Road 2 Pleroma

What the Word Needs Now...

noreply@blogger.com (Bert Johnson) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:34:00 +0000

It evoked the smell of fresh bread, being part of a grocery store name.
It is the genus that contains the royal root, dye of royalty and ancient sweet, sugar beet.
It is a high energy electron or positron.
It is a high school honor society.
It is speed relative to the speed of light.
It means that it probably won't friggin' work, but don't blame us for not finishing our damned job, we told you it was a Beta.

When did this idea become acceptable? When did taking the trial phase into mainstream society and washing our hands of the repercussions become the norm? I'm guilty, look at my blogs, none of them are finished, I'm too damned busy to pour 100 hours into making this thing look pretty (but ya like that Batek Effect on the tacky title... dontcha? Dontcha wish your title was fly like me.... Jai Ho, bitches)... have you been to my two galleries, Violet's Kitchen, and my deviantArt page? Most of that stuff is starting to show a little technique, but it's far from polished. Why bother, right? Why complete anything? We get credit for inventing, for the thought, for the intention, for the attempt. Other than a tennis stroke, who needs follow through for anything? Oh, wait, have you seen world tennis rankings? Our best guy is behind some dude from Serbia. Serbia? Have you been to Serbia? Isn't that the country Hillary Clinton falsely claimed she was fired on by snipers? Do I need to say anything more?
I mean really, anyone want to take a beta antibiotic? Would you feel comfortable giving your child "Children's Tylenol Cold and Flu: Beta"? No, of course not, that's why God invented macaque monkeys. What if you jumped on your SouthWest flight, and instead of that stupid joke about putting the air mask on children, and people that act like children, tee hee, tee hee, they said "Welcome to the new Boeing 783.... beta." Wouldn't you start screaming about your meds and the box cutter in your pocket to get off? Or ladies, how about getting on the new pill, less acne! Beta. It's unbelievable. Our expectations are so low these days, we don't even expect our newscasters - journalism majors - to know grammar or usage. These wordsmiths have been opening broadcasts with phrases like, "In these uncertain times, America faces..." Excuse me?

These are not uncertain times!

People are certainly broke! You want to know how broke people are? A couple weeks ago, my ex and I were down on fourth street; for those of you who don't know, downtown Austin (which is almost always referred to as "the place where all the shootings and robberies are, but at least we're not as bad as Dallas") has 6th street which has college bars and clubs, 5th street which has all the 30 somethings bars, and 4th which is a little nicer. Anyhoo, we're down at our favorite place (Hollaback Sanchez, greatest bartender in Austin! Seriously, go to Cedar Street Courtyard and try his magic). On our walk out, I stop at one of the fancy, upscale restaurants and check out the menu, which had an entry like this:

Baguette Aoli
Our homemade baguette is split, toasted, and lovingly
smeared with a handcrafted lemon-garlic aoli,
served with watercress and hand sliced pan frites

People. That's a lettuce and mayonaisse sandwich. Let me repeat, we saw an upscale restaurant selling mayonaisse sandwiches! There's nothing uncertain when the societe haute is lowered to mayo sammies team.
If you really want uncertain times, try living with my ex. We were uncertain about what the hell was going on, what was around the corner, when the other would get pissed off. It was kind of like using a Beta, loving all the features of it while never knowing what'll make it crash. The only certain thing was that I loved her. This one was for you kiddo.

I gotta git,
B.

Where we're headed.

noreply@blogger.com (Bert Johnson) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:09:00 +0000

