John Wise

The day goes by without anything worth noting, but by the time the night is nearing its end, there’s a void from not having sat down earlier to jot down some thoughts. I pull up the blog editor, which I often use to write, though sometimes I’ll start with a word processor for musings I don’t believe will be ready to hit publish by the end of the day or maybe even by the end of the month. A strange phenomenon about older writings is how they become tired and worthless to me if they linger too long in digital storage while the things I publish amuse me well into the future.

So here I am, uncertain what to share, half mindless, and trying hard not to be distracted by one or more of the dozens of tabs I have open. It’s evening, and I have a reluctance to start on something that might drag me in and hold on to me staying up late. This need to be considerate of waking at 4:50 to get my metabolism working before the heat of the day kicks in is a nod to aging as I’m trading late evenings burning the midnight oil in studied focus for an uncertain promise of gaining a bit of longevity or at least some quality of life as I move into my later years. Should anyone say that 57 years old is too young to think about this heavy subject matter is either living in denial or hasn’t turned 45 yet. The devil on my shoulder, who honestly feels like the smarter entity, says, “Get yer life on with gusto and take advantage of midnight merriment as one never knows when the curtain closes,” while reason, which only feels lazy as it makes a logical appeal to my stupidity, is trying to convince me that I’d find myself tired and unfocused anyway so I may as well get a good night’s rest.

But the restless nerve impulses that drive my fingers to find a kind of comfort as they intuitively search keys that I occasionally stop on to draw small circles to affirm their smoothness give me a sense of peacefulness. My mind (or maybe it’s actually my fingertips) is delivering instructions to my hands, waiting to convey whatever it is that will materialize here on my screen. As I search and stumble, finally capturing a bit of momentum and a modicum of discipline to ignore those pesky tabs, like a bell going off ringside for boxers engaged in their art, my phone in the distance bleats its summons for me to satisfy a curiosity about who texted me. I know full well I’ll waste my time answering the empty message that will likely end up being an annoyance only working to distract me, but I must give in as though compelled by a Pavlovian tone that demands I overcome my will. I can use the excuse that I’ll hit “save” as the PTSD of using computers 20 years ago conditioned me to be leery of these digital systems, although they rarely, if ever, crash anymore. While my PC needs a few seconds to do its work, I will lie to myself that I can jump up and be back before the task of storing these bits is done. Off I go.

Small talk with a friend is mostly always good as during these times of continuing self-isolation, it’s either me needing to talk to someone or it’s the other way around, so I try to be available. Expecting the seasonal text message about the election, it was instead a friend wanting to chat about something or other. Upon my return to letting my fingers glide over well-worn surfaces in another attempt at getting them to stab at keys while a twitching thumb gives space to form words, I am here with nothing much at all, so maybe it’s best to say good night.

The city we live in is a type of economic prison fenced by roads that act as walls to both a sense of prosperity and mobility. In Germany, autobahns often have the same width as this very common main street that cuts across our neighborhood in Phoenix. At the distance of a mile between each artery, these 25-yard/23-meter wide streets dissect the entirety of our city. It is a smart and relatively easy layout with 17 east-west corridors running from the 101 freeway in the north to the 17 freeway in the south. The city is cut in half by Central Ave, running north and south paralleled by numbered Avenues on the west side of Central and similarly numbered Streets on the east. The grid pattern of avenues and streets forms squares that are roughly one mile or approximately eight blocks long. For example, driving west on Thunderbird Road from its corner with 43rd Avenue (west of Central), you will travel west eight blocks before hitting the next north-south thoroughfare of 51st Avenue. All east-west roads north of Washington in downtown Phoenix are designated as being north, while south-of-Washington addresses are on southern numbering. To continue with the logic of the grid, addresses on the north side of streets are numbered evenly while the southern side is odd; similarly, the west side of a street is even, and the east side is odd.

