Slaughterhouse 67

Slaughterhouse 67
START TIME: 9:37 PM
END TIME: 10:08 PM
WORD COUNT: 799

Read the following article.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1969/12/prison-without-walls/8195/

What do you think about the use of constant surveillance of high-level offenders (murderers and sex-offenders) as opposed to incarceration, and do you think there is any concern over their rights to privacy while under surveillance? 

Do you think people are justified in their concern that the implementation of the technology in this context could somehow lead down a slippery slope toward totalitarian abuses on the general population?

Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be “scared straight,” is actively counterproductive. Such conditions—and U.S. prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male inmates facing sexual assault—typically harden criminals, making them more violent and predatory. Essentially, when we lock someone up today, we are agreeing to pay a large (and growing) sum of money merely to put off dealing with him until he is released in a few years, often as a greater menace to society than when he went in.

Clearly, the concept of prisons without walls would be hugely unpopular among the general population and the smallest systemic failure would cause an uproarious backlash. Given the previous statement from the article, how do you think the benefits of success (cost-reduction and rehabilitation) weigh against the risk of potential systemic failure (repeat offenses by those being actively monitored)? 

______________________________________

First off, please read the article. I'll wait right here. Thanks.

You're right when you assume that "the smallest systemic failure" wouldn't be allowed to happen. The reason it would never be allowed to happen is even the most inebriated, tweed-jacketed leftover Poli Sci hack who's barely awake in front of a lecture hall at a college that's changed names three times to avoid tax inquiries can point to an exact spot on a graph, and that graph answers the question of why we have to distinguish between George Bush Senior and Junior for the rest of our natural lives. There was no Dukakis administration because of Willie Horton.

It woiuldn't matter if you were leading offenders around with a shock collar and and armed guard, we pay people to warehouse incredibly dangerous individuals because we, as a society, have no way to deal with them. The courts rule that prison overcrowding amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The politicians who run the prisons don't care. There is no politician who gets elected by touting "an innovative approach that can get murderers to stop committing crimes" that doesn't consist of smashing rocks or receiving a lethal injection. 

 

A lot of people are convinced that the people in jail are too coddled. "They get cable TV and everything!" I probably entertained this thought a time or two myself, and then I worked in a jail for a year. It was there that I realized that if you have a large mass of people - and some of the units in the Clark County Detention Center have 75 inmates in a room with three guards - and you treat them as if they are worth nothing, then they will act as if they have nothing to lose. Many of the people in jail had an objective, and that objective was not to go to prison. I've spent time in the booking, medical, general population, and protective custody units of our jail (always on the law-abiding side of the counter, mind you) and you are in the overwhelming minority as a corrections officer. So the current setup of America's prisons and jails is putting the lives of those same personnel at risk. (Remember this when you read about "America's toughest sheriff" Joe Arpaio, whose guards at his tent city in Arizona are injured at a higher rate than comparable other correctional facilities. You can snicker about the green bologna and the pink underwear, but if you don't think someone's worthy of basic human dignity, chances are they won't think you are either.) So I'm in favor of anything that will keep the inmate population docile and compliant. For instance, I'd pull all the weight rooms out of all recreational facilities. Beach volleyball and step aerobics from here on out.

So while the Hawaii judge's work is interesting from a theoretical standpoint, it would work on a segment of the population that really doesn't seem to be what the public's most afraid of. The narcotics offenders in his courtroom may have been more than a few steps down the road as they made their way into the System, but ultimately they didn't sound far more harmless than the crews picking up trash along the side of the highway. They had obviously no desire to go to prison, and it was enough of a step for them to get them to continue to progress through drug rehabilitation with a far lower recidivism rate. (I can also argue that their testing and therapy, a fully funded rehab program in which they were very closely monitored, may have offered an even slightly better level of success than someone who wasn't part of the experiment could hope to enjoy or afford)I can offer a counterpoint, take the example of a gang member who's paroled for murder. He has objectives and loyalties that probably got him into fights or worse on the outside; for someone in that scenario, jail is more of a future engagement than something to be avoided at all costs. The violence that's plaguing Mexico has part of its origins in the American prison system. A murderer who's at home in the System but has an objective and can't find the way back - the anklet won't stop him.

