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Expectations

November 19, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

Next week is Thanksgiving.  That means one of my favorite annual events.

Not the parade or the turkey or the sheer joy of hanging out with some of my favorite people for no better reason than eating too much pie.  I love all that, but the event I’m speaking of has become every bit as much a Thanksgiving tradition as those balloons making their way from Columbus Circle to Herald Square.

Each year, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the TV news crews go to the airport.  There, whichever reporter is newest or drew the short straw asks people about their holiday travel experience.  It’s genius.  Every year, as thought is the first time it’s ever happened, people are furious that everyone in America can’t fly at the same time.  And if, since winter is upon us, weather is bad? Well-heh-hell the interviews are Oscar worthy.

I never cease to be amazed.  And yet, it’s somehow the perfect metaphor for the day the country sets aside each year for Thanksgiving.

As Americans, we expect everything.  When we don’t get it, we are not only disappointed, we’re enraged.  How could “they” not have built a fleet of airplanes big enough for everyone in the America to fly on the same day even though we won’t be able to use them the rest of the year? How could “they?” This year promises to be especially entertaining since we are adding the unreasonable expectation that we fly in absolute safety but without enforcing security measures because they’re “too personal” and “a hassle.”

That’s correct, people are calling for civil disobedience over security scans designed to keep bombs, like the one last Christmas, off the planes.  I wonder if anyone on the flights from Boston on 9/11 would mind if someone “touched their junk” to avoid plowing into the Twin Towers or the Pentagon? Some jerk actually threatened to have airport security arrested over “his junk” when they gave him a pat down after he refused the security screening.  The outrage is priceless and sooooooo American, as if flying is a right or something.

We want there to be planes enough to fly all of us simultaneously but we want to fly with $5 tickets we got at cheapsk8s.com in perfect security without having to have our underwear checked for bombs even though that’s where the last one was.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Rather than being thankful that we can make the journey across the country in a matter of hours that took weeks or months only a hundred years ago, we line up for the cameras to bitch about the miracle.  Drowning in blessings, even in tough times, we complain about the package that our gifts came in rather than saying thank you.  Americans could have a bad time at an orgy.

I think we have in mind a version of holidays — and life for that matter – that we compiled out of storybooks, movies and TV specials.  We have our hearts set on things being the way we’d hoped or worse yet, the way we remember they used to be even though they never were.  Then no matter what happens, when it is reality and not fantasy, we cannot help be let down.

More holidays and lives are ruined by expectations than anything that actually happens.

We are a country built on rising expectations.  We expect life to be better with each successive generation.  It’s served us well.  We work very hard and we have achieved so much.  Yet unsated expectation keeps happiness always at bay.

I think the problem may be with our bettermometers.  Each degree of our success is measured materially.  For things to be “better” we must have bigger houses, or incomes, or just more and more stuff.  I’m not really sure, beyond the process of modernization, how much better we can live than we do.  Yet our expectations of success, as measured by our broken bettermometers, tell us that no matter how far we’ve come, its’ not far enough.  No matter how much I have there’s always more that I don’t.

It’s the expectations that keep us unsatisfied, even after our massive turkey dinners.

What if we chose to measure “better” in the number of homeless we got off the street? What if we took pride in how many poor kids we fed or how lavish the educations we provided all children? What if we congratulated ourselves for great the healthcare we provided for everyone no matter what? I think we might actually make room to “feel” thankful if we jettisoned a little of our overstock of selfish.  If we look for what we can give or are just grateful to be able to give what we’re already giving instead of obsessing with we can get, we take expectation and disappointment out of the equation.

That might be something to be thankful for while we’re waiting to be frisked.

 

 

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Discount Citizenship

November 17, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

I think I have a solution for this rather ridiculous debate we’re having over taxes.

To me it seems obvious that if you’re in debt, you need to raise money.  Sadly, the way the government does that is through taxation.  On the plus side, most of us in this country enjoy a standard of living that exceeds the wildest fantasies of Louis XIV.  And I’m not talking about the rich people.

Just electricity or running water or sewage provide us a better life than kings and queens have lived throughout most of history not to mention better than the majority of the present day population the in most of the rest of the world.  In fact, we used to have the best of everything.  The best schools, the best roads, the best healthcare, the best transportation, we were number one.

