I err, I am ashamed

I had a curious experience. And a shaming one.

I run multiple blogs and sites for both my own purposes and my company's…i.e., Belfort and Bastion.

One of these blogs is based on Tumblr. That company allows you to "reblog" material you find on other Tumblr-based blogs. You just hit a button and, voila! it's on your own site.

I had come across a posting on a stranger's blog that happened to include the photo of a young woman—actually a girl, pre-teen or early teens. I was interested in the article not the photo, but when I reblogged one I reblogged both.

I also made some comments critiquing the article.

What I didn't know was that the photo had not been used with the permission of the young woman. Worse, a quick read of my one line comment could be interpreted as a criticism of the woman herself. And, even more of a problem, the young woman in question frequently Tumblr and came across my re-blogged entry.

She was, not unnaturally, offended and sent me a note to that effect.

I was aghast. I apologized, took down the photo, and un-reblogged the article as quickly as I could.

I hope the young woman forgives me. But the experience has taught me something. Or, rather, reminded me of it. To wit: no motion is free of unintended consequences. And some of those consequences may include the injury of the innocent.

It is not possible, surely, to foresee every such eventuality. But (and here is the lesson for the day), you may at least reduce their possibility by always keeping in mind that there is a world out there…beyond the keyboard, beyond the screen, beyond one's own little existence, outside of one's own skin…

And it is your duty, as a human being, to make that effort at empathy. Not just on the web, but everywhere.

For the alternative is to be cruel. First by accident, as I was. Then, all too easily, by design.

That is not a consummation greatly to be wished.

I censor myself...

There are drawbacks in being a public diarist. There is much which I could record in a notebook …material that is sensitive, embarrassing, crude, personal …which I cannot place here.

Which is unfortunate. It removes much of the power of a real diary. The role of a personal, handwritten journal (the kind that used to come with a lock on the cover) is often to be a kind of silent therapist. You place within it the darkest parts of your life. Your hatreds, fears, lusts…the name of the man you secretly wish to destroy (though you know he doesn't deserve it), the acts so foul that you cannot possibly admit you want to perform them. And it is safe to say these things in a journal. Safer even than it would be to speak them on the couch of the psychiatrist or in the church confessional. Because no one will ever know what you've written…save you, and God (assuming there is one).

And besides, some day, when the journal is full, you may toss it into the shredder. Or just pitch it into the trash. (Come, admit, no one will ever read the thing.) And then, those thoughts and sins are consigned forever to oblivion.

How different here in public. Here there is no oblivion. No genuine confession. No absolution. Here, sins would be forever enshrined. Perversions (of the body or the soul) would become your defining characteristic. People would remember you not for your attempts at the good but your admissions of the evil…evils which, truth be told, are present in us all. You would be different, and therefore damned, only because you were so gauche as to say that you had them.

So I restrain myself. I conceal. I censor. And that is for my benefit. But also for yours. You do not want to know.

Yet, I know, too, that mine is not really a popular opinion. As usual, I am the one who is out of step. I am the oddity, the crank, and the eccentric. I cruise the web and walk the aisles of my local bookstore, and I find there are many, many diarists and autobiographers for whom the barrier does not exist. They abandon the implicit privacy of the memoirist as easily as the progressive cartoonist breaks "the fourth wall," i.e., as though it were an act of daring.

And perhaps it is. Daring, I mean.

Yet, I wonder, at what point does confession become exhibitionism? Where does the diarist leave off, and where begins the dirty, sick old man in the proverbial raincoat, pants below his knees, for whom a sad fulfillment comes only in a flash, the pathetic shock, and the waving of his limp little willy at a cold and indifferent world?

The Rhythm Of Melancholy

I have begun to realize there is a kind of generational rhythm to melancholy. It has a predictable pattern.

To explain: a close friend of mine, a man almost exactly my own age, just lost his father…this after his mother passed on only a short time ago. As you know, my mother too recently passed away. In fact, virtually everyone I know who is also of my generation is in a similar situation. We all of us watch as our parents age, become frail, die…

Which is why I suspect that every generation has a certain cadence to its emotional life. We share with the majority of our peers common stages of our lives. We know together the extreme emotions of childhood, the extraordinary unease of adolescence, the confusion of the twenties, the triumphs and defeats that come after that.

When you are my age, and I'm 57, you share with your peers that moment in your life when you suddenly realize that they…your parents …won't be there forever. Or, are not there now.

And, no matter how good or bad your relationship was with them (and in my case it was very good), there is something unimaginably disturbing in that.  For you know that what seemed a fixed point in the universe, its pivot, does not exist any longer. It is wholly gone, forever.

You realize that now you have no choice but to attempt to be a pivot yourself.

