24 Dec

Christmas Eve in the Southern Hemisphere is, as you might expect, opposite that of the Northern Hemisphere--at lest weather-wise. Long days push blooms from various trees and shrubs, the summer solstice having just passed. Where in the Kansas evergreens are almost the only living plant to see, in New Zealand the landscape is alive with pohutukawa and calla lily. Barbecues float aloft scents of sausage and shrimp while the beach is crawling with great, lounging unwashed.

Funny, Jamie thinks, that so many of the Northern Hemisphere traditions are still held on to in the South Pacific. Take house lights for example. The multi-coloured, flashing spots bordering roof rims and window panes that, in Kansas anyway, are a warm sight in the long, cold nights, are out of place in a country where it's light until 10:00 and sees the sun rise at 5:00. Who besides late night revellers even lays eyes upon them? House lights are just one example of Christmas's place as a winter festival. On the darkest days of winter (for it falls very near the solstice), societies need a celebration to lift their spirits and bring each other physically and mentally closer together. A sort of half way point where a great deal of bother is made over heavy foods, spiced wine, and lots and lots of light. Christmas has surprisingly little to do with Christian tradition. Rather, it has a great deal vested in human bonding.

So why cling to roasts and layered casseroles in a region where it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit on a regular basis? For those in the North, imagine sitting down to baked ham, turkey, hot-cross buns, fruitcake, biscuits, chocolates, and heady red wine in the middle of July. Sorta makes you itch, doesn't it?

Slowly, however, it seems subsequent generations are shuffling off the coils of tradition and setting into motion an altered, more appropriate ceremony. Tradition is rooted in necessity; lose the necessity, and tradition is set afloat. How long it can keep its head above water is anybody's guess.

21 Dec--Sport

One of the quirky beauties of living in a nation with the half the population of New York City is reading the sports page. Where national sports news in America is as predictable as reality TV, the sports section of the New Zealand Herald reads like the script of a David Lynch movie. The moment one believes one understands it, there suddenly appears on page 2 in-depth commentary on water polo. Yet unlike Twin Peaks, the diversion is refreshing, if not delightful. Jamie, never a fan of reading about sport, devours the spots page. He reads it as though he were an anthropologist poring over brittle texts depicting rituals of ancient civilizations--how familiar they are as a topic, but so foreign as a serious interest.


New Zealanders report on rugby and cricket with the same voracity as Americans report on gridiron and baseball. This us understandable as the former, although darkly understood in the States, are popular internationally. However, on the same page one may find articles on cross-country adventure/endurance racing, bicycling (both track racing and the Tour of Southland--New Zealand's answer to the Tour de France), netball, sailing, and numerous foot races (triathalons, mountain runs, etc). For Jamie, reading about sport has never been so enlightening.

20 Dec--On Revenge

What is revenge? As an emotion it can overshadow everything: fear, rejection, love--all are eclipsed. Revenge sets the mind alight, and all else is consumed. But why do we feel it at all?

Did it once serve a purpose? Was it beneficial? Life abhors wasted energy, and if there is one thing revenge consumes, it's energy. Leading to what? Retaliation. A specific action. Besides abhorring energy, life also tends toward homeostasis, the evenness of things. Revenge is retaliation against dissenters among the group. Revenge drives the body to act, to retaliate against the dissension. Retaliation leads to less dissension, which leads to a calmer group--homeostasis of small societies.

It had a purpose, once. These days it's all but wasted effort. Personal revenge does little more than quench the raw emotion. The greater societal benefits are lost as the boundaries of the proverbial group expand, growing ever wider until revenge itself becomes the norm, and we retaliate only by staying calm.

So can revenge in contemporary societies still be realized? Well, access to the internet helps.

19 Dec--Take this, JF

There comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop leaning against the wall when using the urinal, and just pee standing up straight. Many months ago Jamie did just this and was surprised, to put it mildly, to see his sister's name scrawled into the wood. How is it, Jamie thinks, that even when she's a trillion miles away, Libby still manages to win.

