In other news, a NY Times piece "Refugees Entering the U.S. Already Face a Rigorous Vetting Process" lays out the actual steps involved in coming to this country. I am going to leave out all the annotations and give the bare bones:

​1. Registration with the United Nations.
2. Interview with the United Nations.
3. Refugee status granted by the United Nations.
4. Referral for resettlement in the United States.
5. Interview with State Department contractors. 
6. First background check.
7. Higher-level background check for some.
8. Another background check.
9. First fingerprint screening; photo taken.
10. Second fingerprint screening.
11. Third fingerprint screening.
12. Case reviewed at United States immigration headquarters.
13. Some cases referred for additional review.
Syrian applicants must undergo two additional steps.
14. Extensive, in-person interview with Homeland Security officer.
Most of the interviews with Syrians have been done in Jordan and Turkey.
15. Homeland Security approval is required.
16. Screening for contagious diseases.
17. Cultural orientation class.
18. Matched with an American resettlement agency.
19. Multi-agency security check before leaving for the United States.
20. Final security check at an American airport.

So basically people with the skills and determination to go through this process are those who keep our country skilled and competitive. Denying them entrance is kind of like publishers denying the manuscript I worked on for 10 years publication on the grounds that it doesn't meet what the market wants... doh... happened.  

​#AriPark

I could go with some choice quips from the Fabric - Chasing Sun fb page where I lay out feedstuff in all its idiosyncratic glory, but why not check it yourself. (Someday I'll get around to compiling it all into a bathroom reader, but for now lets enjoy the discombobulated  anonymity that the internet and the feed allow).

That said, I must share this prediction, inspired in part by a Medium article by Jake Fuentes The Immigration Ban is a Headfake, and We’re Falling For It. I may be totally off, but when the aha! moment came to me it felt very plausible and that is usually a good sign to bet or fold. Let's double down on my hunch:

"Prediction: there will be some demonstration/protest flashpoint in the next three months in which injuries if not deaths occur, and that will be used by Trump/Bannon/Pence/Kushner (if they have consolidated power enough) to push through a state of emergency. 

Worst case scenario: radicals and plants are allowed to dominate the headlines, creating a sense of visceral fear. Those smart enough will ask who whipped up such as scenario... the rest will march restlessly toward the iron gates.

On the other hand, there may be ideological and moral rifts within the government and military that create a situation of stand-off... a power limiting force. If this is all peaceful and the lines are well demarcated, it is a positive development... in other words the power to enforce much of the alt-right's agenda will be cordoned off. 

The Republicans handcuffed Obama in this way, although his agenda was much less extreme. This time actual weaponry stockpiles and access to codes would likely be factored into the calculations, though again they would be "bluffing chips." Do not expect Russia to be absent from this dynamic, they are already involved.

I think this might just get us* through four years of what was known back in the day as a Mexican standoff. And then in 2-4 years, elections will allow a more informed (sobered?) populace to make rational decisions about the future of the country.... oh and of the world. 

* Those Americans who still believe in a balance between democratic traditions, freedom, and living together in harmony with the earth and ourselves. Used to be called patriotism, such a definition may still come to pass."

​#endwriter

In honor of the second year anniversary of endurancewriter a photo from the first post.  Via Amtrak all night from Raleigh to Miami. Coffee on the house from a conductor-cum-philospher, my first concrete inkling that this reality-denial thing was percolating among the masses.

#endwriter

The yin and yang of an emerging autocracy... rogue rangers apparently can't be stopped... while the elevation of alternative facts results in record sales of George Orwell's 1984. Stuff starts to hit the fan in South China Sea. When I interned at ITC in DC, it was shocking how few people focused on Asia and what little knowledge existed . May just come back to bite.​

As the Onion pointed out, poor Trump... trying to reap the benefits of office that are rightfully his and getting stymied by liberal do-gooders (goober farmers, no less) at every turn.

It's fake news/alternative fact, but triangulation discombobulation has occurred... mission accomplished.

Quotes it seems may have been said before: 

Democracy is only as strong as its weakest li​nk.

Growing up... you care so much about what people think until you realize no one really cares.

A prediction I don't want to make: Legacy of Trump's Presidency is likely ramped up hostilities, if not outright war with China. Probably leave it for the liberals to mop up, as with Bush and Obama. And yeah, it has been pointed out that it would be a great way of deflecting attention from poor performance. 

And what about the butcher's bill being due, as Chauncey DeVega puts it? Sad to say, I have this particular form of Schadenfreude myself... when I know in my heart that the gullible are not to blame for what they bring upon themselves.