When I lived in Berkeley there was a homeless man whose name I believe was Charles. I was scared of this man. He would confront me on the street, accuse me of being a sodomizing police officer that he was going to kill me in righteousness. If I saw him a block away, I would cross but he would see me, walk to the middle of the street, and start yelling, pointing, cussing. He pulled a knife once, waved it. I've been thinking about him lately. We always thought that no matter how violent he was (I was not his only target, and after a few months he came to forget how much he wanted me dead), he was of the most harm to himself. To think of a man that tortured, that angry. To think of his mind grappling with itself, the voice that cries because it can't be heard in it's own mind. To think of the cold, wet nights he spent coming down off whatever he'd taken the day before, shivering in pain begging God to not wake him up when he passed out.
While under reported for obvious reasons, there are usually well over a dozen deaths in Berkeley every year among the homeless. It hit usually in the winter the hardest, when the elderly would die. I'd say it's probably even - the number that get out and the number that die each year. Most are just there, in larger numbers every year, braving the rain, shaking in a torn sleeping bag all night.
The numbers in America are bad right now. I worry for my own future, truth be told. I unwisely left my job a couple months ago and it's fairly obvious that I'm not the only one who needs a new one. But when I read the numbers of those who have lost their job after decades of the same work, when I hear of the 50 year old transistor engineer who stood for hours waiting to get into a job fair, when I see pictures of people loading their truck, it hurts. They don't do well, those. The ones who never spent all night getting high and threatening passerbys. The ones that were decent, if not outright good parents, good employees, good friends. They will not handle well. But we still need a National Endowment for the Arts, a few earmarks - be them for Democratic or Republican districts are more important than that. We still hear that they spend $100 million on a movie in Hollywood as tonight we watch that they will evict 150 people from a tent city by the railroads in San Francisco. A tent city that had a friend of mine in it. I recognized ya Jim, with your head bent down from the camera, smokin' that rollie with the Buccaneers hat. You always said you scanned the crowd shots of those games, to see if you knew anyone on television. I saw you. Good luck my friend.

A soaking

noreply@blogger.com (Bert Johnson) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:45:00 +0000

When I was a boy, I used to love to take a bath,
but since I'vebeen able to stand up and take a shower,
Until this moment, I forgot how much I loved to soak.

On Suicide

noreply@blogger.com (Bert Johnson) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:12:00 +0000

I've tried a couple times. There's a key: leave nothing to fall back on. That's why these self-annihilators are always the ones that lost their job - they've lost the respect of their family, their job, whathaveyou - there's nothing left. They're up to their eyeballs in debt, they have no faith or moral compunction, whatever. Unfortunately, they're too emotionally immature to realize that the decision they make is a valid one, but not if it includes others. It is after all, our life. We choose many things, yet the idea that we have made an assessment of what we have lived versus what there is left on our timeline seems ridiculous. Except for those in physical pain and old age (where euthenasia is still debated), if a person, in full mental faculty, decides that the rest of their life will be tinged with sorrow and regret, anger and pain, decides therefore to 'quit the game' so to speak, is absurd?
It is a plain, simple fact that the overwhelming majority of us do not accomplish anything. That being said, is it really that much more noble to wallow in a life of compromise and failure, waiting for some external force to decide we have ended, than rather to decide oneself - to take the ultimate decision - into ourself and say, "Valiant or sloppy, persistent or lazily, the quest for those things I find give my life meaning has fallen beyond my grasp; I should only be wasting the value of my life by extending it any further." Is that so wrong?
Personally, two things have driven my life - a desire to create something that would change us, all of us - be it art or literature, and secondly the belief (albeit delusional one) that there is a woman in my life - at times knowing I would not meet her for some time - that would justify my life's work, that would be my soulmate, that would show me love and make sense of this universe. My Virgin Mary, my muse, my fate. I have failed at both, and while it is of course possible that in the autumn years of a natural life I would somehow recoop either or both, it is obvious from my character traits and situations that will not be. We are all born for greatness, some have enough tools to fool themselves into thinking they can accomplish it. I have learned I do not have the tools, the depth, or the strength to do so. Is it nobler for me to wait tables, drink beers and watch shitty movies for the rest of my days, or rather to accept defeat and journey on?
Of course, we are resilient. We are served lamb and lobster our whole life, yet in a fell swoop we are dumpster diving for scraps. And we persevere. I agree with what I have written, it is difficult for me to understand us, our situation. We change purposes and priorities like they were underwear. One claims to live their life for their family, yet they move on and find new purpose, perhaps a greater one. Who knows...

Purpose, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Bert Johnson) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:49:00 +0000

