i have had a pleasant evening at school. the final 345L assignment calls for soldering components to a PCB board. i've been procrastinating on doing it, fearing a molten disaster, but after making a few ugly globs, i got it. you put the wire near the base of the pin, apply the soldering tip, and there is a puff of smoke and a nearly instantaneous transfer of the solder to the pin. it's easy, no superhuman touch is needed.

also, i figured out a bug in my verilog design. have been seeing red bars for a week, and these red bars are gone. i can go home, have a beer, and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

finally, finally, i finished the schematic of my ALU. impatience and panic started setting in today. i had earlier tested the comparator block successfully in isolation, the part that detects greater than, less than, equal, etc. around noon today i attempted to put it into the larger design. i was so fed up with the project that i lost any interest in the details, and for awhile i was speeding along connecting the comparator wires, feeling very smart. then at the last stage where i wanted to see all of the correct patterns coming out, it gave bad results and I became upset. in fact, i went over my disk quota at school causing weird errors just as i most needed to be thinking about the design.

i had gone out drinking in honor of matt's birthday last night. matt went home and then will, andy, and i went to the whiskey bar to meet will's friend who is a world renowned animal psychologist. but that went nowhere and the result today was that i was upset moreso than usual with being behind on projects. a mental rather than physical hangover. really hitting a wall. i came back here just as julie showed up with her friends annie and megna from canada. they seemed to detect my mood and proceeded to lavish my roomate matt with warmth for his having met them (annie and megna, in vancouver) for dinner. i was waiting for some kind of stinging coup de grace from the situation, something that would really make me regret everything about myself, but they just said bye and that was that. i ate an apple, a very tart and firm jonagold, muttered vulgarities for awhile, and then went back to the lab. i probed the interconnections of my design looking for the stupid error, the shorted wire, the misnamed pin. actually, i had forgotten a fundamental step which was to make sure that the arithmetic part of the ALU performed subtraction whenever being told to compare. really not that subtle a problem. but in the agony of being behind and having more tests bearing down i just wanted there to be some easy mistake to fix. i had willed myself into a state of denial where i was "finished" and simply needed to debug to be done. since i was not finished, i wasted hours searching for bugs that weren't there. as my bitchy ex boss from general bandwidth used to say, the absence of something is difficult to detect.

another sleighride of the mind is to celebrate prematurely. to want to be "the person" finishing an assignment rather than actually finishing the assignment. all this might seem incredibly obvious. but i am all too human. whenever i finish something or take a test i have a flood of thoughts. good engineers and scientists, like richard feyneman, for instance, would never pause to congratulate, chastise, or overanalyze themselves. their minds were quick and their routes of thought went straight to the essence of a problem. on to the next thing, the next truly big thing.

i created my first latex document. when matt alden lectured about latex i thought it sounded like the greatest thing since sliced bread. when i was a technical writer my boss told me that a lack of version control (ability to track who changed what file, how, and when) was why i could never gain her feel acceptance or appreciation as a human being. well, i'm exaggerating, but our little ephemeral group of tech writers were never allowed to feel whole because of this.

so here is LaTEx, a document SYSTEM that lets you typeset documents right in unix. with latex you have total version control. you can set up makefiles, check your books into CVS, the works.

well, follow the link and look at the results. it's my first latex document, but it's a fucking pain in the ass to use.

but so are 16 bit funnel shifters for that matter. i spent the whole day building one.

i'm actually posting this because i think the picture in my latex document is funny. you can really just skip to that and i'll be happy.

my 379k lab partner, who was almost brought to tears a few weeks ago, rallied and produced a working wireless communications link. what this means is that bits leave the computer, enter the air, and return via another antenna (only a few feet away) in the exact same arrangement. i held one of the antennas. the flowchart bryan created to accomplish this looks like the map of a small city. once the bits flew and returned none of his former agony mattered. all of the pain and doubt just vanished as he realized that he grasped something truly difficult. differentiating him as an electrical engineer, and giving him knowledge he might be able to apply for decades. such is the drug.

