Blogs Are Wrong

So, it’s 4:30 in the morning, and I’m just coming back from a very surreal experience at NUBlabs.

We’re leaving for Maker Faire in a day, and we wanted to bring down a bunch of our logobots with us.  We got all the boards and parts at the last minute, and I threw together a robo-building party to assemble a bunch of the robots.  We got about 8 or 9 people to come, bought a bunch of beer, soda and brazilian food, taught everyone to solder, and then laid out all the parts and set folks to work.

It was great!  Everyone had a lot of fun, we built fourteen robots and spent hours joking and soldering and working.  Around 11 at night, people started to leave, but Alec and Shaunalynn and Jason and I kept working.

At some point, Will took off in the car to go lasercut the chassis, and we never bothered to close the doors after him.  It was a nice night, and so we left the big bay door to the warehouse open and kept on soldering.

Around 2 in the morning,  a cop car pulls up and the cop walks uninvited into our space.  I get up to meet him and ask him what the matter is.  He asks for our business license, and I tell him I can show him our operating agreement.  I don’t know what a business license is.  He’s going on and on about how everybody has to have a business license to run a business in somerville, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

In retrospect, I realize my first error was in accommodating this guy.  He shouldn’t even have come into our space, and even so, we’re tenants in a space we’re renting, doing safe work on our own and not bothering anyone.  He had no right or reason to be there.  By doing what he said, I instantly gave him the upper hand in our interaction. (in my defense, I’d had about 7 hours of sleep in the last 70 hours and wasn’t really on top of my game)

So I start shuffling through papers, looking for a printout of our operating agreement.  I ask him if we’ve done anything wrong, and he says that we had the door open.  I offer to close it, and he says, “no–you need to show me your business license.  You have to have one to be working at night in somerville”

Now, this doesn’t make any sense to me, and I’m getting flustered because I can’t find any appropriate papers and there’s two more cops pulling up outside.  A guy with a city zoning badge comes out of one, and another cop gets out of another.  God knows why there’s a zoning guy on call at 2 am.  Our tax dollars at work, I guess.

The zoning guy asks me what we’re doing, and I tell him we’re a company working with local somerville schools (true) and we’re under a deadline and staying up late to assemble a bunch of educational devices.  He kind of turns to the cop with a “what’s the problem?” look.

The cop says, “When I got here, the door was wide open–WIDE open, and there were open alcoholic beverage containers on the premises”

I repeat my offer to close the door to the zoning guy, who says, “well, if they close the door, I don’t see the problem”

The cop, with the smug air of a tattletale, reports “they don’t have a business license for somerville.  He claims to have an operating agreement for his company, but so far has FAILED to show me any paperwork”

The zoning guy says, “you don’t have a business license?  hmmm…”

so, this is where it gets wierd.  Up until this point, I’ve been feeling kind of confused and defensive.  All these cops are apparently busting me for not having my door closed while I was in the shop, and this is the first I’ve ever heard about us needing some business license.  In short, I have no idea why they’re in here talking to us, and I’m wondering why they’re not off chasing real criminals.

The cop says, “Without a business license, who knows what you could be up to in here!  You could be doing anything.  You could have high explosives back there”

So, now I’m getting angry.  This is just ridiculous.  I turn to the cop and say, as calmly and steadily as I can, with an expression of amazement on my face, “Is that really what you’re worried about”

The cop says, “yeah!  As the situation stands, I don’t see any reason NOT to worry about it”

I turn to both of them, an expression of pleading and disbelief on my face.  “We work with schools.  We’re working on educational teaching aids.  We have a deadline and we’re working to meet it.  I’d like to close the door and for us to continue working”

The cop says, “No–shut it down for the night.  You’ve got to go in tomorrow and get a business permit”

The zoning guy, glancing at the cop, echoes him.

I repeat that we’ve got a deadline, they don’t really care.  I finally tell them, OK, we’ll shut down for the night, and they head out.  On his way out, the zoning guy says “this officer will drive by in a bit.  If you’re still in here, there’ll be big trouble.”

I jam my finger on the ‘door close’ button, confused and pissed and unbelieving and turn my back on them.

Now, I’m not proud of what I did next.  I came back to Alec and co and told them what had happened and that we had to leave for the night.  In retrospect, I’m amazed and ashamed at how thoroughly the cops had beat me mentally, to the point where I’d pass on their orders to other people.  I just had this sense that they were fucking with us, but that we somehow were in an illegitimate position and wouldn’t be able to withstand a confrontation.

