Tourist Economy

So yeah, tourist economies. I tend to think people know this stuff, but I forget that it’s not something you think about unless you live in one. Tourist economies are incredibly seasonal. There’s a lot of money to be made (mostly by people who own tourist businesses) during the tourism season, which is usually defined as the spring and fall, when weather is temperate and it’s pleasant to walk outside. It’s no coincidence (well, kind of a coincidence for Mardi Gras) that all of the major festivals are scheduled for those times of year. What this means, though is that the portions of the year that are not in season, there’s no tourism and consequently no money. There are no jobs here during summer unless you’re a long-term employee. The town becomes completely dead as few tourists visit and the people in town with money leave to avoid the heat. Crime goes way up as result of broke-ass punks with nothing to do wandering around and forming gangs and shiz, basically shit all goes to hell. Also there’s hurricanes. 

That’s how it works. That’s also why no one moves here really. There’s no real sustainable economy. After the port became more or less obsolete (and no one wanted to spend the money to modernize that shit) Moon Landrieu and his mayoral contemporaries decided that the town needed to be converted into a tourist destination full-on. He built the moon walk, he designed the laws that keep cars off of royal by day and bourbon by night, he allowed for hotel corporations to build high-rises downtown. All of that shit started in the 80s. And it’s now all we’ve got. There are no tech jobs here. There’s some local banks, but they’re losing money to larger national banks due to their conservative and myopic lending practices. There are oil jobs but no one from here gets hired to work in the oil business, at least not in management. And there’s tourism. Hospitality is the official marketing friendly term for this industry, a term that encompasses travel, hostelry, restaurants and related accoutrements. The hospitality industry is the driving force of New Orleans. Nearly everyone who lives and works here performs in some capacity related to an industry devoted to getting people to visit here and hemorrhage money. That’s why we call it a tourist economy. We can’t survive unless people think there’s a good reason to visit, so we come up with lots of good reasons to visit. We’re not a swinging party town solely for our own benefit. We’re a swinging party town because it inspires people to visit and put cash in our g-strings.

So yeah, that’s where we’re at. And no one visits in summer because it’s too hot and all of our biggest festivals are planned for the spring+fall. So everyone is forced to work around that, to save money for summer from the spring or else find themselves shit outta luck cash-wise. It wouldn’t be so bad if the people working in the hospitality industry were paid anything approaching a living wage, but wealthy tourist business owners are well aware that most of their employees (bartenders and wait staff especially) will just end up working for tips as it is and so they’re paid server’s minimum, something like $2.66 an hour. During the summer where businesses can go for hours without a single tip and half the employees brought on for the spring Mardi Gras-French Quarter Fest-Jazz Fest are laid off just to cut costs (hospitality business owners, as you might be gathering, are generally huge dicks, and worse rarely local, usually collecting money from New Orleans tourism and funneling it to Biloxi or Milpitas or something), there’s a severe uptick in poverty around the city.

It’s a fucked situation, but one that’s been in the making for a few hundred years and perpetuated by the same cadre of wealthy white people that have been in control of this town essentially forever. They’re independently wealthy, they can just put their money into stocks and live off appreciated value (that’s “capital gains”). This power base runs local politics, local preservation societies, and local tourism boards. The system is invested in and self-perpetuating because people (like you) don’t put up a whole lot of fuss over it and blacks are culturally and socially disenfranchised despite being the majority in this town. So yeah, until some kind of major political upheaval happens, New Orleans is a tourist town and we have to deal with seasons.

Recursion

Hey, listen to this as you read, yeah? Multimedia chops, I'm the big bad boss man from a dot com start up, revamping internet 0.5 to 1.0 :



My favorite novel is Stephen King’s Insomnia. Well, no, that’s not really true, but only untrue insofar as I don’t have a hierarchical rating system for things I enjoy. I’d find it incredibly difficult to try to stack Insomnia next to Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s a pointless distinction anyway. The only purpose of a hierarchy is to be useful in rationing out a limited resource. My enjoyment of things is not a limited resource, especially my enjoyment of things I no longer need to put time into. A more realistic measure might be “which of the two are you more likely to read in the future?” though that’s not a particularly useful definition either, because I own both and have plans to read neither and anyway there’s new things to try all the time. I digress.


I liked Insomnia because I felt I could really thoroughly relate to the main characters in their creeping insomnia. I think King did a fantastic job of portraying the feeling of lacking sleep, the sort of hazy “I am going crazy” cloud that descends over the entirety of reality, distorting some noises, making lights brighter or dimmer, sapping your attention. It’s like trying to drag yourself through a awkwardly acoustically designed stage through clouds of weed smoke while a rave is going on. It’s awkwardly designed because every so often there’s a multisided and mirrored convex pillar distorting the noise and light so if you stand just so, you’ll be blinded and deafened or maybe not. Being sleep-deprived is like reading that paragraph over and over.


I’ve been insomniatic since I was old enough to have a notion of set bedtimes. No amount of guilt-tripping, diet changes, lifestyle changes, no place I’ve lived, essentially nothing I’ve done has ever produced any more than a temporary shift in a stereotypical sleep pattern. I am a fraud, so to speak. I don’t have any problems sleeping. I can sleep all day if I so feel. This is why I garner no sympathy, reap naught but shame for how I sleep. Perhaps here I could rail against the establishment, justify my sleep schedule and feel superior in the knowledge that the typical hours that the rest of society runs on is a socially constructed system of moralistic and disconvenient bullshit. I don’t really feel like it. I just wish I were asleep right now because I have to get up in four and a half hours and listen to a health lecture (or watch a ridic movie) covering genetic ideas I already know. I won’t get to go home until 7:15, and I won’t sleep then even, as my roommate will be home and making noise and all of that. Eventually I’ll pass out and everything will be okay supposedly because it will be the weekend or something. I dunno.

