dean terry

We’ve been searching for a new place near the university where I teach for over a year. (For the reasons why we are moving, see Subdivided – an entire film about life in my current cold, uptight suburban neighborhood.)

After looking at fifty or sixty homes, we found one. (Remember, when you are looking, its a home, when you are selling, its a house; one is a place, the other a property. This distinction is supposed to provide the proper emotional distance depending on your situation).

We put in a bid on a remodeled sixties era traditional with plenty of room for (more) kids and (future) dogs. Lots of colleagues around, a 10 minute walk to the office and classrooms, and fairly walkable streets. All good. The search for a happy suburban existence that I thought was lost had been given new life.

The problem came when we went for the loan. We gathered documents, sent emails and faxes, scanned things, remembered all ten places we’ve lived in the past twenty years, sent blood, hair and fingernail clippings, etc. The loan was approved – except for this little matter of a tax lien from California from 1995.

Yes, 1995.

This had never shown up before on any credit report. And it only shows up on one of them.

After two days of phone mazes, automated robotic recordings and real people who sounded like automated robotic recordings, screaming, and testing the physical limits of all the phones within reach, I discovered that the entry was an error. And worse than an error, it was a fart of confused data.

The item on on the credit report – pay attention now – was for a lien from 1995 for a traffic ticket from 2003.

Yes, you read that right.

First I got to thinking it’s either some distracted data entry person playing havoc with my file or some entropic database gumbo. Then I realized it was a new kind of credit reporting – a new “product,” a feature: Premonition Based Credit Reporting.

We anticipate your future missteps by peering into the future. We know you are going to do something stupid pretty soon so we are going to punish you now.

So if you are a bank or an auto dealership or a furniture store looking to establish credit on customers, here’s the pitch: Want to know someone’s credit history? We’ll not only tell you the past, we’ll let you in on the future. Should you give Janet Whatever here a loan for this mini-van? No, because she’s going to bounce a check for $38 in seven years.

One of the credit reporting agencies has a website that invites you to call them if you have questions or need help, so I called them. They promtly direct you to the website, which then suggests you call them, and on and on. An infinite loop of nothing. Minimalist corporate avoidance.

You would think after these kinds of machine loops and phone trees I’d be pleased to talk to a human being. You’d be wrong. They were just as automated and performed with a bewildering level of inhumanity. Scripted, mechanical, routinized, policy driven. I’ve always wanted to develop my own policy in these situations. I would say something like “I’m sorry but in this situation it is my policy to tell you and your entire company to eat shit,” and then, in a polite voice, ask “would you like for us to email you a copy
of the policy?” (“Us” in this case representing me and my various and contradictory mental states, but that’s another story.)

I live in the 21st century with it’s blistering pace and always on culture, but in some places like state and city offices and credit reporting companies I have to slow to an aching crawl, search for things with my hands, and savor the adhesive glue on my tongue while waiting for weeks for a piece of paper to arrive from some musty beige filing cabinet in Norwalk California.

And where the hell are our electronic signatures?

While waiting for them, and for a noxious truck to deliver a piece of paper across the Western United States, we nearly lost the wonderful house we thought would give us a fresh start.

So, I say burn all paper documents. Make a deadline and burn them.

(Remember the last scene in Fight Club? It’s starting to look like a very good idea.)

Here’s the question I have for those who voted for Proposition 2 in the
recent election here in Texas: How many gay people have you been friends with?
Any family members? Have you ever spent appreciable time with anyone who is
gay? Enough time to understand them in a thorough way? My guess is that answers
in the positive to this question number in the low single digits.

Gay marriage affects very few people, but its emotional appeal is the heart
of the conservative republican strategy to get out the vote. The real agenda,
of course, are the economic policies that get passed quietly while all the noise
is being made about the issues that make us uncomfortable. (Thomas Frank has
done an excellent job of outlining this strategy in What’s
the Matter with Kansas.)

When I left Texas for graduate school in 1989 I had little experience with
anyone who was openly homosexual. Though I liked to think of myself tolerant
and liberal, I had no direct experience.

