On butter

What can one say about butter that is not self-serving rationalization for indulging in the richest food on the planet, except for the fat around a cow’s liver? I, for one, love butter, but I think that this is a relationship that is best left alone. Overindulgence in butter is the road to perdition in many ways–cholesterol, heart disease, obesity, hypertension. Yet, I won’t put oleo on my toast because using a petroleum product would be worse. You see, butter has that taste that just sucks you in and hypnotizes your taste buds and seduces your good judgement. You ever sauté garlic in butter? Maybe throw in a few over-sized shrimp, a pinch of hot red pepper and a quarter cup of white wine? You’d know if you had. Butter is a synecdoche for all of our overindulgence and overeating, and butter stands out as a symbol of our own success which may be our very undoing. In itself, there is nothing wrong with eating some butter. I’m from a dairy state, Minnesota, where the local denizens having been consuming dairy products for over a century and a half, and the only long-lasting result is extended life-spans. We have collectively stopped smoking, and although we still drink a bit and carry around an extra pound or two, we are pretty healthy in spite of the butter we consume. What would pancakes be without butter? What would chocolate frosting be without butter? Lumpy and tasteless. Take away their butter and people would stop making toast and life would cease to have meaning. Can you really eat lobster without a nice butter sauce to dip it in? Chicken fried in butter is much better than chicken fried in mystery oil. Yet butter gets a bad reputation because of all that juicy cholesterol. I often wonder if it might be less the cholesterol we consume and more our own inactivity which hurts us. So getting off the couch and into the wide open spaces is more important than skimping on the butter for our bagel.

On the Borg

Normally, I have few problems separating fiction from fact, fantasy from reality, and unlike Don Quixote, I can tell the difference between a windmill and a giant. Nevertheless, the first time I met the Borg, a race of half-human, half-machine cybernetic drones, I knew I was watching a cautionary tale about the dangers of digital mechanization, the incorporation of technology into the human body, and the uncontrolled growth of technology industries. The Borg, first seen in Star Trek: Next Generation, are a race of biological robots who are controlled by a single “collective”, which is code for eradicating, once and for all, the individual. The actors wear a series of mechanical appliances which are supposed to enhance their biological processes–better eyes, better ears, better hands, whatever, the mechanical parts are better than the biological equivalents. Of course, by eradicating the individual, the social interaction between the drones is less than zero, having been reduced to the social behavior of a colony of bees. The actors playing the drones all look pretty much alike, and their skin is gray, and their amour is black, further erasing the last vestiges of their humanity. The Borg are a kind of cross between undead zombies and Frankenstein’s monster with no will of their own, no thoughts of their own, not really alive or dead—more like machines that have on/off switches. Certainly, there is no personal initiative or ethical or moral codes controlling their behavior. They follow the orders of the “hive” without questioning anything. They don’t even interact with one another, which means they have no emotions, can show no empathy, can show no mercy. They are ideal killers. They are the ultimate consumers of technology as they assimilate the others’ cultures with which they come in contact. The Borg has only one concern: assimilate as many races as possible, adding the uniqueness and technology of each race to their own advantage in search of some sort of ideal perfection. Every time they assimilate a race, they also eradicate the unique identity of each victim, a sort of ethnic cleansing, as it were, to insure the idea that perfection does not lie with the individual, but only with the fascistic collective. Perfection, then, is about eliminating all that is unique or different and bending all of those cultures to some ultra-creepy ideology that is concerned with the pursuit of perfection. Why should we, as a people, be concerned about the Borg? Beyond the fact that they are creepy and dark villains, they are also a metaphor for our own society of consumers who are ruled by the collective marketing strategies of the technology companies who are dedicated to rolling out more and better technology to capture the consumer dollar. One of the side-effects of this technology race is a total lack of concern of what technology does to the people who use it. Can we actually say that computers, cell phones, tablets, and laptops make our lives that much better? In some ways, they do enhance communication, especially for those people who are on the go and hard to get a hold of. I like to have a phone in the car in case of emergencies, but I worry about the time people invest in social media and what that takes away from their relationships. I worry that the technology crushes individuality and creativity, that smart phones and tablets eliminate real face to face communication, that technology isolates the individual, repressing or eliminating real communication. Is the Borg collective our society turned on its head and taken to its last apocalyptic logical conclusion? The day it is possible to have a smart phone implanted into your head so you don’t have to worry about carrying it around or making sure it’s charged is the day we all need to take a good long look at what we are doing, but then again, by then, it may be too late.

