“What a wonderous time is spring…when all the trees are budding.”

There is this OLD Christian campfire song called “Pass it on.”  It’s a relic of the kind of “teach the world to sing and buy the world a Coke” mentality that the American 1970s produced so effortlessly and intentionally in its citizens.  I used to love this song when I was a (little) kid.  It was in the tiny “contemporary” hymn-pamphlet we used during chapel, the one that had all the snazzy songs that the kids liked.

“The birds begin to sing, the flowers start their budding.”

By the time I got to college, it was common to express disdain for the earnestness and cheese of this song, and many others in that hymn-pamphlet.  They were just another victim of the pervasive irony that held all of us Gen-Xers in its hypnotic sway.  And, to be honest, the lyrics ARE totally lame and cheesy, and the metaphors…

“That’s how it is with God’s love, once you experience it.”

…feel a bit lazy and forced, unless you happen to be high.

I mention this because I’m up at 5:43am.  There would be a sunrise right now, if not for the clouds that are hovering over Lake Michigan.  There is a giant pink-bud-studded tree outside my window that is pretty even in the dull blue-gray of the not-yet morning.  In the distance, piney trees point to the sky.  Since I’ve walked past just about every square inch of Grafton proper, I know those trees are meant to shield an ugly factory from a road.  But from my window, they could be the entry point to a beautiful forest.  I can’t tell.

“Once you experience it.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the must-be-believed-to-be-experienced nature of God lately, and how leaps of faith are essential to understanding, well, just about anything.

This fact has confused and pissed me off for about five years, and made it difficult to pass on.

But mornings like this, even though they are “cold and gray,” make me understand something important, and this by (what else) faith:

I live in Paradise.  Problematic Paradise.

“Loud boiling test tubes.”

Ok so “Earth and All Stars” is still irredeemable, but “Pass it On” is A-Ok.  Even if it does turn God into a giant mystical doobie.

This blog has been “This is Epth Nation” for so long, I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t sitting here taking up space on the internet and staring at me like some long, forgotten Taco Bell Chalupa.  The title and the banner picture have been changed (the latter to the Tales From the Darkside version of “Hooray for Everything.”) to something more appropriate for the state of affairs we find ourselves in right now. Don’t blame me — every time I turn on Twitter, someone is exhorting me to “change the world.”  Consider what follows here to be my feeble attempts at doing that.

As always, know that if I didn’t love you, I’d turtle-ize completely and vanish from the interwebs like an unholy combination of Pynchon and Nyan Cat.  But I do, love you.  So here we go…

Meme of the day — Meet me:

Totally.

My natural latent cynicism, borne of 1000 sensitivity-induced periods of awkwardness, has been amplified up to the proverbial 11.  You would simply not believe the cynical thoughts I have had. That they keep turning out to be accurate scares me, and keeps the cynicism train rolling.

My tolerance for advertisement, and marketing, and salesmanship, and all that jazz, has fallen to zero.  It’s gotten so I’d rather not purchase something if it’s marketed to me, even if I would benefit from it.  If a salesman would ever try to overcome one of my “buying objections,” I think I would walk out of whatever situation I was in right then and there.  This is why I avoid these situations at all costs.

My sensitivity (I’ve discovered that I am a hardcore “Highly Sensitive Person”) has done other things to me as well.   My tolerance for confrontation, awkwardness, phone conversations, and for just about any situation that’s overstimulating or uncertain, is almost nil.  I go from zero to angry panic and back several times a day.  It’s now a lifestyle that I’ve become accustomed to.  I’ve also become accustomed to masking it.  I’ve taken up things like meditation to try to help myself when those situations happen, and I’ve learned to live with my sensitivity.  It’s spiritually helpful, but in every other way it’s kind of a pain in the ass.

I can no longer stand most political talk, and view political speech as hurtful and ends-justify-the-means-y.  That goes doubly for culture war talk, or ridiculous postmodern hypocritical sheep-speak.  People use coded language to built hate-barriers between their team and the opposite team, and gird these barriers at all costs.  It’s exhausting, really.  We are a culture of know-it-all know-nothings.

I can’t drink beer anymore without getting intestinal issues that go on for days.  I’m no longer allergic to cats.  I’m starting to like folk music.  I just bought a new car.  See?  Totally different person.

