Post Turkey Blues

 

 

 

Actually, it just made for a decent title;  I don’t really have the blues that much.  I’ve been trying to reach my friend Todd Washkoska for a week and a half, ever since he got out of the hospital after having a minor stroke.  I’ve been worried about him, and worried more since he hasn’t been returning my calls.  But today he called and other than sounding a little bit tired, he sounds okay.

 

In other news, I’m buying a new Windows 7 tower from Dell, even though I vowed not to do business with them several years ago after they royally fucked up with a laptop order.  But it’s hard to get a decent warranty out of someone like Frye’s or Office depot so I got squishy about it.  I’m pretty satisfied with the item, though.  Three years warranty and three years of McAfee protection for a reasonable amount of money, plus Worx Plus, which has a version of Word without the accursed ribbon system devised by Microsoft for Office 2007.

 

Now my only area of concern is my novel.  My hero, Pol dairre, is going on a sea voyage on a whaling vessel –and I know nothing about whaling vessels, except what I was able to glean from Melville.  I expect I’ll need to stampede someone into reading a book for me and spoon-jfeeding the details to me so I can write a halfway convincing chapter.  I did post relevant questions to Yahoo, and got a snarky answer from some asshole who obviously knows something about whaling but couldn’t share it without being a prick.  For some people, it’s always tempting, isn’t it, to be superior about something when they could just as easily be gracious.  That’s the psychology of the Internet in a nutshell.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: snark,grace,Moby Dick,sailing

Down the Drain

 

 

Tonight, I had what amounts to a domestic catastrophe.  ON Sunday afternoon I made an enormous pot of chicken noodle soup.  It had noodles, onions, garlic, carrots, celery, pepper and four pounds of chicken.  The first bowlfuls, ladled out Sunday and Monday,  were delicious.  By tonight, though, the remainder was beginning to smell like a pair of old sweatsocks.  It probably wouldn’t have killed me, and might have gone down fine, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.  So shamefully, in the middle of this recession when people are going hungry, I had to pour half a kettle of chicken noodle soup down the drain. 

 

As I say, it was smellling quite bad, but I still feel terrible about it.  It was supposed to last through tomorrow at least, and maybe, if I was lucky, until the day after Thanksgiving.

 

I knew I was going to do it by this noon, since I went out for a bowl of pho instead of ladling something from my pot.  i have to say, though, that although I feel guilt, I also feel tremendous relief that I’m not going to eat a sixth or seventh bowl of chicken noodle soup in less than half that many days.  A day or two of savory, nicely spiced soup is a grand thing for a day or two, but do it for four days in a row and it begins to feel like prison slops, even if the soup is good,and mine was turning into something evil.

 

This is another example of the way in which, though I am poor by American standars, I am almost unspeakably wealthy in relative global terms.  Probably two thirds of the world’s six and a half billion people wouldn’t have turned their noses up at what I threw down the drain tonight.  But though I am in the bottom rungs of the American economic scale,I am surely near the top in global terms.

 

Beyond that, I have enough to buy pho and pay rent while writing a novel.  Hundreds of artists in Seattle alone, to say nothing of the United States, would like to be in my position, though I daresay none of them would like to lose their eyesight to get here.  And that brings me exactly to the reason why, though I have some uncomfortable feelings about it, I can bring myself to waste that much food.  Simply put, I’ve lost half the things which once gave me joy.  I can’t read books the way I used to, or watch movies or participate in a thousand activities which used to round out my day.  I don’t complain about that very much at this point.  But I am simply not going to add unpalatable soup to my list of sufferings. A large part of dignity in my situation, I find, is the ability to draw lines, to say:  only this much and no more. Some things, I find, are more precious than food ethics, which are very precious indeed.

 

Technorati Tags: food ethics,poverty,rationing,chicken noodle soup

ON Being Poor

 

 

It’s fairly common for me to hear otherAmericans talk about their poverty.  Well, I know a little about this.  I live on less than $15,000 a year, and when I need something I often have to wait and save for it out of my monthly SSDI check.  I am more fortunate than some, in that I have a good friend with a higher paying job who helps me out if things get really rough.  IN general, though, other than my DSL connection, I live pretty close to the ground.