15 Dec--On Home

Jamie once referred to home as "what we sacrifice." It made sense at the time--he spent 24 years growing up in Wichita, his family always near. Then one year everyone left. One sister went to Newton, one to Australia (then Canada); one brother moved to California, the other to New Zealand with his parents. Jamie flew to Ireland. And there, in a land of poets, of people so rooted to a place that generations of New Yorkers still call it the homeland, Jamie reflected on what it meant to go home.

There are the obvious cliches: a hung hat, the heart; a place you go where they can't turn you away. There are the traditionalists who, like the Irish or the pagans of ancient Rome, are tied to a region as large as a continent or as particular as one's own neighbourhood. Yet there are only two constants when referring to "home": 1. You know when you are there, and 2. You will, eventually, leave.

The first point is rather vague. It's like determining art from not art. One might describe home as a "sense of belonging," but elaborate--what is a sense of belonging? How does one know when one belongs? And then how does one quantify a sense of this? Furthermore, that sensation is different depending on to whom you're talking. A Congolese refugee may not have the same attitudes toward home as a young girl who suffered abuse there. In both of these cases the individuals were forced to sacrifice their homes--the former being physically removed, and the latter stripped of home's general warmth and comfort before she had a chance to experience it.

But we all leave home--everyone, everywhere--eventually. Whether by force or by choice, we will leave it. Home becomes a sacrifice we share, individually if not collectively. It could be likened to the womb: where we are protected; where we are important. Returning home, be it a physical structure or among a group, is in some way returning to a manifestation of maternal care: like when you were six years old and were scared of the dark, you ran to mother--your first home, your only home.

15 Dec

It has been one week since Jamie's father came to visit. Jamie hopes he is doing well, and he wishes his little brother, Peter, a very happy birthday.

12 Dec

Some days you have life cornered. You're eating lunch with friends on a sunny afternoon, sipping beer and watching the world shuffle about. Things are simple. Everything makes sense.

Then a man walks accross the street pushing a pram carrying a dwarf with a ghetto blaster on his lap, and life gives you a reality wedgie--stuff's happening. Wake up.

11 Dec--FAQs

Taken out of context, Frequently Asked Questions can be quite amusing. Jamie spent a lazy afternoon gathering a few.

• What's an agent?



• Is tic-tac-toe solved?



• Why are so few games released for acorns?



• What's this Information Theory thing?



• How many pictures will fit in my memory?



• What should I worry about when buying from a lowest-cost online dealer?



• Where can I get beer?



• What's all this about Cloves?



• What is a troll?



• How and with what do I polish leather?



• How can I protect my ideas?



• I'm new, what should I do now?

7 Dec--007

That James Bond is one lucky fellow.

6 Dec--On bones

They shine at 35, a veritable summer solstice of bone mass. After which point they decline, wither into dusk and the impending winter. Bones are not built to last. And it doesn't help that the very DNA that creates them also breaks them down. Unlike Rilke's angels who "serenely disdain to annihilate us," a chemical in our DNA decimates without hesitation. Year after year, we wear the scars (wrinkles, poor eyesight) as our body slowly eats itself. Without this chemical, however, could bones forever support us?

A forensic anthropologist can identify your age, sex, and (sometimes) your race just by observing signature bones. American Indians carry a unique gene that produces an extra ridge on the tongue-side of some of their teeth; hip bones of adult women are wider and have a more pronounced curve around the ishio pubis. Osteoporosis, polio, bad diet: all can be gleaned from as little as a mandible. If our living faces are televisions broadcasting our interpretation of the world right now, then our bones are time capsules: calcified sponges of facts into which we encode messages--indicators of who we were and how we lived--for the future. Not quite as quick or Wellsian as sending yourself a decade-delayed email, but enough to say "I was an 18-year-old, American Indian woman"; "I survived another trepanning"; "I drank too much Coke." Bones mumble on to whomever listens until, patiently, they turn to stone; their voices reduced: eerie truths whispered among the clamour of flesh. They linger like picture frames sold on the side of the road: the painting gone, the skeleton appears naked and new, catching the light like teeth petrified and smiling.

