| Goodbye, Coralville. |
[Jul. 15th, 2008|09:02 pm] |
Today I called the building manager, a tall thin blond in sunglasses, and told her I was breaking the lease I'd just signed. Twenty minutes later an identical blond drove up in a white Mustang and began to call to a neighbor across the lot.
"See you tomorrow, okay?"
"Huh?"
She repeated herself. "Our appointment's tomorrow, alright? After tomorrow I'm not going to be seeing you anymore." She pronounced the words sharply and clearly, as if talking to an idiot. Which she was.
"Huh."
"But it better be tomorrow, because you won't see me after then."
"Where you goin?"
"On to bigger and better things" she said cryptically, hurrying to her car. Not scared, but hoping to avoid some kind of emotional connection.
Obviously a parole officer.
This kid is one of a gaggle of black folks who moved in to the building across from me. There are four apartments in each building, and all but one are rented by the same large family. There's a gorgeous nursing student in her twenties who drives the nicest car. There's several boys, all muscular, all American, with that deep ghetto accent that comes to them by way of the south, hip hop, and Madison avenue. There's almost as many girls. There's also a middle aged matriarch and patriarch, and one sad old aunt with chemo hair and a the defeated shuffle of long illness.
This kid, this man who will be a boy whatever his age, walks stiffly with his fists thrust in bitter pockets. His shaved head sports a long pink scar across the base of his skull. His jaw juts out in a rictus of mute anger common to people that can't pass for grownup.
"Awe where." He asked again,
"Cedar Rapids!" She said, again a bit too sharp and a bit too cheery.
"Oh." Came the disappointed reply. "You goin home?"
"I don't have a home." A lie even an idiot will pierce on a few hours of reflection.
Four days after the fourth a bang went off near my window like a .48
"Jezus!" I shouted and turned just in time to see petals of embers dropping from a long stem of of a smoke trail, leading back to the kid's hand. A moment later a patrol car flashed its siren and swung up next to him. A fat white cop yelled and shouted and put him across the hood.
The kid had shot the rocket at the family car, a rust-dappled Le Baron the boys keep taking from their mother to go cruise for girls and smoke ganja in. They never let him come along.
The cop quickly realized he had a "special needs" boy on his hands and asked the swarming family who'd given him the firework. The cancerous aunt admitted to it, but of course she hadn't. The cop took in her patchy hair and sagging face and, one stern lecture later, drove away.
Good luck for the kid, seeing as he was on probation.
"Awe But I'll see you after that," his voice unusually soft and friendly.
This chick, no more than 23, was on her way up at last. Her big break. No more tweaky retards in the Coralville suburbs. No more juvie cases. Now it'd be real wire-rippers and gas siphoners and maybe, if she was lucky, an honest to god meth addict. Her resume unfolded like a rap sheet before her reflective alien eyes.
"I'm with the department of corrections. You don't want to see me." Her door slammed. She drove away.
The kid stood on the stoop and watched the empty street for a good long time. |
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| Third person omniscient |
[Jul. 13th, 2008|01:02 am] |
A few weeks ago Špela told me about a phenomenon anesthesiologists experience that isn't much discussed outside the hospital.
Occasionally patients under full sedation will recall their operation as if they'd been disembodied observers. This isn't the sort of "I was floating above myself, and then I moved towards a great white light" thing you get with a classical near death experience.
Rather, the patient remembered the operation accurately, but had no fixed point of view. At one moment they might have been watching a doctor, then a nurse walking into another room, observed her prepare something, then seen the clock on the wall, etc. The descriptions are detached and depersonalized, as if they were remembering dreams.
This is rare, but happens frequently enough that every anesthesiologist with a few years under her belt had at least one case of it.
Just thought I'd share. |
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| Slower than a ray of light.. |
[Jul. 11th, 2008|11:26 am] |
Occasionally I have chats with my uncle, a retired Methodist minister turned atheist, now in his sunset years. He enjoys watching documentaries on astrophysics and considering the nautre of reality as seen without the beer goggles of dogma. I have more of a background in the sciences, so I can keep him entertained while I ever so discreetly try to convince him he still has a soul.
While explaining special relativity to him, I had a revelation about the phenomenology of time dialation...
( Read more... ) |
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| Floatsam and Jetsons |
[Jul. 11th, 2008|12:30 am] |
Two weeks after the midwestern floods my town still looks like this:
It's an apt metaphor for my life right now. My apartment was in shambles after three months abroad. My town was trashed. So I'm doing the only thing that seems reasonable: packing everything that will fit in two small cars and moving to Colorado, probably Golden or Boulder.