M.T. Anderson opines: "When falsehood invades the highest offices in the land, it forces the population into a surreal doubleness where there are two sets of memories, two account books, two realities that must be contended with. This chokes those who want to operate through a legal framework, according to the rules, since the rules now apply to a fantasy; a complicated strategic triangulation is always necessary to produce a real result. Opponents have to struggle continually with cognitive dissonance."

To end on a lighter note, how about some alternative grammar?

Frank Jaguaradi (for Separate Magazine): You had quite a year, as an... I don't know what to call you, writer, artist... 

Damon Shulenberger: Pardon my poor French, allez vous... (coughs into napkin and takes out another Licorrette). I like to think of myself of a liver of life as it could be lived by many, if we truly took advantage of digital capacities and got beyond this hangup of private property.

A common misconception is that I am against technology. True, I am not a cheerleader on a personal level...I got rid of my iPhone in 2016 (or should I say it liberated itself as part of the Malasimbo Revolution).

Try not to use technology much, but I'll be the first to admit it is working for me even when I am not online. It is definitely doing things to promote fabric concept without my being aware. Hard to keep track of 350,000 sleeper bots, which is what $1.5 million in cold hard cash buys you.

As I see it, technology is inherent in fabric and must be leveraged, if it is to change how monetary resources are allocated, in a way most people around the globe benefit from. Not the 8 families who control half of the world's wealth. The quandary is how to unleash this money without accelerating the pace of consumption, construction, fossil fuel use, environmental destruction. Even the most well-intentioned will go out and buy a car the first time they see real money. Imagine 4 billion people going out and doing this... Beijing on a mass scale. 

Jaguaradi: So fabric is a way of...

DS: Taking the algorithm back and using for purposes that promote sustainability, with the teeth of real transactional flow. Fabric is a map-based travel app that enables transactions, with the money distributed as best as possible to local regions in ways that get around the corrupt government phenomenon so prevalent... everywhere. 

Jaguaradi: 80 percent of profits returned to the "fabric," with a 20 year plan in place to make that 100 percent is certainly ambitious.... 

DS: The point as I see it is that there are numerous ways in which the Net can be misused and we are succumbing to those uses. The advertisement for the Mesothelioma Center that appeared in my Facebook feed an hour after I researched the topic on Google for a client is one small example. At the beginning of the day I had not even been aware that such a thing as mesothelioma existed and now... voila!

No doubt, mass data collocation in ways that drives real world decisions can have unfortunate consequences. Given that this is a nuclear era, safeguards must exist that no candidate is in anyone's pocket. But it goes beyond this into the surveillance realm, data is ripe for misuse with no driver apparently awake on the bus.

There seems to be a blind faith in algorithms among the elite, as a decision... if not maker... enhancer. Algorithms dumb things down, even as they make them simpler. They facilitate the acceleration of forces within Capitalism that are unsustainable from a GNH and climate change perspective.

Jaguaradi: So you are really down on technology, in its uses as an instrument of... 

If not evil, destruction... (dry laugh). Actually I am, and always have been, a glass-is-half-full kind of guy––and progress, properly formulated, always has been a very difficult point to find. 

Everyone hopes some rebel genius will break through, call him Jesus or Neo... Frieda Kahlo... the outlier (as Malcom Gladwell termed it) has always been present in society and its manifestation is tied to having knowledge that is not shared immediately. Two years in the wilderness is good for that, if you do not drift too far afield.

At some point in the near future, people with a combination of high EQ and superior experiential memory will be particularly sought after, because the skull as a knowledge repository is pretty much impenetrable. If algorithm generators and AI purveyors are the gatekeepers, they haven't got down to the chemical-level neurological processes that drive human thought.

Jaguaradi:  They haven't figured out a way to suck out our thoughts yet, upload them into a huge AI server?

DS: No, they haven't .. not without frying the grey matter at least. And the manifestations they can capture and collate––our art, photography, writing, speech, and movements, are expressed in a tip-of-the-iceberg way. They do not accurately capture the complexity that lies beneath. To draw an analogy, if icebergs breaking off of Antartica were all we were concerned about with global warming, life would be pretty simple. There is a lot going on under the surface and evolution is all about finding niches, weak links.  Binary systems are binary systems––even if they can beat a grand master at Go or Chess, they are operating within a defined system of possibility. No matter how complex it gets, the basis is binary. 

Jaguaradi: Neo reading three dimensional movement within number flows....