I could also talk about the exceedingly small percentage of the population that's wearing these devices as having more to do with the gentleman's unfamiliarity with it in the family restaurant. If even the rumor of something like this occurring happened near almost any American small town, there would be more people looking at ankles in the areas nearby than an NBA trainer sees in pregame. I can't see the benefits outweighing the risks, particularly to benefit a constituency that's lost suffrage in many jurisdictions. Correctional empathy and common-sense applications may still be a long way away.

Writing Project Update - Slaughterhouse Returns

WORDS THESE PAST SEVERAL WEEKS: Hard to say. I've switched residences, switched cubicles, switched supervisors, switched nearly everything. But it's Friday night, the desk is facing northeast, and the keyboard still feels the same, so let's get to it.

RESPONSES TO LAST ENTRY: One, I think. I did have a number of people what happened and why I disappeared for a bit. and what can I say? Life intervened. It does that sometimes. In my time away I visited four states, jumped through the waves in the Pacific Ocean, hiked at Zion, dined at the Park Grill, watched friends get married and watched my children learn to enjoy swimming. If you can tell me how any of that doesn't beat sitting here typing, I'm sorry, I can't help you.
But I did miss it. And the amazing part is, I missed it enough that I wanted to get back into the routine of it. It's going to be great.

SUBMISSIONS: A bunch. I'll try to take them at different dates in the future, but I'd appreciate it if you could send some topics my way at slaughterhouse@jameslyden.com.

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION:

What do you think about the use of constant surveillance of high-level offenders (murderers and sex-offenders) as opposed to incarceration, and do you think there is any concern over their rights to privacy while under surveillance? 

Do you think people are justified in their concern that the implementation of the technology in this context could somehow lead down a slippery slope toward totalitarian abuses on the general population?

Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be “scared straight,” is actively counterproductive. Such conditions—and U.S. prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male inmates facing sexual assault—typically harden criminals, making them more violent and predatory. Essentially, when we lock someone up today, we are agreeing to pay a large (and growing) sum of money merely to put off dealing with him until he is released in a few years, often as a greater menace to society than when he went in.

Clearly, the concept of prisons without walls would be hugely unpopular among the general population and the smallest systemic failure would cause an uproarious backlash. Given the previous statement from the article, how do you think the benefits of success (cost-reduction and rehabilitation) weigh against the risk of potential systemic failure (repeat offenses by those being actively monitored)?

Kelli

Oh, this is going to be fun. See you before the calendar flips.

500 WORDS FINISHED BY: 9/24-25 midnight

Tap-tap-tap...

"You coming back out?"
"Maybe. How long has it been?"
"Four months."
"Seriously?"
"Yep. 125 days total. What were you, hibernating?"
"Something like that. Can you give me a few weeks to get settled?"
"Deal."

Slaughterhouse returns September 24. New entry will be randomly drawn on the 23rd.
Topic suggestions welcome at slaughterhouse@jameslyden.com.

Writing Project Update

Slaughterhouse is taking the weekend off. Content next Tuesday. Thanks.

Slaughterhouse 66

START TIME: 9:49 PM
END TIME: 10:30 PM
WORD COUNT: 548

"Elaborate on the 'Turtle vs. Hitler's Skull' question; Briefly explain why you would rather display Hitler's Skull than keep a pet Turtle and what you find to be interesting about the idea of Hitler's Skull as an artifact. Then, pick an historical artifact that you would actually like to display in your living room without coercion and explain why."

From the Chuck Klosterman book "Sex, Lies, and Cocoa Puffs" here's one of the questions he asks to determine if he can really love someone:

"3. Let us assume there are two boxes on a table. In one box, there is a relatively normal turtle; in the other, Adolf Hitler’s skull. You have to select one of these items for your home. If you select the turtle, you can’t give it away and you have to keep it alive for two years; if either of these parameters are not met, you will be fined $999 by the state. If you select Hitler’s skull, you are required to display it in a semi-prominent location in your living room for the same amount of time, although you will be paid a stipend of $120 per month for doing so. Display of the skull must be apolitical.

Which option do you select?"

(I chose Hitler's skull, because I have a hard time with pets with my schedule the way it is.)

I’m not sure that my home is the appropriate place for the display of historical artifacts, but given the premise of the question (which I’m assuming has to do with what value someone places on money, and if they’re willing to do something socially repulsive in order to make a sum of money, versus performing a simple task against the threat of a fine)

My concern about choosing a historical artifact for display is it would have to be interesting enough that I would be willing to look at it all the time, but not so interesting that it would draw throngs of people, or require armed security, or lead to me being interrupted at all hours of the night by even the benignly curious. This rules out most religious artifacts or anything relating to Elvis. It’s also why Bill Gates had no issues with buying Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks – he already lives in a gazillion dollar compound that you can’t just stroll into.

