Entries from February 2004 ↓

I went to church with my wife the other day. We’ve been to this church a couple of times in the past, and I’ve always been impressed with its facilities. Services are held in this sort of cavernous gymnasium-looking sanctuary, with rows of bleachers facing a big stage under a huge television screen. They’ve got a live band and a stable of pleasant-looking apparently well-adjusted preachers, and the lobby has a bookstore and various “stations” manned by people ready to attend to your every spiritual need: if you’re wavering just outside the realm of Christendom, if you’re in the Kingdom but wondering whether you should be anymore, if you’re a teenager trying to sort out the intersections between your faith and your chronic hormonal imbalances, then there’s someone to talk to you about it. The people there were friendly and pleasant and apparently genuinely happy to see us.

So I was impressed, and everything seemed cool. Until the sermon started.

First of all, there was the singing. I have some serious problems with this whole mandatory hymn thing, at least the way it’s done at the few churches I’ve visited recently. First of all, there’s too much of it. I know you need to warm up the crowd before the main event, get their juices flowing, but this place forces you to spend, no joke, about forty-five minutes raising your voice in song. It’s intolerable, and mind-numbing. Which is, I think, the point of the whole affair, and brings me to my second complaint: the quality of the songs themselves. The music is “inspirational” in the canned, uninspiring sense of the word; soaring melodies and loud, insistent refrains that serve as little more than simple conveyances for the lyrics. And the lyrics. Good Lord. Endless variations on the “we are vile sinners” theme, repeated ad-infinitum until the poor rhymes, the nonexistent scansion, the general shoddiness of the words themselves drive you absolutely up the wall.

Now, I realize that I’m probably missing the point here: you could argue that criticizing hymns on their merits as songs is like criticizing pre-school children’s choirs on their merits as choirs. The hymn is a means to an end, and as long as it serves that end, it can do it as badly as it wants to.

Ok, fine. I disagree, but fine. It seems to me that, if 50% of what a viral meme like religion does is bring in new recruits, then it ought to spare no expense in making the tools of that recruitment as good as they can be. This church certainly spends a lot of dough on the trappings. I just think it should look a little bit closer at the content.

But all that’s minor compared to my real beef with these songs: the horrible, endless repetition. You are a sinner. The only way to heaven is through Jesus. You are unworthy. You are weak. You are a sinner. Over and over and over and over again until the words are bouncing around in the echo chamber of your besieged mind even after the music stops and you’re in your seat staring numbly into space. It’s a transparent attempt to bludgeon you into some sort of an enlightened Jesus catatonia, and it freaks me out almost as much as it irritates me.

So that’s a bad way to start. But it gets even worse when the sermon gets going. The preacher spends an hour telling me that I’m worthless, that the only way to salvation is through self-abnegation, through prostration to a wholly theoretical deity, that I am wicked and I need to admit it and hurry up and come to the Lord or I’m going to hell, end of story. What bugs me most about this is the claim that we are not capable of running our own lives, that we are somehow empty unless we surrender ourselves to some invisible force that doesn’t feed us, or shelter us, or do anything beside make us feel guilty about not forcing our lives down the narrow paths outlined for us in a bunch of ancient, much-redacted texts. He droned on about my culpability and weakness and general unsuitability for heaven for almost an hour, and by the time he was done I was so pissed off I could hardly speak. I left angry, and vowed (yet again) never to come back. That doesn’t seem like much a business plan to me.

And it’s not the religion itself that’s making me so angry. The little I know about the moral underpinnings of Christianity seem pretty sound to me (on this side of the New Testament, anyway). Nor do I necessarily have a problem with people who try to foist their religious beliefs on me. Nine times out of ten, they’re doing it with the sincere conviction that I’d be a happier person if I just stepped over the line, refocused on the magic eye portrait of the world until I can see God hiding in its details.

But the exclusionary mindset of the churches I’ve attended, and the whole notion of trying to scare people into believing in their deity, rubs me the wrong way. I just don’t want any part of it. It seems to me that they’re built on this whole us-versus-them ethos that masquerades as acceptance, but isn’t: acceptance is reaching out to people who don’t agree with you and folding them into your presence. It’s not telling them that you can join the club as long as you agree with everything they say.

