jason pettus | Odds and ends.

I have a growing number of random notes piling up on my Treo these days, as well as lots of astute reader comments I've been meaning to share; so today I thought I'd sit down and get them all out. Enjoy!

--All right, get ready, because for the first time in two years I'm about to issue a public apology. And as regular readers know, I only issue apologies when I'm clearly wrong about something I've written about here in the past, and overwhelmingly wrong as well. So here it is:

Dear producers of Desperate Housewives: I hereby apologize for assuming your show wasn't worth watching last year when it was originally on, just because it's so popular among suburbanite morons.

Man oh man! Have you seen this show? I've been watching it this summer in reruns, prompted by two dozen of my readers assuring me that I would love it; and once again, as always, you people are completely goddamn right. Every episode, it seems, I simply can't believe that that show is getting away with the things they do, much less that it's so incredibly popular and got nominated for something like a zillion Emmys. Moms popping their kids' Ritalin as a cheap form of crystal meth! Bitch-goddess showdowns at PTA meetings! Hallucinatory suicide fantasies set to peppy '60s pop songs! Partial nudity in just about every episode! Now that's what I call must-see TV!

This of course gets into a more general issue as well, that I've meaning to mention here: What the fuck is up with the American populace suddenly turning smarter all of a sudden? I mean, just take the two most popular new shows of last year, Desperate Housewives and Lost, which by all rights should've never been allowed on the air in the first place - both of these shows are way too smart, way too dark, to ever have a chance of being a weekly broadcast-television show, or at least is what I would've told you a year ago at this point. But here it is, a year later, and both shows have turned out to be hugely popular with tens of millions of Americans - the same people who two years ago seemingly couldn't get enough of The Bachelor, The Apprentice, and other concrete examples that the American Empire is in the middle of its decline.

What happened? Why are all these people who were acting like complete morons just a couple of years ago now suddenly embracing intelligent, subversive creative projects? And much more importantly, does this bode well for politics in this country as well? Is the American public finally waking up from the nightmare which is the Bush Years? Now that thinking for yourself and questioning authority are suddenly the hot new trends again, will this be applied to other things besides which television shows the public chooses to watch? I don't know...but it's awfully encouraging news to say the least, in my opinion.

--Regarding my entry on terrorism and the Marshall Plan, reader R.K. of California had an interesting thought... "Actually, General Marshall was not the first military official in history to come up with the idea of rebuilding a conquered country, in order to quell the rebellious nature of its conquered population. This was a regular practice of the Roman Empire as well, after adding a new city or region to their expanding territory. It was so popular, in fact, that many 'conquered' city-states would actually volunteer to join the Empire instead of fighting, because there were so many positive benefits to being a member of the Empire." Good point, R!

--Regarding my entry about companies pitching me these days... In all fairness, I wanted to mention that Paul from Meetro wrote back the day after that entry went live, to let me know that they were simply super-busy these days and hadn't meant to ignore my questions. (I should also mention in all fairness that Paul is a longtime reader of my journal, not just someone who stopped by one day in an attempt to get some fast publicity.)

In all fairness to me, though, I unfortunately have no good news to actually report about Meetro - they now have a proprietary desktop version to complement their proprietary laptop version, but all the rest of us are still shit out of luck as far as using the service. (And this doesn't even count all the people who want to check in on a friend's computer that doesn't have the proprietary software, all the people at internet cafes, all the people at libraries, all the people at school computer labs,etc). I have urged Meetro to create a simple HTML version of their service at their website, where people without the proprietary software could at least log in, manually file their location, look around for other members who happen to be in that location, etc. In fact, this is the one single thing about Meetro that baffles me the most - after inventing all this incredibly cool software for social networking, after spending all this time creating their own proprietary software to run it, I simply can't understand why they don't have a simple sign-in page at their actual website, which is something even an amateur programmer like me could sit down and create in a matter of days. And like I said in my email to Paul, I really want to be a fan of Meetro, and of course would love to see the social-networking race actually won by a company based here in Chicago (which just makes so much cosmic sense when it comes to social-networking - the traditional "Hub of America" being the home of the most popular social-networking service in America). But it's simply impossible for me to give a ringing endorsement to any company, when that company locks me out of the process of actually using their product.

So how about it, Meetro? Will we finally see a web-based interface from you guys in the next six months? Enquiring minds want to know!

--I ran across a photo the other day in one of the Flickr groups I belong to, which inspired the following first paragraph of a snarky postmodern relationship story:

"She had decided to recreate 'The Last Supper' on her digital camera, but featuring all women as some sort of hazy feminist statement. And then she decided to feature herself in all the roles, cobbled together in Photoshop, officially as a 'comment' on society but secretly because she was the most intense narcissist I had ever met. Oh, and for some reason she decided to pose nude for all the self-portraits as well. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my ex-girlfriend."

Feel free to finish that story if you want.

--I heard back from Brandy Agerbeck this week, the professional 'mind-map illustrator' I met at the Gaper's Block blogger event that I wrote about, and have two slight corrections to run about that entry: 1) There are actually only 200 fellow professional mind-map illustrators in the world (that Brandy knows of, anyway), not 200 just in the San Francisco/Bay area; and 2) she's actually only received one email over the years from a dental fetishist, as a result of her site's URL (loosetooth.com). But still, man, the fact that you got even one...