4 Dec--On Imagination

One thing is for sure, it would make a good riddle--some stone-toothed whisper from the Sphinx; perhaps chanted in the Oracle's low tones--or a crumb of Zen wisdom dizzying in its circular logic. It makes us human and makes us anything.

In literary circles one finds it dressed up in the guise of Personal Narrative: the stories inside which we frame our existence. We imagine ourselves as forgiving, understanding, attractive. pathetic, thin, fat, tough, happy. We go further and weave a glistening web spun from spools of history, religion, and family. We say, "I am Scottish. We're from the highlands" even when home is America's Great Plains. In this case we are imagining our lives in the context of a whole, where the group in question is family as far down the tree as we can climb with certainty. Understandable when familial links are easily found. More difficult for those orphaned at birth, refugees--those for whom even the concept of home is wholly alien.

Everyone uses it but nobody uses it the same.
In his book The Culture of Make Believe, author Derrick Jensen provides a framework for the notion that Society is little more than a collective imagination, and that the current Western ideals of relationships, crime, and salary expectations are desperately reinforced by other elements of the same culture: television, movies, and print media. As participants in the body, we imagine ourselves fleshing out this skeleton. We emulate the actions of actors and aspire to hang on a model's arm. How we fit ourselves in, on the other hand, is unique to the individual. "Hate" and "love" are spoken freely in reference to a person whom we have never met, and probably never will--except in the context of personal imagination. You hate Julia Roberts. You love Penelope Cruz. You (probably) don't know either, but you can see both women's faces when you read their names. But what about Urmila Matondkar or Mallika Sherawat? As far as you're concerned, they don't exist; and as far as they're concerned, neither do you.


We need it to create our world, but the world would be there without it.
In any given day one can expect the existence of one or more of the following: puppy-shaped clouds, a first kiss, you stole the remote, rainbows, reindeer, Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies; you can bet somewhere there is some sex, or at least the thought of it. And then earth moves, I remembered the song she used to sing me to sleep, a dream involving cattle, flying pigs, queueing up for tickets, dragons in the kitchen, a hailstorm of heaven-sent scimitars, I'm sure she'll call, I'll never make it, I was there all along, you lied, you never meant it, what did I say?, what is it we were talking about?

Imagine a world without it--a good riddle.

3 Dec--The View from Here

Mana island, and murmurs of the South Island beyond.

30 Nov--If the Intranet is a party, Jamie just crashed it

It was supposed to be simple: bury a folder deep in the department's (the government department for whom Jamie contracts, but who must remain anonymous) portal to test a few web pages he built for another client. Sure, it was a little sneaky, and there was a slight echo of subversion ringing in Jamie's ears as he created the new folder (he liked it. It reminded him of any given day between the ages of 8 and 18).

At the last minute, however, he decided against it. Not that he was chickening out, he just realised he knew of a better, more secret, more subversive place to hide the files. So he deleted the folder he'd just made, and was surprised to see a confirmation message pop up. "Are you sure you want to delete this folder and all its contents?" It asked.

"Strange," Jamie thought. "I didn't put anything in the folder. Must be a standard message." And just as he lifted his index finger from the mouse, releasing the left-click and with it the "Yes" button, he caught a brief glimpse of the folder highlighted on the screen: RootDAV.

RootDAV is the agency's server; the Intranet; the Portal. It is the hub of all intra-office affairs. Home of phone numbers and funding procedures, profiles and application forms. And Jamie had just deleted it.

It was 4:45pm. Much of the IT staff had left for the day. He looked over his shoulder to check if anyone had seen what just happened. But since Jamie sat in front of a window, the gesture was no more than thoughtless reaction. He decided to try opening a few pages in the broswer. The error message that flashed before him was so unlike any he'd ever seen, it actually frightened him. This was not a "page not found," or "try opening this file again." Before him were the words, "This Server is not responding. Please contact the Webmaster for support." The word "Webmaster" was a hyperlink, and therein was some assurance. Jamie pointed his mouse to click the link but stopped.

"Shit. I'M the Webmaster."

