uncanny valley

To Lleu, the lady's reflection is puckered wasp paper, her face a writhing hive of alien anger. Shuddering, he returns his attention to the udon soup. Chopsticks the powdered chilli scurf. Plucks out a piece of tempura. He contemplates the moment, and calls over the gristle-chewed waitress to borrow her pen. Writes the word into his napkin: Extemporaneous. Look that up later.

Lleu had forgotten his selfone. Tyche may have tried to contact him. She might even be standing outside his door right now, the corridor's only echo, her overcoat sweating the weather, hearing his phone's loneliness from within. Outside, anxious ankles ticktack into the harrying rain as the soup vapours accrete on Lleu's nose. Oh how these rains betray our efforts to meet each other, dissolving and depositing and fusing us into this cavern. Aren't we but frightful stalagmites? Where is Tyche?

Absently, Lleu wipes his nose and tosses the crumpled napkin into his half-finished soup. Ex tempura. Reaches for his fone to pay but ears burnt by the social atavism, redirects the motion into a wave of his wrist across the register. Transit insurance rates being what they are, he has to walk, and joins with the gloaming. He passes by a woman lying on her back, with a man squatting beside her, rivulets from his umbrella spattering her face as he checks her vital signs. Lleu continues by and on, passing a minor taxi collision and a little girl, shoeless and visibly lost; someone cursing and a worry-wrung woman teetering on tiptoes half a block further.

The streetlights pulse to life, their copper fizz, like orthogonally cut wiring, live-spark off the drizzle. A nostalgic flush to tint his thoughts warm. He doesn't notice that the lights serve the illusion of ceiling, artificial cornicing to relieve the pressing imminence of building mass. Above, the pumice stone clouds of day burnish orange in the updraft of light. City birds hold on wires, like baroque musical notes crouched against the sky. Below, Lleu is lent his very own shadow, which sonars trudgingly across the concrete around him.

He stops, turns and backtracks to a leeway. Aromas of pitch and oily dribble scabbed by illicit tobacco nubs: he's closer to home. A pair of faces bulge the darkness; the pale skin snags, laddering night’s stockings. Courtesy mutters back and forth. Lleu momentarily drifts to another day, its cold-shrouded sun a dandelion clock. They’d bustled into her house, and she’d dressed her coat over a kitchen chair and then he’d draped his over hers. And now it’s now and there’s no one in his corridor; no waterdrops before his door. A housecat mewls further up, locked out. He goes inside.

… on behalf of the Board of Governors, NHL Chairman _____ regrets to confirm rumours of an indefinite moratorium… …marijuana since the crash of Kabul’s opium markets… …’“That’s such a male thing to do” is such a female thing to say’ *hahahaha*… …-tists are turning to some surprisingly remote areas of the globe for answ-… …inversely by the plummeting price of gasoline. Meanwhile, Cascadian Rail has announced… …reentry of failed Chinese space probe, governments are scrambling to calculate when, and where, it will make impact. However, all agencies are offering assurances that… …Island bridge engineering bids have stalled due to unresolved Union concerns… …rural building ordinances have triggered a storm of debate between proponents of wireless electricity and its ‘woodsier’ detractors… …successes with subterranean citadels in the Netherlands might make for viable… …with the release of their latest polymer, Addifax, the 3D printer giant, has seen its stock spike…

Lleu presses his forehead against the window pane. Triple insulated, it doesn’t transfer the cold. Through the wet reflection of his eyes, the city coils up on itself, opposing condo-shelves burning the night like overwhelmed switchboards. There are people there. Across the plunge. His fone flickers the day’s nous against the wall behind him. His interests discerned by algorithm, the device collated, parsed and disgorged all nous segments that might meet his patterned appetites. Without prompts to expand any of the clips, today the fone quickly exhausts its repository, and begins cycling through deeper browsing strata: the littered pediments of his ruined career. While sleep is too imperfect for the architect, its complete absence leaves him pinned beneath toppled voussoirs; the architect estranged.

The selfone chimes an incoming connection.

~Wall, Lleu says, as he wheels to face it. The nous recedes, but no image takes its place. ~Hello? aij-ee-el-el-oh?

An old joke failing for having been rethreaded for too many occasions… Tyche’s name could be described as meaning Lady Luck, whereas his was

~Lleu. Yes, it’s me.

~Oh Tyche, where are you? Do you..

~Lleu, I need to see you.

~Well I need to see you too. But..

~There’s no time but the present. Is now too soon?

~Wait, you’re nearby? I need a few moments to..

~Ok, listen, it’s dePieter’s last week at the Modern. How about we meet there in an hour?

~Um, yes, ok, but where..

~You know I don’t like using the fone, so let’s talk at the museum. I’ll tell you everything then. Meet you in the mezzanine.

Lleu replies, but she is already gone.

Tyche’s lips had formed around foreign words, lifting her philtrum into the anticipation of a kiss. Or the fulcrum for argument. Perhaps they were the same.

~Why don’t you ever wear the visitor’s pin?

~Because I resent the implication...

~You’re liable to be taken as part of the exhibit, the shape you’re in. Let’s grab lanterns before they’re all gone.

Castor dePieter’s collection, Callejόn del Beso [Alley of the Kiss], has sundered the opinion of the art world. Blithely exploiting the mysterious epidemic of global insomnia, dePieter’s statuary is predicated on its self-recognition as the anachronism of form. “The statue’s sustained presence in history is attributable to the inconstancy of the light-source with which it was viewed. The craftperson’s skill honed the features, but it was the flickering tallow of the onlooker which transpired the vital breath to which the sculptures danced. As it solved so much, electricity also solved this.”

Lauded as dePieter’s masterwork, this timely exhibit rests upon a thesis that might be considered unnerving to many of its patrons: the percepts illuminated herein are encountered not by a wind-whimsied lighted-wick, but rather by a consciousness ruptured by cauterized repose. The vitality of these pieces is donated by the onlookers’ inability to still their own minds: the statues’ powers are evoked by a gaze set to a waver by ‘[the] ripples of an ever-retreating wake of sleep’.

{It is of paramount importance that this exhibit be experienced without adulteration. Out of courtesy and respect to other patrons, it is mandatory that you suspend all active and passive use of your cyber-electronics. This includes: selfones, Enhanced Contact Lenses, sensory implants/ameliorators, cameras, nous spheres/players, VR Overlays and any other media interface/recording devices. Non-compliance will be penalized. Thank you for your cooperation.}

They share the one remaining lantern, which Tyche holds as the hall yawns open around them. The exhibit is already full of people, and while the 30-foot ceiling clearance belies any tendency toward agoraphobia, the lurching shadows twist the scene into Faustian oneirism. Tyche gives Lleu a quick flash of teeth and forges into the nearest cluster. There on a plinth lies a ceramic figure, its hands crossing its genderless chest. The placard reads The Transcendental Aesthetic. As the lanterns fuss, the statue’s semi-opacity reveals something dark within. Lleu shifts uneasily as Tyche crouches for a different perspective. The smooth outer shape is a skein, a partially ablative cast that shimmers in the varying light. Given the space between shadow and light, a skeleton flares in full-body rictus, like tangled rebar on a beachhead. And Lleu jumps back, rattling a patron’s lantern with his arm.