So let’s go on this adventure, dear readers.  If there are no readers left, that’s ok.  I understand.  I’m still going to try to climb out of this fog, and see if there’s air left anywhere in the world.

Now, for the meme of the day:

So yeah, 11.04 has way worse problems than bad window button positioning.  You see, they moved from their old boring, functional, customizable “Gnome 2″ GUI to a new one, (ominously) called Unity.  Sure, Gnome is a dumb name, but it works, and it feels kinda like Windows, and I can get to my files and applications as if I were, you know, sitting at an actual computer.  In that, it performs its primary function well.  Gnome 2 might be boring, and “Gnome” might be a stupid name for anything except a small guy who sits on your lawn, but it was literally the only Linux desktop that really made sense.

The problem came when Gnome version 3 came out, and it was radically and awe-fully different than the reliable, computer-like Gnome 2.  This apparently drove the people behind Ubuntu so crazy that they were inspired to created something to compete with Gnome 3 (and KDE 4, that other Linux GUI overreach) in the category of awfulness.  So, in the bowels of Mount Doom, a GUI named Unity was forged.

What wrong with Unity, you ask?  Well:

1) It has a dock, a la OS X, that doesn’t do anything you want it to.  First of all, it’s on the left side, where Ubuntu apparently puts everything now.  You can’t move it from the left side, either.  Also, it’s default behavior is to hide behind open windows until you hold your mouse at the left edge of the screen for almost a second.  But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself…

1)  There is no bar at the bottom that holds your open application windows.  There is no way to GET a bar at the bottom that holds your application windows.  Because reclaiming that half-inch of real estate at the bottom of you monitor screen is more important than being able to switch between application windows in one click.  You see, with the combo of the hidden Dock of Death on the left side and the lack of a way to click on open windows, there is no way to go from window to window via mouse.  You have to move your mouse to the left side of the screen, wait for the Dock of Death to reappear, then click on the application you want to switch to.  And if that application happens to have more than one window open (like if you were –gasp — trying to edit two spreadsheets at the same time), then you have to click one more time on the actual window you want to see.  And you have to do that every time you switch windows.

2) There is no actual menu in Unity, and no way to get one.  I want to be very clear on this point:  There is no nested list of installed software to click on (and therefore run) with your mouse.  Now, I understand that some people hate menus, but they’re wrong.  A menu is the single simplest and most efficient way to organize a given computer’s entire set of installed applications.  Period.  If you don’t think so, you’re fooling yourself.  For the makers of Ubuntu, every day is apparently April Fools Day.

3) When you click on what you think is the menu (it’s in the top left corner instead of the bottom left one, but Ubuntu’s been that way for a while now — wait, that’s where it started!), you get what can only be described as the single most frustrating and counter-intuitive thing I’ve seen in a GUI since KDE’s plasma desktop.  Instead of a menu, you are greeted with a giant black window that somehow eats up your whole screen yet shows you virtually nothing.  There are three lists — one for your supposedly “favorite” apps, one for some of your installed apps, and one for random apps you don’t have installed.  There are only 5 of each application listed, with a tiny yet helpful-looking “see more results” to click on for each category.  Clicking on that will give you an alphabetical list of favorite, installed, or random apps, but the list is limited by the fact that only so many giant app icons can fit in the black window (even though it takes up the whole screen).  Let me say that again:  you’re 3 clicks in, and all you’ve managed to do is pull up an alphabetical list of your apps.

Now, there is a “menu” of sorts where you can filter the results by category, but that’s yet another click, and you still might not find what you want (especially if it starts with a “z”).  I found that the most efficient way in Unity of finding apps is searching for their name in the giant search bar at the top of the black Window.  That’s right, I have to f***ing use my keyboard to find my apps.  What is this, DOS 6.0?

I want to make this perfectly clear — I’m the laziest person I know.  This makes me a pretty good judge of efficiency in operating systems and user interfaces, because I can smell unnecessary effort a mile away.  And the last thing I want to do when sitting at my computer is click in a search box, take my hand off the mouse, type in words I have to think about, and hit enter.  If I have to search for something by name, you have failed as a GUI.  You have my apps.  Please give them back.

