Over the past decade, and especially since living abroad, my perception of my country’s corruption has deepened; I attempted to gain some emotional distance through history; you can’t make moral judgements on history, these things happened and will happen; humans are an amoral bunch, doing what they will, and don’t try to read right and wrong into it.

But I still held a kernel of reverence for the virtues on which the nation appeared to have been founded, that the freedom and equality bit was genuine, and this set us apart. Man. It never occurred to me that it might be charlatanry, that it might be a comforting lie. I simply wondered - why doesn’t our representative government represent us? Why does my vote seem meaningless, when, in theory, I wield as much political power as, say, an oil CEO? I had trouble sussing out these contradictions.

People’s History is unapologetically social-anarchist (or “libertarian socialist”). It shows how money and power go hand in hand, and how they have always ruled this country and probably always will. I’ve been on this path of disillusionment since January, since the Citizens’ United ruling, which shook what faith I had in my country (in that regard, if our public were a bit better informed, that ruling could be like my generation’s Watergate). But a friend offered this perversely comforting wisdom - nothing will change, now that corporations can give unlimited funds to politicians. The Arkansas senator is still the Wal-mart senator, the Delaware senator is still the credit card senator, etc. How bleak.

But of course. People’s History shows it’s always been this way, a combination of government power and private capital, one protecting the other. The Founding Fathers, almost to a man, were rich white males. I recall reading that they rigged the government to be a representative democracy because they feared “mob rule” - and I thought, of course, because the mob is stupid. But, no, it’s because they worried they might lose their fortunes, their wealth built on the backs of the poor and enslaved. The Constitution and Bill of Rights pay lip service to individual liberties, granting just enough freedoms to pacify the mob, but still permitting the unimpeded flow of wealth upward.

Of course everyone knows this, and I’m afraid I’m describing it in very unexciting, maybe maudlin language, but I’m affected by a sort of malaise that comes from a permanent state of anger at forces that are impersonal (though made of persons) and largely beyond my reach. Surely such a feeling is futile on the existential level, but I’m not sure what to do with it. The game is rigged and getting rigged-er. Thomas Jefferson is out of the textbooks - but Thomas Jefferson was a rich slaveholding expansionist anyway. The left in America is neutered - but the best the left could ever hope for was an infinitesimally more equitable distribution of wealth, something to pacify the poorest while still letting the wealthy steep in their riches. Maybe some of the left believe their own rhetoric and their own power for meaningful change - but they, or their party-masters are all bought and paid for anyway, and entrenched in a system where any kind of change is hopeless.

When arguing with a friend recently, he expressed the opinion that every political system, ever, has been corrupt - the implication being that one must tolerate a certain level of corruption. Well. Assuming that’s correct - and I think there are good examples of communities without endemic corruption - Catalonia in the Spanish civil war, Israeli Kibbutzim, the Iroquois League, any number of communes throughout the world - assuming it’s correct that you cannot have human power structures without corruption, does that mean we should tolerate it? That we shouldn’t despise it when we find it? That we should ever pretend that it’s acceptable?

I started talking about People’s History because I wanted to draw your attention to friend Alex’s thoughtful post detailing his departure from Thomson, the same megacorp where I acquired my own distaste for gigantobusiness five years ago. I feel embarrassed linking to it after this rambling, murky post - it is thoughtful, funny, and a subtle commentary on the devaluation of the worker in a capitalist system (and, bonus, it is good writing). Outsourcing is an act of fundamental inhumanity, and we’ve praised it for decades as good business practice. I’ve never really understood the injustice of it until it threatened friends. Then you see it right away. Oh, they want to chuck you so they can pay a guy to work much longer for much less? That’s a step above slavery, I guess. Congrats on the moral growth, Capitalism. Christ.

In David Simon’s (amazing) series, “Treme”, there are several characters (whom I won’t name, for spoilers) who struggle to deal with the damage dealt to New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Some shoulder the hard burden of rebuilding and moving on with their lives; others give in to despair. It’s a story of how people deal with a tragedy and, obviously, it’s a universal story that can be told in any different context. One doesn’t want to give in to despair, the laudable, worthy thing is to bravely face the damage and power through it. But in America, the damage is ongoing - and interminable.

The existentialists offer very good advice for dealing with such situations - “Myth of Sisyphus” et al. You’ve been damned to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity. All right. You roll the hell out of that boulder, and in doing so, you conquer it. By refusing defeat, by suffering with dignity and honor, you become greater than your fate. (Viktor Frankl says a very similar thing, in the context of the Holocaust in “Man’s Search for Meaning”.) Good stuff. But there’s also a certain of defeatism in it. Such a stance accepts the boulder - but unalterable eternal fates only exist in myths. We can change our fates.