Aaaargh. The truth is, there’s a large part of me that wants to believe there’s a Benevolent Entity out there looking after my interests, but I don’t want to have to deal with the trappings of worshipping It, at least not as they’re presented in these places. The standard line (as I understand it) is that God gave us free will as a sort of a test, to see if we’re wise enough to chuck it aside and surrender to His plan. But … as long as we’re not killing people or selling drugs to children or whatever, why not just accept us as we are? Why threaten us with eternal damnation if we don’t happen to believe in the resurrection? Why force us to sing ourselves numb every Sunday? It just doesn’t seem like something a Friendly Wise New-Testament Deity would do; really, it’s more like a Mean Controlling Old-Testament Deity thing. I can see being afraid of a god like that. I can’t see liking Him.

Check out the latest entry in Karim’s Awkward Elevator Moments series. For more in the series, and some excellent caricatures of various rightwing luminaries, go to Stall #2.

In the Whitehouse Situation Room …

Karl Rove: [Rushing breathlessly into room] Sir. We have a problem.

George Bush: [Playing with an ancient Speak & Spell] N - U - C - L - E - A - R. Nucular.

Rove: Sir!

Bush: [Looks up, impatiently] Damn it Karl, Can’t you see I’m bettering myself?

Rove: Sir, we’ve just had a very disturbing report. It demands your immediate attention.

Bush: [Yawns] Let me guess. More dead people in Iraq?

Rove: No sir, it’s …

Bush: [Studies fingernails] A bunch of poor folk lost their jobs.

Rove: No, I’m afraid …

Bush: [Flicks cheetos off lapel] Another hole in the ozone layer?

Rove: No.

Bush: We need four gajillion more dollars for the Medicare bill?

Rove: No.

Bush: [Stretches, closes eyes, lies back on couch] Deficit bigger than we thought?

Rove: No sir. Well, yes. But that’s not it.

Bush: Ok. I give up.

Rove: Two men just got married.

Bush: [Sits bolt upright, gaping] What?

Rove: I’m afraid so sir.

Bush: To each other?

Rove: Yes sir.

Bush: Are you sure they’re men?

Rove: Yes sir. We had our agents check for penises when we picked them up.

Bush: And?

Rove: They have them, sir.

Bush: Damn! [Stands up, paces.] What’s happening to this country, Karl?

Rove: It’s going to hell sir. Thank God we’re here to stop it

Bush: Praise the lord. Let’s get to it then. [Makes for the door. Pauses] What are we going to get to?

Rove: Well sir, you’ve given this a lot of thought.

Bush: You’re darn tootin’.

Rove: And you’ve consulted all the relevant experts on the subject, and spent hours talking to your advisors about the pros and cons of the various alternatives.

Bush: Right. Alternatives. Experts.

Rove: And you’ve decided that there’s only one possible course of action.

Bush: I like it when there’s only one.

Rove: You’re going to have to cut taxes.

Bush: Alright! Woohoo!

Rove: It’s either that or invade Syria, sir, and we’ve got to finish up with Iraq first.

Bush: That makes sense. That makes sense. [Nods vigorously. Makes for door. Pauses.] Does that make sense?

Rove: Yes sir, it does. The only way to prevent men from marrying other men is to make sure that normal people get to keep more of their own money.

Bush: Yeah. Yeah. [Nods] But won’t the fags get the tax break too?

Rove: There you go again, sir. Always thinking.

Bush: Yeah. [Smiles. Frowns.] Won’t they?

Rove: Of course. That’s why we need the constitutional amendment.

Bush: Amendment?

Rove: Banning gay marriage.

Bush: Yeah. Good. Can we call it the “No Adam and Steve” amendment?

Rove: We’ll consider it sir. But it’ll probably just end up being the 28th.

Bush: Ok. [Makes for the door. Pauses.] But if we have the amendment, why do we need the tax …

Rove: Sir.

Bush: Yeah?

Rove: That’s enough thinking for one day, don’t you think?

