Bill Barol

Wait! Did I say go there? I meant "Go here."

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:25:00 -0700

Wait! Did I say go there? I meant "Go here.":

If you’re one of the people who follows this long-dormant blog on Tumblr: Thank you! And heavens, you certainly are patient! I mean, I completely forgot about it a year ago, and yet you kept it right there in your Dashboard. This calls for a reward, so here’s what I’m going to do, and remember not to tell the others because YOU ARE MY FAVORITE. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to extend you an early invitation to be a follower of my brand-new Tumblr, Extra Super Bonus Happy Funtime, which promises literally years of fun, or weeks at least, or until I get tired of it. It’s going to be a party every night, like the old Arsenio show! Or maybe it’ll just be a sad, wan attempt to cash in on long-ago glory, like the new Arsenio show. The point is, it’s there, and if you wanted to follow it, well, you could probably do worse.

You should go here now, please.

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:22:59 -0800

You should go here now, please.:

…and thank you.

Have a nice trip.

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 17:37:58 -0700

And remember, Merv Griffin loves you.

Have_A_Nice_Trip.mp3 Listen on Posterous

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Why I decided to tweet my cancer.

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 09:56:00 -0700

We were hurtling down the 405 in the dark, in that section between Mulholland and Sunset where the canyon walls close in on both sides and the only illumination comes from the lights of the cars, when I turned to Jennifer and said: “I’ve been thinking about tweeting my cancer."

There was a fractional pause. "Really,” she said – the kind of “Really” that implies Holy Mackerel. You have absolutely brought me up short here. Then: “What do you mean, exactly?”

“I’ve been wondering if I want to write about my cancer,” I said. “On Twitter."

She knew that much. What she was asking was: Why? For who? To what end? This was Sunday night. Three days before, on Thursday afternoon, I’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The pathology report indicated a focus of cells that was very small and highly treatable. The fact that it was probably the best kind of cancer to be told you have didn’t feel much like good news. It didn’t make me feel like I’d won an eBay auction or dodged a bullet. It made me feel like the bullet had sunk itself softly into my skin while I wasn’t paying attention and now I was standing there watching it protrude from my body, thinking What the hell is this thing? Where did this come from? "I have cancer,” I’d been telling myself for three days, walking around the idea, poking it with a stick. “I have cancer.” It was still absurdly soon. It had just happened. It was real. It wasn’t real yet.

“Wow,” Jennifer said. “I’m surprised."

"I am too,” I said.

“Why would you do that?” she said.

I’d been wondering that myself, because I’ve never been the sort of person to air much of my personal life in public. It was a week for all sorts of new things. And so I started to talk, thinking out loud – about the world of social media I’ve been spending so much time in lately, for both personal and professional reasons. About whether the notion of social media as “community” is a dream, or a lie. About what community is for, or ought to be for. About people with whom I’d developed a weird, online-only relationship, and how I’d wondered what the limits of that sort of relationship were. I talked about Merlin Mann’s essay on “making the clackity noise,” and the notion that the quick gag might be easy but what people really respond to in social media is what’s real and true. I talked about writing as a way of making sense of the world, and what it would feel like to leave such rich, authentic material on the table and walk away. “Fraudulent,” I said. “It would feel fraudulent."

"Okay,” Jennifer said. “But why Twitter? Why not blog about it?”

This was tougher to answer, although I was already sure I didn’t want to do something like a single-purpose blog about my cancer. I like Twitter, and it felt like the right venue. It felt appropriate to fold posts about my illness into a stream of material, all kinds of material, of which some was trivial and some was smart-alecky and some was serious. That seemed like the sort of approach that most mirrored what I was already groping toward – a life that would include, but not be defined by, my cancer. It didn’t only have to do with balance, though. It had to do with authenticity. There was a sense in which some part of the information I was already putting on Twitter was fake; it was heightened for comic effect, or truncated to meet the demands of the medium. But to omit this new fact in my life felt different than that passing kind of fakery, and worse.

Still, things troubled me about the idea. I worried about being seen as a sort of cancer tourist – a guy with a diagnosis that was highly hopeful, as these things go, slumming in a world of people who were really sick. (I managed to dismiss that idea pretty quickly via a simple mental trick: I pictured a roomful of healthy middle-aged guys, asked how many of them wanted to trade places with me, and counted the number who raised their hands.) I worried about people finding it inappropriate, in poor taste, showy. I could respect any of those positions. For some people, I supposed, it might simply be outside their comfort zones. I could appreciate that position too, because it was outside mine, as Jennifer pointed out now.

