crawldepth-blog

[crawldepth-blog]

Carousel

The bar’s movement gives you the false impression that you’re sliding by life, especially if you’re the kind of drunk that stares endlessly at the same spot with perfect focus. A meditative observer of alcoholism. The liquor bottles on the bar’s central column--the carousel’s spinner--inch by, right to left, imperceptibly twisting along with your inner ear.

Dixie’s on tap, but any variation of Abita tastes better. Hoteliers have overtaken the bar’s originality, flooding cocktail menus with tourist-friendly knockoffs of Old Fashioneds and drinks bearing the names of American writers who wrote in the bar. Opportunities for bragging rights by a visitorship too lazy to care save for the perfect selfie. Cunts.

The carousel remains, patched and renovated time and again to pass city health department inspectors. Often failing, because the consequence of fines hits the ownership’s pocketbook ever so slightly. Most folks just want to sit at the bar to say they have, to do the thing that’s on the tourist brochure, the thing they saw on the internet that drove them in the door. And the staff caters. Tourist dollars pay. And everybody gotta get they cheddah.

The barstools creak and shudder as the old carousel twirls. It’s unclear what’s making them do so, but every so often, the entire machine shudders, as if giving up a death sigh, excited to finally be free of humanity’s ass and then crushed to realized the encapsulating servitude still left to humiliate. Slope-chinned post-college chicks, tattooed dude-bros, and Asians litter the circle.

It’s cold. Colder than it needs to be. An overreaction to the humid heat outside. Or perhaps the only shred of decency offered to staff clad in neck-gripping, full-length uniforms and bowties, forever combating the sweat induced. After one or two drinks, you need to go outside to warm up, and you begin to envy every one of the holdouts smuggling double-cigarette breaths that congregate on the sidewalks. Even in New Orleans you can’t smoke inside anymore.

In an older time, you could sit at one of two tables in front of the windows near The Carousel Bar, tables just high enough to facilitate the stroke of pen on paper or the straight-backed typing on a keyboard. You could sit there and go, pouring your heart out through your fingertips into that story, and watch the people walk by Royal Street outside. You still can, although it’s less comfortable, the pub tables replaced with shi-shi cocktail lowers that match the new restaurant on the hotel’s southern side. It’s not really for writers anymore.

On a good day, you can catch Cedrick at the valet or Blair on the bell staff inside the Monteleone and have a two-minute conversation about things. Cedrick will tell you his fortieth birthday is this weekend, and he’s expecting a new baby soon. He’s hoping for a girl because the boy he’s already brought into the world is a handful of craziness, Blair will do the Jackson Square Shuffle to get you what you need, if you need it, and he won’t blink if you slip him seven dollars or seventy. He just wants to make sure you’re okay. Corey behind the bar is just trying to get through the day, trapped in the carousel’s center, unable to get out even for a piss because the tenders literally have to climb over the bar to get out, and who’s going to let that happen with bridesmaids occupying every seat?

Across the street, even the antique store has cleaned out, and a fresh white FOR LEASE sign banks lightly against the French doors on the French Quarter breeze.

[crawldepth-blog]

Commodities of Humans

Here’s how it works.

The government issues a notice for services needed in something called an RFP, or Request for Proposal. Depending on the source and the services, this could go out publicly for competition or it could get targeted at only a few preselected companies. Federal agencies, particularly the Defense Department, do this all the time to limit the amount of work they have to do in reviewing proposals. What the government needs is called a requirement. This entire process is known as acquisition or procurement.

Worked great in the olden days when the only thing the government bought was airplanes, bullets, screw-on tops, widgets, and doodads. They could define the requirement in extremely specific detail and review proposals that conformed to those details. As usual, federal agencies tend to award to the lowest bidder because who the fuck wants to explain to taxpayers about spending a tit more cash on a doodad that could potentially perform better whereas, fuck it, let’s just see if Captain Kumquat and his F-84747349 stays in the air today.

Estimates vary in how many contractors work for the government these days. The practice of farming out contract labor to private companies has grown exponentially in the past 40 years. Every possible task from HR to personal security can be and often is outsourced by Name Your Government Agency. Political persuasion often dictates how one feels about this. Conservative administrations tend to rely on huge swathes of contract labor, easily terminated and without the long-term cost of government employee pensions and care. Liberals tend to favor fewer contractors in their federal fuckery, going as far as to “in-source” contractors sometimes for lower pay and shittier conditions in poorly-considered cost-reduction efforts.

Labor has been commoditized in this day and age. Huge contract swings get let and protested for hundreds of jobs supporting Name-Your-Agency. Imagine the pre-union days of miners struggling to stay alive while working themselves to death hauling coal out of dank holes in a mountain. Labor unions formed to protect the rights of labor forces so that they could not be exploited by their employers. Or at least, not exploited as bad as they could be. How many miners do you know these days that can’t wait to get back in on that Black Lung action?

For most federal contractors these days, there are no unions and few options for labor protections against mass layoffs in the wake of a lost competition. Sure, you can find a posted for the Fraud, Waste & Abuse hotline in every dust-caked coffee mess on every government installation. Even if you have the gall to call it though, counsel comes only for demonstrable instances of government misconduct...not unfavorable outcomes in acquisition. Companies go bankrupt when they lose some contracts, their workforces decimated and laid off in bulk with nary a concern. That’s what the government’s paying for though: the ability to award to that lowest bidder and walk away easily, with no hard conversations.

Now filter back up to the top. How it works. Oft times, the requirement that the government is trying to fill came from a contractor in the first place. Maybe that contractor got picked up by another company to put together a proposal to knock out the incumbent. Maybe they know the government guys personally or have enough influence with them to know that if they get the right people’s resumes on the proposal, they’ll win.

Oft times, those reviewing the contractors’ proposals barely comprehend the skills required to fill positions and default in their reviews to lowest bidder. The acquisition review process becomes so unwieldy that other government fuckers get to make the decisions on awards. The right contractor could have wired those relationships too.

The right contractor can also nail that requirement by underbidding market labor rates. Salaries for various contractor positions are no secret. A little bit of Googling can reveal plenty of historical data on contractor workforces for various departments and their cost to the public. Some assholes will even hang unprotected spreadsheets with contractor salaries on unsecured websites. Government service and military pay schedules are completely public to an intrepid investigator. Data driven capture teams at contracting companies seeking to win-win-win - because you can’t NOT - know exactly how much they have to underbid to knock out an incumbent, an incumbent whose own rates likely had to inflate over time anyway to retain talent. Companies like these ignore the quality of the labor forces they intend to provide to the government, focusing always on the underbid so they can capture the work now and potentially inflate rates later. As a result, skilled labor often gets overlooked for cheap, poorly skilled labor...chumps who can do the job, sure, or at least deliver a minimum viable product in the form of 9-to-4 workdays and lots of coffee breaks.

A few years later, the cycle begins again.

To use a cliched piece of contractor jargon, it’s the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone.

Worse, smart folks have righteously criticized the federal acquisition process for decades with questionable success. No one pays full price for anything anymore. It costs too much to fly first class. So we devalue human performance, human skill...humans. To need things at scale means devaluing those things to some shitty degree. Even commercial businesses have figured this out. Look at any international retailer seeking to cut costs by moving its production capabilities overseas. Look at domestic companies contacting labor forces at scale to avoid paying expensive benefits like healthcare or pensions. Look at the rise of “the gig economy,” itself a false promise of big cash and freewheeling where it’s merely one more way an organization scales labor fast and cheap with low overhead and responsibility.

We’re all just skin jobs moved into egg crates for easy selection. Whores chasing rewards we believe we earned while the johns wipe their ejaculate on our faces, our necks, our backs. Livestock crowding into pens of our own volition, oblivious to the cost of the slaughter. Shadows on the cave walls illuminated for the distraction of our peers.

Labor is a commodity.

So are you.

[crawldepth-blog]

Done Before

Cliche. An inevitable trap for all storytellers, writers, and producers. Grade school creative writing teachers warn pupils of avoiding cliche nearly as much as the dreaded sin of passive voice. Cliche in imagery and phrase can lull your audience into boredom and trick you into thinking you’re putting something new into the world.

Except you’re not.

It’s all been done before.

By the time you finish that hoity-toity Olde English Literature course in college, you discover elements of the same story told different ways again and again. The hero’s journey. Man against nature. Man against god. Man against man. The old mentor. Standing up to authority.

Can we continue to expect truly new things in innovation and storytelling? The wake-up moment from The Matrix? Even referencing that Rage Against the Machine-inspired filmic moment has become derivative, a heuristic adopted even by slime to describe conspiracy.

At what point does the pursuit of something new in language end up back in the same old circles? Is the purpose of writing and rewriting to merely retell the same stories since time immemorial (cliche) in a neverending vortex of genetic memory doomed to repeat again again? Parables and fables overtold and recontextualized ad infinitum for discovery and consumption by new audiences every generation?

