The frog

Good morning.
It's a sunny day
in Bushrod Community Park.
A Sunday morning.
The birds and squirrels are up.
What are you, poet?
What's your story?
Got anything? No?

This is how you saw it, right?
25, sleepless, sexless
beard and hair everywhere
trying to write himself
on a war-torn green picnic table
in the park in the neighborhood
sure of only one thing:

The last demon
to sit down
at this picnic table
was a hell of a lot scarier
than you are.

This is what you dreamt of, yes?

Well, did you wake up yet?

Can't wake up if you never slept, right?

Cute answer, but wrong.

You love to sleep.

You just can't.

I left the portal on
back at home
while you went for this
adorable little walk.
Cold comfort for when you get back,
I know,
but it's home. Right?

Last night,
you thought you heard this signal
that wrote over the last noise,
whatever it was,
and then wrote over it again.
The sound of the
delete key
on a blinking red
emergency panel.
You pushed the button
again and again
expecting the screen
to go blank
but it didn't.
It wouldn't shut off.

Now it's just morning again.

Just this. Yawn.

The kids are learning baseball
from the dads and other men.

People are holding cell phones
up to their ears
wobbling around by themselves
pretending to have something to do
pacing back and forth
just looking at cracked, green paint
seeing how deep the cracks are.

Don't forget to
do your stretches
before you
exert yourself.

Yeah, he's doing it. Yep.
A grown-up with a blue polo shirt
tucked into his jeans,
after doing his arm stretches,
is climbing onto the jungle gym
right in front of you
to swing from the monkey bars
just one time.
And now he's off the playground
walking back onto the court
to practice his pitching motion
like nobody's watching.

Oh, but he knows you're there.
He's going to walk by you now
on the way to his car.
You're twiddling your beard,
and he's nodding to you.
Quit touching your face
and say it,
croak "Good morning,"
sounding just like the frog
you literally ate for dinner
last night,
crunching up the bones in
your teeth.

Now hop home,
back through Bushrod,
past the Beautiful Gate Church
cross Shattuck
without getting splattered,
crawl back into your portal,
and don't wake the stranger
sleeping in your living room.

Stop telling us what to do

When I can't deal with reality, I go stand in the shower. I think any body of water would do, but my shower happens to be the closest one. I had to do that today.

I can't deal with reality today, specifically virtual reality. It's the day after a tragedy, just like every day, but one of yesterday's tragedies was a bombing in public in America, which always has a devastating effect on virtual reality.

That's probably why terrorism is effective. Its effects are amplified by the media megaphone all the scared, affluent people carry around. Terrorism is a way to create a culture of extreme violence in places where the baseline level of violence is relatively low. To some people from cultures of extreme violence, especially ones caused by violence sent from those very same, less violent places, it's only fair.

There's a lot of macho talk in virtual reality today. On the one hand, there's "Refuse to be terrorized, or the terrorists win." On the other, there's "Wake up to the reality of this violent world! You have to see the bloody truth!" Both of these straw people think they're helping. They both think the way to help in a crisis is to tell people what to do.

The media have assumed the role of telling people what to do in an emergency. It's a way to manage panic and chaos. And now that the broadcaster job has shifted out of the newsroom and onto everybody's phone, people are psyched to play that role for all their friends and followers. People love a chance to boss each other around.

I don't think that's helping. I don't think telling people how they should deal with a violent reality helps them do so. I don't think yelling heals trauma, let alone showing images of trauma over and over and over again. That sounds like more trauma. That sounds like abuse. And victims of abuse do not get better through further abuse. They get worse.

I've never been a victim of extreme violence, the kind we saw in Boston and Iraq yesterday. But I've had enough of the rusty taste of the kinds of emotional violence we act out on each other at our worst, and I know this: seeing it, being reminded of it over and over in the media does not help make it better, especially when those media are also your friends.

I'm supposed to be working today. I'm supposed to be writing the introductory post for my new media operation. I'm supposed to be explaining what it stands for. But I can't type because I'm shaking with anger at the whole world of online media for being so ill prepared to deal with reality. When I eventually got out of the shower, I had to write this by hand.

The chauvinist, mansplaining media apparatus is a weapon. It has to be disarmed. It did not escape my notice that the most violent messages I saw yesterday came from men, and almost all the supportive responses to my plea for harm reduction came from women.

Media are a distorted reflection of the diabolical power structure of real life, and the distortion makes it worse. It makes us — beautiful, tragic humankind — look into the mirror and see only ugly tragedy. And then, feeling ugly, we behave as ugly, we express ourselves as ugly, and the world gets more distorted.

Break that mirror. We are not ugly.

We are fucking beautiful.

On reporting violent news without worsening the trauma

This is a standalone version of a comment originally posted in a Facebook discussion. It resulted from the sharing of a violent image from the bombing at the Boston Marathon today.

Images of violence should be preceded with a trigger warning. Otherwise, the trauma they can induce in viewers only serves to heighten the impact of the violence.