Seems perfectly convenient, doesn’t it? Well, it is if you are in a car. Before COVID-19, we were always in a car. When we’d see someone waiting at a bus stop, we’d pity the poor soul who had to endure the extreme weather and the homeless who use the stops and the bus as shelter. Gridlock would make the bus appear lumbering and inefficient as they seemed mostly empty. For those riding bicycles, we were aghast at the distances in a city that is approximately 20 miles (32km) by 32 miles (51km) the bicyclist might need to traverse. We only knew how inhospitable our city was to alternative travel from the air-conditioned comfort of our car.

Okay, for the sake of honesty, walking around our city from October through the end of April would probably be fine because of the nice weather and little rain; of course, we don’t see any snow here in our corner of the desert. But after months of driving, we are so conditioned by being in the car for convenience and speed that it has become impossible to consider traveling any other way.

After nearly six months of walking every day without fail, I’ve come to believe that we could get around on foot, e-bikes, and scooters if it wasn’t for the fact that our antiquated grid system here in Phoenix is effectively a prison. We are locked into 1-mile squares where escape is treacherous. Sounds dramatic? Let me explain. For a good while, we walked west of home to a smaller secondary street and headed north to an even smaller tertiary street that connected to a main artery that would bring us back home. This mile loop served us during the cooler months as we could walk it multiple times a day with the benefit of never having to cross the superhighway that widens to three lanes in each direction in front of where we live.

As the days were heating up with the approach of summer, we felt that we needed to change how we accumulated our miles as we’d figured it would be too hot to walk around the block at midday. So, we started waking up at 4:50 to get a 3-mile walk finished before the heat became too oppressive. Walking our 1-mile loop three times in a row would get boring, so we committed to crossing the major intersection nearby. This is a dangerous proposition as drivers turning corners are not accustomed to people in crosswalks as nobody walks in Phoenix, especially at 5:15 in the morning. We had to be sure to make eye contact with people wanting to turn left as they were the most dangerous as they raced to beat a car coming right at them and their impatience to wait another 10 seconds. For those wanting to turn right, we could tell that they were measuring where we were in the crosswalk and calculating if they could whip around the corner before we got too close to reaching our objective, and that’s if they even saw us. This crosswalk was and remains our gauntlet.

Once we are across the street, we now have a mile to the next major street, half a mile to a secondary thoroughfare, a mile back to the really big ugly street, and then a half-mile home, so in about an hour by 6:15 we have our first 6,500 steps and feel like we did a little something to help our metabolism.

Being out on these streets, even though we are, for the most part, now safe from crossing the danger zones until we have to cross the street to get home, things are not always very pleasant. Motorcycles, muscle cars, and diesel trucks are the first order of discomfort. When a nearly unmuffled Harley opens its throttle wide as it races down the street, enjoying that burst of speeding up from 20 mph to 80 mph as quickly as possible before having to slow down, they can emit a roar that to the person riding the bike must feel like the exhilaration of power. To those on the street, it’s a scream that can literally hurt the ears. I know, man-up snowflake, but consider this and reference what I said in the first paragraph: we are effectively walking on the shoulder of an autobahn or freeway. Sure, we have sidewalks as some perfunctory obligatory nod to pedestrian civility but walking on poop and trash-strewn slivers of concrete next to cinder-block walls is anything but nice.

Then I consider the people brave (stupid) enough to pedal their unprotected asses right next to drivers behaving as if they were on a stretch of race track that was going to award them eternal bliss if they could just make the next light while still slowing down just enough so that if a police officer happened to be waiting at the intersection, they’ll be spared a ticket before they mash down on the accelerator again and race for the next major intersection a mile further. Those bicyclists, if they are lucky, might have 3-4 feet of a lane carved out for them, but the cars that are less than that away are traveling next to them often at speeds from 55-65 mph or 90 km/h to 105 km/h.

These broad streets, where uncontrolled speeding is the norm, and unregulated intersections encourage serious risk-taking, can be considered playgrounds for those in vehicles but make for a hostile environment for those who are waking up to an enjoyable pace of getting around by alternative means. Where I thought it impossible to endure the distances or the extreme heat, I’ve learned something different, and I’m not alone as we’ve seen a big increase in foot traffic in our neighborhood, and I’m hearing from others that they see similar trends in their own areas. I could see Caroline and I enjoying e-bikes here in the city, and maybe we’d only be really comfortable with them ten months a year, but imagine the fuel and pollution savings. The problem is that we wouldn’t do this without dedicated and isolated bike lanes that remove us from being so intimate with race cars.