Though, in some ways, that is the more dreadful, for you know that…in time…your children will discover in their turn just how unsteady a center you really are.

Easter 2014

To my friends who are Christians, happy Easter. ("He is risen.")

To my friends who are not, may you have a lovely time on this early Spring afternoon, when …at least here in New Mexico…the sun is out and the winds are not chill and everywhere there are the signs of new beginnings.

*

Interesting that both the Western and the Orthodox Easters fall on the same day this year. That doesn't happen often. We, you see, (i.e., the West) use the Gregorian calendar. They (the East) use the Julian.  There have been some rather serious quarrels about that.

Amazing thing, human nature. That we find even in the days of the week a reason to get into a good scrap.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A remarkable man...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html?_r=0

A bit of minor whining

Tired. A wee bit depressed, as I often become when I've finished some major project.

And I have completed one, by the way. A project. Although it isn't quite complete. I was working on the layout of a very demanding book. It has taken me two days to get it (I think) more or less in shape. I sent it to the author this p.m. for a final check.

Two things worry me: first that he won't like it and I'll have to make major revisions. Second, the printer. (Yes, for the first time, I am moving into hardcopy. More later.) I fear that when I send the files off to the printer I'll discover I've done something horribly wrong and need do it all over again.

Let's hope I'm wrong, shall we?

Fashion

I was bored and found myself cruising Tumblr.com blogs. These are interesting in that allow you "reblog" material from other people's Tumblr sites. It makes for an unusual form of social network in that like-minded blogs tend to link to one another. Fans of, say, photos of World War II fighter aircraft post each other's images. With a few clicks you are enmeshed in an entire community.

On this particularly day I somehow drifted into a linked collections of blogs dealing with high-fashion photography. People were scanning or downloading photos from Vogue, Elle, W Magazine, Town and Country, etc., and loading them to their sites for various reasons.

It had been years since I'd actually looked at a women's fashion magazine and I did so now mostly out of a professional curiosity. I am, after all, a former magazine writer and an aspiring publisher.

But, as I looked at the photos, I realized I was becoming more and more uncomfortable. They seemed odd somehow. At first I thought it was just because the women were so very thin. They had that concentration camp look that nutritionists and feminists so often decry.

Then I thought it was just because they were, well, creepy. The modern fashion model is not made up to conform to any traditional conception of beauty (and certainly not a heterosexual man's). Their skins were deathly pale, cosmetic bruises could be seen under eyes on cheeks, expressions were stern to the point of murderous, and there was way too much leather and lace.

Next, I thought that what bothered me was the age (or the seeming age) of the people involved. There were two sorts of model on display: thin, boyish women made to look very young, and girls…girls between the ages of 11 and 14. Both groups wore the same very suggestive outfits, clothing which concerned almost nothing (even though there was very little to conceal). Both were posed in positions that I can only call erotic, as though they were inviting the viewer to join them in bed, or as if they had recently shared one another's beds and we were there as an audience, peeping through keyholes, spying through windows.

It felt, well, perverted. I felt that I was supposed to be seeing children…highly sexualized children…girls, or even boys in drag, offered up for my voyeuristic pleasure, and suggesting that I cultivate a certain pedophilia.

This I found revolting and it was with a real feeling of illness that I left off browsing for the day.


*

The following morning, I took the dog for a walk. As we strolled through the sunlight of a New Mexican morning, I considered again my reaction to those photos. For a time, I believed I finally understood why they'd made me feel quite the way they did. I thought I was reacting as a father, someone who has a child (even if my son is now grown), and who was distressed to have these images floating about, possibly influencing the real behavior of real children. (Pre-teen girls do read this kind of magazine.) And, worse, possibly influencing the behavior of adults in their relations with children.

But just as we came around the corner down by the school, I realized that there was still more…something else was troubling me.

I recalled one picture in particular. It showed a girl of maybe ten. She was heavily made-up. She stood in some urban location and gazed at the viewer with an odd expression that seemed to combine disinterest and erotic availability. Though she was a child, she held a cigarette in one hand.

I later discovered that this picture was in fact "inspired" by much more famous images by much more famed photographers. There is, indeed, it seems a whole genre of them: the child presented as an adult, performing acts which are hazardous at best, and which are therefore somehow infinitely more alarming when they are done by someone so very young. So very vulnerable.

And it struck me. There is something here that is genuinely unhealthy. Something indicative of a sickness at the very heart of our culture.

But that sickness isn't in the threat it represents to children…or, rather, not just in that threat.

It is in what these photos say about our adults.


*

Consider, who is that child with the cigarette supposed to be? Who does she genuinely portray?

