8 Ideas for Blogonomic Stimulus

Latest reports from Statistics Blogger showed I posted only 31 times in 2008, which is--ouch--less than 10% of my first year output, when I posted exactly 365 times, or almost once per day (2004 was a leap year).

Ideas to get me out of my blogonomic recession:

1) Tax-free blogging accounts. Own a blog, pay no taxes on that blog.

2) Make-work blog posts. Fill a page with words, post it, don't worry about editing. Could look something like this:

Flark doodle pansy poop ina fracktacular momentous goop handled fridge magnet moneymaker. Did things like pizza ever pepper the peonies till poems proud did pander out to the west side of the syrup factory foreman's left ankle? Oh crows in a cello salesman's wallet! Eat more Pez and gargle Listerine lustily till the edge of the cole slaw melted more quickly than a bridge builder boosted a bashful boy. If the Fez freaks ever drown a tadpole then I've got more legs than a horned owls has feathers. If that doesn't impress you, then read this, gawk slackjawed and grew twenty extra pairs of ears. Oh yes, the expectations of an oration after Obama's inauguration let's turn off CNN and focus on Playstation...

Wait a sec, I already do a bit of this...

3) Invest in solar, geothermal and other alternative-energy writing strategies. Screw my Mac's AC adaptor, I'm installing a wind turbine: This should create 5,000,000 highly intelligent and dynamic green-sector blog posts by 2015.

4) Increase blog unemployment benefits. Instead of beating myself up over lazines, buy more lattés and stare therapeutically into space.

5) Blog protectionism. I'll blog only about my blog and its blog products. Pageviews may suffer, but at least I won't get any bad comments.

6) Rewrite old posts to compete with bleeding edge products. This means reworking beastly screeds like this into punchy grabbums like this. Take that, TMZ!

7) Blog ironically about the economy.Yes, tackling the global financial mess with wit and verve.

8) More lists. God they're so easy.

Commuter sentence

Winter loses bloom and leaves
on the ground and the freeze thaw cycle
makes thick jagged potholes right on major roadways like
Bathurst. I live on an arterial road, something about the circulation of the city
I bike uphill to work, I almost die every morning nearly creamed by cabbies I
ride a two wheeled prayer got to make it over frozen tiny ice hills that send
tires skidding dangerous my face brushes concrete curbs I arrive at the office covered in
sweat and dirt

A Pack of Lies! (Tragedy of the commons)

(new category: nostradamus)

Search engine marketing is a symptom of our current global-awareness/attention-plundering tragedy of the commons.

The more we struggle to make ourselves heard, the more noise we make, the more we make the rest of the world stupid and impoverish it with our noise.

We cannot read two things at once. Attention is a finite resource.

Our aggregate attention span is imploding, as the universe wakes up and realizes how stupid it is (before promptly forgetting).

The more we search online for answers, the stupider we realize we are (yes, stupider is a word).

We rely on the search engine, because we feel so stupid.

The more searches we make, the more powerful the engine becomes, and less trustworthy are the searches, because search results are a commodity, and so answers are being ranked, bought and sold by search engine marketers.

(We still can have faith in questions though. until we start Googling 'What is my question?')

We don't notice this corruption, because we don't have time. We rush to understand. We fail. Because the noise is drowning everything out, because it needs to make itself heard. The noise is trying to make sense of the noise, creating more noise. This is called a vicious cycle, or positive feedback loop, or whatever other euphemism for 'shitstorm' (which is itself a euphemism malphemism).

Attention is a finite resource.

Money, obviously, is not.

Google cannot be benign. Monopolies are eminently corruptible. Search engines rob from the poor and give to the rich.

Search engines allow spammers to traffic in your attention. As time goes on, search engines, once a democratic tool to find what you want, will completely ensure that loud voices are the ones to get heard.

There is way begin reversing the search-engine attention trap: Make attention (counted by the number of neuron firings in your brain) the only valid currency. Attention must supersede money if we are to protect our well-being. The attention-based economy is democratic and fair. The search-engine economy is a black box, susceptible to the vagaries of expedient algorithms that determine maximum gain for those who trade in search.

[I fear the future semantic web because I fear applying someone else's cognitive feedback loops to unborn generations; I'm pretty sure digital conditioning will be more effective long term than Coca cola. And yeah this is a pretty loopy post but screw you - you've read this far]

Only when we enshrine attention rights as inviolable, then those who abuse and seduce it with noise will lose ground.

Attention = love = all the prayers and blog posts of the earth = what's better than money.

[????]

