Prometheus 6

April 6th, 2005 marks two years of the existance of P6 in one form or another. It feels weird to make note of it when I don't really make note of my birthday, but it seems traditional on the blognet.

Because of the anniversary thing, I thought I'd share the first fruit of my page-per-day project. It needs editing.

I'm keeping the rest to myself until I figure out what I'm writing it for.

I never intended to be a blogger.

What happened is, the nature of my
diabetes changed…I became insulin dependant. And since,
like most men, I was in denial about my health problems as I
wasted away literally to the edge of death, my health took me
right out of the labor market.

Fortunately for me, I’ve been
aggressive and ambitious enough that my disability payments put
me well above the poverty level for a family of four.
Unfortunately for me, I find it totally unacceptable to be
inactive…I am still aggressive. I am still
ambitious.

However, I am also pushing 50 years old
and (as previously mentioned) was on death’s door.

There’s a certain level on which I
saw all that as a challenge. Ambitious Black men have little
choice but to see any obstacle as a challenge. You run into walls
all over the place — the walls every other ambitious person
faces and, every so often, one of those “special”
walls reserved for Black folks. Both sets of obstacles are
irrational and so need an irrational response.

But I digress. Or more accurately, I
foreshadow.

Anyway, I saw a challenge and since
I’ve had to restart my life several times I figured it was
time for another reboot. I still have all the skills I’ve
gained from all manner of jobs, encounters with all manner of
people and attitudes, personal obsessions…all the things
that took me from a foot messenger to Assistant Vice President in
a Japanese bank. I thought, and still think, that you can’t
do that but so many times before you die. This restart will
likely be the last so I needed to think about it clearly, find
something I want to do until I’m unable to do anything
anymore. At the particular time, though, I wasn’t able to
do much more than read and bitch.

Which leads me to blogging.

Blogging had just hit the media radar
screen big time by bringing repercussions, symbolic though they
be, to Trent Lott over his wistful reminiscences of the good
ol’ days. His Confederate dreams of Dixiecrat dominance
didn’t surprise me and therefore didn’t annoy me.
Much. I was far more annoyed by the Black folks that obediently
lined up to defend him and the Republican Party’s defense
of him.

But I was interested by reports that the
challenge Lott faced was driven by Internet sites, weblogs. I
came to realize several of the sites I read regularly, those with
the most trenchant commentary, were weblogs. And honestly,
because I’ve been online for GOD knows how long and am
interested in technology in general, my very first thought was,
“there’s got to be a way I can make money
here.” It was a matter of watching the direction of this
thing and trying to get out in front of it.

I’ve always been more interested in
selling shovels than prospecting for gold. Since it looked like
it was going to go large I thought I’d write some desktop
blogging tools. Programming was one of the skills I developed as
a tool to support my corporate advancement; I enjoyed it, and if
you catch the right product you can do rather well while
maintaining a great degree of independence. I’d also
learned no one, including me, really knows what they want
their software to do until they see it. Seeing a new product
category, I decided I needed to play with it for a while to see
what blogging software needs to be capable of. So after about
four months of reading blogs, I opened an account with Blogger
and began the experiment.

Such was my thinking. But I discovered
quickly that blogs were pretty much what I was looking for, for
those two online decades. I want to share the first post from my
second day with the Blogger account that sums up where I was at.
In the tradition of blogging I repeat it with typos intact.

Second day of
"Blogging"

In quotes because
I playing with it, really.

This could become
an obsession for someone (like me) with too much goddamn time on
their hands. Especially if you've been reading blogs for a
while.

Blogs have me
online so much I can't talk shit about the "web surfers" of olden
days, the people who clicked random links for entertainment. I've
been berserk recently, following the war discussions, and it
hasn't been pleasant (more on that later).

Anyway, I'm
getting the feel for what a successful blogging tool is like. I
get to modify XREBlogger/XREBloggregator/Whatever I'm gonna call
it accordingly…just a bit is all that's necessary. But of
course that's not the only reason I'm interested in this.

Truthfully, I've
wanted a public speaking platform ever since Intersection days.
And in those days I was looking at a specific set of goals and
ideas. Those goals are still good but there's a bag of other
stuff that has me concerned, not least of which is the way the
RIME Current Events/Debate conference seems to have risen to
devour the public debate space (man, you got to be old as
hell to remember that!). The bag is getting too big, too
full. I need to develop some kind of focus.

Crushing asshole
comments and rhetoric feeblely disguised as logic is easy.
Getting heard is hard and getting individuals to change their
behavior is harder. Influencing the public debate alone is
probably a sisyphean task. Finding and linking up with the right
folks is only slightly less difficult.

A single blog is
insufficient unto the task. A network though, properly
used…

And "properly
used" is the problem. It is my experience that too many
grass-roots types (and I could name names) are as concerned with
recognition as correctness. A lot can't seem to think of a
solution that doesn't require themselves at the top of the
pyramid. Human nature, I suppose. A number of folks are just
pissed da fuck off and their idea of activism is ragging
on people…more human nature. And a lot of the discussion
takes place in self-reinforcing groups of people who don't know
how the system operates. As such, those discussions have
self-reinforcing errors.

Lotta lotta
problems, lotta lotta issues. Notta lotta answers, because I feel
like I've lost touch with folks on the ground. Alll this
down-time has let me know that.

I have a couple
of ideas, though. Primary among them is finding some way to
facilitate the communication and exchange of ideas among the
grass-roots. A lot of the discussion is done on the cheap, Yahoo
mailing lists and such. Good looking web sites and/or blogs that
folks will want EVERYONE to know about would help. A method of
letting people know about new information would help as
well--something like www.weblogs.com, maybe, or better, like
www.syndic8.com specializing in syndicating Black
interest/leftist/activist weblogs.

I'm feeling,
though truthfully the public platform thing is more appealing to
me (damn that human nature!), the networking thing is more
important.

If I'm
serious…and I think I am…I got work to do.

(Note to self:
the application MUST HAVE A SPELL-CHECKER)

(Second note: a grammar checker would be nice too, but I don't
know how! sob!)

So it began. And it continues. As I write
every day, it feels like I’m shifting, changing styles,
evolving. Yet looking back over two years of writing and linking
I find I’ve been consistent to a degree that shocks me. I
suspect as this current project proceeds, I’ll find out a
few things about myself…maybe even a few things I
don’t want to know. It wouldn’t be the first
time.