkempt locks, or see Snoop Dogg musing about his earnings, it was a good time.

I grew up on the grunge, metal and rock alternative of the early 1990s. Despite all that anti-authoritarian, "fuck you man, I'm never selling out" attitude, they all made videos. Everybody watched videos; everybody talked about videos.

Music videos may be my favorite form of visual art. I'm a big fan of movie trailers too, and often prefer them to actual feature-length films. I buy DVDs of music videos and keep a collection on my computer.

Despite their commercial nature and intention, they're often a proving ground for genius artists to create something to enhance other genius artists. When they are good, they are really good.

Since VH1 and MTV changed formats, and we all grew up, videos are far less of a mental monolith in all our heads. MTV2, VH1 Classic and others still offer videos, but recently I have been cruising the Web for repositories. Thankfully there are many, and I share some with you now.

VH1 Classic

MTV

Yahoo Music Videos

AOL Music Videos

Google Music Videos

Oh, yeah, YouTube is pretty good too, especially for rare live performances.

Mondegreens, Snowclones and Eggcorns

2007-10-31T13:10:00.000-06:00

Seomoz.org has a great entry on mondegreens, snowclones and eggcorns, which included a tip of the hat to my analysis of the lolcats phenomenon.

These three terms are absolutely fascinating.

Mondegreens appear when people routinely hear the wrong words in a popular phrase or song, like "excuse me while I kiss this guy" instead of "excuse me while I kiss the sky."

Over time, they can overtake the original phrase and become the best-known version.

Snowclones are phrases known so well, you can substitute certain words in the phrase as a nod to others in the know, like "In X no one can her you Y."

Eggcorns are new words created from a mispronunciation or misunderstanding of an original term, like "shoe-in."

According to shor at Seomoz,

"Mondegreens, snowclones, and eggcorns are a growing force in online writing. If you take a look at the structure of headlines at Digg or Reddit, you'll see some familiar wordplay on the front page. You'll find these linguistic occurrences are popular on satirical websites like Fark and SomethingAwful, in cartoons and TV comedies, on the radio and in movies. Custodians of grammar may frown at the decay of 'proper English', but the laziness of online writers is a boon for observing the hyper-evolution of our language."

Check out the full article here.

Also:

Snoclones Database
Eggcorn Database
Archive of Misheard Lyrics

Morning Glory

2007-09-26T08:11:00.000-06:00

Sheryll Betts is still trying to deal with the wad of toilet paper left behind by someone she may never meet. It is 5:45 a.m. on a Friday, a payday.

If she can get a pair of urinals ready for the onslaught of students soon to fill the Cook Library she can move on to the library computer lab, which she says is her daily challenge thanks to the debris from a Starbucks next door. After that, she can go to lunch, scrub a mile of glass windows and go home with her check.

For now, the problem is a men's restroom, typically a disaster by the time she gets to work around 5 a.m. Someone has stuffed the urinals high with tissue from a nearby stall.

"Who knows why," she says, smiling, sweat on her brow. She's been working as a custodian with the University of Southern Mississippi for three years, so the time to complain is long over. She just scrubs.

Betts is one of about 100 custodians at Southern Miss. The number fluctuates, as some people do not hang around for long, and some stay at it for decades. They are part of the more than 200 people who are clustered together as the Southern Miss Physical Plant, a group of blue-collar men and women - plumbers, carpenters, electricians, mechanics, gardeners - who keep the ivory tower standing by getting dirty when they work.

The custodians meet across from Southern Miss in a building separated from campus by Fourth Street. Each morning, Gordy Powell, the custodial services supervisor, begins preparing for them at 4 a.m.

"We make every attempt to keep out of view," Powell says of his staff, a group he manages with a saintly kindness and a gentle voice. His attempts are successful, as most of the students and faculty who fill the university's trashcans and toilets barely offer his crew a glance throughout the day.

Change of career

It is a position becoming of Powell, a 52-year-old former counselor. He earned his master's degree at Southern Miss years ago and worked in the psychology business until he says he "burned out on it, burned to a crisp."

Turning his back on the white-collar world six years ago, Powell found himself scrubbing toilets in the same buildings where he once took notes. Eventually, he worked his way up to supervisor, a job he loves because he has "an allergic reaction to grandiosity."