One word: Metacrap

Job Titles 1998-2008

Too many!

• Student in Economics, Classics, Linguistics, Italian, Publishing, Urban Planning, Web Design
• Office Drone
  
• Humour Editor
• Local News Reporter
• Editor-in-Chief
• University Recruitment Officer
• Expat in Italy
  
• Cupcake Man
• Chateauvian: Pastry Chef and Rock Concert Promoter
  
• Teaching Assistant
• Chef, Community Soup Kitchen
  
• Pun Gent
• Would Be Community Organizer (Ha Ha)
• Campaign Volunteer
  
• Event Planner and Fundraiser
• Freelance Web Designer(eg buy this book)
  
• Copy and Technical Writer
• Amateur Bartender
  
• Copy and Online Editor
• Digital Media Director
• Web Content Manager (Advancement Division)
• Squeaky Fat Guy

Conclusion: He tried hard to outrace boredom.

Wizard of Oz

The author and his hookah, Jan. 2006

25 alternatives to calling it "The Next Great Depression"

1. The Greater Depression
2. The Megathump
3. The Plummeting
4. Global Smackdown
5. The Black Debt
6. The Beggary
7. The Crunk
8. EconoPox!
9. The Harrowing MegaSputter
10. The Intolerable Mellowing
11. Cashtration Nation
12. The Unemplosion
13. The Wayward Lurch
14. World War Wimpy
15. The InterKnot
16. Earth & Wind and Firings
17. Beetle Bailout
18. The WTF by The WTO
19. IMFucking Worried
20. The Epic Fail
21. DOW, That Hurts!
22. The EI-EI-EI OWE
23. TSX in the Shitty
24. Dustbowl II: Lust in the Dust
25. The Greedemption

Yours?

10 Ideas for NaNoWriMo

1. The Unpronounceable Murmurings of Nathaniel P GurgleFist: tracking the final syllables of a man on his deathbed who tries to communicate with his fist in his mouth. A sad tale of phonetic potential ultimately squandered.
   
2. A man and a giant squid play chess underwater at SeaWorld. Man falls in love with squid. Squid demurs. Man pokes squid with a bobby pin and squid explodes in a passionate inky death. Nah too slapstick.
   
3. An anal-retentive druid comes home from work one day to a giant smelly outhouse stench in the druid guild hall and so he invents monotheism to piss off his colleagues.
4. A Root Beer Float for Ramses II: The Egyptian Pharaoh builds a time machine and travels to 1964 Salt Lake City where he runs a soda bar and embraces Mormonism. When the ghost of El Ron Rubbard (L Ron Hubbard's GalactoMexican nemesis) comes to him in a dream Ramses realizes that the time machine is not enough -- he must travel to the centremost planet of the galaxy, and co-write the deepest commandment of the universe and purge existence of all its thetans (Also, Get Behind Me Thetan!)
   
5. Kurt Vonnegut is raised from the dead when all the Earth's alarm clocks go off at once during a public reading by Matt Damon of Cat's Cradle. Zombie Vonnegut has X-ray vision and feasts on the skulls of Bush era Republicans. He can still draw pictures of sphincters but in his incomprehensible zombie drawl he has difficulty finding an art agent.
6. Go Bjork, Young Man: A photojournalist in Iceland is obsessed with Bjork. The nations newspapers pitch in and pay for his therapy (hey that's just a cheap shot at Bjork)
   
7. Emus for Tootie: The Facts of Life musical hits New Zealand, and it has trouble attracting an audience. Until Peter Jackson saves the day by taking the reins and introducing a loveable cast of hairy footed women who go to boarding school and wear frumpy clothing. Andy Serkis as Tootie.
   
8. The Strange Dreams of One Iris Groovethorne: a day by day listing of Iris Groovethorne's incredible dreams. Oh just you blanche at the dreaming!
   
9. Eleven cats live a life a feline frivolity in a sewer main somewhere in downtown West Palm Beach. Until one day a twelfth cat falls down a trapdoor from street and claims to be an escapee of Donald Trump's $125-million mansion renovation where even the cats are put to work and they are forced to give up their feline independence. The cats confront Trump's construction crews and assault them with an ingenious series of Ernest-Goes-to-Camp style forest-guerilla assaults, A must read for cat lovers and home improvement buffs as well as forest gorillas. Jim Varney's corpse appears in the final chapter and is mined for its poetic symbolism.
10. Tread Lightly, Dr. Jung: Carl Jung wakes up one morning and discovers he has been transformed into a giant insect archetype. Sigmund Freud tries to swat him with a couch, among other trials. Eastern Europe is thrown into fits of sniggering. Not for Westerners.
    