Bush: [Visibly relieved] Yeah. Ok. Let’s go save the country, Karl.

Rove: Yes sir.

Imagine this: you’re in the process of putting together a powerpoint presentation on your company’s procurement practices when you remember an article you saved off from a web page a couple of days ago. It had a very cool quote on ferret mating rituals that perfectly illustrates your point about widget acquisition protocols, but you can’t quite remember what it was. So you minimize powerpoint to get to your desktop, only to find your email client lurking behind it, completely concealing the desktop. So you minimize that, but find your web browser staring back at you; and behind the web browser, there’s a promising game of solitaire you didn’t quite get a chance to finish, and behind that is an angry letter you were writing to your feckless jackass brother in Cleveland who still owes you $300.

And then, finally, you’re at your desktop. But, alas, the document isn’t there. You bring up your file browser, poke around half-heartedly for a while, give up, then decide you need to go back to the web to find the original article. You squint along the bottom of your screen until you find Internet Explorer, bring it up, and try desperately to remember the URL of the ferret site. After a couple of desultory, unsuccessful google searches, you give up and finish the solitaire game.

Does this sound familiar at all? It probably should. Although there aren’t any hard data to support this, I think it’s probably safe to say that computer clutter is reaching epidemic proportions on most of our desktops. There’s a lot of information out there, and it’s coming at us from all sides. The bad news is that it’s only going to get worse. The worse news is that our computers, in their current state, are not only ill-suited to deal with this infocrunch, they’re unlikely to get better at it any time soon, at least not the way things are going now. This is because the course that interface design is currently on is a dead end, and not the kind that stops at a blank wall: it’s the kind that leads over the edge of a cliff, into a bottomless chasm that we’re all pretty much doomed to fall into, unless things change radically, and soon.

Take Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, for example. By all accounts, it’s a stellar feat of engineering, much slavered-upon by technocenti and end-user alike. Case in point: the latest version, called Panther, introduces a new feature called Exposé, a wickedly cool interface trick wherein, with the press of a button, all of the windows on your cluttered, crowded display shrink and draw apart from each other until they no longer overlap, allowing you to see everything you’ve got open in a single glance. Click on the window you’re looking for, and everything goes back to the way it was, with your chosen window in the foreground. A different button does the same thing, but only with windows in a single application. A third just clears everything off the desktop, so that you can see any icons you’ve got lurking back there. The effect is absolutely stunning, and it works great.

But, beyond the coolness factor, I think this feature has a pretty fatal flaw — not in its implementation, which is first-rate, but rather in its entire concept. What Apple has done is find a good way to treat the symptoms of a serious problem in the current state of interface design, rather than offer a cure. And the irony here is that the problem is one that the Macintosh, in many ways, helped to create.

Rewind to 1983. The personal computer market, such as it was, was dominated by machines that could only speak to the humans they were made to serve through the crudest of interfaces — written commands (in a tower-of-babble profusion of languages) typed on a command line. Start up an IBM PC XT in the early eighties, and you were greeted with a little blinking white cursor on a black background, and not much else. It wasn’t an interface so much as a challenge. “Can you figure me out? No? Well then get lost, moron. You’re wasting my time.”

And then came the Macintosh, an unassuming little beige box that introduced the world to the desktop/windows/mouse paradigm that has become the overwhelming standard everywhere. It allowed people to understand their machine in terms that were already familiar from the physical world: folders, pointers, documents. It hid the incredible, intimidating complexity of an entire operating system behind a set of familiar metaphors. It was a marvel of simplicity and ingenuity.

But the solution, cool as it was, contained the seeds of its own demise — because it failed to account for a reality that had not (in all fairness) really manifested itself yet, and wouldn’t for many years. The picture on your display may look like the top of your desk, and may even act like it; but the reality is that it lets you do many more things than a physical desktop ever could, and that, underneath the pleasant lie it represents, is a massive, inchoate, undifferentiated, sucking datahole capable of storing as much information as you care to throw at it.

