Catalan Non-Independence + Punishing Dissent in the NFL and the Death of Broadcast TV

There will be no independence for Catalonia this go-round. Carles Puigdemont's obfuscating statement in the Catalan parliament yesterday at least makes that clear (see "In Catalonia, a Declaration of Independence From Spain (Sort of)" by Raphael Minder and Patrick Kingsley):

“I assume the mandate of the people for Catalonia to become an independent state in the shape of a republic,” Mr. Puigdemont said, before adding, seconds later, that he and his government would “ask Parliament to suspend the effects of the declaration of independence so that in the coming weeks we can undertake a dialogue.”

Momentum for independence has been lost. Support on the street will evaporate. Madrid will not likely make the same mistake twice and crack down hard again.

Yes, Puigdemont was working with a fractious coalition. But in the end I would guess that it was the corporations moving their headquarters out of Catalonia that caused right-wing pro-independence lawmakers to think twice. Chalk up another win for neoliberalism.

Talk about an about-face. NFL owners who linked arms in solidarity with players on the field three weekends ago are now backing Trump's call to punish players who take a knee or protest in any fashion during the national anthem. Ken Belson summarizes in "Goodell and N.F.L. Owners Break From Players on Anthem Kneeling Fight":

By appearances anyway, the N.F.L. was one big family two weeks ago. After President Trump urged owners to fire players who did not stand for the national anthem, everyone from Commissioner Roger Goodell to the 32 team owners to the players and coaches locked arms, in many cases literally, in defiance and unity.

That unanimity has all but vanished. As the president continues to harangue the league over the anthem, and a number of fans across the country express displeasure with the handful of players who continue to kneel during the anthem, a growing pool of owners is trying to defuse the politically charged issue, even if it means confronting the players the owners previously sympathized with.

One of the most powerful owners in the league is now speaking openly about benching players who do not stand for the anthem, and Goodell, who said previously that players had a right to voice their opinions, is siding with the owners opposed to letting the players demonstrate. The owners plan to meet next week to establish what to do about the anthem gestures.

“Like many of our fans, we believe that everyone should stand for the national anthem,” Goodell said in a letter sent to owners on Tuesday.

He added that the league cared about the issues the players are trying to highlight, including social injustice and police brutality toward African-Americans. But he said that “the controversy over the anthem is a barrier to having honest conversations and making real progress on the underlying issues.” [!]

The owners' and the League's about-face is overtly political and has very little to do with money. Trends adversely impacting viewership don't have anything to do with patriotism. Broadcast television is dying. The NFL has been the beating heart of broadcast television for a long time. It is no wonder that its ratings are in decline.

There was a little retrospective piece last week, part of regular series that The New York Times runs on page two of its front page, about Truman calling on Americans to ration their consumption of meat and eggs to help fight hunger in war-ravaged Europe. It was noteworthy because it was the first televised presidential address. The year was 1944, and, according to Times, there were 10,000 sets in the United States.

Six years later at the outbreak of the Korean War there were 10 million black-&-white TV sets.

In 1968, at the time of the Tet Offensive, there were 100 million TV sets in the U.S., many of which were color.

A half-century later we are undergoing a huge shift in the electronic age as the internet withers broadcast television. This represents a body blow to the prevailing political order because control switches that exist for broadcast television don't exist on the internet.

What we are experiencing is an attempt to apply the same switches on the internet that exist in the legacy media.

NFL Ratings Drop & the End of the Unipolar World

UPDATE: Today (October 26) Ken Belson, Richard Sandomir and Rory Smith of The New York Times ponder the NFL ratings drop, tossing in the even worse drop in viewership of English Premier League soccer matches, in "TV Viewership Falls in N.F.L. and Premier League: A Blip, or Something Worse?"

The two most successful sports leagues in the world, bringing in billions of dollars in revenue, the biggest corporate sponsors and mammoth audiences every game day, are now sharing an altogether different experience: The National Football League and the English Premier League are seeing startling, double-digital declines in television viewership this season.

Viewership through the first seven weeks of the N.F.L. season is down by 12 percent in the United States, while the audiences for E.P.L. soccer matches this season, which began in August, are down nearly 20 percent in Britain.

All the trends that drove viewers away from other programs on broadcast television in recent years, including cord-cutting and DVRs, never punished the N.F.L. and the Premier League in the same way. Fans — lots and lots of them — did not seem willing to look away. 

