Saturday, February 25, 2006
Life is complex, email detritus (salvaged, revised)
(psssst - I’ve been reworking parts of emails into blogs lately. Appropriately, I think. Just the impersonal rambling pretentious parts. Saving them for you, to read now and here. Aren't you lucky? :)
No, seriously. I was talking (emailing) to my friend (good guy I know) Jeff (rhymes with... wait, what does Jeff rhyme with?). Jeff got me thinking about stratified layers of thought and feeling, peeling them back or laying them down like layers of a... what? onion? roll of wall paper? pile of winter jackets? pizza toppings?
So you see my dilemma here, or you will as I explain that Jeff is somehow combining poetry and spirituality and politics and stream of consciousness in his emails which, peel onion-like as I may, I can't penetrate. So I feel encouraged to ramble back to Jeff, sometimes confrontatively, but posited with the appropriate emoticons :)(=:-)) so that everything is congenially blunted and/or confused with a smile.
This time I tried a different approach, and one no less obfuscatory. I preluded the following (as opposed to postluding the previous, which would be chronological but unremarkable) with some talk of a certain grand artistic project I know of that I'd help with if I had time but I don't so would he care to. You see, people have said that I'm a connector kind of person, and apart from some heightened glial cell awareness that may occur I have no idea what they're talking about, but it seemed worth the trouble to combine a few directions of thinking and share them like bon-bons in the hopes of helping a friend. Such is the nature of connectionism, a confusing job but someone's got to do it.
So I said: )
Life is complex, isn't it. Can't imagine how these people have time to go to wars. There's so much art and thinking and relating to people to do. Between you and me, I think they have emotional addiction problems. There's an underground comic book from years ago called Addicted to War, critical of Bush senior. Who'd have thought years later we'd be under Bush Jr., who is using the phrase America is Addicted to Oil, but he says that we should remain calm because a big breakthrough is just around the corner. They told him, he knows it, really. Bush says technology is going to solve all problems soon. Technology plus democracy. Two of the biggest and best words I know. Plus Freedom. Bush has all these great words on his side.
I can't understand why Hamas was so rude as to run for elections. They should know they are bad people, and bad people don't run for office. That's democracy. The right choices for the right times. Now Bush has to do something to stop them after winning their country's democratic elections. Something like cut funds, even if that further isolates and extremizes the situation. Either you're for us or against us. It's all going to come out sooner or later.
We are so good, we really are. Us, that's why they call it us you know. United States, that's Us. We good. They bad. Simple, right? I mean, the worst we can do accidentally is nothing compared to the worst they are trying to do intentionally. They're trying to kill women and children, disrupt markets, terrorize innocents. We're accidentally hurting some people with our ammunition in self-defense on our freedom-promoting missions of charity. We are liberating these people.
I mean, I know that whenever China invades someone they say it is to liberate them, like they did in Tibet. I don't mean like that. Us, we give real freedom, the true freedom of democracy. Afghanistan and Iraq will love us, you'll see. Because they'll have peace. Highly commercial, highly developed, highly consumer-oriented peace. Given, paid for, a gift from Us. United States, that's us!
That's why you're either with us or against us.
Am I right, Jeff, am I right?
What do you think of this email? Honestly, is letterwriting a dead art? Is it so provacative to empower the author to dump their consciousnesses onto the faster-than-thought internet? And to cut and paste pieces into a blog before you even check your email, so in fact by the time you read said email there will be others separated by time and space but not by befuddlement or rapture, reading it right there with you, including perhaps but not limited to, a housewife in Des Moines, a rancher in Texas, a call center attendant on break in New Delhi, an artist in Switzerland, a monastic pygmy in Peru, and a bird breeder with a curiously prominent nose in New Guinea?
How do I know these things? Because email encourages spontaneity, action without thought revealing deeper thought, automaticity, automatic city, a tomato kitty. Surrealism is more real than reality because it exposes the deeper rubbish.
Email is good, I wrote Jeff an email. But the name of the inner character who said these things in the spirit of the garden path shall remain, um, nameless.
No, wait, Ed. Eddy Tyler Scopeneck. He said it all, he told me to write this to you.
(click here to stop receiving emails like this)
Hope you're doing well Jeff,
Carl
PS - Jeff's email included a copy of Gore Vidal's impressive anti-Bush polemic The Enemy Within, published in The Observer, London, 27 October 2002. He really did write this, I find, (Vidal I mean), and the article accuses Bush of acting for a global economic domination plot. Which I can't disprove, can you? By the way, did you know that Gore Vidal is the same Gore as Al Gore? Yeah, they're related, it's weird, somebody is saying their name backward. There should be a law against that. I'll sic the neighborhood anti-terrorist watch on anyone that I find has reversed their names, like some artsy fartsy anti-Christ. Anyone says fartsy artsy, I'll know, I'll turn them in. Or my name isn't Eddy Tyler Scopeneck.