Do I have a job waiting for me there? Nope. Do I have a place to stay? Nada. I'm just doing it. Screw it. There's supposed to be a good smattering of IT jobs there, I need money badly after my stint in the EU, and Iowa, which is as quiet as the grave has too long been my tomb.
( Read more... ) |
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| You suck, couchsurfing.com |
[Jun. 18th, 2008|02:24 am] |
Or, rather, your userbase sucks. Especially your London userbase. You're worse than useless really, a total waste of my energy and time.
Here's a suggestion: if you want a date, use adultfriendfinder or the personals. If you want to meet new and interesting people try Meetup.com, FaceBook, or any of the other hundred and one social networking sites out there.
Global travel is a recipe for financial and physical suffering. Couchsurfing's model would be a great idea, very economical and humanistic, if it was about people offering weary wayfarers a refuge that wouldn't bleed their pockets. I'm willing to host a stranger that needs a place to stay, with minimum fuss or demand on them, when I can expect the same from others in the network.
I don't want to force someone to entertain me after they've driven 10 hours across Interstate 80. I don't want to drag them to the Deadwood or the Wig and Pen and demand they buy overpriced booze, or make them stroll around my city seeing the sights when thier eyes are red and thier legs are aching. What kind of grinning prick does that?
Conversely I don't want to galavant around London with you when I'm on the second leg of a grueling 30 hour nightmare of trains, panes, and midnight Greyhounds. I want a place to sleep without London making me broke.
I'm not some Bedouin herdsman that needs to make a camel driver spend five hours chatting in my tent because that's the only way I get news from Cairo. I have the internet. So do you. What are you, a hick? Other humans are not alien and exotic creatures. We've got the same number of chromosomes, the same allele layout. We ache when we're tired, we crave when we're hungry, and we ooze red when pricked. No mysteries.
If you want to crash at my place without being fleeced on your way to someplace else, stop on by. No hassles, no expectations. Just extend the other users the same courtesy.
If you need to get to know new people in the comfort of your own neighborhood, start using your MySpace account. That's what you signed up for.
Young, rich or stupid: pick two. Those are the only conditions under which your life is about the journey. The rest of us are trying to arrive in one piece.
Of course I can't actually put this on my couchsurfing profile. I wouldn't even get the denial replies. |
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| I <3 EU |
[Apr. 4th, 2008|10:54 am] |
This is actually made in Slovenia but I bought it in London. In either place it's ludicrously expensive. So expensive in fact that I'm never going to buy another one. But this is the good stuff.
Just so you know what it looks like. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 8th, 2008|10:10 am] |
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Somethin' tells me that any mayor of Kirkwood Missouri got what he had comin' |
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| Welcome to the 21st century! |
[Aug. 25th, 2007|02:21 pm] |
So I decided to join modernity and get a cell phone. My criteria were that it had to be internationally GSM compliant, and that it run a real OS that I control. I found a very nice deal on a used BlackBerry 7290 on Ebay. It cost only a quarter of the Amazon price, and it's only slghtly used.
The thing's a tank.
I didn't know much about BlackBerries when I bought it, but I knew it was also a PDA, and that appealed. I don't want to carry two slabs of plastic in my pocket, and my old Visor is close to the grave anyway. The latest BB software lets you migrate all of your databases from Palm to Blackberry, which was great. I got a cheap pre-paid service plan from a local cell company, and I thought I was set.
What I didn't know was that RIM didn't give the BlackBerry a standards compliant data protocol. It's got it's own proprietary thing, and if you don't have a plan with one of the big four telcos who support BlackBerry, tough shit. It wasn't designed to be fun, it was designed to be a secure work leash for wage earners, and it does that very well. If you want to use a small, competitively priced carrier, or you don't belong to an office pool, you can't browse. You can't SMS. You can't email. You have a phone with a PDA in it. End of story.
I need alternate firmware, or some kind of third-party app that fixes the problem, but there isn't one. Thinking about OSS third party firmwares and how those projects usually go, I realized there would never be one. There's a pretty regular development cycle for firmwares in general. It goes like this:
1. Device ships with house OS: adequate, but limited. Manufacturer will release several upgrades over the next 18 months, ignoring all outside developments.
2. Hobbyist A builds a Linux distro as proof of concept. Barely boots on a few models.
3. Hobbyist B writes thier own distro. Has a few features. Device performs some of its original functions. Project ends here.
