I composed this as an experiment, of sorts - having purposefully never read DFW, I stumbled upon his famous commencement speech This Is Water  to the Kenyon College class of 2005  a couple days ago. It was clear to me that this represented a seminal discovery I would need to process in my own way, through a complimentary stream of consciousness. Without further explanation, "your mind on David Foster Wallace."


Watching a clip of David Foster Wallace speak and dreaming of shaved sea otters,* I begin to envision my head as an overripe piñata. No figure of speech can conceal what we all know, which is that self-destiny has gone defunct. Connected we all are and will be, forevermore, connection a kind of thrill of tribulations, mindfulness an excuse to fuck.**

I never heard anyone call my name because they had trepidations - who is this man with the intense eyes looking outward yet seeming to speak inward, unresponsive to whatever it was that started this cavalcade, name-calling. The inner self gentle, the outer self turmoil, the eyes unresponsive - this is how we protect ourselves.*** We dream of shaved sea otters, unnaturally naked and self aware as the oil slick creeps in and jagged sticks point toward mere despair.

This is your mind on David Foster Wallace. It can go on forever, beware. And though you will catch your mind humming in places it ought not to, like Calvin in his saucer exploring barnacled surfaces of planets inhabited by T-Rex, volcanic fiery lava, you will not despair. Because you are pulled back into some semblance of the now and the life that you imagined was most present is proven, once again, to be a stage for liars to proclaim whatever they desire - to fill the minds of the innocents with fear, trepidation, and to make the world hum along set lines.****

What of the lines that are not mimicking the way things should be, but rather forcefully leading us toward extermination? If the aim of this clatter and car-fed entropy is really the absence of life, a grateful death as we vanish trailing some star. What the earth birthed in its suicide was not for us, the usurpers….*****



* Obviously I am not referring to shaved sea otters, though in a way I am. It is only a matter of time before something else so patently unnatural becomes part of the new mythology.

** This is not at all how DFW would have it - he would point instead to the small epiphanies to be had through completely thinking through the roots of one's anger, petty antagonisms, and sadness - finding commonality in the mundane, the flow. This works exactly up to the moment you hang yourself (humor raises its mordant head, as always, on exactly the wrong occasion). 

*** This is a vision of DFW as I saw him in the first five minutes that I watched of the 2003 interview with the German television station, ZDF. A type of self-consciousness and tendency to overthink that I overcame at age 23, for the sake of sanity.  Now a fervent believer in found art. 

**** What I might have said to DFW, had I known him, to somehow rattle his cage and get him to shift gears. Not so sure it would have worked,  no matter how utterly persuasive. But he could have directed intellect outward, to changing things. Despite tortured zen acceptance. 

***** Externalizing that within, understanding how the lines of evolution that we are so dimly aware of mirror the crisis of consciousness in our own souls. There is perhaps no capsule as I once thought, no myth to get us off this planet alive. We have set in place the forces of our own come-uppance. 

I am on the Central Coast just a hop and a skip from Las Vegas - in other words, an eternity away. I wrote a poem, almost haiku, about the specific mindset:

Foggy, cold, and grey. 
Before Vegas the anti-Vegas 
weather laxative, Monterey.

Often shrouded in fog, with the accompanying bark of seals late into the night, Monterey is one of those enchanting pocket areas of colonial haciendas and fragrant gardens that make California sing. Sheltered on a wide bay, Monterey was a strategically important harbor where goods could be bartered, shipped, offloaded in the early 19th century. It held the customs house and was provincial capital during an era of land grants and vast rancheros, when the Russian fur traders claimed the coast north of San Francisco. 

This history still lingers in surprisingly fertile pockets - walking the streets of old Monterey you sense of why writers and artists were always drawn to the area. Despite the fog and overall propensity to settle into creaky-jointed ennui, John Steinbeck and Henry Miller felt invigorated here. Tom Killian synthesized ageless ukioue and Gary Snyder-serenity into knobby, wood-grained confluences. Even Kerouac settled uneasily into its subdued gravity, for no other reason than that the end of the earth appeared to him, Big Sur. Escape to boredom, call it Zen, from the oppressive pressure of being Alpha Beat.

