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.

(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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

NDTV: How do you do it?

The Dalai Lama: There is no other choice. If you rely drugs or alcohol, it’s going to be self-destruction. So we have a wonderful human mind which has the ability to think with reason or fact. So use that maximum way and then become realistic. Once in the 8th century a Buddhist master expressed : when we are facing problems think of the problem and if you can overcome that problem then no need to worry. If there is no way to overcome that problem then don’t worry too much. Very realistic advice.

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/in-conversation-with-the-dalai-lama-35955?cp

What does it mean to be enlightened in mind?

I am of the opinion that enlightenment of the mind is not a state of being but a state of quest. That to be is not, but to seek is.

There are people who would claim to follow Buddhist doctrines who’ve never read a word of the Dhammapeda

There are people who would profess to be independent [in their relationships] but then take support from their parents.

There are people who would think themselves knowledgeable who have not touched the surface of knowledge.

There are people who pretend to be competent never having truly mastered.

There are people who would say that they are very Zen, but have never sat and contemplated a Koan.

I am (or at least have been) all of these things.

But to know one’s limits, and to actively seek them and understand them and transcend them – this is true enlightenment.

I’m working on a life map. I was inspired by a dear friend from Seattle. Been meaning to make one for a long time, but finally getting around to it, in honor of my upcoming birthday.

and in an odd way, it feels like it’s finally helping me make sense of my current state, integrating the full timeline of my past history into the now.

(in roughly correct chronological order, starting at the age of 4. my inspiration was the hamburgler)

Crayola self-portrait

Excerpted DNA sequences from 23andme.com, with sequential base pairs represented as Crayola colors from the standard 8-pack, adding white as a ninth color. ASCII RGB values taken from Wikipedia. Vim macros to translate ACGTxACGT pairs to form a P3 PPM image, 700×700 px, compressed into final PNG via ImageMagick.

Copyright © 2010 hypeless.net/25lines

–

I have the book but maybe I should record blood test for myself was myself to think about ideas for getting the same things over on I can’t assume that I haven’t been compromised and that eve thoughts and opinions I express or that I think that I have been fuel that was the beginning of water started sleeping on the floor but I’d never give me the same way a lot of the stuff that we shared positive I wonder why White T-shirt but why do I want to read about it I I read about the same text message of this insistence cool but I feel like that but I used yet I don’t have anymore but anybody to talk to the information shortly thanks to Calvin was talking about the sound bites the

How much of being sociable is having meaningless conversation? Perhaps then I should only surround myself with people who want to converse in meaningful ways or who I don’t mind the drivel.

Perhaps it is a kind of quality bar in companionship. I would hope that others would set this bar for me also. That people finding my companionship either insufficiently intimate or productive would discard me.

There are options. And perhaps having people who are near but not of a parallel disposition would simply be disruptive.

Similarly perhaps much of society is also disruptive, preventing me from focusing on what I would like to. Unbroken time is invaluable to completing things.

Abstract < -> Tangible Thinking< ->Doing

Its like the musicians who just play. Enough to feel good, not enough to create.

I have a wider breadth of knowledge than most people.

I understand things better than most people.

I have greater plasticity of mind than most people.

I can grasp and control double-think, something most people cannot do.

I can stay up later than most people, and for longer.

I can work harder than most people (…but only when I really want to)

I can tolerate suffering more than most people (in the western world)

privately, here.

publicly, at http://broadcastutopia.com

my alter-ego at [you already know, or contact me to know]

about spirituality at [you already know, contact me to know]

works in progress will happen at gummybrain.com [contact me for credentials] — i’m still coding it up, so some of it is ugly, and you can’t really comment / contribute… yet. more time, just wish i had more time.

a bit of a hurdle for me has been figuring out what i want to write about, and getting a better handle on what people want me to write about. so any requests, send them my way.

i know that people seem to like my outlook / perspective on life. and i think i plan to share that on broadcast utopia (BU for short).

lately? my mental state is a bit unstable. every time i have to interact with incompetence (from my perspective), I find myself greatly dissatisfied. Questioning the role of government, the role of bureaucracy, or community or spiritual leaders.

I want to live life at the speed of thought, free from constraint. most people think that i need to be more practical or grow up or eschew this desire. but those people scare me the most – either you never thought the way i think, or they got to you.

maybe i’m actually losing my mind this time. it’s hard for me to tell. when it finally happens, you’ll probably be the first to know.

awakened. recalled to life. with a realization that i had inherited views that were not my own that i found myself to be corrupted.

the first step to purge external cancerous influence has got to be painful. you have to want to get rid of it and want nothing more of it. and it’s hard because it comes from people you once knew you could trust. but when the clouds roll in, you can’t see the best intentions as much as the dark side of people when they want to own you.

and they will.

make no mistake favors corrupt the soul as much as tobacco smoke and brine. your liver gives up easily, and you think you can’t too?

the reason a firehose was always appealing to me was because i used to have vivid dreams of a brain surgeon clamping on end to the side of my head – full demi-foot diameter, connected to a red and yellow hydrant, like the one on my street growing up.