4. Developer A, in a spirit of competition, revives old project. Others contribute and project becomes popular. New firmware replicates most but not all of manufacturer's features. One or two new, kinky options added.
5. Manufacturer abandons product.
6. Hobbyist A announces radical, sweeping plan for superior functionality, vast array of apps, world domination.
7. Hobbyist A abandons project back at stage four. Third-party distros never live up to original vendor firmware.
8. New platform is released: repeat.
That platform has to be ubiquitous before it even enters the cycle. LynkSys routers are a good example. There just aren't enough BlackBerries out there, or, rather, there aren't enough unlocked BlackBerries out there in the hands of geeks. If I had a Nokia it might be a different story. But then I wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
Oh well. At least it's a good, solid phone. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 25th, 2007|04:25 pm] |
Yesterday I downloaded Falling Down, the classic Joel Schumacher film whose poster tagline read: “The adventures of an ordinary man at war with the everyday world.” As the movie progresses, however, the veneer of his normality is peeled back, and a deeply disturbed personality is revealed.
I hadn't noticed it when I watched it in the theater, but seeing it again, the film has a strong and unmistakable subtext of Infanticide. Or technically fillicide, since the children threatened are just over the age of one. Regardless, a hidden theme is the death of helpless children, and this enthymeme is a driving force of the story.
( Read More ) |
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| A dainty, precious cosom |
[Jun. 19th, 2007|01:21 am] |
I've often wondered why magnifying photography is called "macro" when the opposite prefix is, by all lexical account, the most appropriate.
At any rate, today turned out to be an excellent day for some naturalist macro shots.
( more purty pishures )
Well some weren't close-ups, but what the hell. |
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| 'enry 'iggins oh my! |
[Jun. 6th, 2007|01:49 pm] |
My woman gave me an opportunity to do something I excel at: other people's homework. She's facing a Physiology exam this week, and suddenly had an accumulation of English busywork dumped in her lap. She's a great English speaker, and a fine writer, and the work was remedial. She just didn't have the time, so I volunteered.
It was a lot of fun, especially the thought of handing in work an order of magnitude more advanced than expected. One of the assignments was to write a fictitious dialog between yourself and a medical professor, during a lecture.
( Read Drivel )
I've realized, however, that the only things my writing style is suited for are parodies of 18th century science. Otherwise I come off as a pretentious Lord Fauntleroy. |
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| Sore-sur-er |
[May. 18th, 2007|02:30 am] |
Half a glass of cheap wine and thirty eight minutes after midnight, my eyes blur, my mind wanders from a treatise on the letters of Psudeo-Dionysus, and I fantasize about an alternate reality in which Carlos Castaneda had never been born.
And my heart is lifted.
For those who are still fans, it's high time you too faced the truth. Carlos was a fraud, plain and simple. He's been quietly, but meticulously debunked in nearly every detail. From his own personal chronology to his uncited sources, his writings are riddled with plagiarism and fantasy. His private story is one of not only corruption (in the form of a marketing engine named Cleargreen that sold kitschy workout videos) but also of madness. Hidden behind the veil of success and grafted respectability he became a dark cult leader, as capricious and lustful as any Koresh, Jones, or Applewhite. His personal legacy was wasted lives, deluded minds, and the group suicide of his inner circle.
The story has been well told by others and I won't go into it here. Try this if you want to be disillusioned.
And apart from the charges above, he left the English-speaking public with an equally tragic legacy. His cosmology carried the ring of truth and authority. As well it should have. He lifted it from only the finest philosophical and ethnographic authors, and masterfully wove it into his own phony narrative. Not just phony, but dismal and despairing. What was the ultimate proposition of his philosophy after all? That the extinction of the spirit could only be forestalled by the abandonment and betrayal of family and friends. That children suck the life from parents (some parents I know would facetiously agree), and the only escape from death was to kill them.
In a time of metaphysical searching and radical questioning of first principles, Casteneda's books stood out as a beacon to thousands of seekers. His influence sculpted the new age movement in countless ways. Many dumped their lovers and loved ones only to take up the banner of his distorted doctrine; his cosmogony of spiritual extermination and chosen cadres. A vision of a zero sum universe. How easily that led into the egoistic, shallow spirituality of the disco era and points beyond.
So in my parallel earth where Carlos became a minor poet, or wrote children's books, or cracked his skull in a bicycle accident in 1952, what were we spared and what did we gain? Perhaps a less greedy, muddy world. One where the psychedelic mystics perhaps read one or two original works on alchemy or shaman ism. A world where Jung might've been more popular on the back of the toilet tank. Where perhaps Plato or Paracelsus wold have sold more reprints. Where Eckhart would have eked out a little more renown.