Apparently the best of everything was a problem for some people.  So, thirty years ago we started toying with the idea of not paying our bills and living on a kind of collective platinum card.  We fell out of first place in a lot of categories, like education. But who needs smart people in a service economy, right? Our heritage days lasted about ten years, by then the economy was thrashed.  It took the previous President Bush and us another ten years to get back in the black and pay the national charge card back down.  We even had a surplus.

So, being Americans, we not only stopped paying our bills again we took that platinum card with the zero balance out and we did some serious damage – mostly to other countries, but we were definitely on a spree.

Now, the bill’s due again.  But here’s the interesting wrinkle.  There are apparently a lot of people who still don’t want to pay their bill.

Here’s my solution.

I got the idea recently from a man who refused to pay a tax for fire service to be provided to his rural area home.  He thought it wasn’t fair so, since it was optional, he refused to pay.  Then, his house caught on fire.  It burned down.  But, think of all the money he saved not by not paying that fire service tax! I’m sure he was very happy with his decision.

I think it’s an idea that we can make work on a larger scale.

Since so many people seem unconcerned that we aren’t number one at much of anything anymore, we should offer second class status to all those people who don’t want to pay taxes and are content with second or third or fifteenth best.  I’m a firm believer in the “you get what you pay for” philosophy so why not give people what they’re willing to pay for?  No one makes anybody buy first class tickets, even though we know the seats are more comfortable and the service is better.

So, let’s do the same with taxes.

For those who want to opt out of closing the party trough by keeping those surplus era tax cuts that have run up the family platinum card, we should offer discount citizenship.

Those of us who want healthcare and social security and education can pay our taxes.  And those who don’t are on their own.  Think of how we could clear out those overcrowded classrooms if we could eliminate the children of those people who think taxes are so unfair.  Clogged roads and highways? No problem.  Don’t pay your taxes and simply walk or drive off road.  Think of what a breeze it would be to get to work.  Long security lines at the airport? Not to worry, second class Americans won’t be at the airport at all.

Terrorist threats? Good luck with that.  Security is for the First Class Citizen.  Those who choose to live in Second Class America can break out those second amendment remedies I’ve heard so much about.

We would only have to insure the bank accounts of those people who want an FDIC enough to pay their taxes.  The police would only have to attend to crimes against those willing to pay for protection.  Think of how fast the ambulance could get to your house with the roads cleared and second class American’s on their own to get to their witch doctors through the woods.  Or the Fire Department, or the mail or even commercial services unable to use the tax payer’s First Class roads to deliver their goods to those unwilling to pay.

There would be so much more flu vaccine to go around if we only had to insure there was enough for the First Class Tax Payers.  Medical and technological advances would just be for First Class.  Those in Second Class who wanted the internet or computers or medical advances from government funded research would have to pay for the research first.

If you want goods or services as a second class American you would either pay as you go or wait until the rest of us are served.

That horrible debt? Well, those people who don’t want to pay for it collectively should just be assigned their share to settle up with the Chinese as best they can.

And civil rights, I wonder how much we should charge for those?

The advantages seem clear.  Those who choose to live in Second Class America will be free to keep their taxes and their standard of living low.  And for those who want a First Class America, we can pay for the privilege of living in a country that offers us the best of everything.

 

 

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Veterans

November 12, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

The very word veteran has come to mean experienced and deserving of respect when applied to any profession.  The veteran actor, waiter, chef, seamstress are those to whom we turn, on whom we can depend, in whom we trust in any profession.  That implied meaning of respect was earned for the approbation “veteran” by those for whom the term was coined more than five hundred years ago: soldiers.

I remain in awe of those who would choose to put themselves in harm’s way on my behalf.  We are all leading the lives that we lead because there are those in our history – recent and distant – who are willing to die for the rest of us and what we all say we believe.  The American Century, as this past one is called by us at least, is one in which we reluctantly stepped onto the world stage and took on the mantle of leadership held by other older countries for many centuries before.

We are a superpower today not because of the bombast of the loud mouths who run for office and make wars, but for the small, individual sacrifices of too many people to thank.

So today, on the day that the peace accords were signed in the “War to End all Wars,” we choose instead to celebrate not hollow victories or bloody battles but the people whose work every day makes everything else possible.