Hey! Today’s my birthday!

Update: Feeling better. Can’t think why I was so depressed this morning.

My internet connection has been well and truly bollocksed. It was always tenuous, a feeble ray of wifi attenuated over the vasty backyard. A light rainshower could knock it out. It finally stopped working yesterday, probably because of some infinitesimal shift of minor gravitational bodies in the Kuiper belt. I broke down and ordered (at last) a real internet connection. Soon there will be enough wifi bouncing around my house that I won’t have to microwave food any more, just hold it up to the router. Raaaaaaaaaaaadiation, great stuff.

Anyway, they’ll have it set up in a week. It’ll be twice as much and half as fast as the service I had in Korea.
I was trying to think of the average internet speed in all the countries I’ve been to, trying to think of countries with worse broadband access than America. I came up with:

Laos.
Some remote islands of Indonesia.

I am not even joking. Cambodia has better internet.

I’ll begin fire academy in a week and a half. A bit nervous about that. I am actually less nervous about the prospect of charging into a burning deathtrap than about hanging out with a bunch of men’s men, a bunch of backslapping country boys, trying to think of things to say about pickup trucks and … coon hounds and … diesel engines.

I’m reading A People’s History of the United States. I used to despair about the encroaching corruption in our government, but no more! Because it’s not encroaching, it has done encroached. It’s been here from the beginning, and somehow that makes me feel better.

Watching Treme, David Simon’s series about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is a David Simon series, which is to say it is better than anything.

Playing Mass Effect 2, a game of polish, poise, maturity, depth, sexy blue alien chicks.

Intending to write a few long entries about our trip through the northwest last month. Who knows?

Revising the novel I wrote last spring/summer. It is very good. I’m really pleased. This is the best kind of work a writer can do: sitting down to read their own stuff, finding it solid, thinking, “I did that!”

(The obvious downside: finding it terrible, thinking, “I did that…”)

It’s nice to have such a huge culturesphere that I am overwhelmed with choice. There’s too much good music, too many good books and videogames and movies, to ever get through it all. Sometimes the prospect of getting through it all seems hopeless, but it’s a good kind of hopelessness. Consume consume consume.

It was a fairly pleasant journey, though the final four hundred miles by dogsled were a bit arduous. We lashed our animals cruelly, though necessarily, over the frigid peaks where the iron bones of the earth protrude darkly from their icy blankets of death. We passed the frozen skeletons of less fortunate travelers, the foolish yet brave trailblazers whose deaths made our own passage across that forsaken hellscape possible. The wind howled and tore at us as if it would rip the skin from our bones. Then a short bus ride, and we were in Vancouver.

Vancouver is a pleasant city of about two million, situated on the Frozen Hellgulf, where icebergs crowd the black barely-liquid water. Every day is a struggle against the encroaching ice, a Sisyphean war fought by flameships, battleprows, and, rudimentary yet effective and above all necessary, mere men and women armed with pickaxes. The price of failure is apparent in the frozen towers of old Vancouver, trapped in the invincible continent-wide Mother Glacier; the dead poised there still, caught in endless surprise at the advance of this life-hating behemoth.

Yesterday we swam in Deep Cove, where the pine-covered mountains roll down to the blue sea. The water was bracing, remaining liquid somehow at a few degrees above absolute zero, the temperature of a black hole. I swam out to an iceberg and climbed the pellucid peaks of that majestic mountain, and there confronted and slew the wendigo of Canadian lore, cutting its throat with the only weapon capable of piercing its wooly white hide: its own claw. Too tired to swim back to shore, I fashioned a harness of moose leather and tamed a walrus for my mount.

Now, the aurora borealis dance in ethereal ballet above the snow-heaped lawn, a stunning yet inadequate compensation for the perpetual night with which Canadians are punished for their hubris, their fatal pride in settling where humans were not meant to tread. Soon we will eat a sumptuous and welcome dinner of the remains of the crew of the HMS Terror, whose yeti-mauled corpses the Mother Glacier preserved in perpetuity. Randi fumbles with her last match, her numbed fingers frozen into hooks; she considers removing her sealskin mittens to grasp the match better, but at what cost, payable in the cold currency of frostbite?

Then Scalzi rebuts that Sawyer’s only fretting about a very small percentage of writers. Only a very few, regardless of genre, regardless of point in time, have made a living at writing. Huh. Now that I think about it, wasn’t Poe the first person to make a living from his writing? That would mean that Austen, Defoe, Milton wrote part-time, or as a hobby. Melville wrote everything in the second half of his career while working in a customs office. T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land while working in a frikking bank. Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov under the most penurious poverty. It seems that if you have inspiration and passion, then you will make it happen. Perhaps Sawyer is worried because he doesn’t have the inspiration or passion to keep writing if he can’t do it full-time.

