You Have To Ask?

Virginia Heffernan writes in the Times:

I know from pushing a baby around Brooklyn’s mean streets that there are a lot of guys who, it turns out, wish they were babies. (”Man, that looks good!” “Ooh, I wish that was me with that bottle!” “Hey, little man, can we change places?”)

So, my question: Is this an exclusively male fantasy? To be a fat, pampered baby in a diaper again? "

And I am like two things ...

Either I cannot pick up whatever is her style of put-on—and boy I scrubbed that post for inflection, for any hint of irony ... (And by god, if there's one thing these squeaky-clean gender-neutral web professionals are, it ain't ironic. Kiss irony the long goodbye. Which is another post. About why Print—real Print. You know, the kind on paper—is not dead, I don't care if I personally have to give it mouth-to-mouth, I do not care if it pukes up the ocean inhaled in drowning, I tell you, that mo'facker is not dead.)

Or I am like, can it be that this woman has never heard of the classic-unto-cliched scenario some men—perhaps successful, perhaps older—pay some women to act out? On them? Like what a treat?

Which brings up another interesting question ... You know many women who have these kinds of urges? Urges dripping, reeking of the most infantile—oops, did I say that?— Freudian origins? Hell, no. But what am I saying, the guy is already perfectly unabashed about wanting a nice diaper. A bonnet. A pacifier. (I'm getting nauseous.) This is not the suck on tits fantasy one might suppose. Oh no. Tis a far, far ickier thing ...

But you know what, men also, have you noticed, don't give a damn about embarrassing themselves in their own view. I'm not sure that kind of view even exists in these our strange co-inhabitants. Ooh, it's so relaxing, change me again, nursie ... I don't think so. Have men, at long last, no dignity, sir?

Yeah, right. Like that question is actually in play. This must be what it feels like to own the place. It's not that your own shit doesn't stink, it's that far from minding it, you find the smell interesting, even pleasant. And because entitlement is yours ... and, well, I guess entitlement kinda drives out self-examination in any form, doesn't it. Or do I mean self-consciousness. Or do I mean, It's a man's world is the single most depressing truth a woman can face.

Yeah, that's what I mean. And I understand when she mostly chooses not, for to dwell upon such a thing, 'twould drive any sane person crazy.

And then who'd be left to "man" the barricades. Knit knit knit.

In Russia, iPhone Buys *You*

Something called SneakyBusiness has compiled their best advice for Apple:

Create a dual CEO. As companies transition to a more effective 24x7 operation, the introduction of an alternative 'night shift' CEO can have dramatic effects. Over time, as the world realizes that two individuals are actually in place, the second CEO can assume more prominent daytime activities.

Introduce deliberate mistakes. Carefully planned errors, selected for minimal financial impact, can help to reduce the halo effect of a hyper-successful CEO. A minor overseas gaffe or ill-judged CEO product demo are good examples.

Spread the persona. Encourage other executives and senior managers to adopt the persona of the CEO. By adopting an identical dress code, mimicking their management style and repeating often used phrases the value of the CEO can be seen to spread further down the organization.

And what I wanna know is ... is this a put on?

Really. It's awfully easy to "have me on," as the Brits say; I'm usually a year behind the times anyway. Tell me the truth—it's another Onion production, isn't it.

Otherwise, hey, it's crap like this that puts us professional snark-bloggers out of a job.

Benefit of doubt scenario: Sneaky Business actually resides in former Soviet Union

... In Russia, HTML codes you.

Blogs Clog The Flow of Information

" ...blog results inundate Google search results."

says Jeneane over at Allied, and I've been wondering when bloggers were going to start talking about this. Yes, you ... you cloggers of the information pipeline. Is your last post funny, useful, human, new, or just plain terrific writing?

Or are you just this whiz-bang guy with the handcrafted Wordpress layout, awash in widgets and gadgets, footers and sliders and Punsalen's (wonderful) latest trick—without a single goddamn thing to say. Because when the only purpose of your post is to hand me off to another page, I could wring your scrawny little web developers neck.

Dear Reader, Are you Googling for a certain bit of information? Then prepare yourself for the Long Wade. And, dammit, if I wanted to know the thoughts of every web guy on this continent and several others ... well, I just don't. Y'all have a happy time trading Selector stories and faking out IE.

The real user, the person without time to waste, is better off at Clusty (formerly Vivismo—okay, these people need help with naming.) Clustered search results are magnificent. Blog results. Results by search engine. (Making it possible to ignore the mammoth worthlessness of MSN, who will link to a comma.)

That's really all I got to say. (All?) Including blogs in the main search may result in a thrill from this end (Page Rank, Page Rank!) but when I am after information: Most blogs? Get the fork out of my way.

In The Arms Of The Angels

Or that's how it looked to me, when I came upon this image after the recent non-serious but sneaky, creepy, loathsome little 4.2 quake that lifted Berkeley to the top of its P-wave crest and then dropped it, this city, with a nasty bang.

I, however, was in the hot tub, so I cannot personally speak to the nastiness. Others, yes. This one, no. I can only report that any number of people were waked from a deep sleep with that sickening heart thump, This is it. Things aren't parsed, in dreams, except by their extremes. wonderfully irrational means of dreaming. The joys are beyond bliss, extend forever, and fear feels itself naked, without reservation at all.

What I saw in this map of the faultlines in California—the San Andreas , that long red scar up the coast, and our fault, the Hayward, the short red line across San Francisco Bay—what came to mind was an embrace. Which is an odd thought, for these are the two big nasties of Northern California life, the Hayward considered really ready to go off ... yet such was my water-logged image, we here held as if in a nest in the notch of a tree.

We live on, ignoring what cannot be helped and will happen, one day, in some horrible way. For now, I commend unto you the view as I write this ...