--Regarding my entry about the Bush Cabal and how it can be compared to Frank McCourt's book Angela's Ashes, I received this wonderful comment from A.G. in Estonia:

"Your blog today made me think about the changing state of national identity. How wonderful it would be, 50 years from now, if Baghdad was a world center for poetry, the arts, filosophical [sic] thought? I have never thought about such things before, but your blog today made me have this dream for the first time. Thank you for letting me have this dream."

You're welcome, A! I think that's a wonderful dream too!

--Regarding my entry about last week's Bookslut.com event, the complimentary emails just keep rolling and rolling in; man, I really seem to have tapped some kind of "Yeah, I wish more literary events were that fun too" vein, which I always thought existed but didn't realize was such a powerful wish among so many people. Well, fuck, you gotta get out to their August event, man! And hey, if you don't live in Chicago, why aren't you throwing these types of events yourself, wherever it is that you do live? It's really not that difficult to organize a live literary event - most authors, frankly, are so desperate for any kind of attention they can get, that they will happily agree to show up and read at just about anything - and especially if they're a local author.

Unfortunately, that entry has also inspired three or four literary organizers (and counting) to add me to their event mailing lists without my permission. And so I've had to say to them what I will say to all of you now as well, which is: DON'T FUCKING ADD ME TO MAILING LISTS WITHOUT GETTING MY PERMISSION FIRST, YOU GODDAMN CLUELESS ASSHOLES. I don't care who the fuck you are, or what the fuck you have to say - if you add me to a mailing list without my permission, I will not only ban your email address from coming through, I will report you for spam abuse and possible federal prosecution. I cannot emphasize this enough, so once again let me please be as clear as I possibly can: FUCK YOU.

--A couple of Critical Mass people have written in the last couple of weeks, wanting to know what I have against Critical Mass. Okay, so I'll tell you. As much as I admire CM for what they stand for, and as much as a fellow bicyclist I appreciate them being out there and being an advocate for me, I absolutely cannot support the "eye for an eye" attitude that many of their members espouse. That is - "Every day these car owners refuse to respect the rights of us bicyclists while we're out there on the streets with them; so once a month we gather together, to throw that disrespect right back in their face."

No matter how noble the cause, I believe it to not only be morally wrong but also dangerous to justify one's actions in such a way - i.e. "All we're doing is giving a little payback to all those people who regularly fuck us over." This is the same exact justification used by a lot of liberal poets of color to exclude white males from their poetry events, which is the main thing that led me to quitting the poetry scene four years ago; and this is also the same justification used by abortion-clinic bombers, and I just can't imagine too many CM members supporting the bombing of abortion clinics.

Retribution is never a morally-sound justification for one's actions - whether you're conservative or liberal, rich or poor, from an industrialized nation or a third-world one, involved with business or involved with the arts. Or as my mom used to put it to me when I was a kid - "Jason, don't sink to their level. It's not right."

--A couple of astute readers have dropped me lines over the last couple of weeks, asking if I was aware of some dude here in Chicago who keeps claiming on his blog that he's "virtually stalking" me. Yes, I am aware of him! That's my friend Mars Sanford, in fact, who longtime readers will remember actually commissioned a screenplay from me a couple of years ago, and believe it or not actually made a movie out of it. (It's called Sick, a half-comedy half-drama relationship story; I'm not sure if it's still up, but you used to be able to see stills from it and buy the DVD from their production company's website.)

And what's more, I completely understand what he's talking about there when he talks about me, because I frankly get that way about other people myself all the time too. For example (a really good example, actually), I would consider myself a legitimate personal friend of San Francisco author Michelle Tea, and over the years she and I have had numerous intimate, late-night conversations about things one would only talk about with a friend, not simply with a fan or reader. But yet there's a part of me that will always be in goofy fanboy awe of Michelle as well, and always in amazement at the way she can capture moments of just pure, unadulterated magic in her writing, in a way that I think not a lot of others in literary history have been able to do. And so I have this strange back-and-forth opinion about her - partly I consider her just a crazy fun drinking buddy, but partly I consider herself one of the most important writers of our generation, and these two halves of my opinion will frankly probably never be able to be reconciled. And so if friends of mine want to have a dual unreconciled opinion about me, I'm not going to complain - and especially considering that most of my friends in Chicago think I've completely lost my fucking mind this year, what with the whole 'quitting writing' thing and the 'I believe I can raise $200,000 to open a new arts center' business.

--And finally, ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to present The Greatest Fan Letter I Have Ever Received (from someone who specifically requested beforehand to remain anonymous, on top of everything else):

"Pettus, you are on top of your game these days. I have to think back a long time to remember as many great entries from you in a row as you've been spitting out this summer. As one random reader in the wilderness, let me thank you on behalf of all your readers for switching over to Movable Type this year. In your words, it's about fuckin' time."

Now that, my friend, is how you write a goddamn fan letter.