Monthly Archives: October 2013

Taking Umbrage With the N-Word

News, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , ,

There’s an interesting article on Salon this morning from Mary Elizabeth Williams on how white people shouldn’t use the N-word under any circumstance.  Ignoring for a moment that most of MEW’s articles tend to be reactionary and designed to cause people to get upset over mundane things that they wouldn’t normally pay much attention to, the points she brings up are interesting, although I’m not sure I completely agree with all of them. I’ll let you read it for yourself and then decide. What I did want to discuss is my own particular perspective in the whole thing, coming from someone who would never use the word, mainly because I find it offensive, and even more important, that it rarely serves a purpose in any conversation I’ve ever had.

But I want to go back in time a bit to a friend of mine I had back in the days of my second visit to the college environment. I had decided to attend a community college (years after the Army AND West Point), cause I was interested in pursuing computer science as a future field. Anyway, my roommate at that time was a really cool guy named (for the sake of here) Bob. Bob was friendly, a good all around guy, and he was dating a woman that he was eventually going to end up marrying. He was also a pretty big guy, and he hung around with a bunch of other big guys, a few of them caucasians and a few of them of all different types of backgrounds, ethnicities and colors. But one thing that used to shock the crap out of me was that Bob used to refer to ALL of his friends as “my Nigga.” And they would refer to him in the same way. And none of them had a single problem with it.

I once asked Bob if that word didn’t bother him, and he looked at me like I was a moron. To him, the word had little contextual meaning as it did to me. It didn’t even have the same meaning to the African-American friends he had, because I couldn’t resist asking them either. They just didn’t grow up in an environment where they felt the typical socio-economic fabric that hangs over so many African-Americans of urban locales. They just smiled when I asked about it and didn’t have a negative thing to say whatseover.

No one thought of Bob as a racist, and not once was race even considered a part of the conversation.

But for me, I never could come around to using that word, even in the mixed company of where it was tossed around on a constant basis. I just didn’t feel comfortable saying it no matter how “welcome” the word was. And part of that is because I grew up in an environment where the word was used in very negative circumstances. The whites I grew up with around in the late 1960s and early 1970s were living through forced busing and the ramifications of the Civil Rights movement, so there was still a long of antagonism existing back then. I was fortunate in being integrated with very diverse populations as a child because I was dirt poor in an urban environment (Santa Monica, California). While many of my caucasian neighbors (meaning people who lived way out of my neighborhood of crack houses and prostitution dens) lived in isolated communities, I spent most of my free time at places like the Santa Monica Boys Club, which tended to cater to the poorest kids who couldn’t afford to spend time after school at the YMCA (where the richer kids hung out). So, I was exposed to all sorts of diversity that quickly educated me on what words were friendly and which words were taboo. As I was always a friendly sort of kid, I learned the ones that made friends (and made lots of friends) and discarded the words that turned friends into enemies.

Years later, in the presence of Bob and his friends, I was completely out of place because the conversations they were having were alien to me, so I did what I did when I was a kdi. I listened and avoided participating whenever I felt uncomfortable. There are certain words I’m not comfortable saying, and I’ve discovered that that is probably never going to change.

This is why I don’t feel concerned that there are rappers out there using the N-word in their music. I generally don’t sing to rap music, mainly because there’s not a lot of it that insterests me. The types that does generally doesn’t have profanity in it, or it’s impact is in a completely different direction. I do think that there are a lot of people who feel they have to emulate that type of behavior to be seen as cool, and fortunately, I’ve never been known to be someone who seeks out that type of status. Whenever I consider myself “cool”, there’s usually a sense of irony or sarcasm involved.

