In the middle of everywhere

Remixed Metaphors

2006-10-17T22:50:00.000Z

This last weekend I had the opportunity to hear a long-time lover of the herb valiantly attempt to repeat the line "Why drink and drive when you can smoke and fly" to a group of people. Having just learned the phrase five seconds previous, and being very much under the influence of the herb whose qualities it espouses, our hero earnestly squeezed forth this delightful nugget of wisdom:

"Why drive... when you can smoke?"

This is now my new motto in life.

The Land of Nod, Pt. 2

2006-10-01T13:36:00.000Z

I arrive at the park to find a group of young children sitting there playing instruments under the guidance of my father. Good thing I have this small guitar, even though I have no clue how to play it.

The sky is getting darker and there are quite a few people milling about. As I sit down and prepare to be idolized by the children for pretending to know how to play a guitar (I plan to tap the wooden panel rhythmically a lot), a blood-red World War I-era biplane swoops in from the west. Set against the dark and cloudy sky and flying low, it would be an ominous thing even if it weren't approximately five times as large as a commercial airliner and fifteen times as large as a regular biplane. With a deep and horrible drone it passes us by and vanishes into the east.

As I prepare to start faking guitar chops, a military helicopter is seen in the east, hovering just above the apartment buildings across the street. It, also, is grotesquely oversized, and it has dark smoke-lines coming from its underside and extending horizontally into the distance, like it just fired off a couple of missiles. It hovers unnaturally backwards to the north, in the process firing off missiles which leave dark trails of smoke but never seem to impact on anything.

No matter. I begin playing the small guitar, and to my surprise find that I am rather adept at it. Maybe it's because it's such a small one. All the children stop playing and start looking at me wonderingly. My father beams with pride. I suddenly become aware that there are quite a lot more people in the park than I realized at first. One of my best friends sidles up and gives me that look, half-jealousy and half-admiration, and I sense that the next words out of his mouth are going to be "Well, you multi-talented motherfucker." In spasmodic anticipation of the compliment, I fuck up the song and accidentally break the guitar.

As if to save me from the feelings of humiliation sure to follow, the dream at this point treats me to an ellipsis, the duration of which I do not know. I am immediately aware of the facts of the present situation, though; there is a nuclear world war on, it is being fought with grotesquely oversized aircraft, and there is a gigantic bomb on its way here to obliterate everything.

I step out on the back porch. This is a house I lived in as a child. There is a giant, endless field across the street from our back yard, and it is on fire. Behind it, in the distance, my city burns. A sense of almost joyous finality lies in the air. This, then, is it. Here's where it all ends. I have vague memories of having said goodbye to everyone. There is a strange, bittersweet glory to the whole situation. We are all going to die, but we will be remembered. History will mourn us.

Somewhere amidst the wash of dramatic thoughts, I am aware of the blinding flash, the burning up of the film, and I see myself from a third-person perspective, arms outstretched, embracing the end. Whatever lessons there could be had from the whole thing are completely negated by its intense thematic similarity to the movie Deep Impact. I am aware of this even as I am vaporized by the bomb.

Waking up in my bed this morning, with drool on my pillow and my left arm asleep, was a bit like going to a Limp Bizkit concert and learning the entire band had been wiped out in a freak embroidering accident. You know; an anticlimax, but a good one.

The Jolly Dickhead

2006-09-30T23:15:00.000Z

I know this guy. He is unique. He is probably one of the most unique characters I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. This is not to say that I necessarily like him (though I certainly don't hate him). It's more to do with the fact that he occupies a certain social role I've not seen anyone occupy in the same way before, and that role is the "man-about-town." It's all he is. It defines him completely. And it's funny as hell, because in and of itself, it's not quite enough to make a complete person. As is so often the case with people, it's the deficiencies that make him interesting.

He possesses a sort of bouncing bluster that, inexplicably, manages to make him hip and childlike at the same time. Occasionally he'll say something so grossly, out-of-the-ballpark inappropriate that people instinctively gloss it over and act like the words didn't just come out of his mouth, because to accept their existence is to accept the creation of a social H-bomb that will wipe out not just your conversation but most likely the entire party, and quite possibly some of the shindigs in the immediate area. I've seen this happen on a number of occasions, and it always strikes me as hilarious. He gets to say whatever he likes, and people don't just ignore it; they simply don't hear it.

He very overtly adheres to the kind of personal meritocracy that I wish more people were honest about. It's very simple, really: in the universe according to him, people's personal importance is strictly dictated by their social stature. If you're Johnny Well-Known, then you're automatically and inflappably more important than John Q. Public. If you're Jack Famous, then Johnny Well-Known can go fuck himself, at least for the time being. I suspect a lot of people go in for this mode of thinking while not owning up to it, perhaps not even to themselves; he, meanwhile, displays it proudly on his sleeve.