On the Borg

Normally, I have few problems separating fiction from fact, fantasy from reality, and unlike Don Quixote, I can tell the difference between a windmill and a giant. Nevertheless, the first time I met the Borg, a race of half-human, half-machine cybernetic drones, I knew I was watching a cautionary tale about the dangers of digital mechanization, the incorporation of technology into the human body, and the uncontrolled growth of technology industries. The Borg, first seen in Star Trek: Next Generation, are a race of biological robots who are controlled by a single “collective”, which is code for eradicating, once and for all, the individual. The actors wear a series of mechanical appliances which are supposed to enhance their biological processes–better eyes, better ears, better hands, whatever, the mechanical parts are better than the biological equivalents. Of course, by eradicating the individual, the social interaction between the drones is less than zero, having been reduced to the social behavior of a colony of bees. The actors playing the drones all look pretty much alike, and their skin is gray, and their amour is black, further erasing the last vestiges of their humanity. The Borg are a kind of cross between undead zombies and Frankenstein’s monster with no will of their own, no thoughts of their own, not really alive or dead—more like machines that have on/off switches. Certainly, there is no personal initiative or ethical or moral codes controlling their behavior. They follow the orders of the “hive” without questioning anything. They don’t even interact with one another, which means they have no emotions, can show no empathy, can show no mercy. They are ideal killers. They are the ultimate consumers of technology as they assimilate the others’ cultures with which they come in contact. The Borg has only one concern: assimilate as many races as possible, adding the uniqueness and technology of each race to their own advantage in search of some sort of ideal perfection. Every time they assimilate a race, they also eradicate the unique identity of each victim, a sort of ethnic cleansing, as it were, to insure the idea that perfection does not lie with the individual, but only with the fascistic collective. Perfection, then, is about eliminating all that is unique or different and bending all of those cultures to some ultra-creepy ideology that is concerned with the pursuit of perfection. Why should we, as a people, be concerned about the Borg? Beyond the fact that they are creepy and dark villains, they are also a metaphor for our own society of consumers who are ruled by the collective marketing strategies of the technology companies who are dedicated to rolling out more and better technology to capture the consumer dollar. One of the side-effects of this technology race is a total lack of concern of what technology does to the people who use it. Can we actually say that computers, cell phones, tablets, and laptops make our lives that much better? In some ways, they do enhance communication, especially for those people who are on the go and hard to get a hold of. I like to have a phone in the car in case of emergencies, but I worry about the time people invest in social media and what that takes away from their relationships. I worry that the technology crushes individuality and creativity, that smart phones and tablets eliminate real face to face communication, that technology isolates the individual, repressing or eliminating real communication. Is the Borg collective our society turned on its head and taken to its last apocalyptic logical conclusion? The day it is possible to have a smart phone implanted into your head so you don’t have to worry about carrying it around or making sure it’s charged is the day we all need to take a good long look at what we are doing, but then again, by then, it may be too late.

On the phantom traffic jam

Today I was victim of a phantom traffic jam on interstate highway 35. By phantom I mean there were no wrecks, no single lane road construction detours, no weather hazards, no breakdowns, nothing. Nothing, yet south of Salado all three lanes of traffic came to a dead stop. The reason, of course, was the shear volume of traffic, the loss of a lane in Salado, and the narrowing of the final two lanes through an area of construction where some lane shifting occurred. It only takes one driver who slows down just a bit, maybe 2 or 3 miles an hour, which causes a wave to form in the following traffic. This ripple effect, which is characterized by stronger and stronger breaking by cars coming up from behind. The final result of this wave is that the traffic will eventual crawl to halt, and it can’t start up again until the cars that are stopped, start up again and allow a bit of space between themselves and the cars they are following. Overly aggressive driving and random lane changing only aggravate an already horrible situation. I was stuck in about ten miles of stop and go traffic that never got above five miles an hour until it left was just outside of Temple, Texas. After that, there were several slow downs at the traffic passed other construction areas, had to climb hills, cross bridges or navigate curves. All of these obstacles create hazards in the minds of drivers even when the lanes do not narrow and climatic conditions remain the same. Drivers perceive hazards even when there are none which causes them to slow down just ever so slightly, which is how a slow-down wave begins, ending in stopped traffic when the volume of cars is high enough. Traffic on a four-lane highway flows in a similar fashion to an actual fluid, so the backwards wave acts as interference in the flow of traffic, backing traffic up until it stops dead in its tracks. Today, Labor Day, was a bit of a perfect storm with everyone out on the road today, returning home, to school, or back to work on Tuesday. Part of the problem with I35 is that there is no other fast north-south artery between San Antonio and Dallas. The secondary roads are slow, filled with little towns, and plagued by a number of speed traps. If you are traveling north and south through central Texas, you will probably be on I35. Ergo, the volume today was very high, too high for the highway to handle in any serious way. Today’s traffic jam, which had nothing phantom to it at all, was very real and another symptom of an overused route that needs an alternative. The state keeps rebuilding and adding lanes, but today all of that construction was actually a part of why it became so dangerous and slow to all involved. The construction covers miles of highway, and all of it goes forward at a snail’s pace because in Texas you can work all year around–you aren’t trying to beat old Man Winter to the punch. The state of Texas will never be able to build enough highways to carry all of the traffic in central Texas, one of the fastest growing population centers in the entire United States. I don’t see planning, only patching. What barely carries the traffic today will be completely inadequate ten years from now, and phantom traffic jams won’t be a holiday weekend phenomenon, but an every day sort of thing, which means driving in central Texas will be exponentially that much more difficult.

