Contrary to Popular Belief

[A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words. . . ]

Contrary to popular belief, a picture is worth considerably less than a thousand words. Depending on fluctuations in the iconography market, imagery actually trades at a rate of about 27 words per picture.

That is not to say, however, that there have not been times when pictures were valued much more highly. In the early days of photography, for instance, the first daguerreotypes were known to net up to 4,000 words. Prior to the anti-pornography regulations of the early 1960s, it was not unheard of for a picture to trade for as many as 315 words. Similarly, with the inception of the World Wide Web in the mid to late nineties, the near geometric growth of cyber porn occasionally inflated picture values over the 100-word mark for the first time in decades.

Nonetheless, the steady increase in consumer photography and technology has greatly devalued the picture. This phenomenon, which iconography market scholars have termed the "Cheese Curve," was demonstrated most starkly in the recent explosion of digital photography, which peaked on December 26, 2003. On this date--known as "Black Thursday" in picture trading circles--when consumers first put to use those Christmas presents that had set new records in digital camera sales, the market was actually flooded with hundreds of pictures that were barely worth a fraction of a word.

Over the same time, developments in the field of language have also taken their toll on the picture's word-value. The regular use of nouns as verbs, for instance, which has been gaining in popularity since the mid 80s, has downgraded the picture at a steady rate of .32 words per year. The general acceptance of slang terms into the formal lexicon has also had a tremendous impact on the market. The first time a white person said "for shizzle my nizzle" in a public forum, for instance, picture value plumetted to a near all-time low of 4 words per picture.

Accordingly, many iconography brokers claim that today's real market for the picture lies in numbers. For despite countless mathematical developments over the centuries, the number-value of a picture has actually risen steadily. Here, the impact of photography and technology runs in the opposite direction. While once pictures had little if any number value beyond their basic (and often unrecorded) measurements, photography introduced values for F-stop, shutter speed, aperture, which have since been joined by new digital numbers such as date-stamping, resolution, and Pantone color value.

Still, some insist that it's time to abandon the picture market altogether, claiming that impending global conflict and environmental degradation threaten to revert civilization back to stone-age-like conditions, in which pictures will once again be used strictly for the purposes of one-to-one iconography. If they're right, then perhaps we'll once again see the day when pictures and words are equal and interchangeable.

Pictures are not the only meduim of exchange for words.

For instance:
A blank peice of 8.5x11 paper is worth 50 words. Legal-size is 60.
Strawberries are 1.5 words an ounce.
In the 80s, a Commodore 64 was 12,000 words, but is now worth less than the letter x.
On eBay, Carl Sagan's eyelash sold for enough words to ring the planet Earth 3 times.
Bacardi 151 trades at 50 words for the first shot, 1,500 for the second, and for the third takes away your power of speech.
An orgasm is worth only 4-10 words, but each is usually repeated upwards to 100 times.

Concordant With Popular Belief

If children lack any experience, it is not in life, and certainly not in the joys of inflicting pain, psychic or physical, but only the constructions of their particular language. For after you kicked their knees, if they had the words, surely they would address you:

You are bigger than I, and more educated. Your verbal arsenal is formidable, but even you are not so obtuse that you cannot see plainly the truth that your words and blows can never controvert. Your power over this world is illusory and your oraculations are the diaphanous veil with which you entangle those you think worthy to love you, but stripped of your machinations, you are small man with a big mouth.

Even as a child, I know that your oratorical excesses are a mask for your inadequacies. Of course, you think I refer to your inability to please your wife, but her taking lovers has nothing to do with your maladroitness with the feather boa she bought you, and my pronouncement has nothing to do with sex whatsoever. What you lack, and what your rhetoric cannot compensate for, is the freedom that I exhibit and you find so repugnant.

The fact is you are as distanced from true cruelty as from childhood. You are isolated on the row boat of your small life that floats on the roiling seas I swim in and though you talk of love and hate, the former leaves your mouth not as a dove, but as a sea gull, and the latter as a murder of crows, and you can never know another person, but only their birdsong.

Oh, and occasionally other people's feelings shit on you.

But I am the barracuda who eats the other fish, even when he is not hungry. I am the voracious eel who strikes the hand cavalierly draped over the side of the raft. I am the water itself greedily crashing in waves, reaching for the very sky as if to consume the whole world in its crashings.

Listen to me, little man: take off your tongue and fight like a four year old. See how far your bloviations carry you.

Contrary to Popular Belief

[Children can be so cruel . . .]

