Dear car drivers who persist in trying to kill me:

I am sure that I don't know any of you personally, and as such I cannot determine at what point in my life I have managed to wrong you. But, as you have made it abundantly clear to me (no less than four times) that you wish to see me flattened like a bug under the tires of your car on South Division Street in down town Buffalo, I am forced to speculate: why?

Perhaps my running theory that the people of Buffalo are in fact pseudo-Canadians has upset some secret cabal. The evidence is clear to anyone who wants to think about it. Most of us drink Canadian Beer, and of course there is our obsession with Hockey, and I have to admit that while flipping the channels on my television I, like many of you, have stopped for an hour to watch Curling for no explainable reason. Yet, somehow, proffering a secret cabal as the central source of the four attempts on my life seems too far fetched.

Perhaps it's that girl I met on New Years four years ago. We hit it off fairly nice for two heavy drinkers. But then, sometime later, I just decided to never call her again. I couldn't afford a relationship that required a fifth of rum and a fifth of whiskey on every date. To this day, when she sees me walking down the street she will roll down her window and just scream at me - no words - just a blood chilling banshee scream of an addict that lost their free source of junk. It seems almost conceivable that she could escalate to attempting to run me down with her car, and her friends were crazy too...

Yet, no - that is not the reason I was nearly run over by four cars today.

The real reason is you, crazy car driver. You know who you are! You Sabres jersey wearing lunatic! You only come downtown when there is a game, so you're completely fucking lost down there in a rat maze of streets. Now you never bothered to invest in seasonal parking to go along with your season tickets, no you just drive around looking for something on the street - maybe, you think, the genie of cheap parking will materialize in front of me and grant my wish for something close to the dome. But there is no genie, and then you're running late, the game is about to start, and that incredible amount of money you spent on season tickets starts to itch at your conscience.

You and several hundred other cars are all trying to make their way to the dome down Washington Street, bumper to bumper, and you spot it. An open street, you could go around this Bull Shit. Why didn't anyone else see such an obvious short cut? So you slam on the accelerator and before you can sing LETS GO SABRES! you're heading west down South Division Street and nearly collide with a pedestrian.

Yes, crazy car driver, that was me in the gray wool coat with the tan scarf screaming, "WHAT THE FUCK!?" as you nearly ran me over. You see, South Division is what we metropolitan people like to call a one way street. And you, are what I like to call an Asshat. You and the other three idiots who followed right after you. Up South Division to a wall of confused traffic waiting at the Main Street and Church Street light. No doubt you were shitting bricks when you were almost side swiped by the train.

We look forward to having you all back in the metropolitan area soon!

Best Regards,

~EJTower.

P.S. Buy a tom-tom.

Anyone interested in studying the effects of absolute rule on the human psyche might do well to look to Bus Drivers. You can almost see the faces of every king and queen that ever lived in the eyes of these monarchs of the road. Each imposing tolls, monitoring immigration and emigration with the variability of every form of rule there could be: I have met bus drivers who would let you on if you flashed a gray napkin with a number on it, and others who would argue your right to ride the bus based on where the issuing driver chose to punch your day pass.

The Number fourteen is ruled from six until midnight by an insane time czar. The universe could not be as accurate as his arrival and departure schedules. A curb popping despot with terrifying accelerations and brakes, I have heard him screaming holy hell out his slide window at any car driving heretic in the way of his accurateness. "Come on you cocksucker! FUCK YOU!" I've seen him leave flag waving old women standing at the stop for being a minute behind. Once I swear I felt him bump a car in front of us out of the way, but none of us said anything and the car didn't chase us.

In the afternoon and late morning somewhere on The Number Twenty you may find yourself in the domain of Time Thief. A robber baron of a bus driver, who has learned to fold time out of his schedules to further his own ends. Driving from the bus station at North Division he floors the accelerator, only choosing to pick up those stops that have large crowds. Goodbye single business woman on Delaware and Huron, see you later chic marketing man, catch the next one in ten minutes - The Time Thief has just stolen your minutes. Rocketing up the street he eventually comes to the stop at Elmwood and Forrest, pulling to the side he turns off the bus, and as we watch in confusion he closes the doors and goes into the Mobil Quick Mart on stolen time. A piss and a coffee purchase later, we're back on the road and still on schedule.

What does it really mean to be "On Time"? It's open to interpretation, whose time really matters most in the monarchy of the bus driver? I will warn you this way: woe to those who argue with the keeper of the doors, for they will kick your ass back out onto the sidewalk even after you've deposited your fare.

snippit from a possible book. Working title:

Notes from the sprawl

Let me know what you think about the writing

My friends all want to be spooks. They're all digging deep into the criminal justice departments, playing their cards right, and planning the complex river stone jumps needed to reach spook country. It's like the only way to become a spook is to fist be enough of a spook to get in. Jogging the social networks, uncovering dirt to blackmail your representative for a letter of recommendation, and applying your face to enough ass and genitals to be noticed.

