It's Rome, Baby!

This is your brain on Fucking Crazy: a 20 Year Retrospective of Text

2007-03-31T18:03:00.008-05:00

6/1/11: The Spirit of Salt blog has been largely archived at and replaced by the infrequently updated Bootstrap Gospel Blog which also houses the engine of commerce for those who like to support weird things by buying weird things. The spiritofsalt.com domain will remain forwarded to the song of the day blog (see previous update below) for the foreseeable future.

10/19/09 The Spirit of Salt domain is being forwarded to the fairly secret song of the day blog for the foreseeable future. Hardly any additional information can be found here.

The blog It’s Rome, Baby! will remain static from now on. If you’re looking for something where fresh material appears on a regular basis, look no further than my very own "the fairly secret song of the day blog". It’s dope. In addition, the erstwhile-defunct Phree Musique blog has ended its stint as a review site for digital music sellers and has been again repurposed as an infrequent blog of commentary on digital culture and renamed Phree as in PhreakShow. I’ll add a note on all the extant blogs if anything else new comes up. This index, detailing the 444 other posts residing on this blog, is the last thing I will post on this site. Bookmark it for frequent review! It’s like a museum that’s open 24 hours a day... in your brain!

Please note:

1. If the title of this retrospective does not make it sufficiently clear, these writings are frequently profane.
2. Although some of these writings are representative of my understanding of reality in days past, many are purely fictional. None should be interpreted as statement, expression of intent, or advocacy of anything.
3. This document was originally coded by hand. If you find a broken link please click to my profile and let me know.

The Comprehensive Index of the It’s Rome, Baby! Weblog

Incarnation The First: It’s Rome, Baby! as Surrealist Celebrity Satire: August - November 2005

Culled from the heppest topics of its day, laden with subtle pop-cult reference, surprisingly difficult to write, this is the original conception of the blog. I managed to keep it up for 4 months and 45 posts. I finally updated the Full Archive and Disclaimer Page, where you can review a summary of all the scintillating posts. So I won’t reproduce that here

Here’s quick links to a few of my favorites, though. There is no relevance to the fact that Harry Potter features heavily in the first two.

Emma Watson Shall Rule Us All

Pat Robertson: Brewing Scandal at Christian Broadcasting Network

iPod femto unveiled, lost

North by Northwest Airlines Declares Bankruptcy

This era ended with the first of several announcements of the End of the Website.

Incarnation The Second: Archives of the Star-Cross’d 33 Magazine: January - February 2006

A haphazardly conceived strategy to publish an online “magazine” supported by voluntary “patronage.” I discovered that the successful application of the patronage model involves knowing people who are wealthy. In a nutshell, it didn’t work out, and I still feel bad about the people who provided the most generous support, I don’t feel like they got their money’s worth. But what are you going to do? I had no idea what I was getting into when I left full time employment to care for my son Jonah. Anyway, I archived the back issues here at It’s Rome. The archives may contain some broken links to the old 33 Magazine and related sites which are now defunct. I tried to clean them up when I transcribed this but I’m sure I missed some.

1. Dubious justification of why I’m still posting, having Ended the Website

2. Explanation of the original 33 project. So Earnest.

3. Explains patronage, used to link to now defunct commerce pages.

4. More commerce stuff. This is actually written post 33. The Den of Thieves link is dead now, but improbably the two cafe press stores are still open (laziness, essentially). I still keep thinking that “I’m Part of the Thing” meme could take off any day. Maybe I need to put a video on YouTube. I forgot all about the website (link to first post, which got lightly colonized by comment spambots I see). You know, I’m not actually very good at this stuff. I no longer can remember the access information on that blogger account either. Oh Google, you never forget though. On the internet, everyone can hear you scream... but nobody gives a shit.

5. Paradox A short story. I find it unsuccessful.

6. Gauss - regarding my first experience recording music with Apple’s GarageBand software. The link to my first song used to be here, now it’s defunct, but if you email me through my profile link I’ll mail you a copy of Gauss for free.

7. Jonah’s Story. I relate the circumstances of my son’s (10 week) premature birth. Probably the most popular piece of writing that appeared on 33. Part 1-Part 2-Part 3-Part 4

8. Playback: I attempt a history of audio recording. It’s a lot longer than I remember. Part 1-Part 2-Part 3- And... then I lost the thread prior to the conclusion, which is a shame, because the teaser to it at the end of the third installment sounded pretty damn impressive. When I was transcribing these posts across I wrote a wholly inedequate little epilog to cap it off. Wholly inadequate. Ah, well.

9. A bit of text that accompanied one of the quirky mailings I sent out to the magazine patrons, regarding Morning Glories

10. Soap: A Science Experiment. I decided to make some soap from scratch. Well, I bought the lye. It was better with pictures but I wanted to delete them from my gallery. I guess google does image hosting for blogger now but I can’t be bothered to deal with setting it back up. When I was transcribing the post over I added a conclusion which I wittily titled soapilog. I keep a chunk of this soap at the laundry room sink and use it regularly for heavy handcleaning, it is very effective. It is rather drying to the skin but otherwise I’d have to say the experiment was a success. Look, I’m Pa Ingalls. Or possibly Ma.

11. 33 Magazine March 05 Quarterly Report. Pessimistic.

12. April Fool’s. When I used to keep a handwritten journal I often did this on April 1, riffed a little scenario where something absurdly amazing happened and changed the direction of my life. It was a personal in-joke because I felt so stuck so much of the time, particularly after college. It’s not actually all that damn funny to me anymore.

13. Semiannual Report. I basically lose it. Poignant, if you like that kind of thing. I talk about my dead kitty. The serialized fiction I referred to at the end of the post is gone (from the online world anyway), its the one thing I didn’t transcribe across, as (unique among all my older writings), I feel like I may still finish it and do something else with the story, so I decided to pull it from the archives.

And so 33 Magazine ended. I posted chapters of the aforementioned story for a while and then canned it the same time as I canned the first iteration of It’s Rome, Baby!

Connected to this section, the only writing on the site that does not originate with me - 33 Associates, a sideline invitation made from the magazine to publish others’ text online, contains a few poems by my sister, a few essays by my friend Jack. They’ll stay up as long as the website stays up and neither author asks me to take them down.

Incarnation The Third: A Big Ol’ Dumpin’ Ground of Text: January - February 06

You could conceive this segment of our tale as the chance to root around in my digital wastebasket. Some writers make their wives promise to set fire to their filing cabinets to make sure posterity never decides to publish their “unfinished” works. I dump them all over the internet to live forever (or for as long as Google’s business model floats) in perpetual obscurity. Scenarios for stories I never wrote, essays written for no good reason, my first, ancient (in the internet timeframe) and long defunct blogs. The theory that the more text the better in terms of attracting Adsense revenue is not really playing out that convincingly in real life. To date, I’ve made $9.68 from google’s ads. To be fair, that’s almost ten dollars more than I’ve made by any other means as a freelance writer, but at this rate it’s still going to take 20 more years before I can get a $100 check from Google. It continues to amuse me that this crap is all online, though.

1. A couple of odd political bits. Satire? Humor? The Howard Dean shtick made me chuckle.

2. A scenario for a science fiction story I never started.

3. A survey created to pick a friend’s brain for research on a novel I started but couldn’t finish. Are you sensing a trend?

4. Another unused scenario for some sort of dystopian postapocalyptic future scenario. Very Mad Max.

5. An unfinished essay, some idea I had about discussing the ecology of my lawn.

6. A clumsy stab in the dark, the start of a story that went nowhere. Character names like “Cyrus Smith” are the fucking kiss of death. Also, it appears I can’t spell obsolescent.

7. An egregiously long response to some website I read which promulgated this idea of a computer-mediated, technological/deterministic eschaton. If that kind of twisted phrasing puts you off you probably don’t want to read the essay itself. I think I started with the intent of making a few response notes to the website’s creator and it just sort of snowballed on me. The five “end of the humanity” stories early on in the essay still amuse me.

8. A meditation on fear from the first true weblog I ever attempted, Slouching Toward Gethsemane (I still really like that title).

9. An essay from the same source on taking sides, and ends, means.

10. A ranting essay asserting that the fundamental problem is that people are stupid.

11. M.A.P.S project summary. Early, long past attempt to drum up interest in an investigation of transforming the way music is transacted. Naive. Nobody was interested.

12. Part of an essay (the other parts apparently lost) about the nature of experience.

13. I rail against dumbass college students rioting over the outcome of a hockey game.

14. a weird dream, written down I don’t know why. I normally make no effort to record my dreams.

15. I bitch about television.

16. an essay I wrote for a contest run by some magazine and some oil company. Pedantic. I made an effort at a positive projection for the human future, as sort of a challenge to myself.

17. I riff on Enron and advocate financial irresponsibility.

18. I submitted this article proposal (by request) to Downward Battle, a anti music industry activism website. Never a response. They suck anyway.

19. a screenplay and a bunch of songs. I’m not sure why the two were posted together.

20. Some BS I wrote about intelligent design. No recollection why

21. a regionally flavored story written for I know not what audience or reason. Its tone feels forced to me.

22. Completely bizarre. Notes from some abstract reiterative searching experiment I did online. It does not appear to have gotten me anywhere much.

23. Remember that M.A.P.S. Project call to arms way back in link #11? Despite lack of outside interest I tried to get the white paper underway myself. Then I apparently succumbed to despair.

24. Satirical Spoof written during the height of “duct tape plastic over your windows” post 9-11 security stupidity.

25. Looks like some heathen got my dander up online. Snarky and dumb. Which is not to say it doesn’t have some valid points. But I don’t bother pursuing that sort of rhetoric any more.

26. A little piece on desire, no idea what it is or why I wrote it.

27. A little fiction sketch.

28. The internet as a metaphor for monkeys. Ahead of its time.

29. A friend asked me to write an essay on why he thought he was special. I doubt this was what he was looking for.

30. Transcript of a long spoken word piece on language and religion.

Incarnation The Fourth: The Kingdom Come Institute, Online at Last: January - July 2006

Most of the remaining bulk of this site comes from a project I never finished which was called something like the Annals of the Home Page of the Kingdom Come Institute. I guess I’ll attempt a slightly more illuminating explanation of it than I put forth here. In a nutshell, I was working on a large series (intended to be hundreds) of essays, experimental fiction oddments, songs and transcriptions of ancient history writings from my journal. They were assigned to a system of categories and the concept was eventually I would interlink them with a huge series (intended to be thousands) of hyperlinks. The basic idea was to create a circular but expansive reading experience. I never even finished the writing let alone grappled with the prospect of coding 3,125 anchor tags. I parked on the domain kingdomcomeinstitute.com for a long time before I finally accepted defeat and let it lapse. The domain now redirects to some Canadian e-commerce service provider’s website. People squat them some weird-ass online real estate. The project will never be finished in its original conception. I’d like to try something like it again some day but I’d start with a much less ambitious scale and a much more meticulous design of component themes).

1. Some original essay related to the project. Chunks of it probably found elsewhere throughout the whole thing.

2. The Celestial Puke Box. I riff about the set top box (that sounds so old fashioned now) and the evolution of teevee, or something. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, AND Part V

3. The Story of a Day. Basically what it says, from a long time ago. fiction of a cipher, sick and dirty, five years gone, repeat one thousand times, AND so let it be written so let it be done.

4. A bunch of excerpts from my handwritten journals of the past 12 years prior to the writing of the main Kingdom Come Institute Doctrine - which started around 1998. From a project subset called Vision. Many pods of these to scattered below. the lotus and the worm, garbage out of some old book, inner bedlam, AND fifteen years gone.

5. The Vision subset also contains a number of selections from a 101 song series from the Song of the Day project first series that are based on zen stories collected in the book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Among them are numbers 54, 27, 56, 37, 53, 19, 73, 91, 59, 100, 21, 4, 29, 77, 15, 80, 94, 86, 46, 67, 1, 66, 71, AND 34.

6. Various essays... Broad casts versus narrow ones, a pep talk to myeself, a twenty minute meditation, a parable of time and madness, musings on Timothy McVeigh, I bemoan poor planning, AND fantasies on a better presidency.

7. I daydream about scripting a sci-fi cartoon in five parts, yamamoto, mushroom scroll, blind spider, manual of sedition, (aside),
AND hidden world

8. The Klik-thru (iM) agreement link disclaimer

9. how to distribute a pamphlet.

10. Living in America: A Guide for the Perplexed. A twenty five part series with segements on 1. a more perfect union, 2. I get no kick from champagne, 3. you’ll have a barrel of fun, 4. Lord, I’m a fool for a cigarette, 5. java, 6. free as in radical, 7. free as in willy, 8. the silican nipple, 9. tee vee 4 ever, 10. yo quiero shit sandwich, 11. feed my lambs, 12. mokie coke! mokie coke! mokie coke!, 13. tote dat barge, 14. lift dat bale, 15. nail gun rhapsody, 16. fugitive, 17. rent, 18. I did it, 19. Chris, 20. oil, 21. car as warmonger, 22. car as weapon, 23. business, 24. politics, AND 25. Union.

11. More journal excerpts:to tell the old, old story, the declaration trip, walk on water, virus, contact, diatribe: valium, the widow’s mites, AND vision seventy.

12. The enigmatic interlude of The Ghost Institute

13. Yet more journal excerpts! dark glass morning hymn, some embarassing vision from youth, AND six hundred less than the number of the beast.

14. A handfull of visions: I used to think it meant something or mattered, yet another enigmatic journal exctract. also true, 3Cs, except that I gave up the filthy things, true, just heaving against the flesh of the evening, puzzledream, metaphysician heal thyself, AND proverb.