He refers to his employees as "my babies" as he makes his rounds just before 7 a.m. to inspect their efforts. He talks to them about their families and their problems in between scrutinizing a broken hand dryer and wiping a finger along the floor to judge the work of the night shift.

As he walks through a few of the 86 buildings under his responsibility, Powell points into hallways and classrooms remembering notable incidents. Besides leaving behind soft drinks and candy wrappers, people sometimes urinate and defecate in classrooms and in trashcans.

"People do all sorts of passive aggressive things in an attempt to protest the university or a professor," Powell says. "They don't realize they are just punishing some sweet lady. The administration will never even know about it."

One of those ladies might be Mary Griffin, 45, who has been working as a custodian for 21 years and has her eye on state retirement.

Until then, she will continue to be responsible not only for her staff of 12 as a foreman, but also helping direct the cleanup after Southern Miss football home games to ensure Sunday churchgoers are free from eyesores.

In that effort, for the last eight years she has directed the cadets of Youth Challenge, a program for troubled youth and high school drop-outs based at Camp Shelby.

"I love the job," Griffin says, although she shares everyone's dread of getting up at 3 a.m. and the seasonal cleanup work at the stadium. "I get here early and get off early, so I have time to do things I want to after work."

Service to students

As the first joggers appear in the headlights of Powell's golf cart, as he finishes his daily inspection, he points to Kennard Washington hall explaining how there are people spraying inside for fleas.

"We also handle pest control," Powell says. "As long as people keep feeding and watering the wild cats, the fleas will keep coming back, and we'll get complaints, and we'll keep spraying."

Southern Miss Custodial Services is totally tuition-funded, a fact Powell and his foremen consider when they go to work. They see what they do as a service to students.

Faculty and staff come second, always. Still, each morning, complaints and grievances are waiting, and they rarely come from students.

According to Powell's boss, Physical Plant Director Rusty Postlewate, part of being invisible is never being thanked until something goes wrong or someone needs a special favor.

"Most of what we do is something that's taken for granted," says Postlewate, a stately man with a crisp shirt and tie, a man who could be mistaken for a general or a congressman, which speaks to his history in the Army Corps of Engineers.

He manages those who replace lights and plant roses, vacuum classrooms and paint walls.

"People come everyday assuming the lights are going to be on, the place is going to be comfortable, and things are going to work. That's the expectation. That's the norm. A great day for me is a day with no complaints. You're not going to get compliments."

Postlewate equates his responsibilities with those of the school's computer technicians, cafeteria workers and residence hall housekeepers. If they are doing their jobs well, they go unnoticed.

According to Postlewate, he lives in two worlds. As a supervisor, he must understand the work and direct the physical labor of 200 employees.

As an administrator, he must manage the physical plant's $8 million budget behind a desk littered with paperwork.

"I got a note this morning. They want to have the fountain run pink water for Breast Cancer Awareness Week," Postlewate says, noting he already has plumbers investigating how to do so without permanently staining the fountain in front of the Administration Building. "They want to have a pink pig race, so they want to have an area cordoned off. We get calls for everything, but we'll get it pink."

Flowers for Bill

2007-09-15T19:15:00.000-06:00

I owe a great deal to late, great Bill Hicks.

Hicks was a stand-up comic, but only when it was easier to consider him as such instead of what he truly was - an angry philosopher, a common man who had touched the eternal and who wanted so much more from life than is usually possible. It pained him more often than not to just walk among us.

He was lonely, and it seemed he carried the loneliness of our entire species with him.

I have a painting of Bill Hicks I purchased from an artist in London. Lately, as the season changes, and with it the vulnerability of my heart, I've been noticing it, pondering it.

Every once in a while, I go on a Bill Hicks binge. I pull out all my mp3s of his stand-up, all my bootlegs, tapes and DVDs, and go through them all again. Sometimes I even laugh despite having long since committed most of his sets to memory.

When I was 18, I was turned on to Hicks through the band, Tool. I had already been a fan of subversive stand-ups, but something about Hicks punched me in the stomach.