On the phantom traffic jam

Today I was victim of a phantom traffic jam on interstate highway 35. By phantom I mean there were no wrecks, no single lane road construction detours, no weather hazards, no breakdowns, nothing. Nothing, yet south of Salado all three lanes of traffic came to a dead stop. The reason, of course, was the shear volume of traffic, the loss of a lane in Salado, and the narrowing of the final two lanes through an area of construction where some lane shifting occurred. It only takes one driver who slows down just a bit, maybe 2 or 3 miles an hour, which causes a wave to form in the following traffic. This ripple effect, which is characterized by stronger and stronger breaking by cars coming up from behind. The final result of this wave is that the traffic will eventual crawl to halt, and it can’t start up again until the cars that are stopped, start up again and allow a bit of space between themselves and the cars they are following. Overly aggressive driving and random lane changing only aggravate an already horrible situation. I was stuck in about ten miles of stop and go traffic that never got above five miles an hour until it left was just outside of Temple, Texas. After that, there were several slow downs at the traffic passed other construction areas, had to climb hills, cross bridges or navigate curves. All of these obstacles create hazards in the minds of drivers even when the lanes do not narrow and climatic conditions remain the same. Drivers perceive hazards even when there are none which causes them to slow down just ever so slightly, which is how a slow-down wave begins, ending in stopped traffic when the volume of cars is high enough. Traffic on a four-lane highway flows in a similar fashion to an actual fluid, so the backwards wave acts as interference in the flow of traffic, backing traffic up until it stops dead in its tracks. Today, Labor Day, was a bit of a perfect storm with everyone out on the road today, returning home, to school, or back to work on Tuesday. Part of the problem with I35 is that there is no other fast north-south artery between San Antonio and Dallas. The secondary roads are slow, filled with little towns, and plagued by a number of speed traps. If you are traveling north and south through central Texas, you will probably be on I35. Ergo, the volume today was very high, too high for the highway to handle in any serious way. Today’s traffic jam, which had nothing phantom to it at all, was very real and another symptom of an overused route that needs an alternative. The state keeps rebuilding and adding lanes, but today all of that construction was actually a part of why it became so dangerous and slow to all involved. The construction covers miles of highway, and all of it goes forward at a snail’s pace because in Texas you can work all year around–you aren’t trying to beat old Man Winter to the punch. The state of Texas will never be able to build enough highways to carry all of the traffic in central Texas, one of the fastest growing population centers in the entire United States. I don’t see planning, only patching. What barely carries the traffic today will be completely inadequate ten years from now, and phantom traffic jams won’t be a holiday weekend phenomenon, but an every day sort of thing, which means driving in central Texas will be exponentially that much more difficult.