They are now, in numbers that are alarming for the leagues, which have grown used to fans tuning in to their games in good times and bad, and for the networks, some of which have spent 10-figure sums for the rights to broadcast them. Viewership for N.F.L. games on CBS on Thursday nights, on NBC on Sunday nights and on ESPN on Monday nights is down by as much as 21 percent.

Everything -- from the presidential election season, to too many games being broadcast, to absence of Tom Brady to begin the season, to distracted viewers during the games -- is considered.

Sure, the presidential election year makes a difference. And we can't ignore the digitalization of our lives -- Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, smartphones, Tinder, Google, on and on. But I think the main impetus to go cold turkey from the national opiate is the loss of competitiveness in the first month, month and a half, of the season. This synced with the shift in consciousness already underway -- the loss in faith in the mainstream; the digitalization of our attention span -- to deliver up the double-digit ratings drop.

Will the NFL rebound? It could. But, as I argue below, since U.S. global hegemony and the potency of the NFL opiate are linked, it probably won't.

****

The seventh Sunday of the National Football League's 2016 season concluded with an overtime defensive struggle between the Seahawks and Cardinals. The game ended in a rare tie, 6-6.

This kind of nailbiter is more rare now than in recent years past. Most of the games I have seen this season have been deplorable. Before last night, I can think of only a few good games all year (though with Week 6's Thursday Night match-up between the Broncos and the Chargers, it appears a shift back to competitiveness is underway).

This is unusual, and worthy of remark. I came across this opening line from a story on the NFL's latest domestic violence snafu, "N.F.L. Shows It Doesn’t Really Care About Domestic Violence," written by the excellent reporter Juliet Macur: "Television ratings for the N.F.L. are down 11 percent this season, and league officials have been grasping for possible explanations."

If anything, excellent competition has been the norm in the National Football League for more than a decade. Such was not always the case. In the 1970s and 1980s blow-outs were common. The obvious explanation for the significant ratings drop this year (one that doesn't include Kaepernick protesting white supremacy by taking a knee during the national anthem) is that the games have been lousy.

But, as I said, with Week 6, things seem to have snapped back to the competitiveness we have grown accustomed to, with exciting, close games like the Rams and the Lions, the Falcons and the Seahawks, and the Colts and the Texans.

The NFL is the premiere entertainment product in the United States. Hollywood is not what it used to be. Old media is giving way to the ubiquitous internet, and there is a scramble among corporate giants to gobble up as much content as possible.

The NFL remains the one true opiate of the masses. For that opiate to lose its potency at a time of political  tumult (Trump, Black Lives Matter, New Cold War) is auspicious.

What this portends -- and here I am being optimistic -- is some form of realignment. The U.S. unipolar world is over. (See Dilip Hiro's magisterial "American Power at the Crossroads: A Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action.") The power elite lining up behind Hillary think that through confrontation the U.S. can maintain its monolithic status. This is clearly delusional. Most voters in the Western core, while possibly not able to explain this, nonetheless feel it in their bones. For the United States, based on the voluble new McCarthyism of Hillary and  the Democratic Party, it appears to be either catastrophic direct conflict with Russia or an embarrassing about-face.

A third way would simply be the maintenance of the status quo where the U.S. unipolar world exists as a sort of kabuki, a fiction whereby American destroyers continue to travel in waters claimed by the Dragon in the South China Sea and the CIA continues to collude with Al Qaeda in the destruction of states, blowback be damned.

But the status quo cannot be maintained. That is what we are living through right now.  That is our present tense.

Hillary chose to reboot McCarthyism to help her rancid old carcass across the finish line; it was either that or address directly the content of the WikiLeaks Podesta emails.

She is in a box now. She is going to have to retreat or escalate. And she is going to have to act with very little popular support.

Dilip Hiro thinks that U.S. global leadership will be unchallenged for decades to come. But this assumes that Europe doesn't continue to disintegrate, which should proceed rapidly in the next four years, particularly given the situation unfolding in Mosul. It also assumes stability in the American electorate. Hillary is about to ascend to the throne with the duopoly crumbling beneath her. No one can foresee how she will able to govern.

The U.S. needs it televisual opiate now more than ever, and early indications are it is not going to be there. Let the brave new world be born!

