Category: Musings

I have…interesting feet. They are sensitive but by no means tender. Raised in rural Arkansas, I have done my share of barefooted living, so I can walk over most anything without major pain. Yet I find that when I walk barefoot I can feel everything intensely. One of the best parts of my day is taking off my shoes when I get home.

I took a walk barefoot outside the office today, and it was great. I started to wonder if shoes in the modern world might be obsolete. Think about this for a moment: shoes were invented a few millennia ago for terrain far more treacherous than the modern world generally provides. How many times in your day do you walk over patches of spiky branches or sharp rocks? Mostly we walk from house to car to building, and it’s a relatively safe and clean path. It might be hot or rough, but this is likely only because our feet are so sensitive from being cooped up in socks and shoes all our lives. Sure the ground is generally unclean, but which is more clean to you – dirt and dust or sweat and fungus? I think my feet smell far worse when they’ve been wrapped in a sock for 9 hours.

Sadly, though, the modern world poses a different set of threats: oil and other chemical toxins. Your average McDonald’s parking lot is probably far more dangerous to the bare foot than any forest. Still, I know that in my daily trek between house, car and office I encounter no major podiatric dangers. For white collar office workers it could happen.

Just something to think about. Go barefoot more often and see what you prefer.

This is why Mike Keneally is my hero. He has a song called “Pride is a Sin” and here is some unpacking of that concept he did in an interview over at seaoftranquility.org:

I think that pride as an emotion or as a way of being, it’s like it cuts off possibilities. It cuts off emotions and feelings. Pride is self … you puff yourself up and it’s like you can’t hear or you can’t feel. And frequently these are hardcore religious people who go on and on about how proud they are. But that’s thing one if you’re going to have any kind of enlightenment is to let go of that shit. Remove yourself from the equation to the best of your ability. Stop being centered on how you feel and how proud you are of your accomplishments. Anything that happens to you is a gift so how can you feel proud of it? Grateful. That’s how I feel about it.

Thanks, Mike. To take it a step further, I think pride is often something that’s only expressed in the face of criticism. Black pride and gay pride are things that only come in opposition to prevailing attacks on their particular cultures. And white pride is something that probably comes from the same thing, but only gets expressed by people who aren’t confident enough in themselves as individuals that they have to identify with a group to compensate for their own deficiencies. However thin you slice it, it’s still baloney. Pride is a sin; everything is a gift so stay humble.

Artist, writer, poet, and Professor of the Humanities Bill Watterson wrote the definitive source text on the Nature of Cool in the late 20th Century. Witness his Zen-like efficiency of line and word.

“What Fun Is It Being Cool If You Can’t Wear a Sombrero?” has been my motto for so long, I’m number 1 and 2 in Yahoo Search for that phrase.

Often do I ponder the Nature of Cool. What is cool and why? I’ve come to the conclusion that what conveys cool in humans is confidence, and that confidence can either be authentic or a pose. Cool can be truth or it can be an elaborate front.

Movie stars and rock stars are generally considered cool by those who do not know them personally. From what we see of them, they move with confidence, either on screen or off. Most often, their cool is a product of their performing skills, their marketing, and their existence inside a glowing screen where dreams come true. Most often, however, this is a pose.

Authentic cool is the sort of cool we witness firsthand in people. Regardless of fame or social status, authentically cool people are self-assured and operate with a freedom that most people lack and therefore envy.

I’m always fascinated by fashion models and their variety of cool. One of our clients is a fashion photographer and I was talking to her assistant, who mentioned that listlessness and boredom have been the general tenor of fashion modeling for the last several decades. The Cool of Supermodels is interesting. They look bored because, as the poet Bill Watterson once said, “the world bores you when you’re cool.” Models, of course, are where the science of pose originates. The easiest way to appear confident and cool is to do as little as possible, lest you give away your pose. If you appear bored, an observer will assume that you’ve been somewhere better than the place you’re currently in, and so you devalue your present location. This sets you apart from your environment, as well as the observer. You are transported in the observer’s mind into the realm of the theoretical, the imaginary, perhaps the idealized. We can’t learn anything about a bored model, aside from the fact that he or she looks good. Beyond that, we are met by a wall of mystique. If a model were to appear excited or involved in anything, then we could learn something about him or her, and the mystique would be broken. The School of Boredom in Modeling retains that mystique, and so it is little wonder that it has gripped the fashion industry for so long.

