ABOUT MY "GENEROUS CONTRIBUTIONS" ...

I've recently been thanked for what for me have been generous contributions to local political causes, and I replied something like, "Thank you ... but they really aren't all that generous."

They aren't, and I'll share with the group part of why not.

In part, it's money my heirs fortunately don't need and which, unfortunately, I won't need for my illustrious career in film production (now, let us say, on long-term hiatus).

More relevant, it's money I'm withholding from commercial ventures, politicians, and charities that are practicing "Constant Contact" — actual name of actual company — far too literally.

Some people like a lot of stimulation, some a little. Me? I find it uncomfortable just to use washrooms where the light intensity is for women applying makeup. Also, many of us old folk were raised to respond and respond politely to requests. So I find the inundation of ads, catalogs, and, importantly here, appeals in varied media to be more than just annoying but mildly painful — and a serious matter when important mail gets lost in the mass and my not-*that*-old computer functions get slowed down.

A bit of street theater that moved me to action in the Vietnam Era was on the theme, "If You Don't Like the War Machine, Don't Feed it." The moral issues are much less urgent here, but I will resist feeding "Constant Contact" as both a corporation and a fund-raising strategy. Those groups I'm supporting, I'll mostly continue to support. Newbies who've bought my contact information — unless I've heard of you some other way, and you've got a really good cause (and maybe an "UNSUBSCRIBE" function that definitively stops your appeals) — you are likely out of luck.

Local folk and groups I know and who know how to ask and then back off: Yep, now and then you'll find me looking considerably more generous than you expected. Don't thank me too much, though: part of that money has been shifted from good people taking prudent advice — and succeeding at pissing me off enough to stop complaining and act.

Welcome Home, Rich (June 2016 Junque Communications)

     I was away for about ten days and had my USPS mail on hold. It has been delivered, and the portion within shouting distance of mail I want rounds up to .5kg/1 pound, counting what feels like a doggie blanket from the SPCA, which I'll hand on to neighbors who actually have dogs. The mail I don't want, the junk mail, weighs in at 2.4kg/5.28 pounds. And I recall deleting something like 238 spam e-mails.

      That is for one old man, living alone, who has about all he needs in the way of possessions and doesn't buy many new things or take extravagant trips or contribute all that much to the Democrats or other objects of charity.

       In his hopeful dystopian story, "To the Chicago Abyss" (1949), Ray Bradbury's crazy-old-man protagonist will help restore civilization by remembering the junk products of "a race-track civilization that ran last over a precipice": i.e., ours. Bradbury challenges us with an intriguing paradoxical conceit we might call homeopathic: his unlikely hero feeds the survivors the words for the "clamored-after [...] absurd [... products] of a never never-ending river of robots and robot-mad owners." The recovery of civilization will require lusting after the lost materialist crap whose production and consumption had doomed civilization.

      As I said, it's a hopeful story, relatively speaking. Looking at the crap being shoved my way without my asking — looking at the waste of all that paper and time and energy — I suspect another couple generations will be time enough for us to run out over that precipice.

This is the way the world ends;

this is the way the world ends:

not with a bang or a whimper,  

but with a pitch and a hustle and an inundation of ads.

                  (And with mild apologies to T. S. Eliot)

Welcome Back, Rich ... (Junk Mail)

I was away for a while and had my mail held in the local US Post Office from Wednesday, 30 March 2016 through Monday, 11 April — so some ten business days. In addition to hundreds (sic) of e-mail posts that went to the Junk folder, I received a bit over 3 kilos (6.6 pounds) of physical junk mail, which works out to well over half a pound of junk mail per day.

I also received eight (8) pieces of real mail.

I support the US Postal Service, but I'd be a whole lot more enthusiastic in my support if they charged more for mass mailings — not counting journalism people subscribe to — than they do for First Class. A lot more.

In an age of over-stimulation and too many people after our time and money, I'm really sure I'm not alone in wanting changes in the postal rate system, and some charge on internet spam. Bernie Sanders et al.: take note.

Spam, Junk Mail, and the Defeat of Public Enterprise (28 June 2014)

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      It looks like I have a Spam-bot of some sort either buried so deep on my computer that my virus scans can't get at it — or them — or some similar bit of milicious mischief is on my account with Miami University, which their highly competent IT people haven't been able to root out. Anyway, I can't complain about junk e-mail, since what I'm getting in my Junk File isn't exactly mail, but I can offer a numerical update on paper Spam going through the US Postal Service.

      I just got back from a trip, and would ordinarily be going over to my local post office to collect and throw into the recycling bin there most of my mail, definitely losing count. But my local post office no longer holds mail (or helps issue passports): for such service I have to go to the nearest real city and pick my mail up there. When I mentioned this, though to my letter carrier, she said she'd just drop off my held mail, which I needed to agree to since there's no way in hell it'd all fit into the little mail pigeon-hole assigned to my apartment, and she'd need to leave it at my door.