Hippies vs. Punks: Television's Marquee Moon (1977)

The problem with this time of year, spring, is that it is actually colder in my 100-plus-year-old apartment building than during the winter. With the return of the sun and the increase in air temperature, the landlord ratchets down the furnace in preparation for a complete boiler shutdown in May.

The radiator now fires up briefly, if at all, for about a half hour around seven a.m. For someone used to waking up at four a.m., getting out of bed only to sit huddled in a fleece and stocking cap in front of a laptop becomes a lousy choice. Combined with a cascading workload at my job, I have basically abandoned this page the last week. I have chosen instead to stay in bed until the last possible moment. Then I bathe, dress and leave the apartment for work downtown.

It was on such morning, Wednesday it was, that dazed and confused I stumbled into my neighborhood Starbucks to get a "shot in the dark." In front of me in the line to the register was a loquacious Metro bus driver. She was talking to any- and everyone in the shop. I think her topic was homelessness because there were several people sleeping bundled in blankets on the sidewalk outside. Her language was somewhat oblique. She was talking at one remove about how it takes time for people to get to know you; that you need to live in a place for a while before trust develops; but things are always changing so it is a balance.

By this time the bus driver had moved to the other side of the espresso machine and was talking to a young guy who was eating breakfast at a window counter seat. I was at the cash register waiting for my "shot in the dark." Suddenly I noticed a song that had been playing on the sound system. I noticed it because I knew it but in my dazed and confused cold spring morning state couldn't place it.

As my brain searched for the artist, it struck me that whoever it was, it was certainly au courant, tasteful, incisive guitar music. I thought maybe a Wilco release with Nels Cline on lead guitar, or Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks. Then it dawned on me. Of course, It was Television!

What had happened is I had wandered into the Starbucks during the long Tom Verlaine guitar solo that consumes the second half of the 11-minute "Marquee Moon."

Last October I wrote about Televison's second album, Adventure (1978); about how I heard "See No Evil" playing on the PA in my neighborhood supermarket and how it struck me as completely in tune with whatever Zeitgeist we are currently living through.

Here it is happening again. A message is obviously being relayed. But what is it?

Marquee Moon (1977), Television's first album, from which "Marquee Moon" is the first single, was recorded in September 1976, a critical time for UK Punk. Television had been around since 1974. The band was the anchor of the CBGBs scene. But like Quicksilver Messenger Service, the San Francisco Sound Hippie band who Verlaine admired, Television waited several years to sign a recording contract. The band had worked with Brian Eno, but Verlaine did not like the sound that resulted. He held out until he could produce, which Elektra allowed him to do.

Marquee Moon was a hit in the UK and elsewhere but not in the United States, where it failed to chart. Yet here it is ambient 40 years later, and not as a golden lite rock oldie like Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (1977) of the same period.

I think Television's Marquee Moon is a vindication of the Hippies vs. Punks hypothesis. Something happened in the United States and the rest of the West in the years from 1974-1975 to 1979. Social democracy was scrapped in favor of something new, a new paradigm, and that turned out to be what we now call neoliberalism. We are still in its thrall after many decades. If you want to hear what the essence of that is, where it gets its power, listen to Marquee Moon.

Christgau described Television as champions of a "single-minded Utopian individualism." When I was doing my week-long immersion in Adventure last fall, I wandered into a trendy cafe frequented by the young digerati and I realized that this is who Television is. That is why Marquee Moon sounds so fresh. "Single-minded Utopian individualism" has been translated into a cyber infinity where the digital and the spiritual are indistinguishable.

Hippies vs. Punks: Television's Adventure (1978)

The wonders of discovery never cease. I was unfamiliar with Television's second album, Adventure (1978), until recently. I checked it out from my public library and have been immersed in it all week; a true immersion, which involves listening morning, noon and night.

One of the reasons that I was unaware of Adventure is undoubtedly due to the long shadow that the band's debut, Marquee Moon (1977), casts. Marquee Moon -- released February 1977, the same month as the first UK Punk full-length, The Damned's Damned Damned Damned -- is one of the greatest records of all time. It sounds as fresh and incisive today as ever. 

Not too long ago I was shopping at my neighborhood supermarket when "See No Evil" began to play on the store's PA. It seemed odd at first that a track from one of the seminal Punk albums should be playing as background music at a supermarket chain. But after a moment or two I realized that "See No Evil" sounded completely appropriate to our present social milieu, whatever name it may go by.