Since he's the guy with the connections - the guy who cuts the deals, the guy who fixes the problems - he's always on the move. There's always someone more important than you that he could be networking with at this very moment, and that person needs to be found and networked with. This means that whenever you're in conversation with him, there's a strict limit imposed on how long you can make your sentences. I amuse myself sometimes by counting the number of syllables I'm able to get out before he starts looking away (roughly 12), spots someone else (roughly 20) and is gone, like a fart on the summer breeze (30, if you're lucky).

But he's real jovial about it all. And here's the funny thing: even with all that, his joviality is completely genuine. It isn't forced and it isn't faked. He doesn't hate you, it's just that you're not as important as some of these other people, and he has no gentle way of easing you into that fact. It's that man/child dichotomy thing. He's the only person I know who could carry the title "Jolly Dickhead" pinned to his lapel, and it would make immediate and obvious sense to everyone who knows him. "Oh," they'd say. "That makes immediate and obvious sense."

I bumped into him the other day. Roughly paraphrased and liberally time-stretched, here's how our conversation went:

JD: (smiling ear-to-ear) Heeey man, you going to the thing tonight?

Me: Oh, I dunno, I haven't really been feeling all that great. Still...

JD: (begins skimming the premises)

Me: ...sorta recovering from that flu, not sure if I should be partying yet.

JD: (fixes his gaze on a point somewhere directly behind my head) Yeah, you probably have ball cancer.

Me: Plus, I hit the bottle pretty hard last weekend, sorta want to stay away from that for a couple weeks. So what about...

JD: (walks away)

It's probably a good thing there aren't many more like him, but the birdwatcher in me is nevertheless glad that his particular breed exists.

Here's to you, Jolly Dickhead.

Simian Disco

2006-09-23T06:56:00.000Z

Here's what I did: I searched everywhere. I went on beyond all reasonable limits of common sense. I searched under every rock. I peeked into every cranny. I explored all the nooks. And here's what I came up with:

We are one crazy bunch of monkeys.

This may not seem like a profound truth to those of you familiar with the basic facts of biology. This was, however, a source of endless amusement to me this evening, as I maneuvered myself through a variable set of scenarios in which my completely arbitrary standing towards other monkeys in my immediate surroundings thoroughly dictated the way I was able to communicate with them.

If there's anything homo sapiens will be remembered for in the trackless depths of Time Itself, I suspect it will be our monumental capacity to build walls around ourselves. The lengths to which we go to craft shells which carefully describe exactly what we want the other monkeys to see will, I suspect, continue to amaze me for as long as I live. I vividly recall a particular moment tonight where I was completely overcome by the silliness of it all; this fantastic congregation of simians, all gathered for no greater purpose than to gawp at each others' flashy clothing and confirm the "individuality" of every monkey present, as if there was a greater meaning to each ridiculous haircut or pink t-shirt or nose ring.

This is not to say that I consider myself excluded; to the contrary, I am as much a member of this monkey discotheque as the next guy. I carefully guard my image, I make reasonably sure my turf isn't trod upon, I litter my surroundings with artefacts designed to reinforce my sense of separateness from the next monkey, and I create things which - in my wildest imaginings - are destined to set me apart, apart from all these god damn monkeys.

Every once in a while, in the process of doing so, I slip up and fall flat on my face.

I'm pretty sure this is where that whole humanity thing goes and happens.

The Life And Times Of Count Fnoonf Du Fnoonf Fnoonfburgh The Fnoonfth, Vol. 1

2006-09-14T04:50:00.000Z

I was born on an unspecified day in the last quarter of the last century, in the quaint capital of a quaint country.

Just like most people not blessed with eidetic memory (and not presently two years or younger*), I have fairly few memories of my earliest years. I think my first memory is of the time I unwittingly simulated a repetitive sex act between a male (the lamp plug) and a female (the wall socket), and I think the jolt I received as a reward is probably the reason why this is my first memory. To this day, I have a vague, nagging fear of being electrocuted every time I have sex.

Another early memory revolves around fire. I was playing around on the living room floor near my venerable grandmother, who liked nothing better than to sit in her wicker chair, read philosophy and smoke Winston after Winston after Winston, like she had something against them and wanted them exterminated as fast as possible (they won out in the end, but she'd had a good run and accepted her fate with dignity).

So I'm playing near her and I smell something weird that I've never smelled before, so I go in the kitchen and tell mom about it, and then she takes me back out to the living room and notices that one of grandma's cigarettes has started a small blaze on the lamp shade. I remember my mother's alarm, and I remember the smell; dark, heady and chemical, so frighteningly rich with un-nature. I also distinctly recall being aware of my mother repressing some of her alarm in order not to frighten me. Since then I've smelled plenty of burning things, but nothing has ever quite come close to that particular acrid, synthetic stench.