And listen to this why not:




I’m not really sure why I’m writing this either, I have other things to write. I have stuff to do, I am busy, perpetually busy. Why? Because I keep putting it off. I keep putting everything off because I don’t want to deal with it. I want to deal with other parts of my life. I need to go resolve some interpersonal shit with a ton of fucking people, but I can’t do that either. Instead I have to stare at a screen and convince myself to be particularly passionate about tourists and tourism when the class has reached that magic moment of recursion where the class isn’t really introducing anything new anymore and instead is reinforcing concepts or identifying things taken for granted. I worry all the time that I’m going to be an academic failure because I literally can’t reconcile the bullshit with my conscience. I can’t imagine doing anything if I don’t feel really good about it. I’m not really principled, I’m fickle and petty and what makes up my “conscience” changes from week to week, if not day to day, but if nothing else I’m a god damned stubborn asshole about some things and I’m well aware that that is what will inevitably hold me back.


I’m also way too damn smart. Inevitably everything I think ends up coming under self-scrutiny. I’m not even really an author anymore, as I sit here and reinterpret what I’m writing as I write it. I consider “well, you just wrote that to reinterpret your sloth as some kind of ennobling behavior, when in reality it’s just a moral failing that you’re refusing to deal with, in part by writing about it in ways to ennoble it and justify it to yourself” or I consider “well, it’s still true on some level right?” until I don’t really know how I should feel about it anymore and whenever I do feel something I feel guilty about feeling that something because I’m not sure if it’s because I am making a calculated effort to present it or if I’m sincere and if I am sincere what does it mean about a person who is that way and how can it be criticized and should I change it so I’m less criticizable? I’m a walking, breathing argument.


I’m not sure I’d have it any other way, either. I both admire and totally disrespect people who have any sort of surety in themselves. Confident sorts of people, confident of opinion or attitude or whatever, are totally uncritical of their activities. How could they be? Criticism undermines confidence. But being uncritical means that you’re not thinking, that you’re just passively living in the world without question even if it’s your own world that you’re not questioning. You may as literally well be an animal of lesser cognition who just so happened to be enculturated and look like the rest of humanity. That’s why no real person is without some weakness or insecurity or disconfidence in them at some juncture (except, I dunno, the autistic and Asperger-ed [criticizing my own statement and adding qualifiers. Qualifiers I’m not even all that comfortable with, as I’m sure it’ll draw ire from somebody somewhere {most likely the autistic or Asperger-ed}]) that makes them relatable and related to the rest of the human race.


Criticism itself too is criticizable. You can problematize anything, as long as you have the moralistic cojones to beat off the hordes of people interested in their view of the world. Academia properly expressed is a lot of bullshit authors bullshitting together about their bullshit, and even my opinion under their bullshit rules has merit. The smartest academes are well aware that the system they’re participating in is on many levels complete crap, but they do it anyway because it’s one of the few socially sanctioned places for people who like to do nothing but talk to hang around and talk. It’s the only place in the world where an egalitarian merit-based system will teach you about the pitfalls of egalitarian merit-based systems and then grant you merit based on how well you absorbed the lesson. It’s missing the forest for the trees, or whatever hackneyed phrase works here. I’m still in college, god dammit, not because I really want to be or because I fundamentally support the system, but because it pays my bills and fulfills my fetish for listening to people passionately talk about things they’ve studied for years. If I could find a decent job where all I had to do was listen to people’s stories about what they’ve learned and what they’ve read and where they’ve been and who they’ve met, I would take it in a heartbeat. For fuck’s sake, if I could get a decent job building houses or fixing bikes or some mindless-yet-unionized factory work, I’d do that. But jobs are hard to find and colleges are pretty much right there and that’s where we’re at.


If you want to know a secret, I added that last bit because I had a momentary pang of guilt/realization that I’m still writing in a super-rich country as a member of a fairly privileged segment of society. As the phrase goes “my privilege is showing” (a hilariously awful method of criticism, as my privilege is not and never has been “mine,” even as the phrase indicates that I have some sort of control over it [problematizing the concept of “privilege” {I’m sure I can find at least a dozen papers to cite}]) and I need to acknowledge it, lest some random stranger come along and point out how good I have it and what an awful whiny person I am for complaining. Except that person already came along and he lives inside my head and follows me wherever I go and I can’t sleep because

"I'm just going to type until the feelings stop."

No one is immune from self-delusion, it’s a product of life as fragile constructs influenced as much by instinctual emotions as by rationality. We all lie to ourselves, sometimes in big ways, sometimes in little ways. Sometimes the lies are necessary, self-preserving, benign. Other times the lies we tell are harmful to ourselves and those around us. But we all have them, each and every one of us.

I lied to myself for a while. I told myself that what I wanted would inevitably come to pass. I seized on every scrap of information that affirmed my lie and minimized any data that denied it. Even now, after confronting the truth, I still hold out hope in my head that my reassessment was wrong, that I haven’t interpreted the data correctly. It’s the hardest thing in the world, and one of the most painful to break through, to accept as fact something your very subconscious doesn’t want to believe.

Popular morality believes that any sort of lie is anathema to existence. (Good) religion believes that self-knowledge is the path to enlightenment. The idea of the fully self-aware as the pinnacle of existence is pervasive throughout region and worlds. This is a convenient belief: where the goal is clear and obvious and the objective world deemed the most important. But it loses sight of the function of self-deception. We lose sight of its purpose.

People don’t lie to themselves forever as a sinister method of shading the divine from their eyes, they do it to protect themselves from what emotions they cannot practically deal with. In a world that is constantly moving, no matter the era, no one has the time to spend two or three weeks resolving some kind of emotional problem for themselves. We can’t all spend three days on the couch crying and refusing to move every time we’re hurt. We don’t belong to monastic orders, practicing peace and dispassion. We’re humans with hopes and fears and dreams and beliefs. Shit can and will affect us, and we don’t have the time to deal with it.

It sounds bad, to be sure. Maybe a better world would be one where we could throw all obligation to the wind, sit on a couch, and stuff ourselves with ice cream and watch sad movies. Maybe we should be able to call into work and take the next month off, going on a wild drug binge, trying to avoid the incipient emotion through altered mental states. The best possible world, of course, would be a homogenous world, where no one has any hopes or dreams or indeed any passion at all. Events would pass before us as wind through reeds, as snow falling on a quiet night. Pain, though, is but one side of existence, and without pain we would not know pleasure.