didn’t think much of it until i learned about the angels come down to open up the chest to remove the blackened spot. the dark spot. the internal conflict of mind and soul. removed.

water in full force isn’t blue and it isn’t green like in nat geos. no, it’s white with bubbly power. effervescent technology to liberate grime. our minds are so influenced that all we can do these days is listen to things we agree with and nod “yeah.” hear music we like and nod “yeah.” talk to people who agree with us, think we know better and nod “yeah.” it’s the same story every day, the same story every night.

but the shit’s caked thick man. it’s on there, in slabs of brown mess to the edges of your consciousness. browned eyed sunshine, when you can’t see reality through tinted brine. and there’s no way to get rid of it all unless you sandblast your reality filters, until you’re willing to let go of everything you take for granted.

even the validity of accepting axioms. any axioms at all.

they make sense in geometry. a point. “yeah.” line is the shortest distance between two points. “yeah.”
and so on.

but as a reality filter? do you think you really understand what’s in play here? history has a lot to teach us, but there’s a lot of baggage that’s coming down from it. mud, stone, clay. writing on tablets, and here we are, looking for a tablet.

no, we can change the way we think, but it requires a little bit of chaos, and just a little bit of patience.

and a hell of a lot of wonder.

if you don’t think i’ve said anything, i’ve actually said quite a bit. but it’s for me, not for you.
just like it helps to hear the obvious in order to beat it into the self, sometimes it works the same way to say the obvious.

over.
and over.
and over.
again.

“yeah.”

When I was about two weeks from finishing my first novel, and really hitting it hard, daily, an old friend phoned. He was on his way…

…up the coast with a new girlfriend, looking forward to visiting. Told him I couldn’t, had to finish my book.

It was hard to do, painful. Disappointed him, hurt his feelings. And, in retrospect, made me a novelist.

No.

“With me you fly, I am the wings.”

No.

Snapshots of our dystopia As It Happens. The emergent self-organization that’s heralded as the salvation of our pop-culture infatuated society is not so forgiving. Where pre-teen over-sexed hormone infested children let their thoughts, their images, their videos run free. The fears of the past, that these mechanical memories would eat our souls. And if they didn’t before, they do now. Even celluloid absorbs us in chemical dreams. Yes, these children – too young to understand what they’re doing to themselves – capture their essences themselves that are allowed to run free, rampant.

You can never get it back again, when you’re out there. It’s a wild, wild thing to ride the light. Living on the edge of chaos, these memes come to life. There’s a loss of control in play, where the memetic evolution leads to these records spreading free. You can never recapture what you digitize, it belongs to the world, the noosphere by its very inception. Yeah we’re gonna buzz. Like we tweet, and we facebook and we youtube and xanga and livejournal and blog and we’re gonna email and comment and rate and tag and drown in a sea of filth that we create and annotate and meta-date. (Ed: the irony of this broadcast is not lost on me for a hot second)
The negatives of our consciousness, mirror imprinted, black on white, emphatically stored one and zero and one again codified data for codified words. A new language emerging in the face of restriction. Brevity. Curt. Concise. To the point. But it can bring us new meaning.
“We choose to go to the moon.”

Generational gaps can be closed, under twilight clouds of acceptance. The white fluffy clouds touch us and it’s ok. Burroughs was wrong. This facade of sharing kills pain unlike no other. It’s our new religion in a way, a new kind of religion for a new kind of world that is itself empty, and adored because of its emptiness.

The void within us everts, and we dump that very nothingness out for everyone to see. Everything is public, nothing is private. The notion of Public incorporated in the republic goes private retreating into board rooms.

Social media as the French revolution of our time. Outing the editorial control of media. No more presses preventing us from spreading our selves. No more editors, no more chiefs of the new age. Here comes everybody and we have nothing to say that’s worth saying. Who is writing what is worth writing? Where are the words that our new society produces, a collective triumph?

The wisdom of crowds widely present, powerful but still raw. The lack of a rich inner life that might expose a new path to Greatness precluded by the vast mass of noise. We all share in this, vibration. Why do we write? Into the void. Scream. Shout. Throw. Jump.

The abyss doesn’t look back into us, our inner abyss leaks… oozes… out from us and into the abyss we ourselves look into. Most of us have nothing to offer, if we are Real. That we might live out some possibility is the sentiment that saves us from nothingness. To chase hope, to follow its shadow across timelines walking each day. There is little else for us. Even me, sitting here, tapping these words out. They come from nothingness, and I know not what I want to convey. I speak because I can, and because the aggregate of humankind is my theoretical audience. I don’t know if anyone reads, and I don’t need to know. I write her to echo against the collective void.

Gone are the days of the perfectly composed sentences. “Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targetted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of film.” Those who try to recreate it are laughed off the stage. Good night, cruel world.

When I lived in Seattle, a highlight every year was the Seattle International Film Festival. For three and a half weeks, any social / work / me-work plans were peppered with plans to attend various films being shown by the SIFF. Usually when I watch something at home, I have to be doing something else. Anime or other foreign films with subtitles are especially problematic – they have to be especially good for me to partake, given they require my visual attention. (For example, Ghost in the Shell). Going to the theatre – I have to really want to see the movie before I’ll do that.