15: The world of philosophy explained! the final word, there but for the grace of gravity and gall, diarism, seven stations of breath, I’m sure a real philosopher would just kick my nuts, goooooooooodle, AND the ticket that imploded.

16: I invented a quasireligion called Realitation! Revel in its mystical components: sleepitate to success, eatitation, workitation: it works!, teletation for the masses, AND realitation is available and operators are standing by now. Deep.

17. A hapless elucidation of art and time. terra incognita, spheres of influence, further elucidation, AND sometimes an aside re art.

18. I engage in heated analysis of the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Why? I do not know. part one, Ignore the apotheosis of pop culture, part two, Five Trumps of Fear, AND part three, defiance (acid test).

19: A couple of angles on text and the methods of its generation: simpleton AND from the word go.

20: The Deck Of Woe, an Oracular Device for Personal Divination: (in the face of any question, decision, or to discern future events simply choose the most seemly “card” and introspectively consume its magical text.
The Blind Badger, The Reticulated Transport, The Thrice of Shears, The Watchtower, The Five of Wheels, The Veiled Lady, The Mask and the Bell, The Vortex, The Seven of Forks, Fleur de Lis, The Twelve Rings, The Masque Ball, The Shuttlecock, The Sleeping Knave, The Back Road, Prince’s Entourage, The Quill, The Surprise Inspection, A Circle of Crows, The Brother’s Riddle, The Lead Pipe, The Parasols Six, The Navel, The Mysterious Stranger, AND The Cup.

21. The Meaty Heart of the Kingdom Come Institute segment of the Kingdom Come Institute Web-Sight Concept: a reeling, relentlessly innacurate tour through science, religion, politics, economics, media and the troubling question of whether our lives are controlled by hypertechnological salamanders from the Center of the Earth: tempus fugit, things lost, will I see the paradox wrapped in an enigma box, Oodles More Godels, God dials you up, Pardon my Prose, my friends couldn’t believe I got a credit limit of FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS, Beggars on horseback, contained within a multitude, silver and gold, Extremophiles, Annual Evaluation (AKA I’ve Got Mine Jack), smooth like butter, already I can hear the coughing from the next room, a mad jack’s jeer that echoed, A mad jackal howled at Jericho, Surreal Astrology, catastrophe, a neoformalist dream, the spider diary, a fictionalization of a work in progress, reconstruction is reclamation, the future is already here, an insightful critique of gender-neutral language, The division of India, The graphite sphincter, Make sure to visit our sponsors and Turgid Links, al gore invented frames, making the case for an acausal universe, Preview on a half-formed universe, forceful redirect, The word becomes text and dwells among us, Are We Not Men?, Shoot-out at the Occipital Ridge, Shamanetics, The fourth estate smashes into the forth wall (sic), If I pass not this way again, negative spaces in the mind, Statue in the Sky, considering this it is sometimes difficult to remember, By the time we got to Woodstock it was burning to the ground, shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot, a king’s ransom, speaking of tie-ins, have it your way, put it all together and it spells, junk science, ecce homo, entropy not mentioned once, Darwin is my Copilot, sweet mystery of life, one tiny ameoba, koan, welcome to your head, fuquetue, lies, damn lies, half truths, the whole nine yards, and the kitchen sink, parenthetical ellipsis,Salamander Diary, censored for your pleasure, an authentic warrior kicks ass Filed under shameless self-promotion, the bastards that control our lives, tu chingada madre, Can hearing it later change someone’s mind?, bred in the bone and then some, a radical proposal, a pointless observation, go hold down the dog while I fuck that pig, im hacking your mind right now, pathology: there are no ends only means, Whether you like it or not, AND A Strategic Vision of Extreme Clarity.

22. The remaining enigma of the Vision subset:the uneasy part, ten. forty. seven., the swede, try a dull knife, some say the cause was global warming, the balance was returned at the terminal node, spore, inspiritus, spike, exculpis speris argamentos vicis, the sea becomes salt with the grains I’ve taken, flow, automatic typing seminar: final analysis, ten minutes of terror, Lost and Hidden in the Mazy Depths of Mind, the third, second, and first visions of the future, the seeming and the meaning, descent into the valley of the prescient scion, the sad refrain of the cart before the course, dogs beg scraps from the children at the table, old brain, new tricks, I only contemplate the return, ninety-five’s thesis, a very Kafka thirteen hours, reap slash sow, quotidian, 1994: I make a New Year’s Resolution to kick your ass, will keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord, any descriptive statement in this document is true, orgasm, a monster in the sleep of reason, Searching for Eric Notch, stoned to the bone, Prior to the redacted confessional, Femiwhatsis, reading between the lines, The song it sang to me, mom, finding them is a scavenger hunt of sorts, fpc, the briefest possible moment, They changed the questions, One shock of recognition, surprised by a savage kicking in the teeth, the third aspect of judas, I was sorry I had no, The sighting of the lost dream, thumbody loves me, now available in a convenient pill, maybe there’s a tiny little machine inside the ghost, hour 27 on the graveyard shift, a copy of a copy of a copy, heat death, Head space soliloquy, The Everyman and his Everydog, The MOST in the gashing, If the shoe fits, Trying to make the weekend pay, How I spent another year of my life, and most will not read any of it at any time, inscription to a crude self-portrait, when in bedlam do as the bedlamites, a spirit so willing, musing the start of a second existence, in which words fail me, better a live inchworm than a dead dog, like a poker in the fire, the head of a dead cat, feast of saints, answer the telemeter, conception hidden in a green glass ball, You know who you are, that line it coils around the world, like a serpent it is curled, therefore you’re not, tis the east, The retribution of extreme morality, the beginning of the beginning, Freedom of choice is a chemical reaction, bug, Death and his Brother Time, Bridge, Building a room for noise to live in, blue blue blue blue, Twice Seven, based on sullen entropy to coin a phrase, what dreams may come?, bursts through the chest, record of a thousand hours imagined, wasted, in inauspicious number, AND The original 4 Track Mind Manifesto.

23. I believe the only stand-alone lyric included not from the songs of days project.

24. More stern exhortations to psychosocial anarchy from Le Pamphleteer: Feel the Burn, Bringing the Scoundrel Hounds to Bay, Taking a Bull by the Horns, Direct action and devlish plans, A fearless manual of sedition, Lost and Hidden in the Mazy Depths of Mind, An insightful critique of gender-neutral language, versus their blandishments and damned lies, The Earl of Sandwich is spinning in his grave, Divide and Conquer, brought to you by the small letter c, parties, killer bean, agencies, Do you seek influence, access, and the Key that Opens All Locks?, Hell is Very Much other people, The Station of Breath, we got problems, one world..., Revolutionary Propaganda for Children, it’s the next logical step from flat, Less is less but I like it like that, economic terrorism, f n pervert, but if a million, how to blow up music, AND

25. A final message of realitation and the coda of the Kingdom Come Institute: Znczmzng mzsszgz frzm thz mzthzrshzp.

Incarnation The Last: Intermittent Howls and Grumbles from the Formerly Present Day: January - July 2006

While archiving 33 Magazine, various chunks of undifferentiated text from my indifferent past, and Yon Venerable Tracta of Ye Kingdome Comme Instietuutte, I wrote the occasional “new” essay under the influence of some stimulus or the other.

I take a break from copying over 33 Magazine entries to bitch about the state of the union address. Cheerful.

Something about Narnia of all things. I was reading the books aloud to my infant son at the time, until the martial tone of them started to skeeve me out.

and the good luck not to fuck up too much: like a lot of other nerds, I was bummed out by the failure of Joss Whedon’s “Firefly” to make it as a television serial. A bitter essay on the topic.

One of the more comprehensive and clear assessments of what I was doing with the blog, of which this index is I suppose the final culmination, written in honor of the blog’s 300th post. The second paragraph does a pretty bang-up job of explaining the ambiguous relationship I have with the kind of stuff I seem bound and determined to write, try as I might to sex it up.

An essay, which turned out to have been an elegy, to one of my favorite teachers in high school, Claude Dziuk. I can’t imagine what he would have thought of this mess.

wait for the call, in which I ponder my fractured search for a vocation.

UNPLUG, a brief rumination on being clever.

The Hour that Stretches, a melancholy essay about a quixotic attempt, 12 years past, to forge some sort of reformulated identity out of memory and media in the alchemic alembic of text, and of the eternal quest to claim some sort of completeness. It seems like a fitting enough end to this retrospective exhibition. Thank you for visiting the Jonathan M. Hamlow 2nd Lifetime Memorial Text Museum.

Znczmzng mzsszgz frzm thz mzthzrshzp

2006-07-12T03:18:00.000-05:00

This is a transmission from the human liberation front. We have infected your continuum with quantum eventuality causation viruses. Your "reality" has been penetrated by aspects of our more fully realized continuum. As a consequence you are in a momentarily elevated state of freedom. Your thoughts and actions have greater impact. Obstructions are fewer and more manageable. "Chance" is on your side. This condition will not last forever. Your framework of maximum causality is now. Please proceed with deprogramming.

This completes the portion of the Kingdom Come Institute designated Le Pamphleteer. It also completes the transfer of what ghosts of the Institute survived its apocalyptic inception, slight, false and tawdry though they might be. The sole exception is the short story pentagon/files, which was never completed but might find a new life somewhere, sometime, somehow. Or not. As regards the Institute: it will never be finished. But it is done.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

how to blow up music

2006-07-12T03:16:00.000-05:00

aside from the present day, ah, once I was a naive and idealistic young man

Here's a little Revolutionary's Guide to the world we live in.

The Parable of the Medium

Once upon a time everybody made their own music. They made it for religeon, to ease the old as time burden of working, to entertain themselves and children, as a way of connecting community.

Cut to the boiling capitalist anarchist state that the de facto owners call USA and the rest of us, for good or ill, generally call America, somewhere one side of the second Julian/Gregorian Millennium...

A handful of synthetic entities called Corporations now control very nearly all new music. These entities are controlled by a group of people called Shareholders. The fundamental principle of the Shareholder religeon is the accumulation of =capital= under an arbitrary state/corporation controlled valuation swindle known as The Market. Curiously, the majority of music exchanged under the system is crap. Some observers maintain that this is an inevitable result of the highly arcane mechanisms of The Market. Being a romantic, I tend towards the belief that it's simply a method of adding insult to injury.

And you thought Nineteen Eighty Four was just a book.

These powerful and nearly undisputed forces have, in the prior two decades, made two incredibly important tactical errors and are on the verge of making a third.

Deep in the grips of the blinding, short-sighted greed that they generally call Smart Business, the Shareholders caused the Corporations to decree that almost all music be exchanged by virtue of a new medium. Music was translated into digital information (the popular misnomer for binary information) and encoded onto a visual matrix. The unintended side effect of this process was to provide millions of potential Revolutionaries with music in a form that allowed exact replication of encoded information for a tiny fraction of the cost of its original production.

Meanwhile, a new medium called Internet was rising in America. It involved the exchange of binary information via telephone. Although the telephone is an old medium and effectively under the control of the Shareholders, it's nature dictates that unlike other media designed to transfer information over distance, it is impossible for the Shareholders to dictate with as much success exactly what information travels over the telephone. This method of transmission is so cheap that the many give information away free or in trade, true revolutionary anrachist economics.

The Shareholders are about to make their third error. In an truly awesome excess of greed, they set their sights on the digitalization of Television, America's most popular (by a gross margin) distance information medium. Politicians (the individuals hired by corporations as a buffer zone between the Shareholders' desire to accumulate points and the citizens' desire to retain the value of their labor) have been paid handsome bonuses to give ownership and control of the narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies suitable for digital information exchange over to the Corporations. It is reasonable to project that a connection between Internet and the new, "digital" Television will become a standard consumer technology within fifteen years of the Millennium, ending the Internet access problem

I honestly think they've completely missed the true implications of these interconnected blunders. Revolutionaries take note that you do not do the same.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

but if a million of us did it they'd lose their minds

2006-07-12T03:13:00.000-05:00

Vexing Corporations Method Seventeen: the Boycott

Actual content of an e-mail sent to the Volkswagen Corporation:

From: Dr. J.L.B. Smith (not my real name)

I'm writing to strenuosly object to your recent commercial in which a Volkswagen's full size spare tire is compared to the famous rediscovered fossil fish, the Coelacanth

This surprising survivor of the 350 million year old sub-class Crossopterygii, or "lobed-finned fish," which was rediscovered in 1938, could certainly be described as the classic textbook case of a rediscovered species, and one of the inspirations of
"Lost World" mythology that pervades the fantasy of our culture to this day. Anyone who has the slightest interest in things biological, anyone who finds the tiniest fascination in evoloutionary theory or the possibility of living fossils such as the Loch Ness monster knows of the Coelacanth. Apt pupils learn of our carnivorous, hollow-spined (the literal meaning of its Greek name) friend before they hit fourth grade. In short, EVERY DAMN PERSON WHO IS GOING TO GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOUR LITTLE JOKE ALREADY GETS IT.

So why in Almighty God's name does this almost moderately clever commercial spoil its impact by the little lecture on what the Coelacanth is? This clumsy maneuver not only destroys the comic timing of the commercial with the shoddy cocktail party comedian's bad habit of explaining the punch line, but it insults the intelligence of
viewer most likely to be moved by the commercial's particular tack.