i've created my own map of a small city, but in a different class, VLSI design. my arithmetic logic unit (ALU) adds, subtracts, increments, or decrements two sixteen bit numbers in 1090 nanoseconds. the core of the ALU, called a kogge stone network, contains several layers of lookahead logic. if at one stage you need to carry a one, it wires this information ahead in parallel rather then slowly ripple the information one carry at a time. for example if your 2nd grade teacher gave you a difficult addition problem like 9997 + 8879 where the numbers were all big and generated carries, the kogge stone network would be like an extra set of hands, doing all of the carries nearly simultaneously rather than one at a time. this is something about 200 ECE graduates learn how to build every year. bryan with his flying bits is in the company of more like 4 or 5 people. i'm beginning to see people punch their tickets out. in fairness to myself, bryan is a graduate student. But I have a tremendous amount of work in front of me and a very short time to do it in. i don't think I'm going to grad school, and for the last few weeks I've been just hanging on.

prof. rappoport gave a brilliant lecture today on the subject of correlation filters and gaussian noise. he showed that with calculus and some basic knowledge of probability theory you can quantify how powerful the distortion is on a filtered channel. it gives noise a bandwidth of a half hertz he said, and indeed you could see on the whiteboard that the effect of a filter on the infinite chaos of random thermal noise is like taking a baby slice of cake out.

alex, my 345L lab partner, perfected his stepper motor program today. my contribution to the lab was to wire all of the hardware together. i used something called an L293 quadruple driver which was a professional kind of touch recommmended by the TA with only 20 minutes to go in lab last week. nobody bothered to try it except me. the thing about this course is that you have to fight for the TAs attention, and when you do get it there are always a few other students hovering around, wanting to take him away. in today's episode two such guys wanted to know how they could calculate the rotational rate of their motor. the lab instructions said that these things turned at 18 degrees per step. we ran our device and counted 20 steps. "count the time duration of 20 steps as the period" we told them. they didn't seem satisfied with this, perhaps because it was OUR device. i multiplied 20 * 18 on my calculator and showed them that the result was 360 degrees. for once i was issuing a smackdown.

i woke up thinking about all of the hours I spent as a child doing things which helped prepare me for my midlife transition to electrical engineering. i used to be an expert when it came to delta drawing, i had vast libraries of artwork, from bleeding snowflakes to armadas of spaceships that wiggled in space and "exploded" (red fill).

i could get to 99 on safari. as an aside, reader, explore the miniarcade site if you've ever owned a handheld game. check out puck'n monster.

i had a library of casio synth compositions, lego designs. cannot deny that was not mozart in any of it.

Spring Break Hell

I'm a little freaked out by wireless digital communications right now. Supposed to be preparing for lab 5 and am still trying to do a post-mortem on lab 3. I realized I was in over my head and found a lab partner last week, but it feels like it is too late. He seems brilliant but was almost brought to tears when his LabView model of a QPSK system wouldn't run. I sat like a vegetable trying to deduce what was going wrong within his large flowchart. As it turned out, he (we) did not physically connect the transmitter to the receiver with a cable. The TA who never helps me understand anything (not to be confused with my helpful 345L TA) tried to joke that first rule of debugging is to make sure it's plugged in. We knew he was scoring easy points. The professor in this course looks like one of the Irish thugs in "Mystic River." I need to see him in office hours next week and ask him if I need to drop.

This is pathetic, I can't express in words how hard I have been trying. The thing is I am not connecting. It seems like sitting around the house all day sitting here staring at notes and books is not really "trying." I suppose I could sit in a library. There is no tutor who can teach this stuff. I attend all the lectures. What more can I do?

By Tuesday, I am supposed to prove the complex least-squares solution to Ax-b. I took a course in linear algebra two years ago that required no proofs and treated complex numbers as "beyond the scope." I flattered myself by looking through the online course notes provided by MIT. For the last few days I have been wondering what a "Lemma" is. At MIT they talk in "lemmas." I had to review the derivation of a proj b! I'll never get it at this rate. It's as though I need to go back to school so that I can finish going back to school.