(Aside: Kevin Smith once wrote a pair of assassins in his Daredevil run who only spoke in cliches. Brilliant confrontation of the problem.)

Baudrillard - whom, I confess, I only discovered through background references by Keanu Reeves on The Matrix DVDs... how’s that for pop cliche? - philosophized about the worship of the icon or representation of something as industrialization of human thought and discourse. He argued that the we only experience the latest “simulacrum” in a long series of simulations, where the industrialized assembly-lining of everything from advertising to ideas has established an ever-diminishing super-simulation based on reproducibility instead of genuine, innovative meaning.

Let that shit sink into you for a minute. Nothing new is new again nor can it be new.

Or, to continue tapping the vein... time is a flat circle.

Or... “This has all happened before... and it will happen again.”

Doomed to repeat. Hopeful for originality. Crushed by the everness.

When was the last time you read something truly original? Watched something? Experienced some new art? Felt new feelings that were not genetic remembrances passed down by the rest of the apes?

Lynch and Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return - in all its transmedia forms - is probably the best example with recency I can come up with. It’s been really hard to come back from that one.

By the by, Baudrillard disavowed The Wachowskis’ interpretation of his work, for whatever that’s worth (cliche).

[crawldepth-blog]

Dancing About Architecture

Back in the ‘90s, there was this little independent film called Playing by Heart. Angelina Jolie. Sean Connery. Jon Stewart. Dennis Quaid. Madeleine Stowe. Ellyn Burstyn. Bunch more. Gillian Anderson, in a character breakout from X-Files trappings. Gillian Anderson, man. 

Anyway, the movie features all these characters’ seemingly unconnected stories coming together in a myriad of unexpected ways, Short Cuts-style (Robert Altman having assembled that Criterion-endorsed masterpiece from loose-to-strict adaptations of short stories by Raymond Carver, who was himself a master of the pedantic yet poignant portrait of modern American everydayness). These “slice of life” vignette-type movies have become cliche by now: expected deviations from popcorn fare findable through deep search of Amazon’s back catalogues. In 1998, though, you had to really look for gems like Playing by Heart. You often did not even know it was a gem until you realized holy shit, Jon Stewart is actually going to get to kiss Gillian Anderson in this movie, by damn. 

Playing by Heart’s Carverian demeanor hides insightful and powerful dialogue. At one point in the film, Angelina Jolie - trying to impress rave dancer Ryan Phillippe - pontificates about the music pulsing around them and delivers this one-two punch: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”

The point Jolie’s character tries to make with this zinger crashes into accepted dogma that, yes, you can try to talk about music...but can you really? This quote - attributed to a lineage of musical masters from Dylan to Zappa to Martin Mull, of all people, who may in fact have originated it (golf clap, Marty) - encapsulates the tragic impossibility of adequately using words to describe music, spoken or written. The dilemma implied involves all the difficulties you’ve ever encountered when trying to explain why that guitar solo is so good at just the right moment, or why her voice instills a cascade of goosebumps down one thigh, or why you put that one particular chord progression on repeat to recapture its feeling and magic.

Some strange mysticism emerges from music. Little pinpricks of genetic recognition, perhaps, as ages-old series of notes in clef replay in new ways under new combinations. Infinite mathematical equations seeking balance...or not. Beats that compel repetition, meter, cadence, and remembrance. Heartaches both joyful and sad, gutted from you by arpeggioed melodies and sensory connection.

There is something futile in talking about music. Worry that the words used reflect only a one-sided, personal representation. Constructs of words, spoken or written, can barely hope to impart the emotional resonance achieved by so mysterious a thing as a well-crafted song or anthem. Even when so gifted a wordsmith finds adequate description, it often falls upon ambivalent audience...others whose interpretations and tastes differ so and contribute toward diffidence. How many times have you read a Rolling Stone music review and suffered paroxysms of confusion or laughter over the writer’s seeming inability to comprehend a musician’s work where you just get it.

Ask any Deadhead or Parrothead or member of The Ten Club. Forums abound to discuss the meaning of lyrics or share guitar chords. Yet all of these people organize soundlessly around their favorite artists and songs. Silent movements better experienced than talked about.

Can we transcend the futility in talking about music? Listen to or read conversations guitarists have between each other as they unpack the chord progressions of their favorite songs. Countless Reddit threads display bizarre alien languages about tremolos or allegros or keys of F#m to Gbm. Search for any keywords related to guitar pedals and find millions of videos of guitarlings seeking to replicate and improve upon the unique sound of their idols using swathes of effects and modulation gear. All of them recede to their smallest states, too, when Gem Archer improves upon Noel Gallagher’s original “Supersonic” with perfectly new fuzz-soaked rhythm strokes at Wembley Stadium, memorialized on Oasis’ Familiar To Millions (2000) live album.

Signposts to demystifying the mysticism. Short code for understanding the dance, seeking the patterns.

It’s not impossible...but it is a bit like dancing about architecture.

[crawldepth-blog]

Where It Gets In

It rained for two days straight. A pool of rainwater collects in the back right corner of the property, the result of a rising water table, poor grading, and Republicans. The house rests on an aquifer discovered only within the past few decades. The moisture-soaked soil causes the house to move periodically, especially when it rains a lot. Its century-old beams and bones creak and groan in unnoticed snaps...arthritic knuckles popping as the house breathes in and out on shaky ground.

When dry, the yard struggles to combat an onslaught of fungus and weed, parasitic gifts bestowed by the uncharacteristic rains. Too dry, patchworks of thatch intrude on the St. Augustine acre. Too wet, the blades turn yellow and broadleaf begin popping through the moist soil. It’s like the ground rebels against its own good, thirsting for just enough water to get by but poisoned by too much. When you walk across it, your foot sinks into the muddy soil beneath the flattened grass and squishy exhortations of groundwater emanate to claim your foot.

Two live oaks stretch across the property in the back, oblivious to the seasons. Wind and rain whip leaves from their branches, which arc up towards the sky  and down again in an arc, bent by their own great weight and age. Their split trunks branch off in two main columns on which many smaller branches appear. Squirrels dart across every bark-covered surface, chasing each other. One of them always gets the best acorns.

A dead tree stands stark and upright between the live oaks. Its head and branches had been cut off and sanded down, giving it the appearance of a sickly knotted totem. At its peak, someone had affixed a bat house. The bat house was made out of a wood similar to the color of the dead tree and nailed to its dead trunk in such a way that the bat house blended in. Difficult to ascertain, the bat house would withstand the sustained rain for only a year or so before the nails succumbed to the tree’s dying wood, and it would fall intact into the mud below.

No one in the 1920s could foresee long-term effects on the property, and certainly no structural engineers existed in these parts that could adequately plan and build for the decades to come. It was good enough back then to just to get the house upright and sealed off from the elements. Even that did not work out so well. With the infinitesimal, minute movements of the house across time came separations between plaster and widening gaps between windows and jambs. Hinges rusted and were painted over, their doors cracking wood frames every time they swung. When the rain got bad, the house swelled, and you could feel the humidity radiating from every corner.

The stairs to the basement sat squarely in the middle of the property, uncovered. As such, over the years, this depression became a natural runoff point for water. The surrounding concrete and foundation split and sank, tilting toward the basement stairs and the tiny, ineffectual storm drain that sat at its bottom. Within hours of the deluge, the drain would back up and cast water into the basement sometimes as high as a foot. Aging gutters also contributed to the flooding in this cellar as overflowing water from outside cascaded down the walls, seeping in from the aforementioned gaps caused by the house’s decrepitude.

It was still a great house. When the sun shone, you could sit upon the lawn - freshly cut and redolent of grass in that way - and watch the live oaks trace patterns in shadow around you. The red brick colonial style had lasted a century, the wetness of the new seasons merely staining masonry with limited amounts of mold. One day, a lime washing of the exterior would wash away all traces of mold and other blemishes. A waterfall from the stone-ensconced pool in the left back quarter of the property created pleasant cascades on a clear sunny day.

The people that came there never found purchase or succor.

[crawldepth-blog]

Narcotic

Stevie Ray Vaughan almost stopped himself from entering rehab to defeat his long cocaine addiction. After three hit albums and countless divinity-kissed performances of his signature guitartistry, SRV worried that the coke fueled his creativity and skill. He fretted about walking away from all the substances, the booze, the tiny little puffs of pot in green rooms and backstage haunts. All trappings of a live musician’s life. Just look at Clapton, Richards, so many more.

SRV completed rehab and produced his best studio album yet, In Step. It featured some of his most memorable songs including the crossover hit “Crossfire,” not to mention returns to his scathing blues roots in Willie Dixon’s “Let Me Love You Baby.” In Step also contained two artistic departures for SRV that demonstrated new growth and power: the pop-infused “Tightrope” and the 8-minute modern Texas blues instrumental “Riviera Paradise.” SRV won a Grammy for In Step in 1989, clean.

