And so much fun to slap the shit out of, too.

It may be because I heard the presidential debate on the radio last night, as much as I heard of it, anyway.   To me the president sounded calm, measured, had fairly intelligent answers to the vague generalities his opponent kept forcefully expressing.  It sounded to me like a mismatch, like the flailing challenger taking a slow-motion fall in a desperate attempt to be a contender.

Then I hear them talking, the pundents, and all these geniuses had watched with eagle eyes and seen what I could not imagine.  The calm, measured tones were coming from a man who apparently looked like he had no fight in him, a listless, eye contact avoiding stiff.  The stream of seemingly inane generalities coming from his opponent were delivered with a confidently thrust out chin, with an engaging half-smile that showed he, not the president, really wanted the job.  He showed he wanted it more!  And America relates to that, especially in these hard times.

Maybe that’s part of my sour mood today, the realization that Americans are more impressed with body language coaching, facial expression coaching and debate style point coaching (how to do it while the moderator dozes) than with the substance of the respective arguments.  You know what, I thought to nobody and everybody, you deserve the most wooden-headed store mannequin the cynical sales team have the termerity to foist on you and may you keep all the splinters too when he’s done having his way with you.  Of course, I deserve him too.  Let the least meek man win, I say.

Maybe it’s the iPod that seems to have been lost or, more likely, boosted, as I was working with a group of nine kids in a public school on the Lower East Side this afternoon.   On that old iPod were many tracks I recorded over  the years that exist nowhere else anymore, tracks I’d been meaning to download and copy for a long time.  Gone now, so it goes.

Maybe it’s not being careful enough what I wish for, combined with my dad’s lesson from beyond the grave.  Dad:  those feelings you had when you were two, when I used to mistreat you in that way that filled me with self-loathing as I was dying?  Those will never go away, no matter how much you come to admire Gandhi or change your outward behavior.  You see, the world’s not black and white, but it’s black enough and white enough, if you see what I’m saying.

Maybe it’s how much of our relentless and all-consuming culture I have placed myself up against in seeking to start a program where the model is community and group-work.  These kids have no model for that– none.  Here it’s competition or get your ass kicked, pussy, I’m not here to help your weak ass.  Yes, the meek shall inherit the earth, when the rest of us are through with it (as a wit once styled it to me, on a bad day when I felt even meeker than him).  Maybe the irony of trying to do this on my own, not as part of any community at all, even on-line, is finally becoming too much for me.  It certainly feels like it as I pound these keys.

And maybe it’s listening, in a moment of not thinking, to a friend urging me to upgrade the operating system on my brand-new iPad, which I’ve bought with funds desperately begged from supporters of my exciting and mostly imaginary non-profit.   I was able to download the first recording program I need, garageband, and everything seemed to be working fine.  Until there was a message to upgrade the brand new iPad to the latest version of the operating system.  

I was thinking it better to leave well enough alone, and truly there was no reason to do it, certainly not hours after I bought it and had finally got it working, but I yielded to a forceful argument and “upgraded”.  

The upgrade rendered the iPad largely inoperable, the tunes I recorded in garageband and sent to iTunes are invisible.  iTunes on the iPad, as it appears so far, is only a store to sell you things, there is no apparent way to use it as a library for music you record on the iPad and share with yourself in iTunes.  And the store will only sell you things if the user ID they force you to change for the new operating system matches up to the password you’ve reset and they can find your matching credit card information so you can use the machine.   The tech support I paid $100 for?  Only open until 9 pm, they don’t work cheap enough in Shanghai or Bangalore, I guess.  So as I struggled at 10 and 11 pm to use this obscenely expensive device I was on my own, as it should be, as it is written, as it has been ordained.  And in his grave the grim, driven, demanding, unreasonable genius of marketing Steve Jobs grins his gruesome grin, just like when he was alive.

“You’ll play in my sandbox, bitch, and don’t worry about the cat turds,” I can hear him laughing his hideous dry cackle as he sleeps the long sleep.