It was now 4:48pm. Jamie received three successive emails: Can't download . . . can't log on . . . Intranet seems to be down.

4:49: the phone rings. Jamie quietly reassures the gentleman that everything is normal. "Just a routine fix. It'll be back up in no time."

"Who was that?" Liam asked, looking over the top of his monitor at Jamie.

"Oh, nobody. Hey, will you open the portal home page for me?" Jamie asked.

"Sure." There was a brief pause. " . . . wait . . . no. I can't."

"Damn." Jamie said.

"Um . . . what'd you do?" Liam asked slowly.

"Remember the Intranet?"

"What do you mean 'remember?'" Liam was more serious now.

"Well, I sorta deleted it."

"You deleted the server?"

"Shhh! For Christ's sake! Do you want people to find out?!" Immediately after he said it, he realised how ridiculous it was. But something inside him told Jamie to stay calm because something else inside him--and Liam--was trying to get out: panic. So both of them sat and looked at the error message for a few more minutes as if it was going to reveal some deeper message.

It didn't.

"James?"

"Yeah."

"You know HR processes everyone's salary on the portal?" Liam asked without moving.

"No kidding? That's dumb. Cause I just crashed it." Jamie replied honestly. "When do they do that?"

"Today."

"Oh. What time?"

"5pm." Liam answered.

it was 4:55. And then Liam and Jamie were struck with the same thought at the same time. But before they could go get drunk, the had to fix the server.

"Damnit. What's the quickest, dirtiest way to fix this?" Jamie was impatient. A quality he inherited from his mother.

"Well, I guess we could just reboot it, but there's no guarantee it will all be in order. Plus, the whole server will be down for 5 minutes while it restarts." Liam explained.

"Liam," Jamie said patiently, "the server is GONE! What's 5 minutes?"

"Oh yeah. Good point. Shall we?"

"Let's." It struck Jamie how nonchalont the two of them were behaving considering nobody in the organisation was going to get paid, and blame would fall on both of them. Liam and Jamie spent the next 5 minutes on Job Search websites. Jamie was just about to submit his resume when he saw Liam thrust his arms into the air.

"It's up!' It's up!"

"Sweet," Jamie said. "Let's go to the pub before people figure out what happened." Jamie grabbed his bag and was out the door. Bringing down an entire government network is thirsty business.

29 Nov

Jamie wishes he was in a gang; wishes he was a tough ass mutha. He doesn't want to have tattoos or shoot at people or throw gang signs (well, he does want to throw gang signs a little), he just wants to dress cool and have the memory of shooting at people and having old, faded tattoos that he got when he was 15. Just the memory: a recollection of dodging bullets, massive fights, getaway runs, and dumping so many stolen vehicles in the pond that they don't sink anymore. He wants to look back at his life and say, "I chased three skirts into a pub then punched the bouncer for the sheer hell of it," and wonder how he's still alive. He wants to bash a cop in the face, or at least he wants to remember doing it. He wants to wear original Conte cardigans tucked into his jeans and be regarded as a hard c***. He doesn't want gang life, just the nostalgia of the lifestyle--to reminisce and be left with the feeling that he's gotten away with something: his own life, perhaps.

28 Nov

One’s comfort level in a city becomes obvious when one can walk down the street eating a sloppy kebab, dripping carrot and garlic yoghurt along the pavement, without a thought about who’s looking. One is either comfortable, or slightly drunk. In tonight’s case Jamie was a little of both.

27 Nov--quoth the poet, "the bearded lady is giving me problems."

An old friend in Texas contacted Jamie to tell him one thing. "Watch this space."

26 Nov--The Internet Spectacle

The Internet is the largest, most-frequented place in the world. More so than Paris or New York. More popular than Disneyland. Yet an inherent charactaristic of the Internet sets it apart from these tourist destinations. The Internet doesn't exist.

Sure, the Internet is real. One may verify its real-ness by the simple process of reading this blog. However booking tickets, downloading music, and reading a blog are all interactions. You perform these actions not so much in the Internet as with it. The Internet facilitates your needs; it gives you what you want. But is it truly there? And what do we mean when we use the term "the Internet?"

