Hi gang. I've been aware of your interest; we've gone from 750
people checking for a new post every day to, most recently,
40. Deservedly. I've certainly had the feeling of being burdened to
write, and being the ever-vigilant rebel, I haven't. In the immortal
words of Roberto Duran: "No Mas, No Mas."
This will be the last post of this weblog.
Over the last few weeks, I've actually read the Whole Thing. All of
it. (I think that the 5/28/04 post is perhaps the most informative,
and that the first two are the best. After that, it's pretty much all
self indulgent.)
...Which is not necessarily bad. You have to be a strong ego
to do this kind of thing. But I don't have that fire anymore.
I had it, over the years. You can see, here, political posts, truth
as clear as the nose on your face -- from three years ago -- that is
only now coming into the group consciousness of our nation. I'm sick
of that. I can't be the leftist rejoinder to the idiocy of the common
zeitgeist anymore. It'll drive a sane man insane. And there are
stronger and better and more well-informed people who can take that
lead, who do it every day, better, and faster, and smarter. I am
simply an informed citizen of the United States of America, and you
have a responsibility to be the same.
But there are posts here that are beautiful, even poetic to me;
posts that expressed exactly my feelings of the moment. I like
those. The soundman post of 6/4/2006. Birthday posts on 6/2. The
Armadillo birthday post in August of last year. The February '06
Folklife post. Tracy's death. Others.
This is a capsule; it's the record of a man who, well, is not in a
mid-life crisis, I don't think. It is a record of a man who was
discarded, laid off, retooling; one step away from the street for much
of the last four years. Much of that work is done now.
So, anyway, it'll remain intact, warts and all.
I'll leave the blog up through the end of the year. After that, I
intend to put up some software that will engender a
community. Where all of you can comment too; where you can have
your own blog and I can comment. Where we can all be human.
Interestingly, it's not better to burn out than to fade
away. Sorry, brother Neil. It's better to do neither.
Perhaps the kindly old guy with the enigmatic smile, friend to all,
sitting on the park bench, feeding the pigeons -- he may know
something that I need to learn. Might be worth exploring.
Thank you, friends, for your attention to this thing. I have no
wisdom to write for the moment; I'll look forward to yours soon. It'll
be better by far -- it'll be more human.
Sorry for the quiet month blog-wise. I've been utterly enjoying a
new home and a new neighborhood, watching my beloved son make new
friends and seeing him actually
looking forward to going to school. And not just him; I have a
buddy a block away to share coffee in the morning and an occasional
beer in the evening while we fix the problems of the world to our
satisfaction. We trade meals and lies, and Ryan plays w/ the dog. It's
also a great bike riding neighborhood, and people actually smile and
say hello as you pass. There are pecans everywhere. I bet
that there's half a bushel in my little 30 x 30 front yard
alone. Makes sense; my dad says that this area was once a huge
commercial pecan grove, back when he was a kid.
It is really a satisfying time of relief and rejuvenation; after a
particularly difficult and ill-fated few months, things could not be
developing in any better a direction than right here and now. I feel a
sense of community here that I haven't seen in perhaps thirty
years. It feels like home, and I am grateful to Mama Universe for
providing such an amazing turnaround in our lives. It has all clicked
together so easily that it's difficult not to believe in what feels
like a supernatural intervention at play here... it's as if somewhere
a dam broke, and all good things started flowing freely in our
direction. Today is the second month anniversary of Ryan's mother's
death, and in that 60 days we've gone from bereaved, panicked and
all-but at a complete loss, to supported, free and very much at
home. It's not just as if we moved to a new city, although there is
that feel; it's as if we've moved to a new civilization, a
better, kinder one. We're utterly blessed.
So, anyway, I'll be pecking out stuff on the keyboard here much
more regularly now. I've been formulating a relatively detailed post
to put up soon; not a very pretty one either. Over the last couple of
weeks or so, I've noticed a sort of a synchronicity in widely
disparate articles on climate change that have me genuinely scared. I
don't want to besmirch my happy post today with a sky-is-falling
essay, so I'll save that for another time.
