Blogger: why isn't there an app for that?

Ok, I'll admit at the outset that there are apps I can buy which will let me post to Blogger from my iphone. And I could just sign onto blogger in the web browser on the phone. But blogger (I'm pissed off so I'm done with capitalization for these guys for now) really doesn't have just a simple app for uploading photos or leaving quick posts?

I've got problems with this for several reasons. Of course the main reason is that it is annoying. I'm not so serious with blogging that it is worth it for me to shell out for a third-party app. Beyond just being annoying, it suggests that whoever is steering development within blogger has no concept of what is going on with technology and the internet. I've got this blog and I'm going to keep pecking away on it, but I've lately been wanting to start another more thematic blog. Should I stick with blogger (who apparently are way behind the curve) or do I give Tumblr a try? They make it easy to send pics from your phone...

I've liked blogger, but this is kind of ridiculous. If there were one little thing to do to stay relevant, this is it. Please don't point out that they now have an Android app. Whatevs. Google might prefer people to use Android over the iphone but this isn't the kind of feature that is going to give Android an edge. It only takes the edge away from blogger.

Also don't mention the blogger functionality that lets you text or email pics. Having a system which requires you to register your device and start a new random mobile blog is awkward and inelegant at best, even if you have the option to then link that extra blog to your real blog. Did monkeys design this?

Nightwood and Giovanni's Room: the dangers of the search for hidden messages in recommended fiction...

Language is meant to communicate, to get a point across. Perhaps also sometimes just to get something out, to express, to release some of that steam that builds up behind our eyes. We can be utilitarian in our language, try to say exactly what we mean in direct tones with simple meaning, but more often than not our feelings are more complicated than that. This is where we get into art and language and communication can get refined, yet also garbled. As we shape and express what we mean through whatever medium our art finds its expression in, it isn't usually just a simple single meaning that comes out. Had we meant a simple single meaning, why bother with art? Just make a sign and hang your message where the target will read it, or just say it straight out. As our intentions and feelings become more complex than just simple cause and effect, so too our forms of expression necessarily communicate complex feelings and messages. Of course, once it leaves our mind and enters the corporeal world, it isn't only up to the artist as to the meaning. We put what we can into something we create, but then the person who comes upon it takes from it according to what they see and what they've brought. It isn't only the creation of the art which completes it, it is also in the viewing. Finding a receptive audience is a talent in and of itself.

I'm prone to forget that everyone in an audience doesn't see the same work. Reading a book that hits on something I've felt but not known how to express always makes me want to share it with friends. I want to share what I've found, I want to discuss it with others, I want to dig in deeper. Some of this is just wanting to compare what we find and trying to see through different eyes. Some of it is just social and wanting to share things. Of course, sometimes there is the feeling that someone has communicated something that I couldn't or hadn't been able to before and sharing a reading feels like a way to let me make more sense to others: if they read this, they will understand what I mean, how I feel!

But we all read differently and each text has many messages. Coming from different directions, relating to different characters, we do not always find the same clarity in the same texts as our friends. Why am I reflecting on this now? Because I just read Nightwood.

There is something intriguing in the title, and I love the author's name. Djuna Barnes. I seem to have a certain predilection for names beginning with "Dj". I really wish I knew some Djunas and Djangos. I'm getting off track, just saying that there has been something compelling about the book that would have eventually pulled me to it, but I read it on recommendation. Ben had told me about it before and I had meant to pick it up and hadn't, so I finally decided to grab it off the shelf to be part of the traveling library that helps make this floating incarceration feel productive and less like a prison sentence. It was finally the right time to read it.

That it was the right time to read it was made all the more clear by Ben looking for it on the shelf and growling when he realized that I had taken it when he wanted to double check his remembrance of a passage for some of his commentary in his Facebook "25 things". Not that the right time to read it was when someone else wanted it (I'm not that spiteful, really) but rather that having read his comments on it and realizing how big an impact it had made on him brought it to the front of my mind and made it something that I wanted to read now. It was already in my mind and he had asked me to read it before; now the time was right to read it.

I think this also set me up for a certain confusion. Going into a book looking for someone you already know is a mission fraught with danger. We end up putting too much of our friends into the characters or too much of the characters into our friends and sometimes if we aren't careful we can distort and damage our reading.