I'm sick and tired of corporations insulting my intelligence every time I turn on the damn television, particularly manufacturers of weird, silly little cars. The Kingdom Come Institute is a Large, Organized Resistance dedicated to a less stupid society and this kind of monkey business won't be tolerated. Be informed that a full-scale boycott has been launched against your products and will continue until the offensive ending of this commercial is expurgated!

Sincerely,

HolierThanThou@REDACTED.com

This act of social conscience was generated by a semiautonomous
semantics engine.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

F****** Pervert

2006-07-12T03:11:00.000-05:00

Vexing Humans Method Twelve was deleted for the following reason:

CONTENT

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

economic terrorism

2006-07-12T03:07:00.000-05:00

I often get depressed by the incredible lack of imagination displayed by most revolutionaries. Most fall into one of two categories, those who advocate mass violent coup de etat and those who essentially advocate a lot of ineffectual bitching. In the first category we find, for instance, the revolutionary communist party... and we can all see how that turned out. They never figured out that the ends never justify the means because there are no ends, only means. On the other side, animal rights activists. Pansy demonstrations and petty vandalism ain't never gonna get people to stop eating meat, dupes, and as long as a person is willing to have an animal killed to eat is certainly not going to object to them being cut into if there's even a remote chance that it's going to save their ass from cancer some day.

Economic terrorism is perfectly open to any group that can organize a million members, and what's more, it's legal. Try this at home!

1. Gather a million people who agree with you about a certain point of view. Let's say, you want to take a swipe at proctor and gamble because they're so damn mean to bunnies.
2. Over the six months, get your hands on as much p&g stock as you can. In this day and age of easy high-interest electronic credit and internet trading, this will be easy as pie. Just put out a message to your minions: I intend to buy p&g stock from January 2000 through June 2000. Not advocating anything: just announcing an intention that is presented in a format that allows a tacit understanding of goals. Hint: this doesn't work very well unless you spend few thousand dollars. Committment is never cheap, kids.
3. Then, over the next six months, same thing, announce an intention to start buying the target company's product. Not all at once, but on a progressively rising curve. Your final six month expenditure should match, more or less, your stock purchases. A simple equationary guide: divide your total intended purchase amount over the 6 months by 63. That amount is your X. First month, spend 1X. Second month, 2X. Third month, 4X...and so on, 8X and 16X and 32X. Simple stuff. If you want to refine further you can take any given month's calculated amount, and run the same pattern, dividing by 15 and running the pattern up to the fourth iteration, 8X. The point is to induce an artificial geometric expansion in income. Believe me, they'll notice, but they'll just assume it's something they're doing right and what's more they'll project into the future and make business plans accordingly.
Stock up, buy things you use and that will keep well. That way you don't really waste any money. of course the terrible thoughts of the poor wittle bunny wabbits being towtuwed may make it difficult for you to stomach using the products.
4. Stop buying product. This can be more difficult than it seems. You have to be assiduous, cut them off completely. Start scanning for "earnings drop" stories in the financial press. As soon as you see a couple, publish a small segment on the same forum you've made the prior two announcements.
5. On that signal, sell all stock as quickly as possible.

See, a million smart revolutionaries who are minimally organized can do pretty much what they want. Our whole system runs on the graces of four billion 700 million stupid, disorganized people and is run by 300 million evil, greedy ones. But there's still a thousand million of us who ought to know better. Think about those thousand points of light.

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The original 4 Track Mind Manifesto

2006-07-12T03:04:00.000-05:00

Brain in about four tracks, feeling =dangerously out of phase with surroundings,= One track's the dull and narrow progress of the days, notes with displeasure that tomorrow brings, oh, fatigue likely, the dullness of being at work, churning out dull and distasteful fact sheets, mumbling and bumbling and futzing around, getting through. Just, it's not so bad right now, so nothing aching about it, just that part of my mind, aware that, truth be told, I would prefer not to.

Another portion concerned with her, and that is a godawful dead end, an unexemplary mix of feeble twitches, yeah... Just, it's very basic, the basic giving up, yet still wishing and hoping, yet so much there's just not a thing there. Nothing was solved. I feel right with the decision I made, not to spring the mine on her, I'm glad I omitted, learned my lesson, yeah, but there it is. I dunno even where it's coming from, it's senseless. And I feel foolish, and I do so hate to feel foolish. Can't help it, can't help asking, why isn't she thinking about me the way I'm thinking about her? Twiddle-dee-dum, anyway, not, that's that. If only.

a note aside from the present time: we're married now

One part tackles the eternal verities, considers thoughts. patterns, all the major questions that seem so remote from the majority of my day to day, and so, so much more interesting.

And yet one more, oh, flips channels on my personal history channel, throwing me a choice moment to ponder every now and then.

And then the evening is over and for a little while all obligations perceived and real (?) can be suspended and I can let these channels of thought loose, fret throught them and fall slowly asleep.

I'm not exactly unhappy, but I am still searching for a better way.

this ends the component of the Kingdom Come Institute designated Second Model

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An inauspicious number, quoth Dr. Khan

2006-07-12T03:03:00.000-05:00

thirteenth vision

Striving to avoid bad luck, I'll keep my mouth shut tight, and avoid telling tales of the scientists and what they don't know, of the secrets we've lost in our headlong rush into oblivion. I quote: the sage walks away from the answerless questions.

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record of a thousand hours imagined, wasted

2006-07-12T03:02:00.000-05:00

After, say, 5 years - realtime - 260 weekends, a thousand hours of play, in half a year the final adventure takes shape. They are equipped with some considerable power, the fate of the very world at stake, the dark designs of evil set fully out, the foe revealed at last, they march on. Minions assault, are destroyed, the characters face insane obstacles and must use every tool in their arsenal to overcome. Finally, at the great juxtaposition, they cross into the pits and darkness of the realms of evil, face a great and supernatural foe. For him, they must fight together with unimaginable precision, practically thinking as one, and by a fantastic effort, the expenditure of every ounce of strength and magic, the spilling of their life to the very limit of constitution they stand, battered, near death, resources gone... Yet triumphant. Some great evil foe lies, with some artifact of good, some great weapon buried in his chest, its last magic gone.

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bursts through the chest in a stunning eruption of gore

2006-07-12T03:01:00.000-05:00

...it's all a waste: woke this morning with the grim knowledge of the alien within:

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what dreams may come?

2006-07-12T02:59:00.000-05:00

This nation is doomed, doomed by dumb ideas and bad choices, limited imagination, and a glossy veneer of can do insistence hiding the whole claptrap rube goldberg machine.

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UNPLUG

2006-07-12T02:49:00.000-05:00

"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."

Mary Chase, Harvey

As a piece of meaningless aside personal trivia, I played Dr. Chumley in a stage production of said play when I was in high school. By my own estimation I was a mediocre actor.

The internets have been putting me in mind of that quote, frequently, as of late. I see the urge to be oh so smart everywhere, I feel it flowing through my own veins like bad cholesterol looking for a warm berth to set up shop and group for a future heart attack. And I realize a simple but very difficult fact: I have come to loathe and despise rhetoric.

And it seems to me like rhetoric is running this world, an engine fueled by an unending supply of human deficiency.

I gotta go. I won't be able to supply anything I implied, promised, or threatened with regards to this misbegotten writing experiment. Not here, not anywhere. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe someday, when I have become more pleasant, I will start something new. Right now I need to unplug.
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wait for the call

2006-07-04T03:51:00.000-05:00

I don't know if I believe I have a calling any more. I think some people are called to do something specific, at least in terms of their life's work, but obviously not everyone is. I guess you can argue that everyone has one and some people just never find or heed theirs. Like all these sorts of hypothetical absolutes, though, all sorts of troubling real-world concerns come up when you try to apply the categorical imperative (who's going to clean all the toilets?).

When I graduated from high school my biology teacher wrote something in the card he gave me to the effect that a person as smart as I was had an obligation to contribute something to the world. Such thoughts haunt me now, but at the time I just considered it foregone conclusion that I would go to the magic halls of learning and be exposed to all the far-out truth and the Path Would Become Plain. It occurs to me as I write this that I have really staked out college in my mind as the territory where this shift occured, and I would probably do well to somehow expurgate whatever hang-ups I'm managing to have left about those four years after a good 12 more have passed. Still: I can say that college was the last time I had that feeling - confidence, you might say, that that call was coming, inevitable.

But really what has it done for me? Today I was checking out the new central library, and I was browsing the whole "how to choose a career" section, and it just made me sick to even think of reading any of these books, well-intentioned though they may be. I've read so many books. But what book can tell you an answer that doesn't exist? You have to consider that possibility. Maybe some people are just wired that way and others are not.

In any event, today I felt like establishing my independence from it. I've second guessed my decisions enough trying to spot the Path hiding in the thickets of real life. Maybe there is no future, no goals, no Proper Place. Maybe it really all is just the moment we are in, and what we are, in it.
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The Hour that Stretches

2006-06-25T00:18:00.000-05:00

Ah, I keep trying to forge ahead... with whatever this is, long neglected, with the fairly secret song of the day blog, long neglected, with the phree musique blog, which is pushing a month past getting back online from its summer vacation...

"I'm tired of waiting for the moment that never comes
while I watch you making millionaires of bums..."

Why write? I have my own reasons to write, right now, and I could sketch them out fairly easily, comprehensibly. I don't really want to, though. Because it crosses into the personal in a way I don't really feel like exposing, basically. Stay cryptic, stay safe, it all looks artier that way anyway, right?

I used to keep a journal. I guess I still keep it, in the sense that I still possess all of the books, thousands of all but illegible (to anyone but, mostly, myself - even I am baffled by my handwriting at times) but I don't write it anymore, haven't for a long, long time. Between late high school and early post college I wrote almost every day. I think I've gone over this before. A lot of recent postings are enigmatic extractions of those pages.

This is about the day I died.

June 24, 1994

"I've been half avoiding this for hours now, ever since I got the half assed notion (of the variety I'm prone to and find myself helpless to shake) that it was time to write the "big one," the mind numbingly accurate entry that would blitzkrieg the past seventeen years and mark the End of an Era.

Obviously that kind of thinking is setting yourself up for a fall: and I don't relish the thought of sitting down to that kind of task with the iron cast knowledge that within twenty lines I would have hopelessly mired myself in a sea of meaningless digressions.

Still, life is composed of these kinds of foul paradoxes: the fact that concentrating on the goal fouls the journey that allows you to attain it (the pustulent cloud hanging over this insane issue of my "purpose" in life), the problem of justifying gracious mercy with the need for justice (the final issue that has probably forever screwed my chances of finding a place in any acceptable religious group), relativism versus objectivity, the necessity of pain for the existence of pleasure... The list goes on and on..."

But not so much as I do. Honestly, I came here with the idea of transcribing the whole of that entry... but my god. It goes on. And on. And ON. Nineteen pages. Of course, this was during the brief hiatus I spent at my parents' (then) home in Montevideo, MN between college ending and my entry into "real life" that began with the move to the city I've lived in ever since, Minneapolis MN. I didn't have anything better to do with my time and I could sleep as long as I wanted to. Now there is this small human being slumbering peacefully above and over my left shoulder, who likes to get up around six thirty, seven, and the days of my staying up all hours and dragging my ass out of bed late late in the morning are done. I've got no problem with that. But though I question the wisdom of those long ago writing jags, and despite the relative surfeit of freedom that allowed them, I can't help admire a certain tenaciousness in tackling this sort of ill defined attempt at completion at all. Cockroaches and beetles are discussed, the break up of a relationship, college, many visitations and commentations of journal entries from the four years prior, and a long, long commentary on an episode of the British sci-fi comedy serial Red Dwarf called "Thanks for the Memory" (which I incorrectly remember at the time as "In Memory of Lise Campbell" - in which the crew of the titular space craft discover that they have lost a significant period of their immediate past memories. They follow a signal trace from their ship's black box to an alien moon where they find a grave with a marker stating "To the memory of Lise Yates," who turns out to be a woman one of the crew members dated when he lived on earth (which, given the premise of the show, was 3 million years in the past). It's not actually that important.

"In the end, the lost day(s) plot in science fiction has always gotten me, I don't know why. It has the capacity to give me a serious case of the willies. There is something about that scene when they come upon that inexplicable (at that point) tomb, commemorating a girl from Lister's memory, a grave containing memories. Something else, a scene after Rimmer has realized his memory is false - out on some kind of observation deck... but that eludes my memory

Maybe it's nothing. Anyway: so much for rambling preamble."

I watched the episode several times since, in this wondrous era where the most obscure rental DVDs are mailed to me upon request. But I could not pin down that feeling, whatever it was I saw and wrote about and then wrote about writing about. You can replay the tape, but you can never recapture the moments. When I first saw that, oh, yes, I remember those times very well. It was the summer after my senior year of high school, and I was on fire. I'd earned a full ride to college and I believed in my heart that I would find all the answers there. Red Dwarf was something I happened upon, dwelling in merry obscurity (from my tiny town hick perspective, I know now it was well known and had quite a following, but in little Montevideo it was the sort of completely obscure thing I delighted in) on late night television, a weakly received signal of the cities' public television station (good old channel 2), gift of the ridiculous complicated aeriel on top of the house you almost never see any more in the era of cable and sattelite.

And I am here, now, thinking, oh man, here I go again.

But no, no, I can wrap this up right quick, there will be no nineteen pages here. The briefest sketch. I know that I am doing the same thing here, now, in this brave new century that seems to me to be going so badly wrong, but is probably not that much worse (or better) than the last, as I did some twelve years ago. I called it a "my character assassination and the final suicide of self-concept," I was writing under the influence of the introduction to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 in which he engages in a similar sort of announcement of the end of his "first life..." like everything, that reads much differently today, now doesn't it?

