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SMOKE & MIRRORS - ANOTHER DAY OLDER, DEEPER IN DEBT: Our Editor and Publisher, ROD AMIS, tells another series of tales after his editorial that discerning readers have learned to cherish
SMOKE
"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.
20 February 2007: You will read this entry during the beginning of our eleventh (11th) anniversary celebration of continuous publishing on the Web. No small achievement, for sure, but - if you've been doing a venture like this as long as I, no major excitement attaches to the milestone.
I suppose I must have been doing something right, as outlasting my competitors demonstrates, but I was usually just muddling forward in the darkness. I have less of an idea what makes a Web site survive and thrive than I did five years ago.
I suspect it may be something as simple as cussedness. I just don't stop or give up.
In fairness, I suppose I should also ascribe a little of it to love.
I have genuinely loved some of the submissions I've received over the years and felt compelled to share them with a larger audience. That is not saying that submissions I absolutely despised also made it to the light of day in this publication due to my heterodoxy.
Those who have written for me the longest, sticking with this project over years, can certainly attest to the fact that my nature is essentially mercurial. I would hope and pray that at least a few of them have sussed out that my mercurial nature has contributed to the longevity of Your World's Magazine. On a medium like this one, it is important to keep your finger to the wind and your ear on the ground. The Short Attention Span nature of the audience requires you to be nimble, sometimes irreverent and often capricious.
At core, though, I have also, in my role as Editor and Publisher, attempted to maintain our focus on NOT going with the echo chamber of the Mouthpiece Media (often to the chagrin of the writers and contributors) but keeping to our international scope. In retrospect, I wish I had cultivated Latin American writers more than I have. Our success with Africa is self-evident. We have done fairly well with Europe and less so with Australia. We have held our own in Asia. But I lament the dearth of material on Latin America here to this day.
Should I decide not to close this magazine and move on to a personal Blog in the summer, I shall focus more on South America during the next year. As I have said before, the likelihood of G21.net ceasing to be unupdated commencing June is rather high. I feel, increasingly, the need to move on.
That makes this a bitter-sweet anniversary celebration for me because it is, more than likely, the last I shall observe at this domain. In the process, I shall lose contact and comity with writers I have communicated with over a number of years and who I have learned to love. I suspect, though, they know that I have evolved and - always restless - am ready for a new adventure.
That is enough about this topic for now. Let us revisit it in June, my little loves.
23 February 2007: I AM ALSO PROFOUNDLY AWARE that, for governments, the existence of people like me is troubling for the simple reason, as the video clip I included from the film "V" mentioned last edition, WORDS HAVE POWER. They would not spew them, spin them, repeat their "Talking Points" over and over again if words did not matter.
And I am, I must unhumbly say, a master of words. I have devoted my life to nothing else.
Every time you click on this page, the Powers That Be get a bit more nervous. I'm happy for that.
The Empire and I have been on a collision course for years. You need only to look back at editorials of mine like here and here. Words have power. The Empire knows that.
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G21 at FeedBurner4 March 2007: My friend DC sent this one to me. I decided I should share it with you. BlogAmerica. Look around. Learn something. It might open your mind.
MIRRORSWhat Love Has Made of Me
Loyal Readers know that I keep coming back to the topic of my misspent love life, now a part of my personal history, since I have been celibate for so long, quickly approaching a second decade. Man, when you get heart-broken, it sticks.
So, while playing a bit of Beethoven in the background (how romantic!) a concerto, I shall talk about the actual Last Woman, Hacker Barbie, again. She who was expected to be my second wife and was not.
I realized the other night, before going to sleep, that it was not so much Peggy who had killed my romantic heart as it was Beth, Hacker Barbie. She made me a shell and returned me to the dawg life of my youth. After Beth, I didn't seek women for love or marriage, just for sex. I can say that now; I couldn't admit that those many years ago.
And then, even sex seemed empty to me. I guess it always had, in a way, when not tied to my notion of a spiritual connection that transcended even the physical coupling. Make no mistake about it, I love sex as much as anyone but only the sex is not enough for me.
I guess the day I realized that was when I went cold. I became the Ice King. I focused more on my heartbreak than what could ever be offered to me in a relationship. I am still here in my Palace of Ice. I would like to get out. I constantly look for a woman with a torch but she has not, as yet appeared.
Beth Brierley, like me, had a thing about the number 13. She, unlike me, made it very public and took it way over the top. Her vanity license plate was "BETH 13." Her birthday was 13 December and like all Sagittarians, she could do now wrong. Though she had had seven vehicular accidents when I met her, NONE of them were her fault, to her reckoning, though she had one blind eye.
She was and probably remains a very beautiful woman. She's also the shortest person I've ever dated in my life. She would design her own clothes, because she was into what she called "Bitch Wear" because of her lack of height. When not wearing her own designs, she had a preference for Donna Karan.
I guess I tried to dump her first (my normal practice.) I was cruel. She managed to turn it around on me, not let me succeed, in order to have the luxury of saying today that she dumped me. God! How cruel we can be in our intimate relationships!
I'll try to give you the Reader's Digest version. First, I decided that she was too self-absorbed. (Look who's talking.) I put the icing on the cake, as she was crying about our break-up over the telephone (yeah, I tried to do it that way) when she said, "Well, at least the sex was good, wasn't it?" I said, "It was alright. Nothing to write home about."
Hey! Hey! I told you I used to be a dick! Don't get on my case about this now. I do enough beating me up on my own!