Guess I’ll have to check out the SFIFF later this year: http://www.sffs.org/sf-intl-film-festival.aspx

There don’t seem to be [m]any sites that let people come together around movies. Flixster doesn’t seem to fit the bill (not in the same way that I use Goodreads for books, anyway. The Auteurs comes closer, but doesn’t have everything.

Hm.

but outwardly i am calm like a bomb. ready to go off at any time, but unassuming otherwise.
these days i find myself highly volatile. not necessarily bad.
but not necessarily good, either.

it is what it is. and so it goes.

my only hope is to narrow my focus. to slash and burn the unessential. to only do what is worth doing. to only say what is worth saying.

let everything else slip.

to forgive is divine.

…but i am human.

in the past i have taken the attitude that i should not tolerate more than a single transgression. today’s enlightened thinkers would tell me that i should be more accepting. that everyone makes mistakes. and i admit that for most people this is probably true. that we should, in the general case, be accepting, forgiving, and understanding. but i am not the general case.

if i am to execute on what i must, i must live by a code of honor. respect. such a code is to live freely. codified rules don’t restrict, they establish a baseline from which one can grow beyond. you can stop asking the same questions over and over and over and over.
that’s what it is, in the end. this is why i’ve started reading (and re-reading) philosophical texts lately. More on that later.

That said, I too make mistakes (more than most!).

Don’t hold grudges on mistakes.
Errors are to be forgiven.
It’s the spirit behind the mistakes, the carelessness or the mindfulness or the frequency, that should be considered.

individual mistakes, individual transgressions – these are things we should not hold onto. they can fall freely between the fingers, like sand passing through air.

but repeated instances are symptomatic of one’s character.
that is something you can either accept. so it is with friendship, growth, and caring for each other.

…or it’s something you can reject.
and walk away.

i dunno- i think a part of me dies when i dont know whats happening in my world

huh

interesting

well

i strongly suggest sometime

some block of time

i’ve done it for weekends

where you unplug

and quiet your mind

…

you’ll be surprised what you tell yourself when no one else is telling you anything

It flies in the face of Twain:

“The only things you will regret are the things you didn’t do”

Both should be carefully contemplated. I currently regret very little, but I have regretted much in the past. It passes through me and over me, leaving – ideally – only the lessons of the [in]action. My exercise of restraint is actually one of the things I am most aware of, and pleased with. I have demonstrated to myself – if not to others – that I am capable of saying no to something when I know that it should be denied, no matter how strong the desire, the emotions, or even the chemicals inside me cry out to be acknowledged and indulged. I can’t say it’s for everyone. I have definitely had my moments of weakness where I wished that I didn’t seem to operate this way, having a kind of auto-pilot rainbow guardian watching over the optimization of my wants and ensuring adherence.

But then I would say that resolve exists to be tested.

old and new:

1 improv comedian encouraging performance

1 food scientist foraying into new flavors

1 architecture grad student sharing excitement

1 colleague teaching me and working together with

1 AI researcher into the future

1 mentor guiding me

1 material scientist working with nano-things

1 musicologist and fantastic carillon player

1 architect-come-college counselor

1 aero/astro engineer sending us to mars.

….and that’s just in-person. nevermind the countless phone-calls, and the incessant pen-paling, and the middle-of-the-night excursions.

the next two weeks should equally interesting, if different.

goodnight, cruel world.

Step 2: Reality

The ability for someone to think about their reality, accept it, and dissect it is paramount if one is to let go of their fear, doubt, and self-hindrance. The most basic element of life, of understanding one’s existence is to think about the state of the world. It’s easy to be distracted by shiny things, it’s easy to avoid thinking about this thing that is most core. It is easy to implement a kind of routine that takes us away from ourselves, and thus from reality.

Escapism is easy. Reality is hard.

To dream of love is easy. To actually live it is really hard.

To live false hope is easy. To find and know true hope is hard.

To consume is easy. To create is hard.

We are, as people, input/output carriers. It would seem that we operate asynchronously (mostly) as far as communication is concerned. To hear and speak at the same time is to neither hear nor to speak.

So it takes great fortitude in order to take stock of oneself, with no sugar coating. No glaze layered on top of it. No rose colored glasses tainting how you view yourself and take stock of just a few things. In otherwise calm silence, taken away from the world’s distractions. (distraction is, of course, for another day)

What is it, exactly, that you were?

What is it, exactly, that you are?

What is it, exactly, that you want?

What is it, exactly, that you want to become?

What is, precisely, the difference between you as you are, and you as you want to be?

It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

The simplest things are usually the most difficult.

If I haven’t said anything profoundly stirring, it’s because this phase is the exact opposite of profound. It’s dirty, gritty, detailed, foul, and painful, at best when done right. Unless you’re super human, and some of you are.

