Bill's Notes

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

Always thought the end of this sonnet was a sentimental cop-out. Someone who is old enough to have dead friends and broken love affairs and has rehashed them in his mind until he brings tears to his eyes has a friend who restore those losses, end those sorrows and restore the lost time with a mere thought? Who is this friend? Where I can meet this person? Does everyone else have someone in their life who can do this for them? Am I missing something?

Only God can restore the years the locusts ate, and restore the dead to the living, and regain time. Not art, Proust's heroic attempt noted. In the present, we can learn to live with our losses, and to fill our lives with new people and new service. But we cannot replace what is lost.

When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret, or pain, or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice, or human touch of hand.
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I used to read this and think of K-. Southside Johnny on the radio I know we had to try, both of us 18 and headed to the beach every day reach up and touch the sky our whole lives lying before us like an unattended Pac-Man machine and we with four quarters and 20 confident patterns in our heads; dots uneaten, power dots there for the taking, a bunch of ghosts either in a box or moving in predictable ways, dreams undashed, hopes uncrushed, faith unlost, our hearts meaty and spicy and flexible and tender like so many uncooked enchiladas ... our souls unaware of the giant existential whack-a-mole game being prepared for us, ready to smack our surf- and cheap-vodka intoxicated heart-pastries straight into the simmering, unfiltered deep animal-fat fryer. There, completely unlike the tempering of steel, the enchiladas would cook through, the ingredients became fixed, and there was no un-deep-frying them and adding in a little more spice or a little less steak, no matter if you cried like Gilgamesh at the loss of his best friend Enkidu, no matter if you crossed the ocean in search of his soul. I know. I crossed the ocean. Both ways. I didn't find immortality, or K- (who was shacked up on this side of the ocean, anyway), but others ready to fry the ole enchilada a little more. If you follow my point and my doubtless ill-conceived decision to melange the hell out of my metaphors.

Or maybe well-conceived. 'Cuz I feel a little better now.

You hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better that they do
This boardwalk life for me is through, you oughta quit this scene, too
S----, the aurora's rising behind us, the pier lights our carnival life forever

How long is forever, anyway?

Questions for Discussion:

1. What are some of Bill Shakespeare's complaints about his life?

2. Do you buy his solution? Who is this watery tart that so soothes his losses?

3. According to the author, why is Proust full of shit?

4. What does the pier light? Use diagrams.

5. Count the metaphors in the most ridiculous paragraph of this "essay". Write the number down on a piece of paper and swallow it.

6. Is a heart really like an enchilada? Describe the difference between a burrito and an enchilada? Are either deep fried? Intellectual property theft alert: Will Cynthia Heimel sue for theft of this metaphor, or will she regret she ever made it and forsake it altogether?

7. Who is Madame Marie? Why is she arrested? How does this arrest subvert or vitiate the themes of the piece — or conversely, how does the inclusion of Madame Marie support the theme of this piece? Explain using clay.

8. Has the author crossed the Indian Ocean? If not, how does he know that immortality is not on the other side?

9. Fill in the blank: I know we had to try, reach up and _____________. True or false: K- used to raise her arm as if to _____________ more than 50 percent of the time when the song was played. When her arm was raised in that position, her boyfriend would start to slip off her shirt. Does that make them young lovers or fornicators? Be prepared to defend your answer on Judgment Day.

10. What is the salient difference between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man? How does this bear on the underlying themes of this piece?

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I'm so lonesome I could cry

I've never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide its face and cry

Did you ever see a robin weep?
When leaves begin to die
Like me he's lost the will to live
I'm so lonesome I could cry

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I'm so lonesome I could cry
— Hank Williams

These big conferences are like intense versions of high school. You show up, you learn a bunch of stuff, you go out to lunch, and then you scatter to the ends of the earth. And just before it all ends, you get that tug, you know, that momentary sadness from knowing that you've had a good time but you'll never again all be in the same place at the same time. And then Hank Williams comes on the radio, and you realize, okay, it's a little sad, but it's nowhere near as awful as a country song.

We should have country music songs for just slight changes in emotion. "Conference Breakout Session Blues," or "I dropped your business card in my whiskey and now I can't read," "I'm piqued you left the exhibit hall", "It took me halfway through a beer to forget ole what's her name," or "Meet ya next year underneath the Starbucks' sign -- if I'm not dead or laid off."

Ack. I never could write songs. Or poetry.

My friend Harry has corrected me about my endorsement of John Kerry. It turns out that Kerry is not honored in a museum in Hanoi, and Snopes has debunked that claim. Check out Harry's site for the relevant info and link.

The larger issue nonetheless remains the same: Did John Kerry's testimony assist the North Vietnamese? The answer is clearly yes.

Nonetheless, an error is an error, and I passed on erroneous information. Industrial Blog regrets the error and will try to be more accurate in the future.


UPDATE: Mike says it best:

Hey - Kerry lost. Really. I saw it on CNN. And if they were gonna try him for treason - they would have. 30 years ago.

