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You aren't fooling anyone, dammit.

A few months ago I was clicking along, going through my regular cycle of megajim email, work email, blog check-ins, Slashdot, CNN and, finally, Hotmail (the slush pile resulting from random site and product registrations), when I noticed a funny little Flash-video banner. I couldn't remember where I first saw it. It just sort of surfaced. This African-American woman is doing a little dance in front of her office computer. She's obviously very happy. Her hips and arms are in the rhythm. At the last moment she turns around and finds that we have been watching her, probably shimmying along in gonzo empathy. You go girl. She holds her hands to the sides of her head, wide-eyed in wonder, embarrassment and the sheer electricity of the moment. Very cute.

Yes, very fucking cute. That's what we're all about these days. Cute videos shot from cell phones are sprinkled onto the delicious donut called the Internet, and we all gather to nibble, filling our lives with empty calories. Our current decade can be generally defined by two things: fear and social networking. Let's talk about The Fear some other time. The social stuff is where we are finding the murmurs of humanity in the midst of post-traumatic madness. It relaxes me to watch a cat flush a toilet 30 times, over and over. That reminds me that I, too, have cats. I, too, have the safety of my home. There is a connectedness within this human society. I've never wiggled my ass in front of a computer in an office, but I can certainly see how someone might be so full of crazy joy.

So a month or so goes by. I see the dancing woman a few more times, and then I see this:



Same video clip, only now it's part of a Mortgage Rates Fall Again banner ad (a headline suspect of a Dewey Defeats Truman level of reliability). The implication is that she was sitting at her desk, doing regular online stuff (email, blog, Slashdot . . . okay, Slashdot is regular for self-described/wannabe "nerds" and "geeks", so maybe she was perusing Salon or Googling herself (to Google one's self is to check in with the zeitgeist, to measure your mark upon the world, or to make sure that the old stalker ex isn't going to easily track you down . . . it's also an electronic form of diddling yourself, so, unless you want to go blind or sterile, keep the self-Googling to a minimum)), having a somewhat normal day, when hey hey hey, it's the deal of the century, dammit, the mortgage of the millennium, and she is right then and there infused with The Spirit, the American Dream pumping through her arteries and down into her feet and she just has to jump up right now and do it! Glory be, get me a mortgage!

Exact same video clip, pasted into the realm of the affordable $510,000 mortgage.

I click around some more. That's what work is all about. Clicking. I'm reminded of the signs I see on the expressway: Click It or Ticket. They're telling me that if I don't click my seatbelt, I'll have to pay some insane moving-violation ticket. Mandatory safety for the good of the people. And they're using a terrible pseudo-rhyme to seduce me with cleverness (click IT or tickET . . . obviously all the folks with English degrees did not move into civil service). You have to click something, though. Make the right clicks and you can create Web sites, sell high and buy low. Make the wrong click and you end up sending that catty email to the very person you decided to complain about. I've done this. Twice. It wasn't fun. So the key, the slogan, is to Think When You Click. If this was a roadside public service announcement, it would read: thiNK it before you cliCK it. Sage advice.

So another three hundred clicks into my day I see her again. Getting down, full of the fever. The scenario is a bit different, though.



This time, she is innocently clicking, checking the weather while her computer chokes through a mail merge, wondering why she ever stopped going to college, why she waffled between Accounting and English and then back to Accounting for a single, brilliantly imploding semester before dumping the whole thing and just getting the job to pay for the car to get to the job, when blammo, she can fix it all by graduating, yes, that's right, graduating in under one year. Holy fucking shit. Get thee to a matriculatron, woman.

Let's take the first issue, the matter of how anyone who isn't a genius could possibly get a complete and fulfilling education in under a year, and put it away for some other time. So, if you're keeping track, future topics include our Culture of Fear, and Instant Education. And perhaps Roadside Grammar.

There's no way that this woman could be dancing about both a $510,000 mortgage and a one-year education. Those two things just don't go together. I do acknowledge that there are people out there with very narrow, parochial knowledge bases who are making a killing. These folks generally don't elevate themselves from the basic cut-paste-merge office job to become major players within a single orbital cycle. No, both of these ads are focusing on the same suckers who attend the Get Rich By Buying My Book real estate scam seminars. These are people who are still wearing their BluBlockers, daydreaming of some magical way to pry themselves out of the American Grave that is the lower middle class. And evidently they're all using Hotmail.