But who am I fooling? This won’t happen in my lifetime, and that’s tragic as I might only have about 20 years left, and I’d like those to be the best they could be. This brings me to my original premise that this grid layout is a prison. It’s difficult at best to get from place to place, it’s downright discouraging and feels 100% safer being in a car. Moving somewhere bike-friendly is not really an option as those places are often economically depressed in some way with poor weather and expensive housing; I’m referring to Portland. And while Seattle is booming economically, it’s incredibly expensive, only has 152 sunny days per year, and is reported to be one of the worst places for people experiencing depression.

Europe is an option, and while we are working on our strategy to get there, it’ll take time while we here in America drag our feet with issues too overwhelming and impossible to find consensus for improving the quality of life and so we’ll just skip the dialog and hope the population quickly returns to having their heads in the sand, or worse.

Twenty-six years ago, I bought the LP titled Hole by Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel, and in nearly every year since then, on September 1st, I think of it. Somewhere in my journey through history, I probably learned on which day the Nazis invaded Poland, but it was Jim Thirwell with his SFOTW project that seared the date into my memory. In the third track on this album, I’ll Meet You In Poland, Baby sings of Hitler using his dick as a measure of guaranteeing unilateral security as he prepares to invade Poland back on September 1, 1939. This was the beginning of World War II. By the way, I was a specialist in the U.S. Army stationed at Rhein-Main Airbase in Frankfurt, Germany, and the gravity of the song had me questioning if it was illegal to listen within those borders. All things Hitler was forbidden.

Following up the ballad for Poland was the provocatively titled Hot Horse which I thought was going to continue the World War II theme, but alas, I was wrong: this was about fucking and so not all that provocative after all. Mind you that by now, I’d listened to the first track in which Foetus wants to shove his head under some pantyhose. He follows that by singing about his lust for death before hitting the song that struck me hard in my historical senses.

This was Oingo Boingo for the angry crowd who required some seething controversy in their pop songs while swing dancing in the cabaret. Foetus delivered all the attitude one needed to feel their teeth were sparkly white after a fresh listen to this journey into the absurd. If someone had told me that Mr. Thirwell had dedicated this masterpiece in honor of Antonin Artaud, I would have had no reason to doubt it. Strangely enough, almost ten years later I felt that it was Marshall Mathers who picked up the baton of master lyricist that transported the listener onto a different stage, one that was often cruel.

I’d first seen Jim Thirwell at a spoken word performance at the Anti-Club on Melrose Blvd in Los Angeles back in 1983. I’d not gone for him; I was there for Lydia Lunch, probably like almost everyone else in attendance. It wouldn’t be until 1988 at my favorite club, the Batschkapp in Frankfurt, Germany, that I’d see him again. Unbeknownst to me, Caroline was in the audience as well. She also was a Foetus fan, having caught him performing as Wiseblood at the Wartburg in Wiesbaden in 1986 before our paths ever crossed.

I wish I had known to write a diary back then, though I can’t help but think that the music I was listening to is more impactful to my memories now as I can reflect on its place in the ever-evolving world of music. From the ’70s through the ’90s, the emergent music forms of those days were my normal and felt like the logical progression of where music should be going in response to rock, pop, disco, and folk that preceded punk, industrial, electronic, and hip-hop. It’s difficult at the moment, when something is fresh, to realize that 20 years down the road, we’ll look back at what seemed almost mundane and realize how much it was shaping some small part of who we were becoming.

There’s such a fine line between being a noodge and an optimist in my world. On one hand, I believe we can manifest our ambition to do better, while on the other I’m afraid that I’m more skilled at complaining about what’s wrong instead of offering solutions. While a radical reform of education is at the top of my list for bringing change, I also understand that humanity shifts at the pace of tar pitch. Without a systemic shock, I can hardly find a sliver of hope that we’ll recover from our willful embrace of intellectual laziness. But it’s not always dark, or maybe it must be darkest before a light turns on.