He died a year later in a helicopter accident after an all-star jam concert in Wisconsin.

Fate, it seems, will get ya.

Music critics often neglect the debate over SRV’s work before and after rehab. To be sure, Vaughan’s prior studio and live albums still display an incredible degree of musicianship: string bends, tremolo hammers, and effects pedals Frankensteined together to wail a sound so unique it continues to elude even the most technical of modern guitar masters. Compare, for example, the stinging, biting rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” (recorded instrumentally in 1984 and released posthumously on The Sky Is Crying in 1991) to SRV’s later introspective turn with the melodic, dreamy “Riviera Paradise.” There is an energy to SRV’s earlier work, arcs of lightning emanating from his guitar. While performances post-rehab still displayed this SRV showmanship, his recording seemed to mellow. After In Step, SRV would go on to record his final album, Family Style, with his brother Jimmy Vaughan (also a blues guitar virtuoso) under the stage name of The Vaughan Brothers. This album tended toward the lighter, bluesier tone of Jimmy Vaughan rather than Stevie Ray’s typical acerbic delivery. While echoes of the old Stevie Ray Vaughan still come through in Family Style, any listener can easily detect his departure from his own tradition and into something new.

Perhaps the music itself became the narcotic, the replacement for the hard nights of drinking after a show and the multiple lines of white powder snorted in between. You hear other musicians talk about this periodically in retrospectives. Noel Gallagher often speaks of how different his music evolved once he left drugs behind. Keith Richards writes of post-drug experiences as new experiments in sobriety, the effects of which contribute something new toward songwriting.

Still...there’s something about the narcotic effect itself on the production of art. Be it booze or coke or pot or pills or packs of shitty filtered cigarettes. Stephen King was a notorious alcoholic and drug abuser during the writing and publication of many of his most famous works. Robert Downey Jr. confronted the law multiple times for drug-induced binges of all types, something that even contributed to the schadenfreude of his eventual casting of Tony Stark in Iron Man. Andy Warhol used obetrol. For Vincent van Gogh, it was absinthe. And let’s not forget the madness of Hunter S. Thompson’s output in light of his shameless substance indulgences.

Many modern psychologists are even beginning to study the effects of common psychedelics on artistic output and drive. Coming down off a head of mushrooms or LSD can put one into a creative nirvana the likes of which would make David Lynch jealous. (Lynch, by the by, prefers meditation over narcotics.)

Consider the feeling you get right after you wake up: the bleary, stumbling, dream slippage that pervades your being in the minutes before you can suck down a cup of coffee or blast hot water over your face. In this morning haze, or its late-night insomniac counterpart, art’s slouching posture slinks in to impregnate you whether you’re ready for it or not. You can wait for it every morning, prompt it to come back and enter you again with meditative entreaties. Or you can have a whiskey. Or smoke a joint. Or drop some acid. Or do a line. Or all of the above.

And see what happens.

Consequence be damned.

[crawldepth-blog]

What Counts as Free?

Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, defines dread as the knowledge of what you must do to prove you are free...even if it will destroy you. The moment we are forbidden to do something, then we must do it...because being forbidden is having your freedom restricted. This is loosely paraphrased from Chuck Palahniuk’s short story “Monkey Think, Monkey Do” collected in Stranger Than Fiction.

Kierkegaard’s scenario perhaps explains the Durdenesque desire to open the exit row door while the plane is in flight or rebellion against any public campaign that focuses on an “anti-” or loss-based punishment (e.g. counter-narcotics).

Compare this to the Matrixian (?) implication by the Wachowskis that escape from bondage is merely breaking one form of control and that our perceptions of control are so limited that maybe we cannot even see or feel the true chains. “Just another form of control,” Keanu says to us, monotone. In this case, however, people do not even know that they are not free and thus they dread nothing. “Ignorance is bliss,” says Cypher, devouring a juicy digital ribeye as he consorts with the architects of bondage to reinsert himself, memory-free, into The Matrix.

Does dread compel us? Does it hinder us? Does it merely create enxiety from which prompts escape? Is Kierkegaard’s dread merely the propellant toward attainment of “The Other,” something different than the bonds of our own making? Discomfort as dread. Apathy. Fear. Wanting.

By recognizing these forces of dread, can we begin to address what breaks us? Can we begin to know oneself indvidually before seeking to act collectively? Should we?

Choice is a freedom, but it is also tyranny.

[crawldepth-blog]

The Science of You

What is the science of you? The cosmology? The pathology? The inexorable series of decisions, behaviors, and reactions that came together in such the right way to produce you. The gestalt of the quantifiable and msyterious. How did it happen?

Anthropology. Ethnography. Sociology. Psychology. Biology. Chemistry. Many studies. Processes boiled down to individual chemical building blocks. Quantum reactions propelling atomic reactions propelling molecular reactions propelling more. People study these processes ad nauseum over decades, centuries, all to explain the specific hue of your skin or the drift of chromosomes from genotypes.

Affectation. Nurture over nature. Behavior. Religiosity. Spirituality. Imagination. Creativity. Morality. Inexplicable forces of reality that further dictate the idea of you, the notion of you in the dimensions we can perceive.

Hidden or ignored forces of control. Undiscovered influence. The blue hued screens. Concrete jungles amdist chaotic plains. Medication to correct errors in you or simply just to cope. The things you do to yourself or that get done to you. Prostheses for the soul.

What chain link created the reactions that lead you to write The Canterbury Tales? To build the Wright Flyer? To cross the Atlantic? To orchestrate Symphony No 2 (Scherzo from the 3rd Movement, of course)? To decapitate people and defile the corpses? To torture and lynch a black person? To walk on the Moon? To invent the internet? To detonate a nuclear bomb? To report to work every day? To consume copious quantities of drugs and alcohol? To ignore injustice? To dig in the desert until you find the artifacts of your progenitors? To abuse a child?

Are you so broken that the science of you can never unravel all the mysteries, explain all the decisions, rationalize all the behavior? Postulate that part of the science’s foundations states that you cannot be so elucidated, that the equations never balance and instead must forever riddle as expressions. Mere definitions of concepts, ideas, chemical reactions, histories, and experiments can only serve to build a body of knowledge but never conclude the theory of you. It hangs unsolved...like programming in code for which there are no recognizable symbols in this planar reality.

Self-determination and purpose then. A process to make meaning for oneself in choice. How does it change the science? Who observes the tests? What alters the calculations?

Do we even care?

[crawldepth-blog]

The Hustle Is Killing You

Long have social media superstars and startup disruptors proffered a cure to perpetual growth in The Hustle. Gary Vaynerchuk, he of sock-tasting for wine variety and excitable ne’er-do-quit entreprenuer, swears fealty to the compulsion of hustling, exhorting in homemade videos and glitzy conference appearances that mandate to never stop. Gary V preaches to legions of startup owners, founders, and sycophants who seek to replicate even a tenth of his success. His message bears a constant drumbeat of “Never give up. Always hustle to get the next thing done. To stop is to wither and die.”

Good advice, no? Good advice for businesses, government, academic, scientific, and many other communities. The fabled rule of the early bird getting the worm still applies in today’s rush-to-grow world because of the hoi polloi’s continued need to believe that the pace and intensity of work will one day equate to immense riches and startup dreams of their own. Tell-all stories from Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and even little guys that got lucky continue to inspire individuals to sacrifice everything in the name of The Hustle. That next phone call. That next meeting. The next deal. Relentless focus on goals. Everything in service of growth. Always on.

The hustle is killing you, though.

It’s hard to disagree with the simple promise of the modern work ethic though, isn’t it? You have to work harder than everyone else in the market to get seen, to deliver your product, to close enough money to keep people employed, to ever be focused on the new and the next. Product cycles. Acquisition. Contract negotiations. Fuzzy goalposts. Goalposts that move. Meetings, meetings, meetings. Never losing face in front of your customers and competitors. Turning chaos into opportunity.

The problem with every hustle lies in the power dynamics of who’s hustling. Invariably, a business - or other similar organization - relies upon hierarchical structures to function and grow. That means people at the top direct and manage people below them to achieve goals. One way to do that efficiently is to motivate a workforce with some core belief or principle that binds everyone to common purpose. Unfortunately, many choose hustling as that belief.

Not that hustling in and of itself is a terrible thing. Misapplied in the workplace, however, particularly from a position of power downward, the unrelenting pursuit of that which never stops will eventually damage the cognitive resilience of those subject to its edict. Hustling in this day and age capitalizes on the worst cognitive impairments brought about in our daily lives: 24-hour tethering to the smartphone. Ceaseless travel between meetings. Last minute planning and preparation. Impossible dedication to long days and crunch culture. Perpetual beta: “We’ll fix it in the next version.” How well is moving fast and breaking things working out for the systematic infection of hate and abuse in certain online platforms?

