and maybe some reiki too.

[Draft prequel, from March, to the previous post from earlier today.]

PRACTICAL POSITIVE POSSIBLE LOCAL INNOVATION, “FROM HERE”

(1) Ban leaf-blowers and -suckers.

Reasons: noise, gas-guzzling.

Replace with: humans (or alternatives) with rakes.

Creating gainful employment; reducing fossil fuel consumption and noise and other environmental pollution.

Temporary compromise: crack teams of faculty, staff, and student volunteers could patrol campus at dead of night; blowers and suckers would find nowt to blow and suck the next day; they might, as part of job-protection, send out vigilante squads; there might then be conflict with potential for conflict-resolution (probably that part of para-academic administration towards which I feel most warm and fuzzy). If we’re lucky, pitched nocturnal battles between forces of good and evil, all happily resolved by tea-drinking. I feel something more, and further productive, could be done with tea and leaves and mulch.

(2) Stop reversing vehicles from beeping.

Reason: noise pollution, disrespect for and destruction of the bare necessity to an academic working environment: that is, peace and fecking quiet; damage to mental health and wellbeing. I speak from experience. Seriously, actually.

Replace with: donkeys and other beasts of burden needing happy retirement homes; rehabilitated elderly vehicles made before beeping became compulsory throughout North America.

Temporary compromises: silent vehicles accompanied (fore and/or aft) by a human waving a flag, and physically removing stray flotsam and e-zombies from the vehicle’s path. Rather like early motor-cars. We could put otherwise pointless or superfluous admin staff to good use, at last, and they could achieve job satisfaction similar to current state (minor tyrannies and trivial petty control-dominance insults with HR; marketing & branding).

Or replace the irritating beeping with music. Good music.

If the university (or its sub-contractors) really cared about getting people out the way–people who can’t see or hear them, the oblivious perma-plugged-in–beeping isn’t a solution. You want robot arms (and maybe flag-wearers on stilts, maybe trad scary carnaval giants); projects for computer science/robotics, theatre, special effects, music again, etc.

(3) Single most precious and rare resource: quiet.

Pedestrianise.

Monasticism.

Employ proctors to enforce silence; come the revolution, redeploy extra ex-vice-administrators as proctors and keep them busy and out of mischief, and happy and fulfilled because they still get to control other people. Revolution need not be destructive, it can be creative and fun, rewarding and liberating, for everyone.

Let Suits keep their lengthy impressive job-titles? Or set students creative writing exercises to invent new job-titles, with attached Odes, in seasonal poetry competitions?

Bring rhetoric and poetics back to life.

Composition, brought back from the death of functional compulsory writing courses, reanimated by Apollo.