Adventure was the follow-up to Marquee Moon. And while it was favorably reviewed by Robert Christgau, who awarded it an A-minus, it didn't fare nearly as well on the charts as Marquee Moon.

Then Television broke up the same year as Adventure was released. The break-up was due to a combination of drugs and the clashing egos of the band's two guitarists, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, both of whom would go on to record solo album's for Elektra. 

Television's break-up combined with the super-historicity of Marquee Moon has to be the reason why Adventure is not more broadly acknowledged as an excellent album and a vital document. The guitar playing is luminescent, sounding at times like Richard Thompson's work from the same period, or Nels Cline's stuff for present-day Wilco, and the song writing is revelatory. But there is a definite spaciness and ethereal vibe to the record. There seems to be a synthesizer anesthetizing in the background on many tracks. Adventure isn't as sharp or exuberant as Marquee Moon. But if one plays the record repeatedly, a complex coherence emerges.

An epiphany I experienced this week while listening to Adventure is that it is an album that defines our Present Age. Gone is any aspiration for grand transformation, total rapture or transcendence. We've settled for a digitized life of individual dreams. The energy of our technocratic elite is intellectual and oblique, much like Tom Verlaine's lyrics.

Adventure was released the same month that Scorsese's The Last Waltz (which was shot at Winterland Ballroom) appeared in movie theaters, three months after the Sex Pistols disintegrated (at Winterland Ballroom). Nineteen-seventy-eight, a year when personal computers start to find their way into homes, is really the dividing line between our Present Age and what goes before. We have been living out 1978 in one form or another for the last 35-some-odd years, a "monochrone." Adventure should be studied as an ur-document for our time.

Robert Christgau wrote a prescient review of Television in June 1978 called "Television Principles" where he notes that 

Not that knowing the words is knowing what they mean--as Verlaine himself puts it in his ambivalent paean to rationality "Prove It "many of them are "too 'too too'/to put a finger on." His writing is genuinely idiosyncratic and spiritual, and although he's more humorous and dreamy on the new record, he stated his credo right after that classic riff at the beginning of Marquee Moon: "What I want/I want NOW/and it's a whole lot more/ than 'anyhow.' " 

Verlaine's needs and visions are deep-seated and obsessively personal; I wonder if even he knows what "Marquee Moon" is about any more. He's such a bourgeois individualist he even changed his credo to "and it's a whole lot more/than Chairman Mao" one time Sunday night, and I say good for him, because I believe he's ready to risk all in his quest. The line that haunts me from the new album--"I love disaster and I love what comes after"--could be a revolutionary's motto as easily as a mystic's. In this denial of limits, asserted too in the musical release they aim for, Television is representative of nothing. Almost every great rock band and a lot of the most successful bad ones culminate some general social tendency, be it the Ramones' pop economy or Kansas's greedy middle-American pseudo-seriousness or Steely Dan's expert programmability or Kiss's life-sized caricature. But while it's possible to imagine a late-'60s revival in which Television would spawn countless imitators, at the moment their single-minded Utopian individualism sets them apart. And it is just that that makes them seem so precious.

This is of course who we are today, or at least what the neoliberal paradigm screwed down on top of us over the last four decades would have us believe: a "single-minded Utopian individualism" that is inflating to enormous proportions the gap between the haves and have-nots; it is a post-familial world of mass extinction where we find ourselves alone in a cyber infinity. This is the dream's dream. The digital is indistinguishable from the spiritual.

Hippies vs. Punks: "Little Johnny Jewel"

This page has done precious little exploration of the Hippie-era New York City scene that actually birthed Punk. So far we have spent more time on London in 1976 and 1977, and San Francisco in 1978 than on the originary lebensruam of Manhattan's "Blank Generation."

Present at the creation is Television. This morning on my way down to the train "Little Johnny Jewel" shuffled into rotation on my iPod. What a song! First recorded as a single in 1975, "Little Johnny Jewel, Part One" and "Little Johnny Jewel, Part Two" sound as if they were just released. Lester Bangs compared Tom Verlaine's guitar playing to psychedelic pioneer Quicksilver Messenger Service lead John Cipollina. You can definitely hear it here.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #26

This letter, number 26 from a collection of letters written the first two years I lived in New York City, tells the story of the evening before Thanksgiving 1989 (the holiday described in number 23).  After posting these letters I've come to think that an appropriate label for them might be "The Colt 45 Chronicle," since the malt liquor is usually what I ended up writing about.