This extends far beyond most things that you would understand for yourself. And you can take it to varying degrees. I wanted to write about it as I was explaining to a friend recently that they were only considering the opportunity cost of leaving, when really they needed to consider the opportunity cost of staying.

To understand this, is to be unstoppable.

In all that we do, the way that we are – we reason with ourselves that we are a certain way, that we do a certain thing, that we decided something or something was ok. In this case, we were talking about jobs, and money as cost. What if you stayed until the end of the year, you knew you would get a million dollars? Most would not leave. You would stay, right?

But if you believed in yourself, and you thought you could make 2 million in the same time, you would quit.

An oft-remembered conversation during college I had with my closest friends was one where we reasonably assumed that we could pursue something, and that we would potentially payoff $50 million each, and we walked away.

Now looking back, we want to say that we were stupid, but I’m not so sure.

Anytime you’re doing anything, you could be doing something different. Know well what is worthwhile, and know what will let you have the most fun. In all things, intensity, whether business or pleasure.

What happened here?

The butterfly has lost its wings

The air’s too thick to breathe
And there’s something in the drinking water.

The sun comes up

The sun comes up and you’re alone

Your sense of purpose come undone

The traffic tails back to the maze on 101

And the news from the sky
Is looking better for today
In every single way
But not for you

World citizen

World citizen

It’s not safe
All the yellow birds are sleeping
Cos the air’s not fit for breathing
It’s not safe

Why can’t we be
Without beginning, without end?
Why can’t we be?

World citizen
World citizen

And if I stop
And talk with you awhile
I’m overwhelmed by the scale
Of everything you feel
The lonely inner state emergency

I want to feel
Until my heart can take no more
And there’s nothing in this world I wouldn’t give

I want to break
The indifference of the days
I want a conscience that will keep me wide awake

I won’t be disappointed

I won’t be disappointed

I won’t be.

I saw a face
It was a face I didn’t know
Her sadness told me everything about my own
Can’t let it be

When least expected there she is
Gone the time and space that separates us

And I’m not safe
I think I need a second skin
No, I’m not safe
World citizen
World citizen

I want to travel by night
Across the steppes and over seas
I want to understand the cost
Of everything that’s lost
I want to pronounce all their names correctly

World citizen
World citizen

I won’t be disappointed
I won’t be.
She doesn’t laugh
We’ve gone from comedy to commerce
And she doesn’t feel the ground she walks upon
I turn away
And I’m not sleeping well at night
And while I know this isn’t right
What can you do?

—–

Me:

the undisciplined mind
will seek to consume everything
you must know what it is that you should read
if you read everything, your mind, like your reading list
will be cluttered
know well what leads you forward, and that which holds you back

—–

Me:
who knows what will happen
i may disappear, only to re-emerge a tango dancer in south america

Them:
is she planning to stow you away to chile or something?

Me:
no, but she unleashed in me passions that operate on their own accord
it’s like
a part of my mind, rusty mind you, activates
it’s like an alter ego that just emerges, everts
ACTIVATE
RECALLED TO LIFE
TAKE CONTROL
COMMAND SYSTEMS OVERRIDDEN
SPEECH PROCESSING SECURED
and then comes to life and does whatever it wants, says whatever it wants
decides whatever it wants
with no consideration for me

Them:
haha apparently one look at a girl like that and the wisdom of the stoics disappears

Me:
i know!
that’s why they’re amazing
they cause great inner struggle
it exercises restraint
and let me tell you, it is difficult, and i LOVE it

—–

Me:
just be mindful of it
i mean
i know, painfully more than most
like the duality of the said vs. the unsaid
carries over…
once you say something, you can never un-say it
and that’s powerful and dangerous
a single misspoken word can cause a lot of damage
Seven, just Seven words I’ve said have changed my life for the worse, and I don’t know that I will ever recover from that
biting your tongue on the other hand (literally) helps immensely

Them:

ugh- ok, couple of thoughts went through- first was yup, completely agree- second was, hmm, interesting- why do i not value my words much anymore? i need to think through this more

Me:
ok, i have to head out
let me know if you have any supreme insights

—–

Them: well, the difference being that we can only travel in time digitally
Them: whereas we can travel in place physically
Me: we can in our memories
Them: ok, fair enough

Me:
like space-time serves as a hash to memories
you move in space
and that’s the part i’m interested in digitally
how you can use, explicitly, space as a… hash key for the brain
to remind yourself of the past there
like you listen to music and remember that era

—–

Them:
we should go back
well
we WILL go back

Me:
yeah
but it’ll be different
so we need to make sure it’s better
it’s like an arms race of awesomeness with our past selves

Them:
haha i like that

—–

Me:

assume God exists, and assume He has access to perfect information, and assume afterlife
do you ever think
about the kind of statistics there are then?
they must be amazing

i hope in the afterlife
there’s a kind of stats breakdown
like when you play civilization
end of game breakdown of the entire game
this is the closest i can find:

http://media.photobucket.com/image/civilization%204%20end/Vessiel/Civ4ScreenShot0214.jpg

it’s just a chart
at the beginning of your civilization
to the end of the game
so imagine God has a giant spreadsheet
and can plot like
number of people alive
number of kids
number of married people
number of adulterers alive
at any time
you know
births per second
amount of suffering on the planet, objectively
amount of suffering, measured by the attitudes of all the people
and how those levels change