On [wearing] seat belts

Just when you think that a debate is over, it comes back with a vengeance. I shouldn’t even have to write this note because I think the content is self-evident, but I would be wrong. Ever been wrong? I have. This summer I made my students buckle up on the bus in Spain because it’s the law–if the bus has seat belts, the riders must put them on or they might be fined, not the driver. Nevertheless, there are still older buses on the road in Spain that do not have seat belts and are not bound by the law because they were manufactured before the law was put into place and the bus companies are not required to upgrade their equipment. In a recent tragic accident seven people were thrown from a bus that went off of the road, and they were all killed. Two were also killed on the bus, but in general, those who stayed in their seats, lived. If those seven had had seat belts on, they would have at least had a chance at surviving the crash. Instead, they were thrown from the vehicle and killed. One would think that the lives of passengers would be more important than a few thousand Euro to install seat belts, or is it more complicated than that? Do we still not take seat belts seriously enough? I was required to use seat belts as a new driver learning how to drive. Yet, some thirty-five years later, I still read reports of people who are thrown from their vehicles and killed because they weren’t wearing their seat belt, which is both kooky and tragic at the same time because they don’t seem to understand simple physics–and I mean simple. Any object which is moving will continue to move in a straight line until it is acted upon by some other force. Ergo, if you traveling at sixty miles an hour and your vehicle stops, unless you are belted in, you will continue to move at sixty miles an hour, which means that you will be thrown through the windshield and into oblivion or the next life, which ever comes first. I find it both amusing and scary that people will brandish this argument against seat belts: I’m not going to let the state mandate my safety–if I don’t want to wear a seat belt, I won’t. At some point in their short lives, this attitude will be fatal. It’s just a question of when. Then there are the folks who say that they won’t buckle up because they might get caught underwater or in a car fire. Either of those two scenarios are so rare that these people will end up in the cemetery long before water or fire ever happen. Some people are just stupid and sloppy about putting on (or not putting on) their seat belts, and they die at some point as well. If you stay in your seat in the car, you have a great chance of living through most any accident that is not totally catastrophic. If the highway patrol have to search for your body in the weeds along the side of the road, well, forget it, there are no second chances in the game of life, mostly because it’s not a game. The real truth about seat belts? Buckle up and live. If the bus passengers had had on seat belts, they would have made it, most likely. In the meantime, there are lots of dangerous tour buses out there along with lots of dangerous and stupid unbuckled drivers. For Pete’s sake, buckle up, and even if you won’t do it for yourself, think of your family–they will most likely miss you when you are gone.

On [wearing] seat belts

Just when you think that a debate is over, it comes back with a vengeance. I shouldn’t even have to write this note because I think the content is self-evident, but I would be wrong. Ever been wrong? I have. This summer I made my students buckle up on the bus in Spain because it’s the law–if the bus has seat belts, the riders must put them on or they might be fined, not the driver. Nevertheless, there are still older buses on the road in Spain that do not have seat belts and are not bound by the law because they were manufactured before the law was put into place and the bus companies are not required to upgrade their equipment. In a recent tragic accident seven people were thrown from a bus that went off of the road, and they were all killed. Two were also killed on the bus, but in general, those who stayed in their seats, lived. If those seven had had seat belts on, they would have at least had a chance at surviving the crash. Instead, they were thrown from the vehicle and killed. One would think that the lives of passengers would be more important than a few thousand Euro to install seat belts, or is it more complicated than that? Do we still not take seat belts seriously enough? I was required to use seat belts as a new driver learning how to drive. Yet, some thirty-five years later, I still read reports of people who are thrown from their vehicles and killed because they weren’t wearing their seat belt, which is both kooky and tragic at the same time because they don’t seem to understand simple physics–and I mean simple. Any object which is moving will continue to move in a straight line until it is acted upon by some other force. Ergo, if you traveling at sixty miles an hour and your vehicle stops, unless you are belted in, you will continue to move at sixty miles an hour, which means that you will be thrown through the windshield and into oblivion or the next life, which ever comes first. I find it both amusing and scary that people will brandish this argument against seat belts: I’m not going to let the state mandate my safety–if I don’t want to wear a seat belt, I won’t. At some point in their short lives, this attitude will be fatal. It’s just a question of when. Then there are the folks who say that they won’t buckle up because they might get caught underwater or in a car fire. Either of those two scenarios are so rare that these people will end up in the cemetery long before water or fire ever happen. Some people are just stupid and sloppy about putting on (or not putting on) their seat belts, and they die at some point as well. If you stay in your seat in the car, you have a great chance of living through most any accident that is not totally catastrophic. If the highway patrol have to search for your body in the weeds along the side of the road, well, forget it, there are no second chances in the game of life, mostly because it’s not a game. The real truth about seat belts? Buckle up and live. If the bus passengers had had on seat belts, they would have made it, most likely. In the meantime, there are lots of dangerous tour buses out there along with lots of dangerous and stupid unbuckled drivers. For Pete’s sake, buckle up, and even if you won’t do it for yourself, think of your family–they will most likely miss you when you are gone.

