25lines, redux

I can come up with stories as to why I dreamt about the people I dreamt about. That is easy. I thought about you during the day, I missed you before I slept, you wrote me an email, I sent you a note. So you were fresh in my mind as I was dozing off.

What I often have no grasp of are the plots and details that are being choreographed in exceptional detail, bringing all of the characters together into the story arc that is just real enough for me to not snap awake, and just unreal enough for me to be at least somewhat intrinsically certain that what I am living is not real.

The Valley of Dreams.

More often than not, I find myself waking with a few things flushed away, cleared from memory. And a few things lingering, left to think on the first thing in the morning.

I wish I understood the process, but until then, I can only trust it.

i cannot fear emptiness, because it means that i am ready to be filled again.

i cannot fear the loss of vision, because it means that i would no longer be burdened by sight.

i cannot fear tomorrow, because tomorrow will soon be yesterday and yesterday is mere wind in passing.

i cannot fear my past, because it is easily sloughed.

i cannot fear myself, because self is the one thing i can control, with sufficient discipline.

i cannot fear you, because you are as you are, and nothing more. nothing less.

this used to exist solely for myself. i wanted a place where i could exercise my “diarrhea of the mouth” in an open place, for any friends or strangers who found themselves peeking in on me, with a kind of voyeuristic charm.

i got lost in a kind of meta-introspection about the nature of broadcast, what i should be writing about, and thinking about my audience.

25lines was supposed to be about just plain writing every day, the origins. just forcing oneself to sit down and write every single day.

i use ohlife, when i feel like it. every day, without fail, around 11 PM wherever i am, i get an email, and think hey! email! but then realize it’s just ohlife. then, if i feel like it, i’ll write back, or at least read whatever tidbit from past-self the service deigns to remind me about.

and now, my writing is fragmented. strewn across the expanse of the internet, some locked behind fortress gates made of light, others guarded by three headed kerberos, secured away, and some, like this, left flapping in the wind.

maybe i need to read blogging for dummies.

at some level i need to sleep in order to awaken.

at some level i needed to stop before i could run

these days, it seems like i’m reconnected with a prior state of self, augmented. my inner space is filled.

it’s back. if you don’t like it, gtfo here, please and thank you.

i used to write like this in high school, and give it to people. they were never as happy as when it was shorter, succinct, if they looked like a poem is supposed to look, and what does that even mean? i mean in some ways writing freeform is just normal writing without punctuation. i used to do that on my other site somewhere, for some time.

it’s a kind of verbal vomit that extracts from the notion of self some ideas and thoughts and words that might not otherwise come out, you see i’m a big believer in the power of various media and styles to express a wide bandwidth of self where any and all can go and play together.

we could talk in youtube clips, our shared dreams of the world, that summarize very small and very specific sets of emotions and visual candy an eye candy of a different kind with babies and kittens and costumes and artificial yet not artificial scenes and set designs of our life.

what does this mean? nothing. move along.

maybe the reason i spout incessantly is because of the inherent fear of radio silence.

that once silenced, i might not again be able to speak.

but if you keep spouting, you can keep sprouting.

the importance then is to be able to cull from whatever is everted.

that’s the essence of gummybrain, i think. which i didn’t realize until today.

looking back and letting go
and things will never be the same,
as the thread of life unwinds
the networked fabric,
a kind of tapestry of time
it’s all falling apart, it’s been tamed.

shifting from a controlled stall,
breaking the free fall,
tacking into the wind,
if i knew then what i know now,
i might have drowned us both
then and there
and be done with it
once and for all.

the precis of our life,
an abbreviation of strife.

writing here has slowed not for want of writing, but for the fact that i have begun the slow social contraction of self.

the continual examining, auditing, and curating of the social sharing and… interactions that i maintain are carefully cultivated. a kind of populous ikebana.

and so it feels it’s time for this site, http://hypeless.net/25lines to die.

its place is perhaps gone from my life as i start to bring myself forward into the known-reality vs. the hidden-reality. the writings here have been scratchworks that i’ve been unwilling or unable to refine into better exposition. so a kind of self serving, ego-centric scratching-on-the-wall-of-my-mind’s-cave kind of flow.

but i think now, as i go forward the self that manifests itself here must split:

the outward facing, proper self. this will manifest at broadcastutopia.com

the private, reserved-for-closest people self. this will manifest itself elsewhere, TBD.

but i think for the most part, 25lines, redux must fall in favor of 25lines, reloaded, just as the original 25lines on blogspot finished.

25lines is dead. long live 25lines.

i don’t know. but there’s a gentle compulsion to do so.

the new Underworld album is out. Barking. At least it’s out in Japan (cough cough).

There’s a bonus track for Japan. Nevermind the vexation such a practice causes me – like an affront to their deepest fans outside of their favored places – but the track is at once both melancholy and deep.

It stirs up flavors of Tokyo that I’m slowly realizing I’ll never be able to slough away. Things were peaceful there. I may have been the only one in my party who found it completely satisfying (and of course the curse of a year following gives the clarity needed to fully appreciate the implications). But it continues to call to me.

What does it mean? Nothing. No, that’s not true. I don’t know. Some attribute it to vacation. Some to novelty.

Lately I’ve started wondering whether it was because my environment there was completely silent. Of course it wasn’t – a megalopolis like any other, there was constant noise. But in public there was little chatter by the populace – Japanese manners perhaps. But if we supposedly live in a world filled with information, then if you live somewhere where you can’t be exposed to it – I don’t know Japanese – then there’s a kind of cerebral calm while still ingesting the energy of the city.

Magic.

“Those roles which, being neither those of hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement were called the Fifth Business in drama and Opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.” — Robertson Davies, prefacing his novel “Fifth Business”

(but, from Wikipedia: “Davies was pressured by his publisher to provide some clear idea of what exactly “Fifth Business” was, and so Davies affixed this opening quotation, which was taken at face value for many years. Only in 1979, when the book’s Norwegian translator failed to find the citation did Davies admit it was his invention.”)

…and I’ve started telling people that I’m the Fifth Business again.

…fool me twice… and i will punch you in the face.

i digress.

as a child, growing up i wrestled with the idea of forgiveness.

i saw plainly in my home the notion of both loving forgiveness and permanently etched memories of ill-will.

on one hand, it’s clear that a transgression had been committed, and equally clear that it was let be. sometimes it would take days. maybe even weeks (an eternity for a child!) or even longer before such a level of acceptance was achieved. but in the end, it was the result of introspection, growth, and simply time’s ability to repair our brains, breaking the associations of pain and hurt from the neurons in question.

but on the other hand…

there were some things, people, events, experiences – some that remained. they were etched a permanent taint upon the self. you could see this in someone’s reputation, when their lifestyle choices or character was revealed or spread. rumors could potentially be gravely damaging in this context, for example. perhaps even the worst kind of near-truths that were perpetuated causing unbreakable stalemates of social dogma.

most of these things were shakeable. one need only focus and direct their attention to do so.
and in the cases where i was involved as one party or another – it’s easy to look back and think “oh, we were just kids” or “we were in high school, we were so young then”

and so it is with life, that we make mistakes at young ages, and learn from them. grow from them. and they bind us and bond us in groups of life, experienced.

but the thing i’ve been contemplating for the past couple of weeks is what to do about such feelings as they happen today.

we aren’t so young anymore.

and so i have learned to be more careful, myself, to do my best never to offend when i know i might. unless i have thought it through and am absolutely sure that it will be something i am ok with. and that’s a hard thing to know. where i might be the transgressor, the fork is typically – either this person will be ok with this statement or mode of behavior… or they will not, and then i don’t care about them anyway. it’s a reasonably simple conditional with potentially deep ramifications. but if i’m able to think it through and decide that this is the case – especially where i might be particularly offensive – then it results in many wins for me.

on the other hand – i’m faced with people who do not give as much thought to their words or actions, and so i’ve had to think about how to deal with these situations.

words are simple. they are weightless, effortless. i know more than most the dark power of words that can be inflicted with such simple utterance. i don’t often tell people that i can look back upon my life, just a few years ago, and remember seven words i uttered so callously, and yet they have had a profound impact on my life since. i will never know what happened if they were never uttered. but because i know how easy it is to say words that can be damaging, they are fluid. nebulous. it’s ok.

but actions are strong. actions are backed by intent. it’s again easy to impulsively act, but the activation energy required is much much greater.

and then there are actions which when considered at scale seem almost like a conspiracy. that there might be a design to the sequence of actions that are put forth.

again, we aren’t so young anymore.