This was much too long. Maybe I’ll make a full-fledged Two-Bit Opinion on it, since I haven’t had one in a dog’s age.

Also, I have a blue toe and a red toe. My guitar tree fell on me Monday night. I think I might have a broken toe. And my Ibanez Universe has a scrape on the back, which is actually more distressing to me.

The last weekend of most every month, I play guitar (actually bass, now) at Christ the King Catholic Church. One of the other guitar players there is Ed Buckner, Channel 11’s weatherman. He’s a good singer and guitar player. He was telling me about some of the crazy people that blame him for the weather. Like he’s got some control over it. He actually told me that once a guy told him something to the effect of “I know the government’s got a big umbrella up there” or something.

Also recently I overheard someone expressing frustrated disdain for doctors, which got me thinking. People often disparage doctors and weathermen. I suspect that there are a few reasons for this: 1) both professions involve a great deal of technical knowledge that confound most people (hence causing them some measure of unconscious resentment, particularly among the those who are complete idiots), 2) both jobs are subject to the whims, chaos and complexities of nature (or the vagaries of God, depending who you ask), and 3) people wrongly assume that these fields are scientifically mechanistic. A mechanic can inspect a car and tell you with a great degree of accuracy how well it will run, whereas a weatherman can only make an educated guess about how the weather will behave, and a doctor can only make a diagnosis based in the data available. Both jobs present the challenge of reading signs within an enormous confluence of factors, reactions and influences.

New plog finally.

I can’t believe it’s already June. I have a dentist’s appointment this month and I remember 6 months ago thinking this month was so far away.

If you’re as easily amused as I am, go to yahoo.com and search on random nouns and see which words Ebay has purchased for its sponsored link in the search results. So far I’ve found schmuck, schmendrick, proletariat, endocrine, and pansy. The resulting sentences amuse me: “find schmuck items at low prices,” “find endocrine items at low prices.”

No Wire Hangers. If you are of a certain sociopolitical bent, you might find this image amusing. Click at your own risk and know that it is an actual sign at a pro-choice rally.

And, of course, a fond farewell to our former fearless leader:

As some of you know, I have developed something of a milkshake addiction in recent months. Chocolate chip cookies of course being a gateway drug to heavier substances, I recently went to Wendy’s for a shake. I know they’re called “Frosties” there, but I didn’t figure that semantics would be a big issue with them. I was sadly mistaken.

I pulled up at my local Wendy’s and scanned the menu for my quarry. A young lady’s voice came crackling over the speaker,

“Welcome to Wendy’s may I take your order?”

“Yeah, do y’all have milkshakes,” I replied, as I saw no mention of the word milkshake in my admittedly cursory examination of their offerings.

“No sir, we don’t have milkshakes.”

“Oh wait, what is a Frosty? That’s a milkshake right?” I asked, noticing the Frosty was the sole item listed under the somewhat prolix heading “Frozen Dairy Dessert.”

No response.

“What is a Frosty, anyway?” I asked.

Still no response.

Some moments passed.

Clearly I had caused her a catastrophic system error, rendering her unable to function, so I capitulated.

“I’ll have a large Frosty.”

“Thank you that will be $1.63. Please drive through.”

We made our exchange, and although I sensed no tension, I had clearly exploded this girl’s worldview. No doubt she’ll spend the rest of her evening contemplating the definition of the milkshake vis á vis the Frosty, a frozen dairy dessert. What is a Frosty? What is its Platonic form? What separates it from the milkshake? What is the essence of the Frosty? Not quite food item, not quite beverage, the Frosty must reside in a culinary netherworld, seldom visited by other foodstuffs.

As I drove away, the subtle distinction of the Frosty from the milkshake was made clear to me: Frosties are served not with a straw, but with a spoon. Eureka!

Perhaps it was the warm weather, or perhaps I had so existentially wounded my server that she sought to extract her revenge on my frozen dairy dessert, but when I got home I noticed that the Frosty was leaking all around its lid. A significant portion had liquefied and was running amok. I got to the kitchen and transferred it to a cup, yet I continued to make a mess of myself. If only I had been given a straw…

Indeed, my Frosty runneth over.

For those who may not be frequent visitors to the Martha Stewart of Geek, here is a hastily-thrown-together picture I did of one of her cats. The cat’s pose naturally suggested the resulting picture:

His name isn’t really Fang, but that’s what he calls himself.