There is also one very powerful memory that I'm inclined to chalk up to youthful confusion between dream life and waking life, because I am fairly certain it couldn't have happened. I was standing in our living room looking out over the neighborhood (we lived on the third floor and the view was rather decent), and I was watching this, I dunno, maybe 200-foot panda blustering around, trying to make a seat for itself on one of the buildings about a block or so away. I think this is a dream because, dude, we totally don't even have giant pandas where I'm from.

It was apparent from very early on that I was a pretty weird kid. Irrational fears began to manifest themselves very quickly; I lived in mortal terror of the vacuum cleaner (which became utter panic whenever the thing was turned on) and it soon became apparent to me that the lamp posts outside my window were, in fact, planning on reaching inside and snatching me while I was asleep, presumably to eat me or sell me for halogen or whatever it is that disturbed lamp posts do with small children. For this reason I flatly refused to sleep, play, or in any way subsist inside my room; the living room became my turf instead. I imagine it must have been fun for my parents, explaining to visitors why the main room of the house had been annexed by a neurotic two-and-a-half year old tyrant.

"It's the lamp post cabal thing. Your... your child has that too, right?"

Next up: Thunderous oratory, banana tragedies, early DJ chops and my first video game. Ta for now.

* Those who are two years or younger should stop reading right now, because there's some totally racy stuff coming up. Thanks.

Majority's Manifesto

2006-08-14T19:01:00.000Z

Hi, my name's Fnoonf and I'm a recreational drug user.

You may have heard of people like me, but odds are you haven't. In our world of knee-jerk polemics there's no room for the vast majority that makes up the middle, we who occupy the spectrum between the cracks of the establishment's gleefully black-and-white definitions of "law-abiding citizen" and "drug fiend." Yes, there is in fact such a spectrum, and it is entirely possible to occupy one of the non-extreme parts of it; to, verily, use drugs in moderation – without doing irreparable damage to your life, your body and the people around you.

Take the first time I smoked pot. Now, I may have lost my job and quit my girlfriend (she did not appreciate the sitar, so she had to go) and taken up stuff like weaving and pacifism, but who's to say that made me any worse a person than I am today? There may be the slight matter of short-term memory loss, but I contend that in the grander scheme of things, the Wizards were far better with Jordan than they ever were with Carter. Wait, Carter was never with the Wizards? What the… whoa, nice lamp.

And take speed, right? It's great, right? I mean, I'm able to concentrate on things I never would have been able to concentrate on, talk bullshit all night long to complete strangers and it gets me real edgy sometimes but that doesn't matter because fuck this tune rules man bosh bosh bosh bosh fuck I just chewed through my cheek anyone have a band-aid fuck me that's one fine lady yeah let's just nip back into the john over here bosh bosh bosh bosh bosh.

Now, cocaine, man, don't even get me started there. I mean, I'll allow for a small possibility that you might disagree with me here, but the chances of you actually being right to my being right are so miniscule that I'm sure it would just break your spirit to even contemplate going there, so I know you’re not going to. Besides which, we both know that, even on the infinitesimal off-chance that I were actually wrong, I'd just bend the truth around your truth until you have no idea what's up and what's down. And I'll do it all with a smirk on my face, the kind that tells you no matter what the outcome, I've already won.

Ecstasy, man, this is what it's all about. Finally I get it, finally. This is what's been holding me back, all this negative energy, man, all these petty insecurities. Finally I'm free to just be who I want to be. I don't have to hold myself back anymore. Christ, how come I never noticed how freaking awesome this music is? Boy, it sure does feel awesome to just move around, feel my body drift through space. I'll never have to come down from this, man, because I know what it's about now and I'll never forget. At least not 'till tomorrow.

And mushrooms. Heh. Heh hah. Haheha. HAHEHAHEHAHEHAHEHAHEHAHEHA. YOUR FACE IS ON THE RIGHT WAY AROUND! AND I DON'T EVEN EXIST! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Whoa. Dude, whoa. I just realized that, like, everything in our sensory experience is, like, just a bunch of symbols that we put our interpretation to, based on our previous experience and the synaptic firings inside our skull, and, like, the only absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths, man. Also, YOUR FACE IS STILL ON THE RIGHT WAY AROUND AAAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

These may sound like scary examples of altogether nutty behavior, but that's kinda the point. Let your hair down. Fucking stop holding on so tight. It won’t be like this forever, you know.

I still have a great job and a rewarding life in an awesome city, packed to the brim with wonderful people. I’ve done all the drugs listed above, all of them more than once, some of them in combination. And I’m still here.

