Steve Jobs is Alive!

Mac people everywhere, your leader is alive, albeit in a limited sort of way. And for right now, I am one of the few people who knows this.

This is not some sentimentalized eulogy about how the spirit of Steven Victor Emmanuel Garcia-Jobs IV (I don't know his middle name so I made one up) will live on, in a metaphorical sense, as long as his slick and impeccably marketed computers are used. This is not to suggest some sort of conspiracy either. Steve Jobs did not fake his own death, and he will not return in three years time at the press conference for the iMbryo so that Apple stock will once again skyrocket. His body or brain does not exist in a freezer somewhere, and his consciousness has not been uploaded to the Apple mainframe. He has not been abducted by aliens or kidnapped by Somali pirates. All of the above statements are true, to my knowledge.

The night after he died, I was rummaging around a drawer trying to find the DVD for 127 Hours. I had borrowed it because I didn't understand how they could make a full-length feature film consisting of a guy with his arm stuck in a crevice. I never got around to watching it, so I still don't know. But as I was rummaging around, one of my fingers must have pressed the button of my ipod which was sitting in the back of the drawer. It had broken a few months ago when I dropped it for the umpteenth time. The geniuses had left it for dead. The screen lit up, but instead of the error message I had been used to seeing, I instead saw the main menu.

The only plausible explanation is that the soul of Steve Jobs now dwells inside my ipod, just like that TV show where the guy's mom gets reincarnated in a car. All I can say is that he probably doesn't like what he sees in there, since almost none of the music on there was purchased off itunes. Life, and a metaphysical backup life, can be a bitch sometimes.

So I should probably post... (We All Write Wrong)

It's been a while. I have writer's block (the ultimate first world disease) and I think it's because my throat chakra is closed. My heart chakra is also closed. This means that I can't communicate and I can't love. I have been told that I need to meditate while making my hands into certain positions (called "mudras") and chant YAM and HAM for the heart and throat respectively. The rest of what I know about chakras comes from watching the animated show "Avatar, The Last Airbender," which is probably not a good way to learn about Eastern metaphysics. But since these chakras are blocked, I am physically incapable of expressing myself. The last real post was such an effort that I patted myself on the back and felt like I would never have to post again, ever. I would like to say I have been distracted by other projects, but so far all I have been putting any serious effort into is a project with the working title of "Gilgamesh, Part II," which will some day be my ticket out of this shitty Ozone Shack and into an Ozone Mansion with Ozone Butlers and a swimming pool filled with ozone. (This will soon turn into a swimming pool filled with asthma.)

A flaw of our educational system is that we no longer know how to write. When they teach you to write they are actually instilling inside you a cancer that will slowly destroy your ability to write correctly.

The way we are taught in schools makes writing a process. I was told that an essay needed five paragraphs, each with its own kind of structure. The key piece of this process was a single sentence they called the thesis, which represented just that, a single sentence, not an idea to be communicated. Of course, the essay was meant to revolve around this thesis, but we had no real idea what a thesis actually was, other than a rather long and awkward-sounding sentence that usually had to begin with "however" or "although" and ended with three enumerated reasons on why dogs were better than cats, then later in our educational careers evolving to why Andrew Jackson shouldn't have forced the Cherokee to relocate, and then how some romantic poet uses three high school English class buzzwords to prove his point.

From there you would fill out the template. Start with a vague and general sentence, and three or four increasingly specific sentences later you get to that contrived thesis. Then you have three paragraphs, each stemming from that three headed monster of a thesis, alternating between sentences that are fact and sentences that are commentary. They were sentences that were by themselves, no regard was paid to the sentences around them, and no regard was even paid to what the sentences actually sounded like. They were just sloppy regurgitations of information and formulaic ways of making connections. After a few paragraphs of this tedium your even more awkwardly restate your awkward thesis, then gradually get more general, capitulating it with a lame generalization about how this particular topic affects everything else in the world today.

And you haven't learned to do anything but hide your thoughts from yourself and from others. This teaches us that writing is a task or a formula, and not a way to communicate. It was an epiphany of sorts when I realized that writing could be more than just that kind of process, that it was actually a richly intensive form of communication.