There's a scary problem at the bottom of this, though. You see, banner ads make money. Businesses wouldn't be paying Google and Hotmail to place those ads if there wasn't some level of return. So there are people who are clicking the dancing lady, actually attempting to get that $510K mortgage. And I suspect that those same users (in tech terms, you usually refer to someone using a Web site or application as a user, similar, I suppose, to how you would refer to someone who habitually sticks syringes of heroin into his/her veins) could very well decide that, in order to pay off that $510K hole, a quick education might be needed to leverage a better job. To make more money to pay for the education. Can enough people possibly be so gullible as to willfully screw themselves over in order to help some unknown business rake it in? I suppose this would be a good moment to post an ironic link to the White House or a picture of G.W. Bush. If the ad persists, then it must be making money. Cold logic, folks.

Then there was this:



Wait. What's up with the doppelganger? This must be genius marketing. As a stupid white guy, I just figured that this was the same African American woman who was in the other ad.



Okay, there's two of them. Well, who cares. I'll just get that mortgage. Then there's another possibility. The first dancing woman just didn't do it for me. Oh, look at this foxy lady in the striped shirt. Oh yeah, she's is far more hip, sexy, and outrageously infused with the exuberance of this amazing freaking deal. And her friend is dancing, too, so this MUST be a solid investment. Or . . . African American women know that something is up. Sisters are doing it for themselves. I've seen several of them dancing around in front of their computers, hilariously caught in candid joy. Deal me in.

I want to believe my own headline. We are not being fooled. We will not stand for this crap. But it's click it or ticket, folks. Someone is clicking this. Some batch of knuckleheads are siphoning us from the potential enlightenment of the information age into a bottomless shit soup. Most of the time I can ignore the static buzz of constant advertising, and most of the ads I see are blatantly manipulative. But this seems to be a new breed of marketing. If enough people are constantly told that they are fucking idiots, I'm very afraid that there will actually be more fucking idiots in this world. Fucking idiots who will encourage the creation of even more egregious advertising, more dancing women and bug-eyed cats and generally cute bullshit designed to both pacify my social angst and convince me that it's okay to be ignorant.

Please stop clicking. Stop dancing. Cut the crap.

Ethical Dilemma of an Idiot

Most of my work days lately have started with a certain element of dread. Often the dread will be pretty low. Maybe there's a meeting that I would rather skip. That usually carries a dread factor (DF) of 2. If I'm supposed to have something prepared for the meeting, the DF jumps dramatically to a 7 or 8 (not to be confused with the Drama Factor (DramFac) – however, there is certainly a positive correlation between DF and one's daily DramFac, and certainly when one is propelled into the Dramarama or ridiculous Dramarama-o-rama zone, DF and DramFac become indecipherably intertwined into a lattice of mayhem). If I'll be PowerPoint presenting on something that I know is only half-baked/half-assed, or bake/ass (if you do the math, that translates to baked/2 multiplied by 2/assed, which can be reduced to baked/assed, shortened to bake/ass), the DF creeps into the 9 or 10 range. A typical day will have at least a white noise hum of 1 DF just as a base, escalated by various crappy elements such as people and meetings. There doesn't seem to be a high end to the scale, but I can't recall the last 15 DF day I had . . . no, yes . . . let's just not think about it right now.

Anyway, last Thursday started with about a 6 DF, waxing to a 7 DF as the train approached the Chicago Ave. stop. The situation was tempered back to a 6 DF when I found a dime at the street-level top of the escalator. I'm a firm believer in the magic of Found Money. For the past few years (okay, it's probably been a decade), I have kept all of the loose change that I've found on the sidewalks, streets and gutters of the city. Sometimes the Found Money will bring quick luck, such as a brilliant hike in sunlight or the guest disappearance of someone I don't particularly want to run into. Other times the mojo will be gradual or hardly apparent. Either way, it all goes into the Found Money jar, slowly building up good fortune, my karmic Green Lantern power ring.

So I found a dime. That's a real Found Money coup! Really, anything over a penny is some sort of amazing happenstance. Most people ignore the poor pennies. Even nickels get the brush off quite a bit. Dimes are right on the line, though. I can't imagine anyone not taking an extra 1.3 seconds to pick up a dime. I mean, that comes out to about $4.62 a minute! In lay terms, that equals $277.20 per hour. Do you make more than $277.20 an hour? So maybe you should stop for 1.3 seconds and pick up that freaking dime.