THEN you could zoom in
to a single person and plot
take it down to your own personal life and given all the people you know
when, on any given day
were you and a friend both thinking about each other at the same time – and then juxtapose that on top of everything
how often do you and anyone you know think about each other at the same time
fluffy, quaint little things that we can never know in life, but you could find out afterward

people who like you, and how much
or people you made angry, and how much
they stayed angry for how long
windows of opportunity to date people who liked you
like you just barely missed it!

this might be a short story in the making
i just got really excited

or people could ask questions
how could we have stopped 9/11
and He would be like one day
Johnson went to the bathroom 2 minutes early
and because of that…
and we see a several year version of run, lola, run
on the planetary scale

—–

I wanted to share more, but wordpress was being difficult. Oh well.

If you can master just one thing, you can become infinitely more interesting to not only those who care about that thing but to people who are otherwise uninitiated. True mastery means you can bring forth what others can only begin to appreciate the hints of. The ideas you can express grow strongly with such a foundation. So it is with understanding and appreciation. Most books describe very simple ideas that can be digested in a single line. But what ideas – and there are many – require story after story, or setup after setup to fully impress upon us their magnitude? I try to read books that require full reading. Unfortunate, because then you can’t easily skim. But so it is with Quality.

I was explaining to someone a single episode of a television show. And I realized that I could not fully appreciate the subtlety, and the true message at the very end of the episode without fully having experienced it. The full episode, with its character development, depiction, and narrative. The season, and in fact the entire show. That over years, the character would behave in one manner, and then in the final two minutes, after facing great strife, change their behavior. The magnitude is inexplicable, but hard to grasp.

Music lends itself to the same. I’ve found that after listening to the same song for years that one day I can start to hear the subtlety in the tone, the delicate composition that is made in the layers below the most prominent surface melodies and beats. That the more you listen to the same artist throughout their growth, the more you can appreciate their musical style developing, bits nurtured, the impact of bandmembers leaving and joining.

Today it seems like most people are preoccupied with finding the newest, consuming briefly – vegging out, if you will, on the music, and giving less depth and appreciation to masterpiece works. I of course do this as well in some respects. For me the purest listen is with the lights out, perhaps with beverage in hand, no distractions, no other disturbances. For certain albums, I’ll even put on blindfolds to deprive the self of distraction, focusing on the album. I know some friends once had listening parties, when an especially anticipated album would be released.

IDEO says they like “T-shaped” people. Well, most people have the head of the T. It’s easy, especially today, to like a little bit of everything. But what do you like a lot of? What do you do a lot of? That’s what sets you apart from everyone else.

What do I take from the muse? What do I give her?

Who would be the most appropriate?

Sylvia Plath?

Anais Nin?

Susan Sontag?

The forms of those who are transcendental. Elevated. Excellent. Those who have passed from this life, so that the inspiration and image that their legacy leaves behind can be interpreted in brilliant ways, captured. Physical forms are mostly meaningless. Surface beauty is the most common. Beautiful people are everywhere you turn. No, that’s why the inspiration comes from the mind. The voice. The exterior is just the shell. So many people focus on the exterior when developing themselves because they worry about surface judgment.

Stylistic.

How you look. How you dress. How you act.

And in so much of life, this is true, and people will use it to perceive you.

But the inspiration has to come from within. A boundless fountain of expression internally.

Inspiration does come from within.

In school, the break away from most peers was sufficient to excuse large changes. The winter break, shorter, meant that you could change but there was some reason behind it. It wasn’t suspect but it didn’t permit everything. Summer on the other hand allowed a wealth of excuses for an identity shift.

Camp. Play. Friends. Parties. Bonfires. Travel.

I made a habit of shifting every time it was permitted. Sometimes big, sometimes small. In school it was a great way to try on new selves. New face, new hair, new scent, new ideas, thoughts, social attitudes. New face.

Thirst is nothing, image is everything.

So I shift now. Reconsidering everything, ignoring nothing. Careful deliberation on the minutest of details, evaluating every temporal draw, every aspect of my day, every social interaction, third party, and yes, even every thought. Every hint of a thought. I choose to design my life not because it is easy–To drift aimless is the life I will never have (again). I am unable to prevent the inferno that burns away every last bit and reconstructs, piece by piece. So each term draws to a close and I find myself rearranging faces to make a new face. Burning the exterior to let the new and improved (ooh, shiny!!) inner self bubble forth.

But amidst the many faces, who is Simon Templar? Behind the masques, who am I really? If I can dance with a dozen faces, then my true identity must be the inner, faceless, self.

