Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

Lest it seem too much like self-congratulatory fawning over my own work, let me say this: I do not really think my last blog post was particularly great. I do think it was good, though I see some cracks, and clearly can see where someone might come across with a “bad” verdict. Still, I wanted to write a bit about what I meant by the whole thing, in spite of a distinct lack of comments on it (I honestly was expecting at least one or two).

To lead off: this story is decidedly fiction. It had a few elements to it that were inspired by real events, but for the most part it is fictitious. I wrote it while depressed, as that seems to be the only time remaining wherein I’m distinctly creative. I walled myself off and had Sigur Rós’s ( ) playing. Sigur Rós, like Massive Attack, has been a must-buy for me for years, all based on watching this haunting video at 4AM one night a long time ago.

I wasn’t really sure what I was planning on writing, at first. Actually, the first part I wrote was the bit in the third paragraph, at the well. As I was writing, I was taking periodic breaks to find quotes that were floating around in my head, and to either integrate them, use them as inspiration, or both. My initial search was for “The time has come to put away childish things.” It seems, based on my initial search, that I mashed up two quotes: one from Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter around the 11th stanza, and one from the Bible, specifically 1 Corinthians 13:11. Interestingly, I chose neither of those quotes, but ones relating to the 3rd stanza and 1 Corinthians 13:2.

I knew I had heard the quote from Corinthians before, but it didn’t occur to me until later where it was: wedding ceremonies. Strangely, I thought of it and immediately jumped to how appropriate it would be at a funeral (strangely I say, because I’ve been to many wedding where they’ve used it). I’ve got a friend who says weddings and funerals are the same thing. Of course he’s being incredibly sardonic, but it has some grain of truth (for the more religious/spiritual among us): in a way, it’s an ending of one life, and a beginning of another (presuming the presence of an afterlife, as one listening to scripture might do). And of course, for the humanist in me, being faithful is all well and good, but living and dying without love is pretty damn terrible.

The third and fourth quotes were somewhat more deliberate, as I put them in after writing at least half of the story, rather than at the beginning like the first two. I had just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” vol. 5, “A Game of You,” and the quote about wishing came from there. From what I could tell, it actually is an old saying, and most of the time isn’t quite as vulgar, but I liked the vulgarity because it seemed more like you’d expect a phrase like that to come. The last quote I looked for specifically as something to do with silence, cause that’s where I wanted to go with the last portion of the story. After passing up a quote from Shusaku Endo’s “Silence” because it hammered too heavily on the Christian aesthetic for my tastes, I settled on a quote from John Cage in reference to his piece 4’33″, which felt better as it had to do with the nature of silence (his idea was actually built into the narrative), and isn’t just something from a work titled “Silence.”

I said I wanted to critique my work a bit, so I’ll get to that, but I also realized another reason I was doing this was for attribution. Footnotes in the text seemed like they’d be gaudy, and so I didn’t include them. However, in fear of people not searching for these quotes and realizing who the original authors were, I felt compelled to discuss it, at some length. At any rate, onward:

As I said, I wrote the third paragraph first. The first I wrote specifically after the inclusion of the Lewis Carroll reference, and honestly it feels a bit forced, like I was leading into the quote and never quite delivered. The idea was that the person who died was just dead, and all the moping was pointless cause they were crying over an empty vessel. Unfortunately, that could not have been more obscured by the text and I think that ultimately the atheistic, cynical, and nihilistic existentialism in the first paragraph really jars when set against the more spiritual context of the scripture quotation later. Although, the narrator’s opinion could be argued to be changing by the time he’s at the bus stop, hence going to the well in the first place.

The other part that’s consistently bothered or delighted me, depending on my mood at the time, is the change in tense. For the first half, it’s in present tense. The second half is in past tense, and takes place over a longer span of time. The change in tense itself doesn’t bother me insomuch as the fact that it felt backwards: the first half occurs historically first, so if anything is past tense, it should be that. However, I keep waffling. It’s all after-the-fact reasoning, though. The real truth is that I just had tense trouble (going back and forth with present and past) throughout and it was easiest to resolve it the way I did, although…

I mention in the last paragraph a scene that didn’t occur anywhere else, with the drifting off in the first bus ride. The whole first half could just be a memory, and like all memory it’s faulty and only the parts that are important to you at the time tend to surface. When the narrator was cynical, all he could remember was his cynicism and the cause of it. When he was hopeful, he remembered something more positive. And, as the entire thing was a memory, he was narrating it like he was there. In that respect, the verb tense issue could be resolved, and I can pat myself on the back for something so deep that I didn’t necessarily mean to do in the first place.

Speaking of tense: I changed “could make it” to “can make it” to sound more hopeful. I’m not sure if it didn’t just sound like I’d forgotten the way I started the sentence. Instead of saying “could” like it’s past tense and has been proven wrong, I say “can” to show it’s still going on, thus: so far, so good. Whatever. The final word problem I had was in the first paragraph again, “tinnitus.” It’s a chronic ear-ringing condition that runs in my family, and it’s maddening. But, more than that, it broke up the narrative because someone might go “what the hell is that?” That would be a dead stop in the story right there as they pulled up Wikipedia, and would be kind of terrible.