This is particularly difficult for me. I'm an avid reader, but a brutal one. Even as I hated book reports in school, I've grown up doing one after another as a hobby. As anyone who has read much at all of what I write here knows, I've got strong opinions and a tendency to share them. I tend towards gushing or demolishing as my whims take me and often enough both about different aspects of the same thing. This is all good and well when it is just me talking about my experience with a piece of art, but what about when this is a thing you approached because it is emblematic for someone you love?

At the moment, I feel as if I am sort of through the looking glass, looking at the reverse of a scene I've been in before. On the other side of the mirror, I'm the one presenting the book which meant so much to me, so colored my world outlook that I felt compelled to share it and then eagerly awaited for it to be read and find myself understood and closer than ever. Of course, this is not how it worked out. I handed Ben Giovanni's Room, as I had handed it to friends before and as it had been handed to me. I devoured it in one night when I got it, reading as the remnants of a hurricane blew past where I waited it out in a safe inland retreat, crying tears openly (which is no great feat now, as I've become a little looser with my emotions and like a good cry anytime a book or movie warrants it, but then I was an uptight control freak who refused such silly human indulgences) and feeling destroyed and devastated by the book, but also hopeful. The book could be so tragic because there was this beautiful love story, that even if this love was doomed, the fact that it could exist, that it could be written down, that this story could make people cry was breathtaking to me. I felt like it was giving me permission to fall in love if I found it. Mason and Liz had made me read it, and I had made Michael read it (don't tell Liz, he still has her copy. I had to find an identical edition to replace it for her.) and made John read it and I don't know how many other people I forced it on. But we were all friends, in various states of tortured love (or not love). When I handed it to Ben, I handed it to someone I was in love with, who I was dating.

You may not know this, but significant others don't always take away the same thing from a tortured love story that you did when you read it years ago and lonely and single. The story told my younger self of the possibility for love and passion; to someone already in love it warns of tragedy and hopelessness. So when he finally read it, Ben seemed somewhat horrified. Why did I want him to read that story? What was I trying to say? I was so flabbergasted that I didn't really know how to respond. Wasn't it beautiful? He said it was sad. Of course it was sad, and beautiful too, but because it wasn't just a book he was reading, rather a message from me, he couldn't just breathe in the beautiful. He went into it looking for me and probably also himself in relation to me and then he finds two people destroyed by each other and the society around them. They fall profoundly in love, and one becomes more jealous and desperate and falls to pieces before being executed and the other retreats in fear and grasps for traditional roles before falling haunted into exile. Was this what I saw as an ideal relationship? Was this how I saw us?

No and no, of course, but it is impossible to take in something brought to us by someone singing its praises and saying how much it has influenced who they are without looking for them in it, and also perhaps a little of what this says about how we fit into their life. So now it is my turn, and I try to look back through and remember his bafflement and then mine too.

At the beginning, I really liked Nightwood. The descriptions are incredibly rich and there is this strangely detailed breakneck pace racing your through a bizarre, but detailed background. You fly straight through one generation in no time. In an odd way, the laying of the groundwork reminded me of Amelie.

I shouldn't have said "At the beginning." I liked the book, when I backed away from my personal quest of finding Ben and I in it. It is a beautiful book and the characters are vivid and compelling. But I've a vicious critic of books and characters. I always have been and not in a particularly generous or forgiving way. When my mother would watch soap operas when I was a kid, I remember thinking how stupid everyone it is was. If they would just explain themselves instead of weaving these complicated lies their lives would be so much easier. I've gotten a little more understanding as I've aged, but only a little bit. And as much as I relish giggling at drama in real life, I've got a low tolerance for feeling like it has been cultivated, in real life or written worlds. I suppose this was my great intolerance with soap operas: there wasn't actually any drama except what was actively cultivated by all these vapid people. They had no real problems, just made some and carefully coached them along.

I don't mean to be so dismissive; Nightwood was certainly not Days of Our Lives. The writing is lush, the characters compelling and vivid and believable. Still, there is a certain flavor of tortured love that I don't really love that you can find in here. Doomed love, I can handle, but just plain old tortured love doesn't really do it for me. There is this feeling that to a certain extent the tortured want their love to tortured, that by traumatizing it that it becomes more real or something. This doesn't inspire sympathy in me, it makes me want to pull my hair out and scowl.