Here's hoping that you are having a wonderful day today.
We are into the new place; the moving is done. Now the unpacking
begins. And, naturally, it's one of the busiest weeks (and earliest
show times) of the year at the club. I am just inundated at the
moment.
But it's all good. In fact, it's more than that; it's the best it's
been in years. I'll talk more about it soon, when I catch my breath.
Well, chirren, I've been head-down and eyes straight ahead for a
while now. We're adjusting to the new rhythms of life and making some
changes.
The best is that I think that we've found a nice little place in
Crestview, which'll put Ryan in the appropriate schools and near to
his friends. I've just talked to the landlord, and she relates that she
prefers us in there to anyone else. (I took Ryan along when we
looked at the place. Manic little boy energy exuded from every
corner. Kitchen!! Bedroom!! Pecan tree!! Look! A closet! We can do a
garden over here and you can have some tomatoes!) Ahh,
yes. Looks like we'll finally get away from this horrid little
apartment that we've been planning to escape since before we moved in,
and Ryan will be within a five minute walking distance of his high
school next year.
And God bless F.D.R. and the Democratic Party, who created and
defended Social Security for all of these years. Ryan will have the
option to go to any college he prefers. (Of course, given his
intellect, he'll likely have that choice anyway. So maybe he'll be
able to buy a house, too. In any case, the money is his.)
I've actually come out of the shell a bit and started looking
around, too. Everything got huge for a while, but it doesn't seem so
big now. I note that the politicians are still out there campaigning
like it's a year from now. Silly. I'll no doubt post some screed to
stave off an aneurysm sometime soon.
And, nice, the rest of the music season at the joint is going to be
chock-full of many of my all-time favorite artists, and work will be
play. Y'all should keep an eye on the calendar and come by, often.
Expect more of the patented trivial content here more often
now. We're gonna be okay.
I've wanted to say something substantive here for a week or so, but
there's not a lot in my world right now that is interesting enough to
say anything about. Ryan & I are still mapping the new terrain; there
are moments of joy and the opposite; mostly it's normal if not quite
yet routine. Finances are coming back into some area of sanity after a
fairly brutal few months. I have an overdue project at my day work
that is taunting me at every turn, one of those situations where
nothing does what it says it's supposed to do, and there's no
documentation to support the errata. Very frustrating.
Heh. That's not a bad description of day-to-day life in general
here lately. It's like badly documented beta code right now. Lots of
exceptions and very little in the way of instructions. Yeah, that's
it.
Boy, I can be a poetic kind of guy, aye?
Hopefully you'll see something more interesting here, sometime soon.
This
Is our fork in the road
Love's last episode
There's nowhere to go, oh no
You made your choice
Now it's up to me
To bow out gracefully
Though you hold the key, but baby
Whenever you call me, I'll be there
I'll Be Around...
We'd had a hard breakup in 1987, seven years before we
married. "I'll Be Around" by The Spinners was the song that I chose to
get me through it. Tracy considered it "Our" song after we cycled back
into one another's life, which I thought was kind of strange—it
was my breakup song. Girls are funny that way.
Well, okay. Ours, e're it shall remain now.
It was a beautiful, unique service today. So many fine people. I'll
gather my thoughts sometime soon; tonight, I am doing the "bear in
hibernation in my cave" thing. But a truly blessed bear; one who is
aware of the extraordinary hearts who've crossed the path of my son
and myself in this fine life.
Rest in Peace, and Welcome Home Again, beautiful Queen of Hearts.
You left this a richer world than you found it.
As many of you are now aware, Ryan's mom, Tracy Austin, took her
own life on Wednesday. She was a good and kind person who suffered
bipolar disease; she finally lost her struggle with depression. She
was a fine and conscientious mother, and we had remained friends after
our divorce and close partners in the gifts and responsibilities of
parenthood. We together made sure that Ryan is supported and loved,
and she will always have my great respect.
I want to thank all of you who have called and written with your
support. It is comforting indeed. I'd especially like to thank
Principal Troutman and Ms. Cannon from Pearce for their incredible
attention and concern; I've never seen such support from so
many. Today, the school sent a huge envelope containing handmade cards
from Ryan's classmates. What an extraordinary gesture. What an
extraordinarily comforting gesture to Ryan.