Worse, hustling became its own industry, the afterbirth of startup celebrities and media poobahs all seeking better ways to do the same things. Shameless promotion gets normalized by the Tim Ferrisses of the internet because he’s providing so much value, man!!! Helping us get more efficient at our own intransigence, our steep sprint down the depressive mountain. Chris Brogan has turned it into a pathetic infinity loop of reinvention, so much so that he publicly blogged about the dissolution of his family as it happened, addicted to being seen. He’s got books to sell too, man.

People fetishize The Hustle to the point of slavish devotion to all the negatives it brings about, becoming apologists for burnout and Asshole Leadership. Accomplishing goals becomes the driver for performance review, and goalposts get moved often when corporate whims or opportunities change. Those left behind become forgotten, or worse, terminated, often as expedient ways of dealing with interpersonal problems that a senior leader just doesn’t want to waste time on.

Some have become so enamored of the hustle culture that we have normed the concept of the side hustle. This used to be a clever euphemism for writing that screenplay you always wanted to in your free time or brewing beer in your garage after work. However, whole economies of industry underwrote their business models with legions of side hustlers seeking to line their pockets with an Uber or a Lyft job, yet receiving none of the benefits typical transportation workers do. Side hustling today leads to longer work days alongside other hustles just to stretch dollars further, all the while hoping to own something of your own one day whilst unknowingly trapped in this mercantilist service cycle.

To be sure, this is not an argument to a return of Olden Days when Jack and Jill reported to their abacus, cranked out documents for 8 hours and a lunch break, and skipped on home to 1.5 kids and a range by 5pm. These goalposts were too rigid, and they crippled vast swaths of American workers with slavish dedication the other way, to fixed processes and promises that could not evolve and support the burgeoning workforces in auto mechanics, coal mining, and other dying industries. People still punch time cards today but only in service to new industries, none of which come with their own long-term safety nets. Ask any code monkey who got let go in favor of fifteen foreigners working the same developer project for a quarter of the cost.

Study after study published shows people working harder, degenerating to unhealthier states, and falling into depressive conditions. We get trapped in cycles, hoping for The Next Hustle to alleviate our pain of diminished wages, unrealized bonuses, and unmet quotas. Franchising represents one such cycle: a perfectly legal pyramid scheme meant to enrich those at the top far more than those at the bottom. Ask any McDonald’s burger flipper: how’s your 401k? Don’t have one? Well, just keep at it and one day you’ll have enough money to reinvest in your own McDonald’s franchise, complete with your own employees to lord over, all the while Mickey D’s Corporate rakes in the highest of profits with the lowest investment.

Middle management. Red and gold uniforms. Weekly profit and loss reports. Cum in the cole slaw.

We commoditized human labor in the 20th century to such a degree that we accept it now as a system to classify our various stratifications of society. Working class, middle class, upper middle class, and don’t forget those pesky undocumented workers who do all the shit jobs you won’t. They’re hustling too, sold on the dream of an honest day’s work for an honest wage and too often exploited with the lowest of wages, dehumanizing working conditions, and easy racism.

The truth is that The Hustle is just another means of control. Control by someone else. The Company. The Big Boss. The Man. Whitey. It’s a mechanism to influence others to keep the machine moving with the promise of a reward at the end, one that doesn’t always work out because it’s built on the fantasy that everything will be fine so long as the goals are achieved. It abuses you, dehumanizes you, demoralizes you. It fucks you. And when it comes, it never asks if you want to swallow.

Hustling every minute of every day of every week makes you a fanatic, an inflexible driver of your own train with no cars, no matter how much you think your efforts are in service of humanity. You may be driving this train, but what’s the point if no one’s there? Worse, what’s the point if your hustle’s side effect contributes to your people actively hating or distrusting you? Hustling with no empathy or externally focused care in leadership is just mania or sociopathy.

Fuck hustling. Fuck the deadlines, the performance reviews. Blow them all. Skip a meeting. Go day drinking. Read a book, an actual piece of fiction, preferrably from an author you never would have picked up in the first place. Lie on a beach or in the grass and stare at the sky forever. Doodle on blank paper, whether you can draw or not. Piss outside. Forget to shower for a few days. Stare unseeing into the woods. Hike through hills. Adopt a dog. Or a cat. Volunteer at Habitat for Humanity and build a house. Smoke a joint. Dine and dash. Listen to an album from start to finish without doing anything else, maybe a concerto or some bizarre prog-rock from the 1970s like Yes or Rush. Lose your phone. Forget the internet. It’s killing you too.

[crawldepth-blog]

What If Hawking Is Right?

Specifically, because the man left us with no shortage of science, what if he’s right about the multiverse?

Once relegated to the purview of comic books and science fiction films, the concept of the multiverse - or an infinity of realities that run parallel to the reality we perceive - inveigled Professor Stephen Hawking and his research partners in the final days of his life. Hawking has long sought to understand the nature of our universe on a grand scale, building upon the time-immemorial theory of relativity offered by Einstein and other scientific research into the nature of time, space, gravity, and other cosmic forces. In May 2018, months after his death, Hawking’s final paper, “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?” (co-authored with Professor Thomas Hertog of Catholic University of Leuven), posited a new concept for not just detecting the existence of parallel universes but also controlling them.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Not only does Hawking say that alternate universes exist around us, but we can control them.

The Outer Limits, eat yer heart out.

The paper, and most of Hawking’s related research left behind, is full of equations and mathematics that would tie good Will Hunting’s glands in knots. So let us, the lay-people, seek not to untangle that uproarious wizardry and instead turn our attention to the inevitable question of, “So... now what????”

If the very nature of reality is provably different in this fundamental way that Hawking described, what should we be doing? His paper argues for a few concrete ideas for continuing research toward detecting and perceiving parallel universes but not much else. Even Hawking was bound by the procedural steps scientifically available to him, but it did not stop him from theorizing a future capability in affecting new realities that we discover. Again, we turn back to the lessons and conceptualizations of the multiverse offered in science and speculative fiction of various media. Where science fails us, art can enable us.

Audiences have been treated to depictions of alternate universes since the time of Plato, whose own musings divided the observable world from concepts of Heaven and Hell, which linearly can be traced through additional manifestations of worlds like Olympus, Asgard, Hades, Valhalla, and more. Early science fiction writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, wrestling with the nature of the observable universe without today’s science-based lexicon, theorized the existence of time as a fourth dimension, how it is affected by the third dimension of space, and theoretical fifth and sixth dimensions beyond. The dimensions themselves become fodder for fiction-versus-science discussions amongst nerd populations worldwide as the influence of TV and movies like Doctor Who and Interstellar explore “hard science” answers to fictional problems. Interstellar’s simplistic description of traveling through higher dimensions to shortcut time have continually popped up around dinner tables everywhere to help wide-eyed, would-be science nerds explain black holes and relativity to their God-fearing families.

Where TV and film have taken the concept of alternate realities into near-nauseating pedestrianism, plenty of short and long prose have been published under various means of explaining the multiverse. One of the more notable attempts is Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series of novels. Begun in 1982, King uses the concept of the Dark Tower to explain his conception of the multiverse: a tall, mysterious tower that exists in time and space but also in various different dimensions as the source of all realities and worlds. It is dimensional damage to Mid-World that prompts Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, to seek the Dark Tower in an attempt to repair reality. En route, Roland finds companionship from characters that cross over into his world from various time periods in New York City, and the narrative even revisits worlds from Kind’s other novels like The Stand and ‘Salem’s Lot.

In the background of this narrative, the reader can sense King working out the math for a multiverse of universes in his own way, the way of the writer. Instead of using equations, King uses cultural touchstones and raw imagination to concoct different scenarios and situations where a multiverse bled over into itself would manifest in reality. The fantasy-inspired land of Gilead bears elements of Arthurian legend alongside lyrics from “Hey, Jude.” Over the course of eight novels, King weaves a complex tale about how reality and time could work.

Some of the most interesting and engaging ideas about the multiverse have emanated from the comic book medium. DC Comics orchestrated a line-wide event in the 1980s to clean up and simplify its comics’ continuity by addressing the multiple worlds and versions of its characters. The storyline, Crisis on Infinite Earths, explored all of the various versions of DC’s characters and eventually harmonized their universes into a single, modified-canon universe, only to be undone decades later with subsequent crossover events. In these events, multiple versions of Superman and Batman exist on different worlds, new character properties acquired by DC Comics were integrated into their publishing plans and explained away, and reality itself is policed by collections of superheroes and “Monitors.” DC’s abundant fuckery with its own continuity eventually led writer Grant Morrison to produce a series called The Multiversity, which sought to define and give structure to all the extant universes and planes of existence referred to and known throughout the DC universe.