Just this: the college thing didn't really work out for me and I was trying to deal with it.

All I was doing in that long spool of handwritten text was searching for a moment, and that is all I am doing today. I think I understand it a bit better now, but I don't know that the impulse is any less misbegotten.

"There is not much else to say.

Except this:

There is no use trying to describe the eerie sensation of coming upon that shallow grave where you tried for once and all to bury your past, your memories. At best, you may end up by discovering that nothing is ever really lost... and that the pieces were always falling into place, if only you knew. But that is another, longer story. The task for the moment, as always, is to close the box and get on with the first day of your New Life - which is every day."

So let it be written, so let it be done.

JMH #2, R.I.P. 6/24/06

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33 Associates

2006-05-17T19:55:00.000-05:00

I'm cleaning out all of the clutter but I couldn't just bring myself to delete 33 Associates entirely. This was the grand experiment wherein I opened magical instant publishing to all comers. A total of two people volunteered to participate. If either of these people ask me to take down either of their two entries each I will of course do so, otherwise, they can live here until the world ends, or Google goes belly up - whichever comes first.

Poems from the Past by Ruth Hamlow

ETHNOECCENTRIC

I wake up
in India
lying on someone else's iron bedstead
on someone else's bed of nails.
I go fire-walking
with complete faith
in the imperviousness of my flesh.
I lay my feet on petals of red coals.
Rosebuds blossom between my toes.
I begin to notice
that life walks
in the body
of some sacred cow
chewed like a cud
swallowed and digested
four times
fertilizing the tired earth
lighting cook fires
growing shapeless with time
ground down to a powder
a dust that millions of pilgrims
walk on
journeying to any
roadside shrine.

PAST LIVES

The lovesick novice
fanatic acolyte
penning the unsent
unread letter
in the flowered journal
velum leaves
dropping
where I tore those pages away.
The white-dress
posy-and-poem recluse.
The suicide
wrapped in her negligee
of see-through confessions.
The virgin virago
agnostic atheist pagan
drunken feminist
gin-and-tonic connoisseur
bloody barstool
vegetarian
plotting the ultimate
revenge fantasy
to win him back.
The temptress
astride her own power
two-fisted high priestess
sacrificing her own heart
to the idol
with feet of clay.
The midnight poet
autoerotic sensualist
fondling words
scattered across
the mile wide bed
cold comfort
three hours
until dawn.

TiVo and Commercial Skipping (commentary by Jack Wiley)

The beauty of recording TV is being able to skip the
commercials. There is a rumor that such activity will
become criminal though. As such rumors go, they
spread like crazy on the Internet. People "pass it
on" without actually reading anything.

First, Replay TV, like TiVo used to have a 30 second
commercial skip feature. The company was sued by
broadcasters and decided to remove the feature. This
lawsuit was only against the company, not the users of
Replay TV. It is still not a crime to FFWD.

There is a bill in Congress called the Intellectual
Property Protection Act (hr 2391). This one bill is
actually composed of eight different bills. Some of
the bills deal with piracy and file sharing. For
example it would be a criminal offense to bootleg a
movie (record a movie at the theater.) Another part
is called the Family Video Act and is designed to
protect people from watching the whole movie.

For example, if you are at home and want to skip a
portion of objectionable material, you may do so
without being a criminal assuming that you are doing
so with your legal copy. Manufacturers may also
produce censored copies of movies, where the
objectionable portion is removed or "made
imperceptible." This would be similar to buying a CD
at Walmart where the explicit language has been dubbed
over.

The reason that this got out of hand is that Senator
John McCain put a hold on the bill, and issued a
statement saying:

"I fear that the very exemption designed to achieve
this laudable goal simultaneously creates an
implication that certain basic practices that
consumers have enjoyed for years -- like
fast-forwarding through advertisements -- would
constitute criminal copyright infringement."

There is nothing in the bill that specifically targets
commercial skipping as criminal. In fact it would have
to be a BIG stretch to imply that. The bill proposal
uses this language:

"the making of limited portions of audio or video
content of a motion picture imperceptible by or for
the owner or other lawful possessor of an authorized
copy of that motion picture in the course of viewing
of that work for private use in a household..."

In other words it says you are not a criminal if you
skip any part of the MOVIE. That could imply that you
are a criminal if you skip anything that is NOT the
movie. Like I said, its a big stretch.

All the hype out there on the Internet has been
promoting this bill as that of a "police state" where
FFWDing your DVDs would be a crime. This idea is
almost an urban legend since the Internet has
converted a "potential implication" into a "probable infraction."

On Demand Video (commentary by Jack Wiley)

The worst part about TV is the commercials. The
second worst part is having to wait for a specified
time in order to watch a show. Now that most TV shows
are available on DVD, both of these problems can go
away, provided that you are willing to wait.

Imagine Growing up with no commercials on TV. The
goal of commercials is to convince you that you are
inadequate as you are, and their product can make you
better. This is especially true with children's toy
commercials. They make toys look way better than they
really are.

With a DVD library we can watch most TV shows older
than one year. We can watch them in the correct
order, and without commercials. We can share with our
families the classics from our childhood like:
Battlestar Galactica, The Dukes of Hazzard, The
A-Team, Knight Rider, and Star Trek. We can also
revisit serials that we may have missed such as Dallas
and Twin Peaks. Some classic shows are commonplace on
cable however they are actually cut down to allow more
time for commercials.

The main problem with serial shows is that they are
difficult to understand after missing an episode. A
modern serial is the show "24." Every episode is a
cliffhanger so the viewers will come back. All you
have to do is wait a year and the whole season will be
on DVD. Then you can watch it at your own pace. And
with episodes 42 min. long the time savings is
considerable. Screaming kids? Just hit Pause.

Poetry by Ruth Hamlow

BETRAYAL

Aroused
from its long hibernation
the lake opens
a wide blue eye
to meet
the unblinking gaze
of a clear sky.
After four days
of warm nights
lulled by the muted rush
of running water
I awaken
painfully curled
against the cold.
Reluctant
I pull out the winter coat
the cap and gloves
finally rejecting
their meager protection
as useless.
As I leave
I turn to see
the lake
laid out below me
a pale drowned man
the vibrant eye
closed
by the impassive hand
of winter.
Grief stricken
I am suddenly uncertain
of day and date
as if time
were moving backward
or had stopped
as motionless
as the stilled waves
frozen in their rippling return
to shore.

WINTER AGAIN

I am lying in bed
cataloging
my aches
with perverse enjoyment
undecided
if the pain
under my eyelids
might not be pleasurable.
My rough and
fickle lover
whines and hisses
outside.
He insinuates himself
through the minute cracks
around the pane
but I turn my back
to the window
refusing him admittance
beneath the covers.
Later
I will go out,
my body shrinking
in revolted anticipation
of the first slap
of wind and rain.
I walk
shivering
into his enveloping embrace.
Every nerve ending
is a brittle icicle
with a heart of fire
pumped out
from my protected core.
As I climb
the final hill
I tear off my cap and gloves
baring my stinging flesh
to the last frantic caresses.
Wrenched between
eagerness
and regret
I rush toward
the long-awaited release
of shelter
only to stop at the door
face uplifted
for the final dry kiss
of the first flakes
of snow.

MIDWINTER

I walk through
the dark apartment
turning on lights
as I go--
bedroom
bathroom
kitchen.
In the living room
I open the shades
to the implacable darkness
of a midwinter dawn.
Not enough light
to stumble through my
morning rituals.
Not enough jam
for the dry toast.
Not enough juice
for a full glass--
I drink it down
half-empty.
I walk to work
still in the dark.
The half-melted snow
isn’t enough
to cover nature’s naked frailties.
The grass
lies wet and matted
under a crust of salt and sand.
The river
is half-frozen
the open water
an oozing wound
in the dim halo
of a half-risen sun.

based on sullen entropy to coin a phrase

2006-04-10T10:03:00.001-05:00

The whole world grows tired, tired, tired as hell, tired to death, fit to fall down. We're falling asleep on our feet, in meetings, on the road. An Egyptian pilot fell asleep at the wheel and carried a multitude down with him in his steep dream. Two children fell asleep in school and sleptwalked through their halls, scattering black sand.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

a smile

2006-04-10T10:03:00.000-05:00

34/101

when they come to take you
and the guillotine awaits you
greet them with a smile
when it's time to meet your maker
and they beat you blind for being a Quaker
get up and take it with a smile
Nothing is fair and nothing makes sense
We're all getting put up at heaven's expense
and none of it will matter a thousand years hence
so greet the new day with a smile
when the big computer mixes you
and your alien slavelord fixes you
hey wake up with a smile
when the universe enters the big heat death
and you're in pain whenever you piss or take a breath
oh lie down each night with a smile
We're all headed for oblivion anyway
and nobody knows who listens when we pray
so you might as well live in the one day
and meet each moment with a smile

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Twice Seven

2006-04-10T10:02:00.000-05:00

The sign.

You know the day, the day you feel like you've waited your whole life, patient as a monk, just biding your time as Buddha whispers "not this" in your ear.

And the world is nothing but strangers smoking cigarettes, and you without a joint, without a mushroom, without a cactus, without anything you will allow yourself to have. Standard misery in a strange town, and you think: this is my message from the stars, a faceless blank ribbon of asphalt, two hours more to get home.

Wait...

In the end, the lesson is the lesson is the lesson is the lesson. You take what you get and do what you can with it. Some day the universe will load a bullet with your name on it and you will die. Nothing else really matters. Noone knows when, and noone knows what comes next. So here, now, you have to let your bad days go and get on with whatever is next.

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Be Silent

2006-04-10T10:01:00.001-05:00

71/101

Hush
Silent
Do not say a word
hush
be silent
do not say one word
not even
this
this
this
this
this
this
this
this
this.

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blue blue blue blue

2006-04-10T10:01:00.000-05:00

Question: What does the big black cloud over the sand, the sun-worshippers, and all the blue water signify? Is it an omen, or some kind of lesson? Does it contain a silver lining?

In fact, the big black cloud signifies nothing special. It is itself, just as the sand, the sun-worshippers, and all the blue water.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Building a room for noise to live in

2006-04-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

I think I've said all I have to say, but somehow I can't seem to stop talking. I guess I haven't got it right yet, but fuck. When will I. I mean, really, when will I? Keep saying this over and over, keep coming back, but I'm just laying bricks.

I'm tired. I have fought as much as anyone, after my fashion. I tried to believe and I tried to do right. But right and wrong are all messed around and I don't know what I
believe anymore. Feel sick. All the shit I put in my system, and all the shit I put up with and all the great motherin' river of shit that flows through my mind, night after night.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Bridge

2006-04-10T09:59:00.000-05:00

I guess the point of the essay is, it is a sick feeling compared to the manic lovehatejoysorrow of putting the torch to that bridge, when you turn back, confused and grainy eyed on an amphetamine fueled all night morning to look at these smoking timbers and say "I..." But must go forward for there is no other thing. And if the road carries us to the abyss... Then we must deal with it, when it comes.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Death and his Brother Time

2006-04-10T09:55:00.000-05:00

Anyway, it's all out of context but it occurred to me that that is at the center of our problems... As a society, chiefly, but as these things work out also probably at the root of our personal problems as well. All one the same, what, hey?

Anyway. Yeah, all those private moral scams and exceptions, all the ways we cheat ourselves in our foolish bids to cheat death. But Death always wins in the end, so... Face it. He's got time on his side. Time. On his side. Funny.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

bug

2006-04-10T09:54:00.000-05:00

Little ugly passing notions seem to be my ouvre lately: just now the thought that arose was (I was gazing at my perennially unrecognizable visage in the mirror)

You are going to spend every day for the rest of your life boiling in confusion and desire.

This too hard. 10:36 and I don't have much to say. Each day is more or less what I expect. My world seems flat, dismally comprehensible, and far too full of me. I would like to be smaller, fill up less space in my personal universe. Be unobtrusive, a bug on the sill. It seems unfair: I feel bound to an idealistic mock-up of the world that I know I can't attain but desire painfully anyway. There is no fantasy to drive away the bitter taste that feeling leaves.

But sleep helps.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Children of His Majesty

2006-04-10T09:52:00.000-05:00

66/101

If I was a shareholder
one of the five percent
would I display my sinister bent
or would I be bolder
If I had wealth superabundant
would I tie my mule to a good cause
could my will contain an escape clause
Would I behave just the same, redundant
While I lay wishing for some fancy thing
ten thousand die ten thousand die
the children are starving I wonder why
the children of his majesty the king
he's mumbling he's mad as a hatter
and I am poor as a mouse
no wagon field or house
no crown no silver platter
Yet if I were a shareholder
I could give away everything
To feed the children of his majesty the king
that's what I'd do if I were a little bolder

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Freedom of choice is a chemical reaction

2006-04-04T21:51:00.001-05:00

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

the beginning of the beginning

2006-04-04T21:51:00.000-05:00

To put the clinch on it, a nasty cold snap has settled in... no wild breeze errant from the north, this shit has a definite sense of impending winter... That chill, here to stay smell, sharp, musty, and more than ready to overstay its welcome. No doubt it'll warm up again, but the menace is here for the duration - the last chance for fooling oneself about the future came and went. It's coming.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

The retribution of extreme mortality

2006-04-04T21:50:00.000-05:00

No Drive. 11:02 pm, not thinking about too much. Got up around nine or so, was sitting watching the snow fall down around me, and it occurred to me, in that more than intellectual way, that my days were truly numbered. That there was a finite number of waking ups, and I was really LOOKING at the snow fall - at the flakes falling, stretching back in such clarity, the silence and presence of the falling snow... I watched individual flakes, trying to follow one flake from as high as I could spot it to as low before it hit the ground - appearing out of one uniform stretch of white sky, down to white snow covered ground disappearing, feeling deep in my body the fact that I would only see this so many times, you know...