Yes, so I was feeling pretty good about myself, having had a 1.3 second taste of the good life. I could feel the power of that dime from within my clenched fist, knocking the DF down into the decimal range. It was like diving through a pool of sludge and surfacing in clear mountain lake. All I had to do was make my wish. A dime-wish should never be compulsive. If you phrase it wrong, you could end up in some horrible Monkey’s Paw scenario. Let's say you find a dime in the crack of a sidewalk and instantly wish for a peaceful breather in a hectic day, just a moment of stillness. Yeah, well, you could very well be wishing for the sudden and unexplained eradication of the human race! I’m sure the Omega Man experienced some stillness as he wandered the barren, unpopulated earth. My point? Don't be a Charleton Heston. Think before you wish. And be specific, dammit. So, as my slump transformed into a stride, I began to inventory my day's agenda, deciding exactly how to shape it.

Then HE appeared. It's never simple. You can't just find a freaking dime and have an excellent day. No, fate won't be so easily manipulated. He caught me at the corner of Michigan and Chicago, as I waited for the traffic solenoids to permit my passage. It was a good corner for the blanket canvassing of strangers. He hit me from the left. My unprotected left.

"Excuse me. I don’t mean to bother you. Could you spare any money? A nickel . . . a dime . . . anything?"

Brother, could you spare a dime. Fuck! No no no. I shook my head with the "sorry" that he had certainly fielded to the point of profession, and he moved on to the next commuter, methodically working the corner. I put my hand into my coat pocket, finding only keys, no change. All I had was my lucky fucking dime. All I had to do was hand it over to this guy who certainly needed it far more than I did. But I couldn't. That dime was worth far more than ten cents. It was my talisman of hope, the exact leverage I needed to push my day beyond the threshold of Crap. I needed that energy, dammit.

As I walked across Michigan Avenue the dime’s density started to approach dangerous, Einsteinian levels of unbearable mass. Why didn't I just give the guy my dime? I picked it up three blocks before meeting him. He had just as much of a right to the dime as I did. Assuming that he didn't have a stable, salaried job as I do, the dime had to be worth more to him. I could have turned around and given him a dollar bill. That seemed like an even trade. I didn't stop, though. I envisioned an image sequence of turning around, waiting for the crossing signal again, hunting the guy down, and crawling to him with sad dog eyes, offering obvious guilt money. That wouldn't erase the moment of judgment. He already knew that I was a cheap bastard, unwilling to offer even five cents of help to a fellow human in need. The deed was done.

DF 11.5 and rising.

Years ago I made a decision to stop giving money to strangers. Non-participation was a convenient solution to a persistent social dilemma. Every now and then, though, I would break my stupid rule and give a little something to someone who impressed me in a certain way. Sometimes my judgment would be short circuited, and I would realize, moments after giving someone a buck, that I had been swindled. I had given money to an asshole, reinforcing that asshole behavior, ultimately making the world infinitesimally worse. My ethical rules have become as convoluted as those governing English grammar, and now, with my withholding of the dime, I seem to have entered the hazy realm of ethical pidgin. Meaning and value are defined in one moment, and then redefined in the next. Stupid dime.

Yet here is the coda: the Found Money magic persisted. When I slouched into my office, infernal dime still pressed between thumb and toted novel, I found both a voicemail and email releasing me from the majority of my day's duties. This was the very all-day session that was the seed of my 6-7 DF morning. Clarity! Peace! The Omega Man prevails! I glanced down to the etched profile of Franklin Roosevelt, the author of the New Deal, a man whose presidency began about the same time that the song Brother, can you spare a dime? was composed. Was it still worth more to me than to a guy reduced to panhandling on a city corner? Maybe I could milk it for a little more. Maybe I'm not a complete asshole. Or maybe, just like most of us, my own worry, dread and twisted superstition will always have the potential to outweigh the greater good. I slipped the dime into my front pocket and enjoyed a relatively uneventful, 2 DF day.

Smokers Kill Yourselves

So I picked up one of the only Vonnegut books that I haven't read, A Man Without a Country. It's a quick, wonderful read. Vonnegut vowed to give up writing after finishing Timequake, and then his publisher released a collection of random early work. So he technically wasn't writing, just publishing. Then there was the Kevorkian pamphlet, which I decided to avoid based on the price/page ratio. It seemed that he was on the verge of being repeatedly repackaged and resold to a devout fan base. Hence, I avoided buying Man when that was first published, particularly since I had read a few of the pieces already via In These Times. What a mistake! Boy, is it refreshing to read these notes from an old friend!