Our computers weren’t always such insatiable infowhores. The first IBM PC shipped with a 10 megabyte hard drive, which was a mountain of storage at the time, but doesn’t even rise to the level of molehill in this age of cheap 200 gigabyte behemoths. Our capacity has increased geometrically over time, and into that unslakeable sinkhole flows rivers of raw data, not only from the applications we’ve begun to base our lives around, but also from our overloaded, incredibly verbose pipelines to the networked world: email, web pages, news readers, RSS feeds, and more. We store photos on our computers now, and movies, and music; not to mention our email calendars, our letters, term papers, bake sale fliers, tax returns, and more. We’re besieged by data, and our computers are more than happy to swallow all of it up for us. It can handle it. We can’t.

These days, your average desktop is an unholy mess, a post-apocalyptic proliferation of documents and applications scattered like storm leavings across a blank, undifferentiated landscape. But, under the covers, things are even scarier: towering directory structures ramifying like cancerous fractals, filled not only with the documents that you filed away and forgot, or filed away and remembered but don’t know where you put them, but also with strange, oddly-named entities like “salkj34343.dll” or “/dev/disk01s1″ that you must not touch under any circumstances lest the whole rickety edifice come crashing down around you.

And, to make matters worse, the desktop metaphor gives us the ability to do many things with that data at the same time. Each task gets its own window, and each window its own share of our increasingly fractured mindspace. You can check email while you work on your report while you listen to the latest Fountains of Wayne album while you balance your checkbook while you compile your new kernel. Which, don’t get me wrong, is all very cool. But it’s too much for the metaphor to handle: the insane proliferation of windows that all of this furious multitasking scatters across your display strains the whole notion of a desktop — not to mention our ability to keep it all straight in our heads — to the breaking point.

The OS people haven’t been ignoring these problems, but they’ve been paying the wrong kind of attention to them. Exposé doesn’t make the clutter go away, it just spreads the haystack apart to make it easier for you to find the needle; Windows XP’s ability to collapse multiple windows from the same application into a single item on the startbar is nice, but it requires you to keep a mental model of what’s available on your desktop, and then hunt through a profusion of hidden apps for the document you seek; Unix’s virtual desktops can be an effective tool, but ultimately, they fail for the same reason: they shift the burden of organization onto the human, when really, it should be the responsibility of the computer itself.

And none of the major OS vendors have even tried to address the problem of data overload, beyond some seriously hyped up search facilities. The next version of Windows will purportedly augment the existing filesystem strategy with a database paradigm that eschews hierarchy in favor of association — which is to say, instead of storing your macaroni and cheese recipe in the “/user/stuff/recipes/carbs/pasta” directory, you’d simply associate it with a couple of keywords (”pasta” and “recipe”, for example) and then call it up by asking for a pasta recipe.

That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not quite enough. Simply put, the current desktop / directory hierarchy paradigm doesn’t scale. We need to chuck the whole thing, and come up with something brand new. I don’t know what that something is. But I have some ideas.

First: I don’t think we can address the issues of application and data overload separately. They’re really two manifestations of the same problem, which is the current metaphors’ tendency to give us the tools to organize our computer experience, but leave the bulk of the actual organization to us. Whatever solution we come up with has to deal with both, simultaneously.

Second: Whatever we come up with has to be smart. Not human smart, and not even artificial intelligence smart, but contextually and organizationally brilliant. It has to divine our intentions based on a minimal amount of input, and then do the right thing.

Third: It has to work with current technology. No, I don’t mean it has to be able to run well on a 1.5 GHz desktop with 512MB of memory (although it does), I mean we have be able to use it with keyboards, mice, and monitors; although it would be nice to come up with some three-dimensional virtual reality avatar-based control mechanism for all this stuff, the truth is that’s way down the line, and, as I said earlier, we need results now; or as close to now as possible.

So what does this mean? What I envision is a single, monolithic application, an alter-ego that handles everything for us, and does it with a minimum of fuss. You sit down at your computer, turn it on, and just start typing; an editor comes up, records what you’ve written, and when you press “Done”, tries to figure out what it’s looking at. Is this an email? Then scan the text for some indication of who it’s for. Ah, the first line is “Dear Aunt Emmy”. Go to the address book and pull up Aunt Emmy’s email address, and sent it to her. No email address? Then print the document out, along with an envelope addressed to her snail mail address, with the appropriate postage barcoded in its upper right hand corner.

