Category Archives: identity

On typing

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I won’t call it keyboarding–I’m too old for that. I learned to type on a small portable Remington while working at a small 100 watt am radio station near Minot, North Dakota. There was really nothing else to do, so I learned to type, even though I had nothing to either write or say. Some might say that is still true today. What I liked about typing was the physicality of punching the keys and watching the letters appear on the paper–an actual piece of blank, white paper–without looking at my fingers or the keys. I developed the same muscle memory that piano players had, but instead of 88 keys, I only had 52, each key was identified with a letter, not a note. I couldn’t play cords, but I could write words in spite of knowing little and saying less. Banging on the keys of a typewriter in order to pound out an essay on post-structuralism is really more satisfying that most existentialists understand. The physical action of punching down the key with one of your fingers give one a very personal connection with the written word. I don’t get that same feeling from contemporary electronic keyboards found on most laptops or connect by wires or bluetooth to a desktop (which are becoming increasingly archaic, just like me). Kids entering college today may have seen a typewriter, but I’m sure they have never used one. Typewriters, along with rotary telephones and cathode ray tube televisions, are relics of the past, inventions that have been dumped on the ash heap of history along with cassette players, eight-track tapes, and 35 mm cameras that still used film to take pictures. A pity.

On the selfie

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The latest craze is to shoot a self-portrait and post it on the web. They did it during the Oscars the other night. I have always found the “selfie” to be a little narcissistic, silly at best. I mean, no one wants to take your picture so you do it yourself? Just because you have a camera doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to use it, does it? The advent of the ubiquitous digital camera, especially those attached to smart phones, means that anyone and everyone has the ability to shoot a couple of embarrassing selfies and post them on their “wall.” The “driving selfie” seems like one of those last things that some people will ever do: take a picture of themselves at the wheel of a car going 70 miles per hour. Some selfies are cute, but most should never see the light of day. The pregnant stomach selfie seems a little weird, but it does document the process. Most naked selfies would best be forgotten for so many reasons–poor taste among them. And naked selfies should never be sent over the web for any reason at all unless you trying to lose your job on purpose, break up with your significant other, or are purposely trying to get arrested. Clown selfies are illegal in thirty-eight states. Friends don’t let drunk friends shoot selfies. Tonight’s selfie could be tomorrow’s viral post on Facebook. Most people’s arms aren’t really long enough to take a selfie without distorted perspective unless you don’t mind that the whole world see your nose hair.

On the selfie

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The latest craze is to shoot a self-portrait and post it on the web. They did it during the Oscars the other night. I have always found the “selfie” to be a little narcissistic, silly at best. I mean, no one wants to take your picture so you do it yourself? Just because you have a camera doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to use it, does it? The advent of the ubiquitous digital camera, especially those attached to smart phones, means that anyone and everyone has the ability to shoot a couple of embarrassing selfies and post them on their “wall.” The “driving selfie” seems like one of those last things that some people will ever do: take a picture of themselves at the wheel of a car going 70 miles per hour. Some selfies are cute, but most should never see the light of day. The pregnant stomach selfie seems a little weird, but it does document the process. Most naked selfies would best be forgotten for so many reasons–poor taste among them. And naked selfies should never be sent over the web for any reason at all unless you trying to lose your job on purpose, break up with your significant other, or are purposely trying to get arrested. Clown selfies are illegal in thirty-eight states. Friends don’t let drunk friends shoot selfies. Tonight’s selfie could be tomorrow’s viral post on Facebook. Most people’s arms aren’t really long enough to take a selfie without distorted perspective unless you don’t mind that the whole world see your nose hair.

