The Middle Class

The Middle Class is the least perceptive. The Rich are somewhat isolated from retribution, have the time to get bored, to explore and to find the truth. The Poor have time, too, and less vested interest in maintaining illusion. The Middle Class is the last to know the truth.

The Gestalt

I never framed the question right, until today. Which came first, the systemic change in The Gestalt or The Blindness? A Gestalt change might have created The Blindness but could The Blindness create The Change?

But I realized today that the Gestaltic Change is so radical that The Blindness must have preceded it. Was The Blindness a function of oligopic consolidation of the media and fanatical focus on advertising revenues???

In either case, it's fairly clear that The Blindness is pervasive. Very people in the U.S. can think outside of their immediate cultural box. Perhaps it's a survival trait. Perhaps those who glimpse the boundaries and lose their bearings are cast out of society, so as to not spread the disease of perception.

The Staple

We were best friends in high school but lost touch after he enlisted. By one of those strange coincidences in life, ten years later he worked at a previous employer in Palmdale and my name fell out on some old paperwork. He found me on the Internet but we didn't shake hands until several years after I left Idaho. I sipped his beer while he ranted about his kids, his ugly wife, conspiracies and UFOs and we watched confidential crash footage of his NASA composite aircraft. Then he asked if I wanted to see The Staple. We took my car (he was afraid of being identified) and drove out into the desert, down Ave R and past Lake Los Angeles.

The Antelope Valley is a vast grid of alphabetic avenues criss-crossed by numeric streets and we ended up around 120th, or 140th or perhaps 160th. Miles of empty desert, tumbleweeds, sand, the rare ramshackle house and finally a small group of farm houses. I wouldn't have noticed but he pointed it out.

"See the haystacks? See the water pipes? See how neat they are?", he pointed.

"Yes, I see them"

"They never change. They never move. And there's never any people here".

He was right. As we drove past the farm houses, they did seem too neat, too quiet. The road ended at a chain-link fence with "No Trespassing" in large red letters. Nothing about the USAF or the US Army or the CIA. Just red letters and barbed wire.

A ways past the fence were two white buildings with satellite dishes and... The Staple. A square brown exterior, hazy blue interior, larger than the houses. I couldn't get perspective until the jeep headed towards us. Then I realized what it was. A huge elevator. It was a underground platform large enough to hold three or four 18-wheelers with 50 ft trailers. He panicked as the jeep approached.

"Come on, let's go, let's get out of here".

I turned around and drove slowly, curious if they'd open the gate to pursue us. But no, they stopped and waited, content to watch us leave. I doubt they even got my license plate although he worried about it for months.

There is a large underground government base somewhere out around Ave R and... 160th street? I should have marked the exact location but it shouldn't be hard to find again.

Crime

I can't help comparing Michael Jackson to O.J. Simpson.

Picture a violent but localized crime, a murder perhaps.
Picture another crime which is mild but sanguinely global, a corrosion of ethics.

Which is the greater offense? The first is shocking but limited while the second might damage many, many people over decades, undetected like a silent cancer.

Was Michael Jackson a greater criminal than Henry Paulson or Tim Geithner? To me, Jackson's fate seems predestined, an outcome of personality rather than choice. Paulson and Geithner strike me as calculating and rational, but free of obsession.

It's easier to rain down Icy Hot Righteous Rage on The Guilty than on The Deluded.

Green Shoots in Nampa

I found my first green shoots in downtown Nampa today!

Facebook Fraud

My suspicions about widespread fraud at Facebook from Oct, 2007.

"I think Facebook's traffic growth may be an illusion. I know that a great deal of my own traffic is web crawlers indexing my site and anticipation of Facebook's growth may be attracting robotic indexing through its API, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy but not one which has the value of human eyeballs"

Recent complaints of Click Fraud at Facebook

"A big part of that revenue comes from cost-per-click advertising from small self serve advertisers. And right now those advertisers aren't very happy. They've been complaining about click fraud of up to 100% for weeks, and the situation doesn?t seem to be getting any better."

It's Over

My prediction from Sept, 2006 -

"Most Americans also don't realize that the major international blocs have been planning to abandon the US dollar as an international currency for several years. The Euro is one example, but the Asian and Arab regions have their own schemes underway."

The American Empire Is Bankrupt by Chris Hedges, June of 2009
"There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance"

"It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world?s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe"

Don't kid yourself.
It's going to happen.
The financial events of the past three years are just the beginning.

Riot Prediction

My riot prediction from Sept, 2007. And tonight's riot in Los Angeles. One-time exception or start of a trend?

Five of the six local pool bars were closed tonight by 11pm.
All were open on Sunday nights before I left for Seattle seven weeks ago.

Cheated

I started off well enough, going from student to part-time employee, then full-time and finally interim Director of IT, my five-year plan completed in six. I had so few problems. But then Life derailed me with Carlson in 1997. BSU's tolerance of his behavior was a mystery until two years later when my stock option money traced down the religious connection. I was naive in 1997. Since then, I've seen the gang game often and usually move on as soon as possible.