The Rain In July

Doug posts: "I got up this morning to discover that it had rained during the night. Real rain, not just an exaggerated fog. I’m not sure I remember it ever raining in July in the Bay Area, so this is something pretty special. Nice for my garden too, and the cats had gotten really dusty so this has cleaned them right up."

Au contraire, mon ami. If you had the weather engraved into your soul such as only an unhappy woman stuck in the boonies will have, forever after, you'd know it always rains once in July. I kid Doug, he works here, taking care of such house and grounds as there are. We both live in Berkeley ... but the country town of which I write isn't far away, maybe sixty miles ...

In time, however, and in the lumpy bag of space that time drags along behind, rough edges becoming smooth, harsh lines gently blurring ...Oh, dear, we are slipping into novel time ... where it is long ago but not so very far away after all ...

(from The Last Time Anyone Was Happy)

By July, the buildings and roofs and fields and even hearts and hopes had so thoroughly shrunken and dried in the heat— as if we were all some ghostly extension of the prune industry, only it was the sun and the air which dried us, daily, at high temperature, never mind that it felt as hot as the prune driers when they ran—that any thought of rain, the soaking, flooding winter rainstorms, the river cresting at 41 feet, had long since been driven from the feeble collective unconscious of Venada.

Until the July thunderstorm. There always was one, and it always came as a surprise, people saying We don't have thunderstorms! which we mostly did not, and It doesn't rain in summer, which it always did, at least once. And there was so much work, in those days, to farm life, to summer. Keeping prune orchards watered and your workers from disappearing after their first paycheck. Dragging out rusty prune harvest equipment with the prayer that it last another year.

In town, the businesses around the plaza were quiet, which made Mama's tour the more delightful,when their ceilings began to leak. And leak they would. The Bank of America building with its columns in front, its certain undeniable grandeur, set out as homely a collection of buckets and pans as anyone, the redwood planking of their high, vaulted ceiling especially prone to shrinkage in the heat. Plink, plonk. She watched for a while in fascination. We had to make a thorough tour of the plaza, that her inspection might be complete. Not that I blame her. Attractions, then, were simpler, both more enjoyable and hellishly sparse. Boredom so integral to country life that people made no bones about the least excitement. I know Mama's pleasure in these things reached, touched levels that may no longer exist, in the modern heart.

Mama knew we were good for at minimum one colossal thunderstorm per summer; her deepest pleasure came in watching the spectacle from the safety of her high old bed, where I would climb up beside her—after having unplugged, as per ordered, every cord from every socket, house and barn, her excuse for sending a child nothing more than that handy enfeeblement that appeared on demand and was otherwise forgot.

The Electric—her name for the beast that lived within our walls, I had brought home a chart in third grade that explained it, which she admired, tacked up and ignored—taken care of, we settled in the darkness, surveying from our perch if not the entire universe, then certainly all relevant parts. I hardly knew what fear was, in those days; it disappeared in the company of that old woman. Who not old, to me, not at all. Had no age. For all I knew, that's what a mother was, and so it is that I remain linked to Mama's reactions and Mama's beliefs. Her amusement when everyone else forgot: it always rains once, in summer.

Zo Gets Her Badge On

What the fork was I bitching about? There had been this badge up at Listics that took me forever to mouseover ... and when I did, whoa! Of course now it's long gone—I told you, I operate on, um, Icelandic time—but there's nothing easier than helping yourself, on a Mac. Just drag that sucker to the desktop, and it's mine mine mine. Unless of course FP has some kinda weird license on it. Copyright I get. That other stuff, no. As far as I can tell, that other thing plays to the conscience, which makes it just tighty-whitey liberal do-goodism. Not that I don't believe in the Good, or that it springs perpetually from the heart—I simply cannot stand anything that smacks of PBS.

So, after finally remembering what this thing was on my desktop—Frank! What greater honor, what higher accolade! I display proudly “The Good Blogkeeping Certification of Incivility!”


That Frank is ...is an old hippie. Is what he is. Not, of course, wholly unlike oneself.

Old not in years—well, maybe that too, depends on your perspective—but to have once been a hippie is to shed traces forever after of that far-away state of heart, of mind ... much as a distant star sheds a light visible only if you tilt your head a certain way.

Dear HST, you can still see the line where the wave broke, from Grizzly Peak. On good day you can see over the city and, way out to sea, all alone, the Farallons. The water is so bright. What I have always thought is that the wave never broke at all, but rose higher and higher til it curled over the San Francisco and fell into the Pacific, disappearing into the ocean again. So that, really, there was never any end. Not in me, not in Frank, or Annie ... not in a million other souls. The wave may grow smaller as it ripples outward in both the ocean and the dusty dimension of time, may seem to disappear ... but that is illusion, my dear Mr. T. You know as well as I, waves never die.

Of course, Hunter Thompson is dead. Largely because he never stopped playing that edge. To get jacked that high, daily, to write, to live in supreme coolness (what a burden, in itself)... an unsustainable method if ever there was one. Which became clear the moment any of us had kids. Although one of the saddest scenes I remember was coming across a campsite of utterly stoned parents ... and a band of puzzled, dirty children, who ran up to our car like beggars. Hi! Where you going? What's your name? When really, they were terribly lonely.

If I'm talking to HST again, there must be Gonzo about. Which is at least half hippie anyway—at least for those who had edge. In Berkeley, we had edge. Some of us still do. There's me ... there's Dave Winer ...

Edge as opposed to those drug-addled flower children in the Haight (present company excepted, Annie.)

So here you are, dear href Frank. My public thanks. I've never received an award for being a pain in the ass! (Unless you count my divorce decree.)

You're the best,
Zo