Editor’s note: Today’s poem comes from an actual reader email!

What the fuck
Is this website?

Books at Grandma’s House.

All of that extraterrestrial space
Just yellowed paper and candle wax
She confided
(as if to say: I hate my Father but it’s complicated)

***

It is important to note
That Mother Teresa

It is important to note that Mother Teresa
Left mountains of paper bundled and stacked
Fifty years in the extraterrestrial space
And that those mountains seemed like pebbles
And that this was her big secret.

They couldn’t fill the space
and t
Mother Teresa’s
Train never arrived.
(anotherwaytosayit)

Mother Teresa
Confided that
Even with her ticket and fifty years on the platform
Her train never arrived.

And so what I wanna know is this:
whaty’ll I get for my ticket?

Hell is other people (not going to the carnival you’re already avoiding).

There’s probably no bathroom here.  And if there is, it has a key and the door is on the side of the building.

This publication is dedicated to the pursuit of skills (among other less important things).  It has documented game-show hackers (pre-internet), video-game virtuosos, and race-car driving bike-riding video-game-shooting master Italians.  Each of these examples document individuals with skills that were acquired only through impossibly hard work and that have no redeeming societal value.  Why are they working so hard?

I don’t know.

I really don’t know.  Hard work is an exercise in extreme failure.  Each excruciating step in the process is planted right on the back of another attempt’s failure.  The enigma of it all is exaggerated when you consider the game-show hackers that have been previously discussed.  It is as if the concept of hard work has been narrowly defined as a 9 to 5 job in a factory; any task that does not involve that experience is considered constructive and/or worthy.  Everything else is a cliche from Office Space.  So as long as the man is working on his own project in his own way, then it is worth the extreme effort.

More to come…

Until then, what does Rakim have to say about this?

How to play Bridge in your basement rec room in August.

When you wait at a bus stop, you are waiting passively.  All of the variables in the interaction – the bus stop, the bus route, the bus number, the schedule (ha!), and finally you – are relics of an age where information required organization to be recovered.  Encyclopedias broke subjects to their elements so that an alphabet would lead you to some data.  A city would determine the most valuable routes to serve a population of commuters.  Everybody understands why these systems were originally designed and we have learned to live with the consequences.  Buses are always late; they are always clustered when they arrive; and you can’t change that.

When Slate.com asked readers to propose updates to public transportation, I proposed a solution that would change the way users wait for buses.  This realignment would revolutionize the way people relate to their public transportation.  Rather than considering buses as road-trains (fixed to a track-like bus route and schedule [ha!]), people will think of buses like livery cabs.  This is a valuable shift and one that would increase reliance on the bus system and improve mobility in a city.  My solution was called Smart Buses.

Smart Buses inverts the call/stop button on a bus.  In the old system, a rider waits at a bus stop for a specific bus to arrive.  The rider then pulls a rope to tell the bus to stop at another bus stop to depart.  In a Smart Bus system, the rider calls a bus at the initial bus stop and is picked up by a bus waiting for the call.  The Smart Bus then drops the rider off at a pre-determined destination (that was indicated at the initial call).

In this new system, the wait at a bus stop is active.  You are not waiting for a random process to notice you – you are calling for attention.  It is a shift in power and a streamlining of information.  The variables are simplified and the incentive to riding the bus is greatly improved.  Riders stuck across town can find their way to jobs anywhere in the system without depending on a limited set of bus routes.

More on this to come. (ha!)

Sylva, North Carolina

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!”

An everyday order belies the incredible weirdness of life.   There are phrases and words and compliments and mannerisms and womannerisms and made up words and single and double and triple entendres all like a giant raging river and it’s dammed and controlled by whatisit? our language or our God or our culture or our wommanerisms or our nationality?  I won’t even venture a guess.  But it’s controlled – only slightly, barely, as if a tiny hole would bring the whole thing crashing down.  It’s controlled and harnessed, as best as can be expected by the things we take for granted.  The power of language and ideas and conversations and arguments and confusion and boredom.  It’s all important.  This video plays with language the way today’s child plays a video game.  It’s sure-footed and quick and it comes out of a place apart – let’s call it the shore of the river that’s dammed by God.  Was that a pun?  Dammed by God.  Damned by God.  Does that even have to make sense?  Remember the river is life or truth or something I probably didn’t clarify because I never claimed to know in the first place.

The things I don’t know are probably not answers to questions.  They are things though, I can tell you that – they are items that can be quantified and probably stacked like books.  But books are filled with more things listed on pages.  Those pages are counted and numbered and then read and turned-over.  The aggregate of those things leads to less things but bigger things.  Bigger things are probably more important things; things with weight.  What is the thing of a book?

2666 is 900 pages of things that I’ve read and loved and when you ask me what is the book about? I answer back that it is probably…… probably about life – life like living, the verb part of life, the noun.  It’s a documentation of many things that are semi-related but man, they are barely semi-related.  The only thing linking them is the beating heart and blood and raging stupid sweaty hormonal thoughts of the characters involved.  God are they stupid.  God, did I love this book.  What was it about?  It’s about that god damn river.  Did we even get to the part where we wonder where the river originated and to where it leads?  Do metaphors have myths and origins?