On writer’s block

Obviously I don’t have writer’s block. Yet, there are many things I will never write about because either I don’t care or it’s none of your business. Writer’s block is really about shutting down the creative process and convincing yourself that you have nothing to say, which, given what I know about the human race, is blatantly false. Those who complain about writer’s block are just looking for an excuse to not write, and if you don’t want to write, you really don’t need an excuse, do you? Writing is about both creativity and a lack of shame. If I care what people think about what I write, then I would never get two words on a page, ever. Writers who write do so because they cannot imagine their world in any other way–ink, pens, keyboards, monitors, notebooks, scraps of paper, moments lost to the world while hammering out a haiku. Writing for some of us is just as vital as the blood that runs through our veins. If we couldn’t write, we wouldn’t be able to understand either our lives or our passions. We read, we write, we breathe, we live, and when we have trouble or troubles or concerns or worries, we write to try to figure it out. Writing is not a perfect catharsis for what ails a person, but it does help. When we feel the knock of eternity at our door–someone dies, a love moves on, the world changes–we write in order to listen to our own heart beat, to know that we are still alive, still vital, still worthy, still marching to our own drummer. The world is alive with the smell of fresh ink flowing onto a virgin white blank piece of paper, creating a new way of loving or hating or perceiving or longing or eating or losing or playing or enjoying the whole world. There are times when you hit a perfect phrase–just two or three words that sing, that shine in the darkness, that illuminate a dark area where the monsters come from. And when you do find those two or three words that sparkle in the fog of the mundane existence of an everyday routine, you create magic, and life is really worth living all over again–you understand why you put up with crap, why you try to do better everyday, why you risk failure, why you don’t fear criticism. You write to find your way out of the labyrinth, to understand loss, to contemplate beauty–physical or mystical or ephemeral, to know the unknowable, to experience the inexpressible. Writing is life and life, writing. The blocked writer has given up to frustration and failure, given in to the idea that they have nothing to say or worse, that it has all already been said and that there is no possibility of writing anything new. Poor devil. It has all been said before, but that is not precisely the point–it can always be said again. Humans have very short memories, and writers depend on that so that each generation might rewrite everything again. I know that a writer about six thousand years ago complained that all the good topics had already been written about and that there was nothing new under the sun. He was both right and wrong: there is nothing new under the sun, but that is totally irrelevant because each generation must write their own discourse–political, social, religious, historical, poetical, fictional, polemical. So I write. The muse comes in the door, drinking bourbon and smoking a cigarette with a funny smile on her face. It looks like I’m going to be busy for quite awhile and that my writer’s block will have to wait for another day–tonight I am busy writing, again.

On writer’s block

Obviously I don’t have writer’s block. Yet, there are many things I will never write about because either I don’t care or it’s none of your business. Writer’s block is really about shutting down the creative process and convincing yourself that you have nothing to say, which, given what I know about the human race, is blatantly false. Those who complain about writer’s block are just looking for an excuse to not write, and if you don’t want to write, you really don’t need an excuse, do you? Writing is about both creativity and a lack of shame. If I care what people think about what I write, then I would never get two words on a page, ever. Writers who write do so because they cannot imagine their world in any other way–ink, pens, keyboards, monitors, notebooks, scraps of paper, moments lost to the world while hammering out a haiku. Writing for some of us is just as vital as the blood that runs through our veins. If we couldn’t write, we wouldn’t be able to understand either our lives or our passions. We read, we write, we breathe, we live, and when we have trouble or troubles or concerns or worries, we write to try to figure it out. Writing is not a perfect catharsis for what ails a person, but it does help. When we feel the knock of eternity at our door–someone dies, a love moves on, the world changes–we write in order to listen to our own heart beat, to know that we are still alive, still vital, still worthy, still marching to our own drummer. The world is alive with the smell of fresh ink flowing onto a virgin white blank piece of paper, creating a new way of loving or hating or perceiving or longing or eating or losing or playing or enjoying the whole world. There are times when you hit a perfect phrase–just two or three words that sing, that shine in the darkness, that illuminate a dark area where the monsters come from. And when you do find those two or three words that sparkle in the fog of the mundane existence of an everyday routine, you create magic, and life is really worth living all over again–you understand why you put up with crap, why you try to do better everyday, why you risk failure, why you don’t fear criticism. You write to find your way out of the labyrinth, to understand loss, to contemplate beauty–physical or mystical or ephemeral, to know the unknowable, to experience the inexpressible. Writing is life and life, writing. The blocked writer has given up to frustration and failure, given in to the idea that they have nothing to say or worse, that it has all already been said and that there is no possibility of writing anything new. Poor devil. It has all been said before, but that is not precisely the point–it can always be said again. Humans have very short memories, and writers depend on that so that each generation might rewrite everything again. I know that a writer about six thousand years ago complained that all the good topics had already been written about and that there was nothing new under the sun. He was both right and wrong: there is nothing new under the sun, but that is totally irrelevant because each generation must write their own discourse–political, social, religious, historical, poetical, fictional, polemical. So I write. The muse comes in the door, drinking bourbon and smoking a cigarette with a funny smile on her face. It looks like I’m going to be busy for quite awhile and that my writer’s block will have to wait for another day–tonight I am busy writing, again.