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freedom and rules
Saturday, November 27 1999
A prisoner becomes familiar with the bars and walls of his cell and the patterns and schedules of his jailers. These things represent the limits of the prisoner's world. He knows he isn't free in proportion to his familiarity with the things that keep him from doing what he wants to do. Execution has always been a way out for prisoners, since no one knows what it's like to be dead.
I don't know much about tax law, which indicates that I don't consider taxes much of an abridgement of my freedom. I do know approximately how far I can go with outrageous statements on my web pages. I've been punched in the nose for things I've written. I've had people threaten to contact the FBI about pages I've posted. This indicates that I'm not especially free when it comes to expressing myself on the World Wide Web. But it's a limit I can play with, subvert and taunt. Every artist who's any good is familiar with all sorts of limits: the time it takes paint to dry, what colours are opaque, the limitations of certain brushes and strokes, the possibility of fingering certain guitar chords with a human hand. Those limits represent the barrier between what needs to be considered and what can usefully not be considered.
In the evening the new neighbor girl Anne Marie came over and asked if I'd fix her computer. She was hanging out at her place with my other neighbor Jason (the "redneck surfer from Malibu"). While he stood around kibitzing and coming up with one unhelpful debugging suggestion after another, I was in pursuit of a simple dial tone. A lack of such a dialtone turned out to be the problem. I fixed Anne Marie's telephone jack by poking its thin little pins back into tension with a stick of incense of all things. It was the closest thing to a tool in Ann Marie's entire apartment. Rejoice; her AOL was functional again.
We sat around after that sipping wine & brandy and smoking resin scraped from the heavily-laden inside of one of Kim's pipes. I couldn't find Kim's stash of kind bud, but this was just as good.
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