I figured out the concept of interpolation yesterday. The chip we are using in 345L has a special command calld ETBL that fills in the gaps between entries in a lookup table. A lookup table is 256 straight line segments approximating some sort of nonlinear curve. It is probably how robotic hands are able to grasp things without breaking them. A few days ago I came up with a method for debouncing pushbutton switch inputs using another freescale feature called "interrupt capture." Satisfying, you press the button, setting a latch, and then check the status of that latch a few times to make sure that the button has in fact settled on a 1 or 0. We use this everytime we type a character.

Relax and let the sheer hell of the next two months just hit. I saw "Constantine" a few nights ago with Julie, and am thinking that the question will not be "will i go to hell" but "how" and "when."

Readers, I do understand the importance of remaining positive. However, I suppose it is just that, a logical conclusion that "it is important to remain positive." I want the thrill of getting it, that's all. But that's quite a lot.

i dug through boxes to find an electronics part this evening and came across my textbooks from community college. fundamentals of financial accounting. college algebra. seeing them made me feel humble rather than humiliated; i am just an average guy. i used to feel that i was too good for those books. now i realize that the books are a part of me. some people go through life at a faster pace, building brilliant libraries. the nausea of life is that it is always possible to speed up, yet at the same time the amount of things we've done to define ourselves is always increasing. the moment screams "read the best things, go to the best places, be with the best people," but the sad truth is that most of us cannot handle the best. we wait in loops to find or be ready for "the best," and then we die.

now the books i'm reading are a little more challenging at least. studying computers and engineering is addictive because the battles can always be refought. being baffled today only sweetens the pot of being right tomorrow. the problem is today.

at ECE the scarce resource is time. those who make the best use of it succeed and gloat in inverse proportion to those who fail and cower.

enough prose.

my life has become nonstop school. i feel as though i spend almost as much time carrying books around as I do reading them. slice the pie chart up and the largest wedge by far would be staring into the computer screen. not necessarily learning. in the case of my VHDL course, lining up the edges of metal traces and dealing with a crappy CAD interface. a lot of time sitting in lecture. fascinating professors this semester. two of them are on the subject of timing, making sure that read data required starts and ends within read data available. i noticed somthing that binds together many fields of electrical engineering and computer science: parallelism. the computer program runs between samples, or processes between interrups. or on a finer level, multiple steps of computer logic execute between the miniscule edges of the system clock. i wrote in my notes that "it's all the same problem." controlling execution, which entails controlling time. the fields of electromagnetism, optics, seem quaint in comparison to the herd of geeks devoted to the pursuit of speed, moore's law, capturing higher and higher frequencies. 60 jigahurtz! my digital communications professor bellowed, the new frontier, ubiquitous broadband content. speed of course. very tiny time delay. robin tsang, my embedded systems TA remarked that intel chips are now so fast that execution cycles can no longer be traced with rectangular edges so much as humps measured in nanoseconds.

a painful day ends in revelation. a prelab, due this evening, called for a printed circuit board (PCB) schematic and wiring diagram. rectangular blocks, each having between 16 and 56 pins on them, needed to be wired together such that synchronized memory reads could occur. my lab partner alex and i sat in the freezing computer lab at around 1 PM wracked with confusion. his first question to me was why components could not be loaded from the schematic to the layout diagram. We wasted an hour trying to debug netlist errors in a vain effort ("to load the schematics"). alex seized the day and walked down three flights of stairs to the embedded lab. there he saw that people were not designing with specific serial numbered components but with generic dual inline package (DIP) footprints which matched the dimensions of the components. it was only then i realized that there was no need to load schematics to the layout tool. it doesn't care what the serial number is on a component. nonetheless, the assignment called for both schematic AND layout. i discovered that schematic tool was hinky. parts could be cut and pasted between schematics only by copying to the clipboard, closing the file, opening the file you want to paste to, and then pasting. the schematic software couldn't hold two documents open at the same time and let you cut and paste between them. two problems solved. 4 pm. we then proceeded to draw hundreds of wires, connecting write enable pins, wiring logic into nand gates, forking datapaths around latches (multiplexing), etc. alex muttered that what we were creating was fucked up. into lab. it is there that we bask in the warm glow of information. after some more nervous "what do we do now" kind of moments we are paired up with two chinese students for the actual PCB hardware segment of the project. (custom PCB boards are relatively cheap, but at $51 a pop you still don't want a bunch of people running willy nilly with their own designs. better to create large groups.) one of the fellows had a beautiful layout on his monitor with all 45 degree wire turns. meanwhile our layout was a 90 degree maze. we'll get to why this is bad in a minute.