Attending graduate school, I also fell into the rhythm of foggy days amid a street-choir  of raucous seals. I grew to appreciate the damp, enveloping jazz of Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Ambrose Akinmusire. I came to feel a kinship with Steinbeck in my bones - the pastoral Pastures of Heaven yes but, infinitely more, the “ray of light among the darkness” vision of Doc Ricketts and his slice of hip brotherhood, nascent eco-consciousness in industrial canning town. Seagulls swooping and alighting on rusty relics of wrecks, past sins. 

Walking Cannery Row, even now that it has become the picture-perfect incarnation of a tourist trap, I can envision what a behemoth of a town Monterey was, with a hulking industrial footprint far outstripping its nascent tourist potential (unlike Santa Cruz, the peninsula was too far away from Frisco, too foggy). Those industrial remnants, now presented as an atmospheric cautionary tale (sardines still give the Monterey Bay a pass, 60 years later) provide proof that yes, nature can outlast, as former marine wastelands become a gateway to kelp reserves in which Humpbacks, Great Whites, tuna, sunfish freely roam. 

The Cannery Row remnants I treasure most are the weathered wood Pacific Biological Laboratories, still intact with specimen tubs behind; and the Wing Chong store, where Mack and the boys would buy beer and hang out, and which stayed open until “the last wandering vagrant dime had been spent.” Guarded by Dora Flood and her less-than-respectable choir of street corner muses (the early-70s Van Morrison song evoked is not entirely unintentional), this was an attempt at preserving  community in the face of the sterile, inhospitable to life. 

Monterey is intoxicating in the same way as sipping whisky can be. Not immediately palatable, with all-too-rough edges, it gets into your bones. Sometimes you sip a bit of Monterey, its achingly sharp edges (once the fog burns off) and think yeah, maybe I could settle for a bit of this wharf life. Then you think no, there is all too much sameness,  a cotton smock spread out against a sky pulled tight at the edges, madhouse cloth.

I am an author first, poker enthusiast second. Which is not to say I do not enjoy the psychological uncertainties, the constant shivers of  adrenalin on the felt. I am consumed with a dread fascination whenever I play live poker, a sense of psycho-social immersion. Enjoying the chess-like ambiance as I read into souls and try to make my own soul a little murkier than usual. As a “usual” player I respect those who, like me, play with passion rather than fear. Who love the game for itself and are lifetime students. The narrow way of poker - tuition variable, lessons infinite. 

The “usual” bit also relates to every poker player’s third-favorite movie, Usual Suspects. Who can forget the way in which Kevin Spacey created a whole world populated by figments of his imagination (and the artifacts around him) in a police station? The on-the-fly, fifth level thinking that got him, the mastermind of mayhem, out of the house of detention free. I am often in the Spacey mode on the felt, seeking the story behind the story, storing artifacts of past behavior for strands from which to spin a convincing narrative of my own. 


The “usual” part also relates to life as an endurance writer -  just an ordinary person, able to travel light, observing. Carefully sifting through unfiltered experiences and spinning them into compelling stories. The only thing unusual about the blog Usual Poker is its quality. I stand behind that. 

I am now in Tulum, Mexico, on the Mayan Riviera, surrounded by creatives from around the world––writers, musicians, photographers, videographers, artists, eco-village creators, bamboo bicycle craftsmen. The contours of Earth Fabric, as a new “creatives engaged” platform that combines social media with curated gallery features is taking shape. 

Given the propensity of Silicon Valley types in search of scalable ideas to rip them off,* claim them as their own (and my own emerging platform as a writer and influencer) it makes sense to set down the parameters of the Earth Fabric vision on the channel readily available to me.** 

I have talked with dozens of people in locales from San Francisco to Miami Beach about the concept over the past three months, gaining valuable feedback and insight––now is the time to lay out the structure. Fleshing in the details will take place in the months to come, hopefully in collaboration with other entrepreneurs of vision. 

