I believe I have a gift certificate.... let me look

Speeding tickets are fun, getting them. I got one the day of the company picnic. They mailed me information about it. It was a "Courtesy Notice" which arrived yesterday. The fine of $366 is due tomorrow, or a bench warrant for my arrest will be promptly issued. If I decide to fight it in court I must pay the fine by tomorrow anyway. Then, they will one day decide if they want to give me the money back, or fine me more for having tried in court to assert my blamelessness. So much for the presumption of innocence.

Pay now, pay later. We prefer a little of both.

It took 5 days for the letter to travel 27 miles from the Marin County Superior Court to our home. Google Maps shows that it takes 38 minutes by car. I got the ticket on August 2nd, the notice was printed August 14th, it was stamped August 15th, it was mailed August 16th, it arrived 5 days later on the 21st.

That which is not being destroyed by corruption will be handled in time by incompetence. All that it takes to lose faith in the system is to brush up against it.

I'm sure nobody would be able to explain why it took 3 days to actually end up in the outgoing mail from the time that it was printed. This type of government functionality is a process. The arm of justice swings wide and slowly.

I'm tempted to not pay it just to see how long it takes for them to respond. But that way brings much unpleasantness in the form of bureaucratic withcraftery.

Also, I wouldn't want to deprive the state of California from some much needed revenue. I've been told that you can overpay by $2 and it's fun to watch the process by which they must legally return the excess money to you, but those options are closed to me now. I must call in tomorrow with a credit card rather than send in a potentially bad check. I'm going to ask if I can split it up between three or four different cards. 

"Do you take Sears, or JC Penney... Diner's Club?"

"I have this gift certificate that I haven't used..."

"Any chance I could work some of this off, maybe test driving cop cars for you?"

Ah well, best to quickly put it behind me. I will have to try to make up some lost time in the car getting there and back.

That's the thing: I like to drive fast. I always have. When I am a passenger I hear people ask rhetorically, "What's the hurry?" Or, "Oh, you'll get there soon enough..."

But I always think to myself, "I'd so much rather be in that other car, driving."

I see cars go fast and I want to drive fast, also. I want to drive faster than them. No car goes so fast that I do not want to go faster. It is a rush and a thrill to burst past others locked in a machine dream.

If I came into sudden wealth I would purchase a new car first. Many must dream of having a new car. It is where you can spend the most money with the least amount of thought. It is a guaranteed loss, we're told, just to drive a new car off the lot. That's what I want, to pull out of the dealership and mash the pedal to the floor, a detonation of sudden commerce. A volcano of fiscal waste.

Then, once a new car was in place underneath me, I would better be able to find ways to waste the rest of the money, perhaps by buying another car. If one enjoys driving fast, as I do, there should be additional options as to how to break the law. What form will it take...

The day that I got pulled over the cop asked me why I still had a New York Driver's License. I explained that we also had an apartment in NYC. He asked how much time I've spent in California this year. I said, "Just less than half."

"You'll need to get a California driver's license if you live here."

"Am I allowed to have two?"

"If you live in California you need a California Driver's license."

He did not like me very much. That exchange was the closest the event came to being anything of interest. He clocked me at 83 in a 65 zone, 3 mph past the point where the ticket becomes more serious, and expensive. His name was Fitzgerald, which I repeated to myself as Sgt. Shitzfitsimmons on the way to the picnic. It felt like torture to keep my speed under 80 the rest of the way there, and then on the way home. These speeding laws are stifling the natural rambunctiousness of the American working man, they are hobbling the horsepower that carries the precious cargo of the American dream. How is industry expected to ever bounce back at these overly-regulated speeds. 

Why couldn't there have been at least one founding father that was obsessed with racing his carriage through the streets of Philadelphia, crazed with that magic sense of forward, the feeling that only ever-increasing tempo and momentum can bring.

Perhaps some distant kinsfolk of the Andretti family.

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A Tuesday afternoon in Sonoma

Our friends adopted their boy yesterday. We went to the courthouse with them. They had been fostering with the intention to adopt, now it is legal. The documents were all signed and put in place. I've never seen a judge be so pleasant, or pleased to have people in his courtroom. Nor I. We were all quite giddy with it.

I almost felt like offering him an explanation for some wrongdoing out of inertia, pure habit.

The officer on duty allowed me to step behind the barrier to take pictures. We were like guests. All was wonderful. The ladies and gentlemen dressed up for the occasion and we went to eat sushi afterwards, then champagne at home. A bottle of 2000 Dom Pérignon, then another more recent one from Napa. 

It's official. 

There is a different entrance to most county complexes at which I am normally received. They boast more elaborate security systems and rather regimented teams of chaperons. 

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Totally

I might not ever see my dream of Mayor Weiner come to full fruition. He is sagging in the polls, we're told. Too bad, that. He is painting the portrait of himself being an "underdog" and nobody yet seems to quite get the joke. They will. It is important to have things in which to look forward.

Attempting to not end sentences in prepositions makes you sound preposterous. Not me, you. It is an unnecessary silliness, we're told.

The internet is boring this morning. 

Well, there is this one thing... David Miranda had his property seized at Heathrow airport without having broken any laws. This wouldn't matter much, except that he's the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist that broke the Edward Snowden story. They held him for nine hours and seized all of his electronic devices. When governments start breaking their own laws in this way.... always for national defense, well, it puts the lie to the test.

We are currently doing things in the defense of our country that will render our country not worth defending. We have been for some time now. It started long before this. The Patriot Act is an adequate bookmark to refer back to.

I couldn't understand why most people weren't more angry about our second invasion of Iraq. I remember thinking at the time that something about it seemed off to me. It seemed that even the liberals were a little bit excited about it. There was some national flexing going on. We had been wronged on 9/11, and it just seemed that there was a little too much willingness on everybody's part to really show somebody that, to prove that you don't fuck with us.

Invading Afghanistan never seemed quite commensurate to the shock of 9/11. It lacked that victorious, nation-toppling feeling. We needed something more. It was important that we take out a personality as much as a country. A feared dictator must fall, in statue and in gallows.

(I've read compelling arguments both for and against our invading of Iraq. That's not really the point that I am making here.)

Now, the enemy is far more insidious. We are expected to trust that the government has our best interests in mind as they dismantle our rights. It is a necessary process that we all must endure, to ensure against the secret evildoing of others. They are now daily thwarting terrorist plots that they can't tell us about. There is no public record of any of this, of course. That also, sensibly, falls behind the fresh new iron curtain of national security.

More little Guantanamo gulags will start to appear here and there. Mark my words on this. In the next couple years we will hear about yet another secret prison where normal laws need not apply.

When water-boarding can be presented to the nation as something other than torture then we are already sliding over a lost edge of previous sensibilities. How is it even possible that we allowed our elected leaders to introduce that question into the national conversation. Those fuckers should have been run out of politics and flogged.

One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian society is that laws are put into place which can not be obeyed. It becomes impossible to somehow not break them. When journalists are regularly being hunted and imprisoned for revealing violations of some of our most basic principles then we are not far off from a place where it will be equally punishable to protect and defend said journalists. Once lawyers are afraid to represent certain clients then the circle of new justice will nearly be complete.

Another attribute of a regime-run society is a single ideology that justifies all changes. Something like "freedom," for example. The concept must be flexible and nebulous with the ability for its meaning to be stretched in several different directions at once, as needed. It must simultaneously mean two opposing things, having the power to inspire both fear and action. Likewise, dissent can be defined as almost anything and suppressed through overt and secret means, often with the use of public and private (secret) police forces.

As far as an exploited conceptual archetype goes it doesn't get much better than "freedom," particularly when being defended through secret means.

This eventually reduces life down to two alternating social/political demands in which everything that is not forbidden becomes required.

I feel that way even when I have to renew my driver's license. There is a sense that this can't possibly be right.... We were told about the horrendous bureaucracy involved in communist living, that they had to wait in line for hours just to get a license.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even before that, the term totalitarianism has fallen from popular favor. But the term still best describes the tendencies present as a government seeks to assert and maintain increased control over its people.

This is why I was suspicious of the Snowden thing from the beginning. It appeared to me to be a little bit too staged. It seemed that it was just an effective way of letting everybody know that they are being watched. It seemed canned to me, too convenient as far as messaging goes. I have since changed my opinions on it, though I am still unsure. It almost seems as if Snowden could be an elaborate governmental hoax that has now filtered its way deep into the Wikileaks camp.

Who knows, really.

To be monitoring people is one thing. For it to be an effective means of intimidation then people must know that they're being monitored. It must put and keep them in perpetual unease, pitting suspicion against suspicion. It must become a known fear of the unknown.

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If these records could talk....

Another weekend completed. We put up new record shelves. Now I must reduce my collection to what will fit on the two shelves in the downstairs bedroom, the guest suite, Chalet Q6.

There are 50 sections between the two shelves, each comfortably holding ~100 records. 

It occurred to me as we were assembling the Ikean monstrosity that it has been exactly two years to the day since I left New York, Sunday. I went to our friends' wedding in Brooklyn the day before leaving. 

We abandoned a similar Ikea shelf in the apartment when we left. It was too big to move to California, not worth the time, trouble, and space. Well, I didn't leave it in the apartment. Myself and a friend broke it into pieces and dragged it to the street in shattered pieces, a blast of final catharsis. 

It feels good to purge. Rachel says that I am a border-line hoarder. I believe myself to be a refined collector, with great and magical powers of discernment. 

This latest Ikea shelf will very likely be my last, for records. Hopefully the last I purchase for anything. Ikea is like Costco. One does not shop there because they want to. Even if it feels good to finally organize there is also that accompanying feeling: this, really?

There will be thousands of records to get rid of. Once I go through and make my final selections there will be the small matter of the remaining records. Many have offered to take them though that requires effort and expense. I'd like them to somehow survive together but I don't see how that will be possible. They will be given in boxfuls to the first, second and third takers, irrespective of merit. 

Now I must assemble at least one turntable and an amplification system of some sort. A thing that is easily done, by most. The parts are all here, somewhere. 

That will take another 10 years, somehow.

There was a time when it seemed improbable that I would ever live in a place in which there were not two turntables, a mixer, and an adequate amplification system. 

Now, such a thing seems almost as unlikely as watching the sun come up, high in the desert.

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Autochrome (also)

Went to bed early, slept in late. That is what a weekend should be. The others are still sleeping.

I have been looking at autochromes all morning. They are really something. CS wrote about them and I have been doing searches, staring into the computer screen at another time, a lost process. 

I don't know anything about film. It's too bad, I have a B.S. in Motion Picture Technology (film). I should have learned something along the way. I vaguely remember studying it, a lifetime ago. 

Do a Google Image search for Autochrome. They are really something.

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I wonder what time Ikea opens

I want a new computer, a more powerful one. I don't know why I would want this. I don't need it. I just need a larger hard drive. I have too much music, double copies, triple copies. It takes too long to manage. It requires a dedication that I do not have. But, I like listening to new music.

I don't buy the "cloud" concept for this, yet. All of these companies are eager for you to put all of your data in the cloud, for a price. It will only be a simple matter of time before they are charging you even more to give back to you what is already yours. It will be a form of renting your own property. People will line up to pay.

Their side business will be selling information about you to other companies. A perfect fiscal circle. 