it was getting late and we had a crankyness settling in, but alex had a few questions. why did the TA tell somebody that they could wire their external memory pins anyway they wanted, why could the write enable pin be set to ground rather than carefully wired. robin came over and showed us that an external memory has practically no preferences as to how you hook up its address and data pins. since the program always reads data from where it stores it, the actual hardware location of data is irrelevant. coming and going. it stunned me and then filled me with a sense of zen enlightenment. after the long day, you come to the realization that is you, not the computer, behaving rigidly. "did i give you a hard day? i think not, i could give a fuck where you wire my pins, i'll put your data wherever you tell me and give it back regardless of how i am asked. regarding the write enable pin, it is there for larger PCB schemes containing a bus, wires that are shared between multiple IO components. when one component is no longer using the bus, it sets its outputs to "undefined," effectively greasing the rails of the bus for other users. however, since we were only interfacing one memory, there was no need for a bus, no need to worry about setting the write enable bit correctly. more slack from the computer. it cares less than you do.

finally, i asked why it is so important not to draw PCB wires at 90 degree angles. robin drew a square outward spiral, asking, "what am i drawing" "an inductor" i say. he says right. "what does an inductor do" "disrupts adjacent wires, traps energy." right, "how many turns is this?" i count four square turns; a powerful inductor. he draws two sides of a square, a corner. "how many turns is this?" "1/2 turn" i say, "wrong, one quarter turn." obviously, the corner of a square is a one quarter turn, you need four of them the get back to the beginning. ultimately, the circuit is better if all connections are smoothly sloping, aerodynamic almost.

For weeks, sticky mousetraps have been empty behind our rat-infested oven. With the appliance guy coming over with a new oven I needed to move them out of the way. Holding and inspecting the trap (which had dust bunnies and dog hair clinging to it), I realized it required bait. I stuck a little wedge of parmesan in the middle and placed it on the floor in Lobo’s dogfood closet. The appliance guy arrived within 20 minutes. I cleaned up the floor beneath the old oven and let the guy bring in the new one. I went to wash my hands and saw the rat peeking out at me from around the bathroom door. I called the appliance guy over to see him. We both stared at him and wondered why he was standing his ground.

Appliance guy recommended putting on gloves and I proposed trapping him with a wastepaper basket. Appliance guy went back to his work and I entered the bathroom prepared for war. It was then that I saw that the trap was stuck to the bottom of the rat. Despite this, it was able to scurry past me and run to my bedroom. I finally got the trash bucket on top of it there. Sliding a manila folder underneath I was able to flip it into the bucket.

I took the bucket to the backyard where Lobo (Matt’s dog) was. It is embarrassing to admit, but I showed Lobo the rat in the bucket. Why did I do this? Hard to say. Lobo is like the child in the house, and in some way I felt like I was educating him, letting him see what a rat looked like. Another reason is that I have watched him chase phantoms around the house for weeks. He has been aware that SOMETHING was in the house but was perpetually too slow to see or seize it. I wanted to say “here is your culprit, boy, we have him.”

Naturally, Lobo trotted with me over to the marble-topped game-cleaning table that sits in the middle of the backyard. This was left over from the previous owners, and my plan was to bash the rat with a shovel on that marble slab. I lifted the bucket and the rat immediately flipped off into the grass. Lobo stuck his face in and the rat began making the trademark “eeee eeee” sounds. I had to fight Lobo off of the rat, shouting “no!, get off Lobo, goddamnit!” Lobo, resisting every instinct god ever gave him sat and watched me bash the rat with the shovel.

I breathlessly told appliance guy what had happened. I realized that I had needlessly exposed Lobo to rabies. He doesn’t appear to be bitten. Matt will have to decide what to do. The moral of the story is that in the heat of battle one can make pretty stupid decisions. I was supposed to make sure that Lobo was in the house before bashing the rat. For some primal reason, I wanted Lobo to see that I had a rat and was bashing it.