Today, I would also like to pay special tribute to those who choose to stand up for a country that did not stand up for them.  I salute the black men who fought and died in a segregated army in World War II.  I take my hat off the Japanese Americans who fought for this country while their families were in internment camps back home.  I  pay tribute to the brave women who fought for the right to fight for mine and today leave behind traditional “second class” roles for the honor of facing death to protect us all.  And today I especially honor those men and women who must deny who they are and who they love to defend a country that asks them to lie as part of their duty.

Don’t ask Don’t Tell compromises the honor of all concerned by asking good men and women to lie to protect the feelings of bigots.  What it does not do is prevent these honorable gay soldiers from stepping up to serve their country with bravery and distinction.

We are a country founded on high ideals.  In many ways we aren’t there yet.  But we get closer all the time.  Sometimes it’s legislation that moves us along.  Sometimes landmark court rulings bring us closer to liberty and justice for all.  Sometimes we have had had to fight for those rights on real, not just ideological, battlefields.  But sometimes it is the small personal acts of bravery like taking a seat at the front of the bus or serving in honor and in silence that advance the lives of us all.

It’s easier to see and reward acts of bravery and sacrifice on the battlefield and it’s worth doing.  But that’s not what Veteran’s Day is about.  Today is set aside to celebrate all those men and women willing to make the choice, despite the risk, despite the prejudice, despite the hardship to those they care about most, to advance the causes great and small that make us a better people.

In our quest to be the best that we seek to be, we would be hard pressed to find a better example than our veterans.

Thank you for your service, not just the ones we can see and hang a medal on, but for serving as models of our best selves and leading us toward those ideals that we say we hold to be self evident.

 

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Fashion

November 9, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

Something is really wrong with fashion design.

I went out to get something to wear on my birthday a while back and I found that I was an XL.  I’m pushing five foot seven and at my roundest, I had a 33 inch waist.  I could stand to lose a few pounds, I have in fact, but extra large? Who are designers making clothes for?

It seems to me that the hallmark of good design of any kind is, working with what you’ve got and making the best of it.  I wouldn’t be much of an architect if I could only design buildings that looked great on level, perfectly square lots.  In fact I’d be kind of a hack.

Yet in fashion, we hail as genius, folks whose clothes only look good on people who could wear garbage bags with duct tape accessories and look amazing.

With blessed few exceptions, fashion designers are no longer making clothes that make people look good.  Most designers seem to be working with Jenny Craig and the cosmetic surgery industry to make us feel bad about ourselves, not good about their clothes.  I saw a commercial recently featuring Vera Wang – she’s a noted fashion designer for those who don’t care.  In the ad she says that what she values is good design above all things.  Her words voice over a series of shots of perfect looking people rocking what can only be described as thrift store costume wear.

Nothing wrong with thrift store costume wear, I’ve got plenty, just ask the folks at my 10th high school reunion.  But in the Vera ad there was no “design” involved and again the models would have looked great in anything, especially with hair, makeup and lighting.

Maybe I’m late to the topic, but it seems to me “supermodel” syndrome has overtaken fashion.  Rather than buying clothes that make us look good, we feel we much change ourselves to look good in the clothes that were designed by these hacks.  I know there’s the delusion that we will look like the guy painted on the wall in Times Square or the lady on the cover of Vogue, but often times, even they don’t look like that.  Their bodies are more the product of retouch than real life.

I don’t know about women’s fashion mags, but GQ, Esquire, Details and their ilk not only need to ramp up their dreadful editorial (Andrew Goldman’s work is a welcome exception), but they might want to rethink their definition of fashion.  Their pages are peopled by young men who will graduate from high school any day now — if that tape worm doesn’t get them first — wearing suits they will not be able to afford until their parents die and leave them everything.  They look great.  They also look great in jeans and sweatshirts, their old Boy Scout Uniforms and their Sponge Bob PJs.  They are however the only ones who would look great in high water suit pants and three button jackets.

This month’s Details magazine features fisherman’s coats with rope toggle buttons (remember those from grade school?) and shoes that look like they came out of a bin at the Goodwill as their fashion forward for the season.  While it may be fashionable to have beat up shoes and to still look good in a kindergarten coat, it does not offer much in the way of design.

I despair for the fashion industry.  We are either doomed to look like Maoist China with everyone in the same jeans and chambray shirt or to be victims of the sort of thinking that had Mayan parents hang beads before their babies faces to make them cross-eyed because it was fashionable.