This epistle is to my friends Greg and Tresca back in the Bay Area. I must say the final paragraph -- coming home at night after work to an empty apartment and seeing my wife's red comb on the counter next to a sink full of dirty dishes -- is a perfect image of my marriage at the time.

Autumn 1989

Just stuck my head out the 30-degree window and took a few good puffs on a Cuban which was old and crumbling but once I got it lit and slobbered on a bit the crumbliness disappeared. The weather has been very cold the last two weeks; shit, we were even treated to several inches of snow on the eve of Thanksgiving; the papers said it was the first white Thanksgiving in 51 years, which was all right by me. Ashley and my buddy's wife were baking pies in the kitchen, and my buddy and I were in the living room drinking beers and smoking a joint and listening to a Leadbelly album. We, my Buddy and I, had gone down to Harlem earlier in the evening, had taken the 1 train down, to a wholesale beer warehouse and purchased a case of Harp specifically for the Thursday holiday. It turned out to be not such a great deal. We paid $23, which breaks down to a little under $6 a six pack. For New York, this is not bad, but no great bargain. Anyway, it was all worthwhile because it felt good hauling that case over my shoulder back home on the subway. When we got home and for the ladies already at work with flour sprinkles and melting butter we couldn't help but bust into the Harp, even if it was only Thanksgiving eve. The problem came at 10 o'clock when we realized that the case was already half gone. The wives told us that this wouldn't do, and that we must trudge back out and get some more beers and possibly a bottle of wine or two for tomorrow's turkey feast. We protested. We were happy and warm and stoned and it was damn cold out there. But they persisted. We resisted some more but then acquiesced and slung on coats.

When we got outside it was cold -- very cold -- but the air was moist, not dry and cutting. On the top of the hood of a Ford Ltd something stood thin, white and dirty. Right then something landed on the bridge of my nose. And just like that I figured out what was happening. -- Nothing hits your nose like that, not rain, not hail, not beer foam or pigeon feathers. -- It was snow!

It was snowing, and the snow was sticking. The black top of Haven Avenue was turning gray as the flakes stacked on each other. Gary and I were tickled pink. It was the first snow of the year -- the first snow after another grievous summer of subway sweat and air-conditioned beermares -- and we were out in it. We giggled up to a bodega on Broadway and bought two six-packs of Colt 45 talls and a bag of potato chips. The problem here was that at this bodega they didn't put price tags on anything; sometimes you'd go in and get it cheap, other times they'd tack on a dollar here and a dollar there. This time they added a few dollars. I gave the guy $20 and he gave me back $6 and change. I  knew something was up. I asked him about it. He had a shitty look on his face, a combination of fear, hate and boredom. He repeated the total. I asked how much for the Colt. He said a buck a can. Bullshit, I thought; but fuck it, it's only money, which must've been more important to him since he was taking the time to fuck me in the ass. I had known what I was getting myself into; it had happened to me before at this bodega; in fact, it had happened to me there one too many times. So I had stopped shopping there. But I'd started going again, after work, because it was close to where the subway spit me out, and I could get quarts of Colt for $1.50 -- a good price in Manhattan. Gary and I turned the other cheek and stepped out the doorway. We turned the corner and a group of Puerto Rican kids stood huddled on the sidewalk. As we passed, they radiated powerful prickles of hatred. And I radiated 'em right back.

I guess nobody likes whitey, even if the snow is falling for the first time. Even more troublesome than that realization was the realization that both times Gary and I had gone to get beer we'd ended up with less than what we could feel truly thankful for. I thought about that for a second or two as we walked home, and about stuff like whether the pilgrims drank beer with the Indians, or whether it was supposed to have snowed on that original Thursday, but nothing amounted to much. I went back to appreciating the fact that it was the first snow of the year. I tilted my head back and took a good pull at the snow flakes; they were falling through a street lamp's yellow light.

