Thinking

I wonder, "Where is the thought?" "Where is the contemplation?"

I’ve had so many ideas, so many thoughts I wanted to write about and I’ve ended up with one sentence deletion after another. Ideas and concepts bombard me so rapidly that I don’t have time to process them or even create something meaningful out of them. So I’m attempting to create meaning out of the madness.

I look at people. I try to imagine their lives – work, eating, television, Internet, family and social connections and stress. I fail.

Last night, I attended a birthday party of one of JulieAnn’s friends from high school. It was a party, a celebration. I really didn’t know anyone there very well. All of the party accouterments were present, including a live band, shrimp and cocktail weenies (of the human and pork vanities) and rumor had it a comedian was going to come and perform later. I mourned me inability to simply relax into the frivolity. I couldn’t do it. I had nothing to say. I had nothing to contribute to the party euphoria.

This is when I lapsed into trying to figure out the people I was observing. I had the same thing happen to me the night before at an Italian restaurant, Zucca, near our house. My thoughts on the human condition intruded on my ability to enjoy the Margherita pizza, as I marveled at the sociality of my fellow humans.

I’ve never been much of a social animal, preferring to remain on the outside looking in, but I also crave to belong and be part of the crowd. I would like to be able to lose myself at a rock concert, banging my head in time with the moshing masses. I would like to immerse myself in the birthday party, dance and sing and speak of what? What were people talking about? I’m inarticulate and unable to speak the language of Party.

Music seems to be a mechanism for forming these communities and music hasn’t effected me much since my adolescence. Heavy metal gives me a little teen testosterone memory, but the music of parties baffles me – you can’t communicate over the noise. Karaoke baffles me. I can’t connect without words. The music that moves me is often in the words (ala Leonard Cohen), more than the rhythm, beat or melody. My I-pod is filled with spoken words, not music, an Apple aberration.

I want to connect to people. I want a society, a group to which I belong, but I don’t. I ache for a community like the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder) or the literary cliques in Paris in the 20s (Joyce, Hemingway, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co.) or 30s (Miller and Nin) or D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe in New Mexico.

Technology seems to offer an opportunity for such connections, but then I go back to my gaze at the crowd at the party and at the restaurant. There is a small likelihood I’ll connect at any level with those crowds through technology. In fact sprinkling my blog post with references to Apple, Microsoft and Amazon is more likely to get me a connection that anything I might write in a blog post, but I’ll be connecting with a computer, analyzing what I write for marketing purposes.

Yet, I hope. I feel connected reading. Books have always been the connective tissue joining me to the outside world. Occasionally, I’ve had the thrill of being connected by my writing and a reader who acknowledged the connection. The connection of words is the language I understand. I don’t understand the language of rock concerts or parties. I’d rather batter an idea with someone than smack at a pinata. I struggle with the banter of social websites, but crave legitimate debate and discussion.

I’m going to go to my Facebook page now. When it asks me what I’m doing, I’m going to tell it I’m thinking.

The Politics of Reconciliation

Reconciliation is not a popular political choice apparently. I wasn’t going to write anything today, but I noticed the article on Pastor Rick Warren defending his choice to give the invocation at Barak Obama’s inauguration, despite the fact he is openly hostile to the concept of gay marriage. The "left" as characterized by the news report is up in arms over the choice.

I’ve never completely understood the religious animosity towards liberal thinking. I’ve always believed that true Christian beliefs were more conducive to liberal, rather than conservative thought. You know – feed the poor and the hungry and do unto others. Somehow divisiveness over abortion, homosexuality and feminism, led the Christians away from New Deal politics.

I applaud Obama’s attempt at trying to bridge that gap in his bookend pastors for his inauguration – the anti-gay marriage pastor and the pro-gay marriage pastor. Anyone that is truly concerned about getting away from politics as usual and in favor of progressive government policies on an economic level, need to encourage their political representatives and political parties to remove the "moral" and "family value" issues and address what should be the real issues of politics: how best to govern and how best to protect all members of the society. Leave individual morality to the churches and religions and promote a society that isn’t divided, but reconciled towards common goals that we can all agree on.

Political discussion can actually have some benefit when it is about how best to accomplish a goal, rather than fighting over what the goals should be. The goals of a government are simple in theory – "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and secure the blessings of liberty for us and our posterity." Let’s go back to step one – a more perfect union can only be created by knowing when we can agree to disagree. This is the message of Obama’s pastor choice. We must have a society that can agree to disagree.