Of course it's ridiculous to blame Casteneda for the coke craze of the seventies, or the yuppie Reaganite cunts. But perhaps those social trends would have been a little less pronounced. Just that much less kitschy. And modern theosophy and metaphysical movements would have been that much less polluted. The water much, much less muddied.
Maybe I'm turning into some kind of 17th century medievalist but the dangers of False Doctrine are more apparent to me the more I think about the "mexican waiter". Perhaps I should start carving my own rack.
According to Cleargreen video director Bruce Wagner, Castaneda's cohort Carol Tiggs made the following statement:
“There's a song Don Juan thought was beautiful – he said the lyricist nearly got it right. Don Juan substitute one word to make it perfect. He put in freedom where the songwriter had written love.”
Any comment on that would be redundant. |
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| In Slippage, Veritas. |
[Apr. 16th, 2007|03:52 am] |
On Friday there was an interesting debate between Kerry and Newt Gingrich on Global Warming, and what the policy solution should be. Kerry advocated a Cap-N-Trade plan, which is flawed at best. Newt advocated.. well. He didn't advocate anything at all. And very strenuously. Free Market blah blah blah and faeries will cool the planet with their wings.
There was an interesting moment, during which he was suggesting x-prize style rewards for new solutions to ignore, when he suddenly tipped his hand. Let's listen shall we?
300k
I think that about sums it up.
First against the wall, etc. |
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| $5.25 |
[Mar. 28th, 2007|01:06 am] |
Two 10/100xT NICs, two older Soundblasters, one PCI VGA card, one internal ZIP 100, one 28.8kbps modem, two Maxtors totaling 14GB, one Ubuntu CD.
I love the University surplus! |
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| Too long; Didn't write. |
[Mar. 24th, 2007|06:07 am] |
Googling for stock photos of Lacanian philosopher Slovoj Žižek, I came across this satircal shop, which I found fascinating. As a political cartoon it contains, almost as if a deliberate specimen, the key elements necessary for a deMausian psychohistorical critique.
( Read more )
I always knew Jerry Pournelle was an overrated hack, a pale key-pounder basking in the glow of Niven's reflected prowess, but now I have it confirmed beyond a shadow. No, I didn't force myself to read Lucifer's Hammer. I just caught him playing World of Warcraft. That's all the confirmation I needed.
( Read more ) |
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| Zagreb Technica (backdated) |
[Feb. 17th, 2007|09:06 pm] |
Again, Špela and I were talking about going somewhere, and then Peter and Tanja dropped us a line a few minutes later saying that they were headed that way. This time it was the city of Zagreb in Croatia, where Tanja's nephew was having a birthday party. Špela and I wanted to see the Nikola Tesla exhibits at the National Technical Museum, so it worked out perfectly.
( Read more. ) |
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| Pust in Ptuj (backdated) |
[Feb. 7th, 2007|08:59 pm] |
Spela and I spent about a week planning to go to Ptuj on the first day of Pust, the traditional spring festival. Then at the
last moment, our friends Peter and Tanja called and asked us if we'd like to join them. Free ride! It didn't take much to
convince them to see the Hapsburg castle that overlooks the city.
( Read more. ) |
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| The Story of Carniola (backdated) |
[Jan. 27th, 2007|12:01 am] |
This is Shpela with my bags when we got off the train from Austria. The coach-class cars in the train fold down to make traveller's beds. We were both exhausted, but too keyed up to sleep. Instead we looked up at the ceiling and made loud jokes in german about nazis and gas chambers. This earned me a particularly hard look from a woman in the next cabin.
Schadenfreude macht frei, meine Frau!
( Read more ) |
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| I Had A Dream. |
[Jan. 12th, 2007|07:53 pm] |
In this dream I was a familiar guest in a house at the edge of a country road. A comfortable distance from the house, also next to the road, stood a tree. This tree had started its existence as a normal deciduous dicot, much like an oak or elm, but as it aged it evolved into something wondrous strange.
The long limbs of this tree were flexible, and mostly naked of twigs or branches, each ending in only small tufts of stems. The limbs projected from the large, symmetrical trunk in perfect columns. As the tree twisted back and forth slowly, like a gymnast warming up, all twenty or so branches rotated and waved in perfect synchrony: like flagella in an invisible current.
( tl;dr ) |
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