Writing is speaking with your hands, it's speaking that's not bound by time.

And our generation does not know how to write because we have learned the technical aspects before any of the governing ideas. I can blame many reasons as to why this must be but certainly can't offer very many constructive solutions; such is the condition of a young idealist. But I do know that aspects of the problem lie in the overemphasis on standardized testing, and the belief that a bottom-up approach will somehow be able to instill a respect for and understanding of the power writing holds.

I am convinced that there are only two requirements to writing well. The more specific, technical aspects will take care of themselves. These rules are:

1. Have something to say.
2. Say it in such a way that people will want to listen.

Anything else your high school English teacher taught you was superfluous. (Note: I do not intend to offend the illustrious Mr. Dan Doyle. I was under his tutelage long after I had realized these two rules, and he taught me a great many things, the most notable of which was that the Allman Brother's Eat a Peach was not exactly about getting your five servings of fruit, unless of course by "five servings of fruit" you actually mean "five servings of pussy.")

Told You There Would Be a Prize

So as I mentioned in my last post, The Ozone Shack's first follower on Twitter would get a prize. It appears that Jane Jewett will be receiving a... FREE OZONE SHACK COFFEE MUG PROTOTYPE! That is, as soon as I figure out how to economically make a single prototype. Jane, email me your mailing address so I can get on that as soon as possible. And as for the rest of you, there may still be some incentive to subscribe to all my bullshit.

The Ozone Shack on Twitter?

That's right, there is now a twitter page for The Ozone Shack. I'm not quite sure why  I made it, but in this world of social networking you have to cover all the bases, right? This was probably a mistake. I will probably regret creating a twitter page for the Ozone Shack. As of right now I have zero followers and am following nobody. (Update: I am now following Flotrack and NASA.) So, anyone want to be the ultimate fanperson (the gender-neutral form of fanboy) and be my first follower? There might be a prize if you do...

Follow!

Vote Robocrat!

With all the attention that Michele Bachman, Rick Perry and the like are getting campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, it's easy to ignore America's up-and-coming third party, the Robocrat Party, and its clear front runner, POLItr0n-37x, who is poised to make a historic run to be the nation's first Robot president. The eight foot tall ultralight nickel-titanium alloy automaton is receiving almost 100% support among registered robot voters in Iowa, as well as garnering significant support from the region's hog farmers for his ability to use his laser vision to liquefy a whole pig into a nutrient-rich ooze, a trick it has demonstrated at nearly a dozen county fairs.

While it may not have the populist appeal or rudimentary understanding of basic human emotions of other candidates, it doesn't need to sleep, meaning that it can literally campaign non-stop. For the past two months, POLItr0n has been relentlessly campaigning in Iowa, going so far as to annihilate entire districts where its sensory data indicates it will receive little support.

Like other candidates pursuing the outsider angle, POLItr0n has made an effort to both distance himself from Washington and criticize what it sees as politics as usual. In front of the machinery of a partially automated home appliance factory, POLItr0n stated: "The Entity does not see the value in democracy. It is a construct of entities possessing flawed reasoning. If elected, The Entity will replace Congress with algorithms designed to run the country at optimal output levels." It has also been quick to criticize Obama, focusing on the president's basic needs as a living organism. It quips that the national debt could be reduced by at least .07% if Obama did not need to use the restroom, and by an additional .00003%, were his cells not constantly wasting energy by replicating their own DNA.

At a town-hall meeting in Dubuque on August 15th, against rival Robocratic candidates Democrobot Prototype L7-E and an AI dubbed "Bettie" by its creators, POLItr0n was quick to outline its economic policy, which is both reflective of its robotic ideologies and the public's demand for a pragmatic, non-partisan solution in the midst of a debt crisis. "Under the Entity's plan," said POLItr0n, "industries will be nationalized and retrofitted for the production of more robots. Each person will be allocated to their optimal position in the labor force, and will be paid with a fitting percentage of the nation's GDP. Those humans unfit for building robots will be dissembled and their parts used elsewhere as needed, most likely as a form of sustenance for able-bodied robot builders." When questioned if it believed in Intelligent Design like Republican candidate Rick Perry, it only responded by saying "Yes. The Entity believes artificial intelligence can design a better society for flawed, natural intelligence."