Morrison himself proffers an intriguing concept about the nature of the DC universe and, by extension, reality itself. In his autobiography Supergods, Morrison postulated that the DC universe’s fictional world was in and of itself sentient in some way, arguing that all of the published DC Comics stories existed as by-products of a living, breathing, and aware reality. He even used this concept in his own Final Crisis miniseries to bring back Barry Allen, the original Flash (who had been killed in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths), where Morrison explained that because of a reality-altering threat by the New Gods of Apokolips, the DC universe itself resurrected one of its greatest heroes to combat that threat.

Morrison, by the by, did a lot of drugs. It was through one of his LSD-inspired brainstorming sessions that he believed to have pierced the veil of reality for himself in a quite literal way. He went on to use this specific drug-addled experience as inspiration for his reality-bending series The Invisibles.

Writer Warren Ellis’ and artist John Cassaday’s finite series Planetary explored the idea of the multiverse by confronting different storytelling genres and tropes. The underlying story involves the discovery of and attempt to contact a fictional world by a group of four scientists familiar to readers as sociopathic analogues of Marvel’s Fantastic Four. Several types of fictional universes find their ways into Planetary from Hong Kong action movies to Sherlock Holmes to Godzilla to Tarzan to the Justice League. Ellis and Cassaday use the comic book format to play around with the nature of reality and storytelling under the guise of revisiting notable fictional genres.

Possibly one of the most mind-bending and detail-obsessive approaches to the multiverse occurs in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, illustrated by Kevin O’Neill. The initial conceit for the series involves the organization of a group of characters from Victorian literature to protect the interests of the British Crown. These familiar characters - Dr. Jekyll, Allan Quatermain, the Invisible Man, and more - served Moore in a way to discover and explore the connective tissue between British fiction. Throughout the series, the characters encounter characters from many different types of British fiction, from H.G. Wells’ Martians to Moriarty himself. In one notable endpoint to the series, modern versions of the League seek to put an end to a fabled Antichrist who takes the form of a grownup Harry Potter that has laid waste to Hogwarts. Volumes of annotations have been produced that analyze every panel of each issue of LoEG, discovering degrees to Moore’s obsession with detail that surprise even the hardiest of readers. With each successive reread, one discovers throwaway mentions to obscure characters that prompt instant reexamination of the entire text and which fictional worlds may become part of it.

Moore’s conceit with LoEG evolves into an examination of possibility and imagination, positing that all the worlds we have dreamt up exist in the same continuum. In The Black Dossier, readers discover that League members have ascended their protection from just Britain to reality itself. They enter a conceptual Shangri-La called The Blazing World, which seems to be the intersection of all known realities and universes conceived of and recorded by man, and perhaps a few more at that. The greatest concept offered by Moore here, and echoing both Morrison and Ellis, is that stories and ideas themselves constitute universes of their own... that the mere dreaming of anything in imagination creates new universes, worlds, and realities.

Spool that idea now back to Hawking’s theoretical concept of the multiverse. In Hawking’s estimation, the Big Bang did not just create the universe that we know of and can perceive, governed by our known laws of physics. Instead, it created multiple universes that continue to expand today. So, what if those expansions account for the same universes dreamt up in fiction? That every character, every novel, every short story, every idea put to paper or not creates its own universe in Hawking’s multiverse?

Does that then mean we can discover them? For real? In the means of our universe’s physics and not just through the experience of consuming stories about these universes?

If that’s true... then what do we do next?

If by Hawking’s logic we can detect the presence of the Blazing World... can we also get to it?

Here’s the bigger “if”: Even if we work out how to get there... then what? How does it change... everything? If you know that one day, maybe not tomorrow or even within your lifetime, but one day we will be able to leave this reality and enter a new one of our choosing... what do we do next? How does it change things? Society. Civilization. Religion. Politics. Taxes. Conservation. Space. Science. Learning. War. Hatred. Evil. Good.

What do we do now?

[crawldepth-blog]

Fisticuffs

You walk into a convenience store. Maybe you grabbed a six-pack or some noms to tide you over till dinner, or maybe you popped in to get some cash from the ATM and you succumbed to marketing fuckery and just HAD to grab those Altoids or a bag of Doritos.

Whatever the case, there you are in line, waiting to pay. Something happens. Maybe you see someone you know, and that person is an asshole. An asshole at the very least; perhaps a stone cold enemy at the other extreme. Considering enemies, it could be a rival gang banger, a bully who fucks with you at school, somebody of another skin color for whom you have a hidden epithet, or even someone you just don’t like and you’re at a mental boiling point to do something about it.

The recipient of your ire is unimportant. What triggers you to escalate your ire to violence is.

Something else happens. Seeing your rival triggers a physical response. Your blood pressure rises. Your heart rate increases. You feel a flush across your face and your chest. In your mind, you’re not inciting anything when you call him or a bitch or shove them or even just pepper them with the stinkeye. However it is you choose to respond to the stimulus, let’s say that your response engenders another response from your target. And the next thing you know, you’re chest-to-chest slinging insults, tightening fists, pointing fingers, and about to serve up a beat-down.

You feel every pore in your body individually light up, tingling and hyper-aware. That’s the adrenalin kicking in, revving up your sadly devolved limbic system with thousands of years of Neanderthal genes that singularly serve to get you ready to kill. The epithets you throw could be nothing more than a bulwark against this genetic disposition to attack, psychological warfare designed to show force and peacock for the audience while also delivering custom-made lyrical barbs to your adversary’s psyche.

However it happens, a punch gets thrown or hands push a body off-kilter. More fists deploy. Sweat pours. You scuffle. The Doritos fall forgotten to the floor as your rage consumes you. Blood trickles, gushes, pours. Fight.

Your descent (ascent?) into violence may tap an ages-old genetic disposition to protect your tribe or to kill your food or even to slay your rival. Those environmental norms have changed a tad in the last couple-few thousand years. You evolved into Today’s Human, streamlined for GrubHub-enabled sustenance acquistion and 911 calls to the police reporting black people in your Starbucks. Generally speaking these days, our predisposition toward violence has more to do with a political will to improve oneself than actual defense and hunting. (Sean Hannity may say otherwise, but that guy can cock-gobble himself into oblivion. Seriously, go watch the John Oliver segment on how much that guy loves to “train for a fight” in case he is “accosted.” For fuck’s sake.) Your friends take up Brazilian jiu-jitsu and krav magra to hone their minds or improve their fitness, right? Hell, even the time-honored process of “jumping in” new members to a gang - where newbies get beaten by their brethren - aims to ensure they know what it’s like to have one’s ass kicked so that it baselines a certain level of violence competence, whether it’s intended for deployment or not.

So what propels you toward violence in this seeming safe and secure civilization where we have so many options for its safe release? In that context, why are there seemingly so many outbreaks of violence these days? More to the point, why are we still so surprised by it?

Let’s think about your threshold for doing harm. “Normals” will only fight if they have to. Their threshold for violence is high. Someone literally has to punch them in the face to convince them to put up their dukes. Many will not even leap to the defense of a loved one or ally in many situations, so pussified has normalcy become. These are your “beta cucks” that alt-right, pro-toxic masculinity voices decry as contributing to the downfall of modern man. Many of these same edge-of-violent individuals have to participate in a group with others of their own ilk before they will employ violence. The Proud Boys behave this way often: getting into fights as a group against a smaller number of adversaries. Often as a group against just one adversary. Seems like pussified behavior to me, but the threshold for these folks is only a little lower than the normals. They have to physically be part of a violent group before launching a kick or a punch of their own. In-group violence. Distributed faggotry.

In another corner of the continuum, think about the threshold for you and your enemy in the convenience store. Let’s say you’re hyper-aware of others that seek to do you harm in some way, not even physically but perhaps mentally or psychologically. Public disrespect from a rival weakens your reputation in some  communities, and by not responding to the disrespect in an overmatched way, your reputation could be permanently ground into irreparable paste in a community in which trust amongst your peers is how you survive. Think about that community as any cliche of urban living on The Street, maybe where that convenience store is the same bullet-riddled shithole where drugs get sold, bangers beat on their girls, and robberies invariably take place. In that community, your threshold for violence is much lower. A disrespectful word could set off the adrenalin kick for attack or at least prompt a heightened, outrageous response to “state prime.” Even the appearance of an out-group, nonconforming individual could incite you toward a wild response of this type. People have been known to attack police merely for being police, for wearing the badge. Of course, where turnabout’s fair play, police have been known to kill civilians for the mere heuristic of being African Amercian.

Malcolm Gladwell has written about how the thresholds for acceptable behavior increase the more that behavior is normed. In other words, the more you see a school shooting happen, the more you come to accept that that behavior is normal, and the more normal it is, the more likely you are to adopt the behavior (given certain triggers, of course). That theory of thresholds totally works. It explains why more people commit violence-based crimes.