I haven’t seen that Project Runway show that’s so popular with my people.  Perhaps there is a new generation of designers coming who are talented enough to design clothes that make actual people look good, not just mannequins.  If not, there is a fortune to be made by the person who has the strength of character to withstand the Emperor’s New Clothes design school that has taken over fashion, the vision to remember what true purpose of fashion design and the skill to make us look good again.

Or maybe we just need to invent cosmetic health insurance.

 

 

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Enemies

November 5, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

Back in the before times, there was a movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

For many, it was just this creepy movie about some alien race taking over by replacing us, one by one, with duplicate, alien versions.  Many also saw it as allegorical for the prevailing cold war mentality of the time.  We were faced with the daily threat of the ideological opposition of a strange and mysterious force – Communism and the countries that espoused it’s evil philosophy of equality and social and financial equity.  Scary, right?

The movies of the day reflected our fear.  They were filled not only with sinister aliens, but dastardly villains with mildly German accents and murky Anti-American agendas.  In each, outside forces sought to despoil the American dream.  Everything from The Day the Earth Stood Still to North by Northwest, make a case for the theory.

So, what’s up with all the zombies?

Movies, TV shows, even poor Jane Austen are being overrun by hoards of the living dead.  I don’t really get zombies.  I like Bond Villains.  Brilliant, driven, lots to say.  But zombies? Mindless eating machines motivated only by the basest and most obvious desires.  Dullsville.

I was hiding out from the annual Halloween invasion of my neighborhood last weekend.  Something like a half million people in masks show up each year to take over the small town in the middle of Los Angeles where I live.  I’ve never minded standing in front of a crowd but I’ve never been a big fan of being part of one.  It may just be that I’m short and can’t see where I am when I’m surrounded by a crowd, but it freaks me out.  Also, I’ve done enough acting that costume and makeup sounds like work to me.  So, on Halloween I stock up on can goods and hide out in my apartment till the crowd subsides or someone at least offers me scale and a good script.

In honor of my annual siege, I Tivoed a lot of scary movies.  Some were recent and so they had zombies in them.  I didn’t really enjoy them much.  I did a fair amount of “speed watching” which involves just leaving the playback in fast-forward mode until I see something that looks like it might advance any plot there might be.  I watch that at normal speed, backing up, if necessary to pick up any salient details, and then back to “speed watch.”

I was pretty bored.  Since the film makers hadn’t bothered to give me anything to think about, I started thinking about my question:  What’s with the zombies? Why do so many current films and books and TV shows include zombies, the dullest and least nuanced of villains?

Then it hit me.

We have a new common enemy.  It’s not Osama.  We don’t even seem interested in catching him anymore.  And there’s the vague threat of terrorism that’s given rise to an increase of Muslim hatred, but anti-semite prejudice isn’t really anything new.  Our new enemy is us.  We hate each other.  The evil empire of the east has been replaced by open contempt and disrespect for one another.  This past political campaign was the most uncivil I’ve ever seen.  It was even worse than the one before.

There are whole networks devoted to hating and saying the most vicious things possible about those who disagree with them.  People are taking guns to appearances by the President.  We’ve stopped calling the President the President, referring to him simply as Bush or Obama.  The airwaves are clogged with reality shows that allow us to look down on and celebrate the humiliation of others.

We have met enemy and it is us.

Without a common outside threat, we have come to hate each other.  Increasingly polarized, we trust and care about one another less and less.  Health care? Who wants to offer aid and comfort to the enemy? We lock our doors, get into our armored SUV tanks and protect ourselves from the evil that surrounds, threatens and looks just like us.

Sounds like the people in a zombie picture to me.

What zombie pictures offer is the chance to blow the heads off the mindless idiots without consequence.  It is a chance to enjoy unspeakable violence against people who are otherwise our neighbors and fellow citizens.  Their mindless, single minded drive for something that we find repellent and threatening justifies the most extreme reprisals.

That makes all of us, someone else’s zombie.  I wonder if we will ever be able to evolve past the need for a common enemy.  I grew up in the 60’s and though the cold war wasn’t over, it seemed to me as though there was a rise in the unifying desire for the common good.

I wonder if that’s what’s next? Can we replace the need for a common enemy to a desire for the common good as what unites us?

I hope so.  I’m really sick of all the zombies.

 

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Greed

November 2, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

Greed is good.