Which brings me back to that word. I don’t know why people feel such a need to use it. But unlike the professor mentioned in MEW’s article, I don’t care enough about the fact that others use it to feel slighted myself. Words do have power in some circumstances, but what MEW and people like her don’t often recognize is that they also lack power if people don’t subscribe to their doctrine. Whenever I hear the N-word, I don’t think “subversive”, “cool”, or even “outrageous.” I think “uneducated” and “limited in vocabulary”. But then, when writing a novel, there have been times when I have chosen the simple phrase rather than the more complicated one because the message was the medium, not the other way around. And in those cases, I guess my own jury is still out.

Jelly Bellies are for eating, so please just shut the hell up

Business, News, Politics, Social Networking, , , , , , ,

One of the few givens in today’s society is that either some pop star is going to try to push the envelope by participating in some semblance of outrageous behavior (like saying the wrong thing, or forgetting to wear her clothes in public, or just having sex with strangers in church) or that some corporate executive is going to overstep his or her authority and say things that probably should have been sent anonymously to the racist message board where it belonged. Today, the owner of Jelly Belly decided to come out against transgendered rights in California, somehow thinking that his ability to make candy filled with high-fructose corn syrup somehow makes him an advocate for anyone who advocates hating people who are just trying to live their lives without discrimination and problems that most of us generally don’t have to deal with because we’re part of mainstream society.

A few weeks ago, it was Abercrombie & Fitch. Before that, Chik-Fil-something or other (honestly, just didn’t feel like looking up their name to spell it right as their company isn’t that important to me that I’d waste that much time putting their name into a Google search engine. And before that, it was Martha Stewart doing whatever it is that rich white women do when they’re not doing what rich white women do normally.

The point is: I’m getting really tired of hearing about corporate CEOs acting badly in public. It was fine when I was dealing with Paris Hilton, who was kind of an acting-badly CEO, even though she’s not actually the Hilton CEO. At least she was attractive and said lots of dumb things that made me laugh, even if that wasn’t her main intention. She at least provided entertainment, and I never felt that behind her ridiculousness was someone who was actually out there hating other people for being different.

But that’s what these CEOs are doing. They’ve made a shit load of money off of the rest of us, and for some reason they think that somehow now gives them the platform to spout some really racist, homophobic bullshit that somehow is relevant to the rest of us. If anyone of us have a problem with what they have to say, they chalk it up as irrelevant because what’s relevant is that we paid them money to become very wealthy and now that somehow their wealth and power makes them think that their opinions are somehow more significant than the opinions of the rest of us.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Those CEOs are not smarter, more lived, or even cognizant of facts that the rest of us don’t know. They don’t have more education than the rest of us; some of them have tons less. The only thing they have that the rest of us don’t have is money and gobs of it. That money opens doors for them so that when they have something “important” to say, people listen, which is why we’re hearing their racist, homophobic rants instead of just eating their candy.

What really seems to be happening is that our media pays dire attention to these Neanderthals because of the money factor. This is why when one of them farts on national television, we all have to smell it for the next couple of days. So, if we want to make this problem go away, we need to write to our media sources and say to stop telling us whenever a millionaire/billionaire sneezes. We don’t care.

Sure, the usual response is to start the infamous boycott of Jelly Belly products, or whatever product a company makes when one of these morons starts spouting his or her nonsense, but most often these products are things we like; we just don’t like the owners of these companies who make them. Why should we lose the things we like because they’re made by morons we hate?

The simple fact is that these CEOs are nothing more than people who were lucky at getting their product to the market and made a killing doing it. What they’re good at is business, so if they want to tell me how to run a bookstore, then the media should pipe that discussion to me. But I don’t go to a guy who makes candies in order to find out how I should feel about social issues in America. For that, I usually go to social figures who have knowledge in those areas of information. By the same token, I don’t turn to LGBT folk to find out the best way to reinvest my 401K; that’s not their expertise. Sure, one of them might know something about it, but you generally don’t just randomly go out into a crowd and start trying to get knowledge by hoping that maybe one of them might know something about the issue you’re dealing with. At least I don’t, any more than I have a tendency to avoid bringing my back pain issue to my dentist, who might feel bad about it but can’t really do anything to make me better.