We are doing well, considering that we're only two days into
this. In some ways, it is something that I've navigated before—I
lost my mom at an early age, albeit to ill health, not by her own
hand. We will continue to work our way through this as time unfolds;
there is no roadmap. It is simply this thing that we have chosen to
do, to come here and live this thing called life.
In the meantime, please know how grateful I am to you for your kind
thoughts and your extraordinary support. We feel your sympathy and
love, and we are comforted in our loss. Thank you all.
I've been exchanging mail with a friend lately, a schoolteacher,
who knows that Ryan is a pretty sharp kid who needs to be in a sharp
educational environment. It being a Sunday morning, my traditional day
of free-form cogitating, I'm going to put down some thoughts on the
subject. Serendipitously, it is the eve of the first day of the
'07-'08 school year. Okay, then. Good timing.
Yeah, I've looked around pretty extensively at the available
options out there. KIPP, Kealing, magnet schools, Breakthrough, Duke
project, UT pre-prep services, augmentative education, private
schools, co-ops, boarding schools. I find (to varying degree) that all
of these programs are geared towards making him an attractive and
productive cog in the machinery of our particular (and in my opinion,
skewed) economic system.
I have yet to find an educational program that is designed to
assist a child in discovering their hidden interests and talents. We
emphasize getting good grades in a standardized curriculum, getting
good scores on standardized testing; getting accepted to a good
college so you can get a standardized degree and spend your life doing
a good standardized "career" definition for some company and have nice
things and raise up another generation to do the same thing. The whole
of it reflects why we are going nuts as a society. At its worst,
organized education can be an assembly line for robots, and I wouldn't
sentence a dog to such a pointless existence.
My son's potential far exceeds a life goal as silly and
monotonous as that. He and his type can change the world, and there's
a hell of a lot out there that needs to be changed.
I'm not worried about his academic education—he knows how to
educate himself, because I've raised him to know how and taught him
how to do it. His vocabulary already far exceeds the average high
school graduate. He has an in-depth and matter-of-fact knowledge of
disciplines that would've been considered graduate studies in my
time. (I know that I certainly couldn't explain general relativity or
discuss speculative Mayan cultural minutiae at the age of thirteen...)
He knows of geography, social studies, multidimensional mathematics,
history, cultural anthropology, political theories and histories,
paleontology, quantum physics. He is already better educated than
probably 98% of the population of this planet, right here and now,
before his voice has even started changing.
Is it because I am such a great parent? Nope. I am simply the
caretaker that points his hungry brain in the right direction. He asks
"Why is the sky blue?" and I answer "Let's find out." After 30 minutes
of research, we both know that molecules interact with photons in the
frequencies of the visible light spectrum in interesting ways, tending
to scatter blue-frequency photons more efficiently than the rest. It's
known as the Tyndall effect, or Rayleigh scattering. We know that it
has to do with the relative kinetic energy of a photon as a derivative
of its oscillation frequency, and we know about John Tyndall and Lord
Rayleigh, and the status of cutting-edge physics in the mid-nineteenth
century. And we know why the sky is such a beautiful color of blue, too.
You see, there is a critically important thing to remember
here: Ryan is a member of the first Internet Generation.
Ryan is among the first of our species—quite
literally—to grow up with the totality of the accumulated
knowledge of the human race at his fingertips. Everything about
education has now changed, and there aren't many who see the magnitude
of that change. Yet.
The old-as-the-human-race question of educational access is
answered. Over. It's done. We have the contents of every textbook
ever written; the mind of every artist and genius and businessman; the
thoughts of every philosopher and saint and sinner; the information on
the techniques of every craft; the cast of similar minds, sometimes as
fresh as this morning's coffee. They're all available via the machine
that you're using to read these words. To you. At this instant.
How cool is that? Think about it. You can type in "Quantum
Chromodynamics" or "Knitting", sitting in your home, right now,
and get virtually everything that is known on the subject,
instantaneously.