Or maybe you sit down and type (or say) “Washington Post”. Your pegboard (let’s call it a pegboard; I like the sound of that) shows you the Post’s web page. You click around until you come across a grilled ferret recipe that looks yummy. You select it, and drag it to a corner of the pegboard. A prompt comes up, you type “ferret” and “recipe”, and hit enter, and it’s stored on your computer, keyed under the terms you entered, but also the date on which your saved it, the web page it came from, and maybe some other stuff that the computer figures out on its own while scanning the text of the recipe. Next time you get a hunger for grilled ferret, you sit down at your computer, type in “grilled ferret”, and there it is.

Something like that. The idea here is that you should spend no time at all thinking about how to do what you want to get done. Instead of starting a word processor, bringing up a file dialog to find your recipe, loading it and printing it out, you should let the computer handle as much of the work for you as possible. It won’t get things right all the time, but it will never get things terribly wrong, and, over time, it’ll learn your tendencies, and become that much smarter.

That’s the holy grail, I think: an interface that’s so intuitive that it’s no longer even really recognizable as an interface. It’s just an extension of you. This will happen eventually. It almost has to. The only question is when, and how much longer we’ll have to endure the broken system we’re stuck with today.

Someone stole my wife’s bank card this weekend. By the time we found out, they’d already run up a bunch of charges against our checking account. I cancelled the card last night, and just for good measure, cancelled our credit card too, just in case they’d gotten access to her purse and copied down the number. As of this morning, the damage seems limited to what we discovered last night. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I am, as a rule, completely paranoid about stuff like this. I’m loathe to give out my telephone number or even my zipcode when cashiers ask for it, I rail against restaurants who still display full credit card info on their receipts, I guard my social security number as if it was soul. And, really, in a way, it is. Our material identity is tied up in, and defined by, the various means of identification that we carry around with us. The dystopian future where human beings are reduced to nothing more than serial numbers is already here: the barcodes just haven’t been tatooed on our flesh yet.

So as of last night, I’m even more paranoid. Even so, I realize that there’s only so much that I can do. There are at least five companies I can think of, off the top of my head, that have my social security number in their databases right now, and that doesn’t even include government agencies. And for all these companies’ assurances that they will never reveal it to anyone, under any circumstances, it’s quite likely that, one way or another, my personal info will be — or already has ben — exposed to the world; and, after that happens, it’s really just the luck of the draw. Some identity harvester might stumble across my numerical self and start defrauding large companies in my name, or signing up for NRA “Guns Are Fun!” correspondence courses, or donating large sums of my money to the Bush campaign. Stuff like that’s happening right now, everywhere. It’s madness.

But whatever. Assuming we did manage to head off the worst of it [frantically searching for wood to knock on, not finding any, rapping forehead instead and hoping the Fates have a sense of humor], then the damage wasn’t too bad, this time. Whoever got our card hightailed it up to Baltimore and somehow managed to spend a couple hundred dollars at a 7-11 (I wonder if the cashier got at all suspicous when a guy named Sandy walked up to the counter with fifty slurpies in his arms and ordered a hundred Big Bites), then went to Wal-Mart, and then to Popeye’s, where he bought what must have been several drum-sized buckets of chicken wings. That’s it so far.

So on the one hand, I’m guardedly relieved. On the other, I feel besmirched, violated, broken-into, and distinctly insecure. A small plastic card-shaped piece of us is out there in the world, in someone else’s hands. It’s freaky, man.

There were more statistics from Iraq this week:

• 100 Iraqis died standing in line for jobs when a car bomb exploded in their midst;
• 2 more American soldiers died when a roadside bomb blew up their convoy;
• 540 soldiers dead since the war began;
• 8000 Iraqis killed in the process of being liberated

All the numbers are squiggles on a page, scores on a ledger, ammo in the battle between the pro- and anti-war factions. They’re symbols of something, but nothing in and of themselves, and it’s difficult to discern the personal tragedy behind them.

