Sylva, North Carolina

How do we square the fact that there are people in our society that find ways to work and live with skills that are even more meaningless than the most scrutinized bean-counter?  It is not enough to say that these people earn a living at these tasks.  In some respect, we should applaud their resourcefulness.  The thing that is most alarming is that people practice these skills to make themselves better.  They practice hard.

The man below spent 6 months studying the seemingly random pattern of lights on the “Press Your Luck” gameshow.  Six months of intense scrutiny and study and attention and finally he recognized 5 rotating cycles around which the blinking lights always followed.  Then he verified his theory with his pause button – able to stop the light at will in his severely cluttered livingroom.  All of this was work – work without meetings or semi-casual fridays or movies devoted to the dronery, or folk songs depicting the struggle or days on and days off.  But it was hard.  Harder still because it was different and secretive and weird.  And yet this man persisted until finally he got his chance on Press Your Luck and promptly won $100,000.

He didn’t cheat.  He worked very hard to earn his victory.  What were his incentives?  What could he have accomplished if he applied his energy and focus to more mainstream endeavors?  How could he overlook the drone-like isolation of six months worth of staring into a television’s blinking pixels – to analyze bigger blinking lights – for the slight slight chance that he might win some money.

This man’s work ethic is amazing.  As are the hand-eye coordination of the Koreans below.

The output of all this effort goes *poof* like the smoke off a firecracker.

America: View through a Friendly’s window.

A man rides a bike on rollers with no hands in a room while playing an online action video game with both hands and most of his brain. He can easily fall off his bike. The amount of brain power utilized to perform this task is incredible.

This man is a Formula One racecar driver.  This is part of his training.  Something about reflexes.

What is it for?  What could he create with that brain power and dedication?

In the end – who cares anyway?

O It’s Nice To Get Up In,the slipshod mucous kiss
of her riant belly’s fooling bore
- When The Sun Begins To(with a phrasing crease
of hot subliminal lips,as if a score
of youngest angels suddenly should stretch neat necks
just to see how always squirms
the skillful mystery of Hell)me suddenly

grips in chuckles of supreme sex.

In The Good Old Summer Time.
My gorgeous bullet in tickling intuitive flight
aches,just,simply,into,her. Thirsty
stirring. (Must be summer. Hush. Worms).

But It’s Nicer To Lie in Bed
-eh? I’m

not. Again. Hush. God. Please hold. Tight

– E.E. Cummings

Several posts on this publication have analyzed the normal everyday structure of life in the US.  The way we speak and think, the way we wait, the way we pursue goals and now the way we furnish our apartments.  Technically, and more specifically, the way I just re-arranged the furniture in my apartment.

The normal structure belies a wild, untamed, unexplainable and lonely and quiet unpredictable wilderness of bad grammar, aimless ambition, and unresolved hours.  The incredible weirdness of life – the utterly incomprehensible strangeness of the thing you are seeing or feeling or smelling right now is a controllable force.  It is a wild animal, but not a cool wild animal like a tiger; it is a normal, reasonable wild animal like a water buffalo, or a yak.  It is a boring, brutally strong, single-minded eating machine capable of clearing a field with its mindless chewing while restoring it with its profuse expulsion of shit.  But it’s too dumb to know its power.

It is a beast of burden and the thing that is probably your conscious or your soul and I don’t care if this is too big of an introduction about the interior decoration of my apartment.

The TV, the great tamer of the beast, is no longer the central focal point of my home.  It has been banished to the bedroom where it will be viewed only when demanded.  My living room is now the room within which I live.  Which does not include watching TV.  It includes other things, TBD.

This is not a post that celebrates the demise of TV in the era of Wikipedia.  I hate wikipedia and I love TV.  Especially bad primetime dramas about death and the resolution of crimes that prevent more death from happening.  These programs are the things that tamed the dumb wild animal inside me.

TV – the Empire of Television – drew the maps of my life.  It laid the highways in the wilderness that organized and neatly divided what was something that had no name or metaphor or reason. It gave a history to a place or to a thing or a to a person that didn’t need one, necessarily.  Is this too big a metaphor for interior decoration?  I don’t know – you tell me.

The boundaries that define normal have been drawn by television.  A living room has a couch and chairs that try to face each other (for, you know, conversation) as well as face the TV (in case, you know, no one’s talking).  A workday revolves around the prime time television schedule.  Even if no one is watching prime time TV the way they once did.  Dinner is eaten at or around the evening news.  Sleep occurs at or around the nightly news.   Go somewhere on this planet that has no specific concept of primetime TV and you will find yourself lost.  You will be looking for an axis point around which a day is organized.  Is today a workday or a weekend?  You will consult the TV and you will be confused.  This is the moment when you realize the strangeness underlying the thing you thought was normal.  It’s a thin line.

I crossed that thin line involuntarily.  I am trying to reorient my way around my home without this time-honored focal point.  I do not expect a meaningful transformation to occur.  I am not seeking a new level of productivity or awareness.  I simply cannot go back to unknowing the outside boundaries of TV’s map.  The outer area is bigger than the 3 hours of primetime.  It is wild, curvy, weird, boring, quiet and completely pointless.  Here’s my impression of a yak’s epiphany: “Oh Look!  More Grass!”