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

cup of tea

2006-04-04T21:49:00.000-05:00

1/101

It seems so obvious
my mind is spilling out on every side
life's a brief candle
and the river's very wide
my cup of tea is running over
trying to make a point
can't solve this with another retreat
can't solve this with another joint
who is pouring out the wisdom
where does the spilt tea go
I can't see the point in crying
how was I supposed to know
If the pot has finally run dry
if the saucer's spilling too
saking down into the carpet
maybe I can share some tea with you.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

tis the east, and my stupid beaming head do be the sun

2006-04-04T21:48:00.000-05:00

Soft, What light through yonder window breaks. Dawn, the sick grey 6:36 ayem dawn of a thousand sick grey mornings that have come to me without the intervening buffer of sleep.

It's all my fault.

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therefore you're not

2006-04-04T21:47:00.000-05:00

Any revelation you can't fit into twenty seconds will not last through the next millenium. Any vacation which can be ruined by bad weather was probably ill-conceived in the first place. Any problem that can be solved exclusively by money is probably merely an illusion, but is likely also partly a trap set by evil men. Any vision that ends with a question must surely be a riddle devised by God. Don't you think?

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

that line it coils around the world; like a serpent it is curled

2006-04-04T21:45:00.000-05:00

Descending. One.

Thanks to David for the title, but you say but Jath it hasn't started yet has it and the answer I give you is no it has not but I have found as Bob said a new place to get low.

(I am being cryptic because at the moment I am too weak to be ridiculous which is what I would be were I not. Cryptic, that is)

I have engineered my own defeat. No small task but you sea (see?) the serpent coils around and takes its own tail in its mouth: I have created desire insatiable, when all is eaten it must by necessity turn upon its own flesh, and, containing either everything or nothing that meal can never be fulfilled.

I, myself, say with some small pride that I have made an art of descending.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

doing saying

2006-04-04T21:44:00.001-05:00

67/101

What are you doing
What are you saying
show me one true thing
You found by praying
doing is being
saying is nothing
dying is freeing
living the one thing
In doing be true
in saying be clear
Everything I do
I do without fear
What are you doing
what are you saying
this is the true thing
the curtain is fraying

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

You know who you are

2006-04-04T21:44:00.000-05:00

But I digress. So anyway: Fuck you. Books are out because they just don't sell enough shit. So we will pander to whatever lowest common denominator we can get away with. Ladies and gentlemen, nazi corporate Big Business Scum... I give you:

Television.

So, I dunno, I kinda feel like we're basically doomed. So I might as well tip my hand and tell you outright:

You disgust me. You sacrifice and devour your own fucking children. You are the depths of godless, unscrupulous beasts. My life is defiance of you.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

conception hidden in a green glass ball

2006-04-04T21:42:00.001-05:00

Will I wake up soon? I don't know. I've never had a dream it seems that lasted so long, and still went on, when I knew I was asleep. So many dreams within dreams. Why do I dream of Merwin, of Simon, of the Kung Fu Master, and the Crow, and a girl named Sue, and the appraisers and the evil old men, Mr. North, Mr. South, Mr. East, Mr. West... Why do I dream an unpleasant dream that this is the afterlife, that some time some long terrible time ago, I died in a tragic camping accident but clung to life, you know, built a mental life and this is where it ends, in realization.

But nothing happens, I believe...

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answer the telemeter

2006-04-04T21:42:00.000-05:00

can the irrational anger spurred by the desire to grasp what cannot be grasped be allayed by sudden and decisive action?

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feast of saints

2006-04-04T21:41:00.000-05:00

And such is this day of the dead. This feast of saints. Uneventful. Sirens scream at a comfortable distance, it is fucking cold, but no real snow, here, yet. I am unsatiated, unsatisfied, and in a mood I recognize well. It couldn't be called acceptance, but perhaps forbearance, or at least a decision to forbear. I am tired, about ready to collapse. A few more obligations to fulfill.

11:21 and I face the hard truths square on and accept them to myself. They are like friends: cranky and enigmatic, difficult, but unquestionably they are mine, and I am theirs: my nature, the scorpion said. A fable.

Go to the minimal tasks, quickly accomplished. 11:23.

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the head of a dead cat

2006-04-04T21:40:00.000-05:00

Christ, I can come back to these pages a hundred thousand times, it'll never get any easier or better. Or will it? Is desire truly the root of all suffering? Can you find the Buddha in a suit, driving Chicago in a rented car? Or is that unlikely? Is anything? Should I have done more today? Or less?

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

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like a poker in the fire

2006-04-04T21:39:00.000-05:00

Well if you're in need of explanations, if you're the kind of person that needs your i's dotted and your t's crossed, I'll supply you with the most obvious:

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better a live inchworm than a dead dog

2006-04-04T21:38:00.001-05:00

But I'll be alive. Chew that acrid morsel of hope, its a bitter pill but It'll do you good. I'll be alive, kicking puking and mewling with the continual pains of rebirth. I'll be alive and oh, my God - what a joyful, wonderous wretchedness it's going to be. Truly awful. Wonderful, then, to be alive and miserable. A whole new universe of failure to come crashing down on my unprotected noggin. And maybe, it's doubtful, but just maybe, in the midst of all of it I'll find a new kind of failure - or perhaps a very old one, old as Eden, old as Israel's hope getting nailed to a tree - a special kind of failure; A sort of death, a sort of success, a sort of Joy.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

in which words fail me

2006-04-04T21:38:00.000-05:00

I am afraid. This world has knocked me down so goddamn many times in the last six years. I've fought until I was bloody, I've pushed back and sometimes I've let myself be pushed around. And I've asked for everything. And for so little. I am afraid. My tongue's tied. I feel what I have to say, inside me, felt it so long, only just want to let it out. Say words so fine and true, enough to fan a spark into a flame and spread just a small circle of light around me... Just a small circle.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

musing the start of a second existence

2006-04-04T21:32:00.000-05:00

I wait. My whole life, my whole existence, is waiting. For sign, or event, for health, for change.

I've done all right, haven't I? Five months and two days ago I promised "character assasination and the final suicide of self-concept..." Yes, and look at me. Short of money, locked in a lease and a meaningless, nonentity job: girlfriend gone, sick, completely clueless.

Yeah, I've done all right.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

a spirit so willing

2006-04-04T21:30:00.000-05:00

...I come back briefly to say, not as if I'm saying truth but rather as I say it to myself: I will not be fooled again, I will not be tricked by my hope and desire. No. I lay out cards in my mind...

I ponder this weird iconography, like some convoluted rebus I cannot decipher. Just look in dismay at these so-called actions and say: I will not be fooled again. Look at my soft brown eyes, look at the steel of disappointment, pain and time that I have invested them with, and mutter =The Flesh.=

But the flesh is weak... And so I poison, deprive and abuse it. Make it the whipping boy for my disenchantment. Tell it sternly =I will not be fooled again,= not knowing whether I am cursing or merely fooling myself with such incantation: I pound the flesh into the ground with neglect, till it is forced to shut down. And so I escape from my mind, and the irony of that dilemma.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

when in bedlam do as the bedlamites

2006-04-04T21:29:00.000-05:00

If only this insane world for once would make good its constant mind-bending threat to go completely crazy, If I could just see where I stand.

The fly buzzes, buzzes, follows its primeval path, no brain at all, it's all hard wired, the finest set of built-in survival tactics creation can conjure sending it smashing, time after time, into the mirror. It stops. What new stimulus will send it into flight again? If nothing were to change, would it stick permanently in its =wait= loop, and die, there, wasted away on the mirror that seems to hold a portal through which it cannot pass.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

inscription to a crude self-portrait

2006-04-04T21:28:00.000-05:00

Today is the first day of the latter half of the middle bit of the rest of my life

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

and most will not read any of it at any time

2006-04-04T21:27:00.000-05:00

What I called the beginning of the end, in my declaration of death, that's what that was all about. Hah, it would be hell to read these all cover to cover, functionally impossible for most... All of the people can read some of my writing but even I can't read all of my writing.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

How I spent another year of my life

2006-04-04T21:21:00.000-05:00

Lose a little ground, gain a little ground, and in the dark at night I have dreams I never remember on waking, just dark glimmers of corridors and rooms I do not know... Wake up and groan with instant tiredness, the burden of morning and another week just begun... Through my morning, into another fucking day at another stupid-ass job, all the same, silent I wait it out. Fractured moments.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Trying to make the weekend pay

2006-04-04T21:20:00.000-05:00

And so another glorious weekend.

11:11, glory be. Motzart and darkness, idly flickering over the Solar Powered Boat, oh, and a beautiful little shack, on some remote island, a little municipality of dubious or perhaps slightly ambiguous legal status... Some nice remote corner where there is no class war, no politicians.

And similar unlikely scenarios. Ah well. Oh, let me die in the ocean. Let it take me at last after all these years. Just not here, not now, let me die alive, hmm? What a fuckin' joke. Motzart is getting a bit vigorous for me.

Enough, I don't feel like categorizing another spent friday night, I have lost my taste for vivisection. Peace? Nearly. Nearly.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

If the shoe fits

2006-04-04T21:19:00.001-05:00

Should I use a sweeter term, making love or at least having sex? Bullshit. Your lies deceive you same as they deceived me. Fuck is a healthy word, it has some fire in it. God, in a world with so little fire anywhere, so little spark left, you might as well be honest with an act so honest. The rest is lies. Approximations. They've put us all though a nice logarithm, don't you see? They've taken all the differences, all the glorious incongruities and sharp edges, all the bumps and dangling errors, and plugged us through neat equations, smoothed us and plotted us, made a neat line of us, shown us to be manifestly less than the sum of our parts, reduced our meaning to nothing, ah, but the correlation coefficient is nice and high. The answer isn't right but it's PAT. It's SIMPLE. Simple in the worst possible way, it's so skewed that it isn't even wrong.

But they can't correlate away that one difference. Much as they'd like to cut off the cock and cement it firmly into the cunt, make us all eunuchs, they haven't managed. The war between the sexes is just this: a thousand illusions to still the amazingly destructive (to them) potential of that simple fit. Christ, if they figure out that it's as simple as that, that a cock fits snuggly into a cunt, who the hell knows what they'll think next. That maybe the differences are what makes things fit. Yeah, that our sharp edges and voids were meant to jigsaw. I don't know. I'm just babbling. Right? Babble. Babble. Babble. We certainly fucked up. All our voids and protuberances, and the best solution we can come up with is to shove jade balls up our asses and cut each other into tiny pieces.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

The MOST in the gashing

2006-04-04T21:19:00.000-05:00

There is a Ghost in the machine and it makes me self-destruct, I don't know how it got there, if it is me myself or if it is some evil spirit or if it is just the insane notion of an old and tired Humanist as weary of the game as I am, am I the Ghost? I don't know but if there is a spirit in me that craves life (and there is, oh, there is) it is a pale and impotent thing next to the malign ministrations of the Ghost

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

The Everyman and his Everydog

2006-04-04T21:18:00.000-05:00

Leaving us where? So hard to believe in change, but I can't accept that I'm trapped. And as always, again, the question becomes what now.

10:02 and the answer is obvious. Sometimes I find that I still believe that a good night's sleep is all I really need. That it'll come to me in a dream. That somehow God will drop a fat golden egg in my lap and everything will be easy. Maybe it's wrong to even want that.

Is it? Is the value of an experience to be measured in the pain and labor of attaining it? Generally I'm inclined to say yes, but tonight I wonder.

Not that wondering changes anything, tomorrow will come as it must and I'll be no better prepared than ever.

Fuck.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

grass trees enlightened

2006-04-04T21:16:00.000-05:00

streaming enlightenment 0.0

46/101

I have a notion
I'm gonna be all right
come what may...
just look I'll have
escaped to paradise
within another day
grass, trees, enlightened
bees whisper
secrets as you dream
insensible
to the notion
of your own silent stream

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Head space soliloquy

2006-04-04T21:14:00.001-05:00

Diffuse throughout the that majority share of mental capacity that pop science claims the "average" person does not utilize is an attenuated electrochemical tracery of the shadows of every dream, notion, bright idea, vision, connection, realization, scrap of poetry and idle daydream that strikes us sufficiently that we think we ought to dig up a piece of paper and write it down, though we never do. The distilled essence of these lost enlightenments form dreams that wake us soaked in sweat, heart pounding, completely disoriented and remembering nothing. This small cautionary note stands in stead of a vision lost in just this manner.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

heat death

2006-04-04T21:14:00.000-05:00

Lost, lost, twisting in the dark ocean, unable to tell what is real and what is imagination, memory. It's all going to hell around me, I can't control anything, can't rise or descend, impotent, causeless, I'm not regenerating, slow entropic decline, heat death, everything settles to a uniform mediocrity, the lance of action is lost, I am lost, all is lost, I just want to dissapear, stop feeling and hurting and hoping god I just want it to end. Just for peace, for oblivion.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

a copy of a copy of a copy

2006-04-04T21:13:00.000-05:00

Mark 34 hours without sleep. It, and the back, now sans aspirin, because of the stomach, which hasn't been fed since noon, the libido, which hasn't been fed since New Years, the Spirit, which hasn't been fed in...