It’s the fog of war. You focus on the killing, not realizing that you are also being quite reckless.

Tomcat adhesive rodent traps are extremely effective if you put parmesan cheese in them. The rat’s legs were completely submerged in the rubbery goo. I put another trap down in the same place and will gladly repeat the experience without Lobo there. To give you an idea of why a rat in the house is bad, imagine turning on the oven to cook a pizza and have the house fill with the odor of a subway station.

finally getting somewhere with my idea for this year's braden essay contest. i am tempted to write about the interesting things i found on the web this evening, but somebody could stumble across these ideas and steal them. a 1/million chance of that happening, but why risk it.

came across another interesting science writer named philip ball. i would love to read his new book, but i've suddenly developed a backlog of books. i started a book called "designing embedded hardware" by John Catsoulis. it's cool in that he explains all of the tangible features of computer hardware. for example, he devotes a chapter to printed circuit boards (PCBs), such as the ones found inside a PC or Mac. he talks about what each feature MEANS, why there is a green film on one side of a board and a bunch of soldered bumps on the other side. he explains why subcomponents on a PCB must have individual voltage regulators. etc.

matt (my roomate) gave me Tom Wolfe's "I am Charlotte Simmons" for my birthday. the first few pages are pretty good. a drunk frat boy admiring his own beauty in the mirror.

i also acquired a book about digital signal processing that seems to fill in all of the things that went over my head in lectures with Professor Brian Evans this semester. Evans is an enigma. Of all the professors at ECE he has seemed to do the most work on advancing the curriculum. for example, he has posted a game plan for how EE seniors (such as myself) might be educated to be able to do embedded system design before they graduate. however, he seemed to treat fundamental aspects of DSPs as advanced subjects. i.e. i was led to believe that what he was lecturing about was NOT neatly summarized in a book somewhere. yet this book "understanding digital signal processing" has sections i would have killed for when preparing for the first DSP midterm in october. i am brought back to the cynical conclusion that lecturers often explain things inadequately and that most EE subjects are best learned from books. professors merely stand there firehosing you with information that they had the time to sit down and absorb before you could. evans taught a lot of things that definitely were NOT in any textbook, but he also taught a lot of things that were and i did not realize it. in my automatic control course the situation was worse, the professor never referred to the book and spent most of the class time fiddling around with his self-devised sys ID and root-locus plotting programs. complain complain. i don't even know what i'm going on about. it's late!

i had an interesting dream that i needed to retake the 5th grade. i woke within the dream with only 5 minutes to get ready for school. because the elementary school was so close, i could run over there for my shower. i ran there in yesterday's clothes and found the locker room. i had forgotten to bring soap or shampoo. i found a tipped-over bottle of pert plus on a ledge. i scooped up some of it and it made a thick lather on my head. i also found a thinned-down bar of dial soap. i put on yesterday's clothes again and realized i only had one minute until the bell. in the hall was a buffet of desserts, cupcakes, date bars, etc. i took a chocolate cupcake with amber colored gummies on it, needing some sort of sustenance to begin the day. the cupcake fell apart and i tried to shove as much of it into my mouth as possible to avoid making a mess. in the back of my mind I thought that it would be okay to be late on the first day of school, that little kids would be expected to get lost in the hall, therefore the same grace period would apply to me even thought I was an adult. (It always amazes me how logical one can be in a dream while carrying out absurd tasks.) The 5th grade class was mostly adult. I looked around for kids and saw a few of them, many with their fathers. I thought everyone in the class (except me) must have been very stupid to require such remediation. The teacher asked "who knows where World War I started." Nobody answered so I shouted out "Munich" feeling very smug and self-assured. The teacher didn't acknowledge my answer and I assumed that he was intimidated by my brilliance. Julie was sitting behind me, one row over. She admired my self-assured answer. Then the dream was over and I woke up.

My history book was on the shelf next to my bed. I turned to the WWI section and saw that Ferdinand was assasinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia. I was thinking "Munich" because just before the outbreak of WWII, Neville Chamberlain thought he had successfully negotiated with Hitler in that city. The "Munich Analogy" was later applied by U.S. officials to the Soviet Union, justifying the cold war. I.e. Munich proved to them that the Soviets could not be bargained with.