The phrases "it's on the Internet," "go to the [Internet] site," and "use the [Inter]net" are all so common they've been abbreviated and lingo-ed a dozen times over in the past five years alone. We talk about it as a place to go, as a thing to use, and as a spectacle--something to see. It is entertainment. It is business. But reduced to its most bland, the Internet is invented space: a dimension of data pinging between nodes. More like the human brain than the nether reaches of the universe, the Internet can easily cease to be. Cut off blood supply to a person's brain, and that person is no longer. Likewise, switch off the power, and the Internet dies in a blink. No swan song or last breath, no sputter--gone, like it was never there to begin with. Its only ghosts haunting in the form of old advertisements and technology mags.

The Internet is both dreadfully important and delightfully fragile. It could also be used as an example of a spontaneous exercise in evolution: we haven't been taught how to use it, but we are using it anyway. We seem to understand that it can never break, per se; it can only be shaped.

So the Internet doesn't exist, but it could cease to exist. It's crucial, but we could live without it. It can be altered beyond recognition, but remain the same. One thing is almost certain: it is just beginning. Are we not like Dr. Frankenstein with his newly moulded--but lifeless--creature? The words we hesitate to speak are waiting. We need merely click the hyperlink: "by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open . . ."

24 Nov--Chicks on Speed: Jamie Writes a Music Review

A person can, indeed, be too old to rock.

In 80s leotards and day-glo paint buzzing in the black light, three middle-aged women strut onto stage to the buzzing pulse of synth rock beats. From the beginning, everything promises mayhem. One of the 'Chicks' fingers a few keyboard keys and swivels a dial. The crowd surges, eager for noise; for distortion; for something destructive.

They are all disappointed.

In the late 90s, Chicks on Speed spat in the face of grunge, post-punk, and anything else that tried to define itself as the new 'rock.' With a distinct middle finger erected toward radio, these three junked out performers did not so much as produce melodies as they did destroy them. In the days of chickie crooners The Cranberries and Hole, when Chicks on Speed screamed, hard-lunged, "we don't play guitars" over dirty, ripped-off computer riffs they meant to say, "we don't have to do this the way you think we should. Up yours." But, of course, in those days they were out of their heads.

The new, sober Chicks stand before me like models of soccer moms or third-grade teachers. Their bones are brittle; their muscles stiff. Instead of freaky gyrations about warm leather, they appear concerned about the moral future of college students. Their latest set includes songs with refrains "Fashion! It's very hard!" and "My Space, your space; whose space is it?" (an obvious attack on the 'theft' incurred via downloading music. And let's face it, if you're not FOR downloading music, your either a dinosaur or a goddamn cop so get with the programme). These hackneyed ballads to hippie happiness turn previous rebellions to jell-o. Some dykes need to ease up on politics and just get on with it. Seriously, we get the point. Girl-power is all good, but for shit's sake chill on the leso porn. In the new millenium, it appears Chicks on Speed are losing their identity while trying to compete with Peaches.

Even their early songs did little to entice the eager 20-something crowd--most stood breath-heavy and sweaty, waiting for something to dance to. One could backstep from the stage, past the sound engineer struggling to stay awake, to the back and on to the outside to get a better show. A regular night on Wellington's Cuba street--punks, bums, and gangs--played to the audience on Indigo's balcony. Only the fading pulse of a desperate attempt to stay current filtered through the glass doors. Tired, but mostly bored, the crowd smoked cigarettes and downed VBs. There was inspiration somewhere, and they'd wait for it.

23 Nov--Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving, Jamie stayed home from work and baked an apple pie. It was his first, and it was delicious. He wished more people could have tasted it--or even seen it for that matter.

22 Nov

When young people on drugs play in a band, their music sometimes transcends composure and triggers an immediate response from the audience. When young people on drugs grow up and stop using drugs but are still in a band, they tend to lean toward singing hackneyed protest lyrics that sound more like lectures than songs. If the audience is thinking instead of dancing, worry: they've lost the connection.