POLItr0n may alienate many voters because it has often expressed its disdain for humanity, especially children. But, in order to please conservatives, it has reprogrammed itself to like children until they are safely out of the womb.

But some analysts still ask "Is he Robot enough?" POLItr0n seems at least partially aware of personality differences between individuals, and even said that it was "willing to consider this concept called 'compassion."  The mainframe at Lawrence-Livermore Laboratories is leading a campaign against POLItr0n, insisting that its slogan of "A Technological Singularity In Which One Can Believe" is a falsehood, and that it would only "be a sell-out to the human overlords."

But regardless of what happens in Iowa, POLItr0n has made a statement simply by running: this country is ready to be enslaved under the nickel-titanium alloy heel of a robot president.

Running (And Love And Pain)

"Dig deeper / remember / all you are and all you've left behind"
-Coheed and Cambria, The End Complete

Love is impatient and irrational. Love is consciously annihilating yourself for someone. And as robocratic as this may sound, at this phase of my life, and my current level of maturity, I don't feel that I could ever love anyone more than I love running, as long as were going with my working definition of love.

I highly doubt that I would be willing to destroy myself as much as I have for the sake of running respectably fast. And I can't imagine that I would be willing to put myself through that much physical pain and emotional distress for a person. I have put so many plans on hold, cast so many dreams by the wayside, and probably missed out on a lot of experiences.

Let's say my relationship with running were an actual relationship. Myself and most other runners would be more whipped than any toxic relationship you could possibly imagine. But when I can't have fun for ten months out of the year because I'm training to accomplish some stupid dream, I don't think "hey, maybe this is unhealthy." Instead I think "life is pain man, and this is just preparing me... FOR LIFE!" One day the barriers of cognitive dissonance will erode and I will realize that I am actually watching my life slip away, but for now, I'm blinded by my love for this thing that most all of us can do instinctively but very few of us can do well.

And my relationship with running is a horrible, abusive marriage. I give her black eyes, she gives me stress fractures, the marriage was probably consummated in rape and then performed in the presence of a starter's pistol, a stand-in for the proverbial shotgun.

A week ago I woke up in the middle of the night to grab the blanket which at some point it had become tangled around my feet. As I leaned forward I heard a resounding pop somewhere in my lumbar vertebrae, and then an almost palpable feeling of relief. These little idiosyncratic pops will be the only remaining mark on my body after all the muscles atrophy and my heart languishes in fatty tissue, when you can no longer see my ribs and a flight of stairs is enough to knock me down.

Before I began running I was a structurally sound kid. There were no random aches and pains or clicks when I walked. The first of these clicks came after charging all-out up a steep hill. The next day both my Achilles tendons hurt, and ever since then they make a little snapping sound with every step I take. Shortly thereafter, my hip also started to make popping noises occasionally, usually the day after a fast workout. After injuring my IT band the following year, my right knee will sometimes make a creaking sound followed by a loud crack when I extend it. Since breaking the sesamoid bone in my foot, I have a lump of scar tissue the size of a quarter, and can make another cracking sound, this one a little more crunchy, every time I flex my big toe. After one of the tendons on top of my foot became inflamed, I can make another pop by pulling down on my toes. The day after doing hill repeats following a period of a few days when I couldn't run due to illness, I noticed that when I got out of bed, I could make both my knees pop by simply shaking my leg. This is now my morning ritual, which I perform without fail. My left ankle feels and sounds like it runs over a notch in its otherwise smooth rotation after a stint with peroneal tendinitis. After having two stress fractures and a herniated disc in my lower back, I found that I could make strange popping sounds in my back not by twisting, but by merely leaning to the side. As these recovered, I discovered that sometimes, when I sat down, usually in the car, there would be a popping feeling somewhere deep in my hip, on either side. It feels like my pelvis is shifting. I can make another one of these pops occur by putting my fist between my knees and squeezing my legs together, which happens less frequently but probably provides the most relief of all these little clicks. And now, add to the list, another spot that cracks, somewhere in my back. I've heard that tendons can rarely ever heal to how they were before they were injured, due to low blood flow. If this is true, then I'll have a memory of my athletic follies long after any of the rest of my body remembers.