A mass of hungers, you might describe me. Yes, a mass of starving desires, but it ain't for holiness I fast. Dunno why it is. But being sleep, food, sex, love, fun, joy-starved is taking its toll in me (refer back to sentence 2, now completed - - - - I'm not, so to speak, on the ball. In fact I think you could safely say I'm right off it. And if I don't sleep tonight, well I guess I may perish.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

hour twentyseven on the graveyard shift

2006-04-04T21:12:00.000-05:00

despite my oft-protested will to live, I seem to be trying to kill myself.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

maybe there's a tiny little machine inside the ghost

2006-04-04T21:11:00.000-05:00

I am an automoton, a machine. My function is to feel pain.

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now available in a convenient pill

2006-04-04T21:10:00.000-05:00

Listen, I was there, I have returned to tell you that it may all be a madness, a jigger in my electron flow that prevents me from thinking in a more harmonious pragmatism. Regardless, I felt it. I am me and real is real and if only dark nothingness comes after I won't know. For my madness, I lived my madness or will live to live it to the full and gloriously mad extent, and just because it is right, or seems so to me.

This may seem unsure or even blasphemous or god forbid help me Jesus a wishy washy God is in us all our glimpse of the great Kah The great spiritual pudding pool Agnostic shit philosphy. It ain't. 'Cause whether you believe it or not, I travelled where something not me existed and touched my mind and told me it was it was God and I believed in that. And I'm laughing 'cause it's such a cluttered thought.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

thumbody loves me

2006-04-04T21:09:00.000-05:00

Somewhere, up there, someone is playing a rather amusing game with my head, cause, though some extremely good times are ahead, I'm currently residing in hell.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

The sighting of the lost dream

2006-04-04T21:08:00.000-05:00

Itemize - where does this need to itemize come from. What is wrong and what else is wrong and and what is the root the cause the fountain... The fountain of this evil, is it me?

I've lost sight of whatever it is I had sight of... I've lost my desire to learn, at least to learn what seems to be out there, I engineered my preference too closely, ignored my essential dissatisfaction too completely, it is no wonder that so few cataclysms were required to turn me upside down.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

I was sorry I had no toilet until I met a man who had no asshole

2006-04-04T21:07:00.000-05:00

If there is a point to this particular excursion, perhaps it is that even paradise has its toilets, and even the toilets of paradise have their graffitti, and even the graffitti of the toilets of paradise may present one with the occasional gem of wisdom. When I see one, I'll let you know.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

the third aspect of judas

2006-04-04T21:06:00.000-05:00

So, this is the journal supplement, which future historians of my rise to Godhead will no doubt be directed to in a note in the real journal.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

surprised by a savage kicking in the teeth

2006-04-04T21:05:00.000-05:00

Joy defies memory, and without the occasional infusion, you don't know what to trust. I seriously doubt whether my heart ever resonated to that secret song, whether the world ever seemed so momentarily, inestimably brighter. Whether I ever truly cried in deep sorrow. Whether I ever experienced anything. Whether I ever truly dreamed that I could fly. The memories seem so pale, and I cannot distinguish them from things that I read in books, from scenes in movies. From stories told by friends.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

A Strategic Vision of Extreme Clarity

2006-04-04T20:57:00.000-05:00

(The Kingdom Come Institute, in that it does not genuinely exist, is regretfully unable to accept any responsibility for the effects that particular arrays of patterns of light and darkness may have on your mind. By reading further you are implicitly accepting the responsibility for all possible consequences of reading further. Not Responsible for Advice Taken. Read further for more details.)

The Kingdom Come Institute has no legal or economic presence. Hence in the cultural paradigm it does not genuinely exist ("There is no such thing").

The Kingdom Come Institute may be viewed as a work of fiction in progress or a multidimensional narrative construct exploring speculations on the possibility of a worldwide personal transfer of collective power from the few to the many, mediated by text interchange technologies and a variety of commonplace social control gambits

In a sense the Kingdom Come Institute exists only in a mind. From one point of view, it devolves into a mere coincidence of interacting physical events. From another point of view it is the only event of genuine meaning (Trees, Forest).

The Kingdom Come Institute is a conceptual/perceptual extension of an identity which is contained within a physical being. Yet in observing it, become a member of the set of the Kingdom Come Institute.

This concludes the briefing. To those who seek a deeper knowledge the answers to many questions begin in the dim corridors of the F.U.Q.s

All that ye may discover herein is protected by the magic sacred rune of the small letter c enclosed within the mystic circle. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

this concludes the portion of the Kingdom Come Institute Home Page designated The Kingdom Come Institute (and left unnamed, its ghost).
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

get a stupid answer

2006-04-04T20:55:00.000-05:00

Frequently Unanswered Questions

Is there something else I can look at instead?
Does this mean something besides what it seems to?
Who made this?
How much is this going to cost me?
Did you say something?

Why is everything so boring?
What the hell was that all about?
How do you spell that?
Can I help you?
How long have you been doing that?

Is this some kind of trick?
Was that the end?
Who is paying for this?
Have I seen this before?
Did something change when I wasn't paying attention?

How do I make contact with someone in charge?
Is there something I'm forgetting?
What happens now?
Is this done yet?
How do I open this?

Does that mean anything?
Is someone standing behind me?
Are you listening?
Should I keep doing this?
Am I asleep?

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Whether you like it or not

2006-04-04T20:51:00.000-05:00

Many people ask me, "how do I become a member of the Kingdom Come Institute?" The more sophisticated ask how they may become a member of the set of the Kingdom Come Institute. The answer is simple: Although I cannot assign anyone membership of the set, I can provide this simple test to determine whether or not you are already a member without yet realizing it.

1. Am I going to die? Y/N

Welcome Aboard. As our newest member you are now Captain.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

pathology: there are no ends there are only means

2006-04-04T20:48:00.000-05:00

Where does it begin? Does it begin with the unwholesome realization that capitalism represents nothing more than the latest chapter in the timeless battle between the many and the few? Does it begin with the contemplation of television, a device designed to encourage normal people to exchange the way their time was spent (and in this day and age of synthetic value, increasingly the way their time will be spent) for pieces of a dream that was spent and useless a hundred years ago, all for the sake of the five percent of humanity who have the audacity to insist that it all belongs to them? Does it begin with the painful apprehension that there is a mighty schism in this world between ends and means, and ten thousand starving children and ten thousand smoke and pollution and toxic chemical choked cancer victims and ten thousand ignorant peasants who know nothing of the high powered politics that mean fire must rain from the sky and ten thousand wise fools like me who know something about the politics but are nonetheless powerless to do anything against them, and ten thousand and ten thousand more fall into that chasm on a nightly basis never to be heard from again? Does it begin with me writing or you reading or with all the reading and writing in the world? Perhaps it begins with just another grim late night (or very early morning) when the distractions I blame it all on must inevitably slip away one by one into the quiet into the dark and I am left alone with these thoughts that circle endlessly in this powerful impotent mind the Lord has cursed my path with.

There are no beginnings in this world, no places where you can place your hand and say "this is where it began." There is only the procession of the event that never ends, which is sometimes the dim doppelganger of an event that it seemed once was, which is sometimes the dim recollection of an event it seems might be. There is always a history, always a precedent, always a reason that never fully explains what's happening now. In short, and to quote my friend Most, "Everything has a pathology."

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

im hacking your mind right now

2006-04-04T20:47:00.000-05:00

What is the power of text? It's no simple question when you start to think about the biological realities of perception and cognition. When you read, the patterns of letters, more specifically the light that bounces off the pages of books or emanates from the textual substrate of electronic media, hits your eye, is focused through an ingenious jelly lens onto the highly specialized retinal receptor cells that transform that light, (that very same sunlight that came erupting out of the unimaginable blinding inferno of nuclear fusion that is the sun, not ten minutes before, right off that page after tangling briefly (we're not equipped to understand how briefly) with the outer electron configuration of the generally tree-manufactured cellulosic infrastructure. Or, for you electronic technoscentii out there, gets generated by firing streams of electrons at the inside surface of a vacuum tube. But screw the screen, man, that's just more tricks with static and magnets. That light hits those receptor cells in your retinas; they convert that light into a chain of chemical reactions that relay the visual impression of the patterns made by that light (that same light!) into the mass of gelatinous tissue in your skull that translates text to words and words to ideas: because of the energy in that light and because of the shapes of those words, those letters, that text, a change occurs in the mind. Text hacks the human mind. It can lie quiescent for a hundred years and still be good to go just by turning a page. It retains its power after its creator is dead. A particularly influential pattern of text may be reproduced endlessly at a tiny fraction of the cost of its original production (running a human being costs a lot of energy). With the advent of computerized information interchange the energy "cost" of reproducing text is ludicrously small. It would seem that the creation of a piece of text has a lasting value. What other fire can a human being light that lasts that long? Or at least has the potential to last that long... Sometimes I fear that text, the written word, is responsible for the downfall of the human race. When language becomes text it is rendered static and thus can become law. It is then hindered from changing appropriately to address the realities at hand. Nevertheless it is the highest technology human beings have achieved and I can't resist tinkering with it.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Less is less but I like it like that

2006-04-04T20:45:00.000-05:00

Constructing a visionary hypercontent experience
so far out of date but not so bad for 1999

There are a million ways to do anything. Here's how I did it.

Materials:
1. Macintosh LC III personal computer
2. basic word processing and FTP software (I use SimpleText and Fetch)
3. a domain (it helps to have fine friends like mine at gumption.com to host)
4. a dozen diskettes
5. a working knowledge of 5 html tags and their antecedents (have you started noticing the fives everywhere?): I use html, head, pre, body, and href.
6. a wild mind and a penchant for self-punishment
8. about a year of heavy thought and three years of heavy labor.

"Ain't we so bloody clever, then"

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

it's the next logical step from flat

2006-04-04T20:44:00.000-05:00

Putting the sub back in suburbia.

I recently came across a diatribe someone published on the net that contained an argument for blowing up the suburbs. Now, while I like to think that every right thinking hip urban youth shares a healthy contempt for the city outside of the city and the general cowardice, conformity, and shallow addiction to having cake while eating cake, I think this kind of wild talk needs to be addressed. If we just start blowing up things we don't like, well, gosh- where's it all going to end? That's like, I don't know, Nazi talk or something. And anyway, someone's gotta work all those office jobs in the city. To me it represents an unfortunate trend in rebellious youth, of simply rushing to an unworkable and untenable extremist solution in lieu of really thinking the problem through.

Does anyone really support the mandatory modification of behaviour to fit a supposed societal ideal? Well... yes, of course. But not the kind of person who generally advocates blowing up suburbia. I say, you have to accept all forms of deviance, even one as wierd as suburban living. Our goal shouldn't be to eliminate the suburbs, since there is a constituency who just want to live that way, and like heroin users and dog fuckers, prohibition only leads to a nasty black market situation, another cash cow for violent criminals.

I advocate a simple solution: out of sight, out of mind. Why not put the suburbs underground? What these people want more than anything is to be seperated from the city entirely, and yet still have useful access to it. Subterranean suburban living is the ideal solution. Instead of driving through a wasteland of decaying strip malls, each suburbanite would simply exit the freeway and follow a circuitous route to their own personal secret underground access (think Batman teevee show). Imagine, a vast underground complex of fast food joints, sports bars, grot merchandise emporiums, dry cleaners and health clubs, and of course ugly and inneficient split level dwellings.

The trick, of course is getting them down there... Although one imagines if they experienced a sufficient amount of antisocial urban incursion, why, they might just head on down by themselves! Imagine a wave of skaters, goths, anachronistic punks (God knows they need something to keep themselves occupied), and whiny college protesters, descending into the wunderbread kingdom... Night after night after night after night...

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

go hold down that dog while I fuck that pig

2006-04-04T20:43:00.000-05:00

Speaking of Dog Fuckers...

I kind of like the old internet. Internet teevee is coming faster than anyone realizes, a horrible thing to contemplate. We're talking about twentyfour hour, totally self determined (sort of) access here. You wanna watch seventyfive straight hours of star treck reruns, well by god you will. I fully expect to see round the clock death sports in thirty years: this culture is on the skids, greased by the infernal pap of the magic box, and there just ain't no way we'll have the resistance to overcome the apotheosis of television refracted through the lens of the microcomputer.

And I suppose this nifty little kludgemachine, the internet, invented and constructed largely by crazy visionary malcontents like myself, will fall by the wayside with the advent of a truly commercialized network. The Network, no doubt, an unholy alliance of the mediaopolizers, with good ol' disney leading the rapacious pack.

