Err, until I am somewhere in northern Kentucky and it is 11:45 PM local, 12:45 AM my time and it occurs to me if I don’t eat something Right Now, I’m probably not going to eat again until sometime tomorrow morning.

Inexplicably, this panics me.

I am on a highway and the car—thirteen years old—still drives like the rock solid humming machine it has always been. The sunroof is open so I can see the stars and the dashboard is all cockpit-like inside, and it’s just so freaking awesome how and where it is I find myself that occasionally I’ll pick up my cell phone and slam it into my face hollering, “Calling all Cars! Calling all Cars…”

Just because I can.

It’s a nice night and I’m in a pretty good mood and as I recall, that’s what guys said when they reached for their microphones in a hurry. Back in the day.

I settle on a fast food franchise that’s been sectioned off from a truckstop store and it’s all about too-bright fluorescents and self-popping colors. The menu is frustrating because I’ve been eating intentionally for a change which means that there’s nothing on it that I or anybody else on the planet has any business eating.

There is an enormous and angry woman behind the register and she’s seriously pissed. She’s miked into a head gear thing that reminds me unfailingly of Janet Jackson circa her oh hell yes go Janet! Control! years. Apparently her headset is telling her something she does not want to hear, because she presses a button which I can only hope is a mute button and lumbers around, yelling to nobody in particular:

“I told you already, I’m outta Whopper meat!”

There are two other dudes manning the Whopper assembly counter, deftly loading and unloading meat patties into microwave oven stations in order to heat them and/or fuse them to their accompanying processed cheese slices. Neither of them are particularly interested in what to me is a looming crisis of epic proportions.

I look at the woman and nod, letting her know I understand, that I see.

She nods back affirmatively as if to say, “Yeah, mister… not on my watch.”

I ended up ordering a non Whopper item because I didn’t have time to see how it all played out. I was happy though about the drama– the question so blithely posed. Because it forced me to consider what it meant to run out of Whopper meat. How one might go about resolving that problem— was it something as simple as a mere trip to the freezer, or was it something bigger, like an AM emergency delivery from the food supply semi?

More specifically: What would that supply chain look like on a Visio diagram and would I still be hungry when I saw it?

Sadly, all that I’m thinking about on the left behind front is merely a certain Bruce Springsteen album that I literally played until the grooves were no longer groovy. I played it in San Diego in my room, I played it in Costa Mesa, I played it in Long Beach and after Long Beach I don’t think I ever played it again. I wasn’t tired of Bruce (although okay, yeah I was– really tired), but in talking to Alisa, a yearning for the loss of that album shot through me so intensely it felt for a moment like I might have fallen off of the earth and into some sort of black hole where I would exist in a state of suspended loss forever.

It was like all of a sudden everything that had ever mattered, including the person I’d been and one day might still become had been stripped to it’s very essence: that particular record album. Mind you, there were other albums that had been discarded, many– but at that moment on Alisa’s patio it was crushingly clear to me that the one thing in my life that had ever mattered– my Bruce Springsteen album– was now lost to me forever and all that was left was for me to pick up the shattered pieces of my life and bravely soldier on.

Bruceless.

The album in question was important because it had been given to me by a buddy who was trying to improve my musical tastes at a time when my musical tastes were still relatively unformed and should have already been formed. It was also about possession and duration– all the things I tend to apply to actual relationships retrospectively– typically after they’ve failed: things like where the album had been, where I had been, how me and that album had… oh, okay, I’ll say it: gone through a lot together.

Sigh.

The thing: last I checked, that album hadn’t done jack other than to take up space on my bookshelves until I relegated it to the attic with the rest of my albums fifteen years or so ago only to spend the next fifteen years carting it around from attic to garage to attic like the baggage it had become.

“It’s just a closet. That’s all you get.”

We are drinking wine and I’ve been– there is no way to say this without sounding like an idiot– pining for my Bruce album. Oh, the attics and basements it had been stored in, the neglect! How could I have left it on the curb so casually? What had I been thinking?