If I had to choose something that were aesthetically pleasing, it would probably have to be small, to be displayed properly. For instance, there’s a Star Wars toy in my curio cabinet, from one of the newer movies that I haven’t seen. At the bottom of it, there’s the word “Coruscant.” If you open it up a little plastic figure floats up and down for a few seconds. Why? What does it mean? It looks and behaves like a little snow globe. Why do I have it?

Because several years ago, my then-wife and I lost a game of Uno with three other couples, and the penalty required us to display said object in a prominent place until the next game. Well, much like Robin Williams in the game “Jumanji”, one of the couples moved back to the Midwest, another player moved to California, we split up and I’m somehow forced to follow these rules as if they were some sort of a blood oath. I’m going to be stuck with this damned thing well into the next life. So the question’s not if I’m capable of doing it; that’s been answered. But what should it be?

I think it would be interesting to have something that looked fairly ordinary, but had a terrific story behind it. I thought that the first wrist watches that were displayed in the Louvre Museum were fascinating, and the knowledge that those were crafted without the benefit of modern tools or even much in the way of lighting or magnification boggled the mind.

Maps would be excellent. How on earth did Lewis and Clark know that river went in that direction? I have a GPS-enabled phone and I can’t find my way through clearly marked neighborhoods with signs. These guys found prairie dogs! I’m not good with vermin, so when these guys hauled off and sent one to President Jefferson as a gift, that might have been taking the exploratory spirit a little too far.

Ultimately, my home is a spectacularly bad destination for a historical artifact, and I’m more of a “going places” person than a “collecting things” person. But I think an early draft of a map or an early attempt at a clock that you could wear on your wrist would be amazing.

Writing Project Update

WORDS THIS WEEK: 1000. Illness, projects, what have you.

RESPONSES TO LAST WEEK'S ENTRY: 2.

SUBMISSIONS THIS WEEK: 3 (Kelli, Kelli, Kelli, Ken, Ken, Ken)

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: "Elaborate on the 'Turtle vs. Hitler's Skull' question; Briefly explain why you would rather display Hitler's Skull than keep a pet Turtle and what you find to be interesting about the idea of Hitler's Skull as an artifact. Then, pick an historical artifact that you would actually like to display in your living room without coercion and explain why."

The background, and the answer, appears shortly.

500 WORDS FINISHED BY: 4/16-17 midnight

Slaughterhouse 65

START TIME: 10:32 PM
END TIME: 11:33 PM
WORD COUNT: 525

“Write a diary entry.” –Ken Faikus

Dear Keyboard,

Today was full. There was no work of the occupational variety, which granted me one day where everybody could conceivably hate me behind my back without worrying about my potential appearance. There was a great deal to accomplish but there was no set time frame in which to accomplish it. I was awake early enough considering the lateness of the checkout time last night and I don’t think I slept late enough to inspire any resentment. I got the pictures done that I said I would do this morning and got those sent over after three tries. The camera saves the pictures with preposterously high detail and the SMTP servers for Google don’t allow this sort of foolishness.

Looking back on the day I think that I got everything done that I needed to. I remembered that I forgot the scotch tape when I was inadvertently reminded at 9:30 and I remembered that I forgot the maple syrup at 6 PM when I was on my way someplace else. I remembered to buy lucky cereal and I’m laughing sardonically at the last time that I had any of it, which now seems more than a million miles away.

I didn’t eat very well today but I ate sufficiently. I did work out for an hour, running a glacially slow three miles and doing an abdominal workout. I renewed for another year at the gym and gleefully noted that the charge for my membership comes to 50 cents a day.

I took [my girlfriend’s] bike to McGhies to get tuned up and prepared for her fitting on Monday afternoon. I said hello to old friends at the bike shop and caught them up on the lives of those around me that they knew about.

They still ask how Nannette’s doing; I mentioned she just moved back out west. She’s now done triathlon camps and is looking to race more seriously. [My ex-wife] is doing a triathlon. [My girlfriend] is doing a triathlon. All around me are people training, people getting faster, people thinking of what that first race is going to be like. The first race is one of those experiences I would gladly not do over again; the bottomless nerves, the swimming paranoia, the confusion, the endless obsessing over transition. Give me the cold dreary professionalism and thousand yard start of my third race in Chicago, or my third in San Diego, or the fourth Las Vegas Triathlon. Races where I could identify the climbs by where specific weeds were growing on the side of the road, where every speck of what I was feeling was already burned in my muscles from years prior. The first of anything is always the worst when you never know what to expect.