"It's big business" I say to him across our table at Starbucks, "these days the call for spooks is way up in both government and private companies. Do you know about Blackwater?"

"No, I'll look'em up"

"If you have a conscience don't bother, can't trust a company that makes it's business fighting to win peace. Their incentive is to win the battles, and prolong the war. Basic game theory there, that's how'd they make the most money."

"I've just always been interested in these sorts of things. The forces behind things pulling the strings, like in cyberpunk stories. Thought it would make a good career."

Like a lot of my friends he's addicted to cybergnosis, a sort of combination concept between Foucault's power-knowledge and the Japanese Otaku. The obscure knowledge about the world that any normal person would never want to know. A normal person suffering from either a complete lack of imagination or an overwhelming sense of their own powerlessness.

I'm an addict too, by the way. Though I am not so crazy as to start thinking spook country is a land I want to visit. Perhaps this is the real truth of my generation: All the past generations, the bohemians with their absinthe, the beats with their everything they could find, and the hippies with their pot; all of them looking for mystical visions and cosmic vibrations in the substances.

Our truth, our drug, is the media.

No, no, not Fox News. The media, like saying the info, we're all infohipsters, media addicts, and news junkies. Stealing away the rare and obscure knowledge and media that grants us social clout, and gnostic power. Fuck the supernatural, this is the information age. Enlightenment is the digital autodidacticism facilitated by the proliferation of the network.

Don't get me wrong you still need to wring the truth out of the world and data-stores with strong arms and mind, but anyone still trying to stare into astral space deserves to be the vegetable that they've become. They need to replace yoga and meditation with solid database building skills.

Sure, sure, we use substances too. Though lets be straight here, my caffeine addiction is just something I have to maintain my insomnia so I can take in more information, my love of whiskey is merely to loosen me up well enough to process my inputs.

I ask him what it is about cyberpunk stories he's lacking in his reality, because mine seems chalk full of it.

"It's just not as apparent as it is in the stories. The situation is blatant in the story. You know the world is messed. There is still room for doubt here."

"bah! That's just the isolation. Here in the decadent opulent center of the sprawl there only 'appears' to be room for doubt. You're not taking in enough of what's really going on out there." I took a deep breath as my mind gathered the ammo for a good cathartic rant. "We're already living in a cyberpunk dystopia, man. The question is not are we there, but what the hell does it mean to be there at all.

"You need to think about it this way: With maybe the exception of full emersion virtual reality, everything in cyberpunk novels already exists in our reality. Corporations with larger budgets than countries, government powers fairly impotent to act against them, people with cybernetic limbs, complex webs of information available online, dangerous hacker criminals, and more; these already exist.

"The doubt that you feel is part of this new problem I am noticing with people. It's sort of summed up in the statement "that only happens in the movies." Science and Technology are advancing so fast that they are out stripping the collective imagination of society. It creates a reality warp where world situations and objects that are in fact real are still considered impossible figments of science fiction entertainment. Hell, even science fiction authors are playing catch-up these days.

"The first cyborg had his nervous system hooked up to a computer on March 22, 2002, but if you asked anyone on the street about it they'd probably tell you that cyborgs are as real as Santa Claus."

He was somewhat dissatisfied. Was I implying that corporations have political autonomy, and are part of some conspiracy to control the worlds governments? Did I know that the Starbucks shift manager was staring at us?

They like to give you side long glances at this one. Especially after you've been sitting for a few hours without buying anything else.

"No," wrinkling my forehead, focusing, "conspiracy theory is an out dated method of geo-political analysis. Like a futurist using tarot cards to write his projections. Corporations will never totally exist as independent pseudo-governments as they appear in cyberpunk novels, because it is too impractical.

"There is a lot to be said for the importance of lobbyists in corporate power, it allows corporations to take turns dressing up and dancing around in Uncle Sam's skin suit. The accepted legitimacy of established governmental sovereignty would be too hard for any single corporation to establish for itself.

"The branding power of the established governments is just too strong for corporations to effectively compete with, so they just pay the governments to release the product they're selling under their brand line. Like The United Fruit Company getting the government of Guatemala toppled in 1954 by the CIA to stop the Arbenz administration from redistributing uncultivated land to the natives. Get me?"