In my previous post, we looked at purpose and man's homocentric view thereof. Much as Galileo was persecuted for insisting that the Earth was not the center of all the universe, when one says that man is not the central, final purpose of the universe we find ourselves persecuted by those who hold on to anthropomorphic Gods and mythos. When we suggest that morality and purpose could be self-generated, we are hit with faulty logic that is the basis of our society and most bed time stories. But that does not invalidate our argument, it just makes it unpopular. It is well recorded that evolution - in it's myriad of forms - is not only the most likely and reasonable of theories on how we came to be, but also that the United States is second only to Turkey as far as western nations in the wide spread acceptance of the theory. The only debate really, is if Turkey can be reasonably considered a western nation.
One of the sources of confusion is the labels applied to evolution and religious belief. Where a Christian, Jew, or Muslim may say "I know there is a God", and (at least in their terminology and definitions) an agnostic would say they are fallicious, the scientifically minded person still calls evolution a theory. The religious immediately sieze on this - "See, you have no faith in your argument; you talk of probabilities while I speak of spiritual truth". It is a different arena of discussion. The religious person now that there is no hard evidence for their belief system but they use their desire, their fear, and yes, their faith to eliminate the gap between what is presented to them and what they feel is truth. The scientifically bent may believe in evolution just as strongly and with a greater sense of certainty when the lights are off, yet they refuse to enter a dogmatic phase: "I am right and you are wrong." is, in the ideal scientific arena, an impossible statement to make. They acknowledge the portion of the argument that goes "To the best of what I have been presented and currently hold as knowledge in my mind, the belief that I am espousing has greater evidence and likelihood than the one that you are championing. I can't prove that you exist outside of some sort of coma hallucination - to get all Descartes on you - but as a matter of faith I accept that you do in fact exist, that you speak what you truly believe, and that we are in disagreement. We go ahead and assume these parts of the arguement"

Yet, one cannot discount that there may be more to the story. Newton believed that gravity worked because of an ether throughout which everything is transmitted. Einstien destroyed that ideology, but in the end posited an absolute time-space matrix throughout which everything exists and lives in relation to one another. The ideas are similiar, but Einstien's is much more advanced and intricate; in the true sense of the world, it is more subtle. But he had to destroy the old paradigm of ether to construct a new, albiet similiar, paradigm of what "space" is.
In the same way, we needed (and as I rather less eloquently than Einstien attempted to do in my last post) to destroy the prevalent ideologies of morality and purpose before we could construct a new view of it.
Words are fickle things. A friend of mine and I argue constantly over them: she believes that the current usage, since it is the popular and known usage, supercedes the original intention of the word and that I get bogged down in etymology rather than move forward in conversation. I am a lover of what something is intended for and clarity thereof. We both have positive arguments and I believe it comes down to a matter of degree. Shakespeare, the author most people reference in "Proper English" loved portmanteaus and slang, often making up or altering words to suit his immediate purpose and corrupting the language of the time. In the end, recognizing the original intention of something as well as it's current usage and emphasizing the aspect that is necessary for the situation is the correct solution. So let's look at purpose:

The online etymology dictionary has this to say:

purpose

c.1290, from O.Fr. porpos "aim, intention" (12c.), from porposer "to put forth," from por- "forth" (from L. pro- "forth") + O.Fr. poser "to put, place" (see pose). On purpose "by design" is attested from 1590; earlier of purpose (1432).

This is kind of what we thought - it has to do with intention, the phrase "by design" is kind of funny here, considering the subject matter. But let's just go ahead and eliminate the non-religious person's definition, which is more akin of the word "reason"; they would say there is a purpose in a tree's side exposed to the sun growing faster than the shady side - but that is a reason. There is no intent there, it is simple cause and effect.
So, since we went all Galileo on purpose in the last post, can we - now understanding where the Earth is in relationship to the solar system, perhaps find greater systems? Can we, taking purpose back from the great "Father God", now look for intent and aim in the universe as a whole and perhaps find a more comprehensive understanding? And once we do that, can we modify our own self-generated purpose based on a detected intent on such?
That's what we're looking at next....

Purpose

noreply@blogger.com (Bert Johnson) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:36:00 +0000

The other day we bought a new digital camera. Walking into the SuperMegaElectronicsStore, you are confronted with just over seventy four thousand digital cameras in more colors than the human eye can register. They have varying degrees of attributes, varying "megapixels", differing "blur reduction" and "motion reduction" technologies. We found ourselves - although we had no idea that anything over 3 is complete overkill - cooing at the cameras with the whopping 10 megapixels and underwater focus technologies... how great it would be to be able to make three story tall prints of stunning clarity to capture our scuba adventures!! This is advertising. It not only convinces us that the product is better, but sometimes has to convince that we need something we never actually wanted in the first place.

I remember being on my 'path' rather well - sometimes I'm fond of the adventures, other times I'm resentful of the false ideologies that led me down certain roads. I remember attending a lecture where one of the most intelligent men I've ever had the pleasure to hear in a live lecture said, essentially, that he went to Harvard Divinity and heard all these atheist and agnostic professors rallying against religion and made the conscious decision to still be a Christian, no matter how much they had evidence and philosophical persuasions to the opposite. He made the decision based on purpose - that a Christian life, even if on the surface holding a certain fallacy that could only be explained by faith, held purpose; a religion free life could hold no such claim.
Two of the major tenets that held me in a religious ideology were the argument that only in a "God" universe could we have a reasonable moral system, and secondly, only in a religious universe could we have some sort of purpose. I was even cocky as I attacked my friend's moralistic codes, things founded on Judeo-Christian ethic. I spouted off about the necessity of a Hedonistic lifestyle in an agnostic weltanschuung. I was convinced.

