Burrowowl

It draws near. Thirty days of nonstop wordcraft. Thousands of would-be novelists descend upon their notepads and keyboards, pouring ideas into fresh works of fiction. The goal is clear: 50,000 words of fiction in thirty days. Start on November 1st, finish before December 1st. The prize is the intrinsic satisfaction of having written a novel.

Last year I gave it a shot. I can fabricate all manner of excuses, but frankly I ran out of steam, got dissatisfied with my premise, and couldn’t gut through the second half of the work. I came away with a greater respect for those who have gone before, the wordsmiths that put pen to paper and bore through it. In theory it looks simple, start telling a story and keep going. In practice I found it was quite difficult. I could have told the story I had in my head in 10,000 words or less, it turns out. Clearly I’ll need to take a different approach this time around, pace myself and my plot, and avoid getting to the goodies too early.

As an extra hurdle this time, I’m spending much of the first week of November in Washington DC. I expect to be kept thoroughly occupied. I invite any brave souls out there to join in the struggle. Check out http://NaNoWriMo.org/ and keep your powder dry till the 1st!

Everybody knows the burrowowl lives in a hole. In the ground. Why the hell do you think they call it a burrowowl, anyway?
– The Dead Milkmen, Stuart

I’ve been around on the Internets for a while. I was using this hunk of junk before they were pluralized. Back when we all thought it was a big truck we could just pile things on. Back when NCSA Mosaic was new and mysterious, and tools like Gopher and Archie were the rule of the day. I remember the rise of WWIV bulletin boards here in Sonoma County and thinking that 9600 baud was a bit excessive. And a bowl of soup was a nickle. Anyway.

There are some things I’m just too old and crotchety to quite understand. It’s a pretty long list, so I won’t get into everything. Instead I’d like to just comment openly on web forums and friend lists. I participate in a couple of web forums (fora for you guys that took a semester of Latin) where I have been a reasonably-frequent contributor. Heck, I’ve made nearly 4,000 posts on the Privateer Press site. I was comfortable that in the twenty-two years I’ve participated in bulletin boards and their more recent analogs were open books to me. You acquire an account by whatever means the sysops make available to you, you operate under an alias, you have to live with the fact that the sysops and mods have absolute editorial control should they choose to exercise it, et cetera. I’ve even (reluctantly) become fairly fluent in BBcode.

What I can’t for the life of me understand is why people I don’t know, that I’ve never met, that I don’t actively exchange private messages with, sometimes whose screen names I do not recognize, will add me to their friend lists. When I get a message that says “somedude has successfully added you to their friends list,” my immediate reaction is negative. Who the hell is somedude? Since when did somebody get to unilaterally make friends with me? What kind of horrible standards does this site have for determining a baseline of friendship? Did the word “friend” change on me, did I miss that memo?

When my kid shares a plastic dump truck at the park, he’s made a friend. It’s a shallow ad-hoc friendship that doesn’t even necessitate the exchange of names. Two little kids being nice to each other at the same time are friends. The older you get, the more involved and stringent your requirements for friendship become. You start sorting people out into categories of “classmates” and “teammates” and “acquaintance,” and save the term “friend” to apply only to people towards whom you extend a measure of genuine trust and concern and camaraderie. The natural development of social caution and skepticism contracts your willingness to recognize friendship in strangers.

This doesn’t jive with some anonymous assclown suddenly sticking a label on your web persona. Not even at its loosest, most innocent, pure form of toddler playgroup friendship sees this, where even a hint of reciprocity need not apply.

I have standards. If you only know me as Burrowowl, I am not your friend. If I posted an encouraging comment on your weblog, that is not an exception. I agreed with you at the moment about that very narrow topic of discussion. Reading the “About” page and seeing my full name doesn’t earn you special consideration. To me you are whatever paper-thin mask you hold up in front of your screen as your online persona.

The Republican Party here in the US has fallen on some hard times. The party of personal responsibility has prominent factotums refusing to honor congressional subpoenas. The party of high moral standards has been hit with a series of embarrassing corruption and inappropriate-sex scandals. The party of fiscal conservatism ran the federal government’s budget into the dirt and pushed for a $850 billion bailout for a financial market they are widely perceived as having failed to regulate for the past seven years. Their presidential candidate has hung his hat on a maverick persona that relies heavily on his reputation for opposing pork-barrel spending; but he pushed for, lobbied for, and voted for the $850 billion bailout laden with pork. Their vice presidential candidate… Well, I don’t think there’s a lot that needs to be said there.

I’m kinda feeling sorry for them at this point.