The Survey Spiral: I Think I'm Getting Dizzy

Have you noticed an increasing number of surveys being sent to you by mail, email or text? I decided to assemble a few of these for a blog post. 

The Survey Spiral

1. Post-Flight Feedback  

Subject: Tell Us About Your Skyward Journey, Ed!

Dear Ed,

Thank you for flying with Horizon Airways on September 5, 2025. We’d love to hear about your experience soaring through the clouds! Please take 5-7 minutes to complete our survey and let us know how our in-flight service, seat comfort, and complimentary pretzel portion size met your expectations.

Your feedback helps us soar higher!

[Take the Survey Now]

Best,

Horizon Airways Customer Experience Team

P.S. This survey is managed by SkyFeedback Inc., ensuring your responses are confidential unless you mention the pretzels.

2. Restaurant Review Request  

Subject: How Was Your Burger Bliss, Ed?

Dear Ed,

Thanks for dining at Burger Bonanza on September 5, 2025! We’re hungry for your thoughts. Please spend 10 minutes rating your meal, from bun fluffiness to fry crispiness. Was our staff’s smile wattage sufficient? Did the ketchup dispenser meet your squirting expectations?

Your input fuels our flavor!

[Click to Rate Your Meal]

Cheers,

Burger Bonanza Feedback Crew

P.S. Complete the survey for a 1% chance to win a free milkshake (terms apply).

3. Grocery Store Survey  

Subject: Ed, Share Your Shopping Cart Story!

Dear Ed,

You recently shopped at Super One on September 6, 2025. We’re curious about your grocery adventure! Please take 12-15 minutes to evaluate the freshness of our produce, the ambiance of our canned goods aisle, and whether our self-checkout scanner’s voice was sufficiently soothing.

Bonus question: Did our parking lot inspire joy?

[Start the Survey]

Warm regards,

MegaMart Satisfaction Squad

P.S. Your responses may be shared with our AI to optimize carrot placement.

4. Susie’s Dinner Survey  

Subject: Ed, How Was Tonight’s Pasta?

Dear Ed,

Thank you for dining at Home Kitchen with me (your wife, Susie) on September 6, 2025. I’d love your feedback on tonight’s pasta dinner. Please take 8 minutes to rate the sauce zestiness (1-5 stars), portion size, and my tableside manner. Was the candlelit ambiance romantic enough, or did the dog’s barking detract from the vibe?

Your input helps me plan next week’s menu!

[Click to Rate Dinner]

Love,

Susie

P.S. Don’t forget to do the dishes. I’ll send a follow-up survey about that.

5. My Dishwashing Survey  

Subject: Susie, Rate My Dishwashing Performance!

Dear Susie,

Thank you for entrusting me with dishwashing duties on September 6, 2025. Please take 10 minutes to evaluate my scrubbing technique, soap suds consistency, and drying efficiency. Did I leave any pasta residue on the plates? Was my humming during the task uplifting or annoying?

Your feedback ensures sparkling clean dishes in the future!

[Take the Dish Survey]

Best,

Ed

P.S. I noticed a fork was still greasy—please don’t dock points for that.

6. Neighborhood Dog-Walking Survey  

Subject: Ed, How Did Jubilee’s Walk Go?

Dear Ed,

Our Solway Neighborhood Watch AI detected you walking your dog, Jubilee, on September 6, 2025, at 7:32 PM. We’d appreciate 15 minutes of your time to rate our gravel road's walkability, the friendliness of passing squirrels, and whether Jubilee’s leash tension was optimal. Did you feel sufficiently neighborly during the stroll?

[Share Your Walk Experience]

Sincerely,

Sandberg Road Surveillance Committee

P.S. Your responses may be used to train our drone dog-walk monitors.

7. Coffee Mug Usage Survey  

Subject: Ed, Tell Us About Your Morning Mug!

Dear Ed,

Our IoT-enabled coffee mug (#45892) recorded usage on September 6, 2025, at 8:03 AM. Please spend 20 minutes rating the mug’s grip comfort, heat retention, and existential contribution to your morning routine. Did the mug’s ceramic sheen inspire you to seize the day?