The first thing that happened to me upon arriving in Southern California was
to end up living with a gay man in a rent house in Claremont. I was literally
walking the streets looking for a place to live and this guy put me up in a
room in his house. For nine months I took part in parties, dinners, and general
lounging about. Whatever was different from straight culture was learned and
became a matter of course. There was never any issue about me being straight
and him being gay.

(more…)

Published in the Dallas Morning News Points Section Sunday October 16, 2005

Rising gasoline prices have many people questioning their commuting lifestyle, and with good reason. Will working downtown and living fifty or seventy five miles away still make sense when gas prices are $4, $5, or $6 a gallon? Maybe “Big D” is a little too big.

Katrina and Rita have demonstrated for us just how delicate the situation is, and Bush himself has called it “fragile.” A blip in our energy supply threatens the entire system, dependent as it is on enormous amounts of cheap energy.

This calls into question basic ideas about how to build and organize cities. If everything is separated from everything else, continually further away and totally dependent on automobiles to make it function, what happens if there’s a problem with the energy supply? The whole idea rests on the assumption that oil will always be cheap and abundant, and both of these assumptions are no longer valid.

Gasoline is up 72% in the last year. Natural gas, used to heat the new homes that are twice the average size of homes built in the seventies, has risen 143%. This is not a temporary situation. Oil is no longer abundant, and many of the largest oil fields are “maturing.” Chevron has acknowledged in a recent PR campaign that “the world consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel discovered.” And even president Bush, in rare form, has asked Americans to conserve in the aftermath of hurricane Rita.

The truth is that we’re drunk on oil and intoxicated with scale. The imagined “bigness” we pride ourselves on here in Dallas is in actuality a weakness. The city marketing slogan “Live Large” is really an invitation to live precariously in a world that depends entirely on the exploitation of fossil fuels.

And insofar as our national security rests on financial stability, this dependency is dangerous. It destabilizes us politically, and we are obliged to compete globally for energy resources. With an energy hungry consumer class rapidly emerging in China, is this a game we really want to play?

(more…)

I came across this advertisement while the newest version of iTunes was installing in to my computer.

At first I thought these two healthy specimens were listening to two different iPods, which is probably how they met. But they are sharing a single device. Both walking along, audible world turned off, matching Gap denim. Nature and marketing taking their course.

The young woman looks at you, and has her hand gently and suggestively on the thin cord. They are outdoors – a rarity nowadays. But the sounds of the world are coming in mono, sans the production value of the sounds in the other. The suspension bridge intersects with her eyes and the kiss being delivered to her ear by a mostly obscured male interest. Maybe he’s trying to whisper the words of the song, or smells the sea in her hair.

She pinches a little tighter on the cable, the absurdity that dominates the image. Creating a snaking white line from her ass, traversing the belly and into her shaped hand, it then appropriately splits, traveling to opposing ears of the two supposed lovers.

In a few years this advertisement will date itself very precisely. Not because of the clothes or the graphical design. It will date itself because of the cord. Like the decayed plants and animals that run our cars, the cord shows just how crude the technology still is. A cord? But as the cable and the product disappear into chips in our heads (or asses), the image becomes all-important. Who it allows us to be, since most of our personalities are the color of moldy brown Play-Doh.

The image seduces. It says: we’re carefree. We’re outdoors; we’re in San Francisco, not some craphole like Atlanta or Houston, where it smell like pesticides rather than herbal essences and salt water.

If we accept this condition, this splitting, this dual monaural soloing, maybe there’s something we can make of it. Musicians could start making recordings for people who share their iPods. Maybe both channels are the same. Maybe they are completely different, like in early stereo recordings by the Beatles.

Maybe they are themed, or simply reflect different tastes. The guy can listen to something abrasive, the girl can listen to something romantic. Or they can switch, or mix and match. Or they can hear pre-recorded versions of things they would like to say directly but are too shy to perform. Or maybe some expert communicator can record appropriate phrases for them. Little nothings.

At least that way they will remain in their comfort zone of mutual isolation, back to when they were just silhouettes in the previous ads. Indistinct, separate. Random. Dancing alone.