Since that time, I've learned over the years to expect certain personal revelations to later be discovered as established paradigms. You know the feeling, as a kid you think you're the first person to consider perhaps not everyone sees the same colors you do, but because we all use the same words no one ever realizes it, or you think, hey, maybe time is an illusion, then you wander into physics and find an assload of theories on the topic complete with impossible to understand equations and 50-year-old books saying the same thing.

You feel validated and naive at the same time, a state I've learned is not so bad to be in as long as you don't stand still.

With Hicks, my own misanthropic, angry urges were validated, uplifted, made whole. Then, he took me further out, and revealed to me my own ignorance. It was a glorious age to feel this way about yourself, and I was forever changed.

As I've gotten closer to the age Hicks was when he died of pancreatic cancer, his aura of mysticism has diminished. I've come to realize the source of much of his ranting. Noam Chomsky and Terrance McKenna, Timothy Leary and Carl Jung - the illuminated few I too have devoured and re-devoured with healthy skepticism and a pinch of salt.

At first, his allure was the connection he offered, a connection to concepts and sensibilities about reality I thought I was alone in, or had yet to consider.

Now, as with a great book you return to with new found wisdom, Hicks offers something else. He too was a Southern man of humble origins; he too yearned for meaning, and he never compromised his convictions or doused his flame.

This is what he offers to me now - a reaffirmation of what is important in life. When I have grown soft and forgotten how much is worth my attention, how much is worth my righteous indignation, how much is worth my anger and my passion, Bill slaps me in the face and puts out a cigarette on my forehead. Bill reminds me of the difference between what matters and what is empty.

I recommend you do your own research. Download some of his work. He is astonishingly relevant, and there are too few who carry on in his name.

His grave is not far from my home. My wife and I have placed flowers at his there before. I think it may be time to refresh them.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING MAY OFFEND YOU

The Value of Chewing Slowly

2007-08-31T09:14:00.002-06:00

It's been two years since Katrina, so I thought this would be an appropriate post. I wrote this two months after the storm, and haven't written anything about it since.

After Hurricane Katrina evaporated, after the sun disappeared behind the hills, we ventured out.

We packed into a small car, five of us, and slowly navigated our razed suburban streets until we emerged into the city. A few neighbors with chainsaws had cleared narrow paths while we collected ourselves earlier in the day.

We moved through Hattiesburg as if diving along a coral reef. There were no lights other than an occasional passing car. Our child-wide eyes would flick to movement or damage as our high beams washed across broken buildings, their roofs peeled back like sardine cans. We pointed; we gasped.

It was like browsing a museum with a magnifying glass, and as we headed back home it was easy to imagine hundreds of bodies strewn across the mall parking lot or upturned cars perched on twisted McDonald's signs.

We had a sense, after making a few rounds in the city and returning, all of Mississippi must have looked like Hiroshima after the bomb.

Our frenetic preparations seemed distant once we unloaded from the car and lit a kerosene lamp inside our spared home.

My wife, in-laws and I had been preparing for Hurricane Katrina for a day or so, the fear slowly building as we put tape on the windows and stocked up on food and water. We picked up what could easily fly and gathered flashlights. We did a million things around the clock with the Weather Channel barking at us and flashing the terrible red and green pinwheel a little closer every 15 minutes. I was almost thankful when the television expired.

We were all shaken and tense when the first branches began to snap and shoot into the sky. When the tree in the backyard spiraled open like a time-lapsed flower, and the shingles started peppering the lawn, we darted into the hallway and stayed there for the next three hours.

I felt sore afterward, worn out from fear.

Not the kind of fear you get when you are pulled over and you know you're busted and are going to go to jail. That's some sort of logical, cognitive fear.

And not the kind of fear you get when you think your dad is having a heart attack. That's some sort of electric, slippery fear.

And not the kind of fear you get when you are 8-years-old and you know you've been caught with a porn magazine in the school library. That's some sort of judicial, repugnant fear.

Not the kind of fear you get when it's raining and the guy next to you on the highway lurches into your lane, causing you to slam on the breaks so fast you fishtail, weaving backwards through traffic till you settle in the median. That's some sort of sharp, fierce fear that leaves your adrenaline tapped.

And it certainly isn't the fear hanging on you for days as you wait for your girlfriend to start her period. That's some sort of barren, empty fear.