But again, we have no time for pain. Our world demands that we pay attention to our surroundings, that we keep an eye out for opportunity, that we remain steady and constant in our activities, if not our mental state. This is what self-deception is ultimately for: to create a semblance of stability, to maintain the forward march of progress for our species. We’ve even codified a sort of strained sympathy for people who are “unable to move on” or “incapable of letting go,” preferring the mercurial to the constant, at least in emotional concerns.
So rather than solving a self-deception, ultimately I’ll be replacing one for another. The new lie is that I don’t feel bad. That I don’t feel hurt or depressed or angry or frustrated or just plain upset. The hope is that it will eventually even become true.

Jake's Second Mardi Gras

I forgot what I wrote for the last Mardi Gras thing I wrote. I don’t remember much of that time. It was a tough period in Jake-ville, as my girlfriend dumped me while in the midst of a severe depressive episode (indeed, because of that severe depressive episode. “I can’t handle this” she said, ironically walking out after I had put up with her anxiety attacks and nervous breakdowns. Whoops, too bitter.) which then dragged into a several month’s long spiral of drama and bullshit as we had our apartment broken into by a neighbor and subsequently became homeless when we moved out (because said neighbor was being covered by other neighbors) thanks to Jazzfest and then endured a short period of “I think we would be great roommates” nonsense before I kicked her out. I willfully block out the memories from that period, because that is my unhealthy coping method: forgetting that bad things ever happened.

All I do remember from that note was complaining about people drinking and how awful the world was. I think the entirety of my mainstream Mardi Gras experience was Druids, Muses, and Chewbacchus. I hated it because it was everything I don’t like in a group of people: rich white drunken tourists standing around in front of floats of rich white people throwing useless trash on the ground and generally being loutish. The KKK horse riders sealed the bullshit envelope for me as a strong reminder that the world is a fucked up place and it’s everyone around me’s fault. That much didn’t really change this year. I was high as fuck on Mardi Gras evening and I sat at a bar and watched the Rex Ball, some kind of conglomerate of inbred southern fucks milling about at 9:30 at night playing nobility charades. It’s spooky as hell. People still do this! In this day and supposedly enlightened age! I really am pretty naïve. I tend towards the belief that people are basically smart and when they buy a party line it’s just a matter of good persuasive politics or some kind of psychological tribalism that necessitates group identification regardless of veracity in ideals. (or, as is usually the case on the internet, a knee-jerk reactionary contrarianism constructed from the conceptualization of “cool” or “edgy” as being against the expected response toward a situation. See: 4chan) But when I’m confronted with a very clear set of ritualized oppressive politics that is so thoroughly embraced and maintained so as to seem “normal” and be thoroughly accepted, I’m usually dismayed and upset by the manifest reality that these people seriously do not understand the source or inevitable result of their actions.



Carnival is okay! Nothing is inherently bad about parading. Second lines are an awesome community-binding force and a seriously uplifting representation of alternative constructions of life-patterns (I really am just fucking around now. Blame college) accessible in the otherwise monocultural landscape of America. There’s a reason I love living here. I love parades, I love the effort people here put into costuming and creativity, I love the laid-back lifestyle of the artist community. What pisses me off is not the season itself or the people or even really the parades, what bothers me is the clear and obvious demonstrations of subjugation that take place year in and year out.

New Orleans is very much a Caribbean bumfuck third-world island nation, where everyone with a job works to please the rich white foreigners that come along and fuel the economy in its entirety. We’re whores, and in a culture that doesn’t give three shits about its whores, we’re treated as expendable pleasures, temporary forays into the world of sin to be condemned vociferously after we’ve been used. Everyone who lives anywhere else will gladly talk about the wild parties and crazy adventures off the one hand while warning us about the collapsed housing market and hurricanes and the scary n*****s off the other. Kanye wasn’t wrong, that’s not why he was shut up. Kanye made people uncomfortable with the god damn truth. We’re in a city packed with black people. Up to the gills. 60 odd percent. It’s terrifying to the rest of whitebread America, who only see their monocultural media views of the scary n*****s yellin’ ‘bout murderin’ an’ rapin’ an’ whatever.

I’m never going to forget how god damned ashamed I was to sit there at the fucking Marriott in a room full of white male oil execs and chemical engineers waiting on a keynote over a nice (free) lunch and having a black waiter waltz over to serve the old white men and I. It’s terrifying to me that there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t make any of them feel bad about it; it’s all they’ve known. They have years upon decades of ingrained justification for their attitudes and behaviors. All I can do is eat a nice lunch and file away my impotent rage for some other day (probably around Mardi Gras). Since my unhealthy coping mechanism is to forget that there’s a problem when I can’t solve it, I don’t like being reminded of that problem. Watching the KKK march on by on horseback, flanked by floats of moneyed white people, surrounded by white tourists with nothing but abject terror at the prospect of confronting class or race disparities, having a sea of white men in tuxedos leading around their nubile daughters in a display of eligibility to ensure breeding stays amongst the nobles televised during the celebrations, none of it makes me feel any better about the chances of forming a more tolerant and loving society.

That’s why I’m depressed during Mardi Gras. That’s why I didn’t go to any parades except the ones I was actually in. That’s why I was high as fuck on Mardi Gras and pretty thoroughly wasted on the days proximate. Cause my other coping method is drugs.

Status Update

Good morning. I was asked when I’d be writing, and I told myself I would write and I tried to write back in a hotel in Camarillo, but as it turns out, it wasn’t meant to be. Instead I’m sitting here in Oakland, on 108th street (2380) in a guest room of the house my dad and his fiancé bought. In the room with me, besides my things, is a shelf full of self-help books and a piece of contemporary artwork by said fiancé, which features some kind of word bubble theme on dripping, what I’d guess are watercolors or very watered down oils. The painting sort of clashes with the French design of the siding for this room and the bay window immediately behind me. I woke up late today, as I spent all of yesterday in a car, variably traveling past the endless plains of Californian highlands or driving along a vantage of the deep blue Pacific Ocean. Eventually I will get up and do laundry and then perhaps visit my aunt and grandmother. More likely just google the nearest taco bell and eat there.

As I’ve mentioned on my facebook a few times, I’m a little bit grouchy being here. I’m glad to get a chance to get away and see something somewhat new from new Orleans, but I feel less like I am or have done this under my own power and more like I’ve just ended up in high school all over again.

