"the lunatic, the lover, and the poet"
(from Saturday 7-6: Quotable Quotes "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact." -- William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream")
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet -- it's what Melody calls Facebook, Twitter and Livejournal.
"Really. And of the three, why have a billion people embraced the lunatic?" she asks.
It's not a trivial question. The billion people f-book claims it has, all came from somewhere. Riley thinks many of them arrived on special friend-mobiles from Mars. Still, with no real answer to her question, he continues smiling back at Melody like a dog who is pretty sure the question was rhetorical. Some dogs really are smart enough to Facebook. And I'm guessing that the marketing people there are working out the promo slogans even as I type. "One billion people, point-two-five million dogs, and half the butterflies on Planet Earth. Who's Hot? A: Marrrrrk Zuckerberg!!!" [so really not]
"Because lunacy is po-pu-lar. That's why it's lun-a-cy." Melody continues. She's not happy. Her friends on Livejournal have either all been abducted by alien friend-mobiles from Mars, or have just grown-up. She isn't sure which. But when the happy in her boots is nearly empty, she often speaks like George Bush reading with third graders. You know, like on that memorable morning in September as he sat at the front of class in Florida and waited for his advisors to tell him what to do after planes had flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York, and the Pentagon just across the river from the big house at his eastern city ranch.
Riley nods his head and raises his right hand for a high five.
"What the fuck? I don't high five," she says. "We've been together as a couple for a year. You know I don't high five."
Riley's still smiling but drops his hand. He made his point and his arm is tired.
She looks out the window at the family of clowns who are now in temporary quarters, in this the winter of their clown town and not-touring discontent, like fourteen people in a Volkswagen now piled into the humble three-bedroom ranch across the street. "Why are we still together?"
"Because I'm the clown who doesn't clutter up the monologues of your bite me Q&A, with humble and inane replies."
"What the fuck?" Melody asks, swinging back to Riley like a weather vane that has suddenly felt the first warm breath of spring. She heard his answer and it wasn't difficult to understand. But it has been eleven months, three weeks and six days since Riley actually responded with words to anything she's said. He's been mute since the last English Department Christmas party, that turned into a three-day festival of debauchery with footnotes.
"Are ... you ... back?"
Riley smiles and lifts his hand again above his head.
* * *
In the eleven-plus months since Riley took the "I mute" pledge, he's had to keep the wordies living in his head happy by just writing. Or by just "typing" as he calls it. The boy is way too humility imprinted to ever use the language to self-promote the one thing in the world that is at the heart of the one thing in the world he considers to be a serious threat to the future of the species -- namely, "The Great Confusion." Which is, namely, that the ego is not a symptom or effect of individual life at all, but a devious social virus that infects the simple human tendencies we might all have as individual life forms, now, with a meme cloud of social masquerade and grim confusion.
For proof of Riley's theory of ego relativity he likes to say the evidence is simple.
"Take Tom Hanks. Put him in a movie with a soccer ball and a dozen FedEx product placement packages, all washed up ashore on an uninhabited island somewhere in an ocean known to be pacific. What does Tom Hanks do? Set up a social network that will help him figure out just who and what and where the fuck he is, by who and what and where the fuck his friends are, now that he realizes he has no real clue about the who and what and where the individual life he's living now, really is in the time and space he calls a world?
"With you as the steadfast and solitary Magellan of your life," Riley would continue, "is Tom Hanks really suggesting that if Magellan, like you, had only had a larger social network in his life, he could have easily circumnavigated his grasp of what a round world really meant, while downloading boodle-butts and checking messages on his iPhone? Or, to put it another way: You take individual human life out of social role, ritual and context, and what happens to the ego? Does it come with you on the lonely boat of self-discovery, or merely stand there in the crowd, waving bye-bye from the dock?
"EGO: (shouts and waves) Have a nice trip! I'll miss you!!! (mutters to self) You stupid fuck."
Eleven-plus months ago, before Riley went "I mute," he could theorize on egotize for days, and often bend the ear of anyone who happened by the house of sick repute that Melody had happily moved into. Bend the ear right off their head.
"Hey!! My EAR!!!" people would often yell, running like a tourist in a pair of blood-red thongs pulled up above the waistband of their jeans, as they fled the bull of Riley through the narrow vestibules of Pamplona Lane, College Town, USA.
* * *
"It takes a lunatic to love a lunatic," Melody says now, as the clowns across the street begin to reenact the First World War in pantomime in the front yard of their house.
