>From Frank to me: In order to communicate ( meaningfully ) I must impose upon myself the rules of discourse of this particular culture.
In doing so I become less particular. a) Pissing into the wind b) A wise investment ( choose one ) That's a tough one for me to distinctify Frank. Many times I've wondered how you tell the difference - in the moment. I mean, it's easy in retrospect to tell the degenerates from the messiahs, but in the moment it's not always so clear. Was Don Quixote pissing in the wind when he charged the windmill? Or was he fulfilling a deep personal need which affected millions in a ripple effect through all time? I'll give you two different examples from my own life, occurring around the same time - attending a RepliTech Expo and something I call the "YouthSpace Experience.". The RepliTech Expo came about because of my first e-mail list involvement - Guy Kawasaki's Thunderlizards, it was called. It was a Mac advocacy group, active in the mid '90s and I got involved with it for research and learning purposes because I was the Mac guy for the two competing ISPs in Grass Valley in those days. In those days and at that time there were geeky types and there were Apple types, and little did they intersect. I happened to be a quasi-geeky Apple guy and it served me well because for the most part the geeks didn't speak Apple. But because of Apple's heavy promotion of their machines to the education field, most of the teachers had Apples. So even while the Mac had only about 5% of the market share that DOS_PC enjoyed, more than half the customers for this new internet thing were Mac users. And it was through a friendship with someone on this ThunderLizard mailing list, that I scored a couple tickets to this Exposition in San Jose called the RepliTech Expo. I'd recently bought a motorcycle fixer-upper, a Suzuki 1000GS and gotten it running and decided to take it to this expo, staying with my in-laws who still lived in the Bay Area. The expo itself was fascinating. I got my first peek at CD-R and this new-fangled format called DVD that was predicted totake over the market in a few short years. They had actual, working CD replication plants on the premises and you could watch as little plastic pebbles were turned into information-bearing disks - one they were set up, they'd run off CDs at a couple of cents per. They also had duplicators, which were more expensive per CD, but much cheaper to buy the equipment and run off copies. And as you all know now, destined to become ubiquitous. But after the first day, I'd seen all there was to see and being bored, I went next do to the San Jose Convention Center to the huge San Jose Library. I had been seeking a book, for some time - Big Sur, by J. Kerouac. Every bookstore I'd enquired didn't have it, and every library I'd enquired it was already checked out, and I really wanted to read it. The San Jose Library had it in this room where you couldn't check it out. I had to stay in there and read it, and so I did. For eight hours. At the end of the day, I finished the book and then rode my bike home, along my favorite route from the Bay Area to Sacramento - HWY 12 from Antioch. A slower trip, beside the Sacramento River and through the Delta towns along the way, over levees and drawbridges. A pleasant backroad experience. That night I stopped at this one particular place, a postage-stamp park and rest area, popular with windsurfers and a good place to pull over and have a smoke and a pee. It felt so good to be on a motorcycle again. It felt good to be on the road and on my own for a short while, it felt good to take a piss into the wind and Kerouac's poem from Big Sur kept reverberating in my brain, haunting somehow. Resonating somehow. --" There's all that, and all my fine thoughts, even unto my ditty written to the sea "I took a pee, into the sea, acid to acid, and me to ye" yet I went crazy inside three weeks. For who could go crazy that could be so relaxed as that: but wait: there are the signposts of something wrong." Poor Jack. So true. So Frank, the point of that poem as I took it is - We are fluid. I had some ideas about starting a CD duplication business. They came to naught. I had dreams of taking a vacation on my bike - the clutch burned up on the way home and I had more pressing responsibilities. It came to naught. Jack couldn't handle success and drank himself to an early grave. My pee wended its way on the wind to the sea, and blended in to nothingness. And yet, I deem the whole experience a very wise investment indeed. The ripples in my life grew outward and inward. YouthSpace grew from the attempt of NCCN - Nevada County Community Network - to get involved with bringing kids into our non-profit endeavor. For a while, NCCN was the only CoOp ISP in the country that I'd ever heard of. As a non-profit, it did a lot of really great things in the community. My earlier interest in Community is what got me involved with those guys in the first place, and I was so eager and idealistic that I naturally became the spearhead for the more communal endeavors of the organization. Most of the people involved were interested in money and profit and using this