We sat there quietly for a few minutes. I took a drag off my triple shot cinnamon latte, and crammed a piece of marble loaf into my mouth. This trip to Starbucks has cost me nearly eight dollars. I am suddenly aware of how much I need to cut back on the caffeine intake; the more I drink, the more I need, the more it costs. Luck for me I am in the caffeine pushing business, and have a key to a warehouse full of it.

"But that's not what you were talking about," The conversation had gone adrift, and I wanted to get back to his crisis of conscience.

Our vision of the world has come to be dominated by the monolithic figures of the north and south towers of the world trade center blasting fireballs, pluming smoke, and piled as rubble in lower-Manhattan. These moments, witnessed by most of us through the media, have greatly effected the life choices of many of my would-be spook friends.

They were unceremoniously made aware of the harsh realities of geo-political threats, or rather the threats made themselves painfully present in their otherwise comfortably isolated lives. Now in early adulthood their mind is full of a single question replicating itself over and over again: What the hell are you going to do about it?

"I'm looking for a way to do something interesting, and productive without..."

"Standing on the backs of the innocent?"

"yeah,"

"Me too." It's true. I'd been going to business school for years, for my undergraduate degree, before I finally opened my eyes to the fact that the school is designed to produce responsive corporate soldiers, not free thinking business people with consciences.

"What are you doing about it?"

"Slamming hard on the brakes until I can figure out what the hell I am doing. Last thing I want is a grey suited job in a grey cubical waiting for a gold watch retirement. I'm afraid of getting space monkey syndrome." As defined by Chuck Palahniuk in Fightclub: The space monkey pushes buttons, pulls levers, never understands a thing about the purpose of his life, and then dies. "Those prospects scare the shit out of me."

I am starting to understand by the look on his face that it scares the shit out of him too, and I can't blame him. Space monkey syndrome is even more frightening when used in the context of the intelligence industry. You might flip a switch or push a button that lands the whole country in another Vietnam or Iraq.

This is the dissonance between the power mechanics of the world and the information age. The mechanics of the world doesn't work with our drug of choice. Governments, Corporations, and the rest of the power structures require the space monkeys to move forward. The info-hipster addiction to cybergnostics has placed us in a situation where we have to choose between our professional survival, and what we know to be true. All of this before we get the first job in our field of choice.

Last night I downloaded a very interesting book, which I am listening to in audio while I work. The book is by Neal Stephenson, the author of The Baroque Cycle and a few other cyberpunk classics like The Cryptonomicon. This book is titled Anathem and is for the reader or listener who enjoys the experience of imagining other cultures through fiction, and exploring their deep histories and linguistic differences as a lens to understand our own. So, if you enjoyed the epic scope of Frank Herbert's DUNE, or J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings (or if you had the gumption to read through Tolkien's notes on elf language, or the mind melting cosmology of The Silmarillion) then I have no doubt that this book is for you.

I will not waste time giving you a plot summary, which you can find here on wikipedia, or by looking it up on Amazon. What interests me more about this book is the connection it has with The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. I have been following the doings of this foundation for some time, because they have a wonderful monthly podcast where scientists and leading thinkers of our day are free to speculate about the next 10,000 years.

The book itself budded out of the continuation of Stephenson's involvements with the foundation on their most ambitious project of creating The Clock of the Long Now, or the 10,000 year clock - a sort of every lasting sign of human ingenuity and a inspiration for thinkers to think not towards short term horizons, but toward long term horizons measured in near geological timescales.

The chimes for the clock itself were developed by Brian Eno using algorithms to ensure that each time it chimes it will be different than the last.

Proceeds from the sale of books, and a number of other items related to the world of Anathem through the Long Now Foundation's website go towards the 10,000 year clock fund.

SO... I've been away from the strip for over a year now. A year and some four months for the counters. Much to my general disappointment this past year and four months has been a hellfire downward spiral on a rocket. Punctuated - as all interesting downward spirals are - with heavy drinking, a falling out with friends, and a protracted period of alone time.

Hard to tell where the bottom of the whole thing was, or is, but I have moved to south buffalo, ditched my car in favor of the bus system, and stopped drinking. The cherry on top of this cascade came when I was rushed to the Emergency Room back in November with heavy heart palpitations, numbness in my fingers, and pain shooting down my arm and up my neck. Thinking I was having a heart attack they took me in for monitoring and later took me out of work for two weeks.

So, out of work for two weeks killed me in the money department. No one is getting a gift from me this year, not even me. But the heart thing came to a relatively happy ending that could make a person laugh, or at least made me laugh after all of this. The chest pains, my cardiologist advised, were caused by elevated stress levels - Relax, he said, you're only Twenty-Five.


(My internet connection died in August, and I just got it back today.)