(Well. That’s not exactly fair - after all, he made it to the big time, back in the 80s. He had to have been  struggling writer once, working on his lunch breaks or whatever. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.)

Continuing on this tangent, there are plenty of writers who claimed that they wrote only for money and would quit if they had enough, or couldn’t make any more - Jack London, for one. To myself, and most writers I think, writing is a thing we do because we like to do it, and we’d do it anyway. There’s a lovely Gillian Welch song, “Everything is Free”, which seems like a reaction to file sharing - “Everything is free now/ that’s what they say/ everything we’ve ever done/ they’re gonna give it away”. Then, “I can get a tip jar/ gas up the car/ maybe make a little change/ down at the bar/ because we’re gonna do it anyway/ even if it doesn’t pay.” Yesssss, thinks I. It’s a simple affirmation of her love for her art form.

Cultures do require excess wealth to produce art, but perhaps we overestimate the amount of excess wealth required. It’s not essential, for example, to have an elite of full-time novelists pushing our prose forward. Primitive hunter-gatherers living at a subsistence level had their cave paintings and their oral traditions. It’s the human impulse to create, to make narratives as a tool for understanding the world or enlivening our experience here, and I’m not at all worried that impulse will go away; simply that the model of a few full-time novelists (representing the very top stratum of novelists, each one resting on top of a hundred dayjobbers) can’t survive. That doesn’t bother me. No mistake: I would love to be a full-time novelist. It’s the one thing I’m good at, the one thing I want to do. But I don’t expect it, and I won’t be devastated if it doesn’t come to pass. I like to think I know better than to build my life plans around the whims of indifferent, overwhelmed New York editors and indifferent, overwhelmed audiences. Maybe Sawyer doesn’t realize this because he’s been a pro for so long, but the traditional publishing model is broken, broken, broken, and it must change to survive; or maybe he does realize this, and he’s worried because he doubts his ability to change with it.

Yesterday I got Hepatitis A in one arm and Hepatitis B in the other. This is part of the gauntlet of fun that one must brave when becoming an EMT. Next they will ram a giant spear through my torso to see how I react to giant spears rammed through my torso. Next time you see an EMT, shake his hand.

By the time you read this, I will be in the back seat of my parents’ Honda Pilot, bound for Iowa, the state voted “corn-stubbliest”. Family reunion. I’ll be playing bluegrass with some extended family members. I’ve met some. I’ve never met some others. I’ve not seen yet some others in six years or more. I expect it will be a good time. I’m not sure what it says about me that I look forward to periods of enforced nonactivity, like car rides, when I am free to read or play video games on my sundry portable systems. Can I not make time for these things in normal life? Or can I just not justify spending time on these things in normal life? Dunno.

I’ll be finishing David Simon’s Homicide, the book that he wrote after following Baltimore’s homicide unit for a year. It’s funny, it’s beautifully written, it’s profound, it’s generally all things The Wire is. I wish I’d read it before seeing The Wire; it contains important background information regarding the operation of police departments, stuff that you kind of have to piece together in The Wire. I’ll also be finishing my critique of my friend’s first novel, on which I’ve been taking entirely too long.

And I’ll be playing Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. It’s a more story-driven dark scifi version of Etrian Odyssey, which I will always love, even though it hates me. And I’ve got the Megaman Zero collection to keep me awake when first-person dungeon crawls get too slow.

Steam, the digital distribution service that shows other digital distribution services how it’s done, is having a massive summer sale; I snagged And Yet It Moves, which took all of five minutes to be too hard for my feeble brain - why do I keep buying puzzle platformers? And The Maw, which I might have pirated long ago but never played because I felt guilty about pirating from an indie company so I redeemed myself by buying it on sale for 75% off; and Rocket Knight, which is pure fun shot up the nostrils of my brain. I might also buy GTA IV, which is only five bucks. Five bucks! And the game cost a hundred million to make, sold for sixty bucks a year ago. What a world.

Went to Half Price Books yesterday. Because we’d spent so much on books in the past two months, I’d forced myself to stay away for a few months. My bookshelves were all but full. I could only feasibly hold so many more books in our current domicile. So I waited, like, a month at least before I bought some more.

Got a book by Matt Taibbi. A book on suburban sprawl. A book of Barbara Ehrenreich essays. Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels. The guy at the counter told me, “I tried to get into him. I think you need to be high on something.” Maybe, maybe. Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife, volume four. Someone dumped a bunch of Gene Wolfe, and I snatched it all up, including The Death of Doctor Island and Other Stories and Other Stories, the collection that has such awesome story names: “The Death of Doctor Island,” “The Island of Doctor Death,” “The Doctor of Death Island.” Got China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun. A book by Doris Lessing, whom I’d been wanting to investigate. She won a Nobel Prize, you know. They don’t just hand those out.