What they were trying to do is emulate your average smart phone’s screen (with the apps and the black Window), and they failed so miserably that you can hardly recognize what they were aiming for.   My iPhone shows me all my apps on the screen, and I can organize them in whatever way I choose.  Unity does the opposite of that — only showing a few apps, and not allowing me to organize them at all.

4)  It has become apparent that the only reason Ubuntu exists is to sell people on Ubuntu products, such as (the again ominous-sounding) Ubuntu One.  What does One do?  Well, for $3.99 a month you can store a bunch of data in their (presumably totally secure) cloud, and even stream stored music to a variety of devices.  Because using up bandwidth streaming stuff to your smartphone is better than just putting the actual songs on your phone, apparently. That’s why it costs money.

What Ubuntu Inc doesn’t understand is that I use Linux to get away from being sold things by the software that runs my computer.  That’s the whole point of open source and free software, right?

Finally, a serious point:  All the Linux GUIs seem to be hopelessly broken right now, and it’s put the whole idea of Linux in jeopardy, at least for me.  I’m using Linux Mint right now, but there’s talk of them switching to Gnome 3 next year.  Maybe Gnome 3 will improve enough to be usable next year, but I doubt it.  So my choices seem to boil down to:  Using Mint 11 for the next 10 years, or giving up on Linux entirely.  Maybe I should just get a Mac.

Not A Leader

Again, that’s where the good blog posts are going to be.  This current blog is going to be the place of Michael Pape, author.  Blech.

The twitter feed (twitter.com/epthnation) shall remain the same, for now.

2009-2010 was a bad, bad couple of years for a lot of things, including me blogging.  “I haven’t felt like it” “The FBI thinks I’m evil” and “I really really haven’t felt like it” are the three main reasons for my internet silence.  If this bums you out, I apologize.  If it makes you happy, then I take back my apology.

I know I said I was going to make the NBA season a story, but that seems ludicrous in the face of my total lack of interest in it.  What story?  LeBron doesn’t care about Cleveland?  Players don’t care about you or me?  There will be a lockout next year because (in this terrible economy) the two sides of the NBA coin both are thinking they need more money?  I can’t even muster up indignation at the players — this whole thing seems very owner-driven this time.

So, screw that.

I read an enormous amount of totally useless stuff on the internet. You would not believe the stuff I read.  Much of it is to reinforce my beliefs, and much of it is to just piss me off.  This might seem judgmental, but that’s ok.  I forgive you for thinking that.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOO, lots of things go through my head that I’d like to share, but don’t seem appropriate for a personal blog.  They would seem more appropriate coming out of the internet mouth of one of my alter egos or something.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, I’m going to start another blog, where I can explore these things that affect me so.

Epthnation.com will not cease to exist, but rather will become the mouthpiece of Michael Pape, aspiring author and soon-to-be-productive member of the Community of Books in America.

That means some fiction, and some writing commentary, but mostly…silence.  I’ll basically shut up until I have something to say.  Isn’t that a nice idea?  Now, if I write a book and SOMEHOW manage to snooker somebody into publishing it for me, that will be an example of something you could find out here.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, don’t delete this RSS feed just yet…please?

More details on the blog when it’s up and running.  It won’t be on the epthnation.com domain.  It’ll be somewhere else.

In the meantime, my Twitter feed is living and active and full of “win.”  I’m not sure if I’m going to also create a separate Twitter feed for the new blog (seems like a good idea, but also more work then I’m liable to be able to tolerate).  Twitter’s nice because it’s condensed and flippant, just like my brain.

Juno is notable for its ending, which gives vision and words to the geeky sensitive male high school fantasy better than any film before or since. It’s like the John Cusack holding a boombox over his head moment for skinny, awkward, and shy heterosexual males who ran cross country. I’m flabbergasted that a woman wrote the screenplay, actually. It’s like Diablo Cody’s in my head. It’s a weird feeling, this having a former stripper in one’s head. I don’t quite know what to make of it. Suffice to say, Juno kind of rocked my world.

So we’ve removed the old theme and put a picture of the dog back up, for now.  This is as it should be.  This feels right.  Maybe I’ll get un-blacklisted, and maybe I’ll get hacked again.  Who can know?

