Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 44

The Report (Vol One, Complete): “Doing a Business.”

In which Team Mueller paints a portrait of a campaign rife with imbecilic, overconfident menchildren playing politics and seeking to seek opportunities to impress the boss, a cadre of Vincent Adultmen “doing a business” on an international / geopolitical stage – with coffee and donuts and notes scrawled upon yellow legal pads just in view of the camera to show that they are doing so many businesses, in the worst traditions of hotel banquet hall networking events – that they were too inept to understand – though not, it would seem, too inept to “do a [sensitive and/or potentially illegal] business” either over encrypted apps or delete conversations pertinent to said “business”:

“Further, the Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated – including some associated with the Trump campaign – deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records.” – Vol. 1, p. 10

It continues…

“Accordingly, while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.”

Thus, it would seem, in our age of loose (at best) definitions of “complete and total exoneration,” (the current bloviating rally cry of both Team Malignancy and its legislative enablers, a messaging predicated upon a cynical faith that people are too lazy to read the actual report) that willfull (?) stupidity coupled with the utiliziation of encrypted communications tools and/or the deletion of pertinent documentary evidence (for example, messages from before March 2017 were nowhere to be found on the phones of both Steve Bannon and Erik Prince; similarly, both claimed not to know why messages didn’t appear on their devices – Vol.1, p. 156) is, indeed, the sure-fire way out of anything.

Currently 50 pages or so into Volume Two: if Volume One was a surreal portrait of a campaign of imbeciles, Volume Two is a damning portrait of the mercurial degradation of the presidency; my highlighter is drying up, my sticky tab supply dwindling, my horror growing.

Of Temporal Blurriness and Meteorological Disorientation

It’s 50ºF this morning, the second day of K’s summer break and I’ve already lost track of the days, one day bleeding into the other, into the other…

Combined with efforts to enhance and tighten discipline and schedule during anointed writing times, I’m telling myself that this sensation of blur might be my approximation of the truest form of Annie Dillard’s exhortation of the import of schedule in THE WRITING LIFE:

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time… Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”

(Though more likely than not it’s just me being the truest form of the forgetful heathen I tend to be…)

It feels like March and it’s been 03 June twice in my illegible scrawl this morning: Blurred? Indeed. Powerful? Working on it.

P.S. LEGENDS OF TOMORROW is the most fun show on television.

After Two Weeks of Writing with The Exorcist…

Since I’m bored with calling my Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen The Fountain Pen, The Fountain Pen will henceforth be known as The Exorcist, that vessel by which my brain is unburdened of its legion of fuckeries as they move, bit by bit, in illegible scrawl (though I’m working on that – indeed, The Exorcist encourages it) to the page for all methods of poking, prodding, and/or discarding.

Findings:

Any worry over smearing, smudging, and streaking as a result of my inveterate left-handedness was wholly without merit. No problems whatsoever. The preferred legal pad of The Exorcist: Staples’ Gold Series, Narrow Ruled, 20lb paper, white. No bleed-through and possessed with the perfect amount of gloss to allow The Exorcist to GLIDE. Started using these only yesterday and I’m already in love. Speaking of paper: though I’ve used them for a little over a year now and besmirched them with various pretenders to the throne of The Exorcist, my beloved Midori A5 “Ruled Line Free” (AKA Blank) notebooks/journals are proving themselves to be the perfect home for days rendered in The Exorcist’s discarded processings.Ink cartridges (Pilot Namiki black) changed – more or less – once a week. Might take the leap into bottled ink as that green conscience of mine is getting a bit more verbose (though cartridges are a vast improvement over disposable pens).Two minor problems that might become more but are tolerable for now: The Exorcist is a bit thick, resulting in slight discomfort as the day goes on, possibly the result of arthritis’s first whisperings; and the ridge just above the nib digs into my finger with something approximating wanton cruelty. Lastly, while I don’t see myself being unfaithful to The (present) Exorcist and seeking greener pastures anytime soon, I can’t deny that the Lamy Safari and the Muji Fountain Pen are both tempting. For right now, however, the local availability of Namiki ink cartridges and general love of its heft and balance (and value) is keeping me faithful to The (present) Exorcist.