Well, there is a theory we humans prefer photos of things that resemble us. Confronted by a collection of strangers' images and asked to pick the most attractive, we select the men and women who most look like us…either our exterior self or our internal reality.

If so, then the images in the fashion magazines are in fact those of the adults who read, write, and publish those journals—our fashionistas, our Devils In Prada, our setters of style and makers of trends. It these people whose souls and whose inner-most selves are presented on the shiny pages.

These are powerful, powerful people. They are among the mightiest of our civilization has to offer. What they decree to be fashionable will determine the purchasing of millions, and the labor of millions more.

And who are these people? What do we see when we turn to their images in the glossy magazines?

Answer: a person who has all the superficial characteristics of extreme youth…but whose reality is vastly different.

That reality is exhaustion. It is corruption. It is the Bordello Madam somehow concealed within the body of an ingénue as she smokes her cigarette and contemplates heroin chic.

In other words, there is much in this child-hag to remind one of the corpse. Cunningly embalmed. The very picture of peaches and cream.

Even as the decay sets in.

A curse?

Seriously, I sometimes worry about that. I mean, curses. I am a rationalist, I do not believe in magic, etc.

Yet, some, primitive part of my brain does believe. Like the cowardly lion, it chants I do believe in spooks. I do. I do…

And that part of brain fears that someone or something has, at some time, cursed me. I was guilty of some unknown trespass. I offended someone. Perhaps it was when I was child…and a distasteful child I must have been. Always knowing the answer. Always putting up my hand with a comment in class. Always the Little Professor. (I deserve a curse, if that's the case.)

As I say, it is only that little piece in my head that believes any such thing. Normally, I ignore its shrill little voice.

But…

Well, let us hope that either it (that part of me) is entirely wrong, or that, somehow, by the intervention of some angel or kindly crone, the curse evaporates like winter's chill on a spring day.

Or a moment of night terror in the dark. Burned away by the rising sun.

A book...

Another worry. I have recently contracted to publish the book of a rather important individual, a man famous in his particular niche of the world. It should sell well.

But it hasn't. It's sold a couple of copies. Not more.

It is incredible. It is impossible. It is unthinkable. Yet it is true.

It may yet sell. Maybe it just needs time to get started. Let us hope so. But, if it doesn't, how do I explain the failure of the book? How do I explain it to my self, and to the man who wrote it?

How, indeed, do I explain it to the world? For it would suggest that I carry a remarkable curse. I am magically capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory regardless of the circumstances.

I trust that circumstance and sales will prove me wrong. And make it unnecessary to explain to the world.

Or anyone.

I forgot something

Realized I left out the most important part of my father's logic in my recent posting about his concerns for his children and grandchildren. That was the one on April 07, 2014.

I have rewritten to include the following:

Ah, but there is more. There were a great many Baby Boomers (that's why we were called the "boom"), but we tended to have relatively small families. Our children and grandchildren, in turn, had smaller families still—often one child or none. This means that a large and aging population has to be supported by a smaller and (in fact) dwindling one.

Alas, we are not finished yet. That smaller population of young people is in the midst of a vast social-economic-industrial transformation. For the first time ever, white-collar jobs are being automated. Machines are taking the place of "brain workers." Quite simply, as a nation we are not going to have many of the well-paying professional jobs that once guaranteed the existence of the Middle Class.

Question on the previous post

The question: is this modesty? Or breathtaking hubris?

On Being A Diarist

Still attempting to be diarist in my blog, which is to say that I am attempting to be as honest as possible. I am attempting to write only what is true.

This is not wise. This is not easy.

For one thing, you cannot record the whole truth. Much of what is true is not interesting. Worse, some of what is true cannot be shared without endangering yourself or others. If I were to faithfully report certain of my darker secrets, I would lose most of my friends and gain many enemies. Truth may be beauty and beauty truth, but not all of it is equally appealing.

Also, there is a practical issue. To anoint one's self a diarist is to abandon all hope of ever being published. The diary has no commercial appeal. It is too personal and my life too mundane. You, the reader, have no need of me. Your own journal (if you keep one), your own memories (if you do not) are every bit as thrilling. Probably more so.

So, why do I do it? Answer: because I can only hope that my writings, while not dramatic, still provide some value. They are the musings of an early twenty-first Everyman. They reflect our common mindset, the concerns of the age.

Thus, the paradox: I elect to write the most personal of all genres in hopes that it is the least unique. The least individual. That it states instead the mentalité of the mass.

Of us all.

Read this article by Sarah Kendzior. It explains a lot...

Surviving the post-employment economy 

I need a Jeeves...

I started Belfort and Bastion as a publishing company. But, come, let us confess. I am the last person on earth who should have begun a business. I have none of the characteristics required. I am not detail oriented, have few people skills, possess no games theory expertise, show little capacity for forethought or strategic thinking, and demonstrate almost no understanding of what customers actually want.