DS: Right. Even with Silicon Valley set bent to extract the last possible dollar out of each human interaction, they haven't found a way to disrupt this neuro-chemical phenomenon. We can tell when something offered to us seems too perfect, non-random. And we inject a little randomness into the mix, to counteract. The mutability of logic is what keeps us alive.

I call those who apply this concept "endwriters." They outpace the Internet in words or images–– their unique fingerprint hasn't been exactly replicated by anything in the digital sphere. They dance around the algorithm and control how information manifests in the NOW (neurologically original world). I'll expand on this phenomenon in my planned novel EVEN. Some algos have already taken what I have published and run with it in directions of mere profit.

But they cannot see into my soul, read things that have not manifested in my subconscious––the germ is intact. Endwriter is incorruptible because it is not revealed until the exact right moment and in the correct order––that aspect is algorithmically determined, because the mode of dissemination must match the technological medium.

Jaguaradi: You are not really an entrepreneur, despite fabric potentially having a huge financial impact within the capitalist system. 

DS: My aim is a bit different, I see no reason not to spread the vision, unconcerned about taking credit beyond several hundred readers who got here, somehow. Despite the bots.

Jaguaradi: Despite the "endwriter" monicker, you say that your approach applies to music, visual art––as much as to writing per se.

DS: It even applies to the act of living in an original way. The practice of outpacing the bots and crawlers in a way that preserves privacy, because the algorithm hasn't cracked the code yet. And never can if endwriting is properly practiced. As Leonard Cohen put it, realizing that the only inherent limitations lay within, "I have tried in my way to be free."

Jaguaradi: So if there was an endwriter who created content of such originality that the content could not be codified, replicated? 

DS: He would be Jesus. (They both laugh for a second, draw silent). He would be very sought after, because he gets in there at the end of the digital conversation. He is surfing the tip of the wave so to speak. 

Jaguaradi: And the other content is....

DS: A vast well of meaning wanting to get out but unable to at the exact moment of the NOW, when it has maximum effect. Because these creators inhabit the end of the conversation––the point at which content is shared––they are called endwriters.

Slight confession though...  this was all thought up after the fact. It really comes from endurancewriter, a pre-EVEN breakthrough I had. Something that took root at around the 36th hour of a really crazy poker tournament, the equivalent of trench warfare with cards.

Jaguaradi: Can you give me a concrete example of this digital-outlier-sic-endwriter concept?

DS: You remember Cameron Harris, who wrote all that fake news that got seen at exactly the right time for Donald Trump to get a major boost against Hillary Clinton? That is a very crude, early stage manifestation of the phenomenon. Harris had enough inside knowledge of something not true to get it out the the public as "news" before familiar media outlets and vetters––the traditional gatekeepers if you will––outed it as not true.

Harris was an endwriter in the sense of knowing the current digital cusp and being able to write his pieces with enough credibility and conviction such that it was spread organically through shares among gullible people. Algorithmically spread at first, it took root among humans as intended––it was perhaps designed to influence those for whom English is not a first language and do not read much... and thus sway social network communities that drive our shared concept of the truth.

Jaguaradi: Moving on to your tangible breakthrough moment,  the limerick that got you noticed.  The one about Rick Perry's aha! moment realizing he was tasked with handling nuclear codes....

DS: Yeah, that. 

[TBC?]

#endwriter 

Life in TJ is interesting... working on a little noir video to give a taste. Inspirations abound. 

I was just perusing the old Cowachunga files, looking to dust off the novel and set it in Baja, which makes a lot more sense. There was a poem stuck in there randomly and... it was actually not half bad. So here, to tide over those who puzzle over blue moon phrasings:

​The Hack 
​
Life after good grace,
I just want a taste––
lips like honey, wanton,
non-age-restricted
how does this song go?

In the place beyond where 
“Dear PC Officer”articles 
reside, taste has no meaning, 
writing is not delineated 
by what peers consider

short enough
for the virally infected, 
where no choice is to be had
beyond the stark reality of
the hack,
carving his way to survival, 
immemorial, sleepless. 

Jerky energy, between the lines
pure survival, this writing thing
the credit cards maxed, 
the old ties slack, 
burn the house to generate heat. 

Baby needs to eat.

Technology update: About 6 months ago after losing my iPhone at Malasimbo I reverted to a simple SMS text phone. I notched it back another level after arriving California. No phone. Here in Tijuana at the Hotel C I have reverted to an even earlier habit, from the early 2000s––poor Internet connection. Dial-up simulacrum is very liberating indeed. Distractions away!

My goal is to make enough money so that I only need to be online one day a week. There are so many interesting live human interactions to be had. Don’t get me wrong, Device Exists. But does it control us? And does it disable in-depth discourse?

