Like Father, Like Son, Think About It

My Son will not eat solid food, but he will bite his nails. I guess this is a genetic trait. He may like high school more than I did, but he is not saying.

News may be breaking about tax returns and who controls wikileaks, but the wrong people are doing the shouting and getting heard. Who gave roger stone and his bowler valuable air time?

What news has diminished to. Sadly, the entertainment draws numbers, which draws corporate ads, which fuels the pump.

Liar. Scream. Repeat.

After many months I did get my official Equity Punk Card from Brewdog, making me an official something. And I renewed my AAA membership so maybe there is hope in me that we have another year left. Possibly until the end of April, 2018, when my membership expires. After then, all bets off the table?

We're having a wild year for all the wrong reasons, although there is a trip to Vegas actually booked and paid up.

What are we going to be flying into?

Some of what I've been thinking about and doing today

Lists are very arbitrary things. To me they are designed to promote discussion, thought, or amusement. Usually I just dismiss them. There are more than a few websites that are devoted to the organization of lists. Best power trios, best left handed first basemen, best James Bond movies that had a shitty soundtrack - that sort of thing.

Yesterday a site called Flavorwire posted a list of 23 People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry in 2013. Really? The original link to the site I saw on a fellow poets Facebook page came with the caveat that 22 of the poets were white.

So I clicked on the link to see for myself, and yes, they were mostly white, and young, too.

There are days when you have to know when to fire your ammunition, when to express your displeasure about things. I moved on with my life after shaking my head at the site and made a silent vow to myself to not take the page very seriously if I came across it in the future.

Later in the day, I saw another link on a friends' Facebook page that Flavorwire issued an apology. The post thanked people for calling the oversight to their attention and that they would do better next time.

The apology seemed to piss people off more than the original post. I guess it was not enough for some.

When does the knee jerk outrage end? Why does a post from an obscure website cause so much anger, especially when a local entertainment weekly newspaper had this article on their front page on the same day?



This is the current issue of Columbus Alive. The People to Watch series is done annually. As you can see, there are a dozen people to watch, eleven of them are white.

How come people locally got in the face or posted a link with outrage as their status update about the Flavorwire site and did not register a peep about this article?

I made a couple of vague references to it then decided to send an email to the guy who wrote the article.

"I could not help but notice that out of 12 people in your People to Watch 2013 story in the current issue of Alive, 11 of them are Caucasian.

While I have no complaint about the credentials of any of the people chosen for the story, I am disappointed that, in a city of this size and diversity, you could not find any members of the Latino, Asian, Indian or other inspiring entrepreneurs of pleasure from an ethnic community to select.

You really could have done better. Next year, I hope you or the story writer looks a little deeper out of their comfort zone to choose some truly diverse citizens of the rad and awesome city of Columbus as people to watch."

Less than an hour later I got a respectful, honest and reasonable reply.

"Thanks for the note. I agree with your criticism. We could have done better. I would, however, point out that this is one of the strongest classes of PTW we’ve ever had (based on merit), and we weren’t without diversity, as nearly half of our selections were either women, of color, GLBT or a little older than our demographic (we’ve been accused of being ageist, too). I think that’s much better than we’ve done in the past, but still not as good as we could have done. I would also respectfully suggest our selections had nothing to do with our comfort zones. After looking at the dozens upon dozens of nominees we received, going over our own internal list and seeking suggestions from previous PTW winners, we simply felt this was the best possible class we could present. Frankly, that’s our chief aim.

Either way, I appreciate you reaching out to keep us honest. We need more of that."

There was no cursing, no wishing of the other to die in a fire, but a short, respectful civil dialogue carried out. Not a long series of insults on Twitter or mentions of Godwin's Law.

It's easy to just lash out on something, especially when it's at a large national level. It's easy to say the president sucks or I hate racists but when it hits close to home, why is nothing ever done when it's so much easier to try and make a difference?