So, with that said, can you CEOs please kindly shut the fuck up and get back to selling us things we don’t need?

Rising Above the Noise

Politics, Television, , , , , ,

governmentThere is an interesting conversation that has emerged because Russell Brand, the comedian/actor, decided to lash out at some interviewer on politics who held him to task for writing for a political magazine. The upshot, or the telling points, are that Brand purports to be an anarchist who doesn’t believe in the current system, doesn’t vote, and doesn’t feel that holders of the current system really have a lot of ground on which to hold him accountable for these thoughts. In today’s Salon, Natasha Leonard expands upon this and then adds the criticism that Brand is basically a misogynist who essentially started his article by stating that he only wrote it because a pretty woman asked him to do so.

Having read both the article and having watched Brand’s interview, my only thought is that I find it fascinating that the concept of ideological anarchy is getting some attention, but at the same time I’m somewhat dissatisfied that it had to be someone like Russell Brand who brought it to our attentions. You see, personally I can’t stand his humor, his movies and pretty much anything about him. Okay, I liked his choice in marriage, as he married Katy Perry, but then that just meant she wouldn’t marry me because she was married to him, so I’m not sure that counts as praise any longer. At least they divorced so she’s still available (once she gets over those extremely rich and famous other guys), but that’s another story.

As for politics, I agree with Brand that the system is rigged, which is basically his entire argument. You see, he doesn’t really have a well-thought out argument. He just has a couple of news bytes, and they’re not all that impressive. It’s like someone listened to an Occupy protest and then shouted out slogans that people wrote on signs. Much of his diatribe was a lot like that. Sure, it was well articulated, but it was basically much of the same.

And that’s the problem with anarchy because we’re always going to be seen as a bunch of yelling, Molotov cocktail throwing Neanderthals who don’t understand that money makes the world go round. Okay, we do understand that, but only because we’re stuck into a specific paradigm that never lets us forget it. And that, too, is another one of the problems.

There are a lot of great ideas out there that have been written down and spoken over the years by people much smarter than me. Many of them have been anarchists. Hell, Marx was an anarchist, if you really think about it. Of course, I’m referring to Harpo Marx, that anarchist-leaning Marx brother who just doesn’t seem to get enough respect.

But anarchy is one of those out there institutions that really gets little to no respect because it’s not something tangible we can put our hands on and say, if we do this set of things, we can move to a system of government that actually doesn’t allow us to have government any longer. We could do that if we all lived in Hobbesian times where we were all scared of our neighbors killing us in this brutal world we live in, but because Locke and Rousseau got to reexamine Hobbes through later lenses, we’re now stuck with a system of a state of nature that requires bartering, food stamps and industry to build very large explosives that will be dropped on other people who might want our food and food stamps (and possibly our bombs). In order to protect the land barons of yesterday, we built industry barons of the day before yesterday, and now we coordinate technology barons who gives us access to our own information so we can reconnect with the people who live down the hall from us, but we’re too lousy to leave the apartment and knock on their doors.

Which brings me to diatribes on anarchy. There was a lot Brand and Leonard both said that is both significant and important. But no matter how much you listen to what they have to say, you’re still left with an overwhelming sense of despair, brought on by the fact that getting to there from here is a lot like walking through muddy waters, without  Chicago blues to back you up. People are really good at talking the game of anarchy or lack of government, but not too many people are really good at being able to envision just how you get from where we are now to a state of perfection (if that’s argued to be someone’s ideal). However, Leonard makes a great argument in that if someone has a parasitic creature on its face, telling that person that he needs to explain what creature he’d replace it with is not a question that should be asked, rather than just offering to get rid of the creature. The same thing can be said for a government system and economic infrastructure that are both not working. The answer that its defenders want is “what would you replace it with” when what anarchists are really saying is “get rid of it first, and we’ll figure out what should replace it later”. Democracy fans (or even monarchists and totalitarian fans) don’t like the absence of government as a state of being in order to deal with the removal of a parasitic government instead, which is why they’ll keep asking “what will you replace it with” when anarchists want that answer to be “nothing” or “anything you haven’t tried yet”.