“It is, isn’t it,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “In a good way. That’s an argument to do it.” There were arguments for everything now, and against everything – writing about it, not writing about it, one treatment, another treatment. I was living in a world of arguments. They were individually compelling, and when you added them up they formed an exquisitely balanced universe of contradictions.

There was even an argument to be made that I was lucky. It went something like this: I had an early diagnosis, a good prognosis, excellent health care and a supportive spouse. All true, every word. But I didn’t believe, as a friend had already suggested, that my cancer was somehow a good thing wrapped in a bad thing. It wasn’t. It would involve, at a minimum, a good deal of fear and worry for me and my family. Whatever intervention I chose would be unpleasant. But at the end of it I’d be somewhere unexpected, my path altered by circumstances I’d never foreseen or chosen. And if that wasn’t worth writing about, what was? Watching the lights streak by us on the pitch-black freeway, red in front of us, bright white to our left, I thought about a scene from William Broyles’ screenplay for “Apollo 13.” Mission commander Jim Lovell, interviewed on TV, recalls piloting a Banshee toward a carrier in the Sea of Japan during the Korean War. His radar jams and there’s a short in the cockpit. He’s flying blind. All my instruments are gone, my lights are gone, I can’t even tell now what my altitude is, Lovell says. I know I’m running out of fuel, so I’m thinking about ditching in the ocean. And I look down there and then, in the darkness there’s this… there’s this green trail, it’s like a long carpet that’s just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship and it was… it was just leading me home. And if my cockpit lights hadn’t shorted out, there’s no way I would have ever been able to see that. So you… you never know what events are going to transpire to get you home.

10 Names That Are Almost As Good as "Bombshell McGee"

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:03:00 -0700

1) Gutshot DiNardo

2) Lunchpail MacGregor

3) Steamboat DeWalters

4) Cloudburst Spillane

5) Doorstop O'Dorgan

6) Hipcheck Woladarski

7) Spandex Fortensky

8) Pylon Kirkpatrick

9) Carwash LoTrulio

10) Gaspump Brocktoon

So, yeah. I misread the rules for the 5 Vignettes thing on Vimeo...

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:03:51 -0700

So, yeah. I misread the rules for the 5 Vignettes thing on Vimeo and did this. While I’m working on one that actually, you know, is eligible, I give you… “Le Mort du Ennui.”

Okay. I’ll play. The Stompers were (and, I’m happy...

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:23:00 -0700

Okay. I’ll play.

The Stompers were (and, I’m happy to say, still are, at least a couple of times a year) one of the best bands ever to come out of Boston. This is “One Heart For Sale,” from their 1984 major-label debut, which was also their major-label swan song. Sheer pop bliss.

How is it possible I’ve missed “How and where not to...

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:39:07 -0700

How is it possible I’ve missed “How and where not to do The Fishstick” for almost two years? I will never stop watching this.

via stuffparty.

Soft opening... Sssssh.

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:48:12 -0800

Soft opening... Sssssh.:

So because you follow this not-very-active Tumblr blog, or because you stumbled onto it by accident, but in either case you’re very very special to me, I want you to be among the first to know about my new photoblog project, Pix365. I’m posting an iPhone photo a day, every day for the next year. It’s an exercise in creativity, or discipline, or creative discipline or disciplined creativity or some freakin’ thing. In any event, there it is. Go have a look. If you like it: Tell your friends, won’t you? And if you don’t: Keep it to yourself.

Your pal,
Bill

Shopping.

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:36:06 -0800

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Ahora con más azucar! Mucho, mucho más azucar delicioso!

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:43:34 -0800

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Paws.

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:57:04 -0800

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BIG QUESTIONS: A video update.

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:04:47 -0800

BIG QUESTIONS: A video update.