The kids are doing great and ate well, they found each other’s Easter eggs and helped out and had fun playing together. They fell asleep as quickly as I wanted to, but I had writing and such to take care of. There are things to do, people to meet, and places to be tomorrow. Today was pretty good and tomorrow will be even better.

Writing Project Update

WORDS THIS WEEK: 1000. Slight improvement but nothing spectacular. I'm starting to get a schedule down, now I just have to feel like writing a little more and make some progress. Events are overtaking introspection, and it's incredible to get to live life rather than just hear about it.

RESPONSES TO LAST WEEK'S ENTRY: 2.

SUBMISSIONS THIS WEEK: 2 (Ken, Ken)

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: "Write a diary entry."

Sure, why not. Plane leaves at midnight and the entry will be on it.

500 WORDS FINISHED BY: 4/9-10 midnight

Slaughterhouse 64

START TIME: 7:45 PM
END TIME: 9:20 PM
WORD COUNT: 646

Choose one place in the world you would most like to visit. Explain your choice in terms of the social history of any significant period that interests you. – Kelli George

I’ve been lucky enough to travel a few places, but if we’re going to throw time travel into the mix, I would like to visit Japan in the early 1990’s to follow the career of Chad Rowan, the Hawaiian-born sumo wrestler know as Akebono.

If you’ve never seen a sumo match, it’s essentially like watching trucks fight. In a society where men’s height rarely exceeds six feet tall, Akebono stood 6’8” and weighed 500 pounds. He had longer legs than most sumo wrestlers, and he had the record and the reputation to achieve sumo’s highest rank, yokozuna.

And here’s the conundrum. A wrestler promoted to yokozuna has a few more responsibilities than soda commercials and grocery store openings. Sumo is heavily associated with the Shinto religion, and was this something that could be bestowed upon a foreigner?

Another Hawaiian, Konishiki, ascended to ozeki, one step below yokozuna. In 1992, the chairman of the Yokozuna Deliberation Committee announced, “We wanted to make doubly sure that Konishiki is worthy of being a grand champion. Therefore, we decided to wait another tournament.” Konishiki was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “If I were Japanese, I would be yokozuna already.” Apologies were demanded and given. He never made yokozuna.

Meanwhile, Sadaharu Oh holds the Japanese baseball home run record of 55 in a single season. Three foreign players have come close to breaking the record – Randy Bass, Karl “Tuffy” Rhodes and Alex Cabrera – and each time that they faced an Oh-managed club late in the season, they were intentionally walked rather than given a chance at breaking the record. Bass was walked on four pitches in four at bats and would have been walked a fifth time had he not practically thrown the bat at an outside pitch and hit a flare into right field. The pitching coach of Oh’s team explained it would be “distasteful” for a foreign-born player to break the record.

Akebono became a Japanese citizen, renounced his American citizenship, converted to Shintoism, married a Japanese woman and followed every example and cleared every hurdle to become the first foreign-born yokozuna.

Something as trivial as wrestlers and baseball may not seem to present much in terms of social history. But sport can serve as a prism with which to view a nation as a whole, and try to remember the backdrop for this time period in Japanese and American relations. Toyota was dominating the auto industry and sending General Motors on the road to ruin (before the American mania for SUVs resurrected American manufacturers for a while). They had purchased Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center. China had yet to coalesce as an industrial center. The fearsome Other to the American manufacturing sector was the Japanese. The real estate bubble was in full roar in Japan and their economic “lost decade” was just starting to occur, and they didn’t know it. (Japanese financial firms gorged themselves on a combination of hyperinflated land prices and extremely cheap and easy credit, and when the prices of the assets collapsed several “zombie firms” were seen as too big to fail. Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before.)

So in a sport that was central to the American identity, Americans were not allowed to succeed so that the Japanese league could retain its cultural moorings, and in a sport central to the Japanese identity, an American broke through and succeeded (and ultimately led to limits on the number of foreign born sumo wrestlers allowed to participate in professional sumo in Japan). I thought that the contrast of a society devoted to exporting goods, having spent an overheated decade as an economic powerhouse, that was fighting to retain its national identity through sport would be an interesting thing to see, particularly with the foresight of knowing how fundamentally different Japan’s global footprint would be in only a few years.

