Blogging at Home for the Painfully Alone

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have a life full of dignity and self respect. Wouldn't it get dull after a while? When would you talk to yourself under your breath, telling yourself how stupid or ugly you are? That you shouldn't do something because you'll only fail spectacularly at it (hello College, Social Life, and Elevennames!), like you've failed at everything else?

This would, in an ideal situation, be the point where I say "But then you go ahead and do it anyway and then you feel great about it because you aren't trying to prove anything to anyone." But I am not going to say this. Because it is a filthy bastard lie. I have done plenty of things that I knew I should not have done, and I did not feel good about doing them. That voice in your head that tells you about your limitations is there for a damn good reason. I don't doubt that sometimes it must be ignored, the times when you have to talk to the girl or write the paper or do something bold and brave and hooray inducing. Other times, individuals must be aware that no amount of blatant denial will hide their obvious, tragic failings. Which is part of what makes the internet such a miracle; we are forever observing people who participate in this culture of blatant denial. Sometimes we even reward them! The great yawning chasm of despair that mortal men call YouTube is seeded on a minutely basis with people who want the whole world to see their failings and arrogance. This is not to imply I'm naval-gazing over some kind of recent phenomenon, either; observe Danny Tanner and America's Funniest Home Videos, or even that Funt guy and his show. There is precedent here - I mean, what did people do at gladiatorial games, if not laugh at the funny looking or unlucky contestants? I mean, there wasn't a lot of replay value when they were eaten by tigers or whatever.

So instead of (can I begin a sentence not on a preposition, just once?) musing about the gradual erosion of dignity and the whole notion of Blogging Like An Adult (I just googled that!), I just figure that the whole thing is a social construct anyway, and I've got enough of those already, kthnx. I grew up with dungeons and dragons - I don't need another set of codified instructions about imaginary entities interfering with my daily life. Suffice it to say, the old crank in me hates everything, while the kid in me likes the two scoops of raisins. Or whatever. Effing Family Guy has ruined my entire generation. Or has it?

Anyway. My point (the irony is that I got distracted by the adult ADD website) is that, uh, the internets are an evolution of natural human patterns, and, uh (ha ha, check out that list of 151 strengths of adults with ADD! "The Positive's (sic) of ADD") that there's really nothing fancy or newfangled about it, that it's just more voices to contend with - that if they weren't supplied from the outside, they'd probably come from within. Human personalities seem to be consciously self regulating in a way that I (in my intense and scientific studies) have not noticed in animals. Which is to say, a trained dog will not look down it's nose (okay, so it will, hey, why don't you shut up?) at a dog which doesn't have any sort of normal socialization. And that hey, maybe that's the point of humanity's progress! Perhaps every social and scientific advancement has just been one great escalation of snobbery, a great sociological pyramid of gentrification, constantly seeking that one universal, Fonzy-like cool that will end the search. It certainly sounds bleak enough to be a cosmic truth, and fits nicely into the myths of lost civilizations.

Yeah, Atlantis? It was real cool until all these effing hipsters moved in, and the developers built all those new hotels and then the Gods killed the fuck out of everyone there.

But we, as mankind (perhaps man unkind? Oh ho!) will continue to build these giant enormous misguided attempts at setting ourselves apart from the crowd; our Williamsburgs or our Towers of Babel, and in the end, we're going to be left with a thousand languages and a million Brooklyn Vegans, leaving behind only disunity in their wake. We, as a species, will always look back to the studio 54's of our past, proclaiming that before us came a golden time, and that it is what we strive for, and that only disease and death await us in the future. Which is true!

In summation, we can have our metaverses and second lives and other kinds of annoyingly populist dreams about the future of technology, but we also have to acknowledge that, ultimately, they're going to jump the shark. As Yeats wrote, the center cannot hold. Or, as the alternapress can point out, Vice is going to be bought out by MTV. And that, in the end, is the mad rush and joy of being human - fast paced, tossing your all behind a hope or an ideal (we're all scenesters - don't deny it!), and then praying that we don't be too embarrassed by them in later on. Or that if we are, then at least we can be proud that we ignored that little voice inside our heads long enough to actually go for something, to risk being put in a compromising position so that we can know, for just a few moments, that for a short while we were the mad pulse of humanity, driving it onwards to it's next heartbeat.

A Clam before the Storm

So, I made a stealth update the other day, buried below others. It's a few posts down, or here if you like clicking things.

In it, I lay out a rough itinerary that will either guide my next few posts, or, more likely, fade into the sands of the internet like a statue of Ozymandias, taunting me all the while with the fact that I failed to live up to its promises.

I am finally recovered from what my ex-girlfriend mockingly called my "once-a-year vacation into manual labor," and have had a couple days of inactivity to make my muscles forget that they exist. In it, I have spent practically no time at all looking back on the tangle of awesome that was Folk Festival, and nearly all of it looking forward at the last few days before I am swept back to school by tides of necessity.

That said, some of you may be curious, so, without further ado:

For me, Folk Festival is an opportunity to feel good about working hard, see people who I don't get to see anywhere else, perhaps engage in some light partying, and did I mention working really hard? Did I mention that I pay the Folk Song Society for the privilege of working really hard? It's truly an amazing deal.

To continue on the bullet train summary: I work on the Lighting and Electric crew. We handle everything even slightly to do with electricity. When we arrive at the site, weeks before the festival itself, it is several fields and some woodlands covered in permanent and temporary buildings that were nailed together by even more hardcore volunteers of the Grounds crew. They have pagan rituals and totems, and you shall know them by their bells.