It was a line from a movie in the 80’s.  It was spoken by the villain.  It was intended as an indictment by the filmmaker.  It was adopted as a mantra by a generation.  Apparently no one noted that the speaker of the iconic line went to prison at the end of the film.

I think the line spoke to the spoiled children of the baby boom and told us just what we wanted to hear:   It’s not only okay to be selfish, it’s a good idea.  There’s only so much prosperity pie to go around and if you don’t get a slice, there won’t be any for you.

Greed is just fear gazing into the future.

Thirty years later we have disguised our greed, our fear of the future, with a thousand rationalizations.  Social Security won’t be there for me so we need to end it now.  Those greedy teachers are ruining education even though we stopped paying for it in the 70’s.  Health care reform means I’ll have to pay poor people’s doctor bills.  And the end of all these scenarios is that there won’t be any left for me!

What do we have to show for our lack of investment?

At the time the movie Wall Street came out, we were busy planting the seeds that we are harvesting today.  Companies were being bought and traded like used cars, broken up and sold off for parts and scrap for the profit of only the traders.  Those who had counted on those businesses to support them and their families were out of luck.  The industrial foundation of the country was broken up and shipped overseas.  We shifted to a “service based” economy – had any of that “service” lately? Then we shipped the services overseas.

Retail was gutted by the “buy more cheaper” philosophy so we that those who’d lost their good paying jobs could still afford to buy large quantities of the same crap.

Today our great country can’t even make its own TV’s but we can buy ‘em cheap at the WalMart.

The computers and smart phones that are supposed transport us to our roadside markets along the information highway aren’t made here.  I don’t even know if we can still make anything.

In short, the greed born in the 80’s has made the prosperity pie smaller.  Fewer people control more of the money than ever before.

Henry Ford did one of the smartest things anyone ever did.  He paid the people who worked for him enough that they could afford to buy his product.  Before Henry, automobiles were like those electric Tesla sports cars driven by the George Clooney crowd.  Only rich people had cars and nobody much worked in the auto industry.  Imagine what the manufacture and sales of cars have added to the prosperity of this country.  I know, they’ve added a lot of particulate matter to the atmosphere too, but that’s another blog.

The point is, the greatest thing about this country is that we’re the greatest market in world.  That market is made up of an affluent middle class.  And having an affluent middle class means sharing the pie.  The richer we make more people, the more pie there is for everyone.  Even the rich people get richer if more people are making more money.

How does that happen? Well, first we need to spend a fortune on education so that there is a future.  Then we need to provide the best and most lavish infrastructure on the planet – how else to get all that crap to WalMart if we’ve no roads to ship it on? That’s right, the freeways made WalMart not the Waltons, we all made the single largest investments in their billions dollar empire.

All that evil tax money gets spent on us.  They don’t keep it in a vault.  They buy us stuff and they buy that stuff from us.  They build us stuff and they hire us to build it.  They give our neighbors jobs so our neighbors can afford to shop at our store so we afford to hire their kids to work so they can pay more taxes so we can all have more stuff.  They allow us to take care of those least able to take care of themselves – the old, the young, the poor.  The 80’s gave us street people.  Maybe we should start calling them Wall Street people.

The trouble with greed is that it tells me that I’m better off alone.

The truth is, it’s only together that we’re able to be our best.

So, don’t forget to vote and don’t forget what’s at stake.

 

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On Writing #7 – Say Uncle Reduxpdate

October 29, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

For those of you who’ve been wondering – I hope – the re-release of Say Uncle progresses.

Just for the record, on the overwhelming advice of those who had an opinion the last time I wrote about this here, I did not re-type the book.

For those who don’t remember or didn’t read the previous post:

Say Uncle, my first novel is no longer in print thanks to the evil machinations of publishing.  That is, the original editor moved to a different house.  His replacement, to prove that his was longer, cut my novel in favor of the nonfiction work of someone in the, at the time, unheard of profession of blogging! There was some pretense that they wanted to avoid “conflicting” titles on the same topic, but my editor’s replacement eventually manned up and alluded to things and staff changing.

Fast forward to today.  I’m experimenting with the emerging new world of electronic publishing.  Traditional publishing seems increasingly interested in only publishing books that relate to movies, TV, reactionary right wing politics or Oprah.  These subjects employ the strange modern technique called advertising as yet untried in the publishing field.  I mean, why try promoting your product when you can add sea monsters and zombies to the well known works of authors dead so long you don’t have to pay them? Right?