We are all journalists now, and the most important job of a journalist is to put facts into context. The violence of a news event is a fact of a serious nature, and so it should be reported carefully and in context.

The real-time social streams from which we get our information are challenging places to provide context. Attention is scarce there. Sensationalism is tempting. But attention garnered that way comes at a cost. When that cost is the amplification of trauma, I think that's too high.

I understand the argument that privileged people should be confronted with the violent reality of day-to-day life. It is easy to ignore news of violence for those to whom violence is an abstract idea. Comfortable people will go to great lengths to remain comfortable, even going so far as to ignore uncomfortable news. I agree that news media are ineffective if they allow violence to go ignored. But a violent photo is not the news. It's violence out of context.

The problem with forcing violent images on people is not mere discomfort. The problem is trauma. There are plenty of images that can be used responsibly to package the facts with the right amount of discomfort. The line not to cross is further traumatizing victims of violence. That is, after all, the goal of those who engage in mass violence.

The Temple of Whollyness

The Temple of Whollyness has been revealed. It’s a massive pyramidal complex made entirely of interlocking puzzle pieces of wood, without any metal hardware. This kind of construction looks and feels organic, like something naturally produced by intelligent life forms — because, of course, it is.

It’ll also go up like the Fourth of July.

Read more on the official Burning Man Blog.

Dear Internet friends,

What would we do without you? You’re like lighthouses guiding our way across the fuzzy digital sea. In a room of voices, we happened to hear yours. A link, a warm idea, a staticky Markov joke confirmed we were playing on the same team. After months, in some cases years, we’ve built up such a strong network. We depend on it.

But what happens when the services we use to stick together fall apart, as they inevitably do? Won’t you miss Google Reader? Aren’t you sad that Instagram sold our moments to Facebook? Aren’t you worried about Twitter’s mad rush to turn tweets into auto-playing video commercials?

We are. That’s one reason we joined App.net. And now that it’s free to participate, we hope you’ll join us.

https://join.app.net/from/ablaze

What's the point?

App.net is infrastructure for a social web that its users and makers control. Your account lets you authenticate into any application a developer can dream up for the service, and it can store all the messages, media, and data you create.

For example, if you don’t like the way a photo app is going, you can just switch apps and bring all your photos with you. And App.net has a backbone of a Twitter-like social graph, so your relationships come with you, too.

But there’s no advertising. You choose your applications. You own your data. You can follow some people, post messages, and store some data with a free account, and paying ADN boosts your following and storage allowances. It’s like Dropbox, Flickr, or Evernote. The relationships and the stuff belong to you, and the service just makes your applications work.

We’re not App.net members just to replace Twitter for some ideological reason. We’re members so we can try out new ways of managing our thousands of digital photos without having to do some huge migration every time we switch. We’re members so we can meet collaborators — the same way we met you — and move with one click into a private chat room where we can plan, work, and share project files, all on one service.

There are so many cool apps already, and it’s just getting started. And if there’s something else you want to see built, you’re in the middle of a community that can help make it happen.

What do we do now?

Oh, what are we working on? Well.

We’re sharing stuff we’re reading and writing. We set up our @reading bots over there. We’re posting snap insights and observations, just like we do on Twitter, but with a little more writing room and a smaller but more excited community. We’re also thinking and talking about new possibilities for publishing over a network like this, and some of the first experiments are about to begin.

The last critical ingredient we need is you. Come join App.net and get in on this jam session. We’re not leaving Twitter (yet). That’s still where the global conversation is. But there’s a whole different thing happening on ADN, and it’s well worth it to spend time in both.

So here’s a link with 100 invitations. First come, first served. I bet we can even rustle up some more if this link runs out.

https://join.app.net/from/ablaze

We hope to see you on ADN soon.

In our typical sincerity,
Jon (@ablaze) and Rob (@yay)

Two stems and a cap

for Irina

There was a poem.

I did the laundry.
I took out the garbage.
I ate some mushrooms.
I went for a walk,
and I got it.

Why do we go on?

It's this desire for a state
in which the whole world
expresses itself to you
as one,
and it always knows
just what to say.

Talent is

Looking at it,
taking a deep breath,
and being able to tell
if it's good.

Burning Man is a story field

From high above, you’d think Burning Man was just a bunch of objects.

You take the vast, blank field of the Black Rock Desert, place items and humans in a C-shaped formation, and you have yourself a Burning Man.

Now that Black Rock City has found its shape, it looks more or less the same from orbit year over year, although it scoots around the playa a little bit. Our festival of spontaneity begins to look pretty repetitive from high up.

How much more Cargo Cult does it get? We build our city of cars and altar of sticks, we burn the altar, we demolish the city, and then we do it again. We keep having this festival to blow up reality or whatever we’re doing, but reality keeps on being real, and we keep building this C-shaped pile of objects over and over again. Does this not meet the definition of insanity?

Read more on the official Burning Man Blog.