While I was in the hallway, the slivers of light under the doors to the bedrooms flickering, the walls breathing, the roof clattering, the wind bellowing, things cracking and crashing outside, the windows screeching, I felt the kind of fear that asks you to submit.

This is the kind of fear that asks you if you are satisfied with what you've done with your time. This is a fear radiating from the reptilian portions of your brain, but you have time to consider it, to hold it in your hand and examine it. It permeates you, but also delivers a sort of calm - probably endorphins - because your body is telling you this is the end. There will be no consequences, no one else to consider, nothing to ponder after this. You are going to die, and there are no words worth fumbling for.

I suppose this is terror, but stretched for so long you are somehow comforted by the sensation of the hunger juices cascading along the insides of your belly.

I kept my hand under the door to our bedroom and felt the air pressure alternate. Sometimes it would suck at my hairs; sometimes it would push into the room, always cold. I kept trying to explain it away with all the science I could remember.

But, eventually, I just focused on the sensation. I was alive, and I was processing information from my skin's receptors, maintaining muscle tone to hold myself up, remembering and experiencing and cross referencing and sustaining homeostasis as much as possible with my heart thumping and my fight or flight system exhausted.

I focused on being a living thing.

I know it's probably lame, but I thought of people in the towers, in the tsunami, in war.

I didn't join their club, but I had been there and spent the afternoon. I brushed against the same dread they felt when they could no longer descend the stairs or could get to no higher ground, the same fear one feels when you think the next mortar might have your name on it.

I thought I was going to die for about 10 minutes, and only the people who read this sentence will ever know that.

Once we returned from our excursion, we were eager to get some sort of information after all the insanity of the day. With 90 percent of the roads blocked and no power anywhere for a hundred miles, we felt as though we needed to hear something official.

We fished an old television out of a closet and hooked it up to a generator. After fumbling with the antennae for a few minutes, something started to emerge behind the static.

Someone was on a couch next to someone at a desk. Everyone gathered around, inching closer as the snowy reception threw shadows across the room. Then I froze.

I recognized the voice and the hair, my stomached rattled against my ribs. It was Conan O'Brien.

We waited for news, but none came. We sat through commercials for cars and soap and other things from the real world.

I watched a steak sizzle on the screen and looked at the faces of my in-laws. They drooped and leaned as I asked them if I could turn it off. We agreed it wasn't worth the gas.

We had no source of information other than a distant radio station for about two or three days. Trees were collapsed like accordions in the neighbor's walls, ants were getting in our food and our dog somehow hung itself on its makeshift rope leash. Meanwhile, all the television was running were sitcoms.

Things quickly degenerated. The home was intact, but the foundation of our little group was not. We knew we couldn't hold out much longer after hearing gunshots as someone in the neighborhood tried to frighten off suspected looters. Everyone was arguing and sweating and worrying. We decided it would be best if we parted. My wife's 10-month-old nephew, three sisters (and a fiancé), mother and stepfather headed north.

My wife and I decided to travel west instead, to my parent's home in Sumrall. It was more rural, less hysterical. Our in-laws begged us to come with them to fresh water and electricity. Somehow, after three days of screaming, it didn't seem appealing.

I come from a farming family. I'm among the first generation to have never manned a mule-driven plow. They bought clothes from the profits made from growing cotton and cucumbers. They grew all their vegetables and built all their additions to home and farm.

When I was old enough to get to know my grandparents, they had already given in to the microwave, the riding lawnmower and the grocery store; but they still grew and canned most of their own food.

My family had long since abandoned that way of life when I was growing up. We microwaved and ate out, and we bought our vegetables and meats. We used Tupperware instead of mason jars.

But, during my childhood, everyone still enjoyed the fresh and pure results of my grandparents' labor, and that was what my grandparents wanted. They saved everything they grew and distributed it to their children and grandchildren.

Without them, I often feel the loss of something real and honest. Like the man who prefers the feel of work at the end of simple tool to the lazy, noisy convenience of a weed-eater, I find I prefer the food I received at my grandparent's table to the grocery store versions.

I have tried to eat greens and black-eyed peas from restaurants, but they are not very good. I have tried to make red-eye gravy and biscuits, but apparently I never paid much attention to the details.

Right before Katrina, I had given in to the fact I would never again eat the kind of food my grandmother used to cook.