"Creative works on the Internet are treated as an exploitable asset."

1. Need –– When Facebook was introduced, it presented the revolutionary concept that the Internet was not a random collection of privately hoarded connections. That social groups would share, influence, entertain, and communicate through a unified platform that was visually appealing, real time, non-commercial. The latter concept was critical –– the idea of free content on the Internet was one that appealed to a broad demographic of people who wanted, well… not to pay for things. Not only that, there was an ethos, embodied by Wikipedia and archive.org, that the essential information that defines our collective basis of human knowledge  (okay, a lot of the architects found this in Grateful Dead concerts) should be available at no cost. Laudable in concept, catastrophic for those who wish to get paid for their creative efforts.

Earth Fabric is revolutionary only in the sense that periodic disruption is a given in any dynamic system. If power corrupts absolutely, Silicon Valley is corruption cooked up, triple-distilled, its essence shot up into the arms of VCs who scheme all day of “multiples.” The hundred (or thousand) times on investment return that will enable them and their shareholders to… do the things obscenely rich people do. 

What it all boils down to, as far as creatives are concerned, is that elaborate platforms have been set up for the sole purpose of hosting content provided for free. Twitch, Medium, Facebook, Blogger, Huffington Post, your good old-fashioned neighborhood Forum, you name it; they are all part and parcel of this scheme to one degree or another. Virtually all the profits generated through marketing leads, advertising, spyware, are retained by the platform provider––who misuses what is provided on good faith, essentially a common good. Creative works on the Internet are treated as an exploitable asset.

I propose: instead of populating blogs, sites, platforms, social media platforms with free quality content, why not withhold it? Much as the women of Greece in Sophocles’ Lysistrata withheld sex from their male counterparts until war was officially ended. Creatives en masse would  have the power to dictate the terms of consumption of their product, in ways that benefit their bottom line.*** 

How? Through self-curated fabrics of creatives who interact in an ecosystem not unlike Facebook, but far more interesting. A gallery feature built in to provide the possibility for seamless, one-click sales. 12 percent retained by EF on each transaction of creative content (physical or digital), with 2 percent going to worthy charities. A parallel emphasis on discovering new artists in developing regions of the globe, in ways that inspire and contribute to income equity worldwide.

Next: The concept defined at a practical level. 

* As reported in the New York Times: “The issue of having to document an idea is now set to ripple through Silicon Valley. While the truth of what did or did not happen with Twitter was one of the many unresolved points of the trial — Kleiner did invest later in Twitter, but at such a high valuation that it did not qualify as a home run — it is a pretty good bet that the next time a junior partner at Kleiner or any other venture firm thinks he or she has come up with something great, the partner will record it in emails, memos, diaries and possibly stone tablets.” 
(After Kleiner Trial, Expect Less Shooting From the Hip in Silicon Valley, By DAVID STREITFELD and CONOR DOUGHERTYMARCH 28, 2015)

** If that channel is a Weebly blog dedicated to endurance and writing, so be it. 

*** I know there is a bit of a "prisoner's dilemma" masked by this assertion, but no solution covers every exigency. If offered a chance to make decent money off of the quality written, audio, and visual content currently provided for free, what creative would refuse?

When words do not roll, 
when nothing can quite express what I have seen
writhing on the ground, head cut off

I am vivid with your question marks, my tail chopped,
your acceptance my only constant worry,
I have been neutered, marked, to wander this wide world

please give me your hand, it is warm,
about the only warm thing here 
in this frozen land of corn and giants

disjointed ceremony, among those who have forgot 
how to be human
I still see nature seeping through to something inside

trickle down, corner me with those eyes
if we are feral at least we are not docile,
at least we choose not to die by degrees

It could have been otherwise, we came so close
the sun a mattress for past indiscretions