What are the alternatives

What are we, drawn into ourselves by chiseled time. Sketched into stone by self sustaining repetition aka conditioning, sometimes conscious and sometimes, I dunno, deep, unknowable, maybe geothermally leaked, carved into an impressive pattern, our body bed, space for the universe inside his image, supporting Niagara Falls effluvia through the persistence of a rivulet [tilt]

Overly deep, the madmen creep under the waves, poking never a head above, they drown without oxygen where there is no love.

Of awesome powers plenty, men to admire too few, he said "that's why I worship nature, but won't shake hands with you."

In fifteen minutes of not doing it only one reason stands reasonable enough: to kiss the missus, yes -- that's a good alternative to spewing this stuff.

How I Prevented Nuclear Holocaust

(my random act of kindness)

I was searching my hair for lice, with a comb. On the edge of the comb was a sticky note, with the words "Jihad is Wrong ~Jimmy Carter". I immediately dialed Jimmy Carter's number in Washington and told him he misplaced his sticky note. He said thanks and could I Fedex it over? I said yes and did just that, and as Carter wrote later in his memoirs, he gave the sticky note to its intended recipient, the Ayatolllah Khomeini. Since that time Iran has launched no nuclear weapons, and if our world leaders keep using 3M sticky notes, they probably never will. That's how I made the world a safer place (and no longer have head lice).

My screen is shattered but hell you need me

Never been so unrestrained and yet focused, never has this weight vanished so blessedly, never have I been so free to be so me. The blog was awaiting my sigh; I was never pompous about the need for purity. I boycotted for the first time, on strike to guarantee my lifeline, twisting in an hourglass until I found the time.

We observe and ape wild seductive methods, untrue expedients that succeed at blurry distance, we are consigned to blunt objects, brute conclusions, frozen resolute regretful obtrusions.

I won't rhyme just cuz I'm able, but pair sound and sense deliberately, so that the rhythm doesn't run off with the brain, a syllabic concatenation as runaway train.

***

[I dance sometimes in the early morning, don't mind me if I do. I will wake you up, my buttercup, and make you breakfast too.]

Twenty five minutes and I'm gone

(killing time -- I missed it)

Limits get results, a hurdle before me artificially coaxes creativity, squeezing blood from oblivion, inspiring netizens to dig within. But if I'm remembered for one thing, bronzed on a pin and shouted about at parties for a game where winning didn't matter, was anti-matter, where I was thick of skin, that's when I dissolve grudges and begin:

There are lights above the muck, and I get shivers in my spine, even from the firetrucks

A toast then, to the marathon men, I was one of them, I ran, broke all my bones; I spent my very best years raising funds over telephone. What then, did I get? A slap on the back and five percent bonus on my paycheque.

But I'm fine with fruit, cave slaving, my shiny bag of loot. (I have a saxophone in my laptop bag, and there are online forums too for how to play the flute).

What boredom! We are constantly at war. No wonder how we snore. For if all the world agreed, there would be anarchy. Hands in the air? Me! me! Buddha won't let me be, until he humbles me (They penalize who's first in line to extinguish all their greed).

Whither

Broken silence is regretful
When absence is the thing I've lacked
But generalizations, I find too stressful
That's how I earn my 'Man in Black'

I don't thrive on exposition
not so much secrecy as I'm too tired
The only thing I can't remember is
what life was like before the wire.

Watching the chili

I miss you, PM

More than [The size and shape of a nuclear plant cooling tower.]

But now the Internet won't leave me alone.

I would explain more [the above parentheses] but
digits are my job and spitting syllables becomes the enemy, totally foreign to
reveal my mind when my only breath is to
enjoy emptiness, embrace blank slates and
skip along with contentment upon
encountering my harried fellow
citizens in the shopping mall.

Admiring my empire from inside a bottle of ketchup

O, rude people, sad citizens, drowning in your thick-necked wizardry and donkey-minded back-and-forthery--will there be a peaceful moment for my clucking to cash your quickness? Hep, young lackeys! Untether my goats. I am hastened toward doom if no wench can cut through ear crusts and mend her wayward belching. If I sneeze in your face, and your brain is beslimed, your guts unsteady, then inhale that wet whisky and redouble yourself all the more!

Yech. I am agog, filled with brine. I rain these invectives for a reason, yet you quiver as toads under a shepherd's boot. Do you choose life, or loathing? Parcels of piffle, or proof and providence? Alliteration, or agony? All the more I impel you and yet you crumple in your daily quagmire. A martyr's death I'll choose before lurching under your bloodfisted baron's capricious yoke.