Writing Project Update - Plea For Continuance

It works like this. You can have something really good on Sunday night - I assure you, the question is excellent - or you can have something awful that I only have 20 minutes for.

I thought so. See you Sunday night.

NEXT UPDATE DUE BY: 4/4-5 midnight

Slaughterhouse 63

START TIME: 9:35 PM
END TIME: 11:01 PM
WORD COUNT: 504

“You've been doing these for over a year now, so what have you learned? Where have you gotten better and what are still weaknesses?”

Taking a clear look at this project is hard for me to do, because I’ve tried to impose a discipline on myself that writing has never really required. I know that I can write SOMETHING that comes out around 500 words in about an hour or so, that it may be confusing, or hilarious, or occasionally incoherent.

The most interesting part of the exercise, other than the topics at hand, is the timeframe that I chose to do it. I picked Friday nights with a midnight deadline because, in all honesty, I’m usually up. But increasingly I find myself keeping those hours in a sort of twilight, half-asleep-but not-awake haze that leads to unfinished sentences, meandering topics, and tacked on addendums in a futile attempt to cross the word threshold. I look at the finished results on Facebook as well as the blog site, and usually I’m amused to find out that the words are all spelled correctly, but I’ve forgotten to finish a sentence or a paragraph.

Slaughterhouse is not good writing, but fast writing, the same way that fast neurosurgery may not necessarily be good neurosurgery. Everyone who sets eyeballs on this reinforces the idea that I should write some more. I know that I should be writing about the projects that I’ve been working on, but right now it’s not as if the rest of my life is running with Swiss-watch precision. My work days scurry into the hours on either side of them. Training is ever-present. We’re beset with clouds of mulberry pollen all over the valley. I’m driving all over and actually enjoying life as a participant and not a spectator.

Where I’ve gotten better is just writing what I want and letting it go; avoiding the temptation to go back and repair everything was not easy to arrive at, but once I forced myself to realize I had to let the stuff I was doing stand by itself as I was prizing speed over quality, it made the rest of it go a little bit quicker.

I think I’ve done a better job of picturing who the target reader is, and interestingly, it’s no one who’s probably heard most of the stories or comparisons before. Occasionally I feel like I’m writing to the questioner but that assumes we each know the back stories – usually true but irrelevant to most of the broader audience. I have had the distinct pleasure of having other people quote back the experiences that I’ve had (and forgotten that I had written about) to me as I was talking to them about other topics entirely. That was surreal.

Weaknesses still include my maddening inability to write a beginning, a middle, and an end, the fact that I juggle points around whether or not they’re germane to the subject, and that more than a few of these haven’t provided any enlightenment but have the grim feel of punching the clock. Granted, it’s designed to be a punishment, but the reader shouldn’t feel like it’s theirs.

Writing Project Update

WORDS WRITTEN THIS WEEK: 250. I haven't had time to touch anything project-related in a very long time.

RESPONSES TO LAST QUESTION: 1, correctly pointing out that I botched the syllable count in the third haiku.

SUBMISSIONS THIS WEEK: 3 (Ken, Ken, and Ken)

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: You've been doing these for over a year now, so what have you learned? Where have you gotten better and what are still weaknesses?

500 WORDS DUE BY: Midnight 3/26-27

Slaughterhouse 62

START TIME: 9:24 PM
END TIME: 10:46 PM
WORD COUNT: 501 (Seriously, look it up. I’m exhausted, but it’s for real.)

“In the form of a poem with a clear rhyme scheme or a clear structure of syllabic count, what are your thoughts on the NCAA tournament?”

Pretty sure I’m now
Assured of complete failure
With 50 games left

My West regional
Hacked apart with a Ginsu
Chose Florida State

Must have thought it was
January, football
And puzzled seniors

Of course they could beat
The Syracuse Orangemen –
What have those guys done?

National number one?
I should be watching the games
Or maybe TV

Lost to Gonzaga
Popular in March, disappears
Just like St. Patrick

And whoa, look, Georgetown?
This was not the Ohio
I picked to beat you

John Thompson would have
Twisted open someone’s head
Like a coconut

What? His kid coaches?
Suppose next you’ll tell me that
Ewing’s kid plays too

(Wikipedia:
“Jim, if you were any less
Informed, you’d be dead.