I’m not saying any of these things necessarily changed my life for the better, though in a way, they really have. I’ve had a bunch of interesting experiences and made my acquaintance with viewpoints – and people - that I otherwise would not have come into contact with.

It’s possible to do this without killing yourself, is what I’m saying. All you have to do is exercise a little bit of common sense. There are good things and bad things about each of these drugs, and you take the bad with the good, just as with any other thing. And you tread carefully.

So don’t swallow what they tell you hook, line and sinker. Remember, kiddies: caution is a noble necessity, but blind obedience to a faceless patriarch is a bigger corrupting force than any combination of chemicals.

Thus endeth today’s lesson. Now go get fucked up.

The Grand Orchestra

2005-09-14T16:23:00.000Z

Hi, kiddies. Today I want to talk about a masterful film I recently saw, and then saw again, and then saw again. And then again, and again, and again and again. This monsoon of greatness is called I Heart Huckabees, and it was showered upon the world by David O. Russell, the guy who made Three Kings and Flirting With Disaster.

The wonderful thing about this film is that it pulls a neat little conceptual hat trick I’ve never seen pulled before. Before we delve into that, though, let’s have a few words about the movie’s principal trappings. Right here, incidentally, is the end of the line for you if you haven’t seen it - I’m about to spoil stuff. Besides, if you haven’t seen this film yet, you shouldn’t be reading this or anything else. The only place for you right now is on a breathless sprint for the video store, currency extending from your outstretched hand in a supplicating manner, last night’s dinner barely contained within your quivering bowels.

So, okay. For the sake of brevity, I’m gonna drop the standard film-criticism parentheses and just lay out the bare-bones version, like so: A pair of young men facing separate but similar existential crises are torn between two ideologies, one a new-agey mysticism, the other a bleak nihilism. These ideologies’ representatives chase our hapless heroes through a distinctly 21st-century landscape filled with suburban sprawl, corporate mindlessness and the kind of sneering simplism peculiar to the offspring of consumerist societies. By the end, through the machinations of its screenplay, the film has managed, gently but effectively, to reconcile the two opposing philosophies. In doing so, it comes to a realization about the nature of ultimate truth, as far as such a thing can be confidently defined. Truth about truth. How post-modernistically post-modern.

I love this movie as much as I do because through this hat trick, it illustrates something I find myself in absolute agreement with but rarely see expressed: that ultimate truth (again, with the aforementioned proviso), as a destination, is achievable by many paths. Whichever path you choose, it will eventually lead you to the same place as all the other ones. Some paths are winding, others have great big detours, yet others are relatively straight. What the film’s two apparently opposite philosophical blocs are doing is merely taking different paths; in essence, their philosophies share the truth at the end of the rainbow. It’s not even that the scenery on their respective roads is different; all that sets them apart are the thoughts they have about the journey and the words they use to describe it. Like Pac-Man, they need only move an inch off the left side to suddenly find themselves on the right side.

Nothing matters, so everything matters. Strip all the layers off your ego and you have absolute emptiness, a.k.a. divine bliss. Life is transitory and unpredictable, yet bestowed its meaning and beauty by these very things. From whichever side you look at it, truth is truth.

The world’s religions and philosophies are all strumming the same piece on different instruments, and it would do us a world of good to remember that more often. As an astute fellow once observed, the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us.

And if you think I’m full of shit, then here’s me waving to you across the fork in the path. We’ll see each other again sometime.

Stubs

2005-09-07T14:47:00.000Z

I'm a smoker. I like to smoke cigarettes. Most of the time, this doesn't present immediate problems for me - I don't smoke in places where I'm not allowed to, I'm generally able to go through a cigarette from start to finish without burning holes in myself, and I don't, knock on wood, have any terminal diseases.

There is one aspect of the whole process, however, that never fails to make me come across as a modern-day village idiot, the kind that beams at you benignly while drooling on your shoes. See, through years of practice I've polished the actual act of smoking to a very refined level, but when it comes to the inevitable moment of putting the thing out, my arm invariably considers it a great idea to perform an impression of the eastern water cobra in its death throes.

Any persons present are then treated to a morbid post-modern danse macabre, wherein the principal players (my hand, my still-glowing cigarette and whatever cold, discarded cigarette butts may be present in the tray) create a whirling maelstrom of light and fury on the porcelain stage. As I earnestly stab the ashtray (displaying much the same intensity as a man might were he using a toothpick to punish the cockroach that killed his family), the cherry will break off the cigarette and fly into the single most populated area of the ashtray, where it will proceed to ignite the nearest filter (always a filter), as well as my temper.