~Why did we meet here? Tyche.

But she’s flit to the next installment, Cleavage : Hypolink, a pair of gendered statues each in mid-flight from the other. Both hold the duplicated, disembodied hand of their partner, cut just above the wrist. A step behind the space between them is a single figure with two placid faces facing one another, their necks joining in a V-cavity at the chest’s solar plexus. It has no forearms but the faces’ tongues are fused.

~A bit heavy handed, that. Calls to mind the Donko Donàt bite: ‘Art is a bi-valve adapted for life in the intertidal zone between perception and conception.’

Her eyes clutch him still as the lantern trembles minutely.

~Oh fuck off. ‘Lleu and his crypto-wit.’ It’s tiresome, recursive, and I’m done with it. This isn’t right. I can’t smile for the both of us. You’re always...

~What am I always?

~I’ve been down at the Faraday Dorms, Lleu. I slept in quarantine for 5 days, and I slept well. It’s why you couldn’t reach me.

Lleu sighs.

~Did you dream?

~Yes, sometimes I dreamt, but more importantly, sometimes I didn’t. I just went away and had unbroken nothingness, rather than this… broken everythingness.

~Like a fox curled beneath the roots. Didn’t you miss me?

Tyche purses her mouth and looks to the forest of statue-stiffened phantasm.

~I missed you Lleu, but not as much as... not as much as I miss you now.

He sways as she pivots and floats toward a statue at the end of a truncated corridor. He follows, unlit as his shadows eel away from him. Ahead, Tyche’s steps cause her light to undulate against the emphasized features of the figure before her - a simulacrum of a famed portrait - the movements accenting the shaded creases of first a smile then a frown and back. Lleu murmurs as he reads the accompanying card: Mona Lisa Simile {Morality is for Other People}.

~Lleu. Are you ok?

~Yeah. No. I’m feeling a bit unsettled… All this seems so sharp, so edged. And of all the nightmarish settings.

~It came out a lot crueler than I intended. I’m sorry.

He produces his fone, but halts, pinioned by admonishment.

~I need some hot chocolate.

~Yeah you do. Me too. Walk?

They make for the exit, snapping cursory glances from pieces as they pass, each one worried over by a knot of people: Interiority, a vertically broken mould of a human. Bardosphere, a lone head with its brains dashed out. And Tarantella and Crow’s Eye and Petrichor and Usufructory and Voyager’s Golden Record. Each is a worming tableau, like a grotesque nativity scene lit by the other patrons’ nervous, maggoty attentions.

Tyche gives the lantern to a couple. Newly arrived, they stand in the threshold, blinking mutely into the strange market of shadows.

~To stand on a bridge, and look out at the night with you. A fair consistency, no?

Lleu seems so vulnerable here. Small against the effortless force of iron holding them up, eyes trembling over the bay, over the dark slash of the tributary beaded by anchor lights, framed by a gold curlicue from the city’s streetwash. He seems sunken, a depression in the landscape, a place where the waters will collect. Good thing the rain stopped.

~Why ‘a fair consistency’?

~Well, if I were to write us into being, I’d counter that exhibit, that menagerie of anxiety, with some certain –if not unsubtle- symbolism. The story arc, you see? Tyche swings her hands out and then up to clap and bind above her head.

~But you cannot write life. Only its representation.

She lets her smile curdle. A lock of hair shifts to a gentle tug of wind.

~How can you bear to say that to me, Lleu? We are choking on representation. We inverted the ratio years ago, and now we cannot even sleep for the space it swallows. How to use it, to build with it, this is the lost knowledge. And you - what of your own profession? Poor Lleu, you write as literally as I do. But all of your problems are folded up and packed into what you just said.

They stood, leaning out, pressed against the black.

~I can’t go on like this. Lying awake, hearing your eyelashes brush against the pillow. I went to sleep in the Dorms, only to realize that it’s us that tires me. It’s me, it’s you and me with you with me. Remember when you said that the most worthy gift you can offer your intimate is to change? Well I disagree; being with me is the change. We are breathing each other’s space, and we should be enhanced.

snappy

{Day 4 sees me picking fights on the internet. No change there then.} Smoking smoking smoking. In 3 short years, I've shifted to actually caring what people think of my habit. And only because of this has duplicity entered the picture. I am a worse person because of the association (anti-smoking rhetoric; being on the one side and actively seeking the other, nobody knows the health concerns BETTER than a smoker - whilst non-smokers can act all smug and condemnatory. Lean people telling the obese how great it is not to be obese. Great not to even see them. No, not in public. No late-night fat people on your balcony please. Sir, you are fatting up my shopping experience. By gum, leanies are meanies!) and I've somehow accepted this identity. Hmmm. Poor troubled people of the world. Where was I? Being a « nictim »:

I do not want to call it quitting, but something like, 'regulating autonomy'. Here is what the newt few weeks' itinerary will likely look like:

- Sheer bloody habit I use smokes to package time, reallocate boredom. They are excellent for achieving 'deep' time. I find excruciation occurs when the immersion in other performances cannot be had because of the nicotine ITCH. But the itch will pass. Right!? Each of us has reasons (I have a few more), charting and reassigning them is part of the process.

 - Justifications Accept this this will be shitty. Savour this (sensually, not sensationally!) and find the nuances. Despite the discomfort, there's a lot of novelty going on here. Different muscles are tense, digestion is wonking out, moods are fluctuating rapidly and the external world is beginning to feel intrusive. I am already trying to trick myself into reverting - the T-1000 polymorphing into each stolen identity as it thrashes in the molten steel. What's tough to accept about addiction is that it is a preconscious need located just below the tideline of our cycling awareness. To be inspected, it's got to be dragged ashore. Being fair, it's pre-you and influencing your choices, and to relapse is to miss the opportunity of exercising self-respect: authentically acknowledging your powers [snotty way of putting it, I know, but ultimately it's true. 'will power' is an empty appointment, as everything could be ascribed to this, but the reasons behind will power are very valuable.]