If you've read this book, you are probably scowling at me now, wondering why I'm so dismissive and hostile. As I said earlier, Nightwood is not a soap opera, it is a beautiful book. The characters tug and tear at one another and talk over each other trying to make themselves heard, and there is a terrible lucidity in it all. Just reading the book, unburdened by personal association, I'd see that. I'd be more forgiving and gentle to each of the characters, because I wouldn't assume at the start that I was any of them. If Ben found himself in this book, then wouldn't I also be there too, because surely I'm in any story he is in, right? I rail against silly romanticism muddling the thinking and blurring meanings, but damn if I'm not guilty of the crimes I accuse.

It is still difficult not to ask who in the book am I when Ben reads it. If-we-were-who-would-we-be is my favorite game anyway. It just gets loaded when you think someone else has played it already and sees you hiding somewhere in a text. Who am I when I read it and do we think the other person sees us the same person? Who are they? And do we see them as that person because we like that character or is this an indictment?

I assume that there are two choices for who we are, since in the book there are two main lovers: Nora and Robin. There is also the interloper, Jenny, but we'll assume as a given that neither of us could be this character; the implications would just be too ugly to contemplate. I'd assume that Ben sees himself as Nora, but I have a hard time imagining that he sees me as Robin, even if I do like going out drinking and wandering through the night. Of course, comparing yourself to characters is an imperfect game. And only a game. I, nor you, are the the characters in the stories we read.

I assume this is the same mistake he made when he read us in Giovanni's Room. I didn't love the book because I thought I was either David or Giovanni. I love the whole book, the whole story, and listening in on their conversations and the indictments cast against them by other characters, I found things explained that helped me understand better what I was feeling and how to navigate in the world. I didn't look to it as a plan for success or what my ideal love life would look like. It informed my world view; it didn't replace it. I wonder that that was the miscommunication when I shared this with Ben: he went in looking for us or a message from me to him.

Now I find myself fighting this same instinct with Nightwood. Even knowing this is a mistake and not why Ben told me about the book and wanted me to read it, I still couldn't help looking for us in it and being irrationally critical of the characters, thinking "I would never do that!" So I back up a little, relax, try again.

The writing is so beautiful it leaves me jealous. Even not imagining myself as the characters, they still irritate me somewhat, though flashes of brilliance shine through in their speeches. The character of the doctor is of particular interest (had this book not been recommended by a lover, he is the character I would have picked as myself: meddlesome, know-it-all, talkative). Interestingly enough, both of our emblematic books are set in Paris amongst gay expatriates and in roughly the same time period.

Perhaps I've written in enough circles about all this. I've just had to coach myself out of this trap and back into (somewhat) objective readership.

Phoenix rising

(Written sometime in October, somewhere in the Bering Sea)

I might try my hand again at fiction in November. Why then? Not exactly sure, but it seems a good month for such an undertaking. November has always been my ill-placed month of rebirth. October scours me clean and in November I rise anew. Why these months over any others? Wouldn't it makes sense for my rebirth to be at New Year's, particularly since I've made a cult of it's celebration? Or maybe in the spring when new life springs forth or summer when it grows? Why be built fresh in the season of dying, with leaves falling and days shortening and temperatures falling?

If I had been consulted in the matter, I might have chosen differently but my rhythms seem to have been mostly preset. As to this one in particular, I grow restless in the fall. As soon as the summer starts to cool even a little bit, I get hit with wave after wave of ecstatic wanderlust. At first there is mostly wonder and joy in this feeling, calling me out to explore and enjoy. If, as I am doing now, I can heed this call and take flight and explore, then the feeling can keep some of the joy about it and I just flit about like a kid in a museum for the first time, all big wide eyes and gaping smiles. If I can't, the feeling turns dire and I feel like there is a freight train continually slamming against the inside of my skull, violently and persistently screaming for me to move. I have a hard time sitting still. I have a hard time dealing with other people and retreat deeper and deeper in myself and catch myself wanting to scream out loud or smash things. I do neither; I'm not the type to give into such whims, but I might manage better if I occasionally did. I find myself wanting to force away every familiar thing around me and start over completely. There were more than a few years where it was speculated that any relationship I was in could not survive October unless I was completely sequestered away from my beloved. This was both true and not: October doesn't inspire me to just destroy anything in my reach, it simply refuses illusions. Without illusion, many things fall apart.