“He was drafted by
The Kings, traded to Houston,
Then wound up in New York.

Played in the D-League,
Hurt his knee pretty badly,
Joining Jamaica.”

“Jamaica?” I thought.
“How the irie have fallen –
Dad started Dream Team.”

Then I realized
Being prone to distraction
Had several drawbacks.

I returned to the
Scene of withering collapse –
My erstwhile bracket.

Louisville got thumped
Which made my bracket entry
10 points less funny

The name that I chose
Was “Pitino’s Dine and Dash”
True schadenfreude

You’d think a wealthy
Motivational speaker
Won’t tryst on the floor

But apparently
He was overtaken by
Passion, not hygiene

Guess I picked Marquette
With the misguided belief
Dwyane Wade was still there

Somehow and some way
My Elite Eight selections
Are still quite intact

Picked Temple; looks like
Those numbskulls get drubbed by the
Ivy League Champions

They lost to Cornell!
The hotel management school!
They’d better walk home!

Notre Dame lost, and
Suddenly my smile brightens
With dark-hearted glee

If the football team
Joined the Big East Conference:
Pounded like cheap veal.

But in March Madness
You collect conference bucks.
Doesn’t work solo.

UNLV lost,
Newly minted Las Vegans
Act disappointed.

They miss the days of
Ol’ Jerry Tarkanian
When they weren’t from here.

“If a kid can’t read
And after 4 years, reads some,
You’ve done right by him.”

Are you thinking that
A true university
Should aspire to more?

You must be in league
With those racist jackals at
The NCAA.

The world got to see
How genuinely crazy
This place really is.

The courtside is still
Nicknamed “Gucci Row”
By the media

UNLV’s coach
Lon Kruger, fits in here like
Bacon with gum drops

The former coach was
Bill Bayno, who got
Caught with some hookers

I know! In VEGAS!
You’ve really got to wonder
“Wow, what are the odds?”

God knows where he’s at.
Wikipedia must know;
I could not care less.

The happy mistake
That would have let me win this;
It never happened.

If my picks were an
Expensive thoroughbred horse
They would have a limp

Got me an express
First Class ticket to Suckville
Population: Me


Clicking on “Word Count…”
Like a crack-addled mule deer;
Am I almost done?

But I finished this
Insane assignment in time;
Victory is mine!

Writing Project Update

WORDS WRITTEN THIS WEEK: 250. (Seriously? You mean it's already Friday?)

RESPONSES TO LAST QUESTION: 2, who interestingly each had different ideas of what the metaphors were. Were they right? Yes.

SUBMISSIONS THIS WEEK: 3 (Ken, Ken, and Ken)

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: "In the form of a poem with a clear rhyme scheme or a clear structure of syllabic count, what are your thoughts on the NCAA tournament?"

Ye Gods. I've seen a grand total of eight minutes of basketball in the background all weekend. Let's give it a try.

500 WORDS DUE BY: Midnight 3/19-20

Slaughterhouse 61

START TIME: 9:45 PM
END TIME: 11:23 PM

"Describe an aspect of your life only using metaphors."

The metronome is ticking, ticking, ticking, and I’m losing myself in the rhythm. The notes are laid out in front of me and so much of this piece is committed to memory that I’m playing with something much deeper than fingers and ears and timing, but I’m going for precise, I’m not interested in playing just to hear it. I stopped having to actually play the piano to know what it sounded like many, many years ago. Maybe you can read the script from a movie and hear the actors saying the lines that you saw play out? That’s me. I can read the sheet music and hear the symphony. Look at the walls – I’ve been there and done that.

When a lot of people hear the piano, they can identify it as such. Everybody’s probably been near one or touched one and maybe learned a song or two. I did a little more – OK, a LOT more – than that, but I still need to practice. There’s an aspect of something more finite that someone who walked by the room right now would understand that I’m looking for. I want the piece to work completely, and there’s a spot over here that’s a little bit off. Something seems a little out of tune, the high E is a little too sharp, and the natural translation that I’m hoping for isn’t quite there.

Repetition, tuning, more tuning, more repetition.