- Substitutions Nicotine is an interesting drug. It ingratiates itself into the dopaminergic demand/reward loop, saturating the acetylcholine receptors, which affect all sorts of emergent skills but generally helps you feel aware. Thing is, there's no clean-up crew for nicotine, so the synapses simply create more receptors which will then demand more acetylcholine. What is shitty about this is that by satisfying this demand, we get the endogenous dope fix. It is about as classic and universal a case as conditioning can get. So substituting OTHER loops is ultimately using the same devious pathways. But for the express purpose of regulating autonomy, I am not addicted to junk food or exercise or compulsions to clean... so am likely safe to indulge while I deal with what I am addicted to.

- Philosophy There are not many occasions or events in life where one can directly apply philosophical experimentation, and better yet, expect to achieve a new plane of perception. But regulating autonomy is one: confronting illusion, diversifying the matrices of reward, exposing cognitive bias, examining your body's response to a sensation equal in force to starvation/asphyxiation/dehydration but without the deathy side-affects... Even barring success, this experience is directly transferable to all other psychological appendages of life.

[EDIT: Day 5 was sweaty and grim. With a very moderate amount of vodka, the romance of alcohol and nicotine had a violent domestic incident. Though one might accuse me of masochism, under heavy environmental controls (alone, isolated, Friday night) I had about 1 oz. of vodka and went into pronounced paroxysms of withdrawal. I would have had to have been tied up were I with my friends, which would've been the direct opposite of Stockholm Syndrome: turn your friends into assholes by publicly wetting yourself in self-inflicted agony. Upon a small amount of online clickery, I discover that their bond is mutual in that 1) alcohol's acidic metabolises flush alkaline nicotine out of circulation, this requires quicker nicotine replacement and 2) nicotine surreptitiously imposes its demand/reward pathways onto the enjoyment of alcohol, giving a sort of Happy Meal halo effect

Smoking is obviously bad for you in and of itself, but the true horror is through its association and the rest of one's lifestyle is impoverished. Exercise-reward dyad is corrupted. Taste reduced, so shittier food may be consumed. Outside is for smoking, not other pursuits. Self-enhancement mechanisms are ascribed to externalities. Drama is artificially induced so as to encourage the need for a cigarette, damaging relationships as a result. Hedonarchy reigns supreme.]

Sorry about the fatty thing from earlier, I was just trying to demonstrate how villainizing the smoker is as unforgivable as any other form of prejudice. Either be compassionate or mind your own fucking business.

the allegory of the cave painting

we've infantilized our origins as cave dwellers, becoming superior to ourselves - a N'itchy leap-over-your-father mentality, which is itself funny, as the immutable generational presence is evidence of its heritability.

i think it was in Wade Davis' Massey Lecture contribution, The Wayfinders, where he discusses petroglyphs as the subterranean nursery of the minds, the creches whence we dreamed ourselves awake. i've returned the book to the lender, else i'd pluck a plump morsel for you, but i recall Davis proffering another's interpretation of the cave painting: less as rudimentary alphabet, and more of a pining frustration. to draw the wild horse was the divisive act of an essentialist recognition, the animal-not-animal captured-released... ah, spelunked it out of the internet... here it is...


"...clearly at some point we were all of an animal nature and at some point we were not and he viewed proto-shamanism as kind of an original attempt through ritual to rekindle a connection that had been irrevocably lost. So he saw this art not as hunting magic but as postcards of nostalgia." -- Wade Davis on Clayton Eshleman

John Cleese on Creativity

shit shit says

been stewing this one for a few weeks. parody and highschooly group-identification in the otherwise amorphous, un-delineated web... the humour varies with the level of production, and lovingly scalds the archetype and its concept-regionalized esoterica. decentralized centralization is ingenius, if not utterly variable. identify yourself either through soft-satire of personal affiliation, or by teasing others' markers of confederacy.

- "what the hell ate me?"
- "i WILL stop you from jogging"
- "peek-a-poo!"
- "oh man, i've got such a hangunder"
- "ever notice that Hogwarts' house names reconcile with toilet experiences? Slytherin? Hufflepuff? Ravenclaw!?"
- "you'd do this in the same room that you keep your toothbrush?"
- "i don't care if you'll be late for the meeting, you decided to go public and i'm not coming out till there's noone else here"
- "where's your god now? bet she has the same determined jawline as Sigorney Weaver in Alien.. HAHAHA"
- "that's funny, the damage doesn't look as bad from out here... these aren't the 'rhoids you're looking for... you don't believe in the Force, do you?"
- "getting on the bus, are we?"
- "boobopbeebopbiddleybop - i'm a scatman"
- "soon i'll be touching the poos of countless others. does that freak you out a little?"
- "i've given you pins and needles. you'll get as far as the middle of the atrium before it'll hit. and there you'll wobble like a wally, rubber-legged, teetering to retain your balance. and all because you don't eat enough fruit."
- "hey everybody, we're going streaking!"
- "this is a reminder that what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas"
- "nope, today we're faster than it takes to read the headline"
- "do you like Celine Dion?"
- "k, i'm out. msg me on the Blackberries, or iSplat or Fecesbook or whatever"

Island of the Dead - Arnold Boecklin

stonyteller

'To write is to pull stones from a river' - a smooth weight to rub against your palm, but still, too polished to be placed in the story for which it was intended ===

sometimes I wonder at unintentional plagiarism, as copywrongs should at least reference the source... so i go-ogle [back when first using the new company, i though it was pronounced this way..!?] the phrase, and find a writer's blog

quite sweet really, but to see it rest there... why not go guerrilla? scribe the stone, and let it loose in a spot where it would be appreciated? glyphiti? petripoems? geodes!

Dumpstrep

What happens if you take dietary supplements that suggest you do so on a full stomach, on a stomach full of dietary supplements that suggest you do so on a full stomach?!

We're about to find out. Perhaps it'll grant me the energy necessary to enjoy Skrillex, a fartist with the power of turning all milk and cream and frappe you've ingested into bowel-cheese: Dumpstrep. He's like the conductor for a choir of tractors. Or an interpretive fiscal policy report for the US economy. If it weren't for the youth-market mills of the disaffected suburbs, he wouldn't have to produce vicarious screams.

Anyone else seen Girl With The Dragon Tattoo?

Wait, why I am being so cruel? Especially when complete and utter disregard is so much more effective. I know why: cause I'm getting SICK.

I'll make up for it now by injecting music that CURES instead:

slipstack : snowstalgia

IN the phantasmagoria that is Victoria, a rare element has graced us: SNOW. IT turns us further inwards, for which people here will never make apology. WE are the seashell mysteriously found in every other domestic bathroom.

OUR hedge cat, Hucklebetty, is stress-eating. AND he's right to do so: light's become dark and he's just a giant polar-bear's nose. A lonely, staff-less note on the music sheet.

THE diligent, the SCRAPISTS, are all outside, huffing and swearing as they defile her. I've some ruminating to be sating the demands of a project, but first the this (FROM WIKIPEDIA - yes, there's ways to still use the thing this day of SOPA-be-gone):

'The name Ranunculus is Late Latin for "little frog," from rana "frog" and a diminutive ending.'

One God Universe

funder and laughtning

Maybe it was about the 3rd or 4th round of the game of spitting over a wire just off my deck that I realized exactly how bored I am. Like a 12 year old boy malingering outside a slushie-mart, target-spitting for pleasure. And I recalled just how much fun I used to have with this blog, or how the blog used to enhance the fun I had in life. And then I shrugged and spat clean over the wire.

But it's true. Somewhere back in the misted past, I resorted to a sort of crypto-nonsense, binding words up within the absurdity I hold so dear until they could no longer lubricate the story. Like the sewn pockets of a new suit, or braile on a parking meter, or your ultrarich landlords who flagrantly dress down only when they visit you
'Nice wellies. Is your stubble mascara'd on? Pizza's held facing the other way up, you know. Otherwise I totally relate to you.'
(I hate the word landlord, I really do. What other title invokes such presumption? 'I'm the bus-baron, and don't you forget it.'
'I'm not a valet, I'm the car-tsar. The auto-crat. The fourwheeled Fuhrer. The...

And I didn't bother finishing... so what.. it's boring

where? anandroid

there're methods to e-mediation - short snappy lines; photo-punctures; lurid unclickable ad-zones in the margins - and all fit into the con-template of blog/web expectation: the tacit rules of content-layout that permits navigation to the most casual of visitors. but if you've ever tried flipping through the garble that is an architecture firm's website or artist's portfolio - them other buckers of convention - you'll see that those most likely to want content made deliverable by anticipatory design, are those most obfuscating and indulgent. and i'd be proud to count the who? alongside this inaccessibility. posthumunculously, of course, as this place isn't.

i've not had a cellphone for 2 years, and it's bliss. people tell me how much i miss, and i tell them the very same. this anachronism likely has much to do with my inability to substantiate their expectations, twisting up rootedly into elusiveness: i can quarantine my time. those without the phartsmone are the lost demographic. the gap in the map. the ignorant willful innocents. well, at least, we teluselves that.

with universal serial buses (yeah, you use their transit thousands of times a day) plugging us all in, commuting our service, we're now all subjectoplasm. internolinked. by circumventing the computer - some would claim smartphones have even eclipsed it - to flit through evolving reefs of info-ecology, these devices have become appendages, swinging around in bardo. purpose trivial. and part of me needs one, just so i can stay currency. but most of me is telling me that it's a sickness. i do not want my brain to do that, but i want it to be able to.

Pinch & Shackleton : Cracks In the Pleasuredome

Post:Hello

recording from the brain from yaron steinberg on Vimeo.

elegant proof

"Gregory Bateson has clearly shown that what he calls the 'ecology of ideas' cannot be contained within the domain of the psychology of the individual, but organizes itself into systems or 'minds', the boundaries of which no longer coincide with the participant individuals."

Felix Guattari [trans. Pintar & Sutton], the three ecologies (London: Continuum, 2000) p54

fingers

i don't think about my body much in its own right. the sensory harp that is my nervous system usually bypasses itself to privilege my brain, which will then inspect respective reports. i'm sure you can already see why this might be a prosaic recipe for stupid... cerebral distortion rears rampant, and discordance reigns. dancing unmakes this order in me, or beauty, or passion, or meditation... but, back to her, beauty really does it best: in music in facial constellations in literature in architecture in justice in empathy in nature... these make real, and decommission a tyranny that ofttimes feels most desperate. guillotine.

nevermind.

fingers get allocated strange habitual tasks. i use a different finger for each lightswitch (within reason. i never borrow.) and say its dark, or i'm altered or moody, and i miss my jab.. there's a wrongness there, like my body forgot, not me. extreme moods call for the weight of a second finger behind the one of contact (ebullient? try jazz-snapping. pissed? try judo.) there is never as much authority behind the switch which has an auxiliary. obviously, going off is more final than going on, but there's still a confidence pushed into the finger. sometimes one pushes that finger-thought further, into a whipped towel or thrown object. to affect a light.

i believe the above was mostly speaking to the forefinger. do you use odd fingers for specific tasks? i lift my pinky to thank drivers for stopping when i walk. that may've come to be because i was once concerned that a wave could be seen as imperious. actually, it can't really be confused for much other than what must be acknowledgment "thanks for letting me cross, want this in your ear?" the ring finger on my left hand (is that redundant? where do rings go again? evidently i pour custard on marriage. but i wish i trusted it) checks my fly as habitually as i pat my pockets for keys and bankcard. to assure itself, the zipper toggle is run beneath the fingernail. there are regrettably too many reasons why this digital affirmation came to be.
nervously, i will lightly circle the dome of one fingertip on the dome of a thumbtip, even more lightly than 'lightly' might convey, until the feeling of rolling a pea emerges. this simple discovery, made at the age of 7 or so and continued to this day, might have shaped me more than i know. the translocation of sense, producing a phantom object? only ever had this with my fingers. couldn't imagine how it would be with any other area to be honest "i have a tangerine in my armpit"?
the nerve buds at the fingertips are very densely packed. how concomitant with the use of, say, an iPhone is that idea? what evolutionary use would this extreme sensitivity have aside from the obvious interrelation with technology? ever read this article? it's worth it.
and fuck off.

I don't care, but you do, so I should and that means I do

Supposedly hard to describe, toujours dans la moment, but that was exactly good. Gaslamp Killer was a Jim Henson puppet gone ronin, respectfully. 12th Planet was a dubstep dervish, precise and yet delirious. Daedelus, whom I dimwittedly engaged with the axiomatic 'Montreal loves you.. that is, those parts of Montreal I could vouch for loves you. They're not quite all there, cause I'm here, but they love you!' to much fist-throbbed chest motion, is a composer.

It was all so achonological then, that it decries sense to try depict now, but... there was a moment when, purchasing a shooter, a lass dropped what may've innocently been a billfold. I stepped in and said, scuse me lady, but you dropped something. She looked down and said what? Gentle as I want to be, the room ever having corners with shadows with shapes in them, I say that. She looks at me like I am holding a grilled cheese in one hand and someone's scalp in the other, and teeters. Her friend pops up as I am in the midst of kicking the sanitary pad into the shadows - as a geniality mind you, not a spontaneously-educe-feminine-hygiene-products-from-your-friends service I've got going on the side - and withers my attempts to be conspiratorial. Fine. Time passes, much lots happens. And we're in a crowd. Lady-you-dropped-something rushes past again, somewhere in the midst of her early 20s entourage, and I wouldn't have noticed her except that she caught my arm in her open purse. Seriously. What would you have said? A lot came to mind. Belatedly.

Not much transpired from that, as even within an elapsed 50 seconds it seemed such a waste of moments otherwise human. Being with friends, and meeting theirs', and partaking of a disjointed engagement around the music.. ultimately that's what was. Though there's something in me that ever wants to share it... to hold it for someone in particular, or be there with them to spin it further. It feels like 'missing', but I'm not sure if this is so. I miss so many people, I know it can't be so. Perhaps the future?

Developing Notions

Plenty Offish is a bizarre bazaar of a free 'dating' website. It gives me pathos like mashed potatoes. You simply develop a name and profile (mine's Developing Notions and I like sustainable sandwiches and speaking pretentiously) and then take a tour of those of other people. You can write to them and chat, and, if anything kicks off, go for a date.

All that is in principle though. What really happens is that you embark on a demented cross between a safari and a dungeon. Earnest people peering through their picture portals, so lonely you can almost hear them tapping the other side of your monitor.. their cells made out of gliberties and 'about mes' and platitudes and attitudes. Or single moms stealing your hubcaps and menacing you if you venture from the car. I don't really want to get involved, but maybe just give everyone a hug.

I actually thought I'd have more to say about this, but I find I'm just annoying myself.
[edit: single mom just msg'd me, she'd like to play chess some time? is this a trick?]

Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo from Jeb Corliss on Vimeo.

public pools, or, why self-diagnosed hypochondria isn't

i have a pet project of taking photos that attempt to discredit our silent predilection toward gravity (NB: this project does not actually involve pets.) in consideration of this, i'm now going to try to conflate that idea toward the hope of undermining the preceding posts, which may come off as grave. i will not fuse words for purposes of intelleggtable wankery; will not talk about the Egg, or any part thereof (eg[g]. is the albumen more or less repellent than the germinal disc? how about in the conteggst of public pools?); will only offer ruminations of impending mortal doom specific to the person under discussion; will not mention the juvenile belief of saving the orange Smarties for last in the imagining that one could wish them to actually taste orangey etc.

i went to a public pool on Monday. turns out that the notion of 'public' is subjeggt to deggree. Mondays are eggstremestly public. and that's not especially good for someone with the lamentable problem of distortative logolatry. unbidden comes glyphic degeneration of the word 'public'... pubic is one. lice, another (it's there, believe me.) and then there's poo and whatever ool might turn out to be. however, because i was chatting with my upstairs flatmate the whole while, none of this was thought about until the changing rooms, which are apparently designed to ensure that every single article of clothing you bring will touch the floor. toughest though is changing amongst children again without actually being one yourself. not that i conduct my waking moments with the mantra 'do not eggspose yourself to children today', but, for a generic-looking, scruffy white guy with salient markers of maturity-under-duress, there is the problem of observed societal-refleggtion whereby i often find myself confronted. i am eggstremely sensitive to this (my biggest driving dilemma is having to slow down to 30kph when passing a schoolyard... crawl past, and i'm flaggable; speed up, and i'm flagged as looking like i'm trying to ovoid looking flaggable.) there is no graceful eggsit from this crushing eggsplication...

so yeah, in the pool. trying not to notice other publics repressing their compulsion to itch, i hop straight on in, rinse the goggles and submerge. bliss! favourite ending to a sentence, anywhere in the world, is submerged (ed: voluntarily and in water.) swam a width this way: first half, aglide! first half of the second half, goggles fogging, thoughts of 'oh no, what if i'm thought of as even more pervy?' and 'what was that semi-mucilaginous entity i just passed?' and then 'perhaps i could've phrased that last thought more accurately, considering its antecedent', oxygen? second half of second half, dancing gummy bears, replete with names, bios and musical influences........dots........ and at the other side!! the rest of the pool appears to have continued beautifully in my continual absence of 23 seconds. colour slowly returns.

chat with my friend some more. aww, she's great. lets me blather on about 'let the right one in' while she does floaty-legg eggsercises back to where we started. chinese dude sweeps upper thigh whilst in backstroke, top to bottom. and back again (lower thigh, up.) mild panic, visual confirmation of untampered towel; soothed. we go to and fro some more, go down the slide letting the lifeguard believe her own ironic smile, and then head to the steam room.

28 seconds into over-crowded steam room, and with surprisingly little prompting required, my friend mentions her potential three-way tryst with randoms. i joke she met them at 7/11. moderate time elapses before she laughs. room's ceramic silence deepens, other than -admittedly already developed- laboured breathing. i quail and ask her how etsy.com works. she tells me. we go to the sauna.

bum-prints everywhere. sit on the half of one which doesn't contain the toenail. eggschange views on the differing merits of sauna vs. steam room with my friend. my claim is that i like knowing where my sweat is, hers is feeling her respiratory system. trio of blokes having a similar comparative chat, except over eggonomical sources for 'chainmail'. friend and i eggshaust the topic of swiss chard. we go back to the pool.

pool is fantastic! we loaf around again, obtain some large oblong float-pads under the lifeguard's proviso that we only stand up on them in the deep end. we immediately go stand up on them in the deep end as if we came up with the idea ourselves. tiring, we make to go into the jacuzzi. i am hampered by seeing my friend Arturo stretching off a workout on a raised alcove. i do this:

Arturo doesn't hear. i degglare that i'll get him later. we get into the jacuzzi. 8 months preggnant lady (that's an interpretation, not a hope) on the left. righteous dude with righteous babe opposite. pimply people to their left. lose my goggles. friend finds them. much merry rejoicing is had by all, except for alpha pimples who wants to punch me. look a bit harder at those sharing the tepid water with us: conjunctivitis on righteous dude? his girlfriend (behavioural observation) has similar ailment.. they high? wistful pangs emerge, but suppressed with assurances that phenomenon is definite proof of conjunctivitis. notice red lines describe peoples' high-water mark. suggest we leave. friend justifiably freaks over bubble-scum on her back. we take a shower and giggle a bit. back to the steam room.

then, sauna... triumvirate of historical reenactors replaced by homeowners sizing up 20 year mortgages. friend leaves. spritely old lady does the splits beside me on the top riser. i leave.

towel grabbed, i enter the locker room. shower, check on the socks i left airing up top the lockers, phew... fuck! children! thank heavens for punctuation marks! change as modestly as humanly possible, making sure every article first sweeps across puddles of discoloured liquid(s?) eggreggating in physically improbable areas. leave.

and am left -skin feeling a few sizes smaller- ovoiding eye-contact with angry-looking parental people outside whilst waiting for my friend. why do i have to endure this prejudice!? should i rise now, denouncing and condemning this indiscriminate bigotry towards disheveled misfits with red eyes hanging around community fitness centres? what form would this indignation take? a minor remark about how best to obviate grammatical ineggsactitude within the usage of 'slow children crossing' signs? or, go strong and find some way to prove that, irrespective of gender or mediated alarmism, it is hard doing kindness these days? doubtlessly, the counterclaim would be: what's hard? and, did you know that 'kind' means 'child' in German? and, if you burn, you're innocent. then my friend came out, and i felt the borrowed calm of looking like we were together; a prejudice finally eggsalting my favour.

at only $2 for a couple of hours, i'll definitely be going next week. gonna grow a beard first though so's to make my face, if not less suspicious, then at least more alterable. will also pass eyedrops round the jacuzzi, but will reserve the right to do the application myself on those wearing down the question. this way everyone will be more able to [e]n[g]a[g]e with the raw-egg-in-a-jacuzzi test.

ps. did you know, that -potamia (sing. -potamus) means 'rivers' or 'of the river'? think hippos or mesopotamia!

distancing as means of possession / Marco Polo awareness

perceptive possession begs space. a retreat to secure. extirpative immersion at odds with fathom-soundings. the call and response of conversation, especially with oneself. morelike twoself. a yes:yes that shimmers forth a mirror studio within which to think and meet another truly. do not get con-fused, leave that for the skin. you know that retraction of space that another can 'inflict' on you, they literalize you, becoming themself some spontaneous arbiter of reality? some people are very good at this sort of violence, but don't worry, it only postpones their realization. literalism is a sort of thievery, a social trick, try not to encourage it. you are a broadbeam of pure thought, so think of time as its syntax and respect your spectator.

Each Hit and I

Something beautiful should be written, but I am a bit too angry to be the one to write it. Mine is the anger of a fantasist, and it's not very healthy. Here instead is a saying that I can only hope is truly attributable to the supposed source:

"One winter’s evening whilst gathered round a blazing camp fire, an old Sioux Indian chief told his grandson about the inner struggle that goes on inside people.

“You see” said the old man, “this inner struggle is like two wolves fighting each other. One is evil, full of anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, deceit, false pride, superiority, and ego”.

“The other one,” he continued, poking the fire with a stick so that the fire crackled, sending the flames clawing at the night sky, “is good, full of joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith”.

For a few minutes his grandson pondered his grandfather’s words and then asked, “So which wolf wins, grandfather?”

“Well”, said the wise old chief, his lined face breaking into a wry smile, “The one you feed!”"

Egregiously borrowed in entirety from Don't Feed The [Wrong] Wolf (www.dontfeedthewolf.com)

how soon is now?

Riddles often don't beg solutions, but choice. And so the riddles remain, their understanding somewhat improved. Most deceptive are those riddles intimate with their solution; their alloy betraying all hopes of choice. How many ways to choose are aborted by such prejudice? By solution?

Consciousness is most effective when gauging differential. This is stimulating, and the conscious mind will crave it. Much harm has been done by the sheer ability for the consciousness to create it for itself.

What is confusion? To crack it as one would some lexical geode, it appears to be a contradictory state wherein competing thoughts are co-mingled beyond individual discernment. What then rises to decipher it?

This imminence of present-mindedness is a messy, messy business. How 'thick' is the now? Thick enough for the mental space required for efforts of projection into the past or future. But it must fluctuate also, determined by those minds consensual of the shared moment. Also, I still do not trust the idea of 'being in the now'... what does that mean? Opening the senses? Reading the symbols? Destroying the past/future (both of which a could be said to take the form of remembrance)? Taken too literally, we might spite our gifts of intelligence.

Tractable familiarity saddens me, which might be why I get upset when people forget that they've already told me something. It makes me feel interchangeable with anyone else. This interchangeability is likely all too true, hence my sadness. When someone's warmth ebbs and flows, I am distressed, perhaps because at that point I am more them than they are me.

things rich people say

"oh, that's just so the otters won't get in"

"Maude, I can see a piece of chewing gum in the privet"

"it's not squabbling, it's foreplay... for our respective extramarital affairs"

"I don't have a hammer. will a power-washer do?"

"Free Tibet? you're Free Tibet.. on whether or not it'll ever gain its independence"

"one of my sons is a broker, the other a hippie. but i forget which is the blighted freeloader"

"she's in Bermuda, but we play correspondence tennis"

"we save the tonic water for when we have guests"

"i only laugh upwards in class"

paper scraps found while tossing my room for Tax

-landscapes of stories folding always back on themselves; pushing mountains out of them by sheer heft of societal force -> putting roads and rest-stops, stores and haylofts. And kitchens, always kitchens.

-egg punctured by the tines of a fork -> clouds like a jangle of brass keys

-inversion of the city's wealth strata

-of Victoria's nightlife:
"phalanxes of flaxen lactators
identitties, casualties of whore?
there's safety in numbness
village of the dumbed
remancipate yourself dears
pluck the sucker from you"

-?:
"symbionts and symbols
symphonies of cymbals
how's it hard
forests of fingers
contorting, distorting, retorted

and there's pride, it's filling
but not enough
to fill the trough"

-sudoku on the toilet; a process of elimination?

-anything that changes your behaviour must be real

-"ruffled willow Ryn,
wind whisperer, eolian empress
rustled billows press the push of swish and swoosh
her wisp, a kiss to cup the air
her shift, a crisp kristling crown of hair

lithe limbs arouse a mind amaze
enlaced grace assists the heart's arrest
and curtseyed skirts curtain your search
to curve your course to convalesce

fronds framing her slendor, besplendrin' the attender
with manifold dance of light,
levity lands, licked liminal,
by many lanced delights
fanning favour for fancy's full flight

with dipped hips Ryn sweeps and weeps for the river
sighs breathe through her, the breaths move her
a silhouette in shiver,
a candlebraic calm veils soft muted charm
hers is dryadic embrace
tending sanctuary beneath
her lullaby sways.."

similimilimiles!

- like a prostitute describing herself as 'outdoorsy'
- like birdsong from a thicket
- like confusing Plenty of Fish for People of Walmart
- like being corrected for a purposeful hyperbole (A- "that bobcat driver is skilled enough to change a diaper" B-"i don't think that's really true")
- like literally shaking the last drop out of the carafe
- like being the very last person that anyone will sit next to on the bus. yet again
- like the magic cyclone a project needs to be finished
- like an atheists ability to still reference the world using religious language
- like the apparent nonsense of echinacea being applied BEFORE one gets sick
- like a clown afraid of children
- like a surname corresponding to the profession (Madoff the shyster, Maycock the optician, Pollen the horticulturalist, Straddlin the guitarist...)

so yesterday i smashed the tea set at my pity-party. needed that. today, i woke up with the idea of augmenting what to me is central to the anthropological problem: scale.

but maybe i'll do that later instead.

going to just hover my fingers above the keyboard and see what blurts out.

winds blew April into us and a synapse somewhere burped me a message so simple i'd of course overlooked it. hide in plain sight. blossoms evolved to release and capture pollen in those March winds, to be watered by those April showers. i am one of the many of this town that venture into gusty nights. it is a favourite escape. see the world pulled by an edge of force (i repeat myself, surely, but the force enacted on an object in the wind is more of a suck than a blow. think of the 'lift' of an aircraft's wings as it creates its own wind here.) perhaps the stormchasers who roam out to intercept the sensory concert these nights generate are there for the pollination of blown ideas. to receive the ideal mistrals of others, and perhaps let go of a few of their own.

i am confused by myself. there's some sort of problem of the heart that occurs everytime i try to play the sheet music i burnt so many candles to scribe. this is a stupid metaphor, but also apt: i can think it, just not do it. i'm not sure what is at fault here. a fear, a very basic fear, one i learned before i learned that i learned. i'm not sure what is holding me in this spot... i am afraid of finishing anything, and it's affecting my entire life. over. and over. i defer, i procrastinate, i moan, i mither... and i feel sadness, as i know i could be wonderful at life. that's all i can say, as i don't want to participate in its reification any further.

a Mona Lisa simile

like a broken arm and an apple tree...
like a bobby pin on the floor of Starbucks...
like an old dear in the Express checkout...
like Gandalf's hemline...
like a conversation about Stephen Harper with your mother...
like mustaches and 'irony'...
like your ex contacting you upon breaking up with her latest boyfriend...
like a meteorologist in a convertible...
like the last biscuit at a tea-party...
like flattery after an unintended slight...
like zombies, vampires, trucker-hats, wearing your pajamas in the mall, and the miasmatic word 'sustainable'...
like reviving your use of Facebook a few days before your birthday...
like finally receiving the email you sigh to...

sounds

communities used to convey information through the use of bells: marriage, commemoration, time, religious observance, victory, defeat. now this news is quietly embedded in our self-phones. and bells, when they bell, are a sort of vestigial emotion. a nostalgic tracing similar to Bjork when she gets to that part of the song where she plays with the limn of words' sound and meaning

i have a collection of 8 foot bamboo rods in my bedroom right now, they crackle softly like a bored Geiger counter. harvested from my yard, i wonder if i wouldn't love giving it all up and becoming a bamboo treehouse guy

toast is quite sonorous when the lights are out. spreading butter sounds somewhat like someone ox-plowing a parking lot

my alarm clock does not wake me up. but my sister's one, 35 feet away and through 3 doorways, does. by some feature of harmonics, it's soft enough to be piercingly loud. that and its bleeps are akin to a truck backing up

extractor fan drones; ear-bud hiss; people dragging their feet in libraries; the noise of another's single mistake that you somehow know is antecedent to their declaration that they're having a bad day; sailboat clanks as the water passes its waves through the boat and to your ears; the ticking of an unseen bicycle being walked past your window; the sound shadow an object creates as you pass, such as how bench curves the susurrus of a fountain; the ubiquitous use of power heels and jangled keys forecasting arrival of authority

the word 'ostentatious' is

Divestity First

Point form!! YAY!

- Sustainable porn?

- is one of the Kids in the Hall playing the role of Stephen Harper these days?

- Found shopping list at Safeway:
1. Chips
2. Pop
3. Ice-cream
That's it! Someone WROTE THAT DOWN TO REMEMBER. I hope they're not still wandering the aisles in anguish as I write this.

- Diversity Fest, 2009. Was as righteous as ever [aside from another sad loss] But I remember thinking one thing to always keep in mind: the nastiest object that one could possibly touch would be a hand-sanitizing bottle when it's empty. That's all for this point.

- Best movies I watched this year (2009-2010, in order of remembrance):
1. The Fall
2. Moon
3. Let The Right One In
4. District 9
5. Stalker (favourite?)
6. Mary and Max
7. Mongol
8. Primer (a sci-fi filmed for $7000?!?!)
9. Silent Running (made me feel sadder than I thought it could)
Could you recommend any? This list feels mildly insubstantial...

- You are my among my softest thoughts, being not privy to yours. Is that why we always end in obloquy?

- Also, THIS GUY!

no more negative thoughts

soundtrack: shackleton's breezeblockmix.mp3

homework's jeering at me and my room's a snowglobe of clothing in stasis. these are both pushing at me, and i realize i realize them. as walls and arches, i feel i occupy and build within such negative space of these outerworldly materials. not negative as in subtractive, or in some perceived absence of good, but as the space of semi-invisible constraint. as tasked materials within which i react. often, i dwell there precognitively: i shouldn't drink a beer now, i want to drink one later. i should reflect on the memorial service for my mother's neighbour. i am afraid to finish that music track, so i won't. i am afraid to write, so... i will...

What are the benefits and pitfalls of approaching sustainable building from a philosophical position?
i owe an essay to this question for an accreditation course i am pursuing. i wish i could decrypt the problem i have with it... it appears to have too many intrinsic assumptions: philosophy is an immovable, immutable 'monolith' with no endogenous complications? surely not... philosophy will aggravate ideas of sustainability until it has bled all intended meaning? no... a philosophical position is doxy, whereas the vacuity of the word 'sustainable' is necessarily adaptive? i'm not sure about any of this... honestly... benefiting who? in the purview of what timescale; the lifecycle of a building? is sustainable sustainable? building is generative whereas philosophy is masturbatory? perhaps at whomunculus, but really, philosophy has set itself up so that only parts of it can fail [this could be read: succeed in becoming 'factual', and thereby aphilosophical]... so this shivers out of shape again. instead, i hope to divert the river here:

take the human out of her own devices of measure, and place her in the universe. she becomes both the alien and the intimate. let us suggest that she could imagine her self being more-than-one within her lifetime. that is, she can readily say phrases such as: 'i like myself when i am around you' or 'sometimes i wish i were a tree'. it could follow that these possibilities allow for this differential of self down to a minute quantum of time (quick cloud gaze: do units of time become 'dryer' the smaller the get?) thereby, taken objectively, a person both is and is not who she is... it is only her claim -and constant repetition of such- that she is that might make her so. if we allow the shattering of that person even further (or, it could be said, simultaneously) into feelings, then perhaps feelings belong as organs. not separately, such as anger = pancreas and love = heart, as that shit's older than age itself, but as parts of a whole. the twist is, the whole is not here the individual anymore, but that which is conceived by the individual. our she might have an idea that is made up of many emotions, each one presenting themselves as they are benefited or pitfallen by interaction with the universe. any perception that she IS her emotions, would speak to her beholdening of herself as a contiguous in-dividual. instead, she could become the (now messier than my room) many-one that conducts emotional response over now very divisible ideas. again, the blurring of these ideas into a representation of her true self is a conceit of convenience and indiscriminate thought. i'd say developed, in part, by legality [as attempt at quantifying the human condition in lieu of acceptable qualification?] and deeply ingrained social mores. what's left becomes subject to questions like 'what becomes of personal agency and responsibility in the case of the many-one?' - but do we not already have this problem, i.e. pleas of temporary insanity (apparent interruptions of continued self) or corporate malfeasance (bad doings by the meso-many-one)?