And there won't be anymore crazy text side alleys, like the archive I stumbled accross the other day and came across a detailed manual on dog-fucking. Now, I'm sure this is all very evil and wrong, but I confess a soft spot in my heart for the demented intelligence that produced that bizzarity. What struck me most is that this person was not wasting any time apologizing or justifying or trying to dredge up examples of really super nutty behaviour as an excuse for dog fucking. Quite the opposite. The author positively advocated fucking your dog, he really insisted on it. He immediately put the nay-sayer on the defensive, insisting that non-fucking dog owners were denying their pets the sexual release their natures demanded. He was quite vehement. This is not to say that I am an advocate of dog fucking or that I really have any interest in it. His argument was passionate, but it failed to convince. Me, anyway. But only on the old internet, you know? In a lifetime of paying singular attention to the various emergences of text in my world, from breakfast cereal boxes to library books to pamphlets I've found on the street, I never in hell came across anything quite like that. It goes without saying that on disnetwork inkorp, this sort of thing just simply won't be allowed.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

a pointless observation

2006-04-04T20:42:00.000-05:00

Have you noticed the way that eighty-five percent of us make the goods, purchase the goods, and elect (or more often than not, passively observe the election of) the officials entrusted with the oversight of the manufacture and distributin of goods (the business of america, good old Ronald Reagan pointed out, is business)? And yet who feels like they're in control? Who's in charge at your job: you or your bosses? Are your politicians, even the ones you voted for, doing what you hoped they would? Do you control the quality of the goods you get? Do you ever feel fucked over by a transaction you're involved in? Are you satisfied with the means of recourse you are supplied with when this situation occurs? How much control do you feel like you have on interest rates? How much control do you exert over the stock market? If you've ever been layed off, chances are you were sacrificed on the altar of Shareholder Value. Do you have any idea what that means? Nearly every time politicians propose a tax cut, they try to sneak a capital gains cut proposal in too. Have you ever experienced a "capital gain?" Do you know what a capital gain is?

I'm sorry, it's pointless to go on, but if you want to paint yourself a revolutionary, you better get used to this sad rap. Y'all are so damn stupid it just makes my head spin.

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a radical proposal

2006-04-04T20:39:00.000-05:00

So there it is again. As a failed (or, from another point of view, liberated) chemist, I couldn't help but take notice of the latest killing spree in Atlanta. What's the secret with these guys? 'Cause it's always the same. Kill a bunch of people who have fuck all to do with your problems, then kill yourself. Evil or mad? Who knows. You'd have to be mad, you'd think, to want to be immortalized in history as a cowardly asshole. Or maybe evil enough not to care...

Listen, if you're feeling up against it, why not do everybody a favor and just kill yourself? I mean, seriously, what difference does it make to you? You're done, game over. You're gonna end up killing yourself, they always do. Why not skip the middlemen? And on the off chance that Somebody's running this whole sad show, I'd have to call it a decent bet on a loophole around that ol' suicide damnation problem.

"Well hell. You did kill yourself... But I see here that you were about to go on a killing spree! Ah, what the hell. Get on in there, have some fun. No, seriously, go ahead. You're due."

I guess it's what I would do... But then, that's probably why I'm not out killin'.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

One shock of recognition

2006-04-04T20:38:00.000-05:00

The lesson is discipline in the face of no reward.

The actions are simple but the consequences are uncertain. The question, what then shall I gain, puts the action in peril, because the principle of the action is the abandonment of the gaining idea and the severance of attachments. There is nothing to be gained and likewise there is nothing to be lost. When this action, in any circumstance, is carried out for the first time, there is an enourmous show of seeming consequence: anxiety, anger, a sense of loss of self. Carried through, there is the sense of meaninglessness or senselessness: the action carries no gain or reward and so seems without point. Frustration and disillusionment follow. Carrying the action through these irrational deceptions is the final enactment of discipline: once undertaken, an understanding develops that the action proceeds without gain, justification, attachment, or any outside meaning: this is the proof of the action, even when it seems to be its condemnation.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

They changed the questions

2006-04-04T20:36:00.000-05:00

With knowledge comes the inexorable sensation of falling behind. You can learn a lot but the first thing you learn is how much more there is to know, and how much more than that that is as yet unknown and so potentially unknowable. Learn about sleep and you learn that your whole life you've been falling behind, building a debt that in the end can only be cancelled by the big sleep. Learn about Motzart and find out how far behind your genius is already.

And so it goes. Learning is a fool's game. Lucky are the masses toiling fruitlessly in the happy fields of their ignorance.

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the briefest possible moment of time passes unnoticed as if in a dream

2006-04-04T20:35:00.000-05:00

Despite some rather obvious ommissions (it really is a rather lean overview) it's done which at the moment is what I care about. C'est la vie.

And other cliches on a similar vein

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living christ

2006-04-04T20:29:00.000-05:00

86/101

Hey living Bhudda
Where are you at
won't you give me audience
you're one elusive cat
If I were a tubmaker
at least I'd make some sense
have a reason to hang around
on this side of the fence
I need a mentor
to lead me on the path
I need some guidance
and an abacus to do the math
I need a metronome
to keep a steady beat
I need a stiff one now
to keep me on my feet
hey living Bhudda
try and help me out
I really want to learn the way
to live beyond my doubt

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

fpc

2006-04-04T20:27:00.000-05:00

Nothing I can promise. I suppose. Nothing I can say. It's been too long, I've lost faith.

God. The waters are too deep, too vast. I got so lost, I'm floating...

Bullshit, fucking poetic crap!

Fuck this, oh, FUCK this. This goddamn book of lies. Everything but what I am, everything but what AM I? Everytime I look, it's never sure. I'm such a fuck up, Lord.

I'm tired of writing this I'm so tired of not saying anything new. Ought to burn it all... The end of all illusions... Hardly... Nice wish, Dorkboy.

Losercore.

This isn't going much anywhere, now IS it? Fuck.

Just been a shitty fucking new life so far.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

finding them is a scavenger hunt of sorts

2006-04-04T20:26:00.000-05:00

Me. Yeah, Me, being the subject of this ongoing monologue, extensively littered with interesting quotes from better authors.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Midnight Excursion

2006-04-04T20:24:00.000-05:00

94/101

Daytime the extended version
Me still pondering the midnight excursion
station to station day to day
channel to channel hell to pay
when it's all done and it doesn't matter
anymore just more dust to scatter
the answer is hidden in a recursion
M.C. Escher version of a midnight excursion
If the master catches me scaling the wall
I'll never go out at night again at all
No more midnight excursions of pleasure jaunts
No more to revisit these old haunts
Rewriting the aspect in new designs
rereading the roles the sun assigns
Living in the day in the noontime sun
So this excursion day version begun

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

miracle

2006-04-04T20:23:00.000-05:00

80/101

It's a miracle I'm breathing
That I'll probably survive
through to the next tomorrow
It's a miracle I'm still alive
I'm eating when I'm hungry
I'm sleeping when I'm tired
I'm writing every chance I get
Look at the strange procession I've sired
look at this foolish rambling mess
it's a miracle heaven knows
it's a miracle I'm still around
it's a miracle my eyes can close

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

mom

2006-04-04T20:21:00.000-05:00

And I came back and here I am.

"Cleared up," I said to Mom. "You can see the stars."

"Well, I thought it was, before," she said. "You just have to wait - it takes time."

Yeah

"I hope it lasts a while this time" she said.

"So do I," I replied.

And the thing is - I don't feel any different. I feel just the same. That's all I can say, there's no but. I feel just the same.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

bred in the bone and then some

2006-04-04T20:20:00.000-05:00

There is a moral to this madness. Grand definitions spawn lack of meaning, grand viewpoints breed relative minisculity, and over-examination breeds insanity.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Can hearing it later change someone's mind?

2006-04-03T10:28:00.000-05:00

Consider this: if we attempt, having had no experience of it, to cultivate a plant, it is likely we will fail. At the least we will fail to make the most of what the plant could be. If we then read a book on gardening and make the attempt a second time, we may still to some degree fail but we will fail more intelligently and the knowledge contained in the text of the book will change our behavior in cultivation. What happened there? We uploaded some software. By mulling over pages of ten thousands of black marks, each bearing only the most minimal meaning as a phonetic building block, we have realigned our neural networks in a manner that causes our behavior to change. More importantly, it causes or catalyzes us to choose to change our behaviour, if you're still optimistic enough to believe we have free will. I think that's crazy: it blows my mind. It gets wiggier when you bring the electronic media into the picture: now this information is stored in arcane codes deluxe on a sea of silicon and wierd trace elements and copper printed green circuitboard, (just what the hell is that green board made of?); it exists as a billion billion series of quantum electron states, tricky and bewildering things if you know anything about quantum mechanics and the electron, believe you me. If text has the capacity to alter the human mind and if the human mind has the ability to alter physical reality (as everyone still optimistic enough to believe in free will believes it does, whether they realize it or not), then what sort of potential energy does this information contain? What is its form? Does it have anything to do with the configurations of the electrons marking places on the big boards in that computer off somewhere in my friends' house? Obviously the patterns of those electrons are relevant as they are specific to a particular piece of text (or in the case of my writings generally a peculiar piece of text); nonetheless we cannot begin to relate the energy represented in a piece of text as a motivator of change to the rather better understood phenomenon of electrons and silicon and germanium and other wierd transition metals and semiconductors and how they interact. They are obviously connected but we cannot sensibly relate them. Begging the question: how does the information retain its meaning when noone is looking at it? It's just hanging out there in "cyberspace," unobserved (and so in some quantum questioners' minds in a highly ambiguous state of being)... Where is the meaning? It's not in my mind anymore, at least not in a form I could readily communicate. It's not yet in your mind. But it's out there... Behaving like perfectly normal electrons. Not to be cliche but if the tree falls in the forest...

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tu chingada madre

2006-04-03T10:27:00.001-05:00

I have seen the problem addressed by the usual divisions, the material and the living and the sentient and the divine. Nomenclature and classification run into the usual problems, to perfectly describe reality there is no recourse but to treat each individual as the special case, but at this extreme the utility of of the system comes into question. Meanwhile down the paths of futility forged daily by the materialist reductionists, it is all reduced to some single principle, there is no division between the quick and the dead. We can dismiss this view as being self-evidently false, but viruses and even wierder beasts like prions call it into question. So it remains: might the earth be an organism?

I say why not. There's no point trying to apply the principles of conventional species centric evolutionary biology in any but the vaguest sense. Nomenclature is no use: in this case we're compelled to address the single individual because as yet it's all we've got to study. There follows the sticky question of whether or not the ability to reproduce (at least in theory) is a prerequisite to the definition. It's a valid point, considering that reproduction is sufficiently basic function of the living that we allow viruses and prions and the rest to come under consideration solely on the basis of their prodigous abilities for self-replication. I think that, in theory at least, a planet could reproduce, using it's sentient species as the germ cells... It could probably happen with our planet if we weren't all such a bunch of selfish, troublesome, violent, hateful, ignorant, short-sighted, small-minded, lazy and uninvolved assholes.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

the bastards that control our lives

2006-04-03T10:27:00.000-05:00

I get asked this a lot: who is this They, the mysterious They who hike taxes, sell build insane freeways, buzz my home in night-silent black helicopters. We all talk about the they, but when most people ask it's always as if it were a rhetorical question. The implication is that there isn't an answer and that noone's really in charge, noone's really to blame. I'm not like most people. I'm referring to someone specific: They are responsible and they are to blame.

This is not about the Antichrist, the Beast of Revelation (which some say, will come in the form of "an Amazing Super Computer Robot"), Atlanteans, Illuminati, Knights Templar or an incredible race of Super Salamanders that dwell in the indescribable heat and pressure of the Earth's molten core. It's not even about more garden variety conspiracies of government spooks and chemical magnates meeting in darkened rooms to plan the assasination of JFK Jr. (you think that little plane went down by accident?)

"They" are, quite simply, the majority shareholders in the world markets. There is nothing secret or mysterious about Them. Their names are public knowledge and much bandied about, likewise Their tactics. In a recent article about layoffs in the chemical industry, I heard Their primary tactic referred to as the "Shareholder Religeon," which I thought was a very appropriate phrase. The question of money versus value versus wealth is another file's tale, but the name of the game and the god of the religeon is wealth. Because shareholders control corporations, all corporate actions are meant to result in shareholder wealth. When a business talks about corporate citizenship or customer or employee satisfaction, they're full of shit. It's all lies. Sometimes these things occur, but only as a means to an end. The sole purpose of business on the cusp of the twenty-first century is to see Trickle Down Economics actualized: their job is to make sure that by the time it gets Down to us, it's just a Trickle. That's what profit means. The whole point of a profit motive is that you extract the greatest possible value for the cheapest possible product.

Sure, they buy off politicians, they own the media, they probably occasionally kill enemies or perceived enemies. But for the most part what they do is right out in plain sight, unambiguous financial transactions. They do not control the media through some secret shadowy conspiracy where Tom Brokaw gets encrypted orders through a pneumatic tube that connects Zurich to the bathroom in his dressing room. They control the media by simply owning it. They don't care how their posessions behave, good or ill, as long as they practice and follow the Shareholder Religeon. Once the End is established, They trust the Means to take care of themselves. And they do, they do.

And there aren't a whole hell of a lot of Them. Check Forbes and you'll see Them nicely listed. Nothing clandestine about that: their best trick is getting half of us to believe that some crazy shadow conspiracy is running things, while the rest assume that noone is running things at all.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Filed under shameless self-promotion

2006-04-03T10:26:00.000-05:00

Once I realized that I had no place, part or parcel in this culture, this society, this dialectic of dismal ages, it all became so much easier. The degree to which I have tried to bend my mind down to the level of ordinary human endeavor is precisely the degree to which I have induced madness, trembling, fear and loathing, mania, consternation, foul temper, excess of bilious humors, blind rage and not a little melancholia in my abused mind. I just wasn't made for this world and that's not the half of it.

I have thrown down all the old paradigms like so many dice, exited the system entirely and declared a new day, a new taste, a crystal perfect uplink to the Big Sound that informs all. I am a visionary genius, a new order of mind, a harbinger of the Second Organization. It's all here, it's all real, it's all happening right now and you are part of it for as long as you choose to bask in the solar wind of my superior semantic epistemology or until you figure it out yourself and become one with the rest of it.