On homecoming

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Tonight, the St. Peter Saints will play the Luverne Cardinals at 7 p.m. in St. Peter. St. Peter is celebrating its homecoming week and football game tonight, which means parades, homecoming queens and kings, getting out of class early, and an exciting football game to which alumni are invited once a year. Nostalgia is fun, but it doesn’t pay the mortgage. I have always thought that Thomas Wolfe was correct when he said you can’t go back home. Personally, I haven’t really lived in my hometown for over thirty years, so although I recognize the last names, a couple of generations of children have gone through the high school. I have more in common with the football players’ and cheerleaders’ grandparents than I do their parents. As the decades have dropped by, my hometown has changed a bit, but it has also stayed the same. Living in the past is a dead end. Homecoming is more fun for the high school kids than it is for the old alumni, and that is the way it should be. Kick-off is scheduled in about an hour, and the band will play, the cheerleaders will jump and scream, the young men will strap on their gear, and the students will file into the stadium to cheer on their team as they always have. Perhaps homecoming is there to remind us all that we have grown up, Peter Pan. I will not be there, just as I have never been there for the past thirty-six years. It’s always time to move on.

On homecoming

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Tonight, the St. Peter Saints will play the Luverne Cardinals at 7 p.m. in St. Peter. St. Peter is celebrating its homecoming week and football game tonight, which means parades, homecoming queens and kings, getting out of class early, and an exciting football game to which alumni are invited once a year. Nostalgia is fun, but it doesn’t pay the mortgage. I have always thought that Thomas Wolfe was correct when he said you can’t go back home. Personally, I haven’t really lived in my hometown for over thirty years, so although I recognize the last names, a couple of generations of children have gone through the high school. I have more in common with the football players’ and cheerleaders’ grandparents than I do their parents. As the decades have dropped by, my hometown has changed a bit, but it has also stayed the same. Living in the past is a dead end. Homecoming is more fun for the high school kids than it is for the old alumni, and that is the way it should be. Kick-off is scheduled in about an hour, and the band will play, the cheerleaders will jump and scream, the young men will strap on their gear, and the students will file into the stadium to cheer on their team as they always have. Perhaps homecoming is there to remind us all that we have grown up, Peter Pan. I will not be there, just as I have never been there for the past thirty-six years. It’s always time to move on.

On Sherlock Holmes

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There are few characters in the fictional world of literary creations that are as pure as Sherlock Holmes. He is driven to solve the crime, not because he necessarily wants to see justice administered, but because the puzzle must be solved at almost any cost. I wouldn’t suggest that Holmes is obsessive or compulsive, but in a way, he certainly is. He doesn’t care about moral philosophy or the structure of the universe unless either of those topics would help him solve a crime. His ideas about crime and punishment are black and white, so his objective of putting the criminal away is clear and obvious. At the same time, he hasn’t the least bit for popular news, discussions of the weather, or sports, beyond his own training in boxing and stick fighting. Like most people, he loves to eat, listen to music, talk when the talk interests him, but the one thing he cannot escape in this life is solitude–no man is an island and Sherlock Holmes is no different. His ability to discern the important from the mundane and casual stems in large part from his willingness to narrate the facts of a case, but he needs an audience, and most of the time his sounding board is Watson. Watson is the sieve through which his reasoning passes. If he can tell Watson the story, he can figure it out. Holmes functions because of the power of narrative. He can work through the logic of the clues by building a narrative that makes sense, discarding incidental clues that may be red-herrings, and see through the smoke screen left by the criminals. In the end, the stories are all very similar about shame and hate, vengeance and envy, greed and stupidity, or love and jealousy, and Sherlock must sort out the facts without getting personally involved in any of it. Emotion is all too often the downfall of many a criminal, and Holmes works constantly to see through the intentions, let the clues speak to him, and resolve the problem at hand. Yet, I would also suggest that Holmes cannot do all of this work, wade through so much human flotsam and jetsam, and still be the least bit normal as a person. He’s interested in bee-keeping; this is his only outside interest that doesn’t appear to have anything to do with crime solving. Bees can’t really talk back, they have a collective conscience, they have no crime, their objectives are orderly and pure, free from envy, sloth, and ire. He admires them. If Watson were not there to act as chronicler and psychologist/therapist, Holmes would go crazy listening to the irrational world which surrounds him explode. Watson is the perfect foil for Holmes because he is a walking case to be constantly narrated and resolved, but Watson is also the perfect uninformed audience who needs the explanations to make the world return to proper working order again. After all, isn’t that what the detective does? Return things back to their proper place, pass out punishment, get the world to spin on its axis again, make sure the bad guys are put away, give a solution to the problem. Holmes wouldn’t be Holmes, really, without Watson, and Watson would just be retired, boring, military surgeon with a bad shoulder without Holmes. A more interesting symbiosis in the literary world would be hard to find.