Better than TED

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:50:00 -0800

So I’m thinking my invitation to speak at TED this year got lost in the mail or something, but you know. Whatever. It’s like the third year in a row and honestly, the mail’s not that bad around here, you know? The LA County Clerk always manages to put the summons in my hand when it’s time to go sit in the jury box cooling my heels for a day, but, you know: Fine. Whatever. Because I really don’t mind at all. You know why. It’s because I got my own pretty damn sweet international confab of edgy, out-of-the-box Big Thinkers happening right here in my carport in Santa Monica. I had to shove some bags of charcoal and dog food out of the way and get creative with the wife’s car, but it was totally worth it because I got the best damn multinational gathering of unconventional, thought-provoking thought leaders in the world right in my own backyard, baby, or right next to it. It’s accessible from the yard, anyway, if you prop open the gate (it’s been sticking since we had all that rain). Who have I got? Oh, nobody. Nobody very famous or thought-provoking or conventional-wisdom-challenging. Just a few very good friends. Does the name BONO mean anything to you? No? How about a little guy I like to call MISTER STEVE JOBS. How about that. Plus I got Buffy Sainte-Marie and that guy who invented the Snuggie and 1976 Nobel Prize winner Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg, and they’re all mixing and cross-pollinating and whatnot out in the carport, and then after they’re tired from altering each other’s fundamental assumptions about the world and stuff we all kinda take a break and chillax and crack some Red Bulls. And baby, you HAVE NOT LIVED until you’ve argued semiotics with Kevin Garnett after he’s gotten a few Bullies under his belt. What’s that? It sounds all cross-disciplinary and stuff? Oh, we get cross-disciplinary up in my carport, and if you don’t believe that, you should just ask MY VERY GOOD FRIENDS NOAM CHOMSKY AND DR. OZ. Yeah, it’s pretty sweet, even if shit gets real once we have to find a place for everybody to bed down for the night, what with Brewster Kahle refusing to sleep on the air mattress and the sexual tension between Sarah McLachlan and Atul Gawande. But it all works out, and when we straggle out to the yard for coffee and donut holes the next morning, you can just tell it’s gonna be another day of MAD CRAZY ASSUMPTION-CHALLENGING, BAYBEE. Look, if you work for TED, just read this part: Please invite me next year. I’ll sit in the back and be very quiet and not bother anybody. I swear it. Just put me on the list for next year and I’ll be there on time and look sharp. I’ll even drive myself there, although I’m gonna have to have some work done on the Gremlin because somebody sat on the fender and dented it, I’m not naming names STEVE WOZNIAK. So call me, okay? Please. Please please please. I won’t beg, though.

Originally published over at the HuffPo, there.

Best meme ever: Snooki is everywhere.

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:42:13 -0800

Best meme ever: Snooki is everywhere.

It's like jolly old St. Nick never left!

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:48:19 -0800

Thanks to my super-thoughtful across-the-alley neighbors, I can be reminded well into February of the joy that Christmas brings. The dead, brown joy. Salud!

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Look... Shiny!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:42:09 -0800

Hey, Tumblr followers (and there’s 23 of you, much to my amazement)! How you doing? Good, good. So I… Uh huh. Okay, look, I… Right. I… Look, I didn’t ask for your life stories, okay?

So if you like what I’ve infrequently been doing here, and again, against all odds, almost two dozen of you do, would you consider following my other Tumblr site, Big Questions? It’s a daily vlog detailing my 45-day campaign to get a Web video pilot funded, and you’ll be privy to all of it – the thrilling highs, the sludgy lows, and that gristly bit right in the middle. You know, the one that always gets stuck in your molars.

It’s rank self-promotion to ask, and I know this, but these are rank times we live in. So thanks.

Big Questions goes multi-platform

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:58:00 -0800

Hi, Tumblr. I know you think I’ve been… well, absent for a while. I know, I know, you think I’ve been spending too much time running around with Twitter, and that Twitter’s shallow. Look, me and Twitter… ? That was totally a summertime thing. What can I say, I have a thing for short girls. But now I’m back, baby, and this time I mean it when I say I’ll never leave you. …What’s that? You say I’ve got something to “promote”? What, you mean like Big Questions, my web video pilot that I’m trying to get funded over at Kickstarter? Or the daily Big Questions vlog I’ve set up to keep supporters updated on the project’s progress? Or the Twitter feed I’ve set up for the Tumblr vlog? Baby. Baby. You know you’re the only one for me. You know I love you, Posterous… Wait. What?

BIG QUESTIONS: A Web video pilot.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:11:26 -0800

BIG QUESTIONS: A Web video pilot.

What?... Yes. No. Maybe. I'm sorry, I just want so badly to smack you.

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:23:00 -0700

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