But, a few months before, my dad found a pack of collard greens my grandmother cooked and froze before she died. He had thawed them out and brought them to a boil one afternoon before I came to visit him.

We sat together and ate the greens, grown by her and my grandfather, cooked the way she had perfected over the course of her lifetime and returned to us from the other side by the freezer in the utility room.

I wish hadn't done it. It was awful and strange to stumble into such territory.

Tasting her food somehow reanimated her spirit. I wanted to chew slowly, savor every second as my teeth squeezed out her essence. But, instead, it felt unnatural. I had the sense I was doing something perverse.

It did not bother my dad. He was happy to commune with his mother one more time, and he ended up eating the entire pot over the course of the afternoon.

I was able to experience the life of my grandparents at the dinner table; the old ways spooned out onto a plate and laid out before me.

Until Katrina, I thought my brief interlude with the old ways would be the last of those sorts of memories.

On the fourth day after Katrina we stepped out of the car in Sumrall and were struck with the sweet smell of frying sausage.

My father, a lifetime electrician, had set up a contraption that converted power from old car batteries into a power strip. Despite this, the ice in the deep freeze was still melting.

With electric grills and ovens, my family had been cooking everything they could pull out, some of the food stored for years.

We sat down and ate our first cooked food in days, and we chewed it slowly.

That afternoon, my uncle came over with several whole chickens and some corn on the cob from his own freezer. We feasted together. We talked. We laughed. When we went outside, a cool breeze billowed my shirt away from my ripe belly. I felt as if I had come out of a long sleep, or been cured of an illness. I couldn't put my finger on why, but I had confidence I could last as long as it took to get our power back.

The night of the storm, a friend of mine left his home in the drizzling aftermath to join a crew of men with chainsaws, trucks and elbow grease who methodically cut and cleared the roads around Sumrall. It took them 10 hours to get to the highway, and when it was over, they cheered a little bit, said goodbye and disappeared from each others' lives. I figure this happened on a thousand roads and back streets before the official responders could come and do anything.

Most days we made at least one trip to find gas. Most of the gas stations did nothing, but one guy in Sumrall - Jack Aultman - wired up a generator to his gas pumps and filled up the emergency and police vehicles in the city before offering his gas to everyone in town.

After gas lines started stretching over hills, hooligans started to siphon gas tanks and snatch gas cans. We left Hattiesburg to stay with my parents in the long wait for power to get away from such insanity. While there, we kept our eyes and ears open at night, coming to the window whenever the dogs were agitated.

I saw signs everywhere that read "You loot, we shoot." I realized once this was over all those people, the ones willing to kill and the ones willing to take from others in need would be shuffled into the same deck.

Neighbors started checking on each other, gathering for cookouts and passing information about the location of ice, water and gas. Our families, once spread out and distant, congealed to support each other.

My friend Blake, the one who cleared a path to the highway, came over every afternoon, and we sat on my parent's porch. We lazed and debated when and what would happen next.

"It's not so hot this evening, huh?" he said.

"No."

"Makes you wonder, huh?"

"What's that?"

"How people used to live like this. How did they stand it?"

Somehow, around the seventh day, a neighbor got us some tomatoes, and since some of the bread was already growing mold, we made sandwiches.

Biting into a fresh tomato sandwich, with or without tomato juice running down the forearm, is as close as mortals can ever hope to get to kissing the cheek of God.

I've seen them prepared in a variety of ways. My family used two slices of white bread, a healthy dollop of mayonnaise and sometimes a little salt. After Katrina, the mayonnaise was stored in a cooler covered with ice from Oloh Baptist Church .

My grandfather loved tomato sandwiches so much that during the summer he rarely ate anything else. He still had a microwave with the words "radar range" written across the handle, and you had to turn a dial in order to set the time on it. Still, he went right out and bought a brand new Salad Shooter after he saw the first commercial for it thinking it would make perfect slices of tomato. I remember he got steaming mad once he realized it couldn't handle a whole tomato.

Our olfactory bulbs are part of a direct circuit from our nose into the brain, so smell is the most rapid, most powerful trigger for memory. If I eat a tomato raw, I am transported into my grandfather's backyard, and through squinting child eyes I can see him approaching his workbench with an armload from the garden.