It’s so hot, the crystal key in Jeremy Piven’s Chrysler refracted the spitting image of Ricardo Montalban

It’s so hot, the Corinthian leather in Jeremy Piven’s Chrysler just drove itself back home, leaving his crystal key refracting a laser beam through his second best emergency backup hairpiece.

the Chrysler Imperial is out.  can’t figure it out yet.  Believe me, at the time in my mind when this came together, it was hilarious.  Now it’s too much.

Take 2:

It’s so hot, the boils on Larry King’s ass….. nope.  still not there.

comedy………………………….  GOLD

Slate.com can’t ask you about the T or the Metro because it doesn’t know who you are.  And if it knew who you are, then it would know where you are.  That knowledge is the thing that makes a cloud-based publication a community.  That knowledge is the thing that can be harnessed to solicit information of value from a community that is not interested solely in prize money but rather in the value that is collected by the community itself.  Because the community shares a problem that needs to be solved.

So Slate.com which may or may not succeed in solving the world’s transportation woes made me realize recently the difference between an online publication with user-accounts and comments sections and blogs and the same thing that is also an online community.  I posted a solution to transportation woes and if you were to be so kind, I ask you to please vote in favor of my smart buses solution.

– Einstein & Freud & Jack –

Death is a dead, at least that’s what Freud said.

Long considering, he finally thought

Life but a detour longer or less long;

Maybe that’s why the going gets so rough.

When Einstein wrote to ask him what he thought

Science might do for world peace, Freud wrote back:

Not much. And took the occasion to point out

That science too begins and ends in myth.

His myth was of the sons conspired together

To kill the father and share out his flesh,

Blood, power, women, and the primal guilt

Thereon entailed, which they must strive

Vainly to expiate by sacrifice,

Fixed on all generations since, of sons.

Exiled in London, a surviving Jew,

Freud died of cancer before the war began

That Einstein wrote to Roosevelt about

Advising the research be started that,

Come seven years of dying fathers, dying sons,

In general massacre would end the same.

Einstein. He said that if it were to do

Again, he’d sooner be a plumber. He

Died too. We live on sayings said in myths,

And die of them as well, or ill. That’s that,

Of making many books there is no end,

And like it saith in the book before that one,

What God wants, don’t you forget it, Jack,

Is your contrite spirit, Jack, your broken heart.

– Howard Nemerov

I’m waiting for the NBA finals game 3 to start.  The pre-game show has lasted for an hour and a half.  The pre-game announcements have lasted over a half-hour.  The lights are off the stadium.  The entire nation is watching the Boston Celtics’ home-crowd promo video.  Paul Pierce just told a tired nation to GET LOUD.

Enough.

I love the Milwaukee Bucks more than you love anything.  When I make $1 Billion, I will buy the Bucks from US Senator Herbert Kohl (D-WI).  He will sell the team to me because he will know that I love them and will keep them there forever.  I will also build a new arena for the city.  I will hire a thick-accented old man to call the games at the new arena.  He will be old.  He will be unpolished.  He will wish he was calling an arena league football game.  He will be stuck with the Bucks.  He will fall in love with the team in spite of himself.  His love will infect the city.  There will be no dancers.  The music will be provided for by a city band that does not include Warren Wiegratz.  It will be plainer but purer.  I know what I sound like and deep down you agree with me.  Let’s replace the shine with boredom.  It’s okay.

When my Bucks (our Bucks) make it to the Finals, the game will start earlier, I don’t care what the networks say.  The tickets will be cheaper.  I don’t care what the sponsors need.  The game will reflect the city that will shine in the league.  The old man announcer will speak to something you forgot you thought you didn’t know.

I don’t have to make sense here – a) I’m going to be a billionaire, b) I’m going to own the Bucks, not you, and c) I’ll buy you a couple tickets to show you what I mean.

Go Bucks.

After a while, one recognizes the boundaries that frame a point of view – the things that define normalcy – are keeping other perspectives out.  This video demonstrates how our concept of time is determined by factors that have nothing to do with the seconds clicking away on the wrist watch you used to have but don’t anymore because your phone does it all.

This song introduced me to the 3rd dimension.  To shadows.  To real symmetry – that is to say, it introduced me to asymmetry because every note I played was over-thought-out and wrong and slow and behind and did I mention it was over-thought-out?  A7 means A dominant 7 which means A C E G-flat – is that right?  tickticktick G-flat sounds weird, should I think of it as F sharp?  What’s the normal way to call it? tickticktick How can I connect this to an F tickticktick shit.

This is another language problem.  So many problems.  Problems like arithmetic.  Problems with remainders.  Problems with formulas.  Problems with answers and guesses that are right and wrong.  Problems with answers I already know but can’t yet communicate.