Tangent: some three people have told me I don’t know anything because I’m only 3 years out of high school or something. Honestly, they’re right, but not because I’m, just because that is the way of it. They don’t know anything either, they’re just blustering for some kind of way to shame me for having the audacity to be younger than them and disagree with them. Age = authority, and often the only authority people can justify any more. Personally I’m terrified of the elderly. They’ve had so many more years to have all their prejudices and irrational thinking etched in. Like petrified trees, they’re the least likely to ever accept or understand change. That is why I mentioned several times when writing about occupy that change will only happen when the next generation of people with somewhat more progressive ideas replaces the current.

I’ve mentioned living in New Orleans to several people here, and the responses were about to be expected, from complete ignorance to frequent mentions of Mardi Gras and how I must party all the time. I am not even remotely surprised, having moved from California to Maryland and heard people ask me whether or not I surf and moving from Maryland to California, which some people seemed to think was actually another school called “Marilyn.” It seems ironic that the most “well-traveled” of people that I meet also seem to have the most skewed concepts of the places they’ve been. Tourists, man. I don’t think I’ve ever been a place just specifically to see it or wander around (fact check: did this for spring break 2010. Went to San Francisco and hiked all of market street and avoided everyone. Not sure if it counts as tourism as I was born there and have lived fairly near there for a substantial portion of my life). I go to do certain things or see certain people. My trips are business trips with a side of scenery.

I actually brought out a collection of t-shirts that are all relevant to New Orleans, and I’ve worn them every day so far and no one has asked me what Noisician Coalition is or who Mitch Landrieu is and why vote him mayor or what the Zephyrs are or what the big five made of hammers and stuff represents (Habitat). It’s a little frustrating, only in the recognition that I could have worn any damn thing and it would’ve had the same response. I think maybe I’m just one of the really few people who would ask about something like that. I remember when a professor brought in a bag from the American Gilder’s society and I was totally fascinated that such a society existed, but he got kind of embarrassed and silly about it. Apparently his wife belongs to it, and yes it’s exactly what it sounds like. He’s kind of a poor representative, though, as he gets embarrassed and silly about a lot of things. It’s just an attitude change.

Oh man, and coming back of age is weird too. I keep being offered alcohol for one reason or another and have been sitting here limiting my intake because I seriously do not want to be inebriated around family. Maybe it’s the holidays or something, but it feels like every day so far I’ve been offered a drink. Maybe they’re trying to outdo Nawlins. I don’t even know. But damn, I would rather be shitfaced around a bunch of complete strangers (which I have) than tipsy around people I’m related to, one way or another. I’m trying to get the people I know to throw some kind of party so I can get comfortably drunk around people I am comfortable with being drunk around (and so I can make Dark and Stormies, which is apparently my new obsession. Yay!) but so far it’s not taking.

I wish I were at home. I know so few people I really want to spend any time with here, and what few I do are still stuck in their prisons, at home with their parents or a stone’s throw from them at some college. I planned this trip out for two weeks partly out of interest in having a complete visit with all of family and all the people I left behind and partly because I really thought I was restless and needed to get out of nola for a time. Maybe I am still restless, but coming here wasn’t the place. I helped my aunt and grandma get skype set up on their computer and the first thing they did was call up my aunt and uncle in Montana and they of course got the kids up and everyone was there in front of the screen and happy to see each other and all and I couldn’t help but thinking “damn, I really should have gone up there.” I like my family up there, and I like snow, and I like hiking alone.

Fortunately, Christmas is over, and besides the two lunches and a dinner that are now planned for me to attend, the rest of my trip is open. I’ll probably just wander around the city and get lost and have fun by myself. Then I’ll come back to New Orleans and throw a party and go to parties and maybe feel like myself again.

p.s.I do think it's a bit sad that I am finding out that I didn't really want what I thought I wanted, but I'm not going to feel bad about it because everyone else does it too. So there.

Faux-ironic title designed to maintain my masculinity

Loop de doop, looking at the blank page. I don’t know what to put here because I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s not totally true; I know what the symptoms are. I’ve been picking internet fights for a week straight. It’s a really obvious sign that I’m frustrated about something. The way I operate is that if I’m frustrated about something but can’t really do anything about it, I end up channeling it into something I’m passionate about and start petty arguments about things I normally would let slide. I assume everyone does this to some degree. The problem is that I don’t know what I’m really frustrated about. My life is going more or less okay. Things are fine on nearly every front. Every idea that I have that I might be frustrated about doesn’t pan out when I try to imagine whether I’d feel any better if those problems were solved. My best idea so far is that I feel like my life is going nowhere or not going somewhere fast enough or that I’m totally unsure of where to go. I think I’ve thought up (And then done little to no work on) half a dozen projects to work on, to theoretically jumpstart the drive and get me back on my feet. It’s so strange, because I’m pretty sure I had peace of mind at some point this year, but it’s gone again and I don’t know where I’ve put it.

Not to help matters, I’ve been getting a bunch more acne than usual, especially on my shoulders and forehead, which frustrates me both on a totally vain “insecure about my looks” level and also on a “for fucks sake everyone told me when I was a teenager that I was going to grow out of acne and not get it when I got older” level. Lying assholes. They should have just told me “well, you better kill yourself now because you’re gonna be ugly for the rest of your life.”

Of course when I look back at it, I’ve been feeling kind of like this since the last queerlesque. I’m restless and dissatisfied and totally inconsistent. I’m not even depressed. I know when I’m depressed, and this isn’t it. I’m angry, is what it is. I keep wanting to unfriend everyone I know and say vicious and mean-spirited things to the people I otherwise like and I want to yell and scream, which is basically another way of me saying I want someone to pay attention to me and give me hugs and reassure me and things like that. But I don’t even think that will help ultimately, otherwise I would be asking for hugs and reassurance. The problem will still be there even after the person leaves.