Speaking of Wikipedia, I wanted it to be a timeless sort of story, set anywhere, so I avoided mentioning technology as much as possible. I’m not sure what I could have done about the bus stop, it just seemed like the right location, but clearly that places it sometime since the turn of the last century or so, and as such reduces the “timeless” quality (and not nearly every place has bus stops). Ah well.

At any rate, like I said, it wasn’t my best work to date, but I like it. I originally intended to post a follow-up as a comment on the post, but as you can see from the length of this post, that wasn’t particularly feasible, as it’s longer than the story itself. Hopefully it’s given you more clarity as to what I was thinking, or that it’ll help me to write better in the future. I’d really like to know what people think of these things, so if you’re reading, please do comment (either here or on the original post). I’ve got to approve posts when you do it the first time, but you’re “trusted” after that.

Everyone looks better in a black suit. I distinctly remember thinking it first this morning when getting ready, trying for about the 5th time to get the tie tied to the right length, and now it won’t get out of my head. It’s like a song that keeps repeating, but it’s just that thought, ringing like tinnitus, boiling my brain in its own juices. I look around at everyone else. There’s a lot of sniffling, and some dainty dabbing of eyes. No one’s broken out bawling, yet. I well up a bit, but it’s purely empathetic. I don’t feel anything at all. There’s nothing even in the box in front of us. It’s just a box.

The sea was wet as wet could be, The sands were dry as dry.

After the service, we’re waiting for the bus to come and take us back into town. We talk about something, hell, I don’t even bother to process what. “It was beautiful,” probably. Lip service. There’s probably a questioning of why these sorts of things happen. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a wishing well next to the little shop that had cropped up next to the bus stop. I’m not really thinking about suits anymore, but something I’d heard earlier.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

I’m standing by the well. The coin I’d flicked in flutters lazily to the bottom. Already the exact wording of the wish I’d thrown together and uttered under my breath is fading. I look at you. You look away.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.

I tossed the bags on the couch, thinking I’d unpack them later. We went about our routines. Nothing had changed. Like the tides, we still came and went, not noting the passing of one of our number as it rolled back out to the sea. We’re all crashing up on the shore, and we’re all getting dragged back out. Later on, when the tears finally came, I cried alone. You never even knew it had happened. I wonder if you did the same, but we haven’t talked.

What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.

A month later, I heard you. A little noise, a faint gasp. I looked at you and knew, and you reached out and put your hand on mine. The wind rustled outside, and I thought about that coin. I thought about the scripture that I’d heard, and the book I’d been reading on the way over when you’d fallen asleep and your head accidentally drifted onto my shoulder for a moment. I remembered, and I saw your eyes, and I believed once again that we can make it.

So, my blog went down for a few days. Dreamhost’s automatic scanning script detected something wrong, and disabled it. All I got in the error message was a warning to update all of my software/plugins (which everything was, except for two plugins that went out of date while the site was down), and to check the server-side code for malicious modifications. Despite WordPress being a giant hideous PHP beast, I went through it yesterday, and everything looked just about like I’d expect. I think it was triggered because I had an unencrypted/uncompressed backup copy in a subdirectory with a much older version of WordPress. I’m not sure if it was accessible, but I deleted it anyway to prevent future occurrences.

Moving on.

So, Gizmodo is apparently made up of jackasses. As anyone who’s read this is already well aware, they somehow acquired a next-generation iPhone prototype. As we all know, Apple’s ass is squeezed so tight even radio signals can’t get out, so it’s clear that Gizmodo having the device in the first place wasn’t very much on the up and up. That much was clear as soon as I read the original article.

However, they then upped their jack-assery by outing the Apple engineer whose phone it was. Now, don’t get me wrong: I have no doubt that eventually Apple was going to get their hardware back, and a simple serial number check would tell them to whom they gave it. His life at Apple, likely, was ended. That sucks for him, cause people who work at Apple tend to like it, in spite of the draconian restrictions on talking to anyone about what you do (I know people who work at NSA who are allowed to talk more about what they do for a living). Of course, that much was his own fault.

The problem for me, though, is that all of that is an internal Apple affair. In no way was it journalism to out a guy that was about to get canned. It might be a human-interest story about how evil Apple is that they’d fire someone for losing a prototype; but that might happen at any company, it’s just that much more certain at Apple. And that argument is even flawed, because if Gizmodo had simply been up front with Apple and returned the device, there might not have even been an issue. The human-interest argument, broken as it clearly is, also assumes that they were doing it for some sort of altruistic purpose.

They weren’t.