I miss my trumpet.  I am sleeping with a 49 key Yamaha so that someday I can come back to her.  But this is going slow.  I’m playing Mary Had a Little Lamb in Bass Clef so that I can someday play the thing I am already hearing in my mind.  Same with Bangla – I am squeezing out elementary phrases so that someday I can say what I mean.  I know what I know but can’t communicate either of them.  It is a math problem – I have the formula.  I have the variables.  I even have the answer.  I have trees and squirrels and bad metaphors and brooks and beavers and beaver dams but not yet do I have a forrest.

That was horrible.

As I finger Mary Had a Little Lamb (single entendre) I listen to Mendelssohn.  I was just handed sheet music to a Chopin song I can play (ostensibly).  Playing it drops me in the shadows of this 3rd dimension.  I am touching the sounds buried in my brain – the sounds I can whistle but can’t play.  I am touching them through the finger tips on those 49 electric keys.  I am feeling the curvature of their geometry and I am surprised and confused by the shape of things.  I am not trusting that feeling yet scared of wasting even more time in this struggle.  Both of my linguistic battles are stuck in muck.  This is why toddlers scream when they can’t say what they really feel.

Humans! from three legged legs on Vimeo.

I don’t have a third one.  This is a Twotych.  I just made that up.

I want to say more about this or maybe not this – I want to say more so that the output of my aspirations has some sort of weight.  I do not mean weight in the sense that the meaning behind those words generates any value or meaning, I mean weight in the sense that the tonnage of words is a verifiable measurement that can be taken to indicate that at the very least, I’ve taken this energy and put it to some use.  But rather than struggle for a point or a hook, I let the aspiration speak for itself so I can credit my goals for taking me to whereever I am when I stop and look around.  I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, by the way.  I go on runs not to get in shape but to get tired.

Mario!  Welcome to Nintendo Presents Super Mario Brothers!  Press Right or Left to Walk!

The original Mario Brothers was intuitive and that made it so interesting (I knew I loved it when I first got it).  The point of a game is not always to solve it – the point of the game is to play the game and the point of playing is to not have a point.  The concept of making the web simpler has invaded a space that was doing just fine, thank you.  The web should be confusing in some circumstances.  Let’s not breed a generation of web users that depend on instructions, please.  We can overdesign every experience into a useless gesture – like telling two chess players what moves to make.  Eventually, they stop playing the game and start moving the pieces.

I know why we’re doing this.  I’m guilty of it myself.  There is a glut of step-by-step instructions living online.  They’re ugly.  They’re confusing.  They’re everywhere.

New sites are streamlining these lists with friendlier presentations.  Foursquare is the latest hottest newest coolest thing.  They don’t even have landing pages on their site!  I went there to grab their how-to list and found a video instead:

What am I getting at here?  I don’t know, man.  This whole thing is just an exercise for me to just write anyway…  Foursquare has to be defined – it takes a long video to do it and the answer I get to this question: what is foursquare?  Is: a thing that makes you happy.  Which is probably a good answer, because, when I ask myself as if I wasn’t answering this question: what is Super Mario Brothers?  I say: it’s a game, shut up; just keep moving to the right and you’ll save the princess (and isn’t the dungeon music awesome?).  But SMB didn’t require a 2 minute video to define the product.  Not because anyone knew what the thing was – but because nobody needed to be told about it.

Why didn’t they need to be told about it?  Because they were too busy playing it to ask.

♣ Post Script ♣

Check out this interview with Shigero Miyamoto & Satoru Iwata – the top dogs at Nintendo, Miyamoto being the originator of SMB – about their work and how they “trained” users to know the difference between a turtle, bad, and a mushroom, good, without telling the user.

http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/nsmb/vol1_page4.jsp

Everyday I’m stuck on a train there is nothing to do and my eyes glaze over blankly through a cloud in my brain that suggests rainfall.  There’s light thunder and you start to smell the rain but ultimately it never produces a single drop, the clouds break up, the train moves along, and Access Hollywood is on and what’s up with Billy Bush anyway?   But somewhere in the gray darkness is a series of seeds that have been planted – probably in the angst filled dramatics of my teenage years.  In the middle of all that hyperbole was an overactive brain that was not searching for quiet, but raising quite a stink about one thing or another.  I did not have rent to pay – I had a trumpet to play.  I did not have a family to feed – I had a family feeding me.   I did not have small talk – I had Kind of Blue.

This is a post about the missed opportunities of not doing anything.  This is not a post about the potential of my seeds.  That was a single entendre.

I can’t not do anything as well as I could when I had 4 lawns to mow in the middle of a summer afternoon when it was Tuesday or Thursday (it didn’t matter to me anyway).  At that time, I could do nothing so well that when the time was over, I was better at something than I was before I started not doing it.  Now I just wait.  Not like a waiter in a restaurant, but like the 13th juror in a courtroom without  a book.  Huh?

When I am not doing something now, I pretend to be doing something, or am wishing I was doing something else, or yelling at myself for failing to do the thing I should be doing, or washing dishes.  The goal of my days is to get myself tired enough to sleep quietly at night.  It helps best if I run and cook an elaborate meal and do the dishes.  I avoid the emptiness of a nothing-moment because they just get filled up with check-lists.

It was more productive when it was meaningless.