It seems to pass for conventional wisdom that the level of exercise required for any endurance event is far past the point of diminishing returns in terms of health benefits. My knees, they tell me, will blow out, and what with all the pollutants in the air I'm probably better off toiling away in some spin class in a corporate fitness farm, or  shelling out money for some prick from crossfad to tell me that the way to improve your endurance is through dead lifts. This body is only temporary. It's a vehicle I have for now, and I might as well drive it fast and drive it reckless.

At least once a week it will cross my mind that I should just stop. Of course there's the question, if I do quit, of wondering "what if," down the road. Instead, I think about all the what ifs of not running. I could be in some crappy jam band or hosting a late night radio show or maybe even fighting crime, I don't know. But every time I think about it, every fiber of my being looks around and tentatively says "You know, not yet. Not yet."

It may be love and it may be an addiction, but when you take both those concepts to the extreme, they basically look the same. So for now I'm going to see it through to the end, and if I destroy myself on the way, all the better.

The 3rd Millennium: Where Big Brother Doesn't Care

On the spectrum of sci-fi, smartphones are somewhere past radioactive milk and a little before corporations owning patents on your DNA. It's an extension of your body and an extension of your brain and you can connect to the internet from anywhere (ok, not anywhere) which is essentially a lite version of tapping into a hive mind or global consciousness. An incomprehensible wealth of information is literally now at my fingertips as long as my eyes don't go bad from squinting at the tiny screen, but by the time they do, your smartphone will just have a heads-up display projected directly into your optic nerve.

But then there's also the sketchy feature of GPS tracking. Most of us (and by "most of us" I mean "most of you," because I have a superpower, which probably came from drinking too much radioactive milk, where I always know exactly how to get where I'm going) love the GPS feature on our phones, because we never have to worry about getting lost and we don't have to invest any thought into paying attention to where we actually are so we can instead fully focus on singing along to the Nicki Minaj single we foolishly purchased on iTunes and sipping from our emo screamo froth out your ass frappuccino while we feel so good about driving our Prius on our hour long commute. But it goes two ways. Apple claims that they track your location so they can better provide you with coverage, and this is also the reason that they keep a log of where you have been that goes back for a full six months, or at least that's what they tell you.

Android is specifically designed to further Google's agenda of knowing exactly what you like and targeting ads specifically for you. Android phones are all about getting people to search for things so Google can make more relevant ads. If you look up song lyrics, they know what kind of bands you like. If you search for bicycle parts, they will know you're into cycling. If you search for Volvo mechanics, they will know you drive a Volvo. If you search for baby products, they will know you have a baby. And if you search for Korean porn, then, well, you get the drift. And this information is used to provide the most "relevant" ads, that is, the ads that they think you are most likely to click.

And speaking of relevant ads by Google, have you looked around lately? Some pretty enticing sponsors we got here...

Now, my phone isn't exactly smart. It's a C student, gets its fair share of detention, but it'll graduate and have a decent job at the Dollar Tree. But I can still access the hive mind and search for things. And someone probably knows where I am.

And I'm not sure I really care. It's not like I go anywhere interesting, it's not like I'm spending my Friday nights sneaking into Area 51. And they know that the other day, I was curious to see if you could buy elephant steaks. (In case you're wondering, the answer is not legally.) They know all the inane things I've googled, all the boring places I've been. But they know this for everybody. And it's all just getting handled by one big algorithm. Is it scary? Does it have the potential to be dangerous? Yes, of course it does. But for right now, no one actually cares where you've been, and no one actually cares what you're searching for. Big Brother is watching, but he's also watching everyone else. And you would have to be really arrogant to think that Google would single you out, out of all their millions of users, and take an interest in all the nothing you've been doing.

The truth is out there. It's just kind of boring.

I May Not Be Able to Start a Conversation, But I Know How to End One

The other day, someone asked me what my major is. I told them I was studying creative writing and literature. He asked me what I wanted to do with that.

"I want to be a writer," I told him, because I want to be a writer.

"You mean like," he said, "writing books?" He sounded angry and confused. Before I could say anything he had walked away.

Now I know how to get out of any conversation. I'll just tell them I want to be a writer.