Our political debates should be about how to better serve justice, peace and liberty with our government, not how with religion and belief.

ON DIGITAL PERSONA, FLESH PERSONA, AND PRIVACY

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of persona lately, whether it be a literary persona, a work persona, a dramatic character persona, a psychological persona or the new incarnation of the digital on-line persona. I find myself constantly donning masks to the point of wondering who I am. Am I the husband? The parent? The lawyer? The writer? The sinner? The saint? Am I my digital persona? Who the hell am I?


Social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace are exercises in persona creation. I get to pick and chose the facade I give the digital world. The more devout afficionados of the digital world create their own websites. The real world is reflected in the digital world, but it is a funhouse mirror warped by the design and desire of each person posting.


The creation of a persona or societal mask is nothing new. High school is where every adolescent cuts their teeth on persona creation and the high school personas are predictable – the hot girl, the bookworm, the jock, the drama queen, the rebel. Go rent a copy of The Breakfast Club if you need a refresher course. Adults aren’t much better in the lawyer’s suits, the houses on the hill, the cars (or big trucks) and the entire fashion and makeup industry.


Digital persona are frighteningly easy to create, desperately hard to maintain and control. Fleshy manifestations of persona aren’t easily copied or replicated and due to years of culturization more easily interpreted. Changing one’s flesh persona took time and effort and was a gradual process. I’m no Luddite, but the digital persona swoon can make me light headed.

Another downside is the Narcissistic quality of digital persona, basically a "look at me" culture. Maybe that is why it always feels like high school – it is the adolescent technology screaming for attention. How will digital technology mature? Or are we to be always mired in MySpace and FaceBook?

As I was writing that last paragraph, I realized that I was a little bit off put by the fact that the geeky technology, which used to provide anonymity and protection to my anti-social side has turned into an exhibitionistic orgy with the explosion of social networking sites. I’m the nerd with glasses again being simultaneously turned on and socially overwhelmed by the cheerleader.

The technology has advanced to the point where maintaining a digital life is a little bit like being an adolescent whose diary is always accessible to their parents. Whatever you post, whatever you say, whatever floats off your keyboard into the internet ether is probably and in most instances lost forever, yet on occasion, it comes back transfigured into something unrecognizable or terrifying, often carried by the panting mutt, Google.

Google sounds like goggles and those Google goggles are peering at your every move trying to reduce your fleshy persona into a consuming, buying, advertising accessible animal whose data is slowly being filled in. Google is trying to clone you and anticipate your every move and like Pavlov’s dogs we salivate because Google gives us what we want. Google is the digital Big Brother watching our every move.

My predisposition has always been towards privacy – be it digital or earthly. Yet, I’m starting to wonder if privacy is such a great thing. I’m still very interested in protecting things that people want kept private, but I see a benefit to the lack of on-line privacy. The benefit is by being constantly googled, goggled and gapped at, the mature development is to create an on-line persona with integrity that includes the various flesh incarnations’ strengths and faults. In a world of ones and zeros, the digital persona that best reflects the real person will give the real person the most value in the real world. Become one with your digital self.

The other factor in this privacy debate is that the Internet is essentially the marketplace. Humans have always congregated for social and economic exchange and the two have always gone hand in hand. Posting on-line is supposed to have an economic impact for the participant. Do any of us really expect privacy in the marketplace? The two are incongruous. You enter the marketplace (and I envision street bazaars or farmer’s markets) and nothing is private. To resurrect a cliche, people who live in glass blogs shouldn’t post stones – or something like that.

Simply realizing that the on-line world is a big market free-for-all changes all sorts of perceptions about on-line privacy.

We now convey information more freely, but we are still working on the infrastructure for how that is to function economically. Our libraries are manifestation of the willingness to pay economically for ideas, but the pricing of those ideas has always been a conflict. I’m writing this sitting in my library at home, cocooned in books. Many of the authors died impecunious – Thomas Paine and Oscar Wilde are a couple that spring to mind. Great ideas and great writing have not always ended in an economic payoff. Dying has often been one of those great mechanisms for validating an artistic position. The point is the old system wasn’t always that great at allocating economic resources to benefit the writer and artist and the new system suffers from the same problem, but also offers some unique solutions.