A tiny ember will, of course, remain on my cigarette butt, requiring me to twist and mangle the thing in creative ways in an attempt to suffocate the final hopeful flame. This invariably leads to my fingers being covered in ash - a feeling I can claim no love for - and has, on more than one occasion, created a forceful spasm of disgust in my forearm, strong enough to send the entire ashtray flying through the air, dispensing cancerous confetti in slow motion, showering those present with sooty nicotine love. Whatever claims to dignity I may have had in the moments preceding this are irretrievably lost; the people near me, if still alive, will either be laughing, crying, or reaching for a weapon of some kind.

Also, I snort in ashtrays. An innocent little half-laugh. Fwoosh. Look, it's snowing black.

Sometimes I'm so cool I can hardly believe it.

A Hypothetical Paradox

2005-09-02T17:34:00.000Z

What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security
team, who always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad of
Imperial Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet?

-- Tom Galloway

Shhh Guys, He's On Vacation

2005-09-02T16:28:00.000Z

From a Reuters article about the looting in New Orleans:

-----

"I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering," Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, as he watched a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

"Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is."

-----

And the Commander-in-Chief is whacking off behind the podium again in between ranch outings, dispensing nebulous accusations that the relief efforts are "unsatisfactory." Notice him, leader of the Federal Government, sitting on his hands while throwing around these smug reprimands. Exactly who are you addressing, Mr. President?

The travesty grows with each passing day. If Bush makes it through this with his reputation unscathed, American democracy will have officially taken a dump on its own eulogy.

Food's Moods

2005-08-30T21:24:00.000Z

Throughout my not-quite-30-odd years, a few commonplace things have consistently eluded me. The most prominent of these is the seemingly simple act of eating food with a knife and a fork. Now, I'm fairly certain there's some devilishly straightforward trick that the rest of the world isn't letting me in on; some way of ambushing the steak before it jumps off your plate, or of tricking the spaghetti into thinking your fork is actually a pretty nice place to hang out. Everyone insists, however, that this is just me being clumsy. Nothing more, nothing less.

I've therefore come up with a theory that suits me, and that theory is that food simply doesn't want to be eaten. Think about it for a second, and you'll see that despite being palpably untrue, the idea does hold some appeal, yes, yes? Your food desperately fears mastication and digestion, and there are only a select few persons in the world sensitive enough to pick up on the harrowing psychic screams of the doomed kielbasa, let alone the quietly mournful vibes of the forlorn potato. Those persons are myself, some guy in Beijing called Xu, and successful film and television actor David Spade.

My hypothesis, bullshit though it may be, is further strengthened by the fact that other skills involving manual dexterity (such as typing, playing the piano and tapping out the artfully intricate sequence of complex commands necessary to kick your motherfucking ass with Lei Wulong, motherfucker) are not a problem for me at all; to the contrary, I can claim a high degree of proficiency in most of them. It is therefore only in the arts of silverware kendo my fingers fail me.

Viewed in this unique and totally wrong way, my inability to use a knife and fork like other people is transformed from "maladroit fumblings of utensil-challenged yokel" to "unconscious expression of divinely charitable nature." I like this view much better, even if I always end up eating the food anyway.

I mean, at least I made an effort, right? Not like you soulless pricks.

Next week on Things Beyond My Faculty: Putting Out Cigarettes. Stay tuned.

The Land of Nod, Pt. 1

2005-08-24T10:26:00.000Z

So I'm sitting in this room, right, like a hotel room, with a double bed and two nightstands. The room is septagonal in shape, with wall segments of irregular length lending it a strange asymmetrical eerieness. On the wall opposite the bed are two elevators with shining chrome doors and frames; they look like the elevators you'd see at the Sears Tower or the Waldorf Astoria. "Fancy NY Elevayters," as I perhaps once heard a cowboy say.

I'm sort of milling around the room when I suddenly remember that - holy fuck - the baby's here and I forgot about it! Running to the other side of the bed, I find a baby wrapped in light blue linens, not crying, not smiling, just kinda lying there looking at the ceiling. I feel an intense wave of love and caring for this child, intermingled with guilt for having forgotten it there; after picking it up, I walk around the room for a little while, rocking it and cooing to it. It's unclear whether the baby's mine, but there is an intensity to my affection for it that suggests some form of connection.

Suddenly there are two other people in the room, a young couple dressed in black. As I turn around to face them, standing by the bed, there is an awkward moment; obviously we've both ordered the same room or something, and either they or I will have to leave. My awkwardness is compounded when I realize I'm no longer holding the baby, and that it is, in fact, back on the floor by one of the nightstands. Sheepishly I go back to where the baby is, pick it up and make my way to the elevators. Without using words, the couple and I seem to have decided that the room is theirs.