[Rate Your Mug Experience]

Yours in caffeine,

SmartMug Analytics Team

P.S. Non-responders may receive a follow-up survey about why they didn’t respond.

8. Dream Quality Survey  

Subject: Ed, How Was Your Nap Dream on September 6?

Dear Ed,

Our SleepTrack 3000 brainwave monitor noted you napped from 2:15 PM to 2:47 PM on September 6, 2025. Please take 25 minutes to evaluate your dream’s narrative coherence, character development, and overall surrealness. Was the flying penguin subplot satisfying? Did the dream’s resolution leave you fulfilled?

[Rate Your Dream]

Best,

NeuroSleep Feedback Corp

P.S. Your dream data may be shared with our AI to optimize future nightmares.

9. Existential Life Choice Survey 

Subject: Ed, Reflect on Your Life Decisions!

Dear Ed,

Our LifeScan Algorithm detected you made a choice (e.g., wearing socks with sandals) on September 6, 2025. Please dedicate 30 minutes to assess whether this decision aligned with your core values, societal expectations, and cosmic purpose. Did the socks enhance your aura? Would you choose differently in an alternate universe?

[Evaluate Your Existence]

Regards,

Quantum Life Review Board

P.S. Your answers may influence your multiversal doppelgänger’s choices.

10. Survey About Surveys  

Subject: Ed, Rate Your Survey Experience!

Dear Ed,

You’ve received 9 survey requests between September 5-6, 2025. Please spend 45 minutes reviewing the tone, frequency, and emotional impact of these surveys. Did the font choices (e.g., Comic Sans in Survey #7) evoke trust? Were the questions sufficiently invasive to make you question reality?

[Survey the Surveys]

Eternally yours,

The OmniFeedback Collective

P.S. Failure to complete this survey will trigger an infinite loop of follow-up surveys.

* * * * * 

DISCLAIMER: This blog post is a work of fiction.

Please Rate this Survey Spiral in the Comments below.

On Exactitude In Science: Borges' Pointed Story Is Also Serious Fun

"On Exactitude in Science" is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that was first published in 1946. I discovered it in a 1971 Fall Winter Antioch Review where it was served up as one of six short literary hors d'oeuvre appetizers. The very first bite ("A Yellow Rose") was so tasty that I have been a Borges fan ever since.

This story is about an empire where the art of cartography has become so exact that maps are made on the same scale as the territory they represent. The story explores the relationship between reality and representation, and the limits of human knowledge.

In the very brief span of 154 words Borges shows how the pursuit of perfection can lead to absurdity. The empire in the story as set for itself the goal of creating a perfect map of its territory, but in doing so, it creates a map that is no longer useful. The outcome is comical. 

On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. 
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

* * * 

For what it's worth, I have written a number of blog posts about Borges and his works. You will find links to many of these here. 

Do you have a favorite Borges story? Share it in the comments.

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) -- Dylan Sets The Hook

This is the song that locked me in. That is, when I was a kid living through that convulsive cultural concussion that included Kennedy assassinations, a war in Southeast Asia that made no sense, cities burning and ongoing black oppression despite the new laws that had been passed --- and television escapism that entertained and diverted everyone's attention but did nothing to feed the soul -- this is the song that told me someone was out there who understood what was rattling around inside my head... or soul.

Arrows have barbs for a reason. Bow hunters from ancient times to the present understood that arrows needed arrowheads or barbs to embed them in the sinews and keep them from falling out.

Fish hooks likewise have barbed tips for the very same purpose. No matter how that fish squirms and shakes, waggles and flops, that hook is only going to penetrate deeper, tangled in the sinews.

So it is that a song's lyrics can penetrate ever so deeply into unprotected, unarmored tissue, the soft underbelly of the soul.

I wasn't the only one to be pierced.

What I remember from my youth is hearing that "the drug problem" was only a problem when it wasn't contained in the ghetto. That racism wasn't an issue as long as it stayed in the Deep South. Books like Steinbeck's Travels With Charley, a first person account of a road trip with his dog, caught many readers off guard when he wrote frankly about the last leg of his journey, through our southern states, and what he saw there.