so now, anger becomes again a failure of intended or anticipated happiness of an idea 'he's late to pick me up to go for ice-cream at Fisherman's Wharf'. and not 'i AM angry'. admittedly, there were many allowances made to come to this manifold sense of organic self, but it's largely because i did have that beer in the end.

and, by grand allusion, i'd like to propel this idea as an argumentative analogy to spite 'sustainability'. with out its supersaturated marketplace connotations, 'organic' means so much more... the paisley wallpaper of ecology remains (or is even strengthened), the systemic notions are made firm, the mortality reintroduced (as opposed to some hazy embedding of trans-generational communism/collective guilt) and space for change is again of central concern. considering our historical faults have become evident and that methods of underwriting true value (energy consumption married with nutritional systems) are now available, we have further to go than we've yet come, and sustainability is not enough as that would imply that we've already arrived. besides, 'sustainability' WILL lead to programs of overt eugenics.

of passersby who just don't

in montreal, i began to notice a girl who i could only describe as 'a spunky redhead' was popping up wherever i went. sitting at a cafe, she'd nip past. waiting for an elevator, who would exit it? catching the VIA train to Toronto. even on a ferry in BC. it became at least a bi-weekly game: 'oop, there she is, riding a unicycle, of course' [that never happened] she'd only grimace at me, spunkily. and i've no idea what expression i carried, but one of mild irritation perhaps?

well, this is beginning to happen in victoria, except this time it's with a hispanic-looking dude. i KNOW he's seeing me at least as frequently as i see him. he seems to be on every bus i get on... i suppose we do conduct some affairs in the same quadrant of town, but still, come on. next time i see him, perhaps an awkward moment hovering in the produce section, i'm gonna just tell him that he's got to alternate days with me, else take up a wordless high-five ritual so's to keep it real.

the Princess and the Blog

blogging for me is like doing mental calisthenics. always done alone and in the pink, it's a graceless, self-serving endeavor, like being busted with your mouth on the milk carton, dribbles beading down your bathrobe lapels. for others, it seems not so, and they pull off some remarkably thoughtful ruminations that find a resonant space balancing between the extremes of trivial and profound. perhaps its just their hidden machinations, my own so brazenly revealed (to myself), that make it so, but i'm always impressed. it's a baser program for me, i feel, as i do it to simply wake myself up. i'll readily discuss burrito recipe balancing or bull markets, post-structuralism or polyps... if only to feel that in that day, i had a thought that, if not original, was presented as such.

however.. as i left my own musings in the cold, more or less for about a year, i'd also fallen out of tasking myself to comment on the blogs of others. this is a critical function, like the return of blood to the pumping heart or the intake of fresh air. blogging without reading and contributing to others is being a PRINCESS, and something i really must prevent in myself. on one level, i'd readily admit that i don't want to comment just for the sake of it (as most comments seem to be self-referential/promotional) but shit, this form of individualism is alas an accepted medium for discourse (and tends to trump the input of the modest moiety). it takes a community to whisper up an individual but an individual to shout down a community (or something loose-witted like that). so i'm gonna try to get out of myself and visit the ol' blog-pond and bask a while on their lily pads. kiss kiss.

Team building exercises are an odd idea. I'd imagine their usefulness as having any lasting value being as limited as a People magazine editor's attention span. Take our high school exercises for example: get everybody across this imaginary alligator pit using not-enough planks and a skipping rope. The future applications this has can be projected to what exactly? Escaping from a Nintendo game? Smuggling somebody's relatives across the Rio Grande? If there's ever a point at which I can hold my hand up to the group I'm mysteriously traveling with and say 'don't worry guys, I got this, luckily we covered this one in gym class' I'll reappraise my relationship with my junk-mail folder. Honestly, if our teachers were truly serious, shouldn't they've gone a few steps further in the imaginary activity: 'A few of you have been spraying your precious bodily fluids down your thighs for the last 8 days due to dysentery. One of you is at the end of their second trimester with the Somalian pirate-king's baby. Those two are still chained together and you over there are still blinded from the gasoline siphoning mishap in the exercise we just completed. Now get across that alligator pit.'

Hey! How about some skills we could perhaps transpose onto the real-world? Oh, I don't know, something like 'how to do your taxes' or 'this is your charter of freedom and rights' or 'massage circles' or 'fixing small combustion engines' ...anything even remotely relatable. So what was the point then? For a teacher's lounge betting pool? 'Good job. Because you were death-rolled by the alligator, Mr. Jenkins now has to dress like Monica Lewinsky for a day [this was in the late 90s]. Therefore you have a Type A personality.' Or something more insidious, like getting us used to the absolute pointlessness and subjugation we'll have to endure through much of life? Breaking our spirits with an uncompletable exercise so as to prime us for later brainwashing and ideological impressibility (this has been shown literally ad nauseum through psy-op detention exercises).

I've totally forgotten the point I was trying to make. Nothing like the introduction of gOVERnMENTAL brainwashing to prime one for forgetfulness... Um. Oh yeah, the denouement: We all made it across without a single sacrifice (voluntary or non-) and then, as a reward, we were hosed down and prodded back to our gruel-troughs.

white

i am white. i don't mean that in an ethnic sense, or as a statement of pride, or even as an approximation of my capacity for rhythm. but as sheer fact: my whiteness is profound. i'm surprised i cast a shadow i'm so white. it's beyond ceramic. beyond mime. beyond The Bachelor's teeth. my white is weapon's grade white. i make Russians look Brazilian. i make tampons feel like harvest farm hands. brides feel like anti-smoking ads. i get crank calls from pieces of chalk and magician's bunnies, cave newts and Welsh people, i'm that white. i have to use aloe vera after a full moon. i cannot even look at my own feet during summer.

i say this as i took my shirt off yesterday, and a child pointed me out to her mother, and i heard an audible gasp. people gasp as if i'm some sort of perversion! which is a fair appraisal, it just skips a few salient intermediary points.