I enter the left elevator with the now-sleeping baby in my arms, pushing the top button (I forget the number) as the chrome doors close behind me. It goes up, then stops, goes back down, stops, then goes back up. No matter which floor I push, the doors won't open. I look down at the child. Its eyes are open and it's looking at me.

"I am the child who dreams the world," it says, and then I wake up.

And I didn't even do any drugs last night.

You Think You've Got Me.

2005-08-16T15:29:00.000Z

You think you have the problem cordoned off; that I'm just going to stay up on this mountain until I starve to death or crawl down with my hands up, beseeching your forgiveness. But that ain't gonna happen, you worthless punks, not in this lifetime. When you least expect it I'm going to rain the devil's own diarrhea down on your scrawny hides. I'm going to send every last one of you to the purgatory you so richly deserve.

And then, you bastards, the town of Angel Pine will burn.

I've got a minigun, a katana, a parachute, some armour and a bicycle.

Let's see what you brought to the party.

...

Why no ma'am, I haven't been playing any Grand Theft Auto at all.

Mylo

2005-08-12T19:41:00.000Z

I'm late to the party. I just discovered Mylo.

I heard his album when it first came out, and it didn't impress me at all. I seem to recall using words like "derivative," "boring" and "uninspired." I see now that I need to check my vocab, bitch.

I don't know how these things happen. Repeated exposure plays a role, sure. Others' opinions weigh in, and all that jazz. But the gap still seems unfathomably wide to me; a year ago, my hate for this music was almost palpable and now, almost without my noticing, I'm ready to go down on my knees in a dark alley for it.

It could be that I'm just becoming a curmudgeon. I've hated most of my favorite artists' latest albums: the Beastie Boys' Five Boroughs effort sounded to me like the dying rankle of a once-great poet, the Chemical Brothers' Push the Button is a complete travesty from top to bottom and Björk's whateverthehellitwascalled was a piece of work whose artistic value would have increased enormously by the inclusion of some actual music.

So apparently I have a "Hate All Incoming Music" switch somewhere, and if it's making me miss out on stuff like Mylo then it needs to be turned off, god damn it.

Moral of the story?

The latest Björk album fucking sucks.

It's Tomorrow Already

2005-08-11T11:50:00.000Z

I'm sitting here watching a William Gibson documentary where the man speaks of how fast the world is being flung into the future, how post-geographical cyberspace society and technological advances are shaping tomorrow in ways no one can foresee.

I'm sitting here watching this documentary on my computer while a friend is having a casual phone conversation with his girlfriend halfway across the world. At my fingertips, just a few clicks away, is a wealth of media, mounds of detailed information on whatever subject catches my fancy. I can go most places in the world and still have instant access to all my assets and a direct line to everyone I know back home.

Whenever I so please, I can begin a new life in any of a number of cyberspace worlds, self-contained universes with their own social customs and rules of law, and I can immerse myself however deeply I see fit. With every passing day, the physical world becomes less of a necessity and more of an option.

It could be argued that this vision of the world as an evolving techno-scape is westernocentric (maybe even to the point of naïvete), but even taking into account the poverty experienced by vast tracts of the world, technological advances - and their very real influence on parts both east and west - are constantly growing in both scope and application.

For us lucky(?) few, the future isn't just here already; it has already passed, and we don't realize it because we're sitting on the other side, eyes on the horizon. What comes next is anybody's guess.

Porno Poetry

2005-08-07T02:16:00.000Z

Yesterday two friends of mine decided, as you do, to look up the phrase "monster cocks" on Google. This was done in a spirit of pure scientific inquiry, the specifics of which elude me because I was really fucked up on drugs just when it happened.

What the search yielded were a bunch of porn pages replete with keyword lists designed to ensnare search engine-happy whippersnappers on their first youthful prowl through the fucked-up wastelands of internet porn. These keyword lists, it was discovered, are hilarious when read out loud and imbued with purpose through dramatic vocalization. When read out loud as poetry, however, they reach new levels of abstract communication.

And thus I present to you my latest poem, "Runner Thompson."

----------------------

Horse cock dicks
sporting goods,
horse cocks
chicks with dicks.

Big Dick Pics
girls
fucking huge cocks

Big Thick Massive Cocks
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Big cocks with huge cocks and big dick.

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I leave you with that.

They

2005-07-20T04:18:00.000Z

They* say that every time you drop something, a thousand germs instantly step up to

...

Know what happened there? I'll tell you what happened. I just spent 7 minutes writing the footnote to that asterisk behind the first word, and when I came back to the main body of the text, I realized the story wasn't that interesting to begin with.