Hollywood's Easy Rider was also a road trip story. Hippies were also not welcome in the Deep South. This song accompanied the soundtrack from that film, and produced the most profound effects upon its hearers, at least those like me whose hearts were experiencing disillusionment with the way things were. Were we living the American Dream? How could we have so much and feel so empty?

It's Alright, Ma is a song about innocence lost.

* * * *

The elements of existential philosophy are all here. The sense of the absurd. Disillusionment. The tragic sense of life. But when you reach the end Dylan's response is not resignation. As the narrator goes kicking, upside down inside handcuffs, he kicks his legs to crash it off. 

The existential sense of living within an absurd world becomes a recurring theme throughout the decades with Dylan. His music took root because we ourselves felt it, understood in some inarticulate way. His songs put into words the nebulous things we were feeling. You can especially feel it in his Grammy-winning Time Out Of Mind. "I've been down to the bottom of a world full of lies, I ain't lookin' for nothin' in anyone's eyes," he sings. "Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear... it's not dark yet. But it's getting there."

* * * *

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying

So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it

Advertising signs they con
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough, what else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music

Who but Dylan wrote songs like this? I know not one.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. 

The Painted Absurd

I originally saw excerpts from Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word in Harper’s magazine where the book had been excerpted. (I may still have a copy of that issue in my garage.) His cannon blasts against the absurdities which have presented themselves as “art” in the past half century were deafening. My guess is that some people celebrated and many were appalled, but for sure it became a stimulating read for at least one former art student, myself.

Wolfe essentially relates and dissects the process by which the art world evolved from visual artists creating paintings and sculptures to conceptual artists who had no product whatsoever except the theories surrounding what they were “saying.”

The argument culminates thus: "…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes.… Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until…it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory!…Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.”

Many young art students loved it because it did not require any skills to make “art” any more. You just had to have a cool idea that was communicated in a manner in which other people “got it.” Or twist your head around the zeitgeist of wonderfully new ideas like “ugly is beautiful” and “talentlessness is talent.”

The opening lines of my 1980’s short story Terrorists Preying, which in 2008 was translated into French, summarize some of my feeling about my personal struggle with these issues:

Although I'd been an art major in college -- mostly painting and drawing -- I became discouraged with it shortly after graduation and gave it up. I was living with my family on Long Island at the time and for some while afterwards still visited the New York art galleries, making regular tours of the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Modern.

What finally got me out of art was the whole directionlessness of it all. No one seemed to know what art was about any more. DuChamp started it, of course, with his Readymades. It took the rest of the world a half century to catch on. Everything was art, the critics were saying. For myself, their steel-firm logic stubbornly taunted everything I'd built my life around, leaving me creatively disabled, impotent, and broken down. In the end, I became the essence of minimalism, and ceased to exist.

Eventually every creative artist wrestles with how much to play the game. Each alone must decide for him/herself who they are and what they are about. For me, my fine arts background has blended into the foundations that support my advertising career, but on the side I still make “art” for various purposes, both illustrative and therapeutic. And I also continue to follow the arts scene by visiting galleries and reading magazines like Art News, ArtForum and Art in America among others.

Which leads me to this article that I stumbled on about conceptual artist James Lee Byars. (Nov. 2008 Art in America) Frankly, I never heard of him, but he was someone influential who did some big work which evidently seemed important to someone (most assuredly the critics whom Wolfe lambasted.) The article asks an interesting question: when your art career produces no product, what have you left for posterity?

Thomas McEvilley, author of the piece "James Lee Byars, A Study of Posterity", wrote, "Though James Lee Byars has been increasingly identified since his death, with elegant, reductive objects, his most radical-and characteristic-works were ephemeral and even immaterial." In short, Byars perfectly exemplifies what Wolfe in 1979 was talking about.

To be honest, my college art career began with philosophy classes. After three or four, I felt that since philosophy leaves no product, I should make art, which was also philosophical but left you with something to look at afterwards. Besides I'd been drawing all my life since my classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art when I was five. The irony is that artists likewise went the way of the philosophers… at least, those who bought into the notions of Happenings and Conceptual Art as the next evolution.

If you’re interested in a good short read that answers the important question, How did we get from Rembrandt to a guy painting seal skins white and nailing them to his apartment wall in Boston? Pick up a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word.