I do love that dog.

The good news:  I’ve figured out something to get me interested in blogging again.

HOWEVER, It’s really really sportsy.  And possibly a huge waste of time.

Let’s set it up this way:

The LeBron James Betrayal Episode got me thinking about the upcoming NBA season, and how I could not possibly be more cynical about it. For example, these are some of the things I believe about the NBA:

• The playoffs are rigged by the refs.  Therefore, NBA championships mean nothing.  Kinda takes the point out of watching games, doesn’t it?
• The players, almost to a man, don’t care about anything except themselves.
• The owners, almost to a man, don’t care about anything but the money.

And so when the most popular player conceives* and produces an hour-long self-serving TV special just so he can stab his hometown in the back on live TV, and he doesn’t even seem to realize the implications of what he’s doing, there’s something truly noteworthy about that, even when viewed in the cynical context of the regular NBA.  It was like Leborn hadn’t ever considered that his once adoring fans could possibly turn on him, and that to me is amazing.

And turn on him they did, in spectacular fashion.  The world divided itself into frontrunners (those who switched their allegiances with LeBron, and now are Miami Heat fans) and haters (those who now view Lebron as weak and/or disloyal).  Jerseys were burned.  The Cavaliers owner wrote a scathing public personal attack on LeBron, mostly in all-caps.  Everybody had a hot sports opinion on it.  Lebron had become the NBA’s Brett Favre.

This LeBetrayal thing is a story worth following, I thought to myself, if only to see the fun ways the Cavaliers’ fans’ bitterness will manifest itself.  Also, how will LeBron react to being booed in every city?  Will he care?  Will he crumble?  Will he come to regret his decision and how it played out, or is he so far removed from reality that he’ll actually enjoy becoming LeBron the Evil King of Miami?

So I thought about all this, and then I thought, who better to document the NBA’s season of stories than me, a guy who has given up on sports altogether?  There are as many stories as there are players (and coaches and refs and owners and fans), and all of them deserve to be seen in the distant light of cold reality.  I’m not an ex-athlete.  I’m not a member of the media.  I’m not a journalist.  Heck, I’m not even really a fan.  I’m just a guy who knows a little basketball and who has a blog.  If that doesn’t equal “qualified” in this day and age, I’m a woodchuck.

You see, every NBA season is living literature.  You may not have realized that, but it’s true.  There are heroes, villains, falls from grace, redemptions, betrayals, scandals, romances, and yes, even death.  It’s time that someone saw the NBA for what it truly is: A giant cyclical storybook.

Once upon a time, there was a King who loved his rich friends more than his subjects…

*Actually, it was reportedly Jim Gray’s idea, which makes perfect sense.  The lesson:  If Jim Gray suggests you do something that involves him, RUN.

I’ve decided to actually finish a book now, so we’ll see how that goes.  It’s a bunch of short stories that pretend to be questions, but are really challenges to our current U.S. worldview.  Yeah, like all my ideas, it’s hard to explain until you see it.  I’ve shown a couple of these to some friends and got pretty much the reaction I wanted, so I’ll keep plugging along.  Do you want to read one?  Ok.

(some of you have already seen this and been offended by it, so forgive me all over again…and if you want it in Microsoft .doc format — here you go.)

There is a man who successfully wins a public office…let’s say he was just elected as Dog-Catcher. He has all these new and exciting ideas on how to best catch dogs, and he narrowly edged the incumbent DC using a platform based on these ideas. It’s not going to be easy to get his ideas implemented, though; the Netists are lurking around every corner, and this defeat has made them more vocal and partisan than ever before.

Perhaps a brief explanation and history of Wayward Dog Redemption (WDR) methods is in order, not that it really matters. There are people in this unnamed city who believe without reservation that the only appropriate and effective way to catch dogs is with a net. They self-identify as Netists, and for many of them, it is their life’s passion. Their symbol is a Net flanked by a wild boar on the left and a beaker on the right, which symbolizes their frontier spirit and unassailable reason, respectively. They’re a pretty tight-knit and well-connected bunch, keeping in touch and in spirit with radio shows, newsletters, and nightly meetings in the Old Town Hall’s chilly basement. What the election of this new dog-catcher means for them is the probable end of the dog-catching world. Their goals with the radio show, newsletter, and meetings are mainly (a) to research legal challenges to the election; and (b) to speculate and articulate re: the demise of dog-catching, and with it, society as a whole.