The funny part about it is, I’m not that good of a piano player. Don’t get me wrong, I can play, and I can almost certainly play better than you. But the end result of all of this piano, night after night, day after day, is it’s hard for me to just sort of lose myself in what it sounds like to play for the hell of it. A lot of times it isn’t fun because I’m searching for those minutiae, the difference between me and some of the greatest pianists in the world. I’m listening for fluidity. I’m listening for how it will fit together with the orchestra. Right there is where the bass player comes in. Here’s where the drummer will do the fill with the cymbal.

But I can still let it go, and I still love it, and when it all sets up and I get something to feel the way that I want it, everything all lined up and straight and smooth and precise – I love it even more, and I know enough to appreciate it. What I’ve never understood, though, is the assumption that if I walk into someone else’s house, and there’s a piano there, that I couldn’t possibly want to play it because it isn’t a concert grand in a room with session musicians. If I didn’t love the sound of it I’d never have wound up in that room with those session musicians. I can play just to play, without flourish, without showing off, without a care in the world. It’s still fun. If it stopped being fun, I’d worry.

Writing Project Update

Words written this week: Very, very few. I was busy getting my head shaved and working like a crack-addled lab rat. It simply wasn't happening.

Last Week's Responses: One.

This week's questions: 4 (Ken, Ken, Ken, and Anonymous)

This week's question: "Describe an aspect of your life only using metaphors."

Does an allegory count? I'll have to look it up. We'll be wrapped up at midnight.

RESPONSE DUE BY: 3/12-13 midnight

Writing Project Update

I just got home from work and Slaughterhouse won't be done in three minutes, so I'm taking the night off. I'll write Sunday if the chance arises. Thanks for your patience.

Slaughterhouse 60

START TIME: 9:37 PM
END TIME: 10:19 PM
WORD COUNT: 617

“Please give your personal application of "zeitgeist" to your last essay and include your view from your position on your space time continuum; also consider others younger and older.”

Now, what I was talking about in the first essay was the importance of attempting to participate in content or activities that were outside of someone’s defined comfort zone, because of the danger of living in a self-selected realm of knowledge. If you never make any effort to have your assumptions questioned, you’ll have no idea if you’re right.

Now the self-selected realm of knowledge that I’m picking from is a diverse range of opinion, because that’s important to me; I’m almost certainly reading someone’s work who you absolutely can’t stand, because part of why I’m reading them is to know why I disagree with them. I know that if I threw up my hands and dismissed every single person who disagreed with me as “haters,” that certainly doesn’t infer that I’m making a particularly persuasive argument. Unfortunately most of politics is currently conducted in this fashion.

From a cultural or music perspective, I’m at an age where I am simply no longer the target consumer. The people who buy music by the truckload, like I used to, Maybe you had to listen to a song by Beyonce that had nine writers and six words in it, but I actually know why I hate it because I tried so hard to get through it and couldn’t. I don’t really need to force myself to listen to anything new musically, because the audience is so fragmented that every radio station only plays the same 10-15 songs between the same 7-8 commercials. My sister and my younger coworkers have a much greater grasp on the cultural and music zeitgeist than I do; they’re around younger people, they see more movies, they have the pace and energy to worry about those sorts of things. I hope to God that there aren’t a lot of Us Weekly junkies over at the Strategic Air Command, but I think I know better.

And with where I’m at in my life – single, two kids, busy, self involved hobbies and interests – that’s why I’m not that immersed in it. I’m even a part of the growing number of Americans who don’t watch very much television, so all those big, collective moments that seem to happen every late spring that involve the disappearance of a beloved network television show that less than a few million people watch, I miss out on what all the fuss is about. I mean, were there people who missed any of those benchmark departure shows – Cheers, Seinfeld, Sopranos, Everybody Loves Raymond – who won’t have the opportunity to watch syndicated reruns or boxed episodes of the DVDs until the end of time if that’s what they so chose? Somewhere right now, a cable television station is showing a “Seinfeld” rerun.

I imagine when I was younger it was more important because it was a link to the rest of the world, and when I’m older I’ll be able to view current events against the perspective of more personal background and history. How much more fragmented things can get and retain a perspective that encompasses a collective zeitgeist, I’m not sure. If you think of something like Facebook, where the first page for everyone consists entirely of news from their friends, and the option exists to block news that you do not want to hear. (Since this usually relates to simulated criminology and agriculture, all is not lost.) The journey has been interesting, but the path ahead is murky. It’ll be intriguing to see where it goes.

Writing Project Update

Writing Project Update

Words this week: Less than 500. I did a lot of video work for Space Monkeys promotion this week (the results of which you can see splattered across my friends' and my Facebook pages) and worked late on a number of occasions. Rest assure that everything's falling by the wayside pretty much equally, not merely the writing.