Me (To Alisa): “WTF?” I had absolutely no idea what she’d been talking about. Still, she’s an old friend of mine and I tried gamely to focus. To hear whatever the hell it was she’d been saying to me.

“You get a closet. That’s all. Maybe you have things to put in it, and maybe you don’t. I’m always surprised by the people I meet who end up there. The lives they’ve led, or haven’t led. What they used to have or not have, and always how little any of that matters anymore. It’s just one closet. What you get. When you go. There. ”

To that one room elderly care place that concurrently terrifies me and thrills me.
It terrifies me, because I have an aversion to bedrooms with vinyl floors and sheets that don’t have a certain Egyptian Cotton thread count. It thrills me because I love the idea of ending up in a dorm room situation once I finally get old enough to really appreciate it. Bridge 24/7? Bring it.

So we talked about Alisa’s closet theory for a while, and I liked her theory because after all the weird ass emotional crap I apparently attach to my record albums and God knows what else, I was relieved to affirm that I had been right in setting it out on the curb. That its value to me had absolutely nothing to do with the object it was; the value was derived solely from the experiences I’d had that it ended up indexing.

I understood then, after my WTF moment, that its value could never be lost to me because it had already become– because it was already– solely my personal history of a certain time and place on the planet important to and remembered by nobody but me.

I recently had dinner with Alisa in a restaurant in Point Loma that had been around since we were in elementary school— back in the day when it was our parents that used to eat there, but… hmm… slightly different and good for us.

Alisa will tell you that Mrs. X is why she was never good at math—she can recount to this day in breathtaking detail the horror of the math quiz Mrs. X was fond of—the one where you had to walk up to the board. Alisa says that Mrs. X hated boys and I remember that, because she did.

Basically, Mrs. X was a garish, bitter woman who embraced her bitterness in real time and without any edits. She was angry about a lot of things, but trichinosis, pork products and fish seemed to pretty much top Mrs. X’s list of wrongs. She told me to just pick up a package of meat anytime I was at the store and I’d be able to see the worms myself. Whether or not I actually saw them didn’t matter and I better make sure the meat got cooked right because in the world of Mrs. X, terminal trichinosis was only one poorly cooked pork product away.

So for the longest time whenever we went shopping after that, it was me that bolted to the meat bins—desperate to see the rotting things Mrs. X. assured me were there.

It would have been awesome I think, if somebody had simply stepped up and fired her– she had no business being in front of children and I’m not sure why she was tolerated for as long as she was. It’s how I’m feeling about a lot of people of late, elected and otherwise. Why are we tolerating such poor political behavior from such obviously self serving tools?

Now mind you, I grew up there. I’m there not infrequently. But there is this thing in the back of my mind of late which has to do with this view, from the alley behind the house that I lived in off and on for a couple of years before I left:

The alley behind my house

I shot this the day before I moved to Atlanta for my new job. I wasn’t so much interested in the view from the alley, then.

The day before I left, I wandered around Ocean Beach and Pt Loma taking pictures of things that had meaning to me.

The OB Pier, 1990

It’s the picture of the alley that I keep coming back to because where I am now is so far removed from that, sometimes it’s just really hard for me to remember what led me to here, where I am today. Ideally, I’d be able to just map it all out and say, oh, look: I did… this here, and three months later, this other thing happened and there ya have it, I get it now: Welcome to Durham.

The thing: there is no better place for me right now. I could be pretty much anywhere and there would be no better place for me now.

I prefer linear to random because linear is explainable and can be managed; random is unpredictable, scary and messy.

Linear is cause and effect, timelines and Gantt charts, tasks and task dependencies and I’m here to tell you: when you are working and living to a project plan, anything can be mitigated and everything can be managed. Random is how life happens though, in spite of my relentless planning.

I can’t recapture my past. My past is beautiful and hugely imperfect. I want to make it linear and fix it and I can’t. We forget I suspect, about the messes we really were.. back in the day, no matter how beautiful or perfect our alleys and houses were.