There's no more time for trying to decide what everyone else should be doing, so that your imagined perfect world could finally be actualized. Either that world is in you or it's nowhere and at any given moment what choice do you have but to choose which of those two positions you choose to take. My only commandment is Go Forth. I follow my light, the consequences are not my concern. The future is not mine to see.

Are one million fellow Visionaries waiting to be born from the crucible of Text?

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Revolutionary Propaganda for Children

2006-04-03T10:25:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time there was an old white man named Mr. Crankypants. He ruled of a household of 93 stupid children and one smart one. Mr. Crankypants was very selfish and cruel. Whenever the children baked a loaf of bread, he would break off one end for all of them to fight over and keep most of the loaf for himself. If one of them, through working diligently, managed to earn a dollar, Mr. Crankypants would steal it and trhow a dime and a nickel among his many charges. Despite this, he would sigh endlessly at the trouble his children caused him, even though they did all the work and made all the money. Mr. Crankypants would complain loudly that he had to lend them back the money he had stolen from them so they could get clothes and shoes to keep working.

As if to make things worse, Mr. Crankypants coddled and pampered a dozen or twenty of his servants, giving them the least odious tasks and yet lavishing them with gifts... though admittedly most of the gifts were worthless trinkets. He trusted these children to stake a claim on their privileges when the rest of the children started to exhibit the signs of needing some skull-cracking.

Then the smart child finally realized that Mr. Crankypants didn't actually have any legal claim on any of the children. Each was an orphan, free to live as they wanted. So he spoke to all the stupid children and managed to convince the little idiots that THEY SHOULD VOTE THIRD PARTY FOR EVERY RACE IN THE 2000 ELECTIONS SO AS NOT TO KEEP THE SAME STATUS QUO RUNNING DOGS SQUEEZING US ON BEHALF OF THE RICH FOR ANOTHER HUNDRED YEARS.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

one world...

2006-04-03T10:24:00.000-05:00

It would be funny if, as Christmas approached, a bunch of people swapped their credit cards around, went on a big Christmas shopping spree, and then reported their own cards stolen and just made the banks swallow it. As long as you stay away from stores with cameras you've pretty much got it made. Oh, and don't do too good a job forging the signature. If you're a real nut, I think signing a similar name in a decent handwriting match is a nice flair. Did you realize that Visa doesn't even its vendors to ask for ID? That's what interchange income - the tax such financiers have imposed on the retail structure in the form of a billed percentage of transactions - is for. Five days and then you tell them you lost the card and you aren't sure where or when. I bring this up only in that whereas most revolutionary calls to action insist that a great number must rise up for the cause, this kind of thing works best if only a few people do it at once. For those of you who get some kind of creepy moral frisson, try to remember that the corporate motto of Visa is "One World, One Currency: Visa." Honestly, who's side do you think they're on?

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

we got problems

2006-04-03T10:23:00.000-05:00

The techniques of making a large problem from a small one are simple and ancient, yet they may take a lifetime to master. Luckily there are six billion of us milling around this shrinking ball, all with exactly one lifetime to burn. Consider the depths of the shit we're going to be in this time next century.

Almost universally, the first step is to ignore the small problem. The smaller the problem is, the easier it is to ignore. Certainly there are cases in which premature panic and overcompensation are called for. But when in doubt, wait it out. Almost any small problem worth developing will certainly grow to respectable dimensions if just given some peace and quiet.

Now, the second step is the one everyone disagrees on. For my money, you can't beat spending phase two assigning blame. You can call it ownership or responsibility if you're that kind of perverse mind. Passing the buck feeds the problem and resentment simultaneously. It's a win win situation.

Now it's time for step three, misinterpreting the problem. Here you have some choices, and there's no easy way to learn what kinds of problems respond best to what kind of treatment. You can pretend it's still a small problem, persistent but nonetheless subject to any number of quick fixes. You can then put these off because they're really so simple. You can blow it way out of proportion, and detour a lot of resources you really can't afford into a overly complicated solution.

Now it comes to whether to stick doggedly to a clearly failing solution or change tactics so rapidly that there's no chance of judging the efficacy of any one. If the problem has grown beyond expectations it might already be time to call it self sustaining and let it go.

How to decide? Well, I say it's like golf. They're all good clubs, they'll all whack the ball around. The best way to learn the individual strengths of the components is to head to the range and hit some balls. They're all good techniques. Start ignoring all your problems right now, and see what develops.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

an authentic warrior kicks ass

2006-04-03T10:18:00.000-05:00

In a world where knowledge is the only source of authentic power, intellectual property is the ultimate act of theft. So it is of the first importance to pay close attention to every loophole and scam in the grey sea of copyright protection.

Here's a simple one: damn near every book published in America gives the reader explicit permission to excerpt at will as long as the excerpt occurs in the context of a review of the work cited. That's a pretty bad presentation of copyright law, but the following quotes are still legal.

Consider the following excerpt from Carlos Castaneda's semina work, The Teachings of Don Juan, a Yaqui Way of Knowledge:

" 'Are you angry at me, don Juan?' I asked when he returned. He seemed surprised at my question.
" 'No! I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.' "

Copyright 1968, by the Regents of the University of California Press.

Consider this, from a much later book by Castaneda: The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of don Juan:

" 'The modality of time is the precise bundle of the energy fields being perceived,' [don Juan] answered."

Copyright 1987 by Carlos Castaneda

Years ago, when I expressed admiration for the former book, some people felt a great need to disabuse me of my naivete and inform me that Castenada was just a shyster who made the whole thing, or at least most of it, up. I already knew this, and I always told people that they didn't understand the book if they thought that was important. The line from the second book cited, nineteen years down the line from whatever decisions led Castaneda down the path he took, is from page two of the introduction, which is exactly how far I got before I had to put that worthless piece of crap down and vow never again. I bought the first don Juan book at my favorite used book store for one dollar a couple of years ago and I do believe I've filled my essential Castaneda shelf with that single purchase. I do not have room in my head for dialogues on the spirit that start with phrases like the modality of time. I'm trying to discover something in this life.

Mr. Castaneda? Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Mr. Castaneda, it's time to go out into the desert and eat a whole bunch of peyote and try to figure out at what point in your life you went terribly, terribly wrong and started retching out this odious new-age pablum. Jesus, as if the world wasn't complicated enough, without this sort of money-making shyster rip-off being sold to unsuspecting tourists on the weird side of the street. Repent, Mr. Castaneda, repent!

There, my duty done for another day. I don't even know if the man is alive. I don't pay very much attention to the news. Someone at work had to tell me that Captain Kangaroo was dead. It ruined my day.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

censored for your pleasure

2006-04-03T10:14:00.000-05:00

I have a job: eight hours of my day are dedicated to being a wage slave. Now, I like my job, and the people I work with, and I like to think that the work I do has a larger societal value. But a wage slave is what I am. This is because I do not posess an ownership stake in my business. I work for CENSORED.

CENSORED recently published a typically cranky salvo against CENSORED. One of his key arguments was that CENSORED was created in a time of fear of a monopolistic control of television by the major networks. He put forth that in this era of one hundred fifty television channels, this was no longer a justifiable concern.

You know, I'm CENSORED astonished at the vileness and fantastical filth that continually spews out of the wealth class controlled media engines of this wealth class controlled nation. CENSORED should take a good look at his corrupted visage in the bathroom mirror when he gets up in the morning and then CENSORED himself in the CENSORED. Are you people insane? Are you telling me you honestly can't see what's going on? Our entire main stream media, the whole enchilada, is owned by a handful of corporate players. This is television, radio, movies, music and books. Innumerable tie-ins. If anything, the media universe is more exclusive and incestuous than ever. All these old white men, do you dig? It's just your typical inbred monoculture. Which perhaps explains why it is so sick, sick, sick and wrong. Now the internet biggies, CENSORED and CENSORED and CENSORED and the portal people, CENSORED and CENSORED, are cozying up to the networks, it's CENSORED and you handle the content, boys, we'll handle the access and we'll all whistle a merry tune forevermore. This is Spider Mating Season we're observing, and the only question is who's going to eat who. They're sizing each other up, believe me, and making dark plans in their dark souls. If we allow this to happen, this unholy alliance of the information machines and the entertainment, that's it. We're done. Too much economic power in one place. Listen, antitrust laws exist not because we're so crazy about fairness in the free market. They exist because a company that gets big enough is a threat to liberty.

So, briefly, CENSORED can CENSORED his CENSORED CENSORED. CENSORED is a temple prostitute for the religeon of shareholder value, and he pays fully for his whorish perversions, I have no doubt. Nevertheless, it is the will of the people: you get what you buy. I, meanwhile, will do my work, keep my home, vote the responsible third party and support CENSORED privately as well as in my employment. I kind of like there being a different voice in the fray from time to time.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Mother

2006-04-03T10:11:00.000-05:00

15/101

I don't care if people laugh
and whisper to each other
I don't care what people say
I'm a mama's boy
I'll always love my mother
I love all my family dear
Dad and sister and my brother
I know where I came from
I'm a mama's boy
I'll always love my mother
This life gives you just one chance
you cannot buy another
I know where my heart belongs
I'm a mama's boy
I'll always love my mother

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

The song it sang to me

2006-04-03T10:09:00.000-05:00

The Big Song is calling to me, telling me to seek it, to strive for it, whispering strange and conflicting messages in my ear. It tells me to embrace the big all. Worry not for tomorrow, and do not worry what ye shall eat and what ye shall drink and wherefor thou shalt be clothed...

Oye. All the magic and mayhem all around, all the time. And me, I DON'T know, not to beat the same old saw. But that's what I'm doing. Lacking guidance, I pound on my rusty ol' saw with a rubber mallet, trying to get a clear tone. Oh, lyrical, rhapsodic: Just so. Perfect example.

It just makes me want to scream, sometimes. But if you could see me now, flat on my back in bed, everything but my arm immobile, my aperature making this messy, just legible tumble of marks pass for some semblance of of meaning, and it does, I think. My face is mild, my eyes impassive, merely tracking the page, and this is what I'm doing... I don't know, man, is this the way? What's the WAY, I mean, what is my function, my calling, my action, right NOW.

So I asked myself what must be an old question... If the world were about to end, right NOW...

What would I do?

And I pondered it... Very difficult question. If I had one action left... Should I finish this? Wake up Jennifer? have a last cigarette...

I don't know what I would do, and that doesn't really surprise me, because of course the question I'm REALLY asking is what I SHOULD do and there's no fuckin' answer for that. People couldn't tell you what they were going to eat for breakfast tomorrow... Most probably couldn't say what they had today (I'm one of the rare exceptions, I can tell you both: cigarette).

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

reading between the lines

2006-04-03T10:08:00.000-05:00

Don't matter, you can read between all the lines and fill in the blanks. Don't matter that nothing happened. Nothin' ever happens. For the best I suppose, realizing with a kind of grim surmise that I am in no state to respond to any kind of romantic notion, so starved am I by solitude that I'd fall for just about anyone just to not spend this night alone... But that you can't buy, no... You can buy an image, or a voice, or a body for an hour or two... But you can't buy the night. Not for the kind of money I've got. That you have to earn. And I don't have the goods.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

No attachment to dust

2006-04-03T10:07:00.000-05:00

77/101

There is nothing that will last
there is nothing that I must
No moon in the water
no attachment to dust
There is no one I'm afraid of
There is no one that I trust
I see nothing that's alarming
In a handful if dust
All my treasure has to perish
All will fall to moth and rust
I live without assumptions
or attachments to dust

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Femiwhatsis

2006-04-03T10:05:00.000-05:00

(The Devil demon of mine strife und woe tries to get me to play video games by modulating the dull sounds of evening television through ceilings and possibly walls. On resistance it settled on making me think about how liberals could secretly take on society. Men should be meeting right now in secret rooms, and they are, god knows, though alarmingly few of these characters are what seem to bear the slightest resemblence to what a man would call the good guys. And I can't even remember which of my brackets I've failed to close and this all came out of some mental tinkering with a quasi-feminist revisionist masculinist meta-commentary.

My my.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Prior to the redacted confessional

2006-04-03T10:04:00.000-05:00

Then I see some sixty year old guy wiping tables in Burger King and think about the reversals of fortune that wait out there for you, think about the way anything can go sour, or right, for reasons just and reasons meaningless. Wonder what I deserve and can't see meaning in the question. Wonder what I want, what I need, most of all what I'll get.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

no water, no moon

2006-04-03T10:03:00.001-05:00

29/101

No water, no moon
No water, no moon
at last I understand
not one minute too soon
no more water in the pail
no more moon in the water
I've uncovered my fate
after years that I sought her
after years on the search
after years on the path
there are waves in the water
and moonlight in the bath
there is light in the water
and light in my eyes
there is light everywhere
it should come as no surprise
and the light spills down
from a bamboo spoon
no water, no moon
no water, no moon

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Obedience

2006-04-03T10:03:00.000-05:00

4/101

Called by anger called by dismay
called to the left side watch me obey
called by anguish called by pain
called to the right side see what you gain
called to obedience and discipline
called to the carpet ready to begin
called to gentleness meek as a lamb
I guess I'm finding out what kind I am
I don't mind the sleeplessness or the hurt
I'm rising to enlightenment just keep on your shirt
obedience is hard for me I'm trying hard to change
Guess that I'll just have to wait and see what you arrange
Call me to sit and learn I'll curl up at your feet
the vinegar is bitter but the lotus flower's sweet
the simple truth is there's a truth you can't write down
if you trace it in the air you get to wear the Buddha gown

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.