      Which she did, leave the held mail; so I could sort it at my desk and keep count. For a nine-day hold I got 62 pieces of mail, of which I kept eight, or maybe seven out of 61, if you count as one piece of mail the two Netflix discs for Sergio Leone's "sprawling crime epic," ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, which runs three hours and 46 minutes and spills over onto a second DVD. Of these pieces of mail I didn't just chuck unopened, four are pieces of mail I'm sure I want (or three, if you combine the Netflix mailing); the others I'm going to look at sort of "on spec": they might have something of interest.

       That works out to about 13% of my "mail" being actual mail, with only two of those in the 13% bearing first-class postage, and that is of the pre-sorted, metered variety of "first class."

       I would not have been happy with driving forty minutes or so, depending on traffic, to pick up such a load, and I suspect that's a typical reaction. Now most Americans are  mentally healthy enough to shrug off such minor annoyances: it's an urban legend that post offices get shot up more than most places of business (although the data seem to indicate that it's the employees who aren't all that violent, with little said about customers ...). Still, the reduction in postal service and the mail's being flooded by political campaigns and more directly capitalist junk-mailers makes for a problem.

      Or a set of problems: the Spam deluge is one minute contribution toward the coarsening of everyday life in America and the decreases in mail service is part of degeneration of our infrastructure, plus part of the spiral in which those who would privatize everything in America starve a US government agency for resources, which leads to bad service, which leads to calls for more cut-backs since, clearly, government can't get things done. To overextend a quote from Ronald Reagan, "[...] government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem"; and, like the IRS — and unlike, say, the Bureau of Mines or even Amtrak — the postal service is a govenment agency that most American voters will encounter.

Still Nobody Special (10 Aug. 2014)

            I just returned from some travels and have been reinforced in my views that I am nobody special, but, also, so are most people — both human people and corporate people, as in "Corporations are people, my friend."
            On my travels earlier in the summer, I returned to Miami University, where I taught for thirty-five years and from which I retired in 2006. They are doing quite well without me, or at least as well as with me, and I was generally unremembered and my visit unremarked. In Oxford, OH, a living legend I am not. More recently, I went up to the Chicago area and found myself in the payment line at the cafeteria at the most excellent, if now expensive-to-visit, Field Museum. Finally arriving for the wallet-ectomy for a turkey burger, I was greeted with "Hi-ya, buddy; how's it goin'?" by the young cash-register jockey, before he announced the price. I don't know why — possibly because I was under some pressures on the visit, possibly just getting in touch with my inner asshole — I responded with, "I don't want to come across as uppity, but I'd prefer 'sir,'" which he called me, and was good enough to repeat the price. I wished him a nice day with sincerity, since he seemed like a nice young man, working what must be a pretty boring job and probably in need of as good a day as I could wish for him.
            What I didn't need was a reminder that I was just another body in a cafeteria line and "buddy" to a guy who could've been my grandson.
            Returning home, I got to various kinds of mail I'll get to in a moment, and got to my computer and a chance to check up on The 6^th Friend, a movie I'm associated with, and which you should all go out to see if it ever gets released IN A THEATER NEAR YOU!!! or buy on Amazon or at least order from Netflix. While on the IMDb site for the film, I committed an act of autoGoogle-ization, and looked my name up on IMDb-Pro and, perversely, checked out my STARmeter ranking: it was "2,038,949, down 1,443,667 this week." So please hit those Internet Movie Database links and raise my rating: I'm currently the number of people of a good size city away from being anybody in the movie biz.
             I also, though, checked my telephone answering machine and my e-mail, and I await delivery of the usual basket of snail-mail. Even a nobody, or maybe especially a nobody — rich people can buy privacy — even this nobody is getting over a hundred solicitations each week for my time and/or money, or, only slightly less directly going for my time and money, my business.
            Again, I'm no one special, and, if you're reading this, neither are you (really special folk are reading executive summaries and IPO prospectuses and Eyes-Only intelligence portfolios). But also necessarily unspecial are all those people cold-calling me us or sending out e-blasts or mass mailings: each is just one among hundreds.
            So I repeat my call for all of us to get uppity.
            If mail doesn't come First Class with a real stamp and specific return address, if it comes with a misleading CALL FOR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION!!! — toss it. Let the mass mailers pay full-freight and identify themselves if they want to get us to read their appeals.
            If you answer a phone call and get "dead air," you're almost certainly being called by someone using a multi-dial device. Set the phone down, and let the caller listen to some dead air for a bit, or the livelier sounds of you doing whatever you were doing before you were commercially or politically interrupted.
            If you get a robo-call with anything other than a "reverse 911" disaster alert, also set the phone down and try to keep RoboCaller on the line for the full message, making sure it's a message you don't hear.
            And don't hassle folks struggling to make a living, but when callers or clerks use your first name or "buddy" or "young (wo)man," gently advise them that they can save a syllable and show they really care by saying "sir" or "ma'am" — unless you prefer to be thought nobody special than to be reminded that you're old enough for "sir" or "ma'am."
            You'll be able to think of other things. Remember: In the battle for your figurative eyeballs and eardrums, don't be a noncombatant. Nobodies of the world, arise (it's not like we're busy with anything important)!