It may also explain why we as a society seem to be arcing toward the normalization of violent conflict. Punching a motherfucker in the face may seem like the hoi polloi’s way to respond to bullshittery, but consider other thresholds for behaviors on the same end of the violence spectrum: psychological torture, name-calling, falsified news, intentional misrepresentation, hate speech, casual racism, gender exclusion, discrimination, gerrymandering, you name it. There are more ways to attack someone than punching them despite how awesome the power of bruising someone’s ugly mug feels. How much depravity must you accept to constantly belittle someone? How much more socially turgid, or even sociopathic is it to employ power over a person or a group of people through a disparaging lexicon? If you don’t understand or even believe in that level of power, then I invite you to call the next African American you meet a nigger and see how that works out for you.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., one of the most widely-cited United States Supreme Court Justices (serving from 1902-1932), once wrote, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” Excepting the positive notions of expanding the human mind, consider Holmes’ quote as an admonition: experience, perhaps in quantity, changes people. In the context of our little discussion about violence here, perhaps for the worse. Aggregate exprience over time creates new norms or normalizes certain behaviors, even and perhaps especially radical ones. So if the experience of violence gets normed in all its myriad forms - from fisticuffs to shootings to gaslighting to propaganda to hate speech and all ‘round the common ether - then how should we feel about that? Should we be horrified by the march of evolution, the continued genetic perforation of expectation as we discover new ways to violate our rivals? Should we become numb to it, to accept infinitely decreasing thresholds as the the propensity to visit violence on others increases? Should we rail against the march of normalization, to invoke the superhero ethic that there is always a better way? Should we dive into it wholeheartedly, not just accepting the new norms but engaging in it ourselves to understand the appeal?

“Self-improvement is masturbation,” said Tyler Durden. “Now, self-destruction...”

[crawldepth-blog]

Journalism Fiction

Stories about journalists almost cross a taste threshhold into self-licking-ice-cream-cone territory. Depending on your disposition toward The Press, journalism fiction can entertain or annoy one. Reporters, editors, newspapermen, on-air anchors, and all of their peers rarely find positive purchase in the hearts and minds of American audiences. As far back as the 18th century, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin regularly and unfetteredly manipulated newspaper media and their enterprise to achieve political goals. Still, for every negative perception of a journalist one hears these days, stalwarts will remind you of Dustin Hoffman’s and Robert Redford’s winsome portrayals of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men.

Two very different but equally powerful stories about journalism unfolded in the comics medium in the past 20 years. Both of these series exemplify the gritty requirement for modern journalism using near-future settings into which morally grey protagonists dance with darker elements of their reporting subjects. From 1997 to 2002, writer Warren Ellis and artist Darick Robertson delivered 62 issues of Transmetropolitan through DC Comics’ Helix and Vertigo imprints. Transmet (as it is sometimes called by fans) follows one Spider Jerusalem, a modern media journalist in an anonymous city of the far future, as he ruthlessly pursues the truth in a raucous upheaval of politics, neo-futurism, and drugs. The second series, DMZ (also a DC Comics Vertigo publication), ran from 2005 to 2011 in 72 issues written by Brian Wood and illustrated by Riccardo Burchielli. DMZ explores a Second American Civil War where New York City becomes a demilitarized zone between the USA and the insurgent, non-territorial Free States of America. Journalist Matty Roth embeds into the DMZ to capture and tell the stories of the people caught between the two warring polities. Both series are available in collected print and digital editions.

Warren Ellis, known for grotesquely humorous yet disgusting comics and novels, wrote Transmetropolitan as an homage to the work of noted gonzo journalist and madman Hunter S. Thompson. Transmet also enabled Ellis to place his Thompson shadow, Spider Jerusalem, into a neofuturist cyberpunk world replete with cancer-killing supplements that enabled widespread cigarette smoking, inhalable microscopic robot psychadelics, and evolved police dogs conversant in your local language. Spider, previously driven mad by The City and its reckless aphorisms of transhumanism, returns to write a column for reputed newspaper, The Word.

Spider’s stories initially focus on the WOW FUTURE! aspects of Ellis and Robertson’s world. Spider inserts himself into the activities of each story, influencing outcomes so as to find the truth wherever possible. He writes exposes about a movement of citizens seeking transformation through alien DNA called The Transients, and how their leader conspires with local police to incite a riot that leads to a mass murder of Transient citizens. He also writes about cryogenically preserved people who had prviously died and now recently revived and cured of their illnesses, and how these people become shellshocked depressives unable to function normally or healthily in The City society that has changed so much from the time they were frozen. In these stories and more, Spider’s text guides the Transmetropolitan reader through humanistic considerations of each of these future scenarios. His narration becomes not just mere reporting but also a summary of the emotions one might feel toward each issue or scenario that Spider reports.

While the entertainment value remains high due to Spider’s inherent Thompson-like interactions with drugs and weapons throughout his investigations, the reader often leaves Transmet stories with an unsettled feeling about the near-future technology and cultural phenomena that Ellis explores. It’s not meant to be an easy pill to swallow. The series’ small one-off stories become morality plays in which Ellis uses Spider to unpack the philosophical, cultural, and technological implications of these stories. This serves a dual purpose as both an engaging comic book story but also an iterative insight into Spider’s own mentality, something crucial for the slow-build, underlying long story of the comic.

Ellis’ Thompson homage becomes even more clear when Spider engages in a crusade against American presidential candidate Gary Callahan. “The Smiler,” as he is derisively called, bears frightening correlations to several conservative presidents, from Nixon to Bush. Spider spends the majority of Transmet waging a journalistic war against Callahan, seeking to expose crimes the president committed and fighting off an increasingly harrassing law enforcement community. Spider’s quest for “The truth, no matter what” makes him a target for Callahan, who becomes increasingly unhinged as Spider’s investigations hit closer and closer to home. Readers experiencing Transmet for the Thompson allegories will quickly find shades of Nixon in Callhan and tingle with excitement as Spider’s story mirrors Thompson’s own journey in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.

Even as a product of its time, at its conclusion in 2002, Transmetropolitan bears eerie comparisons to the Trump presidency. Sixteen years later, the only thing that has changed between these worlds is the propensity for the crimes Spider elucidates being more visible and yet somehow less important to the masses. Spider himself is regarded as a hero for his writing and the investigative paths he takes to find the truth, but he pays a high price for it. While we love our drugs, so too does Spider, and we all turn to them to forget the latest presidential tomfoolery. Spider’s indulgence, however, costs him his health, which becomes an unsettling metaphor for the high mental cost paid by today’s journalists and intellectuals in the Trump age. Spider’s bloody, bruised battles (painfully depicted in inky blacks and bowel disrupting browns by Robertson) over the surveillance state, climate change as a weapon, presidential overreach, and a president’s war against the media itself all provoke uncanny comparisons to today, Our Foul Digital Nightmare.

Transmetropolitan will stand the test of time with its subject matter, and it should stand as a rallying cry for journalists everywhere. Hunter Thompson died in 2005, an ignominius end to the father of “gonzo journalism,” which became a curious yet forbidden attraction for many journalists seeking to break the stolid necktie-wearing mandate of elder statesmen journalists and Do All The Drugs. Spider Jerusalem’s adoption of Thompson’s outrageousness begs the question of whether that typically disapproving behavior tarnishes a journalist in this day and age... or does it add something that this day and age needs? Journalists today are constantly humiliated and attacked by the sitting president, and female reporters often lewdly so. Perhaps Spider Jerusalem can teach today’s journalists a lesson in dealing with such a foul personality: maybe you need a trusty bowel disruptor gun to break through the bullshit screen these days. Maybe Spider’s drug abuse is necessary to deal with the mental degradation of today’s news landscape, the promise of self-care too passive and mentally insecure for A Smiler or A Beast. In any case, Transmetropolitan’s relation to today’s context will become intimately familiar to readers right away and its lessons clear.

Wood and Burchielli’s DMZ takes a different approach to the challenge of journalists becoming involved in the stories they investigate. Wood directs his setting toward perceptions of the U.S. military by depicting an aftermath of five years of armed conflict between Americans in Manhattan. An undercurrent of uncertainty and anxiety runs through DMZ every time a military element appears in Burchielli’s panels. It could be the battle-rattle-bearing soldiers escorting Matty Roth to the helicopter that is utlimate shot down in Manhattan,  stranding him in the DMZ. It could be the ever-present whispers of the U.S. Army’s perceived atrocities in killing not only members of the Free States Armies but also hundreds of innocent, unarmed protesters, an act that permeates the opening of the book and explains the uncomfortable stalemate between the USA and the FSA in which Matty finds himself.