But there was a piece on last week’s 60 minutes that really brought it home for me. Christiane Amanpour took a microscope to the conflict, and focused on small stories from both sides: an American soldier wounded on patrol, and an Iraqi family decimated by American gunfire.

The first time we see the soldier, he’s talking soberly about the myriad dangers he and his platoon face every day, about how he had just recently escaped injury when one of his fellow soldiers came back to save him. Three days after the interview, his convoy is destroyed by a remote-control bomb. The top of his head is blown off, and much of the left side of his face ripped away. When we see him next, his head is wrapped in gauze, and the reconstructed side of his face is puckered and cratered and raw, his speech slurred sightly by the damage that’s been done to it. He’s talking about going back to Iraq, and rejoining his fellows.

Amanpour focuses next on a family whose truck, which they used to transport chickens, was completely destroyed by an American artillery unit who thought they were being fired upon. Five people killed, including one boy. Another boy missing. She went to the military and asked about it, and after a bunch of denials and hems and haws finally got them to admit that it happened, although not that they did anything wrong. They found the boy, finally, and there was a horrible scene where he asked his Mom about his brothers and his Dad, and she had to leave the room because she couldn’t bear tell him that they were all dead.

This was difficult to watch. You can see the seeds of hatred being sown, on both sides, and there’s a real danger that this whole thing is going to degenerate into Algeria-style guerilla warfare. It’s hard to blame anyone on the ground for this. The real credit goes to Saddam Hussein, first and foremost, and then to the Bush administration, and the incompetent way in which it went about the process of removing him from power. It boggles the mind that an organization with as many resources at its disposal as the military could screw this occupation up so badly, especially in light of the fact that the State Department undertook a massive post-occupation planning effort, the results of which were completely ignored by the defense department.

There’s no question that the Iraq debacle has damaged our credibility in the world, and made us seem like a dangerous, blundering superpower, not to be trusted. But what’s also true, and more tragic still, is that it has ended or destroyed the lives of thousands of people. It didn’t have to be this way.

Update: The New York Times Magazine ran an article this weekend on wounded soldiers returning from Iraq, and the physical and psychological trauma they’ve experienced, are experiencing, and likely will experience for the rest of their lives. And it’s not just them. Their families are suffering as well:

At night, in the quiet of their rented farmhouse, Robert Shrode lets Debra pick the shrapnel out of his body. Over the last six months, she’s tugged out 15 pieces as they have worked their way to the surface of his skin. She has picked them from his legs, from his neck, his face. Sometimes he will study them, these twisted aluminum chunks that have managed to escape while so many more will forever live inside him. Barely out of her teenage years, Debra Shrode never pictured her life this way. Never imagined the Army would be calling her up and asking her to hand out advice as some kind of expert wife. Yet someone from the Army’s Family Readiness Group wanted her to call another wife whose husband had come home injured. She sighs and dials the number. ”I don’t know what I can say to make you feel better,” she says into the phone. ”If he doesn’t want to talk, don’t take it to heart.” She adds each new piece of shrapnel to the collection they keep stored in a Tupperware container. For a while, the container sat on their coffee table, but recently Robert moved it into a spare bedroom drawer. If it seems as if he might be moving on, Debra has only to ask, What’re you thinking about? ”Iraq,” he’ll say. And then the silence falls again.

Shrode might one day get all the shrapnel out of his body, but I doubt he’ll ever really be rid of it.

Saturday night, dead of winter, and we’re driving home from dinner on curiously deserted streets. The moon is full tonight, bulging like an overinflated balloon. There’s mischief brewing under its dead crust, I can tell. The air is so cold it’s freezing around us, and we keep crashing through sections of frozen vapor that stretch across the highway like plate-glass windows. They shatter and tinkle and fall. Best to get home before something really bad happens.

But we have to stop at the Target first. There’s stuff to buy. Baby gifts, and Tostitos, and batteries. Target is a safe haven: bright and cheerful and full of nicely organized, reasonably-priced household items. Shouldn’t be a problem.