Which leads me to the interesting interview on Fresh Air yesterday with Richard Viguerie, author of "America's Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power." Viguerie is the third disturbing fundamentalist right-winger I've heard on her show. Senator Rick Santorum (PA - anti-abortion crusader) freaked me out in August, and Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind novels, freaked me out in March. Viguerie's premise is that secular society is waging war on Christian society. He described the Bush White House as OK but not doing enough to "control the courts" or to reduce the size of government. When Gross asked him why it was necessary to frame the current state of politics as "war" he said that the war had already been started by secular society and that he was simply helping Christian America to defend itself.

Now, ask me if I like fundamentalist Christian America and my answer is no. I am not sure that means I am "at war" with anyone. I have watched Pat Robertson on television, and find him to be well-spoken but repugnant. Anyone who leads a mass prayer vigil asking God to "change" members of Supreme Court seems too biased to trust, and un-American. What is American about praying for the death of Supreme Court justices? But more to the point, Christian broadcast media is manipulative and in poor taste. Its goal is not to inform the masses but to convert them, to control them. Ultimately, its goal is to draw public discourse back towards scripture because that is where certain men exercise the greatest knowledge and authority. I think that this is a problem because many problems in the world are important even though they do not pertain to themes in the Bible. Global warming, the environment, human rights. I appreciate the wisdom of maintaining a secular society. I see self-discipline, tolerance, and creativity in secular society. Secular insight thrills me. Am I at war with Fundamentalist Christians? I don't think so. I just don't think their ideas and methods are helpful.

But this is not enough. Fundamentalist Christians are at war with ME. So if I am to speak out against it, I need to know things like "Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, not Munich." For that matter, it is helpful to know that WWII began partially in Spain where the right wingers under Franco defeated a newly formed leftist government, with backing from Hitler. America entered WWII as the new deal wound down. In america the role of government had expanded dramatically, to compensate for economic swings, and to assist the needs of people subjected to new forces of industrialization and urbanization. Americans loved FDR, and the fact that government could help.

three days until the end of finals. here is a link to an economics paper i wrote this semester.

currently reading richard wright's autobiography, "black boy." his language in 1944 was, in my opinion, completely modern. the feat he pulls off in this book is in adjusting his narrative voice to complement various growth stages. as a young boy his descriptions and observations are sparse. only by age 17, about 2/3 through the book do you begin to sense that the author is speaking. his perceptions of american culture are still very sharp. it would still seem that we are in a killing sort of system, one that is perhaps not so obviously cruel, but that we still must really use our wits to understand, and feel whole in.

i am finally moved in to matt's place. there are opened boxes and piles of unorganized crap on my bed which is why i am not sleeping right now. since i have much less personal space, the challenge is where to put everything. i can't move one thing without burying another thing. i've been hoisting and shuffling around my many heavy things for four straight days. it is changing my world view. i noticed in the arts section of the austin chronicle an exhibit called "electricity and me" which features fanciful electric devices. the aesthetics of it seemed wrong. our culture already includes heavy, mostly superfluous electric devices, what is the point of creating new, abstracted ones? i want to see art made out of nothing. an art installation that gives one the feeling of having empty hands and a strong back, rather than hands full and a burden to carry. there was actually a piece of art like this at the Tate a few years ago, a large photograph called "planting a ray of light" or something to that effect. the photograph showed a woman digging a hole with her hands, with the caption saying that she was performing an experiment to reveal dark spaces to the sun for the first time. the photo was taken in the late 60s but the woman had a modern stylishness, anyway i'm about to keel over from fatigue.