So just read the footnote again. I'm going to bed.**

*they, in this case, representing that nebulous group of people who "hear" things, "have heard" things and, sometimes, "heard that once" particular things happened. Members of this group, while not often experiencing actual experiences, have honed their skills at hearing about them to a fine pitch. On any given day, one of "them" (often referred to as an "it" or a "that") may hear anywhere up to fifty (50) salient, scientific facts on the nature of reality, such as the fact that your Whopper probably has semen in it, dude).

**(Still bored after reading the footnote seventeen times? Try this.)

Liqourice And Leather

2005-07-20T03:49:00.000Z

An Austrian leather fetishist, when queried as to the beginnings of his particular fetish, stated:

"Yeah, I think I have a pretty good idea how it started. I always liked liqourice a lot - you know, more than the average person."

That's just funny. It's something else as well, but for now I'm just gonna go with funny.

Point of No Connection

2005-07-11T03:38:00.000Z

So there's this guy who, for reasons untold, has been living with me and my flatmate for a week or so now. I wouldn't mention him on here were it not for the fact that he seems to me to embody a trait which I find every once in a while in the people I come across, and which never fails to drive me up the wall. It's a certain sort of overarcing competitiveness, which of course isn't to say that he whips it out, slams it on the table and tries to stare me down when I use a long word. That would be pretty good, though. In fact, I'm gonna go out now and do that to the first person that uses a long word on me.

OK, I'm back. That went well, aside from the ruined salad and all the police.

Perhaps "competitiveness" isn't the best word for it, on reflection. It's more the sense of him not understanding some of the things I say, yet possessing an automatic, unflappable conviction that any miscommunication is up to my being stupid, rather than him not understanding me. I'll give you an example:

Him: "Those things kick serious ass."

Me: "Yeah, they really do."

Him: "What the hell do you mean? You're stupid."

Okay, so that was a bad example. This is because every time I need to dredge up an example to support a point I'm making, my brain automatically shuts down all memory centers relating to that particular point, then throws away the bookmarks and starts thinking about something else, like vodka or boobies. And I don't even particularly like vodka.

Nevertheless, the feeling remains. We all (or most of us, I would hope) know what it's like when there's a level of mutual "get-itness" with someone; when you have that zone of comfort where you're able to go out on little limbs of lateral thinking and express the intangibles informing your particular view of the world without fear that it's going to meet with the telltale blank stare that tells you you not only threw a wide pass, but that you tried to throw it to a piece of furniture in shorts.

Thing is, while most wide-pass non-receivers usually register the fact that the pass was there, and they missed it (I say this having watched my fair share sail by), there are some - a rare but intensely annoying breed - who are not only completely comfortable with missing the pass, but who manage, through some kind of non-Euclidean combination of idiocy and charisma, to actively convey the impression that because they don't get it, you're stupid.

I wouldn't be ranting about this - the guy in question will be living in my house for a few more days at most, and then he'll be gone and I'll never see him again - but I guess I just get annoyed at myself sometimes for not having the courage of my convictions when confronted with dissenting voices that I know to be wrong.

I mean, everyone should think like me, right?

Right?

Like A Phoenix, And All That Other Blah Blah Blah

2005-07-06T16:48:00.000Z

So here it's been almost three years and I stumble upon this blog again. Plenty has happened - I am no longer afflicted by that horror of a boss (I have a brand new horror now, one who isn't really a horror at all), I have a far far better job, and I'm making more money, though only incrementally. Job is still of a sensitive nature, I still live in one of the greatest cities in the world, and there is still no girlfriend, though flings have been indulged in with great gusto as opportunities have presented themselves.

Since I got such a great name for my blog now, I should be able to continue posting to it. Anonymous tidbits of joy, lust, loathing and love. Frequent frenzies of atrocious alliteration. Fun with concepts, logic, and pop culture. Nerd stuff.

Just a few things been running through my head...

Ode To My Boss

2002-12-10T03:22:00.000Z

May my boss cease to be. Please.

What do you do when every single day, every single hour that you spend in the presence of your so-called "superior" -- a person ordained by other people, you'll note, to organize and channel your work and make sure you stay devoted to it, a person who is supposed to have moral authority over you and "keep you in line" when you're not working a hundred percent -- when every single second you spend in the presence of this person reinforces the dreadful, unflappable certainty you feel in your gut that this person is not only intellectually, but also morally, cognitively and spiritually inferior to you, in fact so utterly inferior to everyone you know in all respects that it's a wonder this person hasn't at some point in their life simply forgotten that you have to breathe a couple of times every minute, thus putting a thankfully premature end to its existence?

