pseydtonne | Trailblazers and better maps

I'm watching "Head", the movie the Monkees made. Jack Nicholson wrote it. It doesn't make sense on the surface. It has very little to do with the Monkees as it does with their attempt to reject their image while realizing they don't have anything but an image)

I'm going to describe the thoughts I told Maggie earlier. This may not make a lot of sense, but I'd appreciate your reading it.

I have tried to repress this but I cannot any longer. My deepest desire is to distill the mindsets and practical details necessary to navigate a better future. I want to be the Twenty-First Century version of the Renaissance Man. The only channels that suit this desire are priest, professor, writer or public speaker.

Since part of my theory is that none of the modern religions jive with me, I could not become an official priest. I no longer have a battle with god as I did when i was in high school. I still do not think I could join a church again. I would have to start my own, which may be the only way to get the emotional message with the political one. I don't want to create a religion because I don't need to toss out more dogma. I want something cleaner.

Professor would subsume writer. That doesn't mean I should necessarily become a professor, but it's still the profession that suits my desire the most. Or is it?

I took some bad advice my senior year of college. I regretted that for a long time because I felt like I'd walked away from the Garden of Eden to go nowhere. My thinking was that I'd go into radio and that would just solve things. The year I graduated college, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 became law and thus a lot of radio jobs dried up. I also never got together a decent demo tape because I didn't want to deal with the rejection that would come with applying for my dream job.

That's the first time I've admitted that, by the way.

My thinking after that was that I'd work any other job I could before returning to academia. I'd find out what I was made of, what I was good at, what I could do besides brown-nose professors. This way, I'd owe allegiance to no one and I could think for myself, know right from wrong and preposterous from plausible viscerally.

That part turned out to be a good idea. I looked at my final pay stub for 2003 on Wednesday and realized I made a decent figure. I can afford a comfortable life, pay for another person to be in it, and thus have the material comforts I'd wanted when I was younger and my parents were getting poorer.

I have learned so far that I have a lot of skills already. I can publish a newspaper, fill it with content, edit its pictures for press. I can produce a decent radio show. I can tear apart a computer and put a better machine together from that. I can work in any operating system you throw at me and I can administer some of those. I can cook a decent meal, wash my clothes, keep creditors at bay. I can give someone else enough love that the other person will live better. I can sell lots of things without trying. I'm not the best, but I'm pretty versatile.

I think America needs to give itself a philosophical center so that it can move away from its vices against its neighbors. This country is founded on a lot of violence. We can't bury that and not grow strange fruit. We can't apologize because that doesn't stop us from doing it again. We need to make a concerted effort to do good shit -- build the best prototypes of technological advances, make the great works and lesser works of written and spoken civilization available to everyone at bargain rates, learn to discuss things we fear. We need to take concrete steps toward these actions, thus we must want to make these steps the way we want expensive coffee or television shows.

We're good at DIY, do it yourself. Entire musical genres have been invented by people that thought "there's no reason I can't do this." We need to take that ethos and turn it into community building. We have to understand when we've transgressed our friends and heal those wounds by positive action instead of pale apology. We need a reason to let Ahuramazdu be our guide instead of Ahriman.

When some specialty of the world is put to paper for the first time, the result is always slightly wrong. Just getting the ideas onto paper makes them visible and geometric instead of linear and read-only. Seeing them means they can be pulled apart, tested and proven. Look at Krafft-Ebing's manual on kink, "Psychopathia Sexualis". He published it in 1906, when the mere words "birth control" could not be sent in the mail. The editor of the 1922 edition was proud to obscure vital words by putting them into Latin so that only a doctor would use the book. There is so much wrong with Krafft-Ebing's conclusions, but his observations allow us to see beyond what he saw in them. He saw "fetich" as perversion; we see fetish as a means toward sexual completion. He invented the study of human sexuality; it took nearly a century to get the thoughts clarified and we still have work ahead of us.

Sex, however, is something most of us know about first-hand: I know what gets me off, what doesn't, what I would like to do and what I need to channel. Computers, in contrast, are devices we use every day but many of us don't understand beyond the surface. I've fixed a lot of computers. I know stuff that other geeks don't, although I have a lot to learn. I wish I could tell more people what they could be doing with their older machines, how they could actually solve daily problems, and how a knowledge of rudimentary algorithms could empower a lot of people. Just being able to think out a problem the way a programmer does can change the severity of life's problems, have them more tangible and manageable.

The best thing I could contribute to this is the creation of manuals -- recordings and texts that explain stuff while also providing the mindsets that drive further activity. It's not good enough to explain RAM conflicts in BIOS upgrades; I need to explain why there is BIOS and why its evolution cannot be left to weakened companies.

Thus I want to write. My problem is that my writing is dry and incomplete compared to my spoken words. However, my spoken words are linear and need fleshing. i need to turn my speeches into texts. I have work to do.

Where do I start? Should I still be thinking that a professor is the best method? Maybe a talk show host or and MC would be more efficacious. What do you think?

-more on Head later, Dante