But then, we were still kindah-sortah still together. (You see? The woman always gets her own.) So-o-o, we were supposed to meet near my place, at a local hang-out where we would usually meet. I took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train from San Francisco and waited for her for an hour.
During that hour, she used the key I had given her to my place and took all of her clothes out of the place and left me my key.
When I got back to my place, I realized I had been punked, as we now say. There was my future second wife walking out of my life. There was the last time I would fall in love.
Beth made me make a promise when she and I first met. She asked me never to write about her. "You write about all the women you've slept with," she said. "If we're going to be together, promise you'll never write about me."
"I promise," I told her.
But that promise was based on us being together.
[I know what you want to say. You want to say that I wield words like a knife. Maybe I do. But the blood that flows is my own.]
27 February 2007: The weather here in Austin, Texas, USA, has been pristine for about a week now. Sunshine and blue skies almost every day, temperatures in the seventies and eighties (Fahrenheit) and just too much like Spring for a man to stand. I'm back in shorts and t-shirts and my little Romanic sandles. It's just too good to work.
That may be fortunate, since most of my work is on delayed release right now. The Slashdot job is into near-total abeyance. My other editors don't want anything until the end of March, LeverageSocialMedia.com is just getting its sea legs and - damn! - I'm doing my best to fight off the funk. I'm the kind of writer who is not happy unless he has active stories to submit. Sue me!
Today, I went for a longer than usual walk. I did my laundry. I called my landlord and asked to re-up my lease. I did everything I could not to sit in front of this keyboard. (Like that's gonnah work.)
The novel calls out at me in the night, "Yo, Dude, where are you? We have things to do and people to see." I pretend I don't hear the call.
I listen to children playing outside, smoke cigarettes, listen to the infants next door cry. I devote all my time to minding my e-mail. I find a million and one reasons NOT to write.
Spring Fever usually reminds me of when I was a little kid. When I was a kid, the last thing you wanted to do was be inside. Grown-ups were inside and there was usually something you would do that they would decide was just wrong.
But OUTSIDE, on the world, you didn't run into that. There were trees to climb and hang on, flowers, animals, and mostly other little kids. There was FREEDOM. Nothing you did outside was called wrong. If some other kid called what you were doing wrong - well, okay, another kid would never say you did something wrong, a kid would say you did something stupid - you knew there were two choices: laugh it off and call that kid stupid or jump on your bike and pedal outtah there because the kid was a bully who might hurt you. That was nowhere near as bad as what an adult might inflict.
See what I mean? Spring Fever makes me go back. It makes my mind wa nder and makes me want to roll in the grass or lie under a tree or ä hug a girl. (Oh-oh!)
There was a girl who lived around the corner when I was about eight years old. Her name was Eva Gaines. Man! I thought she was the cat's meow. I would actually volunteer to stay after school and clean the chalkboard erasers for my teachers because I knew that would mean I could walk Eva home. What a chump!
I thought she was the most beautiful girl in my eight year old world.
["Wait!
"Stop the music.
"Yo! Homeboy! You're the guy who has been tellin' us you been celibate ever since we met you. How the hell can a guy who had major crushes on his eight year old girl classmates have turned out to be like a freakin' priest?"
I can't answer that one. Maybe it's Augustinean, like I've alluded to. Maybe I'm more wracked by the guilt of my dawg years than most men. Maybe I'm just cursed. What do you want me to say here?
"Well, at least say somethin' I can understand! It's not natural for a man to go without this long."
Tell me something I don't know.
"Hey, hey! I just thought of somethin'! Did you write this much when you had a wife or a girlfriend?
"Hello? Rod! Are you there?"]
Be careful. Watch my hands. Pay attention to how often I use misdirection to dazzle you. Remember always that this is about magic.
28 February 2007: Think how long it's been since Hurricane Katrina. Today, today, they are still finding bodies in New Orleans.
Think about how I feel.
1 March 2007: I wrote for our last anniversary celebration that we were on the right side of history. I believe even more strongly in that sentiment today, as our nation wrestles with the debacle that is the Iraq occupation and the mistake it made in believing the Mouthpiece Media and giving Mr. Bush a free pass.
There is little satisfaction in being right, of course, when you know that much of what you have to say is either ignored or marginalized.
NOW HERE'S SOMETHING UNCHARATERISTIC: Consider me part of the Christina Aguilera FanClub (in case you hadn't noticed already.) That girl might as well be a sister. Like Toni Morrison said about Bill Clinton being the first Black President, I say Christina is certainly one of the next Black divas. Listen to her music on her latest CD. It's all about soul and I like it. "Do your thing, Honey!"
Well, okay, Elvis was really Black, too.
It's all of a piece.
"And for my next trick... "
Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.
Thanks for coming back this week.
ROD'S FOCUS THIS WEEK
1 - Writing like God.
2 - Scheduling some time for the novel.
3 - A new girlfriend. I think I'm due.
"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "
Love,
Bogart
ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at the (U.S.) Public Broadcasting System (PBS's) WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS Internet magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, r eaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.
He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. When he's not busy here, he writes technology columns for EnterpriseLeadership.org, IT Manager's Journal and NewsForge. Rod's more leftist writings can be found at Atlantic Free Press. (Don't tell his potential employers.) He writes a weekly column on social media issues for Leverage Social Media. He provides entertainment, political and media commentary at TimesSquare.com. Rust never sleeps.
Our Resident Philosopher has decided to return to Austin, Texas, after over two decades away. Wish him luck..
In his spare time, Rod chases women in the way a fly chases a spider..
He continues to be committed to integrity,
chastityand a dose of humility.
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