The airport has always been the lungs of the city. Breathing in and out, lunging people inward or expelling them out. Into the lungs, I move to the trains to carry me into the heart, the city is alive amidst the barren lull concrete. The city floats by, the train is silent. Th track cuts through the backyards the barrenness the bridges overlook forgotten suburbia, old decaying history. Culture is expelled everywhere you could look, stored upon year in the colours of it all. The line of houses staring into the sun, faceless drill marching every sunset.

Into a tunnel; the abyss. The stations live beneath the feet of the city. Stray light penetrates in the final hours of day changing the colours. Into the abyss again.

It howls at us, angry for he violation we bring with us, through and through but out of sight. The train can never be forgotten. At the outskirts is where I love it, above ground. She smells like peaches, her. Lips holding it there, her tongue darting around it, to touch every drop.

The car smells like peaches and everyone is wearing white earbuds, The Mark. The train is the equalizer, everyone rides the train, needs it, wants it to carry them. The cities with the trains have hearts to them, even if the tunnels bowl at us.

They always howl at me. A bittersweet welcoming call back to the street.

“You! You have returned! Hawooool”
In a dirty, rust trodden voice as the metal grinds the track.

The abyss cuts us off from the world above even if we choose to cut ourselves off from the people next to us. The drone of the howl tearing into the silence, we are all forced to listen.

It’s here, in the dark, that the city speaks to us, when we learn to listen.

Part 1: http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=828

Part 2: http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=832

Part 3: http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=834

Part 4: http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=885

———————

Into the mouth. Into the belly. Into the cold, unknown night, I followed this mysterious form.

I hoped I was either on some really messed up five-coffee trip or this was some sort of subconscious hallucination. Or maybe I shouldn’t have accepted that guy’s cookie. In either case, it would make the otherwise dull drive a bit of entertainment. In my silent chamber, I rode on.

Chased her into the mouth, engulfed in concrete. Asphalt mines opened up into the earth and encased us in a dark light. Her board didn’t have wheels, it grew into a snowboard, riding a plume of light energy flushing forward. The hood of our car snarled, barking with the chase. Alongside us winter beasts chased, an unleashed zoo? The mountain kingdom leading us on. The road started rocking back and forth back and forth and I knew it was water. Liquid splashing concrete, hard unpoured, coming apart and falling back into place.

The sky above us went black, went white. Confused about it’s own identity. Uncertain skylight hard protection.

Encased in mist, in snowfall, in the elements of a cold day, crisp in bite, but damp in composition.

My driven beast was surrounded by a dreamlike mythic. Beasts, friendly some, angry others, followed us from the rear, rode alongside us, escorting us safely. We fell into rhythm, our cadence giving us a kind of predictable rhythm. The road was slick, wet with dampened, melted rain.

We rode on. For hours, how we rode. Hard. At the slightest disturbance, of a twitched eye from my family, my cargo, the scene would vanish for a second, but resumed when i returned to an unnatural calm. I followed Gabriella on her board, the engine coughed, struggling to keep up. She was fast, but rode with fluidity. With oneness.

Still water calm. Tranquility. The chaotic nova of imagery around me drew out from within the unquiet, the murmuring mind

I followed her until the end of the highway. We took off into the hill, the dogs leading me along the side of the road. The wolves batting away at the dust. The fox on the hood, looking into the darkness, guiding forward. The daemons pulled my chariot home.

The dreamrun vanished, and my family awoke. We stumbled inside, and withdrew to our quarters.

Of course, she was waiting for me in my room.

Of course.

Sokka: No. I’m saying you’re an optimist. Same thing really.

—
I have been an optimist. It pains me to realize it, but I find it has been a misplaced optimism, which in turn further finds fault in myself for not catching it earlier. Thus, I have lied to myself.

Perhaps it is not bad to be optimistic to begin. I dislike cynicism and distrust. But when I am made to think that someone is aspiring to betterment, I can’t help but cheer on, support, or even collaborate. And that has been the worst for me. I must confess that my mind, feeble as it is, is forced to compile and audit the successes and failures in this respect across demographics.

By now I should have learned that whether it pleases me or not, I think better of people than they think of themselves. Some would say I am unfairly placing people on pedestals, but we’re not in high school anymore. We are all familiar with the states of being and acceptance. No, I choose to see the greatness, the talent, the Excellence in people. And for that I am always punished. The individual, like the mob, does not in fact want to be great, talented, or Excellent. These are burdensome and detract from the pursuit of reptilian bliss. No, they just want to tell themselves, and others, that they do. And that is, of course, fine. It is never my place to opine on others’ choices. I have myself made the most erroneous choices myself in the past.

No, but it’s a permanent reminder that I do, in fact, make erroneous choices quite often and even today. That in trusting people who say they want something, I make the lamentable mistake of believing them. That they might say something and not back it up I find wholly unbelievable. And so I live the lie with them.

But why should this be a surprise? There are varying degrees of wants, no? Even for me. And if most people aren’t steadfast enough to *truly* want, then why should the individual be any different from the despised hypermediocre masses? We are defined not by intention, appearances, words, or desires. We are defined solely by our actions and our inaction. To think that anything else would set us apart is a grave fantasy.