Anyway, the point is that this time of year is when I'm rattled to the core. Pleasant or otherwise, every loose thing is shaken loose and all the joints and bends tested to see what will hold and what needs to be repaired or removed. Then comes November, whose main significance to me seems to lie in following October. And so I begin again...

"you learned something today, man..."

"You learned something today, man," said the cab driver as we raced towards the train station. I hadn't over-slept, as used to be the main reason for me sprinting at the last minute for mass transit and I had waited until the last second to pack, which is a perennial close-second. I'd ignored the red-lights going off in the back of my mind and went with my unintentional boldness that creeps out because I've always managed to survive ridiculous situations and so never learned to run at the first sign of off-color. My adventures have been richer because I've too many times stayed put when anyone else would have headed for the hills, but generally these situations are only socially awkward, not dangerous. I'm not the daredevil type. I'm the slow plodding kind. I put one foot in front of the other, and don't lift the back foot until I'm certain that the first foot is resting on something stable enough to support it. I favor circuitous routes so it sometimes looks like I'm taking risks, but really, I'm the most cautious of gamblers.

So I laughed when Kearney said "Those are your people," when I related to him the stories told to me by an aging hustler who emoted his convoluted life story to me, punctuated with bullet wounds and mistaken love. I like talking to strangers and seemingly, they like talking to me. And the junkies and the hustlers and hitchhikers and whatever tend to find me and talk to me. And when I say talk to, I mean converse (or monologue), not try to hustle me. They never really have. I present an open but guarded face to the world, and seeming these folks tend to sit beside me at bars or trains or wherever and tell me their tales. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't, but up until I'm ready to leave, I'm happy to listen. The people who can't escape or control their stories are the ones with tales to tell.

"My name is Stevie; my momma called me that." So I listened to an aging hustler's stories about first visiting New Orleans with his parents at age 13, in 1984. He had found the bar that we were then sitting in having a beer at 3 in the aftenoon, and from their swept on to another bar under the wing of some drag queen whose name I couldn't quite make out though he obviously assumed I would recognize her. He dissappeared for 4 days, and when he emerged from his whirlwind introduction to gay life and the festive underworld in the Cresent City, he didn't want to return to North Carolina and "all those fucking ignorant rednecks who treated [him] like shit!" Which without rhyme or reason jumped into the story of the latest man who had taken care of him, who he cavorted with for a week, then moved to Ohio for after realizing he was willing to wire him a thousand dollars when asked out of nowhere and had recently found his way back to New Orleans and was sporting a fresh black eye having already been jumped and mugged. I won't relate the whole silly story, suffice to say this is who always sits down to talk to me. As K. asserts, these are my people. They find me, they talk to me, I listen, and though I get asked for cigarettes and the occasional dollar, I'm not usually triangulated as a potential victim.

"Not usually" has never counted as any assurance, and I know this. But sometimes I forget.

Since my last boat, I've had trouble sleeping. I just don't sleep very long. Many nights I don't sleep more than four hours, and even to do that I have to will myself to fall back to sleep multiple times, so despite having stayed up late drinking, I woke up early Weds. morning. My train wasn't until 1:30, so I showered and read and checked my email and relaxed, but felt that I still had enough time to wander a little before my train and needed to find food anyway. So I wandered back into the French Quarter, grabbed a bite and sat to have a beer at the Bourbon Street Pub. I was the only person there until a couple of hustlers came in. (Note on terminology: if I were in New York and refered to someone as a 'hustler', I would mean a guy who had sex for money, but in New Orleans, while it can mean that too, it takes on the wider meaning of someone who is trying to hustle anyone for money, be it through sex, distracting them so they can steal from them, cheating them, whatever. It is that kind of town and if you've been there, you probably know what I am talking about.) We were the only people there, so we started talking.

Now, this is so far par for the course. I knew what kind of guys these guys were and as I've said, they tend to sit and talk to me and usually confess a litany of crimes and woes as casually as discussing the weather. One of the guys drifts off when one of his friends comes in, the other one starts talking more directly to me. Nothing terribly exciting, but I shouldn't have let my guard down or underestimated how wrong things can go. I know to always assume that in any given situation that they will tend to accelerate straight to the furthest reaches of insanity possible, not stop at what we convince ourselves is the more realistic point. So when he discovered that I was heading to the train station and offered me a ride, telling me that he lived near there and was headed there shortly, I should have instantly declined. I've got no illusions about the gentleness of humankind or how people treat each other. I've heard too many stories from hitchhikers about the dangers of getting in anyone's car to not know how dangerous it is. When you aren't in control of that car, you are at the mercy of whoever is driving. People scold me for picking up hitch-hikers (though, notably not my parents, who taught me to give rides to those who need them), babbling about apocryphal tales of murder and intrigue, but it is the passenger who is in the weak position.