Stories

It is obvious that we cannot say that we have lost the openness. “I used to have it, but I have lost it.” We cannot say that, because that will destroy our status as an accomplished person. So the part of self-deception is to retell the stories. We would rather tell stories than actually experience openness, because stories are very vivid and enjoyable.

— Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Religious language

I tend to think of a religion as a language. It's a set of words and movements. One learns to associate those words and movements with one's inward, ineffable ideas about the world. No language is inherently good or bad; it's ideas that are good or bad. Learning a language is just a matter of expressing oneself clearly.

So for people like me for whom religion is a second language, choosing a religion has aesthetic considerations. Does this language sound like the world I see and hear and feel around me? Is it beautiful? Does it describe things elegantly? Does it please my mind?

The trap is to get lost in those superficial beauties, to get caught up in describing the world to the exclusion of living in it. Those are the word games of dogmatists and astrologers. “Oh, that's not an outlier. That can be easily categorized. It's right here in the Bible/your birth chart.”

But the trick is to be skillful with language, to use it for the ends of communicating and understanding oneself, not merely for describing things. Oftentimes no description is necessary. Plain language will usually communicate more clearly than religious code, especially in a pluralistic world.

Just spewing words accomplishes nothing if the speaker and the listener don't meet at a destination of ideas. It's the ideas behind the words that matter. That's the lesson of the Fire Sermon. So religion is only as useful as one is successful at using it to communicate about the nature of reality. It is not always necessary.

With all that said, I have realized what it is about the Buddhist language that appeals to me. Religious languages are usually created to describe human nature. We have many conflicting, often inexpressible insights about our own nature. Religions help us isolate the useful ones and keep them straight. I think Buddhism's language about human nature is the most useful.

Other religions, including the secular ones we study in the West, assume too much shared understanding about human nature, so people talk past each other about each other and themselves. Ideas like sin, justice, marriage as some outwardly defined pact, these don't mean the same things to everyone, but common understanding is assumed. Miscommunications abound.

Buddhism's language is different. It only proposes a minimum viable human nature. "We're here. We'll be gone soon. That's hard. So let's be kind to each other." Everything above that is treated as mutable or transient.

Yes, life is more complicated than that most of the time, but Buddhist practice is designed to boil it all down to that as often as we can remember to do so. If we're acting from that basic place, everything's probably going to be fine. Our lapses are not sins. They're just old habits of making things more complicated than they really are.

At least, that's how I understand it.

Demons

In other traditions demons are expelled externally. But in my tradition demons are accepted with compassion.

— Machik Labdrön

Off the grid, bathing in waves

I'm going to Indonesia for two weeks, and I'm not bringing any computers with me.

I couldn't figure out which of those facts was more exciting, so I combined them into one sentence.

My parents, my younger brother, and I have all had momentous years, so we are celebrating together by taking this trip. We'll be biking and walking through places I've dreamed of seeing.

In particular, I'm looking forward to the music. I studied Balinese and Javanese gamelan in college. I think of musical ensembles as hyper-intelligent super-organisms, and gamelans are highly evolved ones. The contributions of the many interlocking performers combine to generate these exquisitely complex waves. I'm going to bathe myself in them.

I'll also get to bathe in some ocean waves.

Here are some waves in which I will not be bathing: cell phone radiation, Wi-Fi radiation, or any waves of information carried over the Internet. It will be a full-spectrum digital detox, and I can already feel myself healing from it.

I've got good books, lots of blank paper, various pens, and a digital audio recorder powered by one AAA battery. I'm bringing two disposable film cameras. But the point is not to capture this. The point is to go do it and have it happen to me.

Have a good Internet until I return. I hope December 21, 2012 is the most utterly mundane day in human history, and that's all I'll miss by being offline that day. And I hope you have happy holidays, interesting conversations, and satisfying experiences until I see you online again.

I'm sure I'll have a few stories to tell when I get back.

The attention economy

In an attention economy, experiences are the real estate.

Our Cargo Cult

I love what my friend Caveat wrote about the Cargo Cult theme. He is beyond correct that we’ve got a narrow road to walk through a mine field of cultural explosives. But I have a smaller, simpler question about this year’s theme:

Who is Larry Harvey?

Read more on the official Burning Man blog.

Rights of Passage with Jeff & Jon

At Burning Man 2011, when the theme was Rights of Passage, Jeff and I walked out to the faraway Otic Oasis on Thursday or Friday to interview each other. He interviewed me first as we sat on the rickety structure for much of the day. I interviewed him later in the day as we walked around the center of the city during an unbelievable sunset.

After more than a year in a cluttered Dropbox folder, I finally dredged out the interviews, stitched them together, and listened to them on a quiet Sunday spent washing clothes and scrubbing the bathroom. It was such a joy to experience them at a distance. They make for a long listen, but in case they're of interest, here they are in their entirety.

Jeff interviews Jon about the web, design, and the future:

Jon interviews Jeff about the arts of the city and the family: