blog (February, 2004)
ebb & flow
Tiny fluorescent bedlight makes magic on blankets and wintry dry hands.
I read and listen and watch, and it is all IT when I'm in it.
The Dreamers film tonight and it's all France, women & wine. Kerouac has just brought me again to Mexico, and Lawrence sits me down at an English small-town kitchen table with a garden outside, an alley, and a sad, mean life. And more music than I have ears for. Oh, and news news news (the new kind, not the paper pulp.)
I can live it but it's consumption and not mine and the only thing I'm really living is a job where I struggle and kid myself that I'm valuable and participating in a not even itsybitsy piece of world growth, and some running and playing...
I need new someone(s) to really jive with -- to get on with and go on. And the reason I wanna move outta this city is I haven't been lucky in finding that here. And it's not the city, it's me, but -- man, something's gotta shake these doldrum daydreams.
stupid body functions
I just napped two hours but I've got a souring feeling at the pit of me.
I cut out of work a bit early and skipped a lecture I was going to see, veering instead to bed to try and cut through the fog. It's going to be a big weekend, whatwith Melvin & other coming-to-towners for the Case alumni swimmeet my housemates have planned.
On the way home I swung by the Home Depot & picked up another hanging plant and a pen-length fluorescent fixture I'll wall-stick over my pillow to eat battery and spit out reading light. More things to add a smiling touch, but seat me further in this place and life.
A kid outside the window is shouting I'm a zombie! and the Ravel CD in my computer skips again and causes the hard drive to noisily spin back up. My room is dark and if I look sidelong at the mirror, my face is a half moon from the laptop screen's light.
My stomach burns for something, but I ate a whole package of rice cakes for lunch, and I'll wait until I get a short run in tonight before feeding it again.
visceral valentines vicariousness
Funny how I can be so cynical of life and emotion; -- just last week I was telling a recently bereaved friend that these egoistic melancholies we are taught to want by overdramatic literature and film, -- only to be flooded with wishes, love and sorrows at, of all places, the movies.
[In America comes recommended.]
Driving back from the cinema I nearly missed a turn, but my dad's reminder shook me back to life from my thoughts and the question forming:
When did I last experience that pain or love... of losing someone, or feeling someone as close as me to myself?
Lately I haven't been able to yank myself from the subject of my upanddown-ness. But this fluctuation is within the bounds of that same egoism. It's all me, and it's all contrived and buried somewhere beneath life's real fabric.
Yesterday I felt sharply that my consuming interests in technology and all of this webbaloney are not contributing me much in the way of visceral life experience.
That's my funnyvalentine way of saying I need to get out more.
All my love,
thoughts: humans vs. nature
Has humanity become an unnatural beast? Do our actions and our technology defy nature?
Trees stretch skyward, contending for sunlight with their neighbors. But in spite of this competition, we still consider them nature. Every organism is manifested and maintained solely by the base urge to live. That we have used our intellect to create and develop tools to help us do so only demonstrates this.
Our ways are often un-beautiful, unfortunate, and deadly, but at root they exhibit that same desire that is the natural. It is impossible to lose or destroy nature. It's an unbelievable pity that we kill eachother, putrify our soil and air, press the delete key on entire species of organisms -- I in no way advocate violence, pollution, whatever -- but our scars will heal. And we are but a speck, and nearly every trace of our presence will be wiped clean after millions of years, and yada yada.
The struggle against mortality drives all of us [living beings] nuts. If we could listen to the trees I think we'd hear them complain in the wintertime, fear during drought, rejoice after a good watering, shout at someone snapping off a branch, and weep when a family member is cut down in a storm.
Our psychosis and turbulence is natural considering the crazy lifestyle constructs we've created. You don't see squirrels throwing themselves off highrises or yipping to themselves as they stroll down the street -- because they don't have datebooks and psychoactive chemicals and college loans. But that doesn't mean datebooks are unnatural. Only imperfect, transitory elements of the living process.
attempt to redefine my daily guidelines
read, write, sit, shout, sing, and push
These are my new expectations for each day. I won't tell you what they all mean, but the first two are pretty obvious. Running isn't included; it's more than expected.
I've failed in most of those today, though. It's past 1am and I haven't yet left work. I've been here since before 10am.
I've actually been feeling better about things lately. I've had a few less stresses at work which'as allowed me to get a thing or two done. I've been building a company web-based intranet with Apache, Perl, MovableType, php and Smarty. MySQL will be the next friend to come play along, but the tools aren't really that important. I've got to begin doing some reading on intranets in collaboration & knowledge-management. I really want to be creative with this, but ultimately, I can't let usefulness out of sight.
Vonnegut at Severance Hall
Kurt Vonnegut spoke today at Severance Hall, though with the sudden heat wave here in Cleveland, we should've carried the lecture outside.
His age showed when the words didn't always come out in the right order, and when his body defied his mind's liveliness in dancing off the stage for his curtain calls. He is still sharp as a tack, though, and his profound wit and heady, unapologetic viewpoints were provocative and entertaining.
Vonnegut cursed Pall Mall cigarettes for not fulfilling their promise, printed on every box, to kill him -- He doesn't want to live in a world where three of the most powerful people are named Bush, Dick, and Colon.
This existential questioning factored heavily throughout the talk. He credited his son, Mark, with saying,
We are here to help eachother get through this thing, whatever it is...
Kurt's own take on the matter, however:
We are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anybody ever tell you any different.
In the later part of the talk he wandered ever so slightly a few times from his saucy, spirited humor, and dropped us a few reminders: Namely that we should pay attention and recognize those times when we are enjoying ourselves and our lives. To keep our eyes and minds open, because
We don't know enough about life to know what the good news is, or what the bad news is.
tiled floor nirvana
Among the perks where I works are the private bathrooms. No uncomfortable hand-washing meetings, pretending you didn't hear your coworker that was in the stall next to you -- just you, a toilet, a sink, and various and sundry dispensers.
In each of our bathrooms, atop each toilet's iron piping, sits a small house where a tiny robot buddha lives. Each buddha's third eye watches over -- is potty trained -- on his porcelain charge, and he flushes your produce to neverland when you finish.
One of the buddhas is very reliable and efficient. He is eager to please, and faithfully hits the swallow button *ding* on signal.
The second has a lazy eye, or a lazy mind, and must be persuaded. His ineptitude often drives me to take splatters into my own hand and drive home the round, black flush button.
The third buddha's tendencies are even more tiresome, though. He is jittery and anxious, and pulls the trigger at whim; my slightest move in or out of view and he yanks the chain.
I always end my trips to the bathroom doing a handstand against the wall to keep my sanity intact. Karma would have it that the one room with a cement section of wall (that my shoes don't mark up or noisily bang against) is the room where the third buddha sits watch. He goes absolutely nuts when I do my handstands, and I've got to be awfully careful to ensure the hallway outside is empty when leaving the room, so as not to incite suspicions of john-cloggage.
New Album Releases in RSS
I'm digging on the iTunes Music Store RSS Feed Generator.
- Generate RSS feeds for genres of music you enjoy
- Subscribe to them in your newsreader
- Browse newly release albums in these genres as they come out
- Click to open album in the iTunes Music Store
- Preview 30 seconds of each song
- Buy & play a song if you like it (or use your favorite p2p client to steal it)