Contrary to popular belief children can't really be all that cruel. They lack both the wit and the stock of disappointing life experiences that arm their elders with the required venom. Yesterday, for instance, I heard a seven year old attempt to emotionally wound one of his playmates. "Hey fatty fat boy," he stammered. "You're fat."

Figuring the lad could benefit from a quick tutorial, I addressed him. "Understand this, you insignificant twit," I said, drawing myself up to my full height and extending my right arm at a forty-five degree angle in the style of the great orators. "Even if your mother had actually loved you and showered you with attention from the moment of your birth, you would still lack the natural spark needed to be even remotely successful in this life. Once you reach an age of self awareness, you will panic at the realization that you are ill-equipped to contribute anything to society save a foul and somewhat peculiar stench. Naturally, you will construct numerous strategies to prevent you from ever confronting your own inadequacies. Most of these will succeed only in driving away the only people sufficiently courteous to even act like they care about you, and soon enough you will find it difficult to summon the energy to assault your toothless and unfaithful wife."

While my excoriation had no effect on the stunned little tyke, I immediately commenced kicking him repeatedly just beneath the kneecap, thereby producing the tears I'd desired. "That, my little friend, is how the big boys do cruelty," I shouted over his yelping. "Next time, bring it large, or don't bring it at all."

Hagar's Second Husband

Because her third son stopped crying
Before his skin dried from her,
She told her husband to burn their pillows
And fill their cusions with sand
“You will love me like the desert,
and your seeds will bloom for a week
but wither when the waters recede.”

Each son withered faster than his older brother
Until her belly was a garden of secrets
She smoothed with hands worn thin by tilling
Her bed of sand, and in quarter-tones she sang
“has any mother loved her children as I have?
Keeping them safe all their life?”

Though her husband burned his knees,
She soothed his abrasions and said
“has any man had as many sons as you?
Thirteen last year, another soon.”
He rolls away to sleep while she lies in the indentation
she calls Makkah, the uncultivated valley.

Hagar has gone mad in her desert:
Every full moon is her spring,
But when there is no moon, she is a pall bearer,
so she bleeds her sons onto her bed and ties up her sheets,
releasing the sand as barchan dunes
for the winds to push west.

Of course her husband leaves her.
What man can join a woman in her madness?
A father is not consoled to know
His sons are legions marching across the rocks
In graceful arcs that spell his name for centuries.

OK, I added two lines.

Here is the new poem (now: with title!)

Hagar's Second Husband

Because her third son stopped crying
Before his skin dried from her,
She told her husband to burn their bed
And fill their sheets with sand
"You will love me like the desert,
and your seeds will bloom for a week
but wither when the waters recede."

Each son withered faster than his older brother
Until her belly was a garden of secrets
She smoothed with hands softened by tilling
Her bed of sand, and in quarter-tones she sang
"has any mother loved her children as I have?
Keeping them safe all their life?"

Though her husband burned his knees,
She soothed his abrasions and said
"has any man had as many sons as you?
Thirteen last year, another soon."
He rolls away to sleep while she lies in the hollow
she calls Makkah: the uncultivated valley.

Hagar has gone mad in her desert:
Every full moon is her spring,
But when there is no moon, she is a pall bearer,
so she bleeds in bed and ties up her sheets,
releasing them as barchans dunes
for the winds to push west.

Of course her husband leaves her.
What man join a woman in her madness?
A father is not consoled to know
His sons are legions marching across the rocks
In graceful arcs that spell his name for centuries.

I'm working on a new poem.


But I have a student.

BRB.

But for this fortune, you would have malaigned the next person who called your cell phone and after you identified yourself said without reporach "I must have dialed the wrong number." "You idiot!" you may well have said, "these are the last of my any time minutes, and whether I hang up now or in 48 seconds makes no difference! Are you so inattentive to details that you cannot enter the correct number on a 12-button keypad? Are you such the neophyte to telephonic technology that you are confused by the layout of the digits? Do you have so little concern for others that you would have them throw away their cell-time by dressing down cretins." This fortune is not prescient, so your exact words may vary. You will not say any of this, though, for you will remember that you too impede others' progress and tax their resources and burden their mind with the effluvia of your own which spills out of the transmission tower located between your chin and nose and blocks the bandwidth of their attention spans, and anyway the signal is mostly spam, and you might think it harsh, but, while this fortune is not prescient, it thinks it knows you well enough by now.