I can’t get it back, nor do I want to, because I’m too happily attached to the present. But I appreciate my past simply because it’s the place and time where I formed the references and constructs by which I exist in the rest of my world.

What Shelli said…

Shelli in Turkey, 2010

Shelli will tell you these are simply snapshots: an instant at best. A micro-moment of nothing in particular. That it’s one of the billions by which we become the people we are becoming. Shelli will tell you that we are not defined by these snapshots any more than who we are on any given day represents the people that we actually are.

When I was traveling for work I preferred to believe that my mode of travel and the places I stayed at and the lists I appeared on were the things that defined me. That these things, these constructs were far more than merely snapshots; that I really was all that, if only for the duration of my time on the airplane and throughout all the rituals performed at the airport that got me there.

For the longest time when I was inside that, I collected business cards from people I met on the plane. We would drink, we would bond, and then the cabin lights would come up, the glasses would be gone and there was always this awkward… thing. This perfunctory exchange of business cards and numbers with people I knew I would never see or talk to again. Awkward.

I look at all that differently now. I see it more of late how Shelli does: I’m never going to be anything more or less than who I am at any given moment. All I am really, is simply the sum of everything that’s ever happened to me, everybody I’ve ever known, and every place I’ve ever been. No one instance defines me, nor did it ever. It’s… relieving.

Sometimes I come across something like the picture of the alley that unexpectedly brings me to my knees with all that it represents that can never be reclaimed. I have to take a moment and collect myself because it floors me, how immediately grounded a snapshot can make me in a way that I did not know was possible.

Because it’s all of that and at the same time, it’s nothing. It’s just my personal history, and it’s the duration of that and the sum of my time on the planet which defines me still.

Which is fortunate, since if I still defined myself by my seat assignment, my guess is I’d be screwed.

2010 Academy Awards poster

Except I couldn’t find any online feeds. Which made me feel bad about the people in New York who were being denied Oscar access too, but for entirely different reasons having to do with media monopolies and corporate greed. My boycott of cable television is self imposed; theirs wasn’t. I don’t have cable anymore because the idea of paying a hundred bucks a month for three hundred channels, three of which I actually watch, makes me surly.

Eventually, I found a live feed of same from Europe, hosted by four uber-clever people with bad hair babbling on a set that tried too hard to be retro. I’m not sure which was worse:

Not finding it online and available (big surprise there), or,

The pretentious Euro peeps hosting the web feed I was watching, or,

The presentation itself.

Which I have to tell you, lacked hugely. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which has to do with the fact that in spite of twitter and tmz, I basically don’t know who anybody is anymore. Probably because my interest in same, marginal to begin with– well, let’s just say that constant and continual media exposure isn’t necessarily a career kickstarter. We know too much about these people already, and there are simply too many of them.

I get that there’s a focus on keeping the air time down to three or four hours. That said, if you’re going to force these people to get to the stage and stumble through their acceptance speech in twenty seconds— has it occurred to anybody how much that devalues the award? Crowning lifetime or career achievement and all you’re gonna give me is twenty seconds? Really?

twitter has always been useful, even at it’s most popular– which, as far as I can tell, would be not long after Oprah issued her first tweet.

It also became annoying to me around then, because everybody was talking about it and giddily including their twitter handles in bylines and advertisements and I get it: certainly you might want to follow a company or a product of interest to you. You can learn a lot from your twitter info stream, no question.

My point, and this goes to something I mentioned in my previous post: it’s all about context.

As in, you can’t put up a picture of Heather Locklear and Oprah Winfrey and expect that you’re going to get ten thousand hits, because you’re not. It means you aren’t paying attention to your market or your audience, and it means that the majority of the people that come across those pictures or references are coming across them out of context, and that’s annoying.

As an example: A Ford dealership that shall remain forever nameless started following me. So did a website. So did another product. It’s just more twitter noise, and it means that the signal is cluttered and no longer relevant.