On the other side lie the progressive-minded techno-thinkers who couldn’t come up with a suitable name for themselves, so the world has adopted a monker for them: Non-netists. They believe that Netists are borderline fascist barbarians whose destiny is the same as all barbarians — namely, extinction. They communicate primarily in buzzwords designed to make themselves feel smart. It was they who started referring to dog-catching as WDR, and the Dog-Catcher as the WDS (Wayward Dog Saviour, always with the British “u.”). It’s not that they hate nets, it’s that there’s so many better (and more humane, and cooler-looking) ways to redeem wayward dogs these days. The newly-elected Dog-Catcher promised to deploy things such as drugged water bowls and dog hypnosis, which are the very cutting edge of WDR technology right now. The Non-netists have taken their victory as a literal and figurative blank check to pursue newer and better things, which has only increased the vitriol of those who believe in the redeeming power of Nets. This is pretty much where we stand right now.

You are a fly on the wall of one of the Netist chilly closed-door anger-festivals under Old Town Hall. Everyone is wearing coats and frowns. Even though you are a fly, you can understand English. If this seems weird, just say to yourself, “It’s just a question, I should really just relax.” The Netists are trying to determine the motives of the technology-rich but (to them) morality-poor Non-netists. The new Dog Catcher’s plan is pure insanity to them — 1.3 times as expensive, but almost certainly less effective than the Old Way of doing things. Plus, he’s planning on renaming the very sacred office he holds! At least that’s what someone heard someone else say once. They discuss his arrogance, his messiah complex (they might have a point — “dog saviour” anyone?), and his Orwellian future plans.

It’s your job, as a fly on the wall, to decide which of their ideas with regard to the motives of the Non-netists and their new Wayward Dog Saviour is correct. You have three choices:

A) They actually think the new technology is better, and want to catch dogs more effectively and humanely.

B) They hate the city.

C) They want the new DC’s methods to fail so that the city is overrun by wild, unkempt, ownerless, and potentially rabid dogs so that the citizenry will have no choice but to accept their sweeping diabolical “Plan B,” which involves state ownership of all dogs, mandatory feeding times, food rations, free veterinary care (for which it takes weeks to get an appointment), government-employed dog-walkers, compulsory spaying and neutering, and ultimately, the complete annihilation of dogs from the face of the earth¹.

At the same time as this orgy of disillusionment is going on, the winners are having their First Annual Dog Saviour’s Ball in the Old Town Hall’s Grand Ballroom, which happens to be directly above the ceiling on which you are sticking. We could have you fly up there, being a fly and all, but I’d prefer to just give you directional super hearing, otherwise known as Super-Fly Hearing. With your fly ears, you can make out everything the people upstairs are saying. In between commenting on how nice everyone else looks, the Non-netist elite are trying to determine the motives of the old-school but (to them) anachronistic Netists. The old way of doing Dog Redemption seemed like pure insanity to them — more expensive in the long-term and unfair to the very dogs being redeemed. Plus, the whole concept of Dog Catching conjures up terribly barbaric images of uniformed men with nets chasing poor orphaned mutts, which is why they think the name must be changed to something less offensive.

It’s that time again, only this time you’re determining the motives of the cellar-dwelling Netists, as communicated by the well-dressed denizens of the Grand Ballroom. Why are the Netists so obsessed with nets?

A) They think nets are a time-tested and cost-effective way of dealing with stray dogs.

B) They hate anyone who isn’t exactly like them.

C) They want to return the city to the Old Age of Dog Ownership, where dogs’ well-being was solely the concern of their owners. What does this mean? Well, the government would be powerless to stop the rampant and inevitable dog abuse required by strict capitalism. The Dog Catcher would be merely a puppet, catching dogs with nasty nets and then funneling his prey to rich corporate interests. From there, the dogs would either end up in the “care” of some rich unworthy family (since they’re the only ones that could afford them), or find their way to the processing plant, where they would eventually become hamburgers, glue, artificial sweetener, or any of thousands of other products².