In fact, I became an "entrepreneur" only because I had no choice in the matter. I was unemployed, nearly a 1000 miles from any of the publications or schools which might have hired me, couldn't make a living as a freelance writer, and so…well B&B was born.

Sad, really. My talents are being unexploited. What I should have been, of course, was a creature rather like something out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel—an amiable idiot with a trust fund and a helpful Jeeves to get me out of the various pickles into which I blunder on a predictable (if maddening) basis.

Alas, things that might have been. Saddest words and all that rot.

another glitch

Once more I may be in tax trouble. The IRS has not yet said that it has processed our return, nor sent us the refund that our accountant said we would be getting. Don't know what that means. Hopefully nothing.

But, there is another issue. I am not quite sure what I am legally. I formed the company as an LLC because I was told it was safer. Then someone else (someone who was supposed to know such things) advised me to file as if I were a single proprietor. But now I'm not sure whether I've done the right thing. When I was filling out forms for Amazon.com, I came to suspect that I may have been required to file as company rather than as a person.

Let's cross our fingers that I get it all worked out.

Bluntly, I'm not the best the person in the world to have started a business. But for more on that, see the next entry.

My father is no longer optimistic...

Had a long conversation with my father the other day. At 85, he remains one of the most intelligent men I know, and the only one whose predictions about the future are consistently on the money. This is unfortunate because he is (for the first time since I've known him) no longer optimistic about the short-term future of the nation.

In particular, it concerns him that the Baby Boom generation (i.e., mine) is now cranking slowly into old age. As a result of the financial crisis of a few years back, very few of them have anything like the savings required to provide for them, or to pay for their medical care.

This means, he says, that society is effectively passing the bill for that care to the younger generation. Now, in prosperous times, that would not matter. If we knew something like the wealth of the 1960s or 1950s, then young people could afford to pay the tab without suffering themselves.

The problem is that we are not prosperous. We are in a Depression, even if we call it a Recession. Further, after decades of offshoring, downsizing, and "right-sizing" that Recession is simply not going to go away in a hurry.

Ah, but there is more. There were a great many Baby Boomers (that's why we were called the "boom"), but we tended to have relatively small families. Our children and grandchildren, in turn, had smaller families still—often one child or none. This means that a large and aging population has to be supported by a smaller and (in fact) dwindling one.

Alas, we are not finished yet. That smaller population of young people is in the midst of a vast social-economic-industrial transformation. For the first time ever, white-collar jobs are being automated. Machines are taking the place of "brain workers." Quite simply, as a nation we are not going to have many of the well-paying professional jobs that once guaranteed the existence of the Middle Class.

Then, finally, there are our wealthy. If the last few years have proved anything, it is that our economic leadership is incapable of seeing beyond its own bank accounts. Our wealthy will do anything to save themselves a few pence, even if that means the total impoverishment of the rest of the nation. (Yes, I know what Libertarians will say in response to that. But it is true all the same. Greed is not always good. Free markets do not inevitably lead to prosperity. Someday, travel through New England or visit Detroit and look at the abandoned mills, the shuttered buildings, and the shattered lives…the fruit of Neo-Liberal economies.)

All of this together makes my father …unhappy. He worries about the world his son and grandson will inhabit.

Which troubles me no end. I am used to being a bit despairing myself. But not him.

When a man of his vast spirit is daunted, I am afraid.

conclusion?

Later. I am, in theory, square with the insurance company. I say "in theory" because you can never tell. Some error might yet creep into the equation.

Rather a metaphor for life, don't you think?

Still on hold...

Still on hold with the insurance company. Actually, on hold again. I waited for 45 minutes the first time. Spoke to a representative who said she'd take care of the billing and address problem but had to switch me to someone else to restore my coverage. I have now waited another 45 minutes for the second representative.

Will I go mad or merely have a conniption fit? Stay tuned and find out.

taxes and now health insurance (oh, God)

One problem arises. Another eases, if it does not vanish.

The new problem. Blue Cross Blue Shield has just canceled my coverage. Apparently when I changed addresses, the change didn't get made with them. Now they (I think) have dis-enrolled me for non-payment of my bills.

As I write this, I am on hold trying to get through to them. They are saying I can expect a 45 minute wait.

Dear God. I hope I can take care of this quickly and easily.

The problem that is a little less pressing is my taxes. I finally heard from my accountant this morning. Apparently the error was theirs. They failed to tick the box on the return which said I was full-time resident of New Mexico.

The good news is that they should be able to correct the situation by simply refilling.

We'll see.

Meanwhile, cross your fingers for me on the insurance.