For the matters of one’s life, why should another push when one digs on their heels, why, when the mass of their body, rotting with an unwashable stench of stagnation, refuses to budge? When the old ways persist, are permitted to persist, and are even perhaps encouraged to persist? That new patterns are dissolved as easily as they are formed, and with haste? That the tinniest of will is dissolved by the newest distraction? No, there is no why. You mustn’t. I mustn’t. It is possible, sure. But is it worth the time? The effort?

No.

Let this be a reminder to me, so that I may always follow through where I have said I will follow through. Let me walk where I say I will walk. Let me act where I say I must act. Let me do as I know I must do. Nothing else really matters. No wonder I’m a shitty poker player. I hold ‘em even if I every instinct tells me it is time to fold. To let go. I’ll always be an optimist in the beginning. There no reason to be soured forever, at least not in the beginning. But as true colors are unsheathed?

DJ always told me: “Never be married to your position”

Read: always be ready to cut your losses, learn, and get the fuck out.

Amen to that, brother. Amen indeed.

http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=626

i am
like a satellite – executing a burn to broadcast my waves beyond you
like a rhodes – my sails are drawn tighter against and into the wind
like a viper – tilt and yaw preparing for jump of precision power
like a red car – leaving the past in my dust
like a tower – rise tall and Seeing into the distance
like the fire – burn hot and bright, sharing my light
like the surfer – pressing my body against the power of the water, carrying through it and over it, into the very forces from whence we came, returning there again to know the saline womb within myself.

i am become Balance, Symmetry, and Form.
i bring Order to Chaos
————

Chaos is something that has been fascinating since reading Jurassic Park.
I remember the iterative curves marking chapter divisions.

We complain a lot about stagnation. Rigidity. Predictability. Calm.

Chaos on the other hand isn’t ideal either. Unbridled, it is madness, it is raw power.

Uncontrolled power causes destruction. There is a time and a place for that, but if you don’t want to destroy (or be destroyed) it would be good to think about how to ride chaos.

I think that’s why I’ve always been taken by the notion of the controlled stall ever since middle school, when I learned about the X-29: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_X-29

To enter chaos, fully, but then to be able to balance and navigate it.

True power.

Part 1: http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=828

Part 2: http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=832

Part 3: http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=834

—————————————

The road was slick. Rain had just fallen, an hour, maybe two, prior. Rain in December. I remember seeing old men in golf shorts in February in the middle of North Carolina. For a guy who was used to sliding down the golf course through late March (April some years), it was just bizarre. But for home, it was raining. These little weather trends add up to start feeling like the end of the world.

I just assumed I’d be the one driving. Flew into Moncton to save time / money. It’s a good 90 minutes from home on a clear, clean day. With slick roads, you always have the threat of black ice. Better to take it safe, even if you’re used to 20 over the limit. You just don’t fuck with black ice. It’s ice. And it’s black. It fucks you up. Snow tires, even. Studded snow tires. Great for snow, not so great for clean roads, wet roads.

Eased up on the pedal, fell into rhythm. Road the road like a dogsled of steel harness and bench. Red in the butt to tell other sleds to stay back, I was on fire. Glanced to the right, glanced in the mirror. They were all knocked out. It just made sense for me to drive, wouldn’t let dad bully me into giving it to him. In silence, I drove my family home.

The road was pretty straightforward. Just a bit wet. No one else really on the road, just a truck here or there, poor guys.

Snow started falling. More angel dust.

Fog. Visibility tightened up, and I couldn’t see further than my low-beams. You never punch up your head lamps in fog, cause the reflection off the mist punches back. You see nothing. Blinded white.

Eased up on the throttle, slowed down further. Still fast enough that a moose would wreck me (and walk away) but this road didn’t really have many of them. You never knew when they wanted to take a stroll, you never knew. But slow enough that Gabriella pulled up next to me.

I took another glance around the car. Asleep.

I looked back at her. Parka pulled over her silver blonde hair, pulled tight. I could just make out her upper visage. She looked like she smiled at me – you can always see a smile in the eyes – and then led. Her board in overdrive, at unrealistic speeds, but she seemed unrealistic, didn’t she? She rode on ahead, cutting a path through the snow.

The snow started to float around her, together we cut through it cleanly. Anything the light of my dogsled touched was warmed and opened up, the road was ours. Traffic seemed to be non-existent on this particular stretch, too. Hadn’t seen a car in miles. The dogs from the engine broke free, galloped, loose in front of us. Unleashed, they pulled the throttle back up, pulling the aluminum chassis and my family along with them. The snow coated their fur, coated them everywhere. Encrusting their faces with white dust, angel dust everywhere.

Gabriella led the dogs. She didn’t drive them, they simply followed her.

She looked back at me one more time. Raised her hand to point at me. And crooked her finger, beckoning me to follow.

As if I had a choice in the matter.

She pointed forward, and her finger tip went nova. Light, purple and white, burst free from the tip of her index, and a tiny pea of intense glow shot forward and fell unto the road. I could barely make out the silhouette of the light-pea explode into the road, distorting my view – no, distorting the road. The asphalt distorted, writhed in pain, in pleasure? And became fluid. A beast emerged, at first seemingly a sand-worm, a worm of concrete to engulf the road, made of the road. But it seemed more like an unagi, or nessy. Made of purple light, and Gabriella rode on in.