“Oh, this is a dry county. We don’t have margaritas.”

“What is this, freaking Iran? Give me a margarita, you heathen Mohammedan!”

Randi gave their agreed-upon distress signal. Jens desisted.

“Well, then, maybe you can help me with something else,” Jens said. “I’m looking for my friend. His name is Meth. Meth M. Phetamine. Do you know where I can find Meth?”

“Oh, sure, honey, just go down to the Meth Market.”

“I thought that said ‘Math Market’. I guess ‘Meth Market’ makes more sense,” Jens said.

They went to the Meth Market. It was busy. Jens bought some meth. He paid for it with Visa. “Every modern convenience,” he said. “Country living.”

A constable passed. Jens quickly hid his purchase, but the cop saw nonetheless. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that in these parts,” he said with a chuckle. “We love meth, ’round here.”

“Really? Do explain,” said Jens.

“Meth’s the best thing to happen to this town since the cattle industry!” said the friendly sheriff or whatever. “Meth paid off my ranch house. Meth paid off my F250. Meth is putting my kids through college.

“But the economic argument aside,” continued the friendly lawman, “this here is Real America, Main Street America, Tea Party America. We believe in small government, a government that doesn’t interfere with the rights of the individual.”

“Then,” said Jens conspiratorially, “maybe you can tell me where I can buy a margarita.”

The lawman stiffened. “Sir, I will pummel your fucking face.”

“I need a new house,” said someone. “My old house is too old.”

Someone else said, “Have you heard about these new houses they’re building out in this town? They’re waaaaaay out, you can almost see this other town from that town. So nice, they’ve got a swimming pool and a golf course and oh my god.”

“Hello! Ghetto!” said the first someone. “When I think that town, I think dump.”

Jens ate some carrots. “I actually think the oil spill is a good thing,” he said.

My natural response when I asked myself that question was: drug addiction. I’m unemployed, now would be a good time! That is what people do when they are unemployed, yes? Unfortunately I have no howling void within my soul that demands to be filled.

So.

• Learn how to play bluegrass guitar. I’ve got a family reunion in Iowa in July. Evidently my mother’s side of the family is full of skilled bluegrass musicians, and the reunion is one long jam session. I’ve got a beautiful guitar and a clamorous amplifier. I should put my mouth where my money is, so to speak. TANSTAAFL Pub in town has weekly bluegrass jam sessions. So. Time to practice.
• Read my friend Jason’s novel. I’ve been critiquing it since December. Bad, bad Jens. Finish tout de suite! Especially as we’re visiting him and his wife and kid this July. It would be most embarrassing to have not yet finished. It’s pretty good, and a pleasure to read! But critiques take time take time take time.
• Read. I’ve spent maybe five hundred bucks on books since our return. Time to put my eyeballs where my money is. It is a joy to read with no demands on your time, with no pressure of needing to do other things. Lordy, I better not ever have kids.
• Video games. How is it I am unemployed and still don’t have time to play all the video games I want? I’m hip-deep in The Saboteur, which is glorious though wounded, like a twelve-point buck with an arrow through its liver. Also, Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2, et cetera ad nauseum.
• Go outside some. I went to a state park last weekend, did a trail run, swam, hiked. It was a blast. I am forcing myself to enjoy the outdoors and finding, to my delight, that I do not have to force myself. Tomorrow I am going mountain biking even though no one is making me.

And in terms of writing:

• This late summer I’ll be doing revisions of this Aetheria novel (still needs a name) and Khatima. Revisions are fun. No problem.
• Maybe a short story or two before I head out on vacation, and maybe a few more whilst vacationing.
• This fall I’ll be writing a cooperative… collaborative… novel with Talented Friend Alex Burns. We’ve been talking about this for, like, a year now. Can’t wait. We’ll be taking a few days later this month for intense brainstorming sessions. We’ll lock ourselves in a room and not come out until we have an outline. Bread and water will be passed in on trays.

And in the long, long term:

• I’ll be doing another collaborative novel with Niles Bliss, a friend from my time in Korea. He maintains a funny, insightful music blog. I read some of his short fiction, loved it. We like much of the same fiction and have complementary writing skills, I think, so I expect that to be an interesting and fruitful endeavor.
• My novel idea involving HH Holmes and Boston Corbett, following the years of Corbett’s life after he disappears from the Kansas insane asylum. I keep collecting books and ideas for this, and it keeps sounding better and more interesting. The soul of America is at stake!
• This first novel set in Aetheria is nothing if not a series-starter. More to come, definitely, especially considering the ending. Wow!
• Others.