We go our separate ways, she arcing left toward the little clothes, me right toward the electronics. I watch a kid playing a generic xbox skateboard game, flinging his gaunt avatar off of improbably sculpted heights, making him twist around in mid-air and grab his board and summersault four times before he glides to a safe landing on the next ramp. As I watch, a second head grows out of the kid’s back. I can see his t-shirt bulging with it and then it tears through, and it’s looking at me, and it says: “You’re a little old to be watching me play video games, aren’t you Mister? What are you, forty?” That’s when I know the moonlight has drifted into Target, and it’s time to go. I turn around and make for the TVs. The kid’s voice behind me, two of his voices, in harmony: “Or fifty? Are you fifty?”

There’s a music video on all the TV sets, a wall of the same seventies-looking rocker people jamming on the beach. They’re long and thin, all of them, and their hair falls over their faces, probably hiding fame-unfriendly features. Still, I’ll bet they get the chicks. Why wouldn’t they? They’re long and thin and they rock out on beaches. I envy them, for a moment. The radio beside me squawks to life and starts singing along in a sort of Joe Pesci voice, and then cuts off and says: “Whatever happened to your rock star career, tough guy? Huh? I thought you were gonna jam for a living?” I shake my head. “So it was someone else?” it insists. I shrug. “Or is it you, when you were someone else?” The electric toothbrush beside me whirs to life and starts brushing the radio’s right speaker. Pesci-voice curses it, tells it you’ve got five seconds to lay off, motherfucker, or I’ll pull your motherfucking bristles out one by one and feed them to you, you got that tough guy?

I leave them to it. Time to collect my stuff and leave. I glance down the batteries aisle, but there’s a little civil war going on there, the nine-volts and AAs mounting sneak attacks against the C’s, cracking themselves open and spilling alkaline fluid onto their unsuspecting prey. The big cylinders writhe and scream and die, which sucks, because I needed C’s for my clock radio.

A voice comes on over the loudspeaker. “Furniture, you have a call on seven. Furniture on seven.” A moment later a teetering drawerless armoire hurries by, clomping along on wooden bun feet, cursing softly under its breath. “I told her never to call me here.”

The Tostitos are a bust too: all of the bags are full of tiny Nixon homunculi instead of chips, all of them flashing victory signs and jowling their innocence at one another. So, fuck, I guess it’s Pringles. But the Pringles cans have mouths, now, big gashy mouths in their centers with long sharp teeth. The one I reach for bites off my little finger and chews it down, curving into an evil grin as it crunches through cartilage and pinkybones. I lose a couple more fingers trying to get the first one back, then give up. So no Pringles either. Fuck.

Definitely time to go home. I collect my wife (who has selected a couple of pink five-armed baby t-shirts and one armadillo-fur jumpsuit), pay, and jump in the car and floor it. Not far to go, but the car starts changing into a unicycle halfway home, and I only just barely make it into the garage, peddling a wobbly line up the driveway with my wife in my arms.

We get inside and lock the doors and draw the curtains and check ourselves out. Except for my three missing fingers, we’re still all here, largely unchanged. Good. Lucky. We plop down on the couch and turn on the TV. It’s the Family Feud tonight. One hundred people surveyed: what’s the one thing you would most hate to find in your house when you come home?

Number one answer: Pringles with teeth.

I hate full moons.

Neil Gaiman recently responded to another plaintive wail from another aspiring writer, and his advice both echoes and deviates from the usual writerly prescriptions:

It does help, to be a writer, to have the sort of crazed ego that doesn’t allow for failure. The best reaction to a rejection slip is a sort of wild-eyed madness, an evil grin, and sitting yourself in front of the keyboard muttering “Okay, you bastards. Try rejecting this!” and then writing something so unbelievably brilliant that all other writers will disembowel themselves with their pens upon reading it, because there’s nothing left to write. Because the rejection slips will arrive. And, if the books are published, then you can pretty much guarantee that bad reviews will be as well. And you’ll need to learn how to shrug and keep going. Or you stop, and get a real job.