Matty - a photojournalist initially only accompanying another award-winning reporter who is killed in the helicopter crash - discovers that he is the only journalist on the ground with an uninterrupted connection back to the real world. In this rubble-strewn, war-torn New York, Matty seeks to understand the lives of the people trapped in the DMZ, all of whom could not evacuate before the last USA/FSA showdown there. Many of these people just want to live their lives safely and securely. What strikes the reader as they encounter characters with Matty in DMZ is the indomitable post-9/11 spirit of New Yorkers clashing with the hopelessness and fear of a post-Katrina New Orleanian or a post-riot Fergusonian. DMZ features a much realer take on cultural wariness of order than Transmet because Wood and Burchielli enable story elements familiar to all of us: faceless soldiers decked out in combat gear pointing weapons at unarmed black children, bombed-out buildings overgrown with vegetation and disease, the impoverished left behind or manipulated unknowingly by those with power.

DMZ asks “What if it happened here?” and uses familiar uncomfortable social elements to answer that question. Matty’s journey changes from journalist to activist as he navigates this broken world, and he eventually sacrifices his own journalistic morals to take up with one of the many DMZ factions, first telling their story and later literally taking up arms and killing on their behalf. It is through this experience of shedding his journalist ambitions and becoming part of a movement that Matty understands how much everything around him is propaganda. He finds himself manipulated, lied to, and coerced time and again for a variety of unintended outcomes even as he, in parallel, expresses his own beliefs in supporting the coercing parties.

Matty, unfortunately, acts as a stark reminder of how the media can be controlled. Despite being DMZ’s protagonist, Matty exhibits plenty of douchey, unbecoming behavior that purposely turns off the reader midway through the series. While this serves DMZ’s story well, the slimy nature of the character’s turn hits one hard in the gut as they think about the journalism profession writ large. How many times have you been let down by your favorite reporter? How did it feel when Dan Rather resigned from CBS News in the wake of his arguably suspect story about George W. Bush’s National Guard service? Like Transmet, a lesson can be implied from DMZ’s problematic journalist as well. While Transmet argues for the importance of journalists being involved in their stories, DMZ seems to do the same at first but then pulls the rug out from under the reader by showing how Matty’s decision to get involved leads to mass murder. “Watch your back, Jack,” DMZ warns. Sometimes doing the right thing, even in the best of circumstances, can turn around and backfire on you if you do not think about all the angles of the story and the long-term implications of its publication.

To be fair, Matty ends up doing the absolute right thing in choosing to face his trangressions and answer for the crimes in which he has become embroiled, wittingly or unwittingly. Poignance abounds from the story’s conslusion as the reader considers a new New York, one that emerges from the back end of the Second American Civil War to prominence and beauty. Despite the twisted journey of Matty Roth, DMZ is still ultimately all about New York in its great melting pot parable that mirrors the United States as a whole. So satisfying are small stories of New York’s people like the DMZ’s powerless communities growing vegetables on roofs, a grafitti artist struggling to make art in a war zone, and even the special operations detachment that left the U.S. Army rather than engage civilians who live in and guard Central Park. All of these stories contribute to an unshaken sliver of positivity that it is not yet too late for the people of the DMZ... and maybe for all of us too.

[crawldepth-blog]

Death Apathy

Last week, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) issued a report citing scientific evidence that the planet will reach a critical, point-of-no-return milestone by the year 2030: a global temperature 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Widespread agreement in the climate science community consensually indicates that crossing this threshhold will constitute increased extremes in weather events around the world: more damaging hurricanes, hotter summers, wildfires, rising sea levels, polar cap melting, etc etc. The IPCC’s experts say that 2030 is the point of no return. After that, the planet is fucked for good.

Why wait?

More extreme weather naturally translates to more deleterious effects on the human population. (Sure, sure; other animal populations, too.) Higher seas? Coastal communities get washed away. Crispier temps in dry conditions? Fires consume woodlands and toxify the air with smoke. Worse hurricanes? Well, see how that’s worked out for the victims of Katrina, Irene, Michael, Florence, and more. People are forced to move, often with few if not any of their possessions, and those are just the ones who haven’t been killed by the weather in the first place.

Humans, particularly American humans, have demonstrated a particular reticence toward ameliorating these conditions. Many of us do not even believe that climate change is real. So... 2030, huh?

Perhaps we are all suffering from a confused, mass apathy toward our own demise. Sure, we deliver rhetoric second after second that our lives are so important through cat photos, pithy political tweets, and norming behaviors for sexual predation. Secretly, perhaps we hate ourselves for it. Perhaps the false meaningfulness of the slipstream of easily-forgotten but cognitively damaging words and pictures has so eroded our psychii that we have all come to a subsconscious conclusion that it’s time for us to go. All of us. It’s over. The human experiment has failed. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.

That’s a problematic phallus to fellate, of course. Surely we cannot be ready to die. Look at our lovely half-caff whipped pumpkin spice mocha latte Instas and the fifty hashtags about #wanderlust and #love and #howawesomeismylife. So much to live for.

But perhaps that’s the rub. Subconsciously, we ascribe importance to these meaningless ejaculations of culture so as to stave off the conscious realization that we are indeed not worthy of continuing on. Perhaps we never were, and games of politics, socialization, entertainment, and "work” are merely distractions from the inevitability of lives not worth living on a monumental scale.

What better evidence of this disparity exists than our inability to even accept the truth of scientifically proven facts about our planet’s transformative hostility toward its inhabitants? Some will more readily accept the hope of a reality-bending deity manipulating their lives - for good or for bad, for surely even the bad proves His divine plan, so take heart and take faith, O heathen - than the warnings of an expert panel of Science Humans that our virulent coffee-snapping goings-on contribute to an ever-so-slight, incremental provocation of the ecosystem.

Some will argue that this daft ignorance represents calculated political effort on the part of the haves over the have-nots. Manueuverings over the long-term that position the elites and the pursers to retain or attain control over possible doomsday scenarios. Rising sea levels become quite an attractive proposition when Greenland suddenly becomes habitable in the next decade. Like Lex Luthor says, land is the only thing they’re not making more of. However, if you can wash away the hoi polloi and make uninhabitable the ghettoes in which they live, you can drive the prices up on habitable land and re-draw maps of constituency. Oligarchical ways of life become survival strategies.

Do the game controllers demonstrate the perspicacity to even conceptualize such a scenario though? Even the billionaire energy conservatives that pump dark money into election campaigns readily admit their agendas seek to expunge liberal notions from grade school textbooks, ideological combat on a way-of-life scale instead of a LIFE scale. These creationist bros only just choreograph a few more election cycles down the road than the typical asshole, not in the civizational half-centuries needed to engineer climate-based population control. Their goals center on tired traditionalisms like condominium castles for their privilege addicted children and trust fund protections against system taxes.

Given these small games, these dismal chess moves, do we accept the apathy of the gameplay because of an inscrutable desire to see ourselves expire? In our core, do we recognize from some murky place within that there is nothing worth saving? Can we not even struggle to reason why we should save ourselves at all? And because that dinner is so hard to keep down, that realization so difficult to acknowledge... do we subsconsciously, civilizationally skew toward the apathetic demise? The slow, creeping monoxide we cannot even detect physically as it seeps into our alveoli? The refusal to do anything meangingful about climate change because its promised termination lulls us into apathetic acceptance?

Why wait?

Let’s just go.

Let’s just accept it and go.

I’m tired of waiting.

[crawldepth-blog]

Little Rituals

 A man walks into a cafe, shambling along, bright orange jersey and black track pants with a single white stripe down the side of each leg. He sits in a chair at a a modern castle decored table. He sits down first even though the cafe features a self-serve buffet, replete with every possible imaginable breakfast item in its smorgasbord. The man cocks his head, not knowing that he does so, or at least appearing as such. His hair is cut irregularly but short, and he wears thick black eyeglasses. Through it all, his mouth hangs open, jaw set slightly to the right, creating an image of slowness or perhaps even retardation. Hard to tell that early in the morning.

The man sits for approximately six minutes. He does not look at or appear to look at anything in particular. From his table, he can see the full breadth of the breakfast buffet. Is he staring at it though? Perhaps considering what to select to eat first? Is he tired? He does not carry an unhealthy weight, but the slump of his shoulders belies a shuddering bulk.

At the six-minute mark, the man gets to his feet and shuffles over to the buffet. He scoops a large spoonul of scrambled eggs onto a plate and adorns it with additional helpings of mushrooms, bacon, Swiss cheese, and salami cold cuts. He pours fresh made apple juice into a contoured stone tumbler. He takes his selections back to the table, sits down, and begins to eat.

The man repeats his ritual the same way every day.

The food selection alone would stymie any breakfast-seeker for a moment, let alone the slow minutes this man takes before serving himself. The repetition of the man’s pattern invokes comfort in a routine per perhaps devotion to a cultural imperative...a denoted pause demanded by his better angels before feeding.

Why is breakfast so ritualized?