So I’ve noticed a good amount of brain-cruft that accumulates on a daily basis.

Stat counter.

My App Store sales figures

Google Reader.

the Underworld forums

Especially Google Reader – I want to trim that a bunch (which is culminating in a web service I hope to release within 3 months). But all in all, it’s stuff that I want to check, I do check, and I do think about.

It makes me think that it’s finally time for me to have a kind of routine of sorts, if only to flush the buffers.

The way my mind has tended to work in the recent years is in pure promiscuous mode – I spew random thoughts, and they’re woven in myriad directions. But at the heart of it all, I feel like I’ve lost control of information, and I’m not just talking about what I’m consuming.

It sometimes feels like the inside of my head is an echo chamber of abandoned trivia. Not trivia about sports or pop-culture, but trivia around my life and yours. All of you. And at times some of these threads are active and I talk to you about them. And other times they lay dormant, waiting to be summoned.

What does it all mean? I don’t know. I’m just flushing buffers right here, right now.

simul-post: not your usual kind of network structure

I’ll do this for the next few and then stop.

some people have asked what it’s for. basically, i want to start writing more publicly, especially now that i’ve enlisted to become a freelance hacker.

i’ll continue to post here things that i keep private, etc. but more refined posts will be uploaded there…

http://broadcastutopia.com

Haven’t made full use of it yet, but going to write up the road trip at rytrip.posterous.com

it’s common, it would seem, to reconfigure friendships to those that are geographically near.
i have typically found this difficult.

partly because of the level of friendship that i tend to engage in, and partly because ramping up new friends to that level takes a good amount of time. so my friendships are typically geographically scattered. and because we live primarily in a physical world with very real impact on our daily lives, as a result we are scattered emotionally and mentally as well.

i found no reason in the past year living un-alone to treat that with any greater allocation than otherwise. It happened, for sure. But unintentionally so. I would often catch myself in that kind of a feedback loop and know that I did not want such a thing. After all, unless you’re in a relationship, when you live with someone, it doesn’t mean you have to spend all your time with them: physically, mentally, or emotionally.

No, I did my best to remain aloof as best as I could given the circumstances. There were times when it was nice to have people so nearby. But much of the time – because of the nature of how i am – it wasn’t. Work was interesting because it sometimes would feel like every single person in that environment was a more mature, better developed aspect of my personality and preferences. And so there was a kind of implicit nurturing of fragmented personality bits.

All in all, in some ways this makes me wonder whether the past 12 months were a useful experiment. And it was. But like most things in life, I didn’t learn from it or get from it much of what I was hoping for. Lessons learned to never repeat. But I could see myself trying it again. With a very different configuration. In some ways, real-world interactions that gain depth have no substitute, even when an interaction will be taken asynchronous again. And in other ways, real-world interactions that destroy depth have no substitute, especially when an interaction has clearly been dying for some time.

(The former is the acronym for TED Talk Tuesday.)
(The latter is a jp emote for tears.)

Today’s my last TTT at the company.

In many ways I think it’s the greatest example of why I really love the culture at my current, but soon-to-be-former employer.

Lunchtime conversations range from music production, pop psychology, new start ups, combating human trafficking, to the desirability of hot sauce with the day’s catered fare.

There’s a subdued creative spirit in it all, of a kind of meta-thought layer that we collectively carry around the office. And on Tuesday we intentionally draw from it, reflecting against the backdrop of some speaker of varying repute, depending on the day. The team here has been excellently cultivated to retain and attract people who carry a complex interplay of ideas and opinions.

And that can be rare. More often than not, I try to pretend that everyone I know has that, not because it is Better, but because I Wants. But not everyone does, and that’s fine. I was fortunate to find this group here without really having the foresight to look for it and realize it when deciding to come here.

But I found something similar in Seattle with my dear Saturday House crew. And the Sugar Labs folk.

But that tight interplay is not easy to find everywhere.

At least it hasn’t been, for me.

i will be invisible.

and i will be ethereal.

and i will be unattainable.

and then i will turn my voice inward for the first time in a long time. and i will explode.

he didn’t teach you how to win
he taught you how not to lose
that’s nothing to be proud of
you’re playing not to lose
you’ve got to risk everything
you’ve got to go to the edge of defeat
that’s where you want to be, boy
on the edge of defeat.