Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Tuesday afternoon must’ve been pretty inspiring. Walking back from the subject of my last post, my mind was already fomenting the issues at play in this one. It’s probably a good thing that I don’t have more time to write posts at work anymore.

Walking in and out of the Tenderloin is always a surreal experience. It just doesn’t seem to make sense that an area so desperate can be surrounded by such wealth and privilege. The novel idea I had before Loosely Based (what I was actually working on [on and off] during my senior project in 1998) was to be called Blatant Contrast. The idea here was to discuss urban areas in America and how much of a stunning distinction there was between the existence of rich and poor who, often, were integrated on the same blocks and city streets.

While there was integration in Albuquerque, I’ve never seen so much segregation of groups as in San Francisco. Sure, a panhandler might wander down to the nearest BART station or the cable cars, but the Tenderloin generally seems to have invisible walls on all sides, girding in its residents where anything is acceptable and nothing is taking for granted. And yet a walk to lunch, or home, or just about anywhere takes you back to the promised land of California, one of the most expensive places in the world to live, the precious gold of the Barbary Coast.

And yet walking reminds one of one’s feet, one’s literal place in the world, one’s footing and setting and bearings. It certainly doesn’t hurt that I just went to India and have gotten a perhaps unprecedented context for the width and space of the world and how similar every place really is. The spirit ebbs and flows with time and space, but one’s same feet will find the same ground anywhere… anywhere there’s land. And the land may yield fruit or feed fowl or offer rocky rejection, but land is land is land. I have seen it all, and man, it’s all the same.

Of course the real lesson of the Tenderloin is a perfect illustration of how land is not the same, how no land in America (and much of the world) is treated the same as any other patch of land. “How much land does a man need?” Tolstoy asked, but that question never seems to limit the discussion here. Perhaps it’s “How much land can a person avoid getting foreclosed on?” Or “How much land can a credit card buy?” The question is really the same, especially if you’ve read the story (it’s excellent), but the perspective has just enough tweaks and bounces to make it seem different. The point is this, in a world where “Location, location, location” is perceived as the benchmark of selling real estate: every square inch of land is valued differently; every square inch of land is the same.

I understand all the arguments and I’m immersed in a culture that promotes this perspective. Land is where one lives, and where one lives determines everything. Being 20 seconds or 20 minutes or 20 hours from this or that good or service or access makes all the difference in how one lives one’s life. Fair enough, I can understand that perspective and how its valued. The relativity of it all. But the Tenderloin breaks that justification over its knee, since it’s nestled right in the heart of all these other valuable areas. Some definitions of the TL put it as small as 30 square blocks - a castle of poverty under siege from the forces of the gentry on all sides. The Tenderloin is just as close (or far) from all the same activities as everything on its border. And yet its land is worthless, while the same patch of asphalt and cement across the street might be among the most coveted on the planet.

I’m trying to get you to really think about this distinction and whether it makes sense. I haven’t lost my mind and forgotten all of the reasons that property values fluctuate and all the factors the people have been trained to take into account. I understand about the condition of property and the surrounding aesthetics and everything that goes into these calculations that millions of people devote their entire lives to manipulating. I’m asking you to roll back those assumptions, ingrained as so obvious, and really question whether this whole set of perspectives on land makes sense. Or is it simply the willing, overt suspension of disbelief?

Of course the contrast gets wider and more obvious when one looks at a place like India. Obviously one isn’t very close to the services available in San Francisco when one’s in India, but this latter locale is certainly no undesirable place. And yet the whole country, even the most valuable land in the nation, doesn’t come close to San Francisco prices. And even there, constant variation and the close proximity of worthless land and that which is highly valued, is the norm.

Or perhaps the example is best illustrated with land on the outskirts of some growing metropolitan area. Bear Canyon, for those New Mexicans who remember. Or the outskirts of Pleasanton perhaps. The same land, sitting there, can be worthless for decades, centuries, time immemorial. Valued only by lonely souls who seek solitude, or someone who planted their claim flag only after their horse got lost. And suddenly, almost overnight, as the city rolls out and the people roll in, the land is more valuable than it would have been had gold and oil both been uncovered ‘neath its crust.

This is the way the world is. But does it make sense? Is anyone here really valuing land, really understanding its capability and innate properties? Or is it simply the willing suspension of disbelief, to say that other people value something in this and that way, so I will too? That there’s nothing I could do to alter this perspective, so might as well get in line and aspire to the high end as well?