Fortunately, Alec has a solid head on his shoulders and talked some sense into me, pointing out that we are doing nothing wrong, we have every right to be in our rented space working whenever we want, and that we shouldn’t forgo what we’re working on because of them, nor should we back away from a confrontation here.  It took some doing, but I eventually came around and sat hoping, somewhat nervously, for the cops to come back and both nervous and scared about whatever would happen next.

As it turned out, they never came.  We stayed there and worked and built robots for the rest of the night without an incident.

I took a few things away from this:

First, I’m upset at myself for backing away from a confrontation.  I’m not used to interacting with authority figures–I like to do things behind their backs, and it bugs me that I’m not good at dealing with them face to face.  It smacks of passive-agressiveness on my part, and that’s my least favorite personality trait.

Second, cops don’t have our best interests in mind.  Why are they bugging us for having a door open?  Why are they telling us we have to go home?  It’s detrimental to us, and they have no reason or justification for doing it.  I didn’t have much trust for cops, but I lost whatever faith I had left in them tonight.

Third–I should never start out talking with a cop in a defensive manner.  Browbeating is incredibly effective, and cops are experts at it.  They attack any weakness in your personality or demeanor to assert their dominance in a situation.  Never again.  I’ll react to a cop entering my space with mistrust and suspicion, not open-ness and honesty.

Fourth–blind trust of authority is dangerous as fuck.  After our conversation, I was impressed enough with their authority (and their threats) that I was ready to forgo a pretty important thing I was doing in order to comply with their wishes.  I need to start cultivating more of a resistance to cops’ ordering me around, because it’s very easy to do what they tell you.

And finally, thinking back over our conversation, it’s ridiculous.  To come to someone’s open door, suggest that they have explosives inside, and then force them to leave is such a stupid way to behave.  I hate rabid behaviour in anyone, and this smacks of it.  And when authority figures are illogical and inconsistent, I get scared and mad as hell.  We’re a bunch of kids working with local schools, for chrissake.  Isn’t there actual crime to fight at 2am, rather than coming over to fuck with us?

Seriously–you fucking pigs.  Get a life.  Get out of mine.

So, I got into dancing Lindy hop in LA, and when I first got to Boston, I was really into dancing at various places around town.  Then NUB started up and I pretty much put everything on hold, including dancing.  I’ve probably only gone dancing twice in the last two months, and I’m definitely dancing worse because of it.

I went to a dance at MIT tonight and clumsied my way through a bunch of songs, occasionally feeling the music enough to dance without thinking about it, but for the most part reverting to a kind of lame approach of just going through different combinations of steps I’ve learned in the past, which never makes for smooth or interesting dancing.  I was having fun, but definitely not dancing my heart out.

Anyway, I saw this girl who was an incredible dancer, so I asked her to dance.  I did a pretty bad job leading, and we definitely weren’t moving together at all.  About halfway through the song I smiled at her and told her that I had never danced before, and was just trying to imitate what everyone else was doing.  She was instantly relieved and said, “oh, thank god.  I thought you were trying some really tricky steps that I wasn’t keeping up with.”  For the rest of the song, we danced much better together–my skill at leading wasn’t any different, but we were moving together much better.  Funny.

To me, the part of the story worth taking away is that we’re slow to question a stranger’s competence–we’d rather second-guess our own abilities first.  I’m not sure who “we” is, but I can think of a number of times when I’ve followed this behavior pattern, and innumerable times when I’ve seen it in other people

ch-check it out:

Bam! You see how that right leg is all rolled up? That’s cause I just built myself a new bicycle. Not just any bicycle–a gorgeous road bike. Take a look:

The great thing about this bike, though, is the story. I’ve only spent $3 on the entire bike, and everything else was completely free. Alec and I drove out to Newton around 3AM one night and went all over the city, looking for the richest bike shops and their associated dumpsters. We pulled this frame, a mountain bike frame, a ton of wheels and some bike tools out of one dumpster and were about to bring the car around to load up our bounty when a cop showed up and told us to put everything back in the dumpster and to get out of town. sigh. We put the parts we wanted to the side of the dumpster, kicked off for an hour or so, then drove up to the dumpster with our lights off, using the E-brake so the brake lights didn’t show (my favorite part), loaded up the car with trashed bike parts and got the hell out of dodge.