I just managed to say "I hate my boss" in 153 words. This is the kind of verbosity bred only by just the right mixture of seething resentment and careful tactical planning (I know now, for example, that if my boss were ever to read this, she'd give up on the post after the 20th word because her daily allowance of Big Words had been reached, turn off her computer, walk around like a headless chicken for a few minutes, fall asleep on the bathroom floor, then go to work the next morning and spend all day wondering what the toilet and the bathtub had been doing in her bedroom). She is the embodiment of the stereotypical Middle Management Nightmare. She is responsible for facilitating the flow of information and communication from our department to our department head and upper management, and she uses this position to apply what seems to have been the one gift bestowed upon her at misbegetting, which is Taking Credit For Other People's Work. You will notice I put this in first-letter caps. This is to further underline the fact that she has elevated this particular activity into a form of art so refined that it falls squarely within the first-letter caps canon, falling just short of being italicizable or even boldable. She doesn't know how to open a can of Coke without garden clippers or use a cell phone without electrocuting herself, but boy, can she Take Credit For Other People's Work. She can Take Credit For Other People's Work until the cows come home, baby.

Hmm. I'm being excessively verbose again.

Okay, forget what I wrote above. In fact, erase all that from your head the way a piece of pickled ginger cleanses your palate in preparation for the raw, uncooked truth. Here comes the sushi.

Fuck my boss. Fuck her in her stupid ass.

I've said all I need to say.

Fear And Loathing in Candyland

2002-12-05T00:01:00.000Z

Living alone ain't easy.

At least not for me. I'm one of those people who has to have someone around in order to keep from going completely and utterly bonkers. This I learned on my third night of trying to live alone, when after getting out of bed for the fifth time in three hours because of a "strange noise" (that turned out to be nothing more than my friendly neighborhood serial killer idly sawing away at my doorknob -- and there I was thinking it was, I dunno, a cat) I realized that maybe -- just maybe -- it would be a wise course of action for me to:

a) Stop watching movies like this one all the time.

b) Grow a pair.

Notwithstanding the fact that nature already saw fit to bestow me with a pair (a pair that, sad to say, is rather uncomfortably bigger in actual physical reality than in the metaphoric "Boy's got some kay-jones on 'im!" sense of the word), I still believe that I could do well with another one (here I am again speaking metaphorically). The other night, for example, as I was walking to my car after a visit to a friend's house (he lives in a downtown area where the streets are paved with piss and the bourgeouis can't pass by without snorting rhythmically at all the "townie rats and lowlives") a member of the International Lunatics' Coalition, dressed in the trademark black coat and hat, started following me drunkenly down the echoing streets, every so often stopping to rattle off loud glossolalic pontifications that bounced off the stone buildings with a slap like a beach ball hitting a puddle. I vaguely heard him say something about me speeding up my step, but just then I turned the corner and was able to frantically shuffle the rest of the way towards where my car was parked. I'm sure my pulse was somewhere in the vicinity of your average gabber hardcore tune, and the rest of my system was giving me basically the same signals I'm indeed faced with when I hear that type of music. They're called flight signals, and they're your body's way of telling you that it really doesn't want you to be where you are right now because it would really like to stand a chance at going on with this little thing called living if you don't terribly mind thank you very much.

The thing is, while flight signals are a perfectly sane and rational response for a human being faced with gabber hardcore, an old shouting drunk shouldn't be something that strikes mortal dread into the hearts of strapping young men. Nor, for that matter, should fast-moving shopping trolleys, screaming children with face paint or inch-long buzzing things with yellow and black stripes. But all the things I get scared and nervous about have been magnified and expanded in my mind since I moved out of my parents' house not so long ago. It's almost like now that the security blanket for my most basic needs (roof over head, food in belly) has disappeared (or at least been swept from under my feet and placed in the next building), all the things that only vaguely bothered me before now send me screaming in abject terror for the nearest water fountain.

Still, I wouldn't have it any other way. When you gotta deal you gotta deal, and I'm glad I'm dealing. Or at least trying to.

Just keep the hornets out of my way and we'll get along fine.

So.

2002-12-04T20:05:00.000Z

Let me just make it clear from the very beginning that this is going to be a very self-indulgent, very self-referential and oh-so-post-modern blog. I've created this, really, for no other purpose than to hone my writing skills, have fun with the fact that virtually anyone from anywhere might read what I've written at any time, and enjoy the vague warmth that comes from imagining people worshiping at my Great and Joyous Altar of Fnoonfity, or alternatively, finding themselves suddenly wishing with inexplicable fervor that I would lose the ability to type (I have experienced this latter sensation myself on occasion). For various reasons I won't be revealing many personal details; my day job is fairly sensitive in nature and to truly pump this thing for all it's worth I want the luxury of honesty that only anonymity can afford.

There's really no way for me to tell where this thing's gonna head. It's my intention to keep it as free-form as possible. I don't know what to expect, and neither should you. Should keep things interesting.

And if it doesn't, I'll post nudie pictures.

Snoogans.