going up to the right on my facebook page where it says "ticker" allows me to see what all my "friends" are doing and where they comment, and even lets me see what other people who are not my "friends" have posted as long as my "friends" are posting on their posts, so i get to read these entire conversations that people are having in the comments of some post or another, often these roll in right while i'm looking at them, and sometimes as in the case of siuc & lowe's, the institution has eliminated them from their page yet people are still somehow commenting and adding onto each other's comments. i'm not quite sure how this happens, maybe the people who have "joined" are allowed to see what's going on yet people like me who just happen in from somewhere else see a certain glossy page where none of that "commentary" is available. so, by going in through my friend's feed, i get the whole conversation, but by going in as i would the front door of, say, lowe's, i would never see, never know.

the nature of privacy is an odd thing worth remarking on; recently i read an article where a guy who was traveling around, and had a kind of mid-eastern name, started to get yanked into those little rooms in airports and homeland spaces, and asked all kinds of questions, due to someone's impression that he was up to no good, or had a suspicious name. now i've been yanked a number of times in these places, because i look somewhat palestinian, and travel alone, and that sets off all kinds of alarms, but i'm always polite to them and figure, if i were them, i'd be suspicious of myself also, or, another way of looking at it is, if you knew what i was thinking, you'd reach out of the line to pull me over & search me. so to get back to this guy, he finally writes to the fbi and says, tell you what, i'll start sending you information about where i am, what i'm up to, which bathroom i'm in, how fast i'm going from here to there. i'll send it to you, free, bury you in the stuff, i'll give you all this data, and you can have it for as long as you want. i'll give you so much data you'll have no idea what to do with it and you'll have to wade through it just to figure out why you were so interested in me in the first place.

this guy struck a chord in me because basically i saw this coming & have been doing more or less the same thing for years. it's easy for me because i do absolutely no radical or subversive activity whatsoever but instead focus entirely on bringing up young children who wouldn't want me to get thrown in jail or even detained unnecessarily for having suspicious thoughts. so i cleaned up my act, knowing full well i'd get searched at every "homeland" outpost, and to tell you the truth i don't even think revolutionary thoughts much anymore, i even vote democrat, though to tell you the truth i do that more because i detest the republicans, than because i really believe in anything those democrats have to say. really i mull over the radical idea that by voting at all you give them permission to stage all these wars in our name, and both democrats and republicans are the same that way, and execute prisoners and ship some of them over onto this little outpost they have in cuba where they keep them indefinitely all in the name of what, we can go into pakistan or wherever and just grab these guys? don't get me started, anyway sometimes i think that just voting, makes you part of the system, and the same is true for the death penalty, even though you vote against it, the mere fact that you vote makes you part of the state, and the system, that ultimately uses its authority to kill these guys, guilty or not. so i mull over this stuff, but sometimes i just write haiku, and i pull out some little folded-up piece of paper in my pocket and scrawl these little poems while i'm being delayed indefinitely in these lines, and then people get really suspicious (what's he making notes about??) and then i'm really in for it.

but fortunately i haven't figured out how to get my cell-phone to flood the world, or facebook, or twitter, with reminders of where i am and what i am doing and how far i am from any place you could call "sensitive". not to mention, flood the fbi with data about my life. i'm just some schmuck with eight kids and a wandering mind.

it's bad enough traveling around the country without your pocketknife, that's the thing i use mostly to open bottles and screw in battery caps that fall out unexpectedly when my kids overuse their little gizmos and threaten to leave battery caps in hotel rooms across the countryside. being asked to travel without a pocketknife or deodorant or toothpaste makes you feel somewhat naked in the world as if anyone can come up to you with a bottle or something, and there would be no way you could open it. you're out there in the world, with no pocketknife and the keys that are attached to them, which are useless anyway when you're away from home, make your pocket feel a pound or two lighter because i've left the pocketknife behind in the glovebox of the little car in the longterm parking over by the far fence. now there's all my data, but it's too late, because i'm back home, & those keys don't get you into anything to speak of, anyway.

sometimes the world comes creeping in on me, like every little piece of lint floating in the air around me is carrying a camera and somebody is watching every little thing i do and making special note of my radical thoughts, or illegal ones, or just the ones that would embarrass me around my own people, if they ever were to need that. but i guess i consider myself lucky, i've done plenty of embarrassing things, but most of it was in the seventies quick before they developed any of this cloying privacy-busting technology where the minute you express interest in a "gadget" ads for that "gadget" start appearing in the little sides of every blog or facebook page you open up trying to lure you into some kind of deal involving your "time" or your "money" and the "hope" of getting one of these "gadgets"...altogether i find myself getting less and less attached to "gadgets" like cell-phones that connect me with the whole mess and more and more attached to a pocketknife which could, in a pinch, open a can of sardines. i would consider bending over so the security cameras couldn't quite get a full picture of what i was opening but the fact is, it's impossible to open a can of sardines without getting some of it on your shirt, and in this way you leave a permanent record that stands up against the tides of time and will be there years from now, with its mute testimony that you went the cheap route rather than simply go to the airport diner where cameras can get a better shot, and order a "turkey club" or a "burger". and so it is that we spend our days in these public places where somebody somewhere is wondering why we don't just get our faces better into the camera so it can tell exactly what we're doing instead of forcing someone to guess, what the heck is he writing on that little piece of paper. you should be glad i don't text while i'm driving. now those guys are really dangerous, and oughtta be hauled in before they bring down the whole fabric of our society's mutual agreement to drive safely, respectfully, and with eyes wide open, so as not to run over the little kid who's chasing his basketball across the road. amen. travel with god, more later.