And that’s where the complication of anarchy and not-working government comes to a head. Our system hasn’t worked for many years now.. I’m not even talking abou the dysfunction between two overpowered parties that stopped serving the mass needs of most citizens a long time ago either. I’m talking about how those two parties stopped serving the mass needs of citizens a long time ago. I don’t care that they can’t get along. I don’t care that they hate each other. I care that both of them have zero problem enabling themselves off of the system and making themselves filthy rich while pretending to be doing it in the name of the people. We should have seen the warnings when CEOs argued that corporations should get citizenship but shouldn’t have to pay the penalties that are enacted against actual citizens when they do wrong or illegal acts. It’s why major corporations cheat, steal and basically take actions that kill people, and there’s no ramification that causes any of their executives to do anything other than hire a PR team that only responds when too many people start to think they’re doing bad things and stop buying their products. If I’m part of a corporation that kills tens or hundreds of people with my industrial waste that helped my stockholders profit greatly, the only payback that might occur will probably involve fines (at worst) and possibly very weak future oversight. Me, personally, I’ll be free to do it again, and probably wouldn’t lose my job or position, and if I got away with enough, I’ll probably be promoted (or put somewhere with even more responsibilities because I’m seen as someone who can get things done).

That is what a lot of the complaints have been about, but no one really seems to care. Instead, we watch reality TV, worship movie and TV stars,, allow media conglomerates to take over the media industries that report our news, and we become dumber and dumber. And when someone rises above the dumb level of conversation and says something, we marginalize that person and make sure no one else listens to him or her again. If I was a comedian, this would actually be funny. But even our bad comedians, when they say this stuff, aren’t listened to, so what chance do I have to be heard above the noise?

There’s a difference between giving information and asking for money

Business, Education, , , , , , ,
Now, if SHE emailed and asked for my phone number....
Now, if SHE emailed and asked for my phone number….

I received an email from the place where I received one of my bachelor’s degrees. Apparently, according to the email, students from that school have been trying to get a hold of me to tell me about campus activities, important events and to inform me of all the great things that other alumni are doing to support the institution. Having received numerous contacts from this university over the years, what they’re really telling me is that students from this school have been trying to get in touch with me to beg me for money for the university. Simple as that.

So, this alumni organization would really appreciate it if I would update their records with my new phone number so they can get right on that “informing me of things I’m missing out on”.

Look, I don’t mind that a university needs lots of money to pay its professors and cultural studies programs to explain why fish fall in love, but I’m not a spigot of revenue that a university can rely upon to help pay its Board of Directors, or to provide fuel to their limousines they use to drive to their private hanger at the airport.

If I was extremely interested in continuing to provide kickbacks to the executives from my university, I would have contacted them personally so that they would not have had to hunt me down with some undergraduate (or graduate) on a stipend or grant-writing scholarship.

I think what bothers me the most is the dishonesty in the email, in that they’re pretending to be doing me service that somehow gets provided by me giving them my phone number. The reality of the situation is that any emails they send me completely keeps me up to date on what’s going on with the alumni of that university, meaning that a phone call from some undergraduate isn’t going to provide me with more information than I already have. But what I have learned (from a graduate school, not from that school itself) is that foot in the door processes allow you to gain so much more if you can get someone to give up just an inch on ground. In other words, if I am willing to give my phone number, I’m more likely to donate money the next time someone calls because I already “agreed” to provide my phone number first.

So, I’ll pass on this “great” opportunity.