I sniff love that man. Not only is he goddam brilliant, he’s cool about being goddam brilliant, and never comes off as anything more than a really nice guy who just happens to be one of the best storytellers in the history of creation. If that sounds like hyperbole, then you’ve obviously never heard a real hyperbole before: they sound like a cross between a phalanx of angry jackhammers and a gargling amplified opera singer on helium. Trust me, I know. I sat on one the other day. It wasn’t pretty.

Another writer who’s cool about being cool is Wil Wheaton, once reviled as Ensign Wesley Crusher on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, now reborn as a likeable uber-geek who’s published a successful collection of short stories, and just recently landed a three-book deal with O’Reilly. Here’s what he has to say about his writing process:

I have this compulsion to write and create. This is good, because I’m supposed to run in a manuscript of Just A Geek RSN . . . but I’m really only good for about 2 hours a day. Longer than that, and my brain just churns out garbage. Sometimes and there’s value to garbage: It’s easier to rewrite garbage than fill up a blank page, but more often than not, the gargabage* is just garbage.

I just love that, because I have the same compulsion, and almost exactly the same limitations: I can’t do it for more than two hours a day, no matter what. It’s like my muse is hooked up to one of those old-school nicad cellphone rechargeable batteries, the ones that only lasted for a couple of calls before they conked out.

Of course, I’ve never seen my muse. Maybe she’s just got other things to do, or other would-be writers to inspire. Maybe she’s got a day job.

I wonder if she’s hot.

I’ve been picking my way through the collected letters of J.R.R Tolkien for the last couple of months. The guy was an inveterate and apparently tireless corresponder; this “selected” collection contains thousands of letters, to many different people, on subjects both profound and mundane. I don’t have the patience or stamina to read it straight through, so I’ve been dipping in here and there, sampling the stuff I find interesting. At first I thought that would just be Middle-Earth minutiae, but it turns out that the most interesting thing about this book is the portrait it draws of Tolkien himself: his struggles in writing the Lord of the Rings, in getting it published, in dealing with the aftermath. It’s by no means a complete picture of his life, of course, but you feel like you’re getting a really fascinating insight into a good portion of it.

I’ve never been a fan of the idea of reading other people’s letters, even famous people: for one thing, it always seemed like an invasion of privacy; for another, I thought it would be really, really dull. I still think I’m right on the first count, but don’t care so much anymore; because I was definitely wrong on the second.

The bad news is that we probably won’t be seeing too many of these kinds of collections in the near future: really, the whole notion of an epistolary life is coming to an end. People just don’t write letters anymore. I don’t have any hard figures to support this, of course (that would require research, which, besides being anathema to the whole ethos of the blogosphere, might turn up facts contrary to my thesis, which I’d have to ignore, and then what a big waste of time that would be), but with the advent of telegraphs, and then telephones, and then email, and then instant messaging, and now personal video feeds, there just isn’t much actual need to put pen to paper anymore.

You could argue that a piece of email is just an electric letter, but I really don’t think so: the immediacy of email, the speed with which it’s composed and sent and received, makes it something else entirely, something not too far removed from a conversation. Instant messaging is the same thing, or rather the same kind of thing: in its brevity, its immediacy, its telegraphic sublingual gutturalisms, it has much more in common with speech than it does with letters. A letter is a piece of architecture, a structure made out of words, and people tend to invest more of their time, and more of themselves, in its construction. Instant messaging, email, conversation are much more haphazard affairs, lean-to’s and thatched huts that won’t stand the test of time.

So how are future biographers going to get into their subjects’ heads? At best, all they’ll have is reams of scattered electric babble too nonsensical to decipher and probably too voluminous to even address; at worst, they’ll have nothing at all, just a series of actions they’ll have to interpret without the help of the actors themselves.

But. What if the whole self-chronicling impulse hasn’t died entirely, but has moved elsewhere, from the realm of serial, peer-to-peer paper correspondence to the expansive, broadcast, virtual world of blogging? There are blogs everywhere, and the best of them are not only well-written, insightful, funny, and interesting, but also offer a window into the blogger’s mind. If these things can somehow be preserved, they might offer a biographical vein richer than letters ever could.