"And Twitter might be a lover, but so's your Uncle Fingers. And the guy at Dollar Universe who wants to help you carry out a box of aspirin to your car. Love really is like a roller coaster, but without the straight parts. Just all ups and down, and twists and turns. With barf spray from strangers you'd never think of swapping spit with." She takes a breath and squints harder at the clowns. "They're actually digging trenches?"
Riley breath laughs, here, at barf spray. At ten he was barf sprayed by a lady from Dubuque, four cars in front of him on the Cyclops ride at Mission Beach. It was summer, sunny-hot and, even by the beach in San Diego, dry. So by the time he was able to get off the Cyclops and make it through the 10-minute-wait line at the nearest restroom, the Cheetos pieces in the lady's barf had turned to textured, montage art, glued throughout his hair.
"And poetry can as easily be crap you can't flush fast enough, as it can be something unexpected-good," Melody, the clown voyeur, continues. "But even when it's total, self-indulgent doo-doo with a meter, it can't escape one fact that lingers from it's own creation -- which would be the language free-association, combo-meal you've put together on your faded plastic tray, the thing that's also known as 'writing.'
"With the difference, here and everywhere and always, between the speaking-writing, fool-a-roo of Facebook, and it's stunted 140-character-calorie twisted Twitter sister, being the diff that doesn't go away no matter how many billions of monetary accolades you glue upon its humble, wordy skin -- like you, the individual, just can't not stand somewhat naked on a stage as you do or don't do something on your indie own, you can't string a bunch of words together on your indie-own and not show something of your mindless mindful self."
She pauses again and turns back to Riley sitting on the couch. He's been watching her watch the clowns as she does her word show at the window. "What did Hanscombe say? The difference between writing words and speaking them?"
Riley breath laughs again. He knows just what she's doing -- drawing him out. He can't really stay mute now, when it's about the beating heart of what he thinks.
"It's the difference between living blindly in the social reflex, or choosing-making what you think and do and say; by either following the herdsome and expected social links-external, or following the individual links occurring on their own in the indie life that's living in your head."
They're looking at each other, now, like two human planets that have come together in their orbits of the space and time continuum, close enough to achieve a correspondence. Eyes focus-blurred, facial muscles in repose, it's a look that shows a simple image of what happens when external social life dissolves to show two individual lives, living and connecting head to head. Which is the only answer for who we are, today, to the question "Why are we still together?"
2013-07-16 10:08:54 (1538 words)
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet -- it's what Melody calls Facebook, Twitter and Livejournal.
"Really. And of the three, why have a billion people embraced the lunatic?" she asks.
It's not a trivial question. The billion people f-book claims it has, all came from somewhere. Riley thinks many of them arrived on special friend-mobiles from Mars. Still, with no real answer to her question, he continues smiling back at Melody like a dog who is pretty sure the question was rhetorical. Some dogs really are smart enough to Facebook. And I'm guessing that the marketing people there are working out the promo slogans even as I type. "One billion people, point-two-five million dogs, and half the butterflies on Planet Earth. Who's Hot? A: Marrrrrk Zuckerberg!!!" [so really not]
"Because lunacy is po-pu-lar. That's why it's lun-a-cy." Melody continues. She's not happy. Her friends on Livejournal have either all been abducted by alien friend-mobiles from Mars, or have just grown-up. She isn't sure which. But when the happy in her boots is nearly empty, she often speaks like George Bush reading with third graders. You know, like on that memorable morning in September as he sat at the front of class in Florida and waited for his advisors to tell him what to do after planes had flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York, and the Pentagon just across the river from the big house at his eastern city ranch.
Riley nods his head and raises his right hand for a high five.
"What the fuck? I don't high five," she says. "We've been together as a couple for a year. You know I don't high five."
Riley's still smiling but drops his hand. He made his point and his arm is tired.
She looks out the window at the family of clowns who are now in temporary quarters, in this the winter of their clown town and not-touring discontent, like fourteen people in a Volkswagen now piled into the humble three-bedroom ranch across the street. "Why are we still together?"
"Because I'm the clown who doesn't clutter up the monologues of your bite me Q&A, with humble and inane replies."
"What the fuck?" Melody asks, swinging back to Riley like a weather vane that has suddenly felt the first warm breath of spring. She heard his answer and it wasn't difficult to understand. But it has been eleven months, three weeks and six days since Riley actually responded with words to anything she's said. He's been mute since the last English Department Christmas party, that turned into a three-day festival of debauchery with footnotes.
"Are ... you ... back?"
Riley smiles and lifts his hand again above his head.