The slow one asked how he could get to the root of everything. The wise one answered, by speeding up. Change gears, expose yourself to new experience––sip carefully from creation’s grail.
​
#endwriter

It's time for another dribble of the Arisugawa Park cloud novel. I would make apologies, excuses, but I realize I don't have to. I have never made the money through art, though I persist in believing that this will last longer than 90 percent of the published stuff out there. The popular belief that working remotely does not equal real work notwithstanding, I do not have time to focus on creative projects except in peripheral moments of the day. This is not necessarily a bad thing... Shakespeare aside, I have never been a believer that quantity equals greatness. Otherwise we would sit around reading Isaac Asimov and Agatha Christie all day. 

Still, a first novel coming out in drips and drabs at age 42, is inexcusable. Maybe I have engineered it myself. Obscurity is great, as long as you have enough to eat and are not tied to a partner with conventional expectations. And then there is the music. Another portal of expression opened up to me in 2015, on the wings of picking up a (now departed) agent and expecting that I could survive on my own terms, as an artist. Faced with the question of what I really wanted to do, I gravitated toward creating music that got people smiling, bopping, collaborating, dreaming.

I am juggling these two artistic balls (nevermind the ink sketches), which is why you get a rare "twofer" here: the latest AP episode and the 7th  video from the "tribal flute deluxe" concept album Fabric - Chasing Sun. I'll write an entire post about the 9 minute mini-epic in a day or two.. or thirty. 

#endwriter #ChasingSun

Or, the oddest verified true story I have ever come across.

​Somehow Ian (Sir Ian, as he was known by the gals at the Rollin’ Pin) made it through and survived the experience, despite sweating (as he put it) balls. He took in Amsterdam over a period of a week and made his way across the channel by ferry to Dover. From there he went up to ––––, north of London, where he had connections. 

Ian was a dedicated entrepreneur and still had the brick of hash intact, as he had been intending to sell it in the UK all along, rather than on the Continent, where the Rolling Stones had just finished a tour. Economics and sociability dictated that if he could simply smuggle the stuff into England he could sell it for double the price and spread Vibes. 

Mission successful, Ian had some good times. He sold his brick off over a period of a month and it was in demand, though certain friends commented that it didn’t have the usual effect. Tokers north of London were not extremely picky, however. 

After a month, Ian was down to half a kilo, more than he had expected to have left. He needed to divest the rest quickly, as he had a flight to New York in two days and a Wall Street internship opportunity that would surely please his folks. He found someone through a friend who wanted to buy the remainder and traveled to Central London, taking a bunk in a local hostel. 

The problem Ian faced was that it wasn’t okay to take a half kilo of hash into the hostel… there were no lockers and no way to keep a stash like that secret. Ian scoped a mishmash of old junk at the end of an adjoining alleyway, placed next to the metal garbage cans for monthly pick-up. It was a discreet, narrow affair, with few windows on the builidings––no one would think to look there in a million years. At 1:00 am , as planned, he strolled out the hostel, winked at the blonde all-night receptionist, and made as if to buy a pack of smokes at the liquor store down the road. Instead, he ducked into the alleyway and rummaged around for his stuff, which he was  to deliver in 10 minutes behind the pub. 

At the moment he was digging up the brick, ready to gain capital for a nice New York lifestyle over the next couple months, a Bobby happened to be walking by on his beat. This was just Ian's bad luck––caught red-handed with a half a kilo of hash, enough to be considered “with intent to sell” Though he was a naif strictly into organics, the police would never believe he wasn’t involved in other stuff. A seven year sentence was minimum for this offense, though it could be commuted after four years for good behavior. By which point his soul would be crushed,  professional prospects dashed.

Ian spent the entire night in an old style London prison below the gallows––he recalls vividly being led up the stairs directly from his cell into a wood-appointed courtroom presided over by powder-wigged magistrate. At the stand, having slept not a wink, Ian felt distinctly sick. The prosecution was beefed up, imposing, and out for blood––the amount of hash was enough that a federal agent had been called in to determine his level involvement in a hypothetical smuggling ring and the appropriate sentence.

Just at the moment when it seemed that the prosecution were going to push for and schieve a full 10 years behind bars, a lab technician burst into the proceedings and conferred with the judge. After about ten minutes of animated discussion the magistrate, known for his tough sentencing rolled his jowly cheeks toward the rafters, wrath d in his eyes and said “I had every intention of giving you a fair taste of English law––but, having analyzed the samples, it has come to our attention that the substance you carried and distributed is camel dung.”

#endwriter