It always amazes me that believers in the so-called Invisible Hand, the only truly respected deity in modern America, have such a hard time imagining a world where people willingly ruled out violence and embraced pacifism. As though it were somehow more essential to human nature to blindly blithely trust the priorities of a marketplace than to avoid hurting one’s fellow person. Traditionally, it has been easier to persuade people to flee to selfishness and embrace the Hand than to make sacrifices for the betterment of society. But this is sort of like saying that it’s easier to reward six-year-olds for tearing toys away from their fellow first-graders rather than teaching them about sharing. While technically true, it sort of ignores the fundamental question at hand. And when it really comes down to it, humans are infinitely adaptable. This is both a strength (survival through adversity) and a weakness (almost unimaginable gullibility and willingness to follow). But people can be taught.

Because of course the same principle in play with land applies to currency itself. Or celebrity. People have created massive architectures around hierarchy and distinction and the elevation of some to the detriment of others. This has not been the path of least resistance… it has been the result of careful, extensive planning and manipulation and effort and work that, when combined with human adaptability, has yielded the societies you see today.

People tell you this piece of paper has value and you believe them. Why? Most fundamentally, because everyone else is running around believing them as well. Don’t think this is the justification? If you woke up tomorrow and everyone were effusively discarding paper bills, using them to wallpaper houses, wrap fish, light fires, and so forth, how would you react? Sure, for 24 hours, you might greedily grab all the cash that you could. Maybe even spend a week dreaming of the piles of paper that you had amassed, waiting for the tide to turn back. But it probably wouldn’t be much more than a month till you walked by 100’s blowing in the streets, or even started lighting some up on a cold night without kindling. You would adapt. You would adopt what’s being done around you, what you see.

And you tell me we can’t train people the same way to not kill each other? To willingly rule out any possibility of violence, or to put it on the same plane as burning stacks of $100-bills? Really?

I think this is where Hamlet should’ve been going (maybe was implicitly going) with the old “Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” I’ve always detested that line because I believe, wholeheartedly and fundamentally, that moral distinctions are the only ones that transcend all this trivial human suspension of disbelief. Good and bad really do get past human solipsism and sophistry, to a world of God and morality and the higher order. But everything else? Sure. These things are entirely determined by a species almost obsessed with finding distinctions where none exist, with creating ways of valuing the same thing disparately. Think about how things are marketed. Every piece of advertising, fundamentally, comes down to this question. How can we get people to make phantom distinctions? How can we get people to overvalue the slightest distinctions? How can we divide people’s worldview into one of increasing gulfs between what arbitrarily “has value” and what equally arbitrarily “is worthless”?

If we spent the same energy and time on moral distinctions instead of “value” or “worth” distinctions, we’d have a whole new ballgame. And everyone would win.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I grew up with stories of “When Daddy was a little boy…”, tales of my father’s childhood lived across adventures from Nevada to DC to Afghanistan to Korea. The preferred setting for these narratives had to be the streets of Kabul, and no Kabul story was complete without some sort of reference to the Noon Gun.

The Noon Gun was a cannon that was (still is?) fired each day at noon, perhaps the atomic clock of its era, to help the residents of Kabul track their temporal progress through the hours. To the uninitiated, it must have caused quite a start to hear the cacophonous blast of gunpowder, an unheralded harbinger of the decades to come in Afghanistan. And there were reassurances and snickers from those who knew, or those who perhaps were just complacent in their noontide reminder.

I was walking to pick up a burrito just now, exploring a new route to a new Mexican (but not New Mexican) place gracing my slightly new location at my slightly new job. And it sounded, a howling wail tolling the end of the world, up, down, up, hold, down. “Take cover, take flight, take heed.” But then when do I go to lunch? And was I at work just yesterday?

It’s San Francisco’s own noon gun, of course, which sounds only on Tuesdays and precisely at noon. It’s a city-wide test of the Emergency Broadcast System, in case of question-marks, so that everyone can know to head for the hills as soon as question-marks happen. You fill in your own blanks, because no one’s really quite clear what it would be. And that fuels the effectiveness… anything can happen, everything is threatening.

But somehow, at the early onset of Tuesday afternoon, it sounds more like a cry for help. Of course it’s only on Tuesdays - when else could it be? And noon, the dawn of the difficult period, the advent of the slow decline into nothingness that is afternoon. Somehow the Tuesday Noon Siren calls out like an affirmation of one’s internal feelings rather than a particular call to action or safety. Why wouldn’t a forlorn, urgent wailing call out at just this particular moment?

But it’s really trying to warn us, like “Vantage Point”, a movie that should probably be protested and picketed when it comes down to it, that the Danger is Out There. “Vantage Point”, a waste of a dear couple hours over this already less-than-precious-weekend, offers an intricate plot that is fiction to its very core. Yes, there are Presidential conspiracies of body-doubles and the fact that no matter how many people came together to kill someone, they will be labeled as a “lone gunman”. But the picture of a terrorist threat, that for the pure power of violence seems to rail against nearly the whole world, that is collected, coordinated, and wants to fight some mysterious war for the sake of never ending it, is the height of American projection. The United States may stand unilaterally for bold, violent action and rogue “heroics”, thus fearing its own image more than any reality out there. But at least if one attacks a mirror with full force, one only gets bloodied by broken glass.