Why I Never Quit Writing

Memoirs, Writing, , , , , ,
Me writing
Me writing

There’s an interesting post from Konrath’s site, in which he explains why he never quit writing. Basically, years ago, he was making about 25k a year from writing and felt it wasn’t enough, and now he’s making a ton of money from writing, but felt that if you can’t hack the writing challenges, you might be better off just quitting. And he’s right. But his post also hints at something else: The people who basically are driven to write, and therefore need to make it part of their professional life, if not their entire professional life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the same sentiment because let’s be honest, my writing career has never taken off the way it was supposed to. When I was a kid, teachers used to tell me that I was a brilliant writer, that they could see a future for me as an intense writer. I loved telling stories, whether in person or on paper. Writing came naturally to me. It felt inevitable as a future career for myself.

Early in my writing career, I latched onto an agent who was going to sell my first novels. She was a well-known, highly placed agent. Everything was looking great. And then she had a brain injury and left the business. And then came back to it years later, but honestly couldn’t remember who I was. Yeah, sounds like a bad soap opera plot. I then secured a second agent who tried for about six months to sell my stuff (or just thought about it and never did anything about it) and then fizzled. Since then, finding another agent has been almost as easy as climbing Mount Fuji by starting in Texas.

And then the ebook revolution took place, and the whole industry fell apart. There are still publishers out there, but connecting with them has become almost impossible, and agents don’t seem to be interested in anyone any more, and everyone that has ever wanted to be a writer, even if it was just for fun, is now a published author selling their own stuff through Amazon and others. Now, the model has changed from good writers getting attention to the best marketers getting the most attention, even if the writing is awful (i.e., Fifty Shades of Gray, although people tell me that once you get past the really bad beginning writing, it actually becomes a much better writing enterprise).

Which brings me back to my original question in the subject line of this post. Why I never quit writing. You see, I really can’t stop. I love to write, and the only way I’ve ever been able to understand and then explain the world is through writing. For me, the act of writing is an exercise in learning more about the universe and why we’re here. Through continuous experiments in writing, I find myself learning more about myself and more about the world around me. Each new novel is an exploration into the process of writing for me, and each new novel is something completely different than what I wrote before. It’s more of a Murakami type of writing, although it’s my own journey, not one scripted out by someone else.

But the business of writing has been the thorn in my side since day one. I’ve never made it successfully, which often leaves me wondering if I should even be able to consider myself a professional writer when my books are read by so few people. Sure, I can take any title I like, but what good is a false accolade in the long run?

But getting back to the question, what I have discovered is that writing is basically all I have. I don’t have a family. I don’t even have a girlfriend. I don’t have a job that I go to where I think “those people would suffer if it wasn’t for me coming in each and every day.” The people where I work wouldn’t notice at all if I wasn’t there tomorrow. They might notice the desk not being occupied, but that’s about it. I don’t do anything of enough significance that it matters to anyone, nor will it ever.

I don’t have a lot of friends, so I don’t have a large group of people who rely on me as their social hub person. I have very few friends, to be honest.

I don’t even have a pet that relies on me for its meals. Not even a goldfish swimming around, thinking, “where’s that strange human who puts food into my bowl?”

For me, writing is all that I have. I construct fantasy worlds, and sometimes I create scenarios where people do horrific things that force them to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t have normally done. I write about people who question their reason for being, their relationships, their place in the grand scheme of things, while I meanwhile ask none of the questions of myself because I have no ties to the material world that my characters inhabit.

So, for me, if I didn’t have my writing, I’d have nothing. Which brings me to the conclusion that if I ever finally realize that my writing is a joke, that my purpose actually has no purpose, I’d probably end everything right then and there.

That’s why I never quit writing. It’s all I have.

The Teddy Bear Conspiracy giveaway and other little news….

Books, Writing, , , ,

theteddybearconspiracy2aMy novel, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, which is going to be released in December, is available for free as a contest giveaway on Goodreads. To enter, go here.