There's now a new operational imperative regarding the
education of our children, and we'll realize it soon. A new question
that never had real meaning before. If everyone can now access every
bit of knowledge effortlessly, then there is a profound moral and ethical
issue that has to be addressed. We must deal with the no-longer
hypothetical question: "What if Beethoven had never been exposed to
music?"
It is a wholly new question of philosophy.
Ryan will excel at anything that interests him. Of that, I have no
doubt. What he needs here and now is a full illumination of what is
available out there to potentially engage his interest. I'd like my
son to get a good Human Cultural Overview and, quite simply, to
be exposed to every unsolved idea available. Whether he chooses to be
a medical doctor or filmmaker or a truck driver or a designer of
toilets doesn't matter to me. He will pursue and excel at anything
that he feels is worthy of his talents. What matters to me is that he
is made aware of as much of
every branch of the tree of human knowledge as possible, so
that his latent creative talents can be kindled, illuminated and
developed. He'll pursue his personal predilections; we all do. And if
I have taught him anything, I have taught him how to efficiently
research an interest. He's learned how to learn at this point. What he
needs to know is the variety and the extent of the playground, the
gameboard. Ryan might be an expert at weaving Tartan plaids for
all I know.
I believe that we as a people have an ethical duty to make sure
that the hypothetical "Tartan plaid weaving geniuses" of the world
have a chance to find out who they are. Whether they live on a sheep
farm in Scotland or next to a crackhouse on 160th street is
immaterial. For the first time in the history of our existence, we can
find everyone's genius. And we have a duty to do so.
Given that contextual milieu, I have been looking for a kind of
"philosophical survey of the disciplines of the human race" curriculum
that probably doesn't yet exist—but one that in my opinion is
desperately needed. Soon, every young mind on the the planet will have
instant access to this
Encyclopedae Humanae that we call the Internet. What we have to
do now is to find a way to help our children to discover their
interests and their talents. They'll do the rest. I am here to tell
you that I watch it every day.
So. Education and what it should do. In my opinion, the organized
primary education that I see out there is currently failing to provide
the breadth of information that will prepare my son for the world in
which he will be living his life. But it's not catastrophic; it's not
doing any particular damage either. There are certainly social and
cultural benefits to being in school, and the failure is ultimately
marginal in our household. We pick up the slack in our own way.
That having been said, the cat is already out of the bag; The
Internet is here. The magnitude of what it represents is only now
beginning to dawn on us. Primary school is going to have to become
primary meta-school. We are going to have to teach our children
how to educate themselves, and we are going to have to give them what
used to be called a world-class liberal arts education, straight out of
the crib.
When I was his age, we took something odius called the
"Differential Aptitude Test." It helped the administrative staff to
determine who took algebra and who took shop class, and it labeled us
and threw expectations upon us—long before we knew ourselves
well enough to have any opinion about it. That mindset will soon be a
goner. We are approaching a day when the average third-grader will be
more intellectually sophisticated than the average twelfth-grader was
in those days.
I'd like to see something along the lines of grades 1-3 teaching
basic reading, writing, math, and small-group social skills. Grades
4-6 could be devoted to discovering the
individual talents and interests of the child—musical,
arithmetic, artistic, rhetorical, cognative, administrative, athletic,
scientific, social, whatever.
Any human interest or talent; there is dormant genius in
everyone. Some folks will formulate theories in cosmology. Other folks
will be fascinated and fulfilled operating a precision machine
tool. We have a duty to ourselves to help those people to find out
their interests and expose them to the myriad possibilities.
So the rest of the 7-12 school experience could expose the student
to every human discipline related to their talents and interests,
teach them large-group citizenship skills and responsibilities (read:
civics), and expose them to the concept of community service. By the
time of high school graduation, students would most certainly have
a clue of who they were and what to pursue, and be fired from within,
having the interest and intention to pursue truly meaningful higher
education.
In the meantime, Ryan and I will keep doing our own little
exercises in research, and I'll keep looking for the upcoming and
inevitable crack in the monolith that we call public education.