What there? An unassuming Olympiad? Call my mile-long trains and plunder them for a feast. Oh bottler, a million buckets of creamed soda! A tyrant's end to the unworthy! A joyous clanging amid the cock's drudgerous crow! A re-boinking of all redundancy and extra melting under the warm watery sun!!!

Things are rather flonk

Flonkishness abounds. There are many reasons. Copious like grains of sand. I was prappish, I was dunglish, but now all is frisia and butterscones, glashnoo and punabbly.

We wonder why it took so long for this vortex of meanderglow. But patience, like a feather grack, floats in far flung crevices.

Is there a brighter boygan? Is there a likelier mass of marzifleck—in oceans of under the riverbed? I know not.

Oh peppered pillows of pink, inside the undermount sink! Floating clockwise down a stainless steel drain, mixed up with macadamia and sprinkled by rain. Opium poppy powder pizza-pie piledrivers are often discussed, picked apart and proferred but in mid-July we sing instead the snappish chart toppers. Do I wheeze when sun rays are like lanterns of shiny hair? I don't think so, I just don't care.

As for blondie, she and me are in the middle of our history, no time to write, when we use up all the light admiring the light.

Love in the Diner (04/07)

I had a strange experience today
After a 30km bike ride to the Beaches
and back in the spitting wind,
I finally made a break at Bathurst and College
at the College St Diner which
serves excellent pancakes although it has been known
to charge 50 cents a packet for strawberry jam.

In my recent streak of sheer psychic excitement
I've concluded I must be having a telepathic effect on total strangers
so wrapped up am I in this, this thing for which I have too much respect to name
that steam is pouring out my ears and infecting others

anyway it must have been a sign when
just after I ordered the 'Can't Talk, Eating' hungry-man special
four goodlooking philosophers (definitely not Toronto natives) - one woman, three men -
well coiffed, toned, erudite and inquisitive
sat down next to me and proceeded
to hold forth on
LOVE
'what love is' one of them asked
and that hooked me
and what's the difference between love and being in love
and whether love is an overused word
how it means whatever it wants to mean to whomever wants to use it
how the word means nothing at all, really
and how words generally do that.

I couldn't believe my ears
these philosophers
thirtysomething professorial types
the kind who can breezily discern semantics over brunch
the four most intelligent people on the planet, really
having this analytical argument
about the meaning of love
in which
my universe hung in the balance
they were talking about me
everything seems to be about me lately
- I deserve a healthy shake, I know -
I would have banged my sugar shaker on the table
to get their attention
saying 'hey folks, love is war and
you're looking at one of the foot soldiers!'
but I'm trying to give up sugar
in favour of healthier smoothie-type things
and so I kept silent
and they kept mocking me
four feet away

but the coincidence was too precious so
resourceful as I am I
asked the waitress for a pen
so I could jot this down for later
that was my revenge for
them talking about me and my war
ie me writing about them
so I unfolded my bike map of toronto
with the entire city depicted
(I use that map to figure out how to get around)
and wrote all over it but now it's ruined as
in scribbling in all of this
my words filled in all of lake ontario and half of the downtown west end.

(i know I must be preoccupied these days
but there are sensible ways to deal with it and there are crazy ones for
instance
on the way out of the diner
thinking about what it all meant
I accidentally walked right smack into the
women's bathroom
I guess I was looking for you
luckily no one screamed
but boy was I red.)

Built to last

Oh big boy, long at the beginning and thin in the end, mend yourself, send yourself a note, what it was she wrote.

Aggrandize, release, contemplate, celebrate, scrivel in disappearing ink what everyone thinks. The columnists, calumnists, trysts in the mist, the abcess, the cyst.

2 wheels good, 4 wheels bad

(written in 2007, posted today)

I got hit by a car, for the third time, while on my bike and I’ve got say it’s begun to upset me.

What upsets me most is how much I deserved it. A blow to my pride.

I realize I’m a tempting target, resplendent in my plastic helmet, legs pumping like a comely gazelle, just asking to be gunned down by the nearest metal death machine. I realize that bicycles have no place on the road, and that if a 15-tonne truck fails to see me it is completely my fault. Under the ‘survival of the fittest’ (not athletically fit, but 'he who possesses the most body armour' principle) there is no getting around blaming the victim.