Since I’m still alive – just barely – and hope one day to be paid so I can eat and stuff, I’m striking out on my own and testing the ePublishing waters by re-releasing Say Uncle as an eBook.  The advantage is that Say Uncle is out of print and I’ve already written the sequel that my replacement editor passed on when he dumped me in favor of that blogger! Sniff. Sob.

The only problem with the Say Uncle Redux was that it was written in the before times way back in the 90’s and I have no final digital file.  I was planning to re-type it and said so here to the hue and cry of those who thought the endeavor madness.

“Scan, scan, you fool.  Have you not heard of OCR?” or words to that effect met my sentimental rhapsodizing over the experience of revisiting my own words from long ago Eric.  Well I’m nothing, if not lazy, so I figured what the hell, right?

My computer genius Brett could not cause the scanner I actually own to work with my computer despite the fact that both are manufactured by the same company.  Don’t computer and software companies just make you want to get some pitchforks, torches and villagers together for a little rampage?

Brett, or Sir Brett as he shall be heretofore known, pulled a Galahad and took a copy to some undisclosed scanner.  He returned in less than a day with the whole thing on a thumbnail drive.  And poof, my troubles began.

Delighted as I am that I did not have to re-type the bloody manuscript, scanning is not quite the miracle labor saving device it might at first appear.  True, the book is scanned.  Sadly, none of the formatting scanned with it.  No paragraph returns, no quote marks, and if e looks too much like c then Sean becomes Scan, and let’s not talk about seat.  Spell check can only go so far and it becomes all about editing.  But I didn’t have to re-type!

I’m working with an expert on formatting books for ePublication.   Next week I should have Say Uncle in a form that I can edit before I convert it to the form it needs to be in order to translate successfully to the eFormat.  Whew.

So, new book soon.  I’ll let you know.

 

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Bored

October 27, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

I recently saw a news report about hearing damage being cause by excessive iPod use.  One of the people interviewed said something like, without the musical stimulation of their digital music box, life was flat and boring.

Quickly,  I rushed to judgment.

“There is more sensory input available from walking down a country lane on a calm day than in all the music created since the beginning of time combined,” I thought.  “Stupid teenagers,” I added for good measure before contemplating how great Brian Williams looks.  Sigh.

Then I watched an evening of television or looked around on the internet for items of interest — socially redeeming and otherwise – played a computer game, read a book or generally did anything I could to escape from the reality of my life.  Now I’m not the center of the world, but my life is pretty swell.

Still, I would rather spend an afternoon playing FreeCell or updating my Netflix Queue than actually being present where I am.  Try to sit quietly doing nothing for an hour, I dare you.  No eating or drinking, just sitting.  It’s crushing somehow.

What is that? It’s like a vacuum.  It’s as though I live on a grand stage on which I perform the most petty and menial of tasks.   Life is like playing Chopsticks at Carnegie Hall.

Now, I’ve no patience with people who whine about being bored.  Yet I’m not certain that filling my hours with The Sims isn’t just an active form of boredom.  The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we shall all be as happy as kings, Robert Louis Stevenson tells us.  I’ve always been given to understand he spent most of his childhood bedridden.  True or not, the idea that someone confined to bed might be able to see how full-up life is seems to beg the point.

We the bored have no one to blame but ourselves.

When I say I’m bored, what I usually mean is that I am too lazy to do anything to amuse myself or, god forbid, anyone else.  I choose instead to sit and lament that no one in life is bashing in my door with a heartfelt urge to entertain me.  With the exception of those trapped in some non-life-threatening prison, I can’t help but think that, for the rest of us, boredom is merely a lack of effort or imagination.

One of the worst fates I can conceive is to be paralyzed, unable to move or speak, but fully conscious.  Every man must choose for himself (or perhaps have the Senate decide for him on a holiday weekend), but please feel free to pull the plug on me in such circumstances.

Why is my own company so fearsome?

I will spend more time with me than with anyone else.  As a single person who works at home, I spend most of my time on my own.  I spend so much time by myself, it has become challenging for me to visit family or friends.  When I am staying at someone else’s home, there is always someone else there.  Yet, ask me to drive the car without music playing and I will give you the launch codes without resistance or argument.