I hate feeling ashamed for feeling the way I do. Because that’s what I feel. I feel like even posting this is a cloying attempt to garner sympathy, which is ultimately pathetic for me to do. I hate feeling like I need to act this way or that way to satisfy whatever audience I have. I hate feeling weak for writing about my feelings. I hate that I still feel weak for writing my feelings after doing it for years. I hate that I imagine the reaction from people whose opinion I value and cherish will inevitably be tainted with “that’s nice, but boy isn’t Jake melodramatic and whiny?” I hate writing faux-ironic titles where I sort of hint at the idea that I know how silly my emotions are. I hate that anyone else ever feels like this and I hate the people who perpetuate it with non-advice like “man up, son.” For fucks sake, I’m a person on this goddamn planet and I will not be made to feel bad for being as emotionally fragile as I want.

Clearly the solution is drugs or something, but that terrifies me on another level where I admit the ultimate physicality of my being and the completely true concept that I have no independent will except what is chemically expressed by various regions of my brain. I went to a bar just to drink and feel sorry for myself the other week. I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t tell anyone anything important these days. No one tells me important things. I made a hand-turkey for the college of liberal arts office at UNO and dedicated it to someone and then I didn’t tell them about it. It’s still on the wall.

A rambly unfocused rant about OWS that needs more paragraph breaks (and probably proofreading)

I was initially against the OWS movement. I hated the concept vehemently. I thought the protesters were stupid, naïve idiots with no plan and no hope. Most importantly, I hated it because it was so close to what I’m looking for in a revolution. Fuck capitalism, fuck the system, etc, etc. I love change. Change is great and you should radically destroy everything in your life and rebuild over and over. But Occupy was not that at its start. It was a protest, just another march, just another of the endless line of people who think that waving signs and yelling is going to bring about change. It’s not people with guns, it’s not an armed insurrection against the standing order, it’s a lot of kids waving and yelling about idealism and feeling good about themselves for doing so. “I made a difference” they say when they go home from the marches. “I’m intellectually consistent in both practice and thought.” It’s a warm fuzzy feeling that basically lasts until the next outrage does. It’s impotence given a voice and cardboard and a sharpie. That is what Occupy was at first.

But hey, maybe these guys do have an idea. They’re taking "occupy" pretty literally. They’re still there now six weeks later. They don’t have any more direction than they ever did, but they’re still there. They haven’t left. The system in power has decided that they don’t like it. That it’s starting to become more than a cute bunch of kids showing how great and socially conscious and civic-minded and morally superior they are. They’re “overstaying their welcome” and “going beyond first amendment rights.” So the system in power is marching out there and removing Occupy with force, using the same list of justifications as any other tyrannical regime. Make no mistake, we live in a country that does not represent us or our views, no matter what they are. The Tea Party as established was a response to this, a response that really only became noticeable because it courted the easiest section of the population to sway to anger, the ones that always have and always will believe our country is going to hell for one reason or another. Occupy is the same movement, but aimed at swaying those previously unswayable, the bright-eyed idealists and pragmatic bleeding-heart types who can’t support anything that seems too dogmatic because dogma is just kind of uncool, man. That’s the fundamental reason the movement has no direction. If it established a direction, it would alienate the vast portion of dickless carebears it is trying to represent. The idiots in their “general assemblies” continue to promote the idea that direct democracy is not only possible but responsible and sustainable, along with the concept of “nonviolent resistance” that so foils these movements and causes them to become irrelevant punching bags. The only reason revolution became nonviolent is because we as people are no longer remotely as well armed or equipped as soldiers. Start a revolution in 2 C.E. and your average peasant with a large stick had a fair chance of fighting a soldier and winning. Today we’re largely unarmed (because guns are dangerous and weapons used only by criminals) conscientious objectors (violence never solves anything) who expect that everyone around them plays by a set of nebulous rules, even as we break them ourselves. We have an ardent belief that our superior morality will see us through to the end, as god or science or human empathy will save us from what looks like persecution to our ends. So OWS goes out and marches and peacefully assembles and stands around while their peers are arrested and beaten. They walk smiling into paddy wagons, erect with their belief that what they’re doing is right and what the cops are doing is wrong and that karma will sort it out one way or another. Completely useless.

What’s extant, though, is that they’re being arrested. They’ve been overstaying their welcome, they’re finally being shown some respect as potential threats to the modern era. Displaced as that respect may be, esteem in the eyes of the enemy only increases your power over that enemy, and the movement is reaching the stage where either it will explode dramatically and drive a period of civil unrest unknown previously to man, or more likely it will collapse because people are scared and tired and just can’t maintain their energy in the face of such brutal opposition. The opposition has no such lack of energy, as they’re literally doing their jobs: protecting the status quo. They’re paid to do so and that is what they do. Yet the movement still stands, its number only somewhat diminished as outrage flourishes. Why does it flourish? This kind of brutal police action has been the state of affairs for some hundreds of years now. Getting beaten up for no reason by cops is practically standard practice. It pops up in the news all the time, and goes away just as quickly. But this is different today. Today is the dawning of an era where citizen journalism is ubiquitous. The protesters on UC Davis campus were all armed with hundreds of cameras capturing every detail of the events around them. Every major bit of footage in the newsmedia online today is youtubed within hours of the events occurring, filmed by unpaid, unprofessional people that are actively part of the OWS movement. The revolution will not be televised, instead it will appear online, on a communication tool that reaches nearly every single red-blooded American, and certainly every last one in the “young activist” demographic, who have been actively forging mailing lists and tools of communication between each other. The Tea Party’s greatest failing, perhaps, is that it pandered to a section of the population totally unversed in the internet, a segment more than willing to believe that the majority of the internet is a thing of evil, a tool to spread filth among the unsaved, unwashed masses. Though they had a movement, it was largely organized through long-established political organizations in the communities that formed tea partiers, either through local GOP outlets or Eagles/Lions/Shriners/Rotary clubs or other geriatric groups (Casinos as well, I’m sure). OWS, however, is marked first and foremost with a hashtag #occupy, a modern symbol of Twitter. This movement is flooded in internet culture. It’s driven by it. The people involved, the generation involved grew up connected to the internet. OWS is the first real substantial IRL expression of a system of beliefs and understanding of the world created by the ultimate information dissemination tool. This is the Internet’s revolution, not the “mtv” generation or “generation x.” This is what an informed populace actually looks like.

They’re still out there. And there are people who will still be out there month after month. They haven’t changed anything yet, but they’ve done the single most important part of any change, they’ve got people talking about the problems. The old world will struggle to keep up. The old world will label them as bums looking for a free handout, as communists/socialists/anarchists. The political left will bend over backwards to try to galvanize power from their enthusiasm. The political right will try to paint them as politically left (and thus terrible). Everyone will try to get them onto an agenda. Question is, will they buy it? In a day and age where dirt can be found on every interest group as easily as entering a query on google, can the old machinery survive? We might not find out today. OWS might collapse in the face of internal and external pressures. People may lose their nerve, lose their will, lose their direction. But this is what the internet generation is, and this is what their legacy will be as they grow older and replace the geriatric scum who clutch desperately to their idealized concept of the world when they were in their prime. This generation will inevitably be the new geriatric scum. I still don’t think they’re going to change anything. True revolutions only end in bloodshed (see: the American Revolution) and true change only happens when the older generations die out (something of a theme) and neither of those are happening as a result of OWS. However, the movement has been anything but ineffective. That’s why I support it now, because people are talking about and taking seriously true criticisms of capitalism and its abuses. It’s shifted the Overton Window back to the left, if only ever so slightly. We live in tumultuous times, folks.

Commstech

So I was doing laundry last Sunday and watching football, right? And this commercial came on, okay? So it was a Verizon commercial or maybe it was a Sprint commercial or maybe both, but anyway it was advertising the “4g” network, which is supposed to be faster than ever and frankly the whole thing is already terrifying from the outset, but the commercial got me to thinking about technology.

There now exist these devices that deliver, as the ad said, “content” faster than ever. All kinds of “content,” from movies to music to books to games. It’s a veritable cultural cavalcade of Stuff, powered by tiny handheld hunks of metal and minerals. I live in a city with fucked up sidewalks and an apparent lack of viable public transit. Half the neighborhoods here are totally collapsed/ing because no one particularly cares enough to fix them. They’re busy getting paid, getting laid, and living their own small lives. No one gives a shit. Or worse, they do give a shit as long as it’s environmentally friendly and green and safe and sanitary and nutritious and genetically pure. Functional comes last on that list.

Reality is crumbling here but still the latest gadget running the flashiest manufactured reality gleams ever-brighter on into the future. I went home last night and read about a video game that is the latest of the latest undergoing a beta where all of the users (testers) complained about lack of map choice and worried that the existing map doesn’t properly convey the aim of the series the game is an iteration of. On Saturday I sold a Magic card to some guy for $15 so he could later resell it for more. I ate in a Taco Bell with a TV (two, actually) that ran advertisements, music videos, a news ticker that was decidedly right-wing (entire ticker was nothing but terrorism updates and how “despite counter-terrorism success, Obama will have trouble being re-elected in 2012”) and weather news, which is why I decided to do laundry in the first place (gotta wash that snuggie).

Escapism is a part of human nature, of course. In a very real sense, it’s the path of least resistance when confronted by a difficult situation. It’s easier to retreat into a book or a game or a forum than face the real sources of misery in one’s life. It’s choosing to leave the band-aid on and pretend that it doesn’t exist rather than pulling it off at all, fast or slow. It’s not immoral to be an escapist (unless your moral system says so) nor is it really the worst thing to be (you could be a hard working and realistic cheat) but it does foment a sort of stagnation that is and will be ultimately damaging to the self and to society as a whole in the long term. Ignoring problems only makes some of them go away.

It’s tough, though. Especially in this day and age. Last Friday night, I was on my computer until I realized that I really had no reason to be. So I turned it off and realized further that I had nothing better to do, so I decided to go to sleep. As it turned out, I found something to do and I went out instead, but I decided to put my computer away for a while. It only lasted until Sunday night, when I had to complete a short “entrance loan counseling exam” to ensure that I get money in the future. Also needed to check for announcements and readings posted on the internet for my classes. And to look up where to find an army-navy surplus store in the area so I can pick up a duffle bag and so on.

Information technology has become a necessity in today’s modern, western, developed society. It’s become how we communicate with each other more often than not. We’ve reached a point where people who insist on meeting in person, people who write letters, people who do not utilize infotech like everyone else are thought of as strange or eccentric or outdated and fuddy-duddy. Even the act of reading books, that old stronghold, is becoming quickly outmoded with the third generation of e-readers on their way this year. We take this stuff for granted now, and we do so so thoroughly that even suggesting “tech-free vacations” is a big deal.

I’m behind the curve. I still have a phone that was made back in (gasp) 2009, and was basically outdated even then. My phone has actual number buttons and slides up for a keypad (which is why I bought it) with four rows of solid, clicky letter buttons. It was a contemporary of the iPhone 3GS, which I understand is about when the iPhone and “smart phones” in general really took off. I essentially own a relic that’s only two years old. Mind boggling. I bought a ps2 in 2008 because I wanted to play stuff I had missed in the last generation. My music device is a Sony Walkman nwz-s545 that also came out in 2009 (hey, guess when I bought them). Nothing I own is really modern per se, but only by virtue of the fact that technology has such a short half-life. I like it better this way, sometimes. I know the feeling of authenticity associated with using retro devices is some crazy marketing hipster bullshit, but man ya gotta get that sincerity hit somewhere. I think I’m gonna start writing letters again. You should too! Mail me a letter! I live at 1463 N. Johnson, New Orleans, LA, 70116. I don’t care what you put in the letter, say whatever you want. I promise I’ll mail you back, too.

Author's note: I wrote this like a month ago and forgot about it. Irony abounds, I bought a new smartphone because my old phone started shutting off when I sent texts. So it's not entirely true anymore.

Intensely personal blogging! Whoooo!

This is gonna be some personal writin’ here, so be wary of abrupt topic shifts and totally pointless rambling. For instance: “genius of love” is stuck in my head right now. No clue why. Doesn’t seem that relevant.