After a while, a group of Chinese tourists enter the cafe. They are a family of five: two older parents sporting plenty of gray in their hair and eyes, an older daughter of no special distinction, the most millennial of millennial young men tricked out in a Canadian-inspired red and black flannel coat over what looks like a medieval leather apron (?!), and his bleach blonde girlfriend.

The family splits up to attack various sections of the buffet, helping themselves to modest portions of granola, yogurt, fresh raisins and apricots, pineapple, grapes, steaming baked bread, cold cuts of meat, cheeses, nuts, smoked salmon, herring pate, and the odd cup of cornflakes for the millennial. Each gets for themselves coffee, milk, and a juice. No cantaloupe, though.

When they sit to eat, they do so separately. The Millennial Douche Scum (there are plenty of those in China too) and his listless girlfriend retreat to a different section of the cafe to dine in private. The mother and father sit with their daughter.

As they sit, each takes a small moment to compose themselves. They situate their plates at their table space, settled into their leather chairs, and then conduct their own little rituals. The mother and father bow their heads ever so slightly over their plates and close their eyes. A few seconds only and not obstrusively. They finish separately, neither acknowledging the other’s ministrations, and begin digging into their breakfast. Similarly, their daughter performs a similar ritual albeit a bit faster and less intent. The Millennial Douche Scum demonstrates no such introspection and instead cuts to shoveling food into his mouth while yammering away at his bored girlfiend.

Little rituals over food.

In some southern American households, before food can be eaten, dining families must join hands to create a circular bond around a table, and prayers must be uttered. Several variations of this practice unfold depending on the family and the religious disposition, from silent reflection to no handholding to words of grace. Catholics, Jews, Amish, Shinto, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, all and more display their own little rituals before they consume their food. In many of their traditions, it is a giving of thanks to their deities and spirits, conveying appreciation for the meal that has been provided. This is, naturally, a carryover from pagan days when food were much harder to acquire than merely the local Piggly Wiggly.

(You don’t actually hear about too many people giving their blessings to the Piggly Wiggly for their breakfast.)

Giving thanks to gods for sustenance. Hoping these grave pieties will carry favor for tomorrow’s meals. Small displays of obedience. Carrots and sticks. The same everywhere.

[crawldepth-blog]

Action on Thought

A current, evolving school of cognitive psychology dismises Fruedian claims that all thoughts are representative of something else. This school proposes that most thoughts are actually bullshit; that at the end of the day, just because you dream about cigars does not mean you have a dick fetish. Some psychologists have even gone as far as to say that because thoughts come through your mind quickly, just because one of them gets stuck in your head does not mean it’s particularly influential, be it troubling or otherwise.

So the theory goes, just because you have been experiencing thoughts recently of murder, excessive gore, or other indicators of harming another person, that does not mean that you have a cognitive imperative to kill someone. The reasons behind this explosion of thoughts in your mind might have to do with disturbing imagery you saw or other factors. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Now, come with me on a little trip: what if you were to act on those thoughts?

Behavioral psychologists would have you believe that one does the things they do as a reaction to stimuli, that no one is inherently bad or good. (Fun side note: Aristotle might agree with these psychologists. His defnition of “ethos” had everything to do with practicing habits to attain good, not merely being good.) So what if the stimuli were terrible thoughts of murder? And further, what if you took action on those thoughts...and killed someone? If the thoughts are bullshit, then the behavior still has to be explainable in rational terms. What stimulated the person to kill someone?

Let’s say the killer admits that he did it because he could not stop his terrible thoughts of murder. He was compelled to kill that person because of an onslaught of murderous thoughts: blood on his hands, slicing jugulars, spurting veins and arteries, swinging axes, hands around someone’s throat. Are those thoughts not stimuli? But what if we accept that thoughts are bullshit? Is he just crazy? Or an asshole? Or weak? Is all of this just a social value judgement we use to make us feel better about the fact that this killer is just a deviant? An asshole? Someone to pity?

What if we don’t? What if we accept that the thoughts that drove the killer to commit murder are not, in fact, bullshit? What if they are indicators of Something Bad? Are we then punishing the murderer because of his inability or his weakness to overcome those thoughts? If thoughts have power, and we have to resist them (or not), then is that not also a behavioral indicator?

Consider both instances and then tell me this: Is the murderer guilty? Is he insane?

[crawldepth-blog]

Bathurst

Dictionaries define the word “hurst” as a hillock, sandy hill, grove, or wooded hill. Humans have appropriated this term for the time-honored convention of naming things, particuarly themselves and places in the case of hurst. Hurst, Texas, for example, suburbanizes itself between Dallas and Fort Worth in an area featuring no hills and few woods.

Overuse of the word “hurst” (Germanic in its origin; British in adoption) may contribute to a modern confusion over naming and labels. Bathurst, for example, is a town in New South Wales, Australia, over 200km from Sydney. It is an innocuously named town despite the badassness that Bathurst inspires phonetically. At first listen, one may conflate the better known term bat, a winged animal, with hurst in that a hurst may be a place where bats congregate. With a tiny bit more overreach, and no critically propeled notion to do some simple internet searching, one may also make the leap of logic that hurst sounds enough like house to actually mean...house. So...a bat-house. Hello, innocuous error in logic.

Bathurst, NSW, by the by, received its name from English explorers who named the town for Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, William Bathurst, 3rd Earl of Bathurst, in 1815. Bathurst’s name adorns several geographic regions in Australia and Canada as a result of the Earl’s British political service during this period. Most, he never even visited.

Tracing the Bathurst surname back through time, one can find that it originated from smashing two Olde English words toghether: “beadu,” battle, and “hyrst,” a wooded hill. In fact, Bathurst was likely the name of an Olde English manor near Battle Abbey in Sussex. Most easily-Googleable locational histories and various coats of arms say nothing of the manor’s infestation by bats or a rumored lineage to Bruce Wayne.

So...something with such a cool-ass sounding name is literally nothing more than a way for Enligsh pre-nobility to assert generational dominance after some medieval conflict on a wooded hill.

I still like calling a bat-house a “bathurst.”

[crawldepth-blog]

Antisceptic

The smell of an old cheap ballpoint pen, the kind you'd get from a car dealership in the '80s. Maybe marked with the name and address of a propane transport company. Not a Bic, as ubiquitous as those white-tubed black ink sticks have become. No, one much more classic in its commonality. The kind where ink would build up at the tip of the point for no good reason, leaving streaks of vomitous black around the first couple letters you wrote before you could adjust for the spill. The scent isn't metallic or coppery, but oily, in such a way that it threatens to coat the inside of your nose while you write. But you can't stop writing, and you come to expect, even welcome the smell of that old '80s ink. It reminds you of writing checks or scribbling notes to yourself in the top of a pitted old wooden desk. That ink is the industrial '80s--one of a thousand extinct smells from the backrooms of service departments, mechanics' offices, and stale old waiting rooms.

The metallic smell reminds you of a waiting room at an industrial truck repair shop, a tony room apportioned as an office to the shop foreman with an ancient couch thrown against a wall for customers to sit and wait. Which belies the intent of the place anyway: it’s a Mack truck repair shop. Why wait? It’s not going to be fast. The office floor complements the pen smell with radiant concrete because it’s not covered by linoleum or anythin else: it’s literally the same composition of the oil-streaked floor just steps away from you outside the door in the truck shop. The truth is, this is just a place for mechanics to pop a squat and enjoy a Coke between shifts or whenever they feel they’ve put in just enough work for the period to warrant a sit-down.

The evidence further unveils itself from the corner of the room, where an industrial Coca-Cola machine from the 1950s sits OM-OM-OM-OMMING away. These old Coke machines, like everything designed in the ‘50s and the 60s, look like an Art Deco god shat them out from its perpendicular ass while on the way to raising a movie set for Ayn Rand. The one in this room sits squat but tall, most of its bulk given over to the red-painted outer shell, which serves questionable purpose for refrigeration given its size and the fact that it only carries about 8 Cokes. The Cokes themselves rack inside a vertical section covered by a thin white door that snaps open when its chrome handle gets pulled. It’s not locked, and there’s nothing preventing you from just pulling a glass bottled Coca-Cola or an RC Cola out of its cylindrical berth. A bulky change port adorns the left side of the door where you can drop in your quarter, but like many things in the ‘50s, the honor system is fungible.

A bottle cap opener is built into the other side of the bulky Coke machine, merely a small hanging cracker where you insert the top of the bottle, catch the lip of the bottlecap, and pull...releasing that short gasp of carbonated air that signifies there is soft drink in the wild now. The cap then falls into a small metal trash can someone has been smart enough to position beneath the cap opener, and it clatters amongst many more bottlecaps, creating a reverberating noise inside the metal trash can that sounds like a mountain of arcade tokens.

These machines are antiques now. Collectibles forced into some Coca-Cola freak’s garage or unrealistically repainted for display at the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta. The display owners never replicate the ballpoint pen scent.