I see glimmers of potential that there are those who are trying to drag us forward toward our better selves, but all too often, I cringe at what I perceive to be sickly sweet in their approach. I have to tamp down my knee-jerk reaction to the cloyingly wholesome nature of messages where everyone wants to feel good about the situation being documented and held up as exemplary.

The conditioning of my youth was such that the collective was weak, laden with the baggage of hippy love and patchouli. Determined individualism with the lone hero who will inspire the kid, the team, the troop, or a nation out on the horizon, waiting to make his solo entry when the time is right. Did I watch too many John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and James Bond films in my youth? Yes. Come to think about it, our current U.S. president is trying to play this tired trope yet again.

Years ago, I was a proponent of kids playing games such as Minecraft as I felt it exemplified the scenario of people cooperating across unseen borders with people who were relatively anonymous. It didn’t matter if a kid was disabled, starting to be aware of their sexual identity that might be different than the accepted norm, or had already been made to be ashamed of their race because, in the pixelated world of the game, there was only collaboration and sharing.

Today, I watched a clip from Yes Theory on YouTube where their team brought a recent high school grad with an underprivileged background from Los Angeles to Arizona for a visit to Biosphere 2. Initially, my reaction was to hit the back button and leave the apparently sappy content I’d never be able to relate to, but I worked against instinct and tried to see why these young people had garnered 5.76 million subscribers. It wasn’t long before I could get past the exuberance and appreciate that this team was celebrating the tenacity of the young lady to endure hardship. Introducing her to the idea that it only takes a minute and some determined effort to change your circumstance allowed Yes Theory’s team to share the emotional impact made on their guest. The clip ends with her receiving a $300 gift card for art supplies as she’s an aspiring artist, but then they also present her with a $10,000 check to help with the costs of college.

To a generation brought up selfish and isolated in their cubicles, witnessing the youthful celebration and gratification that comes with sharing and maybe inspiring others is bitter medicine that might as well be wrapped in unicorns and rainbows. We need to unwrap that prejudice and join the party, turning away from the I/Me generation and learning to understand that the We/Us generation is here.

Those who are still acting selfishly were effectively abused by a system clinging to outmoded paradigms that are no longer viable. Many of these people are angry that they’ve not yet had their moment in the sun owning a big house or an expensive car, going on pricey vacations, buying designer clothes, and receiving invitations to exclusive clubs. They feel cheated that a generation before them seem to have had all the luxury, and now they want theirs. How those people heal is still up in the air.

For the millions who’ve been considering what kind of normal the world might be in the future after the pandemic, one thing they do know is that they don’t want to go back to what had been. Figuring out something as massive and complex as fairness and equity in the social and economic world of hundreds of millions of people trying to soothe raw nerves created by neglect, disparity, racism, and abuse, leading to catastrophic situations for loved ones is not a solution that just springs into the collective conscience.

People such as the team behind Yes Theory, Best Ever Food Review Show, and SoulPancake, along with individuals such as Liziqi and Lady Gaga, are offering us views of our world that best demonstrate the importance of people in communities helping one another and being positive role models.

The bias some people feel about those things they are unfamiliar with is the real toxic commodity that only works to fuel great intolerance. How we overcome that hostility within ourselves is an ongoing exercise that must evolve as we are forced to confront our new reality, a reality that is still being written, thought about, recorded, shared, and invented.

To close this entry out, please do not read this as a Pollyannaish Kumbaya message that somehow some fresh-faced, bubbly internet celebrities are going to solve our problems. Nothing is that simple. This has me thinking that maybe I should write a blog entry about nuance and generalization where people I speak with face-to-face want to take umbrage with my gross generalizations, but then if I tell them something is green, I get a pass. We can distinguish between millions of shades of colors, and not a single person has ever asked me to be precise in just what hue I’m generalizing about when I speak of the sky being blue. Humans intuitively understand that there are millions of shades across the spectrum of colors that we might speak of, but quickly get caught up in a dilemma of wanting to argue when details they find pertinent to a discussion demand exacting answers to a problem that is obviously multi-faceted.