Few seem as bothered as me by all of this. I'm not sure why. I guess people just don't care that companies regularly sell information about them. I've had some argue that it makes life more convenient. So be it. Who am I to question such things. The concept of privacy is becoming antiquated. 

Okay, today we go into the city, to see an old friend who has returned for the Burning Man holy pilgrimage week. On the way home we'll stop at Ikea and buy a shelf to house some more of my records. Whatever will not fit on the shelf we currently have and the new one will have to go. Somebody will become the lucky recipient of many, many boxes. Vinyl is on top again, I'm told.

A poem for your Saturday:

The Weight of Being Eden

Ran into Ben Henry Howard, 

In the black of the hotel cellar a few hours back.

He had only a short time to spare and spoke

Full of confidence and consequence, 

With his dromedary bottom lip,

And that speck of know-it-all worn by cosmic gurus.

The moths swarmed the solitary condemned glow

Like constellations in motion; peering, swirling, 

Eyeballs gazing back from the mirrored walls

Smeared with interstellar dust 

Painted in pigments of love and lust.

He suggested I kill my imagination

And count my chickens before they hatch

And begin to scratch at their shells and beg for food.

To do this would unhook the clasp of mystery's cloak

And send it floating rumpled to the floor beneath the hat rack,

Until it climbs again to weave golden thread as it did before.

You can feel the Spice Islands' trade winds 

Warm your face before they pale upon the backs of whales

Across the shorn spring lambs skin

Of the bleating North Atlantic toward a battered bowing inn on the shore.

The torches light the drooping tropic night

That sags beneath the weight of its own perfume

And the weight of being Eden in each extreme.

It is always day where it snows.

Always white with perpetual light and fleshful of pumping blood,

Adieu, Adieu.

The last kiss before boarding a train 

Lies frozen beneath the slow drifts 

That creep motionless across artifice of day.

Look, there, another plump thigh

In purple garters warbling the songbird's goodbye to night,

Adieu, Adieu.

And I simply wait and hope the telephone rings

For a conversation about the evening's mundane trials

With the inevitable farewell, awkward and sterile

As it always is across the lines, across the miles.  

And I simply wait and ventilate the balmy breath

That blows unseen between the wiry veins of all things.

See that wall there. It never whispers

Or cracks its toes or masks its intent

To become the universe in miniature.

Best as anyone knows it bears its load

And waits like a curious turtle in repose.

A thousand sermons dangle 

Condemned sprung jacks in their boxes

They bounce and cackle from the tree's unsteady arms.

Each one naked knowledge,

A singular original sin to pluck and bite 

And with delight begin another lapsarian lineage,

Rise, line of Cain, Rise, line of Eve

We are all fallen here,

Get up and breathe.

An empty urn black with tarnish

Greets the tongueless thirsty traveler

Beneath the neon's flinty flickers 

And the maypole's sundered wreath.

We are the spring sprung children

Spinning, spin, spin

Spin with your nectar-ripe ribbons

So that we all may be born again and again.

My head is full of numbers

Manipulated and constantly recogitated in an endless algebra

To push aside the regret and all that is lost with it.

This time I hear the drums

Pound and drum beneath the Banyan tree

And between the fixed wooden wings 

Of the samurai city's soaring gates.

All Hail a little sprig of jasmine, dazzling,

And placed in her hair, just behind the curve of the ear,

Or a wedge of lemon in the blue iris of her stare,

Come, Rise, Hail, Spin, Adieu- and again.

A deposed simple primeval emperor 

Marches across the cold vast silver 

Folds of the budding rose

As it sways in the infinite fields

On an ordinary day,

And now it's best I be on my way.

- Mushika

Elvis died a short lifetime ago

If my readers did not like talk of cosmology then they liked me whining about losing readers over it even less. My site is becoming a black hole of page views. Soon I won't even be able to see the words as I type them. 

Ah well... another Friday has appeared beneath us, like gravitational clockwork, or rather, as calendarwork, and we its humble workers, sucked towards.

I need beautiful things. I am too often reminded of one thing, not enough of the other. I amble, dwell. One's heart must not drift long without some useful breaking. 

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spooky inaction, up close

(An attempt to win back my audience)

People from all over the universe, uniformly in all directions, refused to read my post yesterday. Man, do they stay away from the bad news of all creation. I had the lowest readership that I've had in some time. 

It's important to remember that even though the suggestions made are very disturbing they are not my fault. I caused none of that. I barely even described it.

In truth, it was written poorly and with quite a few typos. I re-read it this morning trying to determine if I had offended anyone. There must have been a few grammarians out there still.

I published quickly, while at work. 

Ah well, that's life, as they say.

People laugh at me, but I like my job. I don't know what happened. I hate to think that it was having a child. Have I become a smiling moron, a good neighbor, a model employee?

Well, I do smile sometimes without provocation, my neighbors seem to like me, and things are going well at work.

That's just math.

I was chatting with Rachel last night, about the article from The Times. I mentioned that I found it disturbing that matter might disappear forever, that I took some comfort in knowing that the atoms that comprise my body will continue on long after they cease giving me form. She said that she was "very pleased" to hear me saying anything like that, and then launched into a spiel about reincarnation and the cosmic connectedness of twins.

I said, wait, wait.... 

She said that I had some faith in the knowing of a thing, and that was nice. 

I proceeded to tell her that is not what I meant. But it was too late. The damage was done.

She'll be asking me to go to church this Sunday. Jesus can fix this. The universe was his dad's idea.

 

I do like singing the hymns, standing there, watching all of the other people, shaking their hands and reminding them of Christ's love. 

They'll smile, and nod, and say, "Praise Jesus." 

I'll nod back, smilingly, "You got that right, brother. Jesus even loves you in a black hole."

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"spooky action at a distance"

(globular cluster at the edge of the Milky Way)

I think I must have done something terrible to myself. If not terrible, at least wrong. It just doesn't feel right any more, my body.

I was reading the NY Times yesterday. There was an article there in the ScienceTimes section about black holes. A relatively simple observation led to a few questions, among experts. These questions had to do with what precisely happens to matter when it falls into a black hole. A question that some felt was already well understood, mathematically. There are three theories which come into play (there are more, of course, but these three present problems): Einstein's equivalence principle (a cornerstone of the General Theory of Relativity), quantum field theory, and entanglement. 

One of them can't be correct, as they are, yet all three seem quite correct and have tested extensively to seem so. The area and action that occurs just beyond the event horizon either represents smooth space in which nothing substantial occurs or there is an invisible firewall in which energy is also given off as matter is pulled in, and some sent back out.

This is where the previously connected atomic particles become entangled, with some particles on one side of the horizon, some on the other. We "know" that this must occur. This is the "spooky action at a distance" that Einstein (and others) predicted, and then Einstein mocked as improbable. He was wrong. The "spooky" phrase was his. It is an action/event that we are now familiar with, one that is tested regularly and describes a relational quantum state between particles that interact and then become separated. 

I've made it sound less important than it is, the actual question. It has to do with the exchange of energy in the transaction. The nature of that event might disprove that there even exists such things as space and time. They may only be convenient ways for us to understand the nature of matter, but as concepts they might also be as false as Newtonian physics. Though that is the more far-reaching suggestion of the suddenly opposing questions, but not entirely implausible.

Space and time might only be well known ghosts, ones on their way out.
 

Or rather, any outcome seems very improbable, but one of the competing theories will fail. What we thought we knew about the universe must be wrong, in a fundamental way.

Nobody had noticed this problem until very recently. The resolution of which will cause one of those well established disciplines to crumble and should help answer the question of whether information is "lost" or retained, not only in a black hole but possibly for the entire universe. If it can happen at the event horizon, then it can happen.

There are many that have been wanting to disprove Einstein for years. To do so, in any way, would ensure that your name survived in the world of cosmology and particle physics. 

These are high times for quantum mechanics with the recent discovery, and tentative confirmation, of the Higgs Boson. For the standard model to be brought into question this way potentially endangers our knowledge concerning matter at sub-microscopic scales.


It will change nothing about our lives or our deaths, but it will give us insight into whether our universe is what we think it is, and what shape it might take in places where we can not see or know.

 What it does change is how we approach the perennial question: does information (matter) last?

The hackneyed joke "matter matters" might be just that, a joke. Matter might do something else altogether: disappear.

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In the offing

(tosser)

"I doubt sometimes whether a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me - yet I sometimes long for it." -Byron

People who live in NYC dream of living in the country, all of them, even the bums. And some of them do, also.

It is odd, what the mind speaks to itself, the happiness culled from private reverie; informing the sub rosa with the where and what and who and how that would make one happy, if only... Some people are happiest wherever they are not. There is always some other place that they long to be, a place that will finally, once and for all, make them happy. Those people rarely arrive, I've learned. Most of them, anyway. 

I dreamed of living in the country. To be more specific, I dreamed of, "living somewhere beautiful," when I was in NYC. I thought that I had lived in the best of all possible cities for more than a decade, had enjoyed much while there. Now, I thought, I would want to live in a place that was naturally beautiful and offered experience that was very different from what I had up until that point. 

Well, I got it. Though I have not become quite the "nature boy" that I had hoped. I have spent precisely zero nights camping since I've been here. Rachel, Rhys and I have yet to go to Yosemite, which is only four hours away. The furthest north we've drive from here is perhaps the Russian River Valley, etc.

Sonoma has stopped appearing bizarre to me. That scares me. Where did all the weirdness go? I have to really search for it now. It is under fingernails. It used to materialize everywhere, out of nowhere. How could this place seem so curious (even deeply suspicious) when we first arrived, and why not now? It is not the place that has changed. I know that. But how long am I expected to wait here and not stumble upon something truly bizarre, something I can stare at, something that I must stare at. How long?

Everybody has their limits. What is life - what should it be - if not surreal, extra? Reality does not await, but rather only tedium. 

We are told to enjoy the simple things in life. But look carefully at who is saying it, if you can. You should only heed their advice if you would seek to emulate them in some way. I like simple things also, but all simple things are the same.

"In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint..." 

- Joseph Conrad, 'Heart of Darkness'

None of what I've written here today, except for the quotes, was what I intended.

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Leading the witness

(found image)

I just want the world to last in a semblance of its present form. Well, perhaps that is the curse that we seem to be stuck with, the semblance of form.

That's one way that I know I'm getting old: the future seems forbidding. 

I was in the past for a little while, it wasn't all that great, particularly the 80's. 

But the future is terrifying, right? It must be... we are told daily, from all directions. Everybody instructs us in the details of precisely how runaway civilization has become, though few agree on "the facts." Why should they? The clock is ticking in all directions. The world is an enormous terrorist act just waiting to happen. We are held hostage by this group this week, that group next; some foreign, some domestic. Radon creeps up through the floors. We all seem trapped in an unending b-movie version of what the future was supposed to be.

Don't have children, it will scare you witless. You find yourself fretting over things to which you were once blissfully indifferent. You will read the news with a more critical eye, one trained on the impending future. You will nod your head from left to right while staring at the ground. You find yourself saying comical things in your mind, a parody of a parody repeating itself.

Don't let parents fool you... they are all scared shitless and wearing diapers also. They only seem happy because they do not often read the news that you read. Why would they? 

You will want your children to be happy and healthy, naturally, even more than you may want it for yourself. You will want to magically create those very things out of life: health and happiness. But you will wake up one day and realize that it is all beyond you, you have no control over anything and you never did.

All that you can do is make it possible to possibly happen.

It is terrifying to realize that the only underlying truth there is in this world is that it will one day end. 

I try not to be an alarmist, but it is difficult. All of the experts are alarmed, so why not me? 

I have a friend that insists that global warming is merely a liberal hoax. He has access to other information, which he prefers. He scoffs at sources that disagree, no matter their number, nor origin. The immensity of agreement only confirms the conspiracy for him. His information states these types of climate changes are quite normal and there might not be much to worry about anyway, except maybe a democrat winning again in 2016, and Obamacare not getting repealed.

Ice ages come and go.

It is possible that the experts get paid to alarm us, to draw attention to their exclusive set of growing facts. It is how they get funded. Perhaps there is just a lot of competition within the scientific communities and they have become like commercials: somehow louder than the show.

I like thinking that. Just ignore them all, they are trying to sell me something that I do not want.

That way lies spirituality, to deny science and reason and fall back exclusively on belief, hope. Happiness is the ability to choose to be in fear.

Those fears of the future create a nearly perfect introduction to the spiritual realm. In court it is called leading the witness. Though in this case it is more of an example of leading the defendant.
 

Begging the question:

I am reminded by many that the supernatural begins where reason leaves off. I doubt that they grasp just how right they are. That mankind possesses an imaginative component is unarguable.

We are told two divergent stories: one, that all religions say basically the same thing, which they do not - and two, that there are spiritual reasons that nobody agrees past a certain point, you must tune your heart to your own truth. Seeking truth is the presumed basis of much of this thinking.

But when I seek truth... people often get angry with me, because I do not readily find their animal-spirit frolicking in the nearby meadows of my mind. Their truth seems silly to me, and not just in the improbable sense of the word. The shape of my imagination does not resemble theirs, at all, and does not rely on theirs for existence. That simple fact alone tells me much that I need to know about religion. Personal convictions and beliefs seem both necessary and dangerous. 

Some people's religion seems to be just accepting the acceptance of other people's religion. But even they have their limits, sensibly. Nobody takes my gods seriously, when we discuss such things.

It always requires so much solemnity, yet they will insist that their gods also have a sense of humor.  As for those gods, the ability to choose among many is a relatively recent addition to the process. Some are still finding their way among the countless options. It is easy to get distracted with so much wisdom floating about.

Perhaps I just got dealt a set of very cynical gods, they neither seek my approval nor praise. The only torment they offer is - quite thankfully - to non-believers, infidels.

I take books off the shelf and read single pages every now and then. It is better than watching the news and it keeps me on my feet. The existentialists make some sense. It is all absurd, we share in it though always by ourselves, there is little that can be done to change any of it, we must somehow give our lives meaning, even though the effort and results may be meaningless themselves, we will all die. It is absurd.

That sounds about right.

Albert Camus said it, "Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable."

Somehow, you are expected to prevent this knowledge from depriving you of happiness... rather, this knowledge is meant to be a reason for it; the catalyst to freedom, its own predicament.

Once understood, something is both gained and lost.

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Another Weiner Joke

(John Cuneo)

Just when you thought no more "C. Danger, it's A. Weiner!" jokes could possibly be made.... 

This is just one reason that I love The New Yorker, and New York. 

That is a fucking funny cover. Look at it carefully. It is a work of genius.

As I said, I could care less about Anthony Weiner's online or personal behavior. I don't even find it all that shocking. But the immense, arrogant defensiveness of his own actions is something worth considering, and John Cuneo has.

Here's the simple version: I'd like to be in politics, I'll present myself as a sound candidate for Congress, a stable decision maker... Ooops, I get involved in a sex scandal, step down from politics, create elaborate articles discussing my family's role in my recovery, attempt to get back into politics... it then comes to light that I was lying all along, even while doing my exposé articles, it's none of your business, this is a personal matter between my wife and myself, I'd still like to be the mayor of New York, I'm not leaving the race. Vote Weiner!

This is somebody that appears to be a glutton for both power and punishment, possibly at the same time, and has a tremendous incapacity for decision making as a recorded process. That's why he has my unequivocal support for the mayoral candidacy, and the office. I only wish that I were still able to vote in the city. New York needs this. I am almost amazed that France hasn't offered him a position in their government yet. 

Those are people that can recognize that this guy has what it takes. The right stuff.

You want, perhaps even need, people like this in politics. Fuck, I'd like to see him beat Clinton in 2016. Why not? His problem would be getting people to volunteer to assist in his campaign. He's made it difficult to stand up for him, publicly. If it were a purely anonymous process, this guy would be a shoe-in. 

The cover, evoking the victim-ness of King Kong trapped in a brutal city, an uncontrollable and misunderstood savage, ill-adapted to the confining restrictions of urban life, forced by hostile combatants to climb, to flee to a place of hoped for safety... wielding the antenna of the structure (brilliantly resembling a hypodermic needle), all while sexting the broken head of the hubristic symbol, grim-faced and determined ... oh my....

If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.....

I mean, fuck... this brings the bullshit claim of sex-addict into clear focus. The era of self-proclaimed victimhood has gotten so out of control that we actually seem to have taken a collective step back and considered it... Well, you know, it's not really his fault, what he did. He has a disease. He's a sex-addict. I once dated one.

What...? We really have reached a point where nobody ever need take responsibility for their behavior again. Sex addiction is what made me do it, too. 

Here:

Interestingly, I am a sex addict. All of my decisions in life have been centered around, and informed by, this initial problem. I mean, there might have been a touch of various abuses here and there in my past, perhaps problems acclimating to certain social settings, but all of these issues just speak to the larger problem: sex addiction. Do not let this affliction fool you, it may have only seemed as if I was enjoying it. That is part of its insidious nature. The only choice I had in the matter was finally reaching out for help. I was powerless against it. God alone took my hand and removed it from the offending organ from which I was playing my cursed melody.

Do not be angry with me, I was suffering from a damned disorder. Some have even seen it up close, sadly, and they will attest... when it rears its ugly, demonic head.... you can recognize it for the scourge that it is, oh dear dreaded malady. 

But: in no way should this prevent me from winning the lottery, or being awarded the presidency, or running a major company (maybe just being the treasurer). In fact, it should be part of my qualifications, my pedigree, if you will. To show that I can overcome even the most terrible hand that life has dealt me (over and over) I should be rewarded with public office, power, and wealth. I can be trusted to keep everybody's best interest in mind, because I know what it's like to truly suffer. I am a survivor.

Fucking brilliant. What a story. It is the triumph of talk-show democracy. 

Twitter is just a filthy enabler. 

Headline: Weiner wins, sues! Works to rid internet of debilitating dirt. 

Why doesn't Lance Armstrong claim sex addiction? He only feels powerful and sexy when winning the Tour De France. What choice did he have, really? 

From now on, I'm going to be suspicious of anybody that even admits to wanting to have sex. Those are the first signs, the symptoms. This should shift the Creationism / Intelligent Design non-debate. Did God make us all sex addicts, or was it Darwin that did it?

Nature vs. Nurture vs. Twitter

But... if those jinxed with the frailty admit they have a problem, publicly, then they get a free McDonald's Happy Meal, and maybe a chance at the cover, or the center-fold...

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Thickgevity

I've decided that I'm going to boycott the gym in its last few weeks, to show my disapproval of its closing in September. That should teach them a lesson.

If I can not exercise then I will be forced to diet. I have reached the breaking age, in which all things are a perpetual, losing negotiation. Just since yesterday my breasts have softened nicely. I prefer them that way.

Who knows, perhaps I will revert to my prison-dumbbell workout. It is a bit of circuit training that I used to inflict upon myself in my apartment in NYC. I was never in better shape, though I was dieting like an obsessive. My friends worried but I was healthier than any of them, even with all of the lost weight and lollipop head. I was making sure to ingest the necessary daily nutrients. I dropped to 169 pounds, the lightest I had been since high school. 

Then, my father had a heart attack, right in the middle of a two week cleansing fast that I was doing. It was designed to purge my gallbladder of stones. 

It was working.

I haven't been able to drink apple-cider vinegar since. I was ingesting several glasses full of it each day at one point, along with medicinal abdomen heat-wraps and generous glasses of lemon juice. It was the master work of a health guru who had a storefront on our street in the East Village, a longevity shop. It seemed to work for me, though the inventor of the cleanse/diet was a kook. He was a self-proclaimed breatharian. It is a form of raw-food diet that removes the pesky food portion involved. People would come from miles away - sometimes the famous, or the sick - to sit in a circle around him and hear him gently dispense his wisdom, which was an extreme form of diet, one that included nothing at all. Even a close friend's father directed me to visit him, claiming that he had healed him of cancer. 

He insists upon being called "Dr." though there are conflicting reports as to what precisely he earned his degree in, some claim physiology, some claim nutrition. There was no degree, nor copy, hanging from the wall of his shop. None that I ever saw. I never asked. I didn't want him to believe that I was that interested in his life or thought, or in that way. I merely wanted to extract some weirdness from him. It seemed easy enough, free for the taking. Just briefly overhearing him chat with people on the street as I passed was enough on a day-to-day basis. A font of uncommon sagacity.

I only half kid here, the guy was well informed and clearly knew much about nutrition. It was where his knowledge ended that the spirit-silliness seemed to really take flight and flourish. I believe that he truly wanted to believe the things that he said. There was an intensity to his faith that was off-putting. His need to share seemed consumed with his need to believe. 

Also, I found him to be just less than spiritual but that is perhaps because we shared a drug dealer and I got to know him additionally on a less-than-spiritual plane. The dealer, a local loser by the name of "Benny," a sort of walking gallbladder himself, the small sac that collects and dispenses liver bile, was to our street what food was to the good doctor: poisonous, etc.

Wait, I'm getting sidetracked here...

Our fearless spirit-guide, the esteemed "Dr. of 12th St.," was a sort of poor man's Baba Ram Dass, I guess.

I mentioned the book "Be Here Now" the other day, and in doing some light internet research afterwards discovered that Ram Dass is/was Jewish and currently is bi-sexual, not that a person's religious heritage or sexual orientation matter at all, I only found it worth consideration. People who choose "the spiritual path" in life often have interesting backstories, especially when fictionalized. I mean that, truly. There is no snark or irony there. The transformation involved in becoming a "person of holy, holy" always includes an unshackling of some sort, a shedding off and even denying of the past, oftentimes at great personal cost and effort. 

Whether spiritual in nature or not, I think many admire the strength to do such a thing; the power to transform, to re-invent the self, to be birthed in a newly found truth, to experience a personal revelation. This is particularly true when something went wrong in the first incarnation of self. 

Just start over is the message. This simple truth need not be spiritual in either content or tone. 

I also found the Doc of 12th interesting, even though I didn't care much for his pseudo-philosophy and nutritional soft science. There is no question that he was a local oddball. To distinguish yourself as such in the East Village is a minor accomplishment. He claimed to survive exclusively from drinking his own urine and extracting minerals from oxygen and sunlight, free prana for all. If it's good enough for lichens, then why not me?

His child was taken away by the state when the boy broke his ankle and "The Dr." attempted to fix it with a chop-stick tourniquet and moonflowers. 

There were local rumors that he had cheated on his girlfriend, the one who brought her family's money to the relationship. So, his store closed shortly after and became one of the uglier abandoned storefronts in the neighborhood. It may have been funded by her strong sense of belief in him. Finances often follow faith. That must have all collapsed after she had the religious vision of him entering other women while she tried to sleep. 

So went the local story, anyway.

But who can deprive a extramundane leader of a few intimate physical relations with his flock. Truly? A great man's capacity to love is only increased in this way - doubled at first, then tripled, and so on and so on, etc. A spiritual man has an abiding obligation to spread love, and the safest home for a spiritual man's love is buried deep in mother earth, where it might grow. 

There are amino acids, enzymes, and even a dash of fructose found in the sustaining seminal fluids of life. How else were these women expected to survive, particularly in the evenings when the sun was hiding. They had been deprived of precious sustenance. This goes well beyond just responsible farming techniques, you see. This is a direct return of life-energy to where it will do the most good, the completion of the circle of life, arriving warmly in the belly of the earth goddess, or two.

Blossoms for being. 

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Fuck!

(despondency)

I just found out that the gym's closing in September. They've run out of money. Very wisely, I had paid a full year in advance. 

There is little chance that I'll be getting a refund. None.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. What made this gym perfect was proximity, and price. 

I'll be getting fat again soon. The pub is still swimming in patrons. 

Money talks, they say. But all it ever said to me was "Goodbye." 

- Cary Grant, None But the Lonely Heart

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The side effects

Now there is new pain, in my stomach. I awoke in the middle of the night and there was a deeply uncomfortable hollowness there. I tried to remember what I had done before I went to sleep. I ate some food and a few Tums, maybe 4 of them. They taste good, the green and orange ones. I hate the yellow ones, they are terrible. Is that too many to eat? I've never checked the label to see what the recommended dosages are. I have been told several times, by doctors, that you can pretty much always double the recommended dosages on any medicine, at least for a brief period of time. Sometimes I'll try the same with prescription drugs but the effects are scattered. I haven't kept records, so that wisdom is lost.

In at least one way getting old is like being a pro-athlete: you need a team of doctors just to stay competitive. 

I want to get some anabolic steroids, some really good ones. There are the advantages in muscle mass, of course, but there is also the relief from pain. One of my balls is useless anyway. I could shrink the other, so they match. Why should I care?

I don't want to abuse steroids, where entirely new tectonic plates form and shift in my cranium. I just a little recaptured youth. Just a taste. All of these athletes are giving steroids a bad name. Soon they'll be just like morphine, doctors won't want to prescribe them any more.

The side effects seem alluring: new breasts, painful erections, shrunken testicles, pimples, baldness, infertility...

The punishment for trafficking in illegal steroids is quite stiff. They're always far too excessive with these things. They've created a world where pro athletes are the only ones that can even afford to do them. Like everything else, they keep the really good stuff just out of reach.

The other day a buddy/bartender and myself played chess, at the local pub. It was a fun game. I hadn't played in quite some time. I lost my queen rather early on, but ended up getting his a little later, when things didn't look very good for me. I won, but it went down to the very end, only his king was left. What fun. 

Usually I get destroyed in chess. I try to play people that are good at it and have studied the game, have played since childhood, etc. There were a few people there at the pub watching the match with interest. Why is it always that the best chess players, the ones that see furthest into the future, the ones that are the most familiar with various strategies, are also the ones who aren't actually playing. There was this idiotic dolt at the bar that just kept talking about how I, "could have really had him back there..." 

Or,"Oh, he almost got you a few moves back...better watch out now."

I wanted to offer to play him, just to see if he was entirely full of shit or not. 

If I lost then I could always fly into a miniature 'roid rage, send the board and pieces flying.... leave the pub in a confused fury, go sit in my car and cry.

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The Dark Ages

(one of the "overly-enlightened")

We are perhaps on the cusp of a new one, perhaps already past; into another dark age. The dawning of the era of private information. Not in the way that one might guess, the term "non-private" would work there just as well, or personal and impersonal. Those terms are quickly becoming interchangeable and meaningless, as has the concept of Privacy.

I listened to a radio news show yesterday while in the car. They were discussing the sale of the Washington Post by the Graham family who has held it for 80 years to Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon. They were all quite happy about it.

This would be similar to the Pope having invented the Gutenberg press, with exclusive rights to its use.  

For the entire talk-show, nobody even vaguely suggested that the purpose of this purchase is for aggressive individual data mining, and represents the furthering of a significantly malicious trend in online media. They had several "experts" speak.

Let me go back.... perhaps some of you have forgotten the significance of the "dark ages," and why we now call them that. It was a period when the church was the sole distributor of information, a period in which there was very little or no organized dissent, and the open inquiry into knowledge virtually ceased for centuries. The dissemination of religious dogma alone flourished and went virtually unchallenged from either without, or from within, the church. It is a period recognized as one of intellectual and economic regression, or stagnation. The time is often accepted to have begun after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ended at the birth of The Enlightenment, though its effects continue to linger in the hearts of many. There are those that celebrate this period with festivals meant to simulate the historical life experience. It is too bad there are not more beheadings, etc.

Everything that I just stated is refuted or ignored by some, of course. Religious scholars prefer to call them the Middle Ages and see them as a heyday of spirituality and humanity. There is not much agreement on the period, nor will there be about the one we are entering.

So, back to data mining... what Amazon hopes to accomplish by purchasing this paper for $250 million cash is access to YOU. If not you, then people like you. All of the major distributors of information are doing everything they can to find out as much as they can about you, personally. By doing so they can better tailor information that suits you. They have found that this method causes the greatest sales, in both physical product and information. 

It's a no-brainer. Give the people what they want. But know what they want in advance of them wanting it. Create desire from nothing, need from nada.

The end effect of this is that you will hear only two types of news: that which you like and agree with, and that which you like to disagree with. Agitation is an alarmingly effective means of gaining attention and generating sales. Confirmation bias exists either way; it either satisfies the belief or supports the subjective negation, even to the lesser level of merely assuaging, depending on known individual preferences. We all have agitation dials built in, commotion capacitors, rage resistors.