We are quick to think our civilization evolved or even advanced.  The idea of third world or emerging cultures originates from our presumption of superiority.  But we are helpless in the face of the truth of our lives.  We have created a construct for existence and filled it up with enough fish plates, salad forks and iCrap to consume every moment of existence with our self-imposed ceremonies of triviality.   We bristle at the thought of being deprived of our portable phones, yet cower at the idea of speaking to the strangers of whom we thoughtlessly inflict our conversations and blinding text screens.

Every day I’m offered newer and faster ways to fill each precious passing hour of my dance, all to brief, across a stage made of stardust into oceans and skies and forests and clouds and everything between them.

I live in the most culturally diverse city on earth.  Over a hundred languages are spoken here.  There are millions of people in this city that sprawls over thousands of square miles of amazing real estate.  The roads are jammed with people on their way to the countless occupations that fill our days and nights.  We clog the freeways to get arrive and escape.  We literally manufacture fantasy here to distract the world from the death row wait that life can so easily seem.  Yet I am surrounded by people who can find nothing to do.

In the midst of it all, I check Facebook to see if anything has happened since I last logged on.  I judge my life by the number of pictures I’ve taken of myself doing things instead of enjoying my life doing the things pictured.

Am I living my life if there’s not a TV special about it yet?

Am I bored or am I just unwilling to make the effort?

The problem may not be that I have too few options, but too many.  Boredom, it seems, is a privilege afforded to those few in life who suffer the burden of choice.

 

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Utility

October 22, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

The phone is dead.
I’m stranded, helpless, clueless. It baffles me. How will I manage? Thank God I switched to cable internet or I’d be completely cut off, isolated from the world. How ridiculous is it that I feel this way?
I have become completely dependent on a few basic utilities, without which, my life is not possible.I live in an apartment in a highish rise building. On those rare occasions when the power goes off I might just as well live in a cave high up a sheer cliff face – no a cave would be better, I could build a fire to warm myself. This place is useless without electricity. I can’t cook. I can’t see in many of the rooms, even in daylight. There’s not even any hot water to clean myself. I must climb an unlit staircase to get up to my floor once the emergency battery lights give out as there is no means of natural lighting there.
I have become helplessly dependent on the most fragile set of circumstances.
I am the first generation in my family to have had indoor plumbing my entire life. It’s not like I’m the oldest living confederate veteran or something. Running water and electrification have been universal in this country for a relatively short time. Huge government programs brought us light as they helped bring us out of the depression a little over sixty years ago. There were hardly any paved roads here just a hundred years ago, and no highway system at all. President Eisenhower started the program that crisscrossed the country with freeways in my lifetime.
Today, if I lose my debit card I’m unable to feed myself, the microwave is taking forever and the damned cell phone keeps dropping my calls.
I wonder what record, if any there will be of us from this period?
These little treatises I post here are never on paper at all. Some sort of electromagnetic blast from the sun would erase most if not all of the records of the last ten years of my life. It’s enough to make me wonder if we are more advanced than those cultures we consider so primitive. I don’twant to go back – hell I don’t even want to go outside if I can avoid it. But the phone or the power being off reminds me of how tenuous and fragile my civilized life has become.
Yet I am bombarded every day with the demands of those who want to take apart or at the very least stop paying for the operation that sustains the very fragile luxuries of our lives. Do you know there are places in our country that are unpaving roads because dirt is cheaper to maintain than pavement?
What would city life be like without pavement? And country life? What if farmers had to clear brush and timber to get our food to market?
As we embark on this debate over the course of our country, I do hope that some voices of reason will emerge soon to remind people that paying our taxes is about funding this way of life that we’ve spent the last hundred years or so creating. If the power grid and the highway system aren’t a great value for our dollar, what’s the alternative? Somalia? Is that really better? How’s small business doing there with no taxes or regulations or a minimum wage?
I like flipping the switch and lighting my house, watching a movie or cooking my dinner. I love that it took me only a couple of minutes to get to the drug store, the market and the gas station today.Even though it had been raining, the roads were open and pasable. Our society is a marvel of interdependence fostered by the strong central government that emerged after the civil war. It was paid for by a thriving middle class who benefited most from their investment. I’m sorry so many people don’t seem to like that. I want a first class country, not a discount knock off. We will not pass this way again, so why not?
I hear all these complaints about deficits but no one willing to pay them off. I understand. I don’twant to pay taxes. I don’t want to pay for anything, if I don’t have to. I’d skip paying rent and load up on groceries if there were no checkout stands. But I like living in a place with firemen and water and paved roads and public schools and hospitals.
Yep, that’s right. None of us want to pay taxes. Tough. None of us is willing to sacrifice anything to avoid it. We’re glad to cut other people off, but not us. I’m bored with this discussion, aren’tyou?
The state that I live in started this so-called tax revolution back in the 70’s when our school system was the envy of the world and our highways the model for a new age. Today, we’re broke. We can’t put together a budget to cover the cost of extravagances like educating the young. And yet, no one here wants to pay for anything. The upcoming elections are another tired discussion about taxes.
Every election since 1980 has been a referendum on whether or not people want to pay taxes.California’s former governor took the cause national back then when he moved into the White House and it’s pretty much been all we’ve talked about since. I’m over this conversation. I thought the 21st century would be about flying cars and transporters and intergalactic travel. Are we really still talking about whether or not there should be a union?
On the plus side, today I won’t be receiving any of the robo-calls urging me to join their cause to stamp out civilization as we know it.