 

But unlike many of my fellow countrymen, I almost never bitch about it.  Because while I am poor in terms relative to other Americans, I am quite wealthy when I understand myself as a citizen of the world.  I can walk eight feet to my kitchen sink and get a cup of cold clear water, clean and free of pathogens.  Also relevant to the water issue are my bathtub, shower and toilet.  I can stay clean from day to day, and my life is thusly more healthful and pleasant than it is for people in many parts of Africa and Asia, for whom personal hygiene and sanitary waste disposal are major public health problems. 

 

And I can eat inexpensively too.  I can drink clean cold milk, or buy fresh vegetables cheaply, wonderful greens, tangy onions and  ripe red tomatoes, with which I make cheap nutritious salads. Finally,while I can’t go overboard on the more select cuts of meat, I can enjoy hamburgers and inexpensive fish fillets.

And though I’d rather that certain people in various State agencies aren’t aware of this, I can afford to go out for some cheap pho and even the occasional helping of sushi, if I mind my quarters.

 

It took me years to come to this understanding of things. And I wish this blog had more clout, because I’d love to counsel people that you can get along without seemingly crucial things –money, a car, your eyesight— and still be reasonably happy. It’s not so hard.  It just requires the deeper part of yourself that doesn’t have anything to do with bank accounts or credit offers.  You have to get wiley and you have to get grateful.  It’s Poor Punk, capiche?

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Poor Punk,thrift,poverty,coping with the recession

On Color Blindness

 

 

Now that we have an African American president, I want to say something that's been bubbling in my liberal head for a few years. Namely, I strenuously object to other white liberals who say that they are "color blind". What is that supposed to mean, exactly? It seems to me that what they're saying is that in some uber-perspective we are all the same color. But I think that's presumptuous,the view from the Throne of God. Of course there is only one human race! But our humanity is instantiated in the particulars of our being, not in some kind of oatmeal aggregate.

 

Also, it seems to me that for a white guy to say to his black neighbor that he's color-blind is at least potentially dishonest. It's as if he's trying to erase a history of suffering and degradation through the sheer force of liberal goodwill.

 
I have to be honest here. I don't know many black people very well. Maybe I'm also wrong-headed in this. But I'm willing to bet that many African-Americans hear the color-blind dodge and roll their eyes. And I wouldn't blame them. A white guy who lays claim to this pecuiar vision impairment, whether he knows it or not, is also saying that he doesn't know anything about the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, lynchings or segregation. And he's also refusing to acknowledge the truth of black genius in art, literature and music. James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Zora Neal Hurston were all brilliantly triumphantly black. I think it's fine to recognize the African American struggle for equality as part of the larger human struggle for liberation from suffering, ignorance and control. But to deny the truth of black experience, black suffering and black genius through some liberal sleight of hand --that's just racism by another name.

 

Technorati Tags: racism,liberal jive,righteousness,Miles

Mud Manifesto

 

 

Apropose of last night’s post about my current mud-home, I’m posting this thing from the old Workpad site.

 

 

---

 

 

First, let me get something out there. I said in my resolutions post that I was going to give up online games. Well, that is not going to happen. I'm moderating my online time, but having no television set and little vision my avenues for entertainment are limited. I am not going to give up the one or two opportunities for idle fun left to me, that would be lunacy.

 
So.

 
I'm still looking for the ideal mud, and I haven't found it yet. I look for certain things in one of these games. One of them is hard to communicate. It's the look and feel, or rather, the sound and feel, a text game that works well with my screen reder and doesn't sound like it was written by a delirious eight year old. Most of them have bad grammar and otherwise fall apart in the writing area. Others are organized visually and simply provide audio hash for the blind player. And probably my least favorite are games based on the Diku codebase, especially those which haven't been rethought and still use the capital city of Midgaard and its streets full of beastly fidos.

What I want is an online text RPG that an adult can play. I want a large map, currency which involves more than one coin, systems for fishing and hunting game, and a crafting system for player created weapons, armor, medicine, herbs and magical items. I want a multiplicity of guilds and races that are genuinely different from each other and actually provide different modes of play. I want room descriptions that are concise and even poetic, but not flowery or overblown. I want a general sense that a thoughtful human being or beings are in charge of the game system and that problems will be attended to quickly and sanely. I want a game with automated quests, and one which provides bells and whistles when you gain experience, when you level and when you achieve goals, from the creation of a magic ring to the landing of a prize fish. In short, what I want is an online reality in text, free of graphics and full of adventure for blind and sighted alike.