If I eat boiled peanuts, even the awful ones that come from a bag, I'll think of my grandmother's pebbled surface pressure cooker hopping on the stove and all of my family tearing into the pot. Some people would get bowls and eat until there was nothing left but shells, others would use napkins. My favorite was to take a handful outside where the hulls could be tossed carelessly into the grass. Sometimes, a peanut would be so cooked that one could chew it up and swallow it shell and all. I can't put my finger on why that makes me smile so deeply I have to take a breath, but I'm happy it does.

I can be moved to memories of my mother shelling peas and snapping beans just by being in the frozen food section and catching a glimpse of a pack of frozen butterbeans, although I much prefer traveling to that memory via an old metal washtub.

Before we had to dump the freezers and begin eating out of cans, my father told us about biscuits with cream skimmed from fresh milk and cane syrup. He paused for a moment to truly take the memory in with his lids half closed, then he lamented on how that sort of food is gone forever.

After all the food was gone, and we stopped cooking, it seemed to stay hot inside and out.

My wife and I sat for long periods stretched out, saying nothing. We watched out the window listening to insects and pine trees. Without any sort of predictable schedule, we did a lot of sitting and lying on the floor waiting it out like a fever.

Outside that afternoon, Blake lit a cigarette.

"Have you noticed how much more focused you become without all the distractions?"

"Yeah. There's nothing to think about other than surviving."

"I know. It's like you're just alive. You're just aware of existing."

Somewhere in all of this we were able to get a small television working and watched the NBC nightly news two times. We just wanted to know of something beyond our community. The coverage centered on New Orleans , and until this point all we had heard were rumors.

After seeing the people wading in water up their chests and waving signs on rooftops, some of our despair washed away. When the news ended without making mention of Mississippi , it trickled back in.

On the tenth day, after returning from Hattiesburg to check on our home, we saw the streetlight glowing next to my parent's house.

The air was on full-blast. The television was squawking. The refrigerator was humming. We took hot showers.

Our neighbors retreated to their living rooms once the cable flickered back to life. Restaurant sales soared, as did Blockbuster's rentals.

Four months later, I saw a commercial on our local television station for a DVD of their entire week-long coverage. They've edited together all of the reports and news desk footage into a DVD they are selling for $24.95.

For months, all around our city there were little tents set up selling Katrina T-Shirts and homemade DVDs about the storm. Several books have emerged as well, the kind you can write in a week. There are still Katrina-themed bumper stickers and key chains in local gas stations.

It is only every once in a while I think about Katrina now, despite vowing I would never take anything for granted again. I laugh at Conan O'Brien every time I watch his show.

Occasionally, it will just pop into my head without warning while I take a hot shower or eat a home-cooked meal. I think about those long ten days sometimes when I turn on the light to read, or get online to check my email, and I know that one day I'll tell my children about Katrina.

They'll be complaining about something banal, and I'll unleash a Katrina story on them in the same way my parents did with Camille. I'll say, "Your great uncle slept outside in a rocking chair with a sheet over him to avoid the mosquitoes and the heat, but sometimes the stench of dead chicken houses would keep him up." Or, I'll say, "Your grandfather and I went around the neighborhood delivering Powerade and baby formula, but we could never get rid of the big box of maxi pads the church gave us." Or, I'll say. "Our friend Blake saw a seagull walking in his yard right after the hurricane passed over him."

I will not mind if they find it difficult to understand, or if they even care. I'll make them tomato sandwiches if they develop a taste for them, and I'll be sure to make them chew their food slowly.

IF YOU LIKED THIS ENTRY, YOU SHOULD ALSO READ THESE:

Flowers for Bill
Reflections on Bill Hicks

No One's Martyr
The life and death of Pat Tillman

I Am A Man
The state of the modern male

Fumbling for a Metaphor
My first flying lesson

1337 Katzorz
The sociological underpinning of funny cat pictures

Lol Street Journal

2007-08-28T18:20:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal finally published an article on the lolcats phenomenon in which I was quoted.

The author contacted me over a month ago, and we spoke for about half an hour on the subject.

The same issue features a great story on leetspeak as well.

I've been so deep into work, I didn't even notice it had hit the blogosphere. There must be 20 or so blogs chiming in on it already.

Link to article

Link to leetspeak article