Of course if bicycles dare to enter mixed traffic, they are vehicles under the Highway Traffic Act. Since the Highway Traffic Act was designed by motorists, for motorists, what this means is that bikes are actually cars. They are not, in fact, bikes. What a coup!

While upwardly mobile types may see this as promotion, I fear it is a misclassification. Unfortunately there is something called reality, which makes life and driving very inconvenient. The Highway Traffic Act is right: bikes are no different from a cement mixer, which is why I guess this last driver who hit me got confused; he thought I was one of his buddies and just wanted to give me a friendly tap. In a similar exercise in reality: when I put my bike helmet in the fridge, it actually becomes a watermelon, so it should come as no surprise if my girlfriend eats my helmet while I’m in the ICU recovering from latest cement-mixer love tap. Once again, it’s completely my fault.

Clearly, helmets do not belong in the fridge, and cyclists do not belong on the road. We must not allow a light, convenient mode of traffic to infest the asphalt, omitting to pollute and omitting to destroy the expensive right of way. Bicycles are too fast for downtown traffic, which according to longstanding traditions ought to function at a crawl. Have you ever seen a cyclist zip through a completely unnecessary traffic signal downtown, as though he had figured out a better way to navigate the road? Not to sit at an intersection and wait for a traffic light - what a horrendous level of efficiency! It’s as though with cyclists, the millions we spend on traffic signals would be completely redundant. This is a mockery! Not to mention we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year repairing our roadways so that cars and trucks may continue to revert them to rubble. Why, my bike’s failure to destroy the roads threatens to put thousands of construction crews out of work. Why should our politicians divert workers to build subways when they can clean up after automobile wreckage? (Enough nonsense - cars can’t drive on subway tracks, not until we invent special wheels for them.)

Of course, a car goes fast. Much faster than a bike. Yet somehow, lots of cars put together don’t go so fast. When you put 1.5 million cars in Toronto – they go very very slow. The more of them there are, the slower they go? How is this possible; I must be bad at math! Yet I’ve seen it every time downtown: the slower they go, the faster my bike goes in comparison.

But who cares about that anyway, because driving in a car makes you feel free! Free to travel across the country, stopping at every fast-food monopoly at the government-allocated rest stops along the way. Free to pay thousands in mandatory insurance fees, free to line up at the gas pump, free to be fleeced by your mechanic. So free! Free to go wherever you want to go, as long as there are roads, and as long as you don’t mind being surrounded by thousands of cars, all exercising their freedom to commute 90km a day from the suburbs – free to give up any alternative to your car! You’re an individual, so don’t bother to share space on the subway. So free! So many millions of motorists, all exercising their freedom in exactly the same way on an identical stretch of road! Freedom to do what you want - that’s what makes the Highway Traffic Act and the hundreds of rules you need to learn to obtain your license so great!

But yes, there is traffic! Solution? Build more roads, so more cars can rocket around to more places! Will the traffic come to the new roads too? I’ve got a hunch it won’t. Somehow, drivers will stop crowding the roads if we keep paving the city and turn all available urban land over to cars! I’m bad at math, so who cares about logic too!

Will we ever give up cars? Likely not. For this involves heeding another feature of reality, namely history. It was actually the League of American Wheelmen, a cycling interest group, who got American roads paved over, before there were cars everywhere, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Thankfully we have managed to forget this. We don’t want motorists to feel guilty about dispossessing someone else’s territory, pretending it was theirs all along, and then lay waste to it – those pesky Indians make us feel guilty enough for stuff like that.

And so a few of us are sacrificed each year, in the name of tunnel vision, denial and a complete lack of common sense. So be it. I managed to survive my last three love taps, but when my number comes up, I’ll fly gleefully off the handles toward the tough but fair arms of that fateful telephone pole. It’s tough love from that cement-mixer, I guess, because it’s love.

I did it!

I deactivated my Facebook.

Friendship has meaning again.

We'll see how long I last.

To/from us

We tumbled head over shoulder, face down on the sidewalk, end over end, jacket on the pavement, quite literally on the way to the movies, metaphorically much more. Open doors, evaporating clouds, hearing music never known because our hearts are turned up loud.

We got a little left tonight, we stroll along the lake, we won that right, your day off today after all, and I see your eyes are made of light.

My job's making music out of music. I mix it up to make it right. Now you've meta-musician, skip the sounds and wave to the waves, each song a ripple stitched together, interlinked as levers, free, no cost except what we couldn't save.

On the wall is the picture of the shadow of the kiss in the sand, and the stereo plays the eternal band, it's Mick and Keith and Bowie and the Cult and sweet soul sister, your little hand is in my hand.