 

Several gamesI have played come close on many of my requirements, but none that I have ever played do it all. If after another month of searching I don’t find what I'm looking for, I am going to roll up my sleeves and code the damn thing myself.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: muds,games,grinding,Diku

Merentha

 

 

I’ve finally discovered a mud which fulfills many of my admittedly persnicketty requirements.  There’s crafting, certain sense of mystery around each of the 22 classes, each requiring very different styles of play.  There’s a certain amount of crafting, an active  lively player base, and though there are levels, experience also must be spent on appropriate skills, so that characters of the same class are not simply cookie cutter droids.

 

This mud is so good that I’m having to tear myself away in order to get my daily pages done.  Given that I am 43 rather than 23, this is not so harde as it once was, especially given that the rewards of completing my novel, quite apart from publication and any dreamed-for paydays, will be enormous, and very likely exceed those of getting a paladin to level 90, however inviting that prospect might be. 

 

Also, I think it might be important for me to be involved with some kind of gameplay while I’m working on “Dragons and Angels”.  My protagonist is a middle-aged toymaker with a marked insight into the lives of children.  Though I’ve only completed the first quarter of the book, His understanding of gameplay may well have a great part to play in the denouement.

 

Plus, I just like to smash goblins.

Technorati Tags: games,muds,goblins,toymakers,writing a novel

Today, taking a break away from my novel, “Dragons and Angels”, I spent hours and hours figuring out Windows Live Writer and using it to post on this site. For that task, it is very well suited and as it is similar in feel to Word, with which I am very comfortable,I will be using it exclusively. The writing frame provided by Blogspot is impossible for a blind writer to use without suffering the sort of pain in the ass with which you become terribly familiar when you are visually impaired.

 

As I write this, I am a little annoyed that the lines seem a little short, but I assume they will fit the standard Blogger page, so I’m not going to sweat it. Also, WLW doesn’t provide a way for me to enter tags while I’m making the post, so I’ll have to publish, then back into the blog with Internet Explorer and unload any tags I might want.  Once again, a pain in the ass.  But the ease with which I can write and edit apost is so great compared to the old way of doing it, that I’m willing to suffer.

 

I realize that this is all unspeakably dull, and will now be returning to the sort of kvetching, bitching and philosophic maundering with which CN readers have become so terribly familiar.

 

Excelsior, pilgrims!  

Bob Is Dead

I'm always loathe to slam someone else's good time. If you're into crafts or homemade root beer or some television show, I'm all for it. We have a boundless supply of leisure time here in America, and I love the idea that folks can indulge any weird little demon they might have, as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. But I'm about to go against this usual ordinary rule of thumb and slam the Church of the Subgenius.
I'm sure you've heard of it. The Church was started in the early 80's as a snarky joke religion whose messiah is the ubiquitous pipe-smoking J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, whose cosmic connections can swing you an extra helping of SLACK if you just send in $30.00 for your license as a bona fide Subgenius minister. If you buy any of their publications, like "The Book of the Subgenius" you get lots of hilarious doubletalk and eye-catching hipster graphics. Maybe for those things alone, the thirty bucks could be worth it.
But, and I say this with regret, I'm sorry but the joke is stale. All the talk about zombies, alien overlords and cosmic conspiracies is over. It's all been done, and done to death. Check out alt.slack, the Usenet newsgroup dedicated toSubgenii and their rantings. You want to poke your head in there and catch some wit, some subversive mohjo, something sharp and cunning and unexpected. But what you get is easy irony which even twelve year olds had mastered and discarded by 1995. It's all so easy: the pop culture quotes, the references to consumer products, the facile world-weariness, which is ugly enough in those who have earned it and is utterlly ridiculous on a twenty- or thirty-something. Look, I caught HIV and lost half my eyesight twelve years ago, and I'm not a tenth as bitter as these cats sound.
Back in 1982, they were funny and necessary. Now Ivan Stang, the founder, really ought to close up shop and think up something else. Cuz I'm tellin' you: Mistah Bob? He DAID.