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Special

October 19, 2010 by Eric Shaw Quinn

The new TV season is one of the least inspired in recent memory.  While I’m always glad to see Tom Selleck and I adore watching the new hot boy haole Five-0’s bicker like a married couple in their Hawaiian honeymoon paradise, I can honestly say the new shows could all disappear and I wouldn’t miss them.

One recent offering that I’m still hoping will turn around is about a family who suddenly discovers they have super powers.  I know, judge me if you want, but I’m a fiction guy.  That means I believe in the power of fantasy to reveal truth through heightened reality.

But none of that is my point.

I think the idea of suddenly discovering you can fly or read minds or whatever is the sort of conceit that is so well realized on the small screen.  But not for the people on this show.  For these folks having super powers is a problem.  That’s right, once again we’re asked to believe people don’t want to be special.  American’s who are so desperate for attention and to set ourselves apart from the pack we post humiliating videos of ourselves on YouTube so millions of strangers will make fun of us.  But time and again, we are told we really only want to be “normal” and “fit in.”

Dear TV People: We do not want that.  We don’t even think that’s a good idea.  And it doesn’t have to be super powers.  People watch American Idol by the zillion and buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lottery tickets for the same reason.  Both promise that we might be lifted out of our “normal” lives and transported into the realms of our fantasy.   Just the fact that other people win gives us hope that it could happen.

We all want to be special.

There was a show on a couple of years back called Heroes.  In it, ordinary people suddenly discovered that they have special powers.  The characters, we were told at excruciating length, all just wanted things to go back to way they were before even though they didn’t really like their lives before.  The show was not about them being special, it was about how being special was a problem.  The show is no longer on the air.  And it didn’t go out in a blaze of glory.

We not only want to be special, we believe we already are.

The reality shows seem to me to be about confirming that the audience is as special as we believe we are.  When we tune in to the manufactured reality of these dubious and fictionalized dramas we are told that because we are overweight or pregnant or broke or housewives or just jerks that live at the Jersey shore, we are special.  Or, better still; we in the audience get to feel superior to the tubby shore dwelling housewives of someplace not as nice as where we live.

If we really feel bad about ourselves, there is even a show about people who live in their own filth.  That’ll up your special quotient on the worst day.

Love stories tell us that we will find someone who thinks we and we alone are so special that we can’t be lived without.  Horror movies tell us that there is something special in us that will allow us to overcome and defeat evil itself even though the high school cheerleader and that hot quarterback guy that everyone thought was so special got eaten.  Harry Potter and the whole fantasy genre tell us that when the prophecy is revealed, we will be the chosen one.  And the coarse comedies from Laurel and Hardy to Judd Apatow to Jack Ass all give us the opportunity to feel superior and, by extension, special.

The truth is, we are all special.  We’re right.  There are something approaching 8 billion people on our little blue bubble and each one of us is having a unique experience.  Twins who live their entire lives from birth to death in each other’s company doing exactly the same things at the same time will have two different experiences.

That is divine, as are we all.

We long to celebrate our specialness, our unique, individual, peerlessness.

So, if you’re looking to make a movie or a TV show that tanks, make one that tells us that we’re not special and we don’t want to be.  Oh wait, you already have.  I guess my question is, why make another one?

 

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