On Sherlock Holmes

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There are few characters in the fictional world of literary creations that are as pure as Sherlock Holmes. He is driven to solve the crime, not because he necessarily wants to see justice administered, but because the puzzle must be solved at almost any cost. I wouldn’t suggest that Holmes is obsessive or compulsive, but in a way, he certainly is. He doesn’t care about moral philosophy or the structure of the universe unless either of those topics would help him solve a crime. His ideas about crime and punishment are black and white, so his objective of putting the criminal away is clear and obvious. At the same time, he hasn’t the least bit for popular news, discussions of the weather, or sports, beyond his own training in boxing and stick fighting. Like most people, he loves to eat, listen to music, talk when the talk interests him, but the one thing he cannot escape in this life is solitude–no man is an island and Sherlock Holmes is no different. His ability to discern the important from the mundane and casual stems in large part from his willingness to narrate the facts of a case, but he needs an audience, and most of the time his sounding board is Watson. Watson is the sieve through which his reasoning passes. If he can tell Watson the story, he can figure it out. Holmes functions because of the power of narrative. He can work through the logic of the clues by building a narrative that makes sense, discarding incidental clues that may be red-herrings, and see through the smoke screen left by the criminals. In the end, the stories are all very similar about shame and hate, vengeance and envy, greed and stupidity, or love and jealousy, and Sherlock must sort out the facts without getting personally involved in any of it. Emotion is all too often the downfall of many a criminal, and Holmes works constantly to see through the intentions, let the clues speak to him, and resolve the problem at hand. Yet, I would also suggest that Holmes cannot do all of this work, wade through so much human flotsam and jetsam, and still be the least bit normal as a person. He’s interested in bee-keeping; this is his only outside interest that doesn’t appear to have anything to do with crime solving. Bees can’t really talk back, they have a collective conscience, they have no crime, their objectives are orderly and pure, free from envy, sloth, and ire. He admires them. If Watson were not there to act as chronicler and psychologist/therapist, Holmes would go crazy listening to the irrational world which surrounds him explode. Watson is the perfect foil for Holmes because he is a walking case to be constantly narrated and resolved, but Watson is also the perfect uninformed audience who needs the explanations to make the world return to proper working order again. After all, isn’t that what the detective does? Return things back to their proper place, pass out punishment, get the world to spin on its axis again, make sure the bad guys are put away, give a solution to the problem. Holmes wouldn’t be Holmes, really, without Watson, and Watson would just be retired, boring, military surgeon with a bad shoulder without Holmes. A more interesting symbiosis in the literary world would be hard to find.