No, seriously. I was talking (emailing) to my friend (good guy I know) Jeff (rhymes with... wait, what does Jeff rhyme with?). Jeff got me thinking about stratified layers of thought and feeling, peeling them back or laying them down like layers of a... what? onion? roll of wall paper? pile of winter jackets? pizza toppings?
So you see my dilemma here, or you will as I explain that Jeff is somehow combining poetry and spirituality and politics and stream of consciousness in his emails which, peel onion-like as I may, I can't penetrate. So I feel encouraged to ramble back to Jeff, sometimes confrontatively, but posited with the appropriate emoticons :)(=:-)) so that everything is congenially blunted and/or confused with a smile.
This time I tried a different approach, and one no less obfuscatory. I preluded the following (as opposed to postluding the previous, which would be chronological but unremarkable) with some talk of a certain grand artistic project I know of that I'd help with if I had time but I don't so would he care to. You see, people have said that I'm a connector kind of person, and apart from some heightened glial cell awareness that may occur I have no idea what they're talking about, but it seemed worth the trouble to combine a few directions of thinking and share them like bon-bons in the hopes of helping a friend. Such is the nature of connectionism, a confusing job but someone's got to do it.
So I said: )
Life is complex, isn't it. Can't imagine how these people have time to go to wars. There's so much art and thinking and relating to people to do. Between you and me, I think they have emotional addiction problems. There's an underground comic book from years ago called Addicted to War, critical of Bush senior. Who'd have thought years later we'd be under Bush Jr., who is using the phrase America is Addicted to Oil, but he says that we should remain calm because a big breakthrough is just around the corner. They told him, he knows it, really. Bush says technology is going to solve all problems soon. Technology plus democracy. Two of the biggest and best words I know. Plus Freedom. Bush has all these great words on his side.
I can't understand why Hamas was so rude as to run for elections. They should know they are bad people, and bad people don't run for office. That's democracy. The right choices for the right times. Now Bush has to do something to stop them after winning their country's democratic elections. Something like cut funds, even if that further isolates and extremizes the situation. Either you're for us or against us. It's all going to come out sooner or later.
We are so good, we really are. Us, that's why they call it us you know. United States, that's Us. We good. They bad. Simple, right? I mean, the worst we can do accidentally is nothing compared to the worst they are trying to do intentionally. They're trying to kill women and children, disrupt markets, terrorize innocents. We're accidentally hurting some people with our ammunition in self-defense on our freedom-promoting missions of charity. We are liberating these people.
I mean, I know that whenever China invades someone they say it is to liberate them, like they did in Tibet. I don't mean like that. Us, we give real freedom, the true freedom of democracy. Afghanistan and Iraq will love us, you'll see. Because they'll have peace. Highly commercial, highly developed, highly consumer-oriented peace. Given, paid for, a gift from Us. United States, that's us!
That's why you're either with us or against us.
Am I right, Jeff, am I right?
What do you think of this email? Honestly, is letterwriting a dead art? Is it so provacative to empower the author to dump their consciousnesses onto the faster-than-thought internet? And to cut and paste pieces into a blog before you even check your email, so in fact by the time you read said email there will be others separated by time and space but not by befuddlement or rapture, reading it right there with you, including perhaps but not limited to, a housewife in Des Moines, a rancher in Texas, a call center attendant on break in New Delhi, an artist in Switzerland, a monastic pygmy in Peru, and a bird breeder with a curiously prominent nose in New Guinea?
How do I know these things? Because email encourages spontaneity, action without thought revealing deeper thought, automaticity, automatic city, a tomato kitty. Surrealism is more real than reality because it exposes the deeper rubbish.
Email is good, I wrote Jeff an email. But the name of the inner character who said these things in the spirit of the garden path shall remain, um, nameless.
No, wait, Ed. Eddy Tyler Scopeneck. He said it all, he told me to write this to you.
(click here to stop receiving emails like this)
Hope you're doing well Jeff,
Carl
PS - Jeff's email included a copy of Gore Vidal's impressive anti-Bush polemic The Enemy Within, published in The Observer, London, 27 October 2002. He really did write this, I find, (Vidal I mean), and the article accuses Bush of acting for a global economic domination plot. Which I can't disprove, can you? By the way, did you know that Gore Vidal is the same Gore as Al Gore? Yeah, they're related, it's weird, somebody is saying their name backward. There should be a law against that. I'll sic the neighborhood anti-terrorist watch on anyone that I find has reversed their names, like some artsy fartsy anti-Christ. Anyone says fartsy artsy, I'll know, I'll turn them in. Or my name isn't Eddy Tyler Scopeneck.