In any case, it is our job to turn this collection of buildings and fields into a place where people can see at night, watch concerts, prepare food and be pampered in air conditioned trailers. This requires running a lot of cables. Every year, we get a little smarter and find another couple places where we can leave things installed all year, and every year some random punk kids come along and destroy a few of our installations.

We also truck in various generators, put up street lights, dig trenches and nail things together. There is a fair amount of sweat, as it tends to be hot outside as August rolls around.

As festival draws near, we assemble mighty scaffolds and hang high the lights of the stage, trimming them with the most colorful of gels and tweaking their aim to perfection. We beseech the machine spirit of the boards not to fail, and we bribe the tiny robots that inhabit the moving lights with cubes of energon.

And then the Festival itself is upon us, and the hippies blot out the sun. More about this stage will probably make its way into another post someday, but suffice it to say that everyone suddenly wants more lightbulbs, crafters always manage to trip their circuit breakers somehow, and the campgrounds fill up incredibly quickly and start looking like something out of a postapocalyptic film on day two.

Festival lasts from (arguably) Thursday night through Sunday evening.

Sunday night, we begin working immediately after the concert to tear down the lights.

And on Monday morning, on whatever hours of sleep remain to us, we begin the teardown. In one day, we disassemble everything we have created over the past six weeks or so. It is thoughtless work at its purest. This year I rode around for approximately nine hours in the back of a pickup truck, in pouring rain and bitingly cold wind, and accomplished many tasks. I disassembled things with a hammer, vigorously. I hauled and coiled wires, and packed and unpacked the machinery necessary for such.

I was tangentially helpful in nearly dropping a heavy light assembly on the head of one of my co-workers, and narrowly missed killing the lad. As it is, he'll have bruises and a story, both impressive.

The details of the incident are... difficult to summarize, annoying, and could perhaps be, in some parallel universe, litigious. Suffice it to say that it wasn't my fault, and that apparently in no one else's universe does shouting "Woah woah woah woah!" as loud as you possibly can indicate that heavy things are falling and everyone should flee and/or dive for cover. I wish I had been capable of doing more than that, in the instant I had to act, but that was the sum of my contribution.

By the end of the day I was exhausted, soaked, shivering and guilty.

It was still my favorite day of the Festival by far.

As a self-professed lazy man, it worries me sometimes how much I enjoy really working.

In Which the First Theme Week is Introduced

Hello!

Welcome to the blog. I'm Thomas. Hi, how are you doing? I love what you've done with your hair. No, no, not ironically - I really mean it. I accents your face. Before we get going in earnest, I think it's important to mention that Zach has made his way into the eye of the internet itself.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=4543

So, how's that for legitimacy?

As mentioned earlier, we're just saying hello. It's something I don't do every day, because I'm basically a recluse. The people that I say hello to are captives, people working in the service industry who I buy my food from. I don't mean to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat, but I do enjoy trying to lighten the day of the working class. Actually, I totally meant to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat. Someone needs to fetch me wine, and to tell that one slave to dance - his antics amuse me.

Personal predilections aside, saying hello is an interesting sensation. We are presenting ourselves with our worst foot forward; we are not who we introduce ourselves as. Our real friends know what lazy, indulgent, inept, and deliriously self-important sophists we are. Meeting someone new, we have, what, thirty seconds to convince the new person that we are witty, charming, urbane, athletic, and good looking.

Further, people carry filthy diseases that they then transmit onto you.

Meeting new people brings with it untold existential stress. Since we often seek to define ourselves through how others see us, to hold very complimentary mirrors up to reality, then, what we say and do literally becomes who we are. How many people out there have met a really cute guy/girl/other at a bar, stumbled out an awkward introduction, and then felt like leaping off a cliff, because the sad charade of their existence isn't worth the resources they're consuming? Similarly, how often do you meet some drunken, unshaved lout, and then the two of you continue to talk the rest of the night, discussing the threat of Uggo Vampires?* Meeting new people, then, becomes an inadvertant form of narcisissm. We value strangers for their appearances, because they present themselves in the ways that we wish we were. Their rejection is a confirmation of our own faults. Likewise, talking to crazy people about made-up undead menaces serves only to compliment our own social grace and tact, that we can so impolitely convince someone less than ourselves of the rightness of our ideas.

*I mention this only to let the rest of the world know - in our struggle against these unnattractive princes of the night, you are not alone.

The internet is the worst thing ever, if only because audiences are then held captive. The written word is historically unable to convey proper conversational dynamism that's needed to create proper communicatin'. Which is why, perhaps, that the upsurge in blogs (like this one!) is a good thing for society and for language. More options mean more divergence from tradition. While small-minded hill-people may smear Youtube with their hateful screed, overexposure to this lowest-common-denominator numbs our senses. All that is foul about spelling and grammar set into the ignorable norms, while people who are inventive with language fall to the much-noticed margins of popular viewing.

I can only hope that Eleven Names is able to follow through on it's original mission statement* and provide some kind of entertainment or whatever to you, the viewer. Incidentally, I did just re-read the above, and after reading "inventive with language", I kind of want to jump off a bridge. SEE? SEE?

*Zach: The internet can pay for our beer, Thomas!
Thomas: Where do I sign up?