I’m not saying that nothing will change, nothing will happen, and certainly not that nothing will appear to happen. But jumping and running from the mirror is a little distracting when we should be realizing it’s what’s being reflected that should scare us.

And boom.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Somehow, this weekend felt like someone sucked all the oxygen out of the universe.

I had big plans for the weekend, or at least moderate steps toward the things I’ve been intending to work on for a while. Many of which are things that just don’t take scads of effort or triumphant victories over inertia. And yet… nothing.

The weekend wasn’t a total washout. I saw some friends, played some games, watched an utterly frustrating Academy Awards session. (Tilda Swinton? In that field? The Coen Brothers on parade? Really?) But could I call myself productive? Did I sit down and get done? Nope.

I feel like I’m revisiting the same crossroads I practically inhabit all of the time. Does the Blue Pyramid, generally, as a potentially limitless pool of opportunity and time expenditure, add to or detract from my overall productivity? Would it be good to run a month of no BP as a litmus test for what else I could get done? Do feelings of inadequate productivity generally help or hinder the cause of making me more productive? Is there any way to make a day job compatible with my dreams, even in the short term?

And yet there is a larger inertia in play here, just in this particular weekend and seeming to extend to today. I hope I can shake it, that the fog lifts before I have to show up to a meeting or try to put together a project at the place that pays me. Which reminds me that I’m in record territory, as of just last week… Glide is now my longest-running employer ever. And it hasn’t even been two full years yet, even though it feels like eons. That’s probably telling.

But what is it telling me? And am I listening? And why was I startled, deep down, in the core, last night, to really contemplate for the billionth time how finite and fragile life is? For the first time in memory, it truly scared me. It didn’t hit as a passing observation or a reaffirmation of things I already knew, but it scared me. A new level of feeling that I’m falling short of potential, of where I should be. How would I feel if the writings didn’t get written, the ideas didn’t get expounded, the plan didn’t get laid out simply because I was slogging away at a day job in the meantime? Wouldn’t that be silly?

Storey Clayton: he made silly, shortsighted decisions that assumed there’d always be time.

God, save me from that epitaph.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Yesterday, I had a really hard time.

For one thing, I just wasn’t feeling that well, which is always sort of a struggle on one’s birthday. Birthdays aren’t quite the same as they were when I was excited to tack on an extra year to my overall tally, but they’re still pretty cool. And having extremely evident allergies (to the tune of 60+ sneezes in a day, with accompanying draining and Cindy-McCain-style-zombie-red-eyes) is just not a welcome addition to such a day’s schedule. I wish I had a better handle on why I suddenly manifest allergy symptoms on and off all the time, but I guess that’s just part of getting older in America these days. Nothing that debilitating so much as really annoying.

The other reason I had a hard time was more whimsical… every time I wrote the date, my inclination was to put “80″ in the year slot. This temptation already would’ve been strong, coming off weeks of traveling and filling out border-crossing forms of all kinds. And that’s just the year I normally associate with “2/20″. But then the actual year is “08″? Forget it. I think the whole day was lived as though 28 years prior.

But tack on “reversal year” as some sort of additional random year to celebrate one’s birthday all the more. I guess it doesn’t work if you were born in ‘77 or ‘88 (or ‘44), but everyone else can celebrate a particular birthday when writing the date will trigger any inclination you ever may have had to dyslexia.

This post is sounding a little overly whiny, and really I had a great birthday (at least the celebrating it part). I really appreciated seeing everyone’s e-mails, phone calls, and (new this year) Facebook messages come in over the day. Gris, Anna, & Brandzy joined us for dinner and an eclipse (I may never get over Anna & Emily’s insistence that we blast “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on the way home from dinner while craning necks to see the moon at the same time). There is now even more baseball to anticipate, as people have solidified that baseball and books are the only things I consistently crave. I sneezed and snorted and drained my way to 11:56 PM Pacific, when I officially crossed over into the territory of Even Older than I Thought Was Old Before.

I am feeling about the same today, but hoping to maybe dehydrate myself into not requiring an entire tree worth of repositories for nasal material today. I know, I know, don’t hold back.

It seems I’m only doing relatively quick updates these days and it’s really about time to shower anyway. To keep you entertained with promises of content, I’m hoping to follow-up my analysis of the Republican vote-counting system with a reverse scenario for the Democrats, which should be much more straightforward, but likely offer similarly election-altering (and more predictable) results. There’s ongoing trip update stuff, including really starting to transcribe my journal. And new ideas abounding seemingly every day, competing with old ideas and the vague notion that I really should write some fiction at some point.