So while a particular negative force might be wreaking havoc in this and that spot and a drug crisis, racism, and poverty are exacting a toll over there, salves are at the same time being applied in the hope of contributing to partial solutions to intractable problems. Sometimes, we need unicorns, rainbows, and even a hug from a hippy.

“I hate Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Apple, Microsoft, this software, that social media company, Amazon, Adobe, apps, online bill pay, convoluted passwords, internet scams, spam, site registration, YouTube, Netflix, cookies, and everything else about digital connectivity.”

Then leave it.

I was just considering doing precisely that, leaving it. Not that I hate any of the above aside from internet scams, but I was wondering out loud with Caroline if we could possibly leave our digital lives behind. She suggested that one way would be if we were to trade our current lives for rural offline ones where we’d accept a life of gardening and hanging out on the farm. No way!

My life online has gradually become so ingrained that I can no longer pinpoint when that happened and at what point there was no turning back. I can share the day it likely happened, though I didn’t realize it at the time as I think I still had options; that would have been on January 9th, 1998. On that day, I placed my first order with Amazon for books that were impossible to buy in Arizona, not just the Phoenix area but all of Arizona. Interestingly, my first two purchases were for No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior by Joshua Meyrowitz (which replaced the photocopy I had from a friend in Germany) and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society: The New Science of Memes from Aaron Lynch.

Ironic that the first two things I bought from Amazon related to fundamental changes affecting our relationships with information and commerce. I’d read No Sense of Place around 1989 when Olaf F. thought it important enough that he accepted the significant (at the time) expense of making a photocopy so I could read it at the same time he was stuck in it. This was a pivotal book for me back then regarding my thinking of how we approach making ourselves guinea pigs in our relationship with technology. By 1998, I needed to know how well it held up, and to this day, I’d still recommend people read this seminal book. The other title, Thought Contagion by Aaron Lynch, picked up on memes, a term I had first learned of in Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene. In Thought Contagion, the author discussed the impact of memes in our world – except that in the late 1990s, he had no idea that someday memes would be such a ubiquitous element of our online lives. Also of note, my next purchase from Amazon included Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie: The New Science of the Meme.

Little did I know by early 1998 that the entire world would become fully dependent upon the Internet within a relatively short amount of time. As I said, I was probably more in need of this online lifestyle by then as the books I needed were not on anyone’s bestseller lists and so were not sold locally.

But what of today, with all the noise around the supposed issues surrounding social media, fake news, memes that become facts, scams, and the myriad other problems that are exploding all around us? None of that matters. They are things that must be repaired over time, but they are part of the evolution of the platform. Does anyone think humanity leapt from a weekly open-air market in the town square to the air-conditioned mall with 150 vendors selling products from around the world, allowing payment by credit card before stopping for gyros, burritos, a slice of pizza, or baked-in-front-of-you cinnamon roll, followed by a movie from Ireland in a month, a year, or a decade? The time required for services to mature has often taken decades, if not centuries, and yet, within 25 years since the emergence of the internet, which started out as a way to share very basic information without photos and send emails, we are now intertwined in a complex web of electronic services that are impossible to pull away from.

This brings me back to the title of today’s entry, Leaving Our Online Lives. Well, I’m not, and we can’t. Sure, someone might figure out how to stop using Facebook or dump Instagram, but they will not leave every vestige of a digital life behind; it is no longer possible. Yes, I really do believe this.

I could probably still do my banking offline, but that’s about it. By the way, when I say offline, I mean not using a smartphone for any of the convenience of an internet connection, either. Some will say that getting rid of something like Facebook is the easiest service to rid themselves of. Well, if all you use it for is looking at Aunt Betty’s photos of her chihuahua and checking on upcoming birthdays of relatives, I could easily dump it. On the other hand, I see it as a useful tool where notifications for international events are announced, product announcements, and updates are posted. I subscribe to a few groups where people with similar interests congregate with new information being shared, and questions asked that spur my curiosity to learn along with them while others offer support or maybe I can be of assistance. I use Facebook to stay abreast of currents of opinion from people I’ve known from around the globe and occasionally chat with them. Yes, there are forums, and there are online magazines that might cover some of these things, but they are not drawing in as many diverse voices and are often not very timely.