The media in this city has a lot of issues involving complacency. There's no real competition in a one paper town. And the arts magazines seem to rehash the same things over and over, playing it safe instead of doing any investigating of all the culture this city has going for it. I do feel better about calling people out on their stuff directly when I had an issue with an article.

Has this been solved? Who the heck knows, but my blood pressure stayed lower while being direct with my concerns instead of putting up a snarky Tweet or posting an angry status update, or simply clicking on like.

When Media Does Good

If you have not heard the story of Homeless DJ Ted Williams, there's the link to the story.

One day ago he was holding a sign asking for money at an off ramp to I-71 about a mile from where I lived for ten years. A local newspaper reporter put up a video telling his story on the Columbus Dispatch's web page. YouTube got a hold of it, as did Gawker Media then Reddit.

He's been on WNCI this morning, phone calls are coming in for him, offering job opportunities. He's going to be on The Early Show. Pretty amazing and emotional stuff.

It's not all bad out there is it?

Philosophy, is the Talk on a Cereal Box

I haven't been punchy here for awhile. Or been self revealing in the form of navel gazing. While I'm in a good place, overall - there's always room for improvement.

There are things I'd like to write about, for instance, the Columbus Metropolitan Library levy, but anything I say, as a disgruntled former employee, would come across as me being bitter. So I do not criticize it, even though I'm more for the levy than I am against it. But, as I learned while working there, expressing any opposing view of that place was strictly forbidden.

It's not even that I'm censoring myself. I do not want to be negative. The trauma of being at my old workplace still exists. After three years I've finally found myself not flinching while being around my current coworkers when they talk to me, about anything. Only now am I coming to terms with it to find myself facing their levy campaign head on in the lives of the people around me. And I understand why it should pass, but there are still people there I want to slap with a dead fish. The bad stuff is not something that is easily let go, but this extension of my pain is not good either.

It's hard for me, like Edie Brickell, I don't get too deep. Yet, I do have my own passionate, yet often misinformed, opinions. Problem is, it comes out as anger, rage, a rant rather than anything with any real depth or intellect. Which is more about me than I care to admit but it's on the screen now.

The online interactions have all become a bunch of snarky one liners in lengthy Facebook threads, and they're starting to bore me. What's getting solved there? Opinions are not changing. I'm not going to retreat to this blog, shake my fist and give out links of things that I hate - there's nothing productive or remotely positive about that way of communicating.

The last thing I need, is a cell phone, another electronic addiction. I'm not a gamer. What I do here is the extent of my gaming. I watch very little actual television, outside of sports, and have no clue who these Jersey Shore people and their ilk are. Nor do I care. Why should I care about Heidi and Spencer, whoever they are? I read Entertainment Weekly and see the names and headlines and read that none of these reality people have done anything of any substance, other than making show. I'm not impressed. Television seems very boring now days and I'm better at entertaining myself than shouting old Nirvana lyrics at the world.

Sometimes I think even the poetry has suffered. Feel like it's rehash. Even when I challenge myself the results are mean. I can't even write a love poem. Should be grateful I'm not blocked. Stuff is coming out. Most of it I'd like to pitch. Some of it, I have not read in public and probably never will. Have I painted myself into a corner?

Never watched Lost. Don't watch Mad Men or anything on pay cable. Wish I saw The Wire, maybe I'll borrow the DVD from the library, but the rest seems a waste of my time. My dead boss used to say 'life's too short' before he dropped dead of a crack overdose at the age of 33 - and he was right.

I try not to pay attention to Glenn Beck, the group of inbred Palins or how the crazy folks in the Federal Reserve and Treasury have pushed this country into insolvency. At the same time it's so bad out there we've forgotten how to coexist. No one wants to share the $1,000 pizza though - and why should they? They paid for it. Then tweeted about it.

So do I lay on my deathbed wishing I had not wasted so much time on my laptop, or that I wasted too much time watching Gene Simmons' reality show? Heck, at least I did not do both. Now, if I could put myself in a situation to ditch both of those options for the real alternative - there's your hot action.