My need for a 10-20 hour/week secretary/coder/admin assistant on the Blue Pyramid doesn’t seem to be dissipating. Though reading my handwriting remains an insurmountable challenge. Which prompted Brandzy to suggest last night that I hire a look-alike to spend that time at my desk while I stay home and try to decipher my own handwriting.

Anyone with long hair and a willingness to wear bright colors out there?

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

No update from the trip that was today. Or at least not yesterday, bleeding into today as it now is. I was fully intending to, and I was probably going to do some other stuff with my night as well, when I got bowled over with a (thankfully brief) project.

Em & I were watching the primary returns come in, already yearning for a time when there were more names and more excitement than we’re down to in this, the allegedly most wide-open year in American presidential politics of our lifetime. And the old discussion came up about whether the Republicans counting all primaries/caucuses proportionally - instead of the status quo, which contains a smattering of winner-take-all, proportional, and mixed counting - would have changed any of the results.

Emily asked and I chalked this up as a quick trip to Google. But either someone’s done it under the wrong keywords or not at all… somehow, in this modern era of instant punditry and an army of political paraprofessional bloggers, could it be that no one had actually run the numbers?

This kind of stuff is now just about my (new) job, so you’d think I’d be tired of it after spending most of my 8 hours today slogging through statistics. But I simply had to know. And I’m glad I found out, because the results will blow your mind.

The fact that this kind of thing isn’t front-page news is either surprising or very much not so. I guess it’s one of those moot points of alternate scenario simulation, since there was never even so much as a tangential discussion amongst the Republican top brass that they might change this age-old system of assigning delegates. But, much like the superdelegate thing, it’s got to make you wonder if people are even pretending there are direct links between the voters and the final decisions.

Anyway, I’m already imagining possible follow-up calculations, such as (obviously, and no one do it while I’m at work tomorrow!) what if all the Democratic primaries/caucuses were winner-take-all? That’s a lot simpler to figure out, although it’s also beyond unrealistic since it’s clearly “going in the wrong direction”. Not that this superdelegate thing giving Hillary a chance to still maintain the monarchy by backroom means is much better.

In any case, I’m plenty burned out on that project for now. It was one of those things, maybe like the old 64-team APDA national tournament concepts, that I just had to sit down and crank out in its entirety without pausing to consider what else I could be doing with my time. I hope someone pays at least a little attention. How did Julian Sanchez put it so long ago… “Storey Clayton is a crazy, crazy man. But the tropical heat of obsession has yielded entertaining fruit in this case.”

That’s damn right.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Day three of my eighteen-day photo tour of India & Nepal (which before today hasn’t actually featured any India or Nepal) is up on the page.

More to come soon, hopefully still keeping up on the daily pace even during the work week.

In other news, today was totally shot down by a migraine, though I’m briefly through the worst of it, if my luck holds. I was long overdue for one and didn’t even have a terribly debilitating one throughout the trip (a minor one and a half, if memory serves). So no complaints, though this one’s been heavy on the vision-reduction as well.

Many reasons for keeping the update quick again today.

So I think I’m going to be releasing these roughly daily, which means I can keep up the pace of uploading photos without spending all my time on it and/or driving myself crazy.

Today’s photos are from the 25th of January, a plane day from London to Delhi. I really only took pictures out the window of Afghanistan, but there are several pretty good shots.

I’ve also added a category to these posts about the trip. And text transcriptions of my journal there will be coming soon.

Well I’m back from India, as should be relatively obvious from the recent spate of Duck & Cover updates (I missed Thursday because the internet was down), as well as the overhaul of the page theme here. It was an incredible time and I’m going to try to let the pictures and primary source writing from there tell the story.

To that end, here’s the first page of photos from the trip. I’m going to just periodically upload one day at a time and roll it out in installments. Similarly with the writing. For now, it’s all I can commit to. You should also be forewarned that the pictures are very large, averaging about 2/3rds of a megabyte each, and there will be tens of pictures on each page. So if you don’t have a superfast connection, grab a book while you wait for the pics to load.

Maybe it’ll be fun to watch this be released serially instead of all the photos and writing at once. Hopefully that’ll be the case.

In the meantime, I’m absolutely exhausted. Emily and I had our sleep schedules totally distorted upon return and have been waking up at 4 AM all week. Which is better than waking up too late for work, but still somewhat problematic. And today we were completely wiped out, unable to do anything at all despite needing to do a good deal to catch up from our time away. I would really think that jet-lag would wear off after five days, but my Mom pointed out that we have been going straight with travel or work without a break for basically 4 solid weeks. So I guess it makes sense to be this worn out.

Hopefully we’ll be able to catch up with people this weekend, not to mention some errands. We can’t stay this weary forever.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.