Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

The meme said “If there was a mirror that would reveal your personality when you looked into it, would you look?” and that got me to thinking. Of course looking into a mirror, in a way, does reveal your personality. If you look into mirrors frequently, you are vain. If you look into a mirror too closely, perhaps you are insecure. If you look into a mirror and start making faces and laughing hysterically, you are probably drunk.
Your personality is with you always, so pretty much everything in your life, how you do it, how you react to it, will be a reflection of your personality. Everything is a Rorschach test.
Eating is a Rorschach test. Are you a glutton, a gourmet, a finicky eater? Do you prefer a sit down meal or a snack while walking? Everything from your choice of food to your choice of location to your choice of company is a reflection on your personality.
How you walk is a reflection on your personality, or how you drive. Something about driving, specifically, seems to bring out the inner rage monster in many individuals.
What you watch on TV most definitely is an indicator of your personality. I’d like to point out, at this juncture, that I watch a lot of nature documentaries, but it’s not true. That would indicate a mellower, more in touch with nature personality. What does it say about me that I watch a lot of cheesy Korean sci-fi? I don’t know, but it’s probably not good.

I didn’t watch the Academy Awards, haven’t watched them in years. It’s sort of like pro sports, or a beauty pageant. I don’t object on principle, and would watch if other people were watching, but I don’t really care. What films the Hollywood elites think were the best are not necessarily the ones I would like the most, and it seems sort of silly to hand out prizes for doing something they’ve already been paid millions of dollars to do.
But, Michael Moore had a few things to say with regard to this years ceremony. Here: “Before the Oscars begin, if I may, in this year of Reckoning, I want to honor what is truly and unmistakably the most important film of the year. It was only 8 minutes and 46 seconds long. It was filmed by a 17-year old young woman under excruciating and courageous circumstances. She stood on a curb in Minneapolis, framed her camera perfectly, and held it steady as the murdering cop stared directly into her lens with the steely, frighteningly look of “YOU’RE NEXT.” But she wouldn’t stop. And because she didn’t, the whole world saw what Black America has witnessed for 400 years. And now we know this is a daily occurrence. And not just the murdering of Black people with guns or knees (lynching), but with poverty, hunger, awful schools, crap jobs, mass incarceration, no health care — a daily killing of body and spirit and hope. Thank you Darnella Frazier for your gift, for creating a moment of justice. Much more to do for sure. But for tonight, assuming most of the Academy would agree, please accept this virtual Oscar for your moving picture that moved billions. Some day, I hope to hand you the real thing! Many blessings to you.”
Kaboom. Truth bomb. Definitely the most important film of the year and not only wasn’t it a Hollywood film, it also wasn’t a professional news crew. Truth is important. When the professionals won’t deliver it, the amateurs have to get to work.

A lot of people bemoan the fact that young people don’t read any more, and I do too. Being a teacher, I’m bothered my students are not more familiar with books, and being a parent I’m definitely bothered that my kids don’t read enough, that they will never appreciate the books I appreciated.
But, I remember when I was a kid, a lot of adults complained about the same thing. They blamed television. Now, it’s the internet that gets the blame.
But, in a sense, I feel that not only is that blame misplaced, but that people are reading more today than ever before. They aren’t reading more books, or even more magazine articles, but they are reading. They are reading whatever shit people have copied and pasted onto the internet, and the semi-literate comments that follow, but it is reading. They may not be in a school environment, but they do get corrected on their spelling (one teacher with one red pen will correct one student’s error once. It may not have an impact at all. Make a spelling error on Facebook, a dozen people will jump down your throat)
So, they are learning to read and they are learning to write. Generally not about anything brilliant. People are a dull lot, by and large, and always have been. But, for people whose literary tastes were not that sophisticated to begin with, social media has actually forced them to be a little bit literate.
I doubt that social media is actually increasing anybody’s intelligence, although you can pick up an interesting factoid now and again. But I doubt it’s doing us any serious damage, either.

I finally finished Infinite Jest, which has taken me about two months, and that during quarantine. It was a slog. I couldn’t get through more than 15 minutes of it at a time before my eyes would glass over and my thought processes stop completely. I know a lot of people raved about the brilliance of the writing, the importance of the book, but I just didn’t get it. A bunch of prodigal teens at an elite tennis academy, and all of them are ten kinds of fucked up on drugs and had bad childhoods and there’s just way too many gross bodily descriptions and gratuitous freak injuries and a lot of them are in rehab but outside of that, there’s no real plot, no overarching meaning, no nothing uplifting, inspiring or even slightly entertaining. Truly, it sucked.
I suppose partly it’s just above my intellectual level. I felt the same as I felt after reading Gravity’s Rainbow. Which was “I’ll never read another book by Thomas Pynchon again.” Then I broke that rule with The Crying of Lot 49, so Pynchon is partially redeemed but I have no intention of seeking out any other books by David Foster Wallace. There would be no point. I got nothing out of it, and it’s the only book he’s famous for.
My feeling is that if writers like Pynchon, Wallace, Joyce, Faulkner and maybe a couple of others in that vein insist on writing in such a way that the reader will never be able to figure out what the actual fuck is going on, what the book is actually about, because it’s buried under such an avalanche of bullshit -like the subplot with the CIA guy and his transvestite Canadian counterpart, what the hell did they have to do with anything in the end? – well, I wish them luck. But I am not their audience.

Today is Earth Day, for whatever that’s worth. It would be nice if it was a day when everyone was inspired to do something to make the Earth a better place, or at least a cleaner one. But, it never happens. Sure, some people are good. Some people plant gardens, or trees. Some go vegetarian. Some drive electric cars. All those people are better than me. I just sit here and bitch on my keyboard, but I’m in favor of everybody doing whatever they can.
The thing is, it should be very easy for us to avoid environmental devastation, to ‘terraform’ the Earth in the way scientists are suggesting we terraform Mars (I just read today that one of the rovers processed 5 grams of oxygen out of whatever poison the Martian atmospher is made of, so we’re moving in that direction), that we restore our atmosphere and our bodies of water and our plant bearing soil to their pre-industrial, non-chemical, pristine natural states.
We have the technology. We have the materials. We have the manpower. It could be done. But, our civilization is such that we argue about it infinitely, and any actions suggested are opposed vehemently.
We need more trees, lots more trees. We need a lot more solar panels and wind turbines, all over the world. We need an efficient energy grid, so all of this power production gets distributed. We need high speed rail, and electric cars. All of these things exist.
One thing that tends to get overlooked – doesn’t figure prominently in the Green New Deal, for instance, although I think it’s critical, and a no-brainer, is recycling. No, I’m not bitching at those people who don’t bother separating their trash. I do, paper, plastic, milk cartons and glass, but I’m still not sure it gets dealt with as it should after it leaves my sight.
No, we should make it easier on everybody and just say, give us your garbage, all your garbage, and we will separate it into plastic, paper, metal, glass, rubber, cloth, organic, and as many other categories as present themselves, because by going through ALL the garbage, these become valuable resources. All the organic garbage from the worlds major cities is enough to reclaim the deserts, and restore all the regions where the topsoil has become untenable. Money could actually be made on this.
Anyway, that’s one idea. Hope everybody is having a lovely day, and enjoying what is left of the world as we know it.