On confusion

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Finally, I get to write about something about which I am an expert. Confusion is a state of mind in which nothing makes sense–the world is illogical, the pieces don’t fit together, two and two don’t make four. For me, the best way to deal with confusion is to admit that I am confused and that the confusion is not going away any time soon. Whether one is actually confused or just pretending to know what is going on, the world is a complicated place. Confusion often arrises out of a desire to put the pieces together when there is no chance that the world actually makes sense. There are those who would argue the world always makes sense, that it just is, and they create a bunch of myths that explain everything. It isn’t so much that the myths are untrue–they are–it’s the initial premise that myths explain the world which is wrong. Yet, confusion is not a comfortable thing with which to live, so many people resort to listening to spurious myths about the way is constructed, constructing a world which makes sense to them, but it doesn’t make sense to others who don’t except their take on reality. Confusion is really about accepting the fact that many times the world–fragmented, chaotic, contradictory, dissonant, and unexplainable–is not logical or sensible in any way at all. The problem with confusion is probably something quite simple: we hate feeling confused, which is the result of not keeping a lid on our own egos. We think we can know the world, and we won’t admit to confusion. I am quite comfortable with feeling confused. I have come to terms with a world that I don’t understand, and I’m not sure I want to. Perhaps a little confusion is a good thing–keeps us honest about how much we don’t know about the world, a quantity which will probably fill volumes someday. We get cocky with our computers, tablets, and smart phones. We live with the illusion that we control things, that we are manipulating the world, that we know what we are doing. We are kidding ourselves about how we think we have constructed our own logical realities. Confusion is the chaos of bad traffic, a broken escalator, a dead battery, or any of the strange and confusing happenings that break up our daily routine which appear unexplainable or unfathomable. We give ourselves headaches trying to make sense of things that make no sense. We talk about fate or destiny, but this is nothing but self-justification for what is actually chaos. We want to see order where there is none; we want the world to make sense–confusion is anathema to our psychological profiles as type A personalities who want to control everything. By allowing myself to feel confused, I make no claim to understanding why the world is as it is. If there is a big picture, I haven’t been privy to that conversation, so I’m not going to worry about it. So when I don’t understand the crisis or conflicts of the world, I don’t worry about it, especially those things which I can’t change, and work on those problems which might have solutions, no matter how confusing they might be. I also find my own attitude to be both confusing and inexplicable most of the time. Confusion is a helpful way to view the world because it removes the pressure of explaining everything, allowing me to be more comfortable in a world that I only partially understand.

On confusion

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Finally, I get to write about something about which I am an expert. Confusion is a state of mind in which nothing makes sense–the world is illogical, the pieces don’t fit together, two and two don’t make four. For me, the best way to deal with confusion is to admit that I am confused and that the confusion is not going away any time soon. Whether one is actually confused or just pretending to know what is going on, the world is a complicated place. Confusion often arrises out of a desire to put the pieces together when there is no chance that the world actually makes sense. There are those who would argue the world always makes sense, that it just is, and they create a bunch of myths that explain everything. It isn’t so much that the myths are untrue–they are–it’s the initial premise that myths explain the world which is wrong. Yet, confusion is not a comfortable thing with which to live, so many people resort to listening to spurious myths about the way is constructed, constructing a world which makes sense to them, but it doesn’t make sense to others who don’t except their take on reality. Confusion is really about accepting the fact that many times the world–fragmented, chaotic, contradictory, dissonant, and unexplainable–is not logical or sensible in any way at all. The problem with confusion is probably something quite simple: we hate feeling confused, which is the result of not keeping a lid on our own egos. We think we can know the world, and we won’t admit to confusion. I am quite comfortable with feeling confused. I have come to terms with a world that I don’t understand, and I’m not sure I want to. Perhaps a little confusion is a good thing–keeps us honest about how much we don’t know about the world, a quantity which will probably fill volumes someday. We get cocky with our computers, tablets, and smart phones. We live with the illusion that we control things, that we are manipulating the world, that we know what we are doing. We are kidding ourselves about how we think we have constructed our own logical realities. Confusion is the chaos of bad traffic, a broken escalator, a dead battery, or any of the strange and confusing happenings that break up our daily routine which appear unexplainable or unfathomable. We give ourselves headaches trying to make sense of things that make no sense. We talk about fate or destiny, but this is nothing but self-justification for what is actually chaos. We want to see order where there is none; we want the world to make sense–confusion is anathema to our psychological profiles as type A personalities who want to control everything. By allowing myself to feel confused, I make no claim to understanding why the world is as it is. If there is a big picture, I haven’t been privy to that conversation, so I’m not going to worry about it. So when I don’t understand the crisis or conflicts of the world, I don’t worry about it, especially those things which I can’t change, and work on those problems which might have solutions, no matter how confusing they might be. I also find my own attitude to be both confusing and inexplicable most of the time. Confusion is a helpful way to view the world because it removes the pressure of explaining everything, allowing me to be more comfortable in a world that I only partially understand.