RESPONSES TO LAST WEEK: 5 - and you wouldn't believe this, but my office found it rather popular.

QUESTIONS THIS WEEK: There were 3, but this week's winner is Jay Lyden, who contributed the largest individual donation to the Space Monkeys and the St. Baldrick's Foundation. You can follow his example and get us closer to our goal by donating at https://www.stbaldricks.org/teams/spacemonkeys . Thank you!

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: Please give your personal application of "zeitgeist" to your last essay and include your view from your position on your space time continuum; also consider others younger and older.

I'll try not to meander, but I think I have an idea.

RESPONSE DUE BY: 2/26-27 midnight

Slaughterhouse 59

Slaughterhouse 59
START TIME: 10:33 PM
END TIME: 11:32 PM
WORD COUNT: 738

"Write a scene as though your life were a sitcom."

INTERIOR

A set of half-wall cubicles in a very grimy basement, with four desks being shown.

At a desk in the back corner, a shorter Asian gentleman is staring closely at a too-small computer monitor, tapping his right foot obsessively and singing along with the radio. His desk is meticulously neat, pencils organized, and he’s wearing a suit.

In the opposite corner is a woman with stacks of magazines lining several bookshelves, four framed pictures of different cats (one of them showing an article surrounding it that makes it apparent it was cut out of a magazine, minimizing the possibility that she actually owns the cat in question), and multiple tins of cat food.

Toward the forefront, staring straight up, is a heavyset gentleman with a shaved head. He is staring at the ceiling at first glance. A second glance proves he is asleep. A quick listen reveals he is snoring.

A twitchy, loud guy in a sports coat with a laptop bag slung over his shoulder strides through the glass door on the left, past a paper sign that indicates the door must stay closed. Four months ago he replaced the paper sign with a mirror image of the words on the sign showing through the other side of the glass, as if the letters had suddenly decided to turn around and face the other direction. No one has noticed.

TWITCH (into cell phone) Loved? Adored? Popular? You’ve got to be out of your mind. We’ll be lucky if they don’t want to shoot us. I know right now what my day’s gonna be. I’m going to walk into this meeting and the only thing that I’m going to come away with, after an hour and a half, is that when I walked in the door downstairs, the security guard at the desk didn’t take the snap off of his holster. That’s the ONLY thing that might go right. It’s all our fault. That’s why we’re here.

Twitch sits down at his desk, grabs an orange gumball from a jar on his desk, mimes dribbling it twice, and throws it at the heavyset gentleman’s mouth. It bounces off of his eye, startling him awake.

HEAVY: What the hel….lo, Mr. Happiness.

A shot of the floor reveals nine other gumballs scattered about.

TWITCH puts on a phone headset and covers his left ear. He is still talking on the phone as he’s doing this.

TWITCH: Look, if they actually LIKED everything we did, if they were so happy with the course of their day that they sent us cards and pizzas and nice little notes that said we were good to them? You know what that would mean? It would mean that when they ruined everything, when they lost the file they were working on, when they caught the virus, when they moved a whole mess of folders around on a group drive for no reason at all, they couldn’t blame us and they would actually OWN UP to the fact it was THEIR fault. They’d have to go home and look in the mirror at night and splash a glass of cold water on their face, and say, “You know what? The computer works fine. I’m the one who ruined it. I have an easy job. I don’t mine coal or unload cargo ships. I’m not a landscaper working in 110 degrees. All I do is push some buttons so that other people don’t have to. That’s all. And I suck at it.” You think that’s going to happen? You think anyone’s going home tonight and saying, ‘Wow, Thank Christ for IT, otherwise I’d be looking for paper files in a cabinet for about a week instead of pushing a couple buttons.’ Trust me, our only hope is that we stay right where we are at the moment – a cab ride away from the overwhelming desire to take our own life. I gotta run. I’ll talk to you in a bit.

MAGAZINE LADY (reading from screen) Wow. Guess who died.

No one responds.

CORNER SINGER: (singing) “I thought I knew what love was/What did I know/Close pays car lawn for Trevor/Pie wood bust get ‘em snow”

TWITCH stares at him with his mouth agape and adjusts the volume in his headset. He looks at a large digital clock next to his monitor, which reads 7:02.

TWITCH (to himself): 30 more years of this and I can retire.