Anyway, enough of that. How's everything going folks? Tresca, thanks for writing; and Greg, I could feel your presence. I hope to see you guys in the not-too-distant future, maybe late spring. I've got to save some money, and I haven't been very good at that. I wanna fly out to Oregon and buy a car for cheap and spend some tine in Portland and Seattle. Anyway, it's pretty much a pipe dream at this point. I might be stuck here for several 49er seasons to come, which would be a crying shame. I'm working at a law firm on Wall Street; I'm a proofreader; they take my soul from me bit by bit; I hope I can make it. But the money's not bad, and I can work a lot of overtime. The subways are a bitch, but that goes without saying. Ashley said I had to reduce my drinking or she'd take a hike. I've cut back quite a bit; no more late night gin shots or Jack Daniels lunches. Physically, I feel a helluva lot better; but mentally, I think I'm operating at half capacity. The problem with most people is that they're so full of fear that they don't ever want to leave the cave. Taking a couple shots of whiskey is too risky for them. They don't know what they'll do once they're drunk or how they'll feel. So they stay in their crab cave huddled next to a small fire and they roast marshmallows on rabbit ears and whistle out into the dark. Fear. It eats people up from the inside and makes 'em go home and eat a lot and watch TV. Everybody thinks they're going to live forever -- that's the problem. And I think it's TV's fault. Nobody pukes and dies and is willing to leave it at that. There's always a tomorrow and a new music video to take a picture of a Lean Cuisine body. There's always that. I don't know if I'm making myself clear -- about television and fear I mean -- but it seems to me that it is an important and primal issue, namely, desire getting put out of the body, out of the trunk, and stuffed into the eyes (and brain), with no way of getting back into trunk. All we can do is think about it and watch some more, watch some more and eat some more.

I came home tonight. I walked in the door and turned left. The light was on in the kitchen, but Ashley wasn't home. I saw was her red comb sitting on the counter next to a sink full of dirty dishes. It hit me hard. I don't know why. A comb shouldn't be there -- in the same picture with a sink full of dirty dishes.

"Hanging on the Telephone"

Though never a big Blondie fan (they were huge my freshman and sophomore years of high school, 1978-1980), they did come out of the same CBGB's scene that birthed Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell and the Ramones.

I heard "Hanging on the Telephone" the other day. And believe it or not for a moment I thought it was Kathleen Hanna. A lot of things get buried in the past.

NFL Season 2012

Dave Zirin has a good blog post today about the irredeemable aspects of the NFL in light of what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic injustice." Zirin is particularly enlightening on the failure of the League's Rooney Rule:

Finally, there is the issue most closely tied to Dr. King's legacy: the "dream" of living in a colorblind world where people are judged by the content of their character. To say that the NFL's deeply conservative all-white ownership doesn't exercise racial prejudice is like saying Florida doesn't suffer from sunshine. This past off-season, the league had eight head coaching positions to fill. All eight were filled by white hires. Despite the NFL's much-celebrated Rooney Rule, which requires the interviewing of “minority head coaching candidates”, the league is down to four head coaches of color including Latino Ron Rivera. That means only 9% of coaches are African American in a league where 70% of players are African American: the greatest disparity in a decade.

The 2012 NFL regular season opened September 5 with the Cowboys beating the Giants in the Meadowlands. From that point forward until last night when Baltimore beat New England in the AFC Championship Game I calculate that I watched approximately 219 hours of televised NFL action, or over nine days (which will be nine-and-a-half days after the Super Bowl). For the most part all I use my 13-inch TV for anymore is to watch the NFL. I saw almost every snap of every Seahawks game. But the pitiful part of the story is that it could have been worse. I don't have cable. So I didn't have access, unless I wanted to go to a bar, to Monday Night or Thursday Night Football. Minus the two Seahawks games this season played on those nights, and available on broadcast TV to me as a viewer in the home market, this would have added an additional 96 hours, or four more days in front of the idiot box.

What kind of idolatry is this? We spend two weeks of solid worship from the end of summer to the beginning of winter soaking up images of athletes moving quickly in colorful uniforms; images sandwiched between images of smart phones and fried chicken and Mercedes. Do we feel better? I don't know. Sometimes I do. But a lot of the time I feel stressed-out. Mostly I am passive: reclining on my mattress on the floor, a pillow under my head; maybe reading a TomDispatch article I've printed off the web; a solitary figure; a bachelor, alone, staying true to boyhood ghosts.