Reading through their repeated posts, it sounds like they’re trying to be funny while fingering the guy. Let me clue you in, Gizmodo: Apple isn’t going to say “well, clearly it’s this guy’s fault so we’ll just let it slide.” The whole thing reads like the following story: a nerdy guy is encouraged by his smooth-talking friends to steal his dad’s porno stash so they can all beat off in the tool shed later; the nerdy guy gets caught; the smooth-talking friends say, while snickering, “Well, shucks, Mr. Jobs, poor old Gray just made a mistake any of us could make, if we were trying to STEAL PORN MAGS TO BEAT OFF, golly goshes.” They act smugly about the entire affair, but the problem is that this wasn’t some small-time misunderstanding, and Steve Jobs doesn’t seem like the kindly hearted dad-next-door who doesn’t want to spank you with the full force of Johnny Law.

I do not like Apple’s methods of locking down all their research, the entire environment of their computers/devices, or much of anything about Apple (aside from the physical appearance and software stability of their computers, which you have to admit is sexy). However, it’s their prerogative. As a consumer, the only way you get to vote on this is with your dollars. They don’t do anything wrong legally by walling off their ecosystem, and it’s not a bout of journalistic prudence to crack open an illicitly-acquired prototype. It’s potential theft and destruction of property charges. And as much as I dislike Apple, and would relish the opportunity to know what the next iteration of their software/hardware does with out the “Apple Event” Steve Jobs/media circle jerk, it’s the way they do things, and the way they’re allowed to do things.

I’m not sure what the statutes will say about any of this legally, since the device has now been returned to Apple without invoking any law enforcement thus far. However, Apple has (to my estimation) the following possible recourses:

• Do Nothing – Unlikely, to me. They rely on extreme secrecy, and if a breach of that secrecy goes unpunished, other people will be willing to say “screw it” in the future.
• Cockblock Gizmodo – This seems almost a given. While other media outlets are invited to the Apple Events to get first cracks at live-blogging/tweeting new hardware and software releases, Gizmodo may have to sit outside in the rain and wait for scraps in the trash can left over from more favored pets. Note that the following options are still available in conjunction with this one.
• Red Tape – Assuming there’s nothing that Apple can eventually legally do, they can still squash Gizmodo with long-term legal problems, overmatching them with a legal team big enough to staff an aircraft carrier, as big corporations are known for having, tying them up until their funds completely dry up and they collapse.
• Lawsuit – Like the previous one, but successful: assuming they can prove that they lost R&D money, or eventual sales due to less impact at their eventually unveiling, or anything resulting from a yet-to-be-proven-illegal “transaction” (read: theft) of a prototype, that could land Gizmodo in spicy legal waters which could prove disastrous: from major fines all the way up to jail time.

I do not like being on Apple’s side on this. If it had stopped at “they published a story which damages Apple’s bottom line,” I’d wince and look away, feeling badly as they were eviscerated and/or annihilated at Cupertino’s hands; I might even write an objection at Apple’s shitty tactics (I did say I don’t like them). But the arrogance and flippant way in which they tossed the engineer’s name out there, while still protecting the guy who sold them the phone “as a source,” like they were some sort of legitimate news organization that just happened to act like guilty 15-year-olds, makes me hope for the worst.

I don’t often post about my musical tastes, as it leaves me ripe for criticism (“oh my god, you like this electro-trash?”). However, I haven’t posted recently and, in want of a more thought-out post, I’ll just list what has been occupying my ear canals for the last week or two. I mean, I added a whole category for it in my blog, might as well, right?

First off, I’ll admit readily that I’m a total mash-up whore. The idea that you can take two songs, sometimes even terrible songs on their own, and play them at the same time and come up with something awesome is just pretty neat to me. While it may seem  I’ve found a few I really like in the past, such as these two Ratatat/Michael Jackson ones (I can never figure out which I like more), this Eurythmics/Lady Gaga one (in spite of the quality issues), and this Gnarls Barkley/Avalanches mashup is just crazy awesome. I miss the original video I saw of that last one, which mashed up both songs’ videos and scenes from The Shining.

But no one has quite captured my fancy as much as Robin Skouteris, who regularly tosses six or so songs into the mix and makes it work. I suggest, if you enjoy a good mash-up, go check out his videos, cause almost all of them are good in some way. However, the one I really like is an ambient mix of HIM, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, and what seems like 50 other people:

So, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s continue to a single artist. Massive Attack has been a long-standing favorite of mine. I have most of the CDs they’ve produced or been featured on. Yeah, CDs, right? I know. Anyway, somehow I missed that they released an album in February. I want to buy it, but at this point I’m still on the fence about this whole “digital media” thing. I want to avoid having more CDs to clog up my physical space, but I’m concerned that by downloading the music from iTunes or Amazon, I’ll be getting a file of inferior quality, due either to DRM or just low-rate encoding. I can’t tell much difference about the encoding cause it seems my high-range hearing is terrible, but other people complain when I put that crap on.

In the meantime, I’ve been entertaining myself by watching this incredibly trippy video for “Paradise Circus”:

Now I have to also get “The Fall,” which looks incredibly gorgeous based on this short video. Damn it YouTube, stop making me want to spend money.