Not shopping online would crush me and my wife. One of my major hobbies is Eurorack synthesizers, and there are only about 25 shops on earth. Am I supposed to call them to learn what’s coming out and what’s on sale on a month-to-month basis? Wait for a catalog in the mail, maybe? The audio software I use, where would I buy a physical copy of a plugin? New drivers for a piece of hardware I own, should I write the company and ask them to send me a USB card with the files? How about graphics software? Blender 3D has NEVER been available on physical media.

Caroline’s major hobby is everything fiber arts. Without YouTube, she’d be sunk. Yarn would be in short supply as Joann’s sells the most common lowest quality inexpensive stuff on the market, many specialty yarns and fibers would be off the menu. As for weaving yarn, she’d have to sell her looms as the state of Arizona is not a hotbed for weavers; then again, nowhere in the United States is that. The magazines that cater to the offline crowd are struggling, so while Halcyon Yarn of Maine sends out their Yarn Store in a Box, just getting hold of their phone number will grow impossible as time goes by.

Food. This is what would make me break down and weep. I currently buy some of the following online: vinegar, oil, spices, beans, chilies, Mangalitsa pork, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, grains, dish soap, bath soap, salt, vanilla beans, boudin and tasso from Louisiana, sprouting seeds, honey, various ethnic foods from crispy mixed beans (ပင်ပျိုရွက်နု) used in Burmese salads to Colatura di Alici Fish Sauce because we are curious, and finally all the things that due to COVID-19 have become difficult to find such as flour, Silk soy milk, and flavored Spam.

Travel would be the other super tragic hit that would occur from not being online. From Google Maps to plane tickets, yurt reservations, and the off-the-beaten-path restaurants that feature authentic flavors instead of those popular with tourists, we’d be hard-pressed to purchase or learn of any of that. How would we reserve tickets for entry to particular places? Don’t tell me I could just call as for 1. There never was a global phone book, 2. Do you really believe Century Link of Arizona information would have access to the phone number for the Hallein Salt Mine in Austria? 3. Certain things are now exclusively online or only purchasable in person.

News. Twenty-five years ago, after moving to the United States, Caroline and I could go to our local Borders Bookstore and pick up the latest issue of the Spiegel news magazine from Germany along with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from Caroline’s hometown along with the International Herald Tribune and a host of other international sources of news we were accustomed to in Europe. On the American side of political, economic, and cultural news, we had access to a bevy of publications that have since shrunk, were consolidated, disappeared, or become clones of aggregators as news collection is no longer very profitable. I refuse to watch television and even if I were somehow able to leave my digital life behind, I will never return to the medium of stupidity known as TV. There would still be radio, but unless NPR were available in our rural location, we’d be cut off from current events.

Uninformed, how would I vote? Unfed, how would we eat? Unaware of the world at large, how would we travel? Unable to equip our interests, how would we practice our hobbies or further our education? And now the postal service is faltering, so getting meds, sending checks to creditors, or waiting for Earth’s last remaining travel bureau to send us some literature about the Oregon coast are all at risk.

This constant chatter about our problems with online lives might be worth it if any of us cared enough to take up the skills to create alternatives to the services we don’t like. Instead, like armchair athletes, weather prognosticators, Yelp reviewers, movie critics, and the host of others that sling worthless opinions of complaint on everyone else’s incompetence, we’ll just keep on having to listen to the bitching of those unhappy with most everything in life as they kvetch about the Borg Mark Zuckerberg, the Trillionaire Jeff Bezos, or the globalist with human chipping plans aka Bill Gates.

Meanwhile, I’ll be online buying some Surströmming after a two-hour binge of watching others retching, trying to eat the stuff before turning to Chaturbate to talk on the newest social platform with participants from around the world as I enjoy a kind of global travel experience via genitalia. When I’m done with that, it’s time for some wholesome QAnon news and finally tuning in to Twitch as I watch others making music instead of turning on my instrument and finally giving it a try. Damn, I hate the internet.