the depth of my ignorance was revealed this evening as I read about the Spanish-American war. most alarming to me was the realization that i never bothered, in 32 years of life, to study the geography of the caribbean islands. cuba forms a fairly straight line with haiti, the dominican republic, and puerto rico. in my mind, these places previously had no spatial orientation, except perhaps that i knew that cuba was the furthest north of the bunch. then, i realize, our country had an imperialist war with Spain, not much more than 100 years ago. Spain was cracking down on a Cuban insurgency to the extent that it hurt U.S. sugar interests, in that plantations were being smashed and workers put in concentration camps. we sent in the Maine for show, its boiler spontaneously exploded through no fault of Spain's, and due to intensly biased U.S. press coverage, we all decided to kick Spain's ass. we kicked Spain's naval ass--in both Cuba and the Phillipines--in 1898. our navy was efficient, but our ground troops were put through a meat grinder. teddy roosevelt and the rough riders prevailed in cuba, but took 1500 casualties. over 5000 U.S. troops died in the war overall, many because of poor diet and disease. this they called the "splendid little war."

of course, it was the turn of the century, when whites in the democratic-held south lynched nearly 100 african-americans annually. i am not sure that life in the U.S. then was any less violent than Iraq is today. our sensibilities have changed, in such a way that we are not any more peaceful or empathatic, only fixated more on outsiders. as our indifference towards genocide in Sudan suggests, we only care about violence that is a direct challenge to our sense of superiority. seeing the beginning of al-Zarqawi's staged beheading on 60 minutes the other night, i have busied my mind with scenarios of how we might be able to shoot or blow up the guy. however, brutality such as his is everywhere NOW, and it has prevailed HERE and ELSEWHERE for thousands of years. it is my entitled life here in the U.S. that is the exception. lives can end and do end in absurd, brutal ways. i could turn around and begin wondering why and how my life should be so GOOD in relation to it all.

there are a lot of things left to think about.

in the aftermath of a terrorist hit, the only alternative we seem to be able to accept is a military strike. a key reason that bush & co. may have put the military in iraq was to have a perpetual front available just for this occasion. assuming that the next terrorist attack is inevitable, our being in iraq will at least allow us to take quick, impressive action against militants, even if they are the wrong militants. in this light, the iraq postwar strategy seems shrewd. bush & co. didn't go in because they thought iraq could be fixed; they went in because they knew it would stay fucked up, a hotbed for extremism. as long as there are insurgents in iraq we will have someone to punish. we can be blind to actual threats, but we won't appear blind. since terrorism is nothing but PR anyway, there is some sort of twisted logic to this.

this is how i would do it, though.

- force all airline passengers to wear nothing but soft, pajama-like outfits. no carry-ons.

- deploy an international system of tamper-proof cargo containers that cannot be opened between source and destination without a "seal" being broken. i.e. allow nothing to be snuck around by ship. Frame the goal of "cargo omniscience" the way kennedy fromed putting a man on the moon and fund international teams to solve the problem.

- tougher gun control laws at home and a comprehensive strategy for disarmament abroad. work towards total prohibition of assault weapons, everywhere, and be persuasive about why this is important.

I looked for a news story about the Bush daughters' speech last night at the GOP convention, one commenting on their remark along the lines of "we want to stand up and support our dad, besides, what else do we have to do, we just got out of college!" (I wasn't watching it and don't know which one said it.) I thought it was a pretty severe dig on the economy, but it seems that I'm the only person who noticed.

No more judging and Dyer bashing. I DO have reasons to be inspired. Yesterday Dillon McKinsey did an amazing “Writing on the Air” (a 30 minute radio talk show I co-produce on KOOP 91.7 FM) with Austin Mayor Will Wynn and his wife, Anne. Dillon interviewed them on the topic of “Poetry in the Public Square.” He had quotes from the likes of Mario Cuomo, “Campaigning takes poetry, leadership takes prose.” His questions were surprisingly good, stimulating. They opened up, talking as people rather than as figureheads. They genuinely like slam poetry; Anne sees more talent in the likes of Wammo than in Bonnie Raitt. (She called Will on his cell as he sat in a Bonnie Raitt concert to call him over to Ego’s to see a slam.) Will, interestingly enough, has all of the songwriter Guy Clark’s lyrics memorized, and he did a beautiful two minute recital of a set of his lyrics.

If the leaders understand the importance of art, and the people play an active part supporting and creating art, then Austin is redeemed. It becomes a place capable of renaissance, not just economic renewal.

i made my way onto a Wayne Dyer discussion board. what a rush! see comment in the next entry.