 

 

 

 

 

destinyDestiny, my science fiction/fantasy novel, which takes place mostly on the planet Reagul (which might be recognized from the upcoming series The Tales of Reagul, which will be released early next year as a three part epic), has been given a new cover and blurb. Here’s the blurb:

The mission was well-planned and intricately carried out. They were going to assassinate the Emperor of Earth. Everything went according to plan. Except one thing.
They failed.
Now on the run from the Empire’s elite guard, Eden System Commander Yeager finds himself on an escape trajectory with a young ensign in his care. Little does he know that this ensign, Laura Bontein, is the reason why Eden is at war with the Empire.
Laura may also be the most powerful being in the galaxy.
They escape to Reagul, a planet in its middle ages and somehow responsible for keeping the emperor alive. Here, Laura begins to discover that Reagul has been planning for her arrival for thousands of years.
Little by little, Laura begins to suspect that her own people, the lost outpost of the Zeus Colonies, may have ties to Reagul going back to the Roman Empire. As the rumors and legends begin to mirror the actions of Laura and Yeager, she begins to believe her arrival on Reagul may have more than a solitary purpose.
It may be her destiny.
Destiny can be found on Amazon (and also in paperback): Here.

My experience with Apple TV

Technology, Television, , , , , ,

One of the problems I’ve always had is that I have a tendency to buy a lot of TV shows on iTunes, yet that has always forced me to have to watch television shows on my computer, and that’s just not what I want to do. When I buy an entire series, or even a couple of shows, I want to sit down in my living room and watch it on my 72 inch television (okay, it’s a 32 inch, but one can dream, right?). Unfortunately, that’s always been difficult for me.

The solutions in the past have been simplistic. I can buy a dvd (or a bluray) and watch it on my television, but like I said, I buy a lot of stuff when it comes out on iTunes, and I kind of like that. The other solution has been to put the stuff on my iPad and then hook that up to my television, but honestly, I’ve never been comfortable wanting to do that.

And then I read an article about Apple TV and thought to myself, you know maybe that might be the solution. For those who don’t know much about Apple TV, what it is amounts to a small box that hooks up to your television that can either receive signals through an ethernet or through wifi. Fortunately for me, my computer system is set up with wifi, so I went with that option.

Almost immediately, I was able to access my iTunes library through Apple TV, so anything I bought in the past was there for me to watch. This helped when I was catching up on a few of the shows that I hadn’t finished watching on my computer. It was so nice to watch them on my main television set.

And then I found out you can access your iTunes library that’s on any of your computers by turning on Home Sharing. Well, kind of. My MacBook Pro, which receives signals through wifi, worked fine. My PC’s iTunes, which connects through ethernet, couldn’t be seen by my Apple TV no matter what I did, so the majority of my collection that’s on my main computer (where I store practically everything) was completely not accessible. So with that feature, I was very disappointed in Apple TV.

The other problem I ran into with it was that when the last episode of Breaking Bad aired and I went to watch it on my television, it wouldn’t download. It kept saying it couldn’t receive a list or something ridiculous like that. It could access anything else in my iTunes, but the one show I really wanted to watch wouldn’t show up. I ended up having to go back to my main computer and watch it there, which basically made me feel like my Apple TV was a dysfunctional step-child that obviously doesn’t work as intended. I didn’t contact Apple because my experience with customer service concerning Apple is a lot like pissing in a fan and wondering why you’re now covered in piss.

The cost of Apple TV was $99, plus an HDMI cord, which cost me about $14. So, plus tax it ended up costing me about $135 or something like that.

The jury is still out for me on whether or not it was worth the money. If you don’t use iTunes, it’s completely worthless, unless you’re desperate for some way to access your Netflix or Hulu Plus accounts (which it does as well). There are a bunch of other channels that you can access as long as you have an Internet connection, but they felt a lot like cable selections, in that you choose one you watch and the rest serve as noise that you have to forward through to get to shows you actually want to watch. But if you use iTunes a lot, like I do, then it’s a great little thing. If only they’d fix its inherent Apple-itis, which means every now and then it just does stupid stuff and Apple pretends everything is fine until enough people complain and they fix it without every acknowledging anything was wrong.