new invention to get rich somehow. I was integral in organizing efforts to provide computers and training to the libraries and to the senior center and to this YouthSpace thing. The Senior Center computers and the librarys still carry the internet stations today that I helped bring about, tho nobody remembers how or by whom they got there, but the youthspace idea pretty much petered out. The organization went away, but the effects did not. Those same 14 and 15 year old geeky guys who I nurtured and gathered together became the future sysops of NCCN and beyond, far surpassing me in their coding mastery, but needing that little gathering of social oomph to get started on their own individual roads. The way I helped was through arranging the elements of avaliable to me. The idea occured one warm autumn evening as I was applying a coat of Navajo White to the walls of this old apartment in Grass Valley, working for the landlord who was a friend of my ma's. Semi-gloss on the trim. >From wiki: Navajo White is an orangish white color, and derives its name from its similarity to the background color of the Navajo Nation flag. The name "Navajo White" is usually only used when referring to paint. From the 1970s to the 1990s it was the standard interior paint color used in most tract homes in the United States and especially apartment complexes as it does not show stains from cigarette smoke or fingerprints. In recent years it has lost favor to other shades of white, grey, and pastel colors. ---------- Well I didn't know that about the Navajo Flag... that's interesting. But I sure knew about cheap apartment complexes and tract homes. I've often encountered the color in doing remodeling or maintenance for apartment managers. These particular old apartments in Grass Valley, were small, about eight or so units, right next to the cemetery and up on a hill, across the freeway from the main part of town. I got the idea for YouthSpace as a kind of an informal clubhouse, hangout for a bunch of these kids interested in linux networking. It was also a convenient place to sleep in town, to avoid the long drive back home at a time when we were (like now) relatively broke and relatively short on reliable vehicles. I'd given up my nailbags in the interest of something different for a change, but having one foot in the old contractor's realm came in handy in negotiating the use of this space while working on maintenance on these old apartments. I got to stay there and use it while working on it. On a warm fall evening, I could look across the valley, see the lights of the town coming on below me and away, and feel part of my town, yet apart too. One side of the apartment overlooked the town, the other overlooked the cemetary. Something evocative arose as I was slathering on the paint, semi-gloss on the trim. Trying to get the smoke of old cigarettes off the walls. Something about the very name of "Navajo White" that reminded me of who I was. A poor-white-trash covering of low-rent life? Maybe. Maybe not. Like I said, degenerates and messiahs look an awful lot alike in the moment. Staring out that window at the lights of the oblivious people of my town - people going about their lives, pursuing their dreams with no idea about the potential to connect, create and transcend that I was exploring in those days gave me a feeling of independence and freedom that I couldn't explain at the time. Though I did try. Kerouac was fond of pointing out that "beat" resonated more strongly with "beatific" than it did with beat down and out. You can't transcend static social patterns as long as you're striving to uphold social standards. You have to be willing to pursue your dreams independent of worrying about how others may judge you by outward appearance. My dad was the oldest male of five kids, grew up poor as sin in the Tennessee hills when his daddy took off when my dad was just 13. He fled the "poor white trash" moniker his whole life. But I grew up watching his striving to overcome social insecurity and it never appealed to me to care that much what other people thought. Finally in a college history class I learned that poor white trash was a label that applied to the low-land slave states of Alabama and Georgia, where if you were not a rich plantation owner or a valuable slave, then you were socially worthless. In fact, it was the denigration of man's labor due to slavery that started the whole Republican party. The hill people of Tennessee were of a different sort. They even fought on the side of the Union in the civil war - even though Tennessee was technically a slave state. But the hill people of Tennessee came from a fiercely independent lot - the Scotch Irish who were the Scottish Protestants who fled Scotland to Ireland, and then America, got along well with the pragmatic Cherokee and intermarried and had a lot to do with the American Character formation. Those ties run deep and strong. Those are my people. We don't kiss ass and we don't forget insults to our honor. We can keep a feud going a long time. Poor? Undoubtedly. White? Somewhat. Trash? I dare anyone to say it to my face. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