The main solution I see is that it allows us to create social networks that match our own predispositions. I’m no economist and I’m a little bit upset that they made economics such a dry topic when I took it in college, because I’m fascinated by it now, particularly as it pertains to writing and art. I read a short story by Tolstoy, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" this week. The moral of the story is essentially don’t forget your mortality in your acquisitiveness.

How much income does an artist need? This is the question I find intriguing in light of the internet culture. I wonder how much income would I need from my writing to pull the literary equivalent of a Gaugin and chuck it all and move to Tahiti and spend the rest of my life swimming in the warm tropical words. I do the math. 1000 fans at $10 a month and I think I could probably do it. Math is an evil thing, because 10x1000 is such an easy equation. You see someone with 850 friends on FaceBook or you see the amount of traffic other blogs receive and it almost seems do-able.

The problem is that the art suffers if you turn from artist to huckster to get your thousand, so the art must come first. Which brings me back to the original thrust of this post – what is a digital persona? Is it the huckster selling? Is it the tortured artist? Is it the social butterfly? Is it the bitter misanthrope? Who am I and why have I donned this digital mask and entered this new frontier? In the past, I’ve always been just a little bit fearful of what I’ve posted on-line, wondering about the what ifs were a client, a potential reader, a judge, another attorney, my siblings or my parents to read this. The answer is amazingly simple and amazingly difficult all at the same time – be a person of integrity and it doesn’t matter.

ON THE POWER OF THE WRITTEN WORD

I’ve always loved books. The word written down on a page or a computer screen – it hasn’t mattered. The power of the Word has influenced me throughout my life, transformed me as a person and shaped my life in ways I probably haven’t even imagined. I’ve read countless books from first grade on and how I think, how I feel, how I love, how I parent, how I make a living have all been shaped by the written word.

Now, I’ve spent an entire Sunday morning wallowing around in words, trying to make digital connections (and failing mostly). The irony is that as I listen to the words of the Christmas songs wafting down the stairs, I realize that my whole life is now connected to things I’ve written. I met my wife because she writes. I read what she wrote. I wrote about it. Now we are married and she lets me stay downstairs on Sunday and play around with words.

The playground of words is so broad and so encompassing, it is easy to feel lost, like I do now. You scream out the words, but no one hears. Words are most beautiful when they are heard, acknowledged and understood.

The power of words comes from their ability to connect us (or in the context of the law – control us). I think I prefer connection over control. I ache for my words to connect and sometimes they actually do.

ON TIME AND INTERDEPENDENCE

It is appropriate that I am writing this on an extreme deadline – I have less than an hour before I need to get ready to start my day of picking up children, meeting with clients and going to court. Almost every tick of the clock today is going to entail me interacting with and depending on the people around me. Just the simple act of getting out of bed, walking downstairs, reading the paper, drinking and preparing a warm glass of liquid and sitting down to write this little blog post and I’ve relied on countless individuals.

I usually only get these thoughts when I have a moment for quiet reflection and the effect is always extreme humility. I can’t do anything by myself without help. I sit now at a table that I don’t even know who manufactured and built, who shipped the table and which store sold the table to my wife before I was ever even in the picture. So my laptop is propped up by factory workers, lumpers, and a retail sales staff – not much independence there. I did not even mention all the parts of the laptop, the history of computing and science that developed the technology to allow me to write this in the hour before I go to work in the morning and post it for essentially the entire world before breakfast compliments of ISPs, digital theoreticians, Hewlett and Packard, Thomas Edison and my seventh grade typing teacher, whose name I can’t remember and who taught me how to type in a room full of Selectrics from IBM, so I guess IBM deserves some credit (or blame) as well.

Time keeps ticking. As totally dependent as I am on the entirety of human existence that has preceded me, the dependence on the ticking clock is what really enslaves me. I want to contribute to the massive flood of interdependence that is the human condition and to make the slightest ripple on the surface of surging existence I need time – and I don’t have any.

Nurturing relationships takes time. Making a living takes time. Raising children takes time. Developing a career takes time. The simple act of reading the paper takes time. Getting Thanksgiving dinner takes time. Getting into shape and staying healthy takes time. Reading takes time. An all time great thief of time – writing.

Time is all about taking.