To quote Arthur C. Clarke, "Something is going to happen. Something
Wonderful."
To quote Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'."
And, to quote Steve Earle, "The Revolution Starts Now."
August 22nd, 1967 was the last peaceful day for parents in the
summer of love. On the following day, Johnny Allen Hendrix (later to
be rechristened James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix) released "Are You
Experienced?", and parents everywhere realized that their daughters
were no longer going to be safe. Pat Boone and Connie Francis were not
going to be on the radio any more. Half the female population of the
planet were suddenly feeling urges that no one had ever told them
existed.
The guy came out of nowhere with "Purple Haze", "Foxy Lady", "Hey
Joe", "Wind Cries Mary", "Fire", and more. There wasn't a bad song on
the album, and it was all unlike anything ever heard before, anywhere,
period. Taken together, it looked like civilization itself was
crumbling to most of the older generation, not the least reason was
that a "black" man was playing "white" music better than any whitey
could possibly do it. With one phallic thrust of an upside-down guitar
connected to a stack of Marshalls, backed by a white rhythm
section, Jimi swept the gameboard clear, installed
his rules into the new game, and every rock guitarist in the
known universe was scrambling to catch up. They still are, come to
think of it.
I remember hating it at the time. It seemed loud and self-indulgent
and violent and base to this little gentle intellectual proto-geek. Of
course it was, all of that. But when the testosterone of my
adolescence kicked in three years later, I began to understand. Forty
years on, it can be pretty clearly seen that this little
hyper-talented drug addict from Seattle did as much as Martin Luther
King to begin to break down the race barriers of the world, and that
is one of his great legacies.
So. Thanks, Jimi. You streaked through like a short-lived exploding
rainbow comet and changed
everything. You heralded a new day, and provided us with both a
map and a warning, all in one package. It was cool to watch and be a
part of. It all happened just the way it was supposed to. And I am
sure that you simply grinned at St. Peter and said "That was fun."
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders,
give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new
problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight
efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
First, you take a bunch of shaky and risky subprime mortgages and
repackage them into residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS);
then you repackage these RMBS in different (equity, mezzanine, senior)
tranches of cash CDOs that receive a misleading investment grade
rating by the credit rating agencies; then you create synthetic CDOs
out of the same underlying RMBS; then you create CDOs of CDOs (or
squared CDOs) out of these CDOs; and then you create CDOs of CDOs of
CDOs (or cubed CDOs) out of the same murky securities; then you stuff
some of these RMBS and CDO tranches into SIV (structured investment
vehicles) or into ABCP (Asset Backed Commercial Paper) or into money
market funds. Then no wonder that eventually people panic and run - as
they did yesterday on an apparently safe money market fund such as
Sentinel. That toxic waste of unpriceable and uncertain junk and
zombie corpses is now emerging in the most unlikely places in the
financial markets.
Second example: today any wealthy individual can take $1 million and
go to a prime broker and leverage this amount three times; then the
resulting $4 million ($1 equity and $3 debt) can be invested in a fund
of funds that will in turn leverage these $4 millions three or four
times and invest them in a hedge fund; then the hedge fund will take
these funds and leverage them three or four times and buy some very
junior tranche of a CDO that is itself levered nine or ten times. At
the end of this credit chain, the initial $1 million of equity becomes
a $100 million investment out of which $99 million is debt (leverage)
and only $1 million is equity. So we got an overall leverage ratio of
100 to 1. Then, even a small 1% fall in the price of the final
investment (CDO) wipes out the initial capital and creates a chain of
margin calls that unravel this debt house of cards. This unraveling of
a Minskian Ponzi credit scheme is exactly what is happening right now
in financial markets.
I've been screeching here about our unsustainable economy, big
business, the common good, and the folly of consumerism pretty
regularly for the entire existence of this blog. For years before
that, actually. Hell, old and dear friends refuse to drink with me
during election season. I don't blame them; it's okay.
But when the Comptroller General of the United States of
America releases an official report comparing our economic state to
the final days of the Roman Empire, perhaps it's time to attend
the issue more seriously and thoughtfully?
Bloxorz