I wanted to make some kind of statement about “sustained naivety” but I soon realized that that was just a bullshit phrase coined by my detox-ing brain. I told someone (Michelle, actually, Hey!) that the reason I bum cigarettes from people instead of buying my own is because at least if I get addicted I’ll have a reason to force myself to socialize. She told me I seemed perfectly charming and friendly, which I guess at that moment I was. Actually these past few weeks I’ve been thinking about that, just because I have been sociable and friendly and it’s been an upward trend for some time. It gets weirder because I’ve been hanging out with my ex (way more than I ought’ve) and thinking even more about the dynamic between us that caused me to decide it was a good idea we’re not together (sorta kinda gettin’ over her). It was at a party a while back where she showed up stone tired and at least somewhat fucked up on some drugs and she proceeded to interrupt every conversation I tried to have with another person. I realized later that this sort of thing was a theme throughout the entire time I lived with her and that I’d had a lot of trouble getting out and feeling like I could meet someone or anyone on my own and not be a function of the relationship I was in with her. Well, not entirely the right way to put it, it just felt like I was constantly hanging out with her friends and not really hanging out with my own. Even when I tried to make my friends they soon would meet her and she’d be very sociable and offer to do things and ingratiate herself through hanger-on-ship or bumming or whatever it is that you call it. People do stuff for her and she knows it and I don’t think she entirely understands why, but she is totally fine with taking advantage of that.

I want to try to wrap the ex thing up because that’s not really what I’m here for. My point was that my ex socializes in a totally different way, and for totally different reasons than I do, and having her back in town after I’ve found some ability to feel independent of her as a person has given me a lot of chance to contrast myself. I ain’t here to lie, I got problems. I used to have social phobia something fierce, and even now I list a day spent inside and away from anyone else so that the only talking I hear is myself mumbling to myself as a perfectly cool and okay day. People terrify/ied me because I would basically sit there and imagine them thinking or saying bad things about me before I opened my mouth and then when I did try to say something I would realize that I had nothing to say anyway. I usually have nothing to say. When I’m sitting around and being quiet, that’s because I either have no real opinion on whatever the subject of conversation is or I’m thinking of something else entirely. I don’t know if this comes across very well/often but I’m a very spacey person. I can pay attention and I do pay attention, but if I have any free time at all, I’m usually thinking about something else. I feel like the internet is terrible and enabley for this kind of short-shrifted daydreaming. I spend all my time reading news articles about all manner of things or checking status updates form like three dozen people whose lives I’m only marginally invested in. The problem comes from labeling this behavior, as it’s absolutely not ADHD or any actual illness (drastically over-diagnosed, though, because it features similar patterns) because the problem isn’t paying attention per se, but rather investment into the world around you. I don’t put a lot of investment in. I think this is probably a coping method, especially when you live in an unpleasant situation. Learning how to divest from the situation, especially if you can’t control it, can be one of the few ways to preserve emotional homeostasis.

I’m not really sure where I was going with that one. As you can see, I’m not thoroughly invested in writing this (at least, not as much as I was earlier) and I decided to go on a tangent where I thought about what I just wrote and evaluated it as whether the model fit my recent experiences and sort of translated some emotions into color and all that weird little squiggly brain shit that makes no sense examined rationally but perfect sense metaphorically. Either right brained or left brained thinking, which I don’t really remember which is which (can’t recall the exactitude of emic and etic, either). Sometimes I write song lyrics. I repeat myself often. In reality, of course, this is unacceptable. We must present a coherent, cohesive, comprehensible consciousness, free from free form (well, now I am really dicking around) representations of reality. We delimit expressions of actual brain function patterns to art, because it does not logically fit anywhere else, but most importantly, it only has relevance to the brain that produced the pattern. Like I’ve written before, art is a message, an emotional conveyance from one brain to another. The difference between “good” art and “bad” art, no matter what the ridiculous debate claims, is hinged on how well that emotional message gets conveyed. A “good” song is one that sounds good and presents a emotional message in a way that coheres to the lyrics and creates an outlet for someone to say “This. This is how I feel about this. I cannot say it in words in a way that feels like it truly presents the way I feel about it, but this song sounds just like how I feel.”

So maybe what I’m saying is that thinking artistically makes you a brooding loner? I dunno. I’m not exactly a brooding loner. Actually, I don’t think anyone would tell me so. I am both bad at brooding and bad at the loner part. I used to be more of a brooding loner, but I got kind of sick of it and realized it was stupid because all I did while being a brooding loner was communicate with other people on the internet (abstract way to say I spent most of my time in my underwear posting on and getting banned from internet forums) and feel lonely. Nowadays when I want to brood, I at least do it at bars surrounded by people so I can listen to them talk and feel better. Speaking of bars, I love New Orleans. I love all the scenes, I love/hate that everyone here knows everyone else. I love that there’s something to do pretty much every weekend, even if I’m at least a little bitter about it because I don’t get a whole lot of weekends where I can sit around and feel fat (got yo ice cream, tubbo?). I never want to leave, but I desperately need to get away because I still haven’t been out of the city for a little over a year. I’m worried that when I go back to the Bay Area for Christmas everything is gonna be weird and out of place. I’m worried that there’s not really going to be a bar scene and everyone is going to look at me funny for asking and the drinks are gonna be like bay area expensive and no one is going to be holding any parties and everything will be different from here, basically. I know why! It’s like moving, except I’m only going on a vacation. It just feels kind of like it does when I move because I’m supposed to be going back to a culture that I’m not real familiar with any more. Going to Montana never feels like that because I just go to be with my family and take a lot of naps. Going back to CA, I’m trying to go and meet up with a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a year and do stuff (trader fucking joes) that I can’t do here, except I’m totally used to not being able to do them here, so it’s sort of special.

I just got a new phone in the mail so now I have no more interest in writing this. Gonna activate this motherfucker and then take a shower and dress up to go to Taco Bell. Happy Halloween!

This is what I wrote about the sims social before I stopped caring

The sims social is creepy. It’s another layer of simulacra past facebook itself, expressed in a little character who lives their “real life” inside a game inside your fake life on facebook inside of your real life. The sims series has always been kind of odd, being a virtual dollhouse simulator with simplified depictions of the minutiae of daily life. Your most obvious goal is simply to keep the sim alive in their early-oughts-era reality and culture. You could set other goals for yourself though, such as fantastic career choices and earning the highest amount of skill at a creative endeavor or simply bedding and wedding a mate and having children who later go on to grow up and move out and generally continue the inevitable and relentless march of time. I don’t need to describe it to you really, as it’s one of the best selling (possibly the bestselling, but I don’t feel like looking it up) games on the PC and is famous for being immensely popular with the sort of people who would not touch the typical gaming fare (monsters, dungeons, competition, all that).