I’m always humbled by the fact that if someone is bothering to read this I’ve taken their time. This morning I’ve read Philip Roth, various articles in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman and JulieAnn (my wife and author) – all before 6:30 a.m. In fact it was the New York Times that inspired this riff on time and interdependence. Sometime before 5:00 a.m. my Kindle downloads the New York Times on my digital doorstep with a digital thunk on my bedside table. I’m compelled to read the paper. I want to read Friedman on the latest economic meltdown. I want to read about the Obama transition team’s exploits. I want to read about how Philip Roth’s publisher has placed a moratorium on acquiring new books and how his Roth’s last three books sold less than 75,000 copies in hardback. I want to think about what that means to an aspiring writer who is masquerading as an attorney and happens to be one of the less than 75,000 that bought Roth’s books.

I’m caught in the cross currents of time and interdependence. Time constraints pull me in various directions, while interdependence goes in another and the swirl can require every effort to try and create a modicum of self-determination in the direction I’m heading. Right now, I’m headed to the showers – a cliched sports metaphor and the reality of my day.

ON BEING HUMAN

I’m having serious issues with the tenth commandment. I am coveting someone else’s words. Few authors make me covet their work – at various times Dostoevsky, Philip Roth, Shakespeare, Kerouac, T. S. Eliot and Kafka have made me slip into paroxysms of jealousy and desire. Yet one author stands above the rest for me – Henry Miller.

Miller has a strange and glorious cosmology, mixing mortality and philosophy into a down and dirty humanism. Miller has the ragged and romantic streets of 1930's Paris as a back drop to much of his writing and he takes full advantage of the squalor and decadence to state his case on creating art and being human. Look at this writing:

When the eyes waggle then will I hear again Dostoievski’s words, hear them rolling on page after page, with minutest observation, with maddest introspection, with all the undertones of misery now lightly, humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until the heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding, scorching light, the radiant light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars. The story of art whose roots lie in massacre.

I read that and I honestly don’t feel worthy to hold the moniker of writer and think my voice is not Art. An anger and frustration wells up inside me and again a voice from the grave sings to me. Henry has felt the anger and frustration and fought back with a vengeance. He is more alive now, even though he is dead. He is dead and lives. I live and part of me feels dead. Yet he fights and dances on my living corpse on a Sunday morning when his immortal words out live his worn out and decaying flesh.

Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . .

Henry was persecuted and prosecuted for his blasphemy that being honestly human is the most difficult of tasks. Yes, he used naughty words, but the repulsion to the dirt, the rejection of the dirt is the rejection of the dust and Earth where Henry rots and dances. The fight to be human and to create art out of being human and out of surviving is the dance against death, against inevitability, against the dust we sprang from and to which we again descend. As usual, Henry writes it and it is not off key:

If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defense left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

Did he know when he was furiously writing out those words seventy years ago that his page would explode in my face and wring tears out of my eyes? Is existential desperation required to write words that explode and wound? I want to feel desperate. I read Henry’s stare down on art and beauty and my world transformed.


I’m not scrounging for meals or food. I’m slathered comfortably into my suburban home surrounded by loving wife and children. My extended family wraps around the outside of my cozy shell of existence, insulating me from Henry Miller’s rotting Paris. Yet . . . Yet . . .yet I want to blaspheme. I want to rip the skin off of the face of society because underneath I don’t think I’ll find a skull and certainly no brain.

Ogden, Utah is the scrubbed up and prettified version of 1930's Paris, but it is worse than Paris, because the rot, the decay, the putrefication hides behind gleaming scrubbed houses and manicured lawns. Miller spoke and I finally inherited those X-ray glasses off of the back of the comic books and I can see. I was blind and now I can see. The facade of clean brick turns to dust to reveal a burned out, toxic waste site that would make the EPA run screaming from the room.

Maniacally we work. Manically we consume. The economy is rotting because we don’t consume, but the human locust leave nothing living behind its consumption, other than the rotting carapace shells of the growing insect and the defecating waste. Like good little locusts, every Monday we parade our consumptive trash to the curb so that the waste and destruction we are committing is toted away in a communal exercise of denial that is known as "garbage day." Consume and show your patriotism. Consume and be happy. Consume and consume, don’t tread on me, I’m eating my own tail. The serpent has come to the American Eden and offers up no fruit, but begs Eve and Adam to consume themselves out of existence. Obligingly we fall. Just make it look like paradise, even though it is a rotting swamp, and we will consume. We will walk through the Garden of Wal-mart and eat whatever the serpent would have us eat. If we keep eating the forbidden fruit of consumption, maybe we will never realize that we have left Eden and paradise is the fantasy of the deluded.