In some ways I'm quite free. Free from ambition now. Free from expenses and debt. Free from Nona and responsibility. I could coast for years on part-time work, spend my time how I want. But there's not much I want. Sex but, well, you know that story. Janet is awesome in Seattle but I can't see an LDR working out.

I wonder what I should do.
What do I want to do?
No answer.

I'd like to accomplish more but so much relies on deception and politics now.

No more school, ten years is enough.

Golf?
Ha.

Revenge?
I've collected enough characters who earned it.
Easy but not ethical.

Detective work? Mysteries to be solved. Motives and events that I don't understand. I figured out Carlson & the Mormons, Third Wave's facade, the Motorola Mafia and smaller matters but a few remain.

I think about painting or writing.
I think about university towns and bohemian women.
I think about Janet.
I never think about Nona.
I think about crime and ethics and justice.

I think about the past more than the future.

The Quarter

I haven't seen one of these in almost thirty years.
Do you know what it is?

This quarter's had a wire soldered to it.

It's used to game coin slots in pinpall games, newspaper stands, etc, anything that uses a quarter. The wire prevents the quarter from falling through the coin mechanism so it can often be pulled back out, or failing that, used multiple times to ring up many games at one time.

She

She was always beautiful. Technically she still is and I didn't notice when she turned rabid. Beauty leads to vanity, vanity to greed, and greed to paranoia. I watched the sickness grow each year, never blatant enough to be sure but never innocuous enough to ignore. It wasn't until later that I saw infection in the people around her. The paranoia was the worst; it often lashed out without warning.

Like tonight. I almost missed his snide implication that I was jingling my quarters as a distraction. I chuckled, explaining that I was nervously anticipating a loss but I was disturbed by the paranoia from nowhere over a fifty-cent pool game. His friend ignored it and advised me to do likewise, so I didn't leave.

Toxic people are contagious. Their paranoia heightens your own, their greed adds to yours, their agitation creates more agitation. For many years I was oblivious to The Sickness, that is until Carlson's sabotage and political shenanigans. But now I am too aware. I hear the tone of doubt during job interviews, the change in sentiment during a date. Now I can pinpoint when sentiment changed, the comment or expression that I made. The Fatal Mistake.

Each time it's different but each time it's the same. Consulting has a template of sickness. A design pattern of dysfunctionality. The inexperienced manager fumbling at politics. The braggart geek with buzzwords but not skill. The perfectionist who can't stand imperfection. The experienced manager setting me as up as Fall Guy. The amiable team member undermined by others. The impatient contractor weary of personal drama.

Slander, deliberate misinformation, being set up to fail.

Once is a mistake.
Twice is methodology.
Three times is a religion.

Eyes For Consuela

J's spur-of-the-moment choice but the play was too appropriate for my age and situation. "You're too old to start over", says El Bandito. "You can only atone for your sins now".

Is he right?

I grasp the symbolism of the confiscated suitcase ("a sacrifice for love") and Henry's alternation between spineless compliance and defiance. The ancient Mexican is a story-telling mechanism and I suppose El Bandito is, too; an interrogation device. But I can't figure out the purpose of the Devil dreams..

For some things, you can't start over. It's an issue of balance, not achievement. As time compresses, achievement requires fanatical energy which might be better spent on other things. Most of life is illusion, anyway. Achievements are social devices for status and ego. They drive younger people (like I used to be) to dubious judgement; to short-sighted action.

I still have impulse to "achieve more" but diminished by recent experience. I spent too much time in dishonest environments, money was too important, mostly for employers & co-workers but it leaked into my thoughts. I wasted too much time on minutiae. Geeks love meaningless minutiae, for the egotistic erection over obscure symbology and irrelevant perfection.

What should I do?

The corporations are full of ego, spite and contention, they churn and burn time but reward well. And I question higher education as well. I'm ambivalent except in avoidance of annoyance. My tolerance of sabotage and egotistical dysfunction is low, now.

David Carradine died yesterday in Bangkok, a 72-year-old victim of sexual experimentation. I'm not appalled or offended. Quite the opposite. Timothy Leary made costly experiments, too, but in the end, we die regardless of whether we strive or hide. I've experimented since I touched Internet in 1989, much of it undocumented and unspoken. Would I repeat it?

Henry sacrifices "valuable things" for a second chance at love soured by ego & circumstance.
I don't expect love these days, although J is awesome.

Straits of Juan De Fuca

Low tide, I walked out onto an uncovered spit.
Beaver, Washington.
The commercialism around Twilight in Forks.

And I met Andy Mackie at the Espresso Train. An interesting talk about the meaning of life, although it might seemed otherwise to observers.

The Boneyard

Kalaloch on the Olympic peninsula - My brother, a boneyard of driftwood and wind streaks.
Lake Quinault Lodge rain meter.
River outside of Aberdeen.

Downtown Seattle

The madness continues.
This panorama view shows about half of the downtown construction.