But it was a bright day, and I was letting myself forget these long-taught lessons. So we went to his car, and I ignored the phone call from his 'brother' and him saying he needed to pick him up on the way. And I ignored him asking me if I used a laptop for my job, even as I processed that he was digging to find out if I had one on me and made clear that I didn't. I should have gotten out at this point, walked away, disappeared into the crowd.

But I didn't, and instead found myself in a car turning the wrong direction and taken towards Slidell. I'll spare the ensuing details and opt for the short synopsis: his story getting barer and barer, threats being slowly veiled into the conversation, the change of plans as he tries to extort increasing amounts of money out of me so he can "pay my momma what I owe her" or more truthfully, when he realizes that sympathy isn't what he is elliciting out of me, go buy the pain pills he is addicted to and disastrously coming down from as we drive. Having given him the thirty bucks he originally asked for (once he had me on the interstate going in the wrong direction), since he was doing me a "favor", he demanded another 20. I bristled at giving it up, but ya know what, it is cheaper than time in the hospital and more recoverable than my teeth or my life, so he got it. Then it turned into 30 more dollars and it was clear that the amount was going to keep increasing and I didn't have enough to satisfy, which meant things were going to turn uglier. They hadn't gotten physical yet (beyond being held hostage in a speeding car). I gathered everything in my arms and tried to get out at a red-light. Damn automatic locks and a lack of crossing traffic to prevent running the light. As we are screaming at each other, and he is running what lights he can, I just looked for any opening and tried to make it clear to him that I wasn't worth more money or the trouble. And thankfully at one stop the crossing traffic slowed us enough and I had snuck the lock open and was poised hand on door and lept out, and he only cussed after me and sped off.

Unfortunately before I could get his license number.

And far from the train and with just 15 minutes left before I missed it. I had been trapped in that car for a whole stinking hour. Luckily, I finally got a cab and he was a kind fellow who drove like he meant it and seeing that I was flustered, asked why I hadn't called one earlier? I told him that someone had offered me a ride and I had accepted. He seemed to understand and could certainly read in my face how badly it had gone, and when I commented that I should have known better, he soothingly replied, "That's alright, you learned something today, man. You know now. You'll make your train."

I do know now.

I did make my train.

I'm trying not to, but I'm getting sucked back in...

I left New York at the beginning of last year. I love New York. I mean, I really, really, really love the City. But I needed to get out of the office. I'm not really an office person and I needed to be wandering about, geeking out over science stuff in the wild.

So I went. And it has been up and down, with pluses and minuses, but one thing that has been lovely has been getting away from all the stupid politics. I've been stuck out on a boat and got to go through last year without having to listen to any of the pre-election crap. I hate seeing Christmas decorations and whatnot before Thanksgiving, and I don't like like campaining a whole stinking year before an election.

I want to be a head-in-the-sand kind of fellow. I really do. I want to hide and leave the world behind. I want a little house on stilts in a remote swamp, and I'll paddle around carrying a shotgun and have a parrot(or macaw or cockatoo) which sits on my shoulder. I'll point the gun silently at anyone I find in the swamp until they cry or start confessing their sins and the parrot will speak only cuss words and scream them loudly whenever it is in the presence of children.

But I don't have a parrot or a swamp to myself(the gun... that I can get my hands on), and if I can't ignore the world with style, I'm going to scream at the top of my lungs put in my two cents.

I'm not ready. All the stupid fucking campaign crap is mind numbing. They turned on the debate tonight and I stupidly am still sitting here listening to this crud. The republican part was painful. Straight stupidly painful. They way they talk about immigration has is all about fucking bigotry. They just kept talking about building fences and sending THEM back to where they came from. Get rid of them damn Mexicans. Blah fucking blah blah blah.

The Democratic stuff is a bit better, but I'm still going to leave now and go to the bar and drink and know that I'm making the right choice.

I'm tentatively going to start railing about politics again, but I can't do it now. Not yet. I need a drink first.