I have to address one funny little Vonnegut-ism, though. He claimed that he would sue the makers of Pall Mall cigarettes for "a billion bucks." According to the packaging on the cigarettes, the Pall Mall people failed to make good on their promise to kill him if he kept on smoking. Of course I laughed when I read that, and the witticism is used simply as an introduction to a political topic. Still, it reminds me of a lot of smokers I've known.

Years ago, I was dumb enough to attempt a career in smoking. After I hacked my way through a pack of Camels, I bought another and couldn't finish. They made me feel as if my veins were full of sludge, while the wonderful cyclone of dizziness rarely persisted. Plus I flat out stank (breath, hair, clothes, skin, disposition). I did acknowledge that some people enjoy cigarettes, and, of those folks, some people seemed destined to be smokers. I, however, failed to join their ranks.

Now, I know that during the last decade or so smoking has become the new leprosy. I see them huddled in their leper clusters outside of office buildings, in alleys, getting in that morning smoke, pre-lunch smoke, post-lunch smoke, afternoon-break smoke, early-evening smoke, after-work smoke, etc. I never cared much about it. Yes, I do think that second-hand smoke hurts people, but, unless I'm in a closed space (such as the fucking Metro at an all-ages show), I never found it personally insulting for someone to smoke. I do get pissed when I see dipshits tossing spent cigarettes out of their cars. The world is your ashtray, you son of a bitch. Smoking, though, just like drinking, is a personal right.

Then I read Vonnegut's little funny. For many people, the anti-act of not quitting smoking is a form of laughing at death. Yes, these things will kill me someday. Sigh. What're you going to do?

Let me tell you what my dad did. He smoked for over forty years. Cigarettes, and then a pipe. About seven years ago, after both his brother and his father developed cancer (and beat it), my dad gave it up. Zyban-enhanced cold turkey. As Homer said, "going cold turkey isn't as delicious as it sounds." That Zyban screwed up his sleeping and made his gums bleed, but he stuck with it because he saw the crap that his brother and father went through and didn't want it to happen to him. Five years later he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in March of 2006 after a 14-month battle.

You see these catch words tossed about when it comes to cancer. Survivor. Battle. It seems like propaganda, but, having witnessed it all, it really did feel like a battle, and it wasn't just about my dad. It affected all of us, everyone who loved him. He never reveled in living the smoker's life, and it took him years to finally commit to quitting. It was a real insult for him to get cancer after taking those steps to better himself.

My point: The "someday these things will kill me" passive acceptance is bullshit! If you smoke enough cigarettes, an upright piano will plunge from the sky and crush you during some random street crossing. Or maybe you'll spontaneously combust. Or the smoker may die in his/her sleep, floating off to a better world. That seems to be the implication. Heart attack. Aneurism. Something clean, instant and final.

Plenty of smokers will not get that lucky break. They will live in pure misery. They will be stripped of their humanity and privacy. They will irrevocably hurt the people who care about them the most, along with the people who might not care much about them, yet are in some state of obligation.

Smokers who are aware of their own denial are the biggest jackasses on the planet. If you're not going to quit, please don't bother laughing in the face of death. Rather, come up with a solid plan for suicide. You know that the things are going to kill you. Yet you prefer to gamble the sanity of anyone who has gotten close to you. So please do them a favor and go for the dramatic, instant death now, while you can. Jump off a bridge (a high bridge, preferably an expressway overpass). Crazy Glue your finger into an electrical socket. Scale the wall at the polar bear exhibit. Picnic on a train track. Do it clean, instant and final, laughing at death the entire time. Just give the rest of us less of a mess to clean up. If life itself is such a casual gamble, why bother?

I still feel that people have the right to smoke, and I find some anti-smoking legislation to be silly and even offensive. Lately, though, smokers just look demonstratively ignorant. Vonnegut's death, by the way, was not related to his smoking. He was one of the lucky ones.

Rented a tent.

Kurt Vonnegut died last night. He was the reason I started writing. Perhaps the Artistic Me would have turned out differently if I had made the choice after first reading Kerouac. As if I don't ramble enough already. As Mini-Kerouac, I probably would have been much more focused on writing as lifestyle. That is, drugs as writing, drinking as writing, rampant sluttery as writing. I'm glad that Vonnegut got to the young/impressionable me first (does anyone discover Vonnegut and/or Kerouac at a stable, non-impressionable age?). Instead of convincing myself that I needed to write what I know, thus pushing to experience Life and get it all down, I went the other way and wrote what I imagined. And above all else, Vonnegut showed me that humor, pessimism and humanity could all brew into warm, tasty stew. It is possible to be both pessimistic and loving within your art.