Other items of business: I’m giving the Pomodoro technique an honest go and have, so far, found it to be revelatory. Will probably discuss it a bit more in the next newsletter.

Your Sunday Dog Picture for 02 June 2019

This week’s newsletter is on its way; regular ramblings return tomorrow.

Case Study: Me

Myself, my behavior, my bullshit: a wellspring of material always at ready for stark, honest exploration, narratives and tales and vignettes, fiction and non-, in which I am the deeply flawed protagonist – and antagonist – of the novel that is life: this is who I am (or think I am, in this present moment), this is what I am doing, and this is what I know (or think I know, and oh, how wrong I was).

Hence why I write about the internet with such frequency, about connectivity and communication: I use it and my relationship with it as a lens through which to explore my own behaviors, my own habits, the weights and counterweights that constitute balance – input and output, talk and silence: What actions do I take to allow these connections and routines and rituals become sacrosanct – no matter how deleterious they might prove? How do they evolve? And how do they, for better or for worse, define me – and how (why) do I let them?

When My Time’s Up

As I’ve attended far too many funerals and/or “celebrations of life” these past few years – including, very nearly, being front and center at my own – for comfort and/or the preservation of sanity, I’ve had plenty of time to think about how I’d like my posthumous send-off (hopefully a long ways off, so don’t freak out) to play out. Current thinking: my body shall be donated to a community theatre troupe putting on a live version of FARGO (perhaps Corky St. Clair’s long-awaited BACKDRAFT follow-up?) so that my corporeal remains might lend a degree of verisimilitude to the concluding woodchipper scene.

Or maybe donate it to science (for science things / because science), I don’t know. Just spitballing here. Adios, May.

Media Literacy 2020

While increasing teacher pay, adding more mental health staff to schools, banning assault weapons, and eliminating educational inequality are all musts, any 2020 presidential candidate that puts forth an education policy that neglects to include a set of standards for media literacy yet speaks of the need to ensure that the Russian interference of 2016 never happens again speaks hollow: it was precisely because of rampant American media illiteracy and an inability to critically analyze, disseminate, and make informed decisions of signal v. noise – across all age groups – that Russian interference efforts succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and poured gasoline on an already-burning fire that will only become more uncontrollable the longer this issue is left in the hands of a president whom it benefited and a group of candidates seeking to unseat him who don’t give the underlying issue the import that it deserves: Media literacy is more than an educational essential and the mark of a “well-informed citizenry”: it is now, more than ever, a national security imperative.

Intake / Balance

In my efforts to tilt my media diet away from the anxious and towards the sane, the necessity of balance becoming all that more clear (especially being a writer – and, by nature, a sponge): the intake of media must be balanced with what I release into the fog of work, just as with an exercise regimen: the intake of calories balanced with those burned: too much and you fall over; too little, and they pile up.

I’m sure I’m going somewhere with this but it’s not coming to me at the moment. Oh well. To work.

And On and Again, This War of Blood and Insulin

Fighting again, still, the seasonal blood sugar skirmish in the midst of an allergen cloud settled over this transition from spring to summer or whatever passes for it in this bastion of wanton heartlandia fallen off the deep end of heartbeat bills and gerrymandering. Normal, then not; not, then normal: a unit drops me 80, same raises me 65; sign of something out of balance, of T1D reasserting itself back to the balance sheet, to find that necessary medium? That both bullshit and blood sugar (though “blood glucose” is medically preferred) share an initialism is more than apposite… fuck this fucking disease and the misfiring immune system it rode in on.

ONCE, Again

Working theory: the word “delightful” was waiting for ONCE to come along to define it.

Revisited it this weekend – for the first time in more than a decade – and found it to be even more delightful the second time around, an intimate fairy tale speaking volumes of the artistic dream, of hope, of love found and unrequited in long walks along city sidewalks, hoover in tow.

When I saw The Swell Season live in the late naughties, Hansard spoke of green light days and red light days, that particular day being a green light day, a day where everything just sort of worked, from coffee to haircuts: ONCE, then, is the story of what happens when a life of red lights finally starts to turn green – in spite of self-inflicted efforts to turn those same lights red again.