There are problems with this line of thought. The first is the assumption, which is popular in theological thinking, that a moral system is only applicable to a population if it comes from without the population. Of course, democratic governments (and to an extent, Communist and socialist ideologies) would say this is not true - they have generated a government - a legal moral code - of the people, not from some divine right. A moral code, when thought of in the monarchist view, is handed down and theologians hold on to the idea that morals, to be absolute must in fact come from the absolute. It also helps that it comes from a father figure to deal with whatever parental issues are running around inside each of us, I suppose. But in truth a moral code is not necessarily something handed down from the absolute - indeed, a moral code need be flexible and not absolute, so as to change with the tides of the times - morals need to be applied not blindly followed.

The second is the idea of purpose. Of course, the religious person's purpose is not that enviable to begin with - it is Pinocchio serving Gheppetto. A subservient ideology of endlessly sing a creator's praise, or an issuing in of their kingdom - a creator by the way, that cruelly sets down a moral code, a systematic free will, and a punishment system for using the second of the three systems that involves eternal damnation (or even worse under a Calvinistic ideology - the exclusion of the second system - you simply burn or glorify based on God's will without any regard to choice or merit)... wow, what a great purpose.
But if we posit a non-religious worldview, setting up a basic ideology of existence without father-Gods or angels or miracles, they will complain that we are - like the Calvinists - merely along for the ride, without free will, and at the mercy not of a God who at least embodies justice (though a rather contradictory one) - we are worse, simply evolved apes who are doing the bidding of an evolutionary DNA - simply spreading our seed so a chain of protiens can flourish! How is that greater of purpose?!
Well, truly, in a purely reductionist world, that is a view. Of course, you could also say you are confusing the mechanism by which we came to be with an eternal and external purpose model. We could, instead, much as we have done in a moralistic ideology, decide to generate a purpose either individually or as a group. But that's thinking on the eighty year plan rather than the eternity plan you say? Well... I suppose it depends, but humor me that we can, suspend your disbelief and lean in as a pastor once asked. Let's return the favor to logic, science and great thought since we did it for people living in fishbellies, resurrections, floating axe heads and such. Over the next few weeks, we'll flush this idea out - establishing a base line of purpose before we even look at some of the more metaphysical ideas - which may or may not move our end product.

Find your purpose,
B.

Building A Foundation

noreply@blogger.com (Bert Johnson) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:06:00 +0000

My plate is full, my cup is overflowing, fish don't fry in the kitchen, time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like oranges. There was some mental whiplash. My plate is indeed full: I'm trying to get around to writing an article about the basic structure of Blogger's main template sections for Veritasti while I redesign it up to a professional level (graphically); I'm working a real job; I'm supposed to be writing a friend's website while waiting for the domain/isp work on another site to get done... it leaves no time for goofin' around. And the play's the thing!
Of course, play requires work, games require rules. Let's flip the script and instead of looking at this work in progress, let's look at Veritasti's new 'JaPop' template I'm slowly developing. Hopefully the end product will have an effect of "Hey, neat idea, it's very fun and Japanese Yogurt Shop looking.. woah, look at that detail in the lollipop, how'd he get the sugary glossy strand look?" The success remains to be seen. Of course, the frivolity of the design comes from hours upon hours of work. I'm working all my graphics from absolute scratch - hand drawn work - right now I'm making a giant swirl lollipop for a sun in my slowly growing virtual summer day theme made of virtual candy. The renderings, the mathmatics, the color swatches, the pixel by pixel fine tuning - and then of course we realize in the end, everything we see on the screen is actually a manipulation of two things - a 0 or a 1, firing off little shots of light at different frequencies. Of course, we don't really look at a webpage and see: 01001110101010100101111001110, nor do we even care to see something like this (which is the CSS for the peppermint flower):

