Regarding Indian Halloween Costumes

I was sad to see a leading figure in contemporary music dressed as an Indian chief for Halloween. Sad and confused. Really? Still?

Then a friend posted this and it helped give direction and fuel to my thoughts.

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Regarding Indian Halloween Costumes:

Forgive them for the know not what they do.

They are so detached from anything that resembles an authentic culture, that they can't possibly understand what it's like to have traditions that actually mean something.

Their own traditions have been packaged and commodified so many times that even ironic representations of them seem cliché. (See: Christmas, Halloween, and every other holiday)

They started by consuming things made by people, then they cut out the middle man and just started consuming people as "services." That got old, so they packaged the service in an experience. Now we're grouping those experiences together as a culture.

The ad wizards who run this culture have been selling culture/lifestyle to them their whole lives and they have become completely numb to it.

Within their own culture, the hints of authenticity that have emerged over the years have been similarly cannibalized and commodified.

They consume what they're sold; they eat what they're fed.

Having no strong cultural ties, they drift in a quasi-nihilist haze, trying on bits and pieces of other cultures like they're garments in a Target dressing room.

But there is hope, and the hope is education. We need to educate people that there are some things that can't be bought and sold because they are sacred. We may even need to teach them what sacred means any more.

And we need to decommodify and rehumanize people and cultures.

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Hiatus Landed: Bay Area

I don't know why I'm writing a blog post right now.

I'm sitting on a couch in a house in a rather suburban part of Oakland, and it's raining. It's raining on both sides of the bay, where I spent the better part of the day and where I am now.

I was struck by the idea today that writing literature is a handy way of purging demons from your past—all those little emotional hangups that we could pay a therapist to talk through or simply invent characters and make them go through the same thing.

And the characters are the easy part. The hard part is the situation. I may not have an overwhelming character, but I find myself in the most interesting situations. And as I accrue new ones, I notice the patterns, the inversions, retrogrades and transpositions of the same themes.

This is also a good time to redefine the blog title, embody the struggle.

The original quote is referring to a novel, not a character. In my head, I had it wrong, whether or not I ever explained it.

For a *novel* to have merit, *it* must embody the struggle of some characters against that keeps them from existing in their own way. The characters struggle, the novel embodies the struggle.

And I am merely a character. Which makes the novel the blog. So the *blog* embodies the struggle. I write the blog to embody my struggle.

So it does make sense. Sorry to think out loud.

Stay tuned, though, for some fiction. It may be loosely based on reality. But the names will be changed to protect the innocent—and the guilty.