Rome Didn't Fall in a Day

I've flown among the clouds and looked down upon primordial mountain ranges, dense with pine, etched with cul-de-sacs of development.

Propaganda

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if everyone went around pricing ... the dozens … of brands … which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to it attention through propaganda….

There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.
- 38

* * *

[T]oday, because ideas can be instantaneously transmited to any distance and to any number of people … geographical integration has been supplemented by many other kinds of grouping so that persons having the same ideas and intersts may be associated and regimented for common action even though they live thousands of miles apart.

* * *

[G]overnment is government only by virtue of public acquiescence.

-64

Innocence

It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is askew. The mirror is not an instrument of enlightenment but of illusion....

What the body creates is as much an expression of DNA as the body itself. The spider's web. Coral. The beaver's dam. If the essence of life is the information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems....

Manifest

It's location-based, at least in part. It's in the genes as well, and having been nurtured by deceit didn't exactly help. But what's going on now is more accute than all of that, and it's tied to this place in which I sit: the black and white view of the rectangular windows beyond my black, rectangular window, they people and the unimportance of that which they hold dear, the intricate systems they've built simultaneously to facilitate miscommunication and skirt accountability.

It is not me alone, but rather is the synergy between me and this, this ... this place.

Peter Steiner

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was in a forum full of newbies. 'Twenty years! I can't imagine enduring it for that long' to paraphrase the reaction of one of the neophytes present.

What I didn't say was that twenty years is a conservative estimate; thirty is a more accurate figure. And some of these poor kids don't even realize they're sick. They believe that this is a phase that they're going through, a series of bad relationships, a temporary downturn of events, growing pains - just as I probably believed decades ago.

What can someone like me possibly offer a bunch of kids like that other than Oprah-esque survivor stories? And what what can they possibly offer me that wouldn't sound like one of my hallucinogenic undergraduate experiments in non-traditional narrative?

Peter Steiner was right, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog.

It's Not At All Like Inertia

It's very hard to explain to those who have only experienced it fleetingly. Words can't describe it because there is no logical analogy. It fools the senses into believing that the laws of physics have been suspended. And as you survive all of the secret attacks, you come to the incipient realization that you're better than everyone else. But the realization is a tragic one.

One Cab and a Pinot Noir

Had two good California wines yesterday with our baked ziti, lamb and sausage with tomato sauce, and grilled vegetables: Greg Norman 2003 Cabernet; Aquinas 2005 Pinot Noir.