That is but one thing that so many of the conspiracy theorists miss out on, that the news they find on independent sites ("the real truth, man...") is there to provide them with information that they already agree with, and serves the exact same purpose as the mainstream news they would reject and deny. It confirms that which they prefer to believe. If it did not do so then they would quickly lose interest. There is currently an inflationary bubble in the conspiracy market for this very reason. 

Try telling them. They will glibly mention your adherence to the "mainstream narrative" as if that alone settles the matter.

(Wow... I just went to grab the link within the wikipedia article on conspiracy theories, one section that used to deal with criticisms of said theories, and how to evaluate belief and disbelief against reason. The section is no longer there. There are still criticisms mixed throughout but apparently they do not warrant their own section any longer. They are diluted here and there throughout the article and given equal footing with much claimed proof and evidence of conspiracy. It's the equivalent of the Intelligent Design argument wanting equal footing in schools with Creationism. "Teach the Conflict!" say some...)

The overall effect is a flattening of information distribution, and not a "democratic" one as many might oddly wish for, but one in which there is little opportunity for information to be regarded against other information, mainly because these distribution conduits will be further apart, more "personal," and will rarely touch. Just watch people argue with articles on Facebook. It will be like that, but even worse.

Intelligence is imperialistic, not democratic. It mainly seeks proof of its own assertions and not just popular, or even individual, acceptance.

There is little difference between having your information tailored to suit your wishes and having your information provided to you from a single distribution point. The effect is similar, if not the same, though it is perhaps even more insidious, resulting in a very seductive ignorance. Without a hierarchy to resist, or to compare, then information becomes increasingly self-produced and self-convincing. It will become a personalized service provided for consumption, nothing more. The practice of open discourse, for the purpose of public debate and persuasion, will be lost, perhaps is lost.

And so goes the lessons of Western culture. Some say "good riddance," perhaps without realizing that same culture privileged them with that idea, also. The open ability to question is a relatively new liberty. Some do not care much for it. That is becoming clear.

Others would say that this is already happening and has been for some time. Post-modernism tells us, or attempts to, that things mean neither what we intended nor believe them to, they mean other things, and always have. Why trust the origin of the thought, or its result. Nothing means anything, or rather, everything means much more than we could ever possibly know. Somehow the reader of great literature becomes more important than the work itself. This partially explains the success of talk-shows. Why read Tolstoy when people admit to getting pregnant in unexpected ways? Isn't that the same, or better?

Many employ this new belief in their daily social lives: I don't know lots of things that matter, but I know other things....

Soon enough, we will all be our own Cardinals and Popes; or worse, roaming Nostradami.

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Amber Alert!

(The scene of the crime)

I was able to lie in bed this morning and watch tv off of my phone. Rachel attends some pre-dawn exercise camp, she leaves in the darkness to go sweat with strangers and friends. I only wish the coffee machine was completely automatic. Meaning: no assistance from me whatsoever. It's the only thing that got me out of bed. Necessity is the mother of mornings.

Last night, after having been asleep for a couple of hours... with my phone on "silent"... suddenly, an alarm was going off in the room, a loud and obnoxious warning, a digital screeching. I grabbed at my phone and looked, it was some sort of alert I had never seen before, an Amber Alert. I stared at it, still in a daze. I thought I recognized the name of the abducted child, Hannah, a 16 year old girl. 

I started to worry. The message had come from Sonoma. The woman who watches Rhys, her teenage daughter's name is Hannah. 

The abductor was a 40 year old white male (the worst imaginable, we know that). 

This seemed bad, terrible in fact. After waking up for a couple minutes I realized that the news didn't quite gel. I did a search, trying to find the street that she was abducted from. All of my searches turned up results south of San Diego. It turned out it was a city, not a street, a city named Boulevard. This didn't make any sense. I searched the girl's full name. 

Yep. That was it. 

A girl and her little brother had been abducted 600 miles away, near the border of Mexico. So, the state, and then my county, Sonoma, sent out an emergency Amber Alert message that ignited phones everywhere across the state at 11pm. 

It's a new feature in my phone, for my presumed convenience. There is a section in the new iPhone operating system called "Government Alerts." 

That they can cause my phone to explode in warning at their whim is distressing enough - a small reminder of their presence, power (and occasional impotence) in the face of crime, and misuse of same. But it was that these nitwits decided to alert people in the middle of the night, against their will, in a state-wide way, 600 miles away from an abduction, even further.... (I've since turned the feature off)

Be on the lookout for a blue car, with people in it.

There are 10 counties in a row separating us and them. Those are just the ones directly between, there are many more to the east. I would be amazed if Los Angeles County sent out the same alert. They're 500 miles closer, of course. 

The state stretches northwards 840 miles from the abduction. 

Yep. I've just checked, it was a state-wide alert. I'd be amazed if they didn't warn Arizona and Nevada also.

I sat on the roof most of night, just in case they drove down our little street. I wanted to be prepared. What's the point of owning several guns if you can't sit on your roof occasionally, hoping to be heroic.

(Addendum: I've just found out that the alert was sent out at 6:45 pm. It took just over 4 hours to reach Sonoma, somehow)

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All, and none

('Kolorit Red' detail, by Katrin Korfmann) 

Last night I dreamed. There was a person there in the elastic vision trying to convince me that the world's troubles come from that which is printed. He kept tracing "evil" back to "paper."

No matter the subject, "See... paper?"

Over and over.

It was strange. I asked the imaginary character what evil had been created exclusively by the printed word, and had there been any evils that had been vanquished through the use of it.

"All, and none," he said.


That would have been my response also. Smart ass, etc.
 

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