It’s a game about REAL LIFE which is also one of Mr. Ghetto’s genres according to his myspace. Except, of course, it’s a gamified (now apparently a word. Thanks, bloggers) version of real life where doing the normal sort of things you do in real life fill up certain bars and cause your sim to become more satisfied, at least until those bars empty with the inevitable passage of time. Gamification is the next big trend in everything, if Kurzweilites are to be believed. Already we see a trend of increasing adoption of things like Fitocracy, and foursquare, both featuring rewards for otherwise mundane things performed separately from the software. The concept is that by attaching intangible rewards to certain actions, these actions can be encouraged. Hilariously, this is the principle that marketing has been operating under for the last hundred or so years. The Sim represents the perfectly gamified life, with a visual display detailing exactly what the sim wants or needs and how much. The result, which is an angle that many critics of gamification take, is that the sims live out their lives bouncing from need fulfillment to need fulfillment, with nary another thought in their heads than to fill the simplified and reductive bars.

But all that is a separate essay. I just wanted to talk about how weird it is to play characters in a game that are capable of forming romantic relationships with one another without respect to the players behind the game. Since the barrier to entry for being able to interact with another sim is to be friends with facebook, there has to already be some kind of acquaintance with the person whose sim your sim is interacting with. The interactions themselves can then lend themselves to some degree of awkwardness between the two of you. My sim shared a romantic kiss with my cousin’s sim, for example. It then asked if I wanted to date her, with of course a message asking her to confirm. Given that dating is entirely separate from relationship status on your facebook this leads to a lot of potentially weird “you’re cheating on my through a virtual character in a virtual space” problems down the line. I do want to praise the game for supporting homosexual relationships (even better, technically bisex cause you’re not really locked either way) but it does proscribe a pretty rigid definition of a relationship otherwise. My cousin (the hussy) ended up dating her female friend shortly after I declined to try dating her (kiss and run the fuck away, that’s me) and when I returned to suck face once more, I was stopped by another prompt suggesting that I suggest to her that she break up her relationship with her friend. Hilarious, but disappointingly rigid. I would much rather I could romance all the people I know at once, because that is not awkward at all. I understand there’s a bunch of other potential relationship types you can get into with people (saw “frenemy” on a list of requirements for an action somewhere. Totes gonna do that) so we’ll see how it goes. Seems the only way you can express any real affection (well, beside hugging) is through dating, though. So rigid.

Of course the game itself has all kinds of other problems. Food is free and limitless and always stocked. Your sim in the sims social can’t even get a job, it just spends all its time painting, cooking, musicing, or writing (or weeding. Mine is weeding) like some kind of awful trust fund hipster. Also alcohol and parties are off limits, though you can dance one on one with other people. Cohabitation is also out, but that’s okay because you live in a rent and mortgage free house. I’m sure a lot of people would tell me “It’s just a game, it’s not gonna be perfect” but I feel that’s missing the point. This isn’t just any game, this is a simulation of real life, except the simulation is not really of real life, but of an upper-middle-class suburban consumerist modern western idealized life. I’m not going to be as crass as to ask for a “living in a roach infested crackhouse with two kids and your dealer” mode, but I am going to challenge any even remote claims towards realism. This is of course now three games removed from the original concept of sims, developed by Maxis under Will Wright, a man known for creating relevant and fairly realistic (under certain theories, of course) simulations. It used to be back in the day Sid Meier and Will Wright were big names precisely for these sort of games, which sold pretty well and were emblematic of PC gaming as a whole. This is the era of Rollercoaster Tycoon and SimAnt and Civilization and SimEarth. What’s interesting about these games is that they almost completely collapsed as an economically viable genre with the advent of 3D gameplay. With the booming development cost and time, weird side projects like what the Sims was back in the day became liabilities for the companies that produced them. They wouldn’t sell because they catered to a relatively small audience to begin with. Costs outstripped potential revenue. The Sims is essentially a holdover from that era, an exception to the rule. After the Sims sold as amazingly as it did, EA bought out the developers, Maxis, and started putting the franchise through the modern product cycle concept (releasing a version for all potential platforms, cheaply producing new content for large profit margins, etc.) and essentially milked as much as it could out of The Sims. With the Sims 3, EA actually took Maxis entirely off the project (they went on to make Spore, and after that was out the door Wright left to start his own new company thing, currently producing a TV show call “Bar Karma,” which is about a bar at the end of the universe that helps people fix their karma.) and assigned a new team named “The Sims Studios” to create the game. They are responsible for the game I am currently playing.

SimCity doesn’t have much of a better story. SimCity 4 was the last real SimCity, and the last one produced by Maxis. The Sims was meant to be a spinoff that integrated with SimCity 4 (you could move your sims to your city! And then do very little with them. Booo.) but ended up vastly outselling SimCity 4. Later, EA, who now own the rights to SimCity, decided that the series was just in need of a reboot and not just a graphical update and extra features, so they put another developer (Ea is a publisher, first and foremost) whose name I don’t recall on a project to create “SimCity Societies” which was billed as “the first social engineering simulator.” It was complete shit. Actually, it shares a lot of similarities with “CityVille,” or CityVille’s true progenitor, “Social City.”

So has been the narrative for the recent history of the games industry. In the nineties and especially in the eighties, production costs for a video game were incredibly low, though sales didn’t start ramping up until the mid nineties. As time has gone on, the graphical quality and inherent complexity of these games has ballooned development costs to the point where companies will spend more than Film budgets creating their triple-A top billing, guaranteed sell titles. I understand that between advertising and development, Modern Warfare 2 cost over 200 million dollars. Of course they made over a Billion in revenue, so it was totally worth it for the studio. However even spending a fraction of that, say 20 million, to produce a game for a niche audience is not likely to bring back any real returns. The average video game sells between 50,000 and 200,000 copies. At $60 each, that’s only $3-$12 million in revenue. So the games industry ends up being ruthlessly egalitarian and endlessly creative in finding alternative revenue streams through things like downloadable content packs (which are often produced right alongside the game, so as to potentially net another $10-15 bucks off of people who buy the game.) and pre-order bonuses.

That’s all I really have to say.