#leftbotf {
background: url(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIekTGkN8rkkiI8f6wWWB_iNrXCay5GKFLbPscYj7BYmHM_AoEcaJbLhdEYThmyZY3Bq9tfMRU9_m3zVtkXT-ppcaXr0D13kbgD0fP8UYnlM2Hh0zFqzouIzdCmRkwF1u2ICuFmIknaNY/s400/botL.png);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: bottom left;
height: 240px;
width: 100%;
position: fixed;
bottom: 0px;
z-index: 4;
}

No one, myself included, finds that visually appealing to look at. However, combine it with

in the body of the code and a file called "botL.png", and you now have a peppermint candy flower with lime jelly wedge flowers. Of course, the picture itself is nothing but that 001001111010010110101001 from earlier. And the appearance is something quite different than the actual behind the scenes ugliness. Yet to a programmer, (think Link in the first Matrix), it becomes beautiful.
Much like Blogger Templates and people's interest in the final pretty product rather than the base structure, when we say 'our plate is full' we reference the plate, but we never take time to look at the actual chinaware. We give it a courtesy nod and then we immediately start talking about what's on it. The Taoists have a great metaphor for life: they compare the Tao and all of us to a field of flowers - when you look out upon the field, you see all these magnificent blossoms. What we tend to overlook however, is the soil underneath - the actual field itself from which the beauty grows and to which it will one day return. We never pause to look or thank the loam beneath the flower petals - it's to messy down there, smells funny.
My life it seems, is gaining a semblance of normalcy. This morning as I made myself some coffee and took a bite of danish, I contemplated a nap before work; I quickly recounted the television schedule wondering if I had missed anything over the week; I started a load of laundry and chuckled at the video of our President ducking Iraqi footwear; I thought about the different phone plans through AT&T and Verizon weighing the advantages of the Bold versus the Storm. I started to listen to a 'Learn Italian' CD in preparation for a possible Tuscan vacation next year. This, by all means, is a rather normal life. It would be pleasant to stop the inward searches and lay content in this new land.
I once wrote that for us to have a moral and social outlook that made any sense we needed to first establish why we're here. In the much belated 23Cantos (I'll tell you how it ends right now) I propose that in the end, we are both art and artist, but more than that, we are art, artist, art critic, museum guide, private collector, and most often if not most importantly, middle aged couple from Iowa that has no idea what the hell we're looking at. In order to truly appreciate the masterpiece of our existence, we have to understand what the artist was trying to portray in the first place, what's the message hidden in each and every stroke. And we have to appreciate it on many levels. We must experience the piece. The piece in question is not some separate thing from us, it is in fact ourselves. We are at the same time undeniably individual entities that are completely made up of the most basic of common materials and inextricably integral parts of the universe in which we find ourselves living; as the flower is seen completely separate from the earth upon which it too is completely reliant and made up of.
We don't need this information, but a true critic should not only appreciate the surface of a thing, but the grace and complexity within that makes it so. Try applying this to everything in your life, and as we look deeper, so will our own depth increase...

Dive deep!
Bert.

Long and Winding Road

noreply@blogger.com (Bert Johnson) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:48:00 +0000

So... I was reading through the last year's posts, both ones published and ones sitting in draft, and this blog had changed. Sad, really. It originally was a truthful thing, it talked of God and a quest for truth, it talked of a rather extreme decision to live amongst the street community of Berkeley. But over the last year, it was pretty much whining, or a blog post written for a particular reader or two, or what have you. I'm going to pair it up with "VeriTasti" and "Violet's Kitchen" - and we're going to start creating a series of tutorials on PhotoShop methods, web design, and blogging.
We'll use this site as the playground, as we'll set up some graphics designs, explore the Blogger Minima and Simple II templates, learn a little about HTML/CSS and even some (gasp!) javascript; we'll talk about what APIs are, how to use 'White Hat' SEO, and even look at how we can make this worth our while with Google AdSense. We'll describe the process over at VertiTasti. We'll display some art at Violet's Kitchen. And hopefully, when all is said and done, we'll have a great looking blog here at the Road, and get back on track with some of that witty and soul revealing writing... I've got some work to do on a real website right this moment, but I'll be back in a day or two with an article on Veritasti describe the architecture of the Blogger Template we'll be starting of with, and we'll do the easy cosmetic changes to set up our color swatch, and take a look at our overall setup from what is our goal in designing the blog down to which side we should have a sidebar on.
And every once in awhile, we'll sneak in a great metaphor, since hopefully, getting the road back on track by going back to where it first went astray - a C.S. Lewis favorite about going back to get ahead - and keep the traditions of senseless babbling and such alive...

Here's to a new road,
Bert.