-pokes with a stick-
nah...it's not moving
-pokes with a stick again--
yep...absoluteltly not moving

Yep - that's one dead horse.

the absolutely dead horse shambles to its feet and lurches towards Mike as it groans, "Braaiiins.....braaiiins!"

Nonetheless, I wrote this correction because Harry said, "The truth is never moot."

But I'm with you, Mike.

Industrial Blog still regrets the error.

For the past few days,I've only been able to drop in for a few minutes and haven't read much of my normal blogs. And now I'm reading that this secession rhetoric has hated up.

First of all, it has felt good to get away from it all. Whew! In the relaxed atmosphere of blue-state California, in which I saw a bunch of people on Coronado Beach during a kind of wind surfing I'd never seen before, that is, a bunch of hippies frolicking in the surf using complex new technology, I had a couple of epiphanies:

1. The blogosphere can cause, in a certain kind of person, a kind of madness. It's caused by a disembodied dialogue on contentious issues. I've been a bit brain-fevered of late. My hope is with the election over, this will stop.

2. California is damned fucking crowded. You know you expect several times a day to be the first in line on something, whether getting a cup of coffee or turning left at a light? Ha. Never was I first in line for anything. There was always someone else trying to do the thing I was trying to do. Too crowded. You guys need to drive some folks into the desert, or buy baja or something.

3. Life is too short for this shit, that is, to get anxious and angry over opinions.

4. No one's going to secede. For one thing, it would require sustained effort and focus.

5. If you're overweight, fly in coach and snore loudly, consider not taking a red-eye flight. Some poor woman was seated between two fat men last night on the red-eye back to Philadelphia. One of the trolls emitted pig-like snorts. I was a row behind him and could barely sleep. Disgusting. And of course he fell asleep right away. Strangely, I prayed for him and his snoring stopped. Really. That kind of stuff freaks me out. Praise God.

Donald Trump had two pieces of advice that I will be unable to use in my editorial job, so I might as well share them here:

1. Get a pre-nup. He's very serious about this. He says repeatedly getting married is extremely expensive otherwise.

2. Get even. Don't let serious breaches of trust just pass. Punish the offenders. "At the very least, it prevents people from playing around with you," Trump said. He was very insistent on this. He didn't say how this coincides with "turn the other cheek" injunction. Well, he did hint that we wouldn't like that advice.

Can't talk about the rest. You have to pay for that.

1. There is a reality about it that's nice. I'm dealing with real people doing their real jobs ... and not having to trade in stereotypes about the business world.

2. A lot of stuff they do is really cool. Figuring out your weighted cost of capital compared to your vendors, and then decided you Days Payable Outstanding. Well, it's a cool concept, but I'm glad I'm a writer and don't have to do it every day.

3. Brownies in the press room. With frosting. Good trade association, nice trade association ...

What's not cool:

1. TLAs. Holy shit! Some of these people talk exclusively in acronyms, terms of art and business jargon. "Applying ODIC and RFDI, we're going to ARC the lockbox and turn it into ACH, but not WEB or Tel. Later, we'll get into Check 21 check truncation." Yikes, I can't even reproduce the language. If I hear one more unfamiliar TLA*, my head may explode.

*Three Letter Acronyms. I'm not getting into four-letter acronyms.

Scott Adams quote from today's presentation:

"When you realize performance and effort are not related to your outcomes, it frees up a lot of your time."

BTW, he was referring to being passed over for promotions in the business world on "diversity" grounds. Part of that free time was used to pursue cartooning, or comicstry, or whatever the word. So diversity works, I guess.

You can't just say, "the facts support this or that political party." Facts need to be selected, assembled, and otherwise processed. Often they are processed using our own internal maps, called paradigms. Sometimes you can develop a cultural paradigm that is "invincible," that is, cannot be impacted by facts.

Neither being a Republican nor being a Democrat constitutes an invincible paradigm. Nor is someone stupid for voting for one or the other. Sorry. Too bad. Intelligent people can assemble the facts one way or the other, and making compelling arguments.

Not to mention that the parties are fluid, not fixed. Their positions change over time and with circumstances.

That all said, the facts of life are conservative. My disagreement is not with liberals but with leftists. Leftists have an erroneous worldview and one that is very nearly invincible — facts and experience cannot help them, and it is pointless to argue with them.

UDDATE: Who's abdicating what? (See comment.)

Yup. It rained yesterday.

Welcome to San Diego.

It's Sunday. Those of you who are checking in from your workplaces, here's a suggestion. Take the day off. Enjoy.

Yeah, I have to work today. Eh, I got no choice.

For the record, yesterday, I wasted two hours because I couldn't tell the difference between the hotel's Convention Center and the San Diego Convention Center. I thought it seemed kind of small.

This is why I go early to conferences. I need at least one day "margin of stupidity," in which I stumble over the kind of obstacles that most people would breeze past.

But today I'm here at the SDCC media room, on track and glad to be back.

Go Eagles.

That's all.