It’s taken me about two weeks to find all the parts I needed to put this together, and in the process, I’ve taken apart, cleaned, degreased and regreased every single individual part on this bike, from wheel axles to the brakes. The only thing I had to buy was a set of crank nuts to hold the cranks onto this weird nonstandard bottom bracket I found. I’ve never built a bike completely from scratch before, and now that I have, it seems like the easiest, most straightforward thing in the world to do. Most of the things I didn’t know about building bikes had a very complex, intimidating feel to them in my mind, and so I generally stayed away from anything more than the simplest aspects of bikes. It’s great to get over that and feel like I totally own a bike, and could put another one together (for free!) whenever I care to put in the time.

I think I probably put about 10 hours into this bike, and it’s totally worth it.

And—oh, yeah. Riding it. I haven’t had a real bike since I moved back to Boston. I’ve been getting around on blades. Blades are great–when I’m totally zoned in and paying attention, I’m easily faster than a car in the city (particularly when I’m catching rides on the backs of cars using these fantastic suction cups (there’s just nothing cooler than flying through the city at 35 mph, catching cars when you can and ditching them when they’re going too slow for you, nothing between you and the pavement but 8 wheels, high-precision bearings, your reflexes and your balls) The thing is, though, that blades are just plain hard. You have to always be thinking, avoiding bumps in the road and actively working to stay fast and upright. On a bike, it’s just effortless. After I finished building it today, I took it through the city at rush hour to get a feel for it, and I just flew through the city. I just can’t describe how much I love the feeling of barreling along, ducking cars and peds and just blowing by everything in the city until everything around me just turns into a montage of red and white lights and the only thing I’m paying attention to is this little bubble that’s around me and my bike right now–It’s fast and thick, effortless and silent, and nothing else can compare.

I also learned how to use accounting software today.

We live in a world of medicinal hype, where diseases-du-jour flit across front pages and TV screens, sparking national runs to the family doctor, hastily published books being scooped off the shelf, and of course, orange bottle after orange bottle of pills going gulp! down the hatch! to save us from yet another imaginary malady.
But of all the over-diagnosed diseases, disorders and complexes that foul the air we breathe, threatening contagion at every choked gasp, there is one in particular that is, to me, unspeakably despicable, deplorably cheap and disgustingly fake, and that is the tripe known as Seasonal Affective Disorder.
According to the US Library of Medicine, Seasonal Affective Disorder is characterized as “a serious mood change when the seasons change.”

Oh my god, what a mindfuck.  What?  We react to the seasons?  That’s terrible!  We must avoid emotional variance at all costs, this way we can all be productive worker bees year round.  Honestly, people, do you really want to be the mental equivalent of a barbie?  Perfectly happy at all times, but you’d need extensive surgery and to get rid of some organs in order to achieve it.  We are animals, we live in the world.  We react to the world around us, and we’re not meant to be imprisoned in a fluorescent cube farm.  If you’re feeling tired in the winter, it’s probably your body telling you that you shouldn’t be working or running around so much, because you ought to be conserving your energy to keep yourself warm and get through the winter.

The fact that doctors are calling a seasonal mood variation a disorder only strengthens my distrust of the accepted notion of a healthy mind.  We all react to the seasons.  Calling our reaction a disorder makes us seem inherently flawed and pushes us to move further away from our biological roots and towards becoming perennially indoor, heated-and-air conditioned blobs.  No, there’s nothing wrong with you!  You are a complex organism with all kinds of stimuli and response.  Get the fuck over it, or better yet, learn to accept and understand it!

While I’m on a rant, I might as well just up and say–I don’t really believe in any of the buzzword disorders that are thrown around today.  Bipolar Disorder, ADHD (what?  your kid doesn’t want to sit for eight hours a day and listen to uninspired teaching?  Something is clearly wrong with him.  Dope him to the gills with speed and stick him back behind a desk!).  Calling our natural mental habits disorders makes us feel abnormal and pushes us to conform to a mythical societal norm of a perfectly stable person, someone who always has a level head and can deal with relationships and mortgages and raising a similarly inclined family.  To the masses who scurry to the doctors for adderall, valium, prozac and light treatments–why are you so quick to cave to pop science?  Are you really so insecure about your selves that you’ll believe any vaguely worded overly general pharmaceutical ad on TV that remotely describes you?  Can’t you define your own contentment, your own goals and needs?  Can’t you see that your mental quirks, your tendencies, fears and inhibitions that you’re so quick to medicate away—don’t you realize that this is the sum of the events you’ve experienced over your life?  That this is what defines you as a person?  How can you be so callous to replace your individuality with drugged mediocrity?