* * *
In the eleven-plus months since Riley took the "I mute" pledge, he's had to keep the wordies living in his head happy by just writing. Or by just "typing" as he calls it. The boy is way too humility imprinted to ever use the language to self-promote the one thing in the world that is at the heart of the one thing in the world he considers to be a serious threat to the future of the species -- namely, "The Great Confusion." Which is, namely, that the ego is not a symptom or effect of individual life at all, but a devious social virus that infects the simple human tendencies we might all have as individual life forms, now, with a meme cloud of social masquerade and grim confusion.
For proof of Riley's theory of ego relativity he likes to say the evidence is simple.
"Take Tom Hanks. Put him in a movie with a soccer ball and a dozen FedEx product placement packages, all washed up ashore on an uninhabited island somewhere in an ocean known to be pacific. What does Tom Hanks do? Set up a social network that will help him figure out just who and what and where the fuck he is, by who and what and where the fuck his friends are, now that he realizes he has no real clue about the who and what and where the individual life he's living now, really is in the time and space he calls a world?
"With you as the steadfast and solitary Magellan of your life," Riley would continue, "is Tom Hanks really suggesting that if Magellan, like you, had only had a larger social network in his life, he could have easily circumnavigated his grasp of what a round world really meant, while downloading boodle-butts and checking messages on his iPhone? Or, to put it another way: You take individual human life out of social role, ritual and context, and what happens to the ego? Does it come with you on the lonely boat of self-discovery, or merely stand there in the crowd, waving bye-bye from the dock?
"EGO: (shouts and waves) Have a nice trip! I'll miss you!!! (mutters to self) You stupid fuck."
Eleven-plus months ago, before Riley went "I mute," he could theorize on egotize for days, and often bend the ear of anyone who happened by the house of sick repute that Melody had happily moved into. Bend the ear right off their head.
"Hey!! My EAR!!!" people would often yell, running like a tourist in a pair of blood-red thongs pulled up above the waistband of their jeans, as they fled the bull of Riley through the narrow vestibules of Pamplona Lane, College Town, USA.
* * *
"It takes a lunatic to love a lunatic," Melody says now, as the clowns across the street begin to reenact the First World War in pantomime in the front yard of their house.
"And Twitter might be a lover, but so's your Uncle Fingers. And the guy at Dollar Universe who wants to help you carry out a box of aspirin to your car. Love really is like a roller coaster, but without the straight parts. Just all ups and down, and twists and turns. With barf spray from strangers you'd never think of swapping spit with." She takes a breath and squints harder at the clowns. "They're actually digging trenches?"
Riley breath laughs, here, at barf spray. At ten he was barf sprayed by a lady from Dubuque, four cars in front of him on the Cyclops ride at Mission Beach. It was summer, sunny-hot and, even by the beach in San Diego, dry. So by the time he was able to get off the Cyclops and make it through the 10-minute-wait line at the nearest restroom, the Cheetos pieces in the lady's barf had turned to textured, montage art, glued throughout his hair.
"And poetry can as easily be crap you can't flush fast enough, as it can be something unexpected-good," Melody, the clown voyeur, continues. "But even when it's total, self-indulgent doo-doo with a meter, it can't escape one fact that lingers from it's own creation -- which would be the language free-association, combo-meal you've put together on your faded plastic tray, the thing that's also known as 'writing.'
"With the difference, here and everywhere and always, between the speaking-writing, fool-a-roo of Facebook, and it's stunted 140-character-calorie twisted Twitter sister, being the diff that doesn't go away no matter how many billions of monetary accolades you glue upon its humble, wordy skin -- like you, the individual, just can't not stand somewhat naked on a stage as you do or don't do something on your indie own, you can't string a bunch of words together on your indie-own and not show something of your mindless mindful self."
She pauses again and turns back to Riley sitting on the couch. He's been watching her watch the clowns as she does her word show at the window. "What did Hanscombe say? The difference between writing words and speaking them?"
Riley breath laughs again. He knows just what she's doing -- drawing him out. He can't really stay mute now, when it's about the beating heart of what he thinks.
"It's the difference between living blindly in the social reflex, or choosing-making what you think and do and say; by either following the herdsome and expected social links-external, or following the individual links occurring on their own in the indie life that's living in your head."
They're looking at each other, now, like two human planets that have come together in their orbits of the space and time continuum, close enough to achieve a correspondence. Eyes focus-blurred, facial muscles in repose, it's a look that shows a simple image of what happens when external social life dissolves to show two individual lives, living and connecting head to head. Which is the only answer for who we are, today, to the question "Why are we still together?"
2013-07-16 10:08:54 (1538 words)