I glanced into the purple mouth, glanced around, my cargo still asleep.

I followed her.

it’s a great time to disconnect, not a great time to want to be connected.

it’s true, we all have our own worlds we live in. some we share, some we keep away.

and physical distance makes it easier to lock people out. to ignore. to not reply. to be aloof.

but man, the jet-lag is getting to me. would rather shift it, be the other way.

i’m just typing words now. i’m not sure what they really mean. and i’m not sure they do either.

“Concentrate on visualizing the flow of time. It must move, not you.”

The last few days have simply passed through my fingers. There’s only a week left, and I know it will pass through me just as plainly. I need to finish all that I’ve started.

In the beginning it was just myself, through writing- no, tapping- my thoughts onto my 2nd brain.

I later started penpalling with one of my best friends, Frogman. We called it “the rainbow”, for each time one would reply, we would pick a different color. She’d share her self introspection and I would share mine. Helping each other to think through our respective situations or lives, it meant that we were able to learn from semi-related perspectives.

As I grew more, at MIT I upped the amount of personal reflection I did. There were days I did little more. Skipping class, lunch, socialtime, everything in order to extract more from myself and put it out there, somewhere, where I could read it (and away from your prying eyes of course). First exploring, then later defining myself.

As I gained more friends whose knowledge of me was bordering on uncomfortably intimate, I started to consult them more and more. But at the same time, there’s only so much you (and I mean “I”) can share with a friend or someone outside of me. There simply must be some level of ultra personal depth and reasoning and especially emotional responses that can only be holistically understood by the self. Maybe the future self, but the self, and no less. How many reasons we keep that are just barely adequate for our own minds, nevermind explaining to someone else? Looking inward is imperative in order to understand one’s state. Mental. Emotional. Spirtual. Even the physical self reflects the intangible internals more than anything else.

Growth comes from observing, appreciating and finally directing the arc of one’s life. Mindlessness is the opposite of this. Not undesireable but different. With one you live fully, until realizing you’re somewhere beyond where you want to be. When impulses dissipate and and you feel emptiness. Another runs the risk of feeling empty until you reach your goals. And who’s to say you ever will? Not everyone has what it takes to satisfy themselves. But if you do, you defer ad infinitum until you get there.

There must be balance.

As it stands, mindlessness will crop up on it’s own. To be human makes this unavoidable. Dead air. Brainfart. Passion. Exuberance. To sacrifice introspection – and let there be no question, sometimes you must – is to allow oneself to be carried forward without question without direction. If unchecked, it can continue for years. Sometimes this is excellent. Sometimes, when you’re desirous of something, it’s not so great.

I have felt this myself as I have allowed jobs to sprout untempered, untrimmed. And so it has been with social interactions where I do not stop to question my involvement, benefit, or contribution. When elements of life grow unquestioned, you are unwittingly trapped. It may sound clinical, but it is simply balanced.

More than anyone, I know that I cannot have everything I want but that I can certainly be drowned by more than I need.

It is then my own desire to reflect and establish what I want, what I need, and what I want to give myself in to. To what (or perhaps more apt, whom) would I surrender myself to?

Thus by writing the outline of the future, just the brief sketches of the varying acts to come soon, that come later, I leave the details, characters, and even plot TBD and to be continued. The rest of life can be improvised and I can still be calm knowing that I am moving roughly in the directions that I want to be going. Never dictated by a plan, and still navigating by feeling. Which will be for next time.

in preparation, I scanned the archives to see what I’d written about sharing in the past.

And found these choice words:
————————-
http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=13
(which i liked so much that i apparently re-typed it 250+ posts later… http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=294)

and also:

http://www.hypeless.net/25lines/?p=66

————————-

At heart I’m questioning what I share with whom.
I know that a lot of people share the same with everyone, but I would say I am not a lot of people.

I have been known to share in an extremely partitioned manner. Not without fault, I can forget the boundaries that I myself impose, or refactor them in incorrect ways, inadvertantly locking out some and admitting others into my inner cloister.

I think if anything, these days I’m wondering if I should just make it better for everyone by sharing less individually and forcing myself to refine and share more broadly. Less depth, more breadth.

No joke, it felt like it could pull me into the drain with it. If it could pull the water from my body, dissolve away my form and take with it only my fluid nature. It would absorb me, and I felt i was being absorbed into something larger.

Entering something, engulfed.

that’s what they are. chemical madness would up on a roll. a perspective to evoke dreams.

today’s digital manipulation makes it easy to re-dream in technicolor rainbow.
in another sense, i want to paint by number.

trawling through the backlogs of this blog always makes me wonder what the patterns are in my life that i’ve documented here. but scanning the archives of iphoto, i can see the similarities in color (from camera or otherwise) in subject or in… yeah, perspective. the things i’ve focused on have changed with