This isn’t a call to arms, it’s not a rant (well ok, it is a rant), I’m not trying to overthrow the american medical establishment. This is simply a plea–I’m begging you, whoever may be reading this, to put in the effort to understand yourself, to actually figure out what’s going on inside your body and mind, and to do this in lieu of, or at least before forcing your body into perfectly predictable pattern by blitzing it with powerful psychoactive drugs.  Find your own definition of happiness, choose what you want out of life, and be secure enough in your choices that if you choose to use a psychiatric remedy, you’re doing so because it’s a clear step towards your well-defined goals.

end rant,

alex, over and out

So, Joey Comeau is fantastic! This man is one of the co-authors of the webcomic A Softer World, which I cannot recommend highly enough. He is also a really talented writer, and I can only aspire to being able to write with his clarity, poignancy and defiance. In the meantime, I’ll just admire his work and wipe up my drool stains.

“But I don‘t know. I think there‘s a place for romance in the world, even if romance can be delusional and damaging in a relationship itself. You know, the kind of dudes who are “romantic” by being in love with the idea of a girl, and don’t see the real girl at all. And I think even though we’ve always been aware of that trap with relationships and love, sometimes you and I are like that with life itself. Like, there’s a romance to danger. There‘s a romance to drinking, to drugs, to petty crime and to heartbreak and loneliness. All of those things can be used to make the STORY of our lives better.”

August ‘07

Well, maybe I was watching you from across the restaurant
Maybe I liked the way your back curved,
The way the hair fell across your face

Maybe I think we could beat this town
sardonic grin and twisted smile
we’ll outlast the airbrushed yuppies
medicinal marijuana
and 2-for-1 colonics

Maybe I’m content just to daydream
there’s plenty of reality in my life already
so don’t notice me
maybe you’re better in my head

Maybe I’m scared of the next full moon
vanity dogs and leather cars
restaurants with chairs outside
and alleys with no place to hide

But it’s city blocks and withered cocks
give a penny take a penny
and maybe it’s not so easy to fly the coop
maybe I don’t want to

But there’ll be constellations tomorrow
and maybe we’ll watch them lying on
the hood of my car
Maybe the bum singing on the street
corner isn’t a higher truth, just the
sad reality of the present, hidden
and crumpled beneath the
onrushing future

Don’t ask for my money
Don’t tell me your story
Why would I want another world adjoined to mine?

So let me sit here with my shake and fries
and I’ll dig dig dig into my personal mine
shore up the walls and lock up the doors

and stay down until the air runs out.

Palm trees, date palms standing sullen, waiting for a breeze, all the while arched gracefully, upended smiles, seagulls, pennants.

There’s a mute on the city, silent figures scurrying back and forth, doors slamming, tires squealing, shouts of vendors, music–it’s all there, but simply silenced.  A blanket of mute-ness has descended, flooding choking slipping through the cracks in walls, pouring through open doors and soaking up the sound, blocking the space between our mouths and our ears.

And we hate it, the silence.  The cacophony of the city, sirens and horns, the cats we curse in the middle of the night, car alarms we want to rip out, drop off the highest point in the world and let that sound trail away, fall from our ears—we’ll fight to have them all back.  This mute world is hostile, relentless, and we want the old, flawed, familiar one back.

Your eyes are burning holes through me
I’m gasoline
I’m burnin’ clean

Twentieth century go and sleep
You’re Pleistocene
That is obscene
That is obscene

You are the star tonight
Your sun electric, outta sight
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight
Electrolite
You’re outta sight

If I ever want to fly
Mulholland Drive
I am alive

Hollywood is under me
I’m Martin Sheen
I’m Steve McQueen
I’m Jimmy Dean

You are the star tonight
Your sun electric, outta sight
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight
Electrolite
You’re outta sight

If you ever want to fly
Mulholland Drive
Up in the sky
Stand on a cliff and look down there
Don’t be scared, you are alive
You are alive

You are the star tonight
Your sun electric, outta sight
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight
Electrolite
You’re outta sight

Twentieth century go and sleep
Really deep
We won’t blink

Your eyes are burning holes through me
I’m not scared
I’m outta here
I’m not scared
I’m outta here