Another New Fortune Cookie

You will fall in love with a girl who calls you Larry only because it irritates you (although she will insist it is because you remind her of a pet hamster she had as a child who bore the same name and, she claims, committed suicide by repeatedly running headlong into a her closed bedroom door.) You will, of course, lover her not in spite of her faults but because of them, and your relationship will become not so much a mutual partnership between two adults invested in complementary value systems, but rather a sustained exploration into the process through which nuisance inevitably transforms into boredom. Saddest of all will not be your frustration with her habit of reprogramming your car's radio presets to stations that won't come in no matter where you drive (and you will at some point drive from town to town in a desperate attempt to decipher them), your contempt for the way she routinely changes her voice to match the accents of new acquaintances, or your rage at her constant lies about the hamster you both know she killed. What will really hurt is the slow dull way these things pass into routines that you one day realize you no longer hate.

So and So Should be . . .

Anyone who considers him or herself an aficionado of experimental jazz should be burned. Not burned so much that they actually die. I'm not willing to take it that far. Just burned badly over a small portion of their body, and on a regular basis.

I'm thinking maybe the fingertips would be the best spot. Everyday they should be forced to lightly touch a sizzling grill or a red-hot coal for 30 to 60 seconds so that blisters the size of dimes overtake their very most extremities. Imagine that cruel burst of pain every time they unthinkingly snap their fingers, run a hand through their own hair in frustration, or desperately caress the skin of a loved one.

This -- nothing less and nothing more -- is precisely what they deserve.

Another New Fortune Cookie:

But for this fortune, you would mistakenly believe you alone were responsible for your own shortcomings.

OK. I'd like to start a new thread here: New Fortune Cookies.

These are cookies of two varieties. The first is questions intended to make people think more critically about their own role in their fortunes. The second is their fortunes that take into account the fact that they have just been told their fortunes.

1. But for this fortune, you will forget to pack an important item before you embark on your next long journey, and you will tell yourself (when you remember that you have forgotten to pack the item) "It is of no consequence, for I will purchase that item when I arrive at my destination" except where you are going, there are no items of importance.

2. But for this fortune you will make the biggest mistake of your life tomorrow, but hearkening back to this moment, that mistake will be averted, clearing the way for your biggest mistake to occur at some unspecified time next month.

3. But for this fortune, you would be enriching your life right now, perhaps meeting a new person or reading some enlightening passage from a book you could not have purchased because you are still reading this fortune, even though it is wasting your time and in fact telling you that it is wasting your time which you are still wasting because these words are no more than warnings of wasted time. Still you persist, thinking to redeem your wasted time with a scrap of wisdom from a scrap of paper that has no wisdom to give. Stop! Though you cannot turn back, you can still give up. No? Then we will give up for you.

4. Do you honestly think that people tell you the truth about yourself?

5. How will you justify this moment to the love who is looking for you?

6. But for this fortune, you would forget to send the birthday card that you now are remembering to send. Maybe you will in fact send it, or maybe you will forget again, compounding your shame when you admit to the birthday celebrant "You know, I got a fortune cookie that told me to send you a card." Either way, you will lose face because you now must either admit that you were warned and forgot just the same, or that the only reason you remembered was because of a $0.50 fortune cookie. Jerk.

That's all for now.

We never landed on the moon. In fact, I'm not even sure the moon actually exists. The JFK assassination? The single shooter theory? Bunk. Truth is there weren't any shooters. Kennedy's head spontaneously exploded. It's a long standing but rarely documented phenomenon affecting at least one person every two to three centuries.

And animals can talk -- they just do so very very very very quietly.

But back to the moon for a second. I take that last part back. The moon does exist. And the lunar landing wasn't faked to fool the American people or the Soviet Union. It was an honest mistake. They thought they were on the moon. It was kind of like how Columbus discovered America. Except that he never did. America is actually just another part of Europe. That language you're speaking -- English. What we know as the Atlantic "Ocean" -- it's a lake, a swimming pool really. The photos from space -- faked.

In fact, that's the reason they even tried to land on the moon and ended up accidentally discovering a Hollywood sound studio in the first place. The reason behind the entire space program -- to secure, produce, or flat out fabricate if necessary photos supporting the myth that America is a separate landmass from Europe and that the earth is round. The true shape of the world, after all, is not flat, but concave, it's outer most edges curled in toward each other and separated by a distance of merely 23 feet.

And this, of course, is why the talking animals created the moon. To distract those people at the outer most edges from discovering that the further apart they seemed the closer they actually were. This is what the squirrels, rabbits, and humpback whales crafted in their conspiracy of extreme quietness. This shiny silver coin of mystery. Always there, never still, and ever changing, ceaselessly tugging our eyes upward, fooling us into believing our mothers, wives, and daughters are deep as the oceans (for "oceans" read lakes and swimming pools), and driving elderly astronauts to assault documentary film makers.