I’m a little monkey typing on a keyboard. Pounding letters onto a screen and no one is listening. The absurdity of me sitting here and typing in the cool fall light about the desperation I feel with existence, with the consumptive rot I see around me as I realize that the writer screaming at the world doesn’t have a place to stand and my body is drawn and quartered, pulled in four directions at once, leaving my heart to beat once or twice in the dust before it is done, but it is the only drawing and quartering ever done as a suicide. I can’t let go of my paycheck. I can’t let go of my comfort. My toes turn blue grasping at physical comfort and solace and at human acceptance. I grasp the reigns of the horses that tear me apart, even as I feel the legs and arms pulling out of their sockets and all I can think of is there something I could bite and grasp with my teeth that would pull me into five instead of four pieces – drawn and quintupted – with my head rolling along in the dust behind the apocalyptic horsemen that have graciously pulled apart my flesh, my teeth grinningly biting into the rope that pulled off my head.

Words have become just another commodity to be consumed and eating only makes the hunger grow worse. Lives and words repeat and the hunger grows because the soul is malnourished. The skeletal soul can’t take in nourishment in the Dante-ian hell of eating without any cessation of the starvation. Words slip down the mental gullet and slip out in an explosive diarrhea leaving emptiness and hunger – nothing sticks. Words are cheap. Here are my words. You have my words. You have nothing. I’ve read and read books and all the words are gone. I remember nothing. You’ll remember nothing of this.

Being human means that we forget. Being human means that we don’t really look at what our life is. Being human means that we don’t realize our life is nothing but a feast of death, that we live by eating other life. Being human is desperate. Being human is being mundane, predictable and agonizingly the same as everyone else. Being human is to decay and grow old and die. Being human is to hurt, an agonizing schism of opposites.

Being human means that we remember. Being human means that we can really look at what our life is. Being human means that we realize our life is nothing but a feast of death, but somehow we still manage to respect life. Being human is being hopeful. Being human is being unusual, unpredictable and gloriously unique. Being human is to grow and expand and become immortal. Being human is to feel exquisite pleasure, in an orgasmic ecstacy of opposites.

Mostly, being human means to covet the beauty and try to add to the beauty we find amongst the horror of existence. Thank you, Henry.

ON CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION -- CONCLUSION

So, negotiation power is not just based on brute physical or economic force. On occasion, power is derived from conviction. Power can be derived from an imbalance of desire. In the case of same sex marriage, the strength of the status quo is derived in part from how much those favoring same sex marriage desire to change the system. The desire for change – in and of itself – grants the status quo power, more than it deserves.


I know this is a little bit of an obtuse point, but it can be illustrated by a simple example from interpersonal relationships. I’m referring to "puppy love" power. The young, ardent admirer who is smitten with puppy love for the love object has submitted to the power of the love object, whether it be the teeny-bopper celebrity (and their marketers) or the kid next door. By desiring an object or a person, the power is bestowed upon another that can either provide or not provide the desired object. Once power is acquiesced, the conflict begins: Does he like me? Can I see him? Oh no, he doesn’t like me. I’ve had teenage daughters. I know how it goes.


The resolution of conflict, then, is in part surrendering the desire for a specific outcome. Being wedded to the outcome adds to or creates the conflict and prevents attempts to find alternate solutions. This is not to say that ardent support of a concept is inviting conflict, just that being wedded to a solitary outcome hampers discussion and problem solving. Demanding a set outcome is an invitation to conflict. Desire the outcome, but desire resolution more.


Invigorated is the emotion I’ve been feeling most since the election. The arguments and the conflicts remain the same, but simply having the hope that my voice could be heard makes me want to speak out more. While appearing counter-intuitive, an environment that encourages disagreement and dialogue is more likely to foster conflict resolution than an environment that discourages, limits or most importantly ignores dissent.


I hope that is the spirit of this blog – a forum for respectful and heated discussion that are argued from foundational principals. Conflict can’t be resolved unless you start from a place of agreement. Finding disagreement is easy. Finding the area of agreement within the disagreement is the first step towards resolution. Follow this first step with an understanding of the power dynamic of the disagreement and with an eye to areas of unused power or improperly surrendered power and resolution becomes more likely. The conflicts of fall and winter can progress seasonally into the resolution of spring and summer and the seasons of conflict and resolution can begin yet again.