Sure, I’m blaming Oprah. Why not?

1. I’m getting ready to re-enter the job market in a few months.  More on that and why it matters…  soon.

2. Nothing spells legitimacy in social media better than a massive hit or follower count, regardless of how relevant those followers actually are.  

Why I’m doing this: I want to explore some things about social media. When it’s relevant, when it isn’t, and how to implement it effectively.   That is, assuming it makes sense to implement it.   A point, I suspect– that is lost on many.

So: I’m thinking about some experiments and I’m doing some research and I’m going to be writing about all of that here.  For now though, bear with me while I test my new Oprah theory:  

Oprah! In my blog!

 

 

 

And my own version of The Locklear effect:

Heather Locklear

My guess is both will increase my hit rate, but will they bring me additional followers on twitter?

My point:  Having a lot of followers is huge fun and no doubt incredibly self validating, but unless you’ve targeted your followers, that’s about all it’s good for. 

Which isn’t to knock it:  I know I’d feel a lot better about myself if I could log on to anything, anytime and see that there are 3,000 or so people that read my blog yesterday.  Or who are following me on twitter.  Or if I had even maybe only a miserly couple of hundred Facebook friends.  Yeah, I know that’s my fault ’cause I generally limit that action to people I actually know…  but still:  Wouldn’t it be great to wake up secure in the self confidence that can only come from the certain knowledge that you have thousands of people following you on twitter?    Hundreds of Facebook friends? 

Again, my guess would be… No.  But as you can see, I’m real curious about both that, and this growing concept of social media context I’ve been thinking about and am looking to define.   In these very pages. 

I’m wch3 on twitter. As of an hour ago, I have 38 followers.  Can I double that a week from now?  A month from now? Who’s out there Googling Heather Locklear and Oprah?  Hey–  if you were looking for either and came to this site instead– don’t be bitter, okay?  I posted great pictures of both, right?  Heather is adorable!  Oprah is wonderful!  So help me out and…  follow me.  

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens, and what we’re all going to learn about the relevance of social media.  More importantly:  what I’m going to learn about the relevance of social media.   Because from my perspective so far, it’s more contextual than anything else and I’m real curious about defining that.

Who doesn’t appreciate iTunes?  Nobody want’s to be illegal, most people don’t want to rip off copyrighted material, and most people are willing to pay for it.  A buck a track is reasonable, so we pay it.  The delivery is there, the content is there–  sort of, for now.  The interface is simple and makes sense, and it’s the easier choice.  It’s also the right choice.

As consumers years ago, we paid for albums, unless we were lucky enough to find the A tracks on a 45.  We paid for them again as CD’s, but at twice the price, even though the packaging, production and distribution costs were lower than for vinyl.  We purchased movies on VHS.  We paid for DVD’s later on as well.  It’s not reasonable to think that consumers are going to keep paying repetitive markups for content already consumed over and over and over again.

The thing:  many people have and will.  The other thing:  there are options which have to do with internet access online content provision and I’m not even going to talk about torrents.

What if the Media Monopolies had simply embraced peer to peer file sharing and set up sites and charged some sort of fee for virus free access to their content instead of trying to force the world to adhere to an outdated content distribution / business model?    Similar to what Apple is doing with iTunes and AppleTV?  Cheaper than packaging plastic, and a lot more green.

Yes, you can easily hack your Apple TV or other interface hardware to get on the web, and the Boxee.com hack allows you to play any non DRM (digital rights managed / management format) from your PC, on your networked HD or component input television.

You can also play network content on it, from actual network internet websites.  It’s slightly different from Tivo though, because you can’t fast forward through the commercials.  But since you only have access to the content after it’s aired, and since they aren’t hammering you with fifteen or twenty minutes of commercials, who’s going to step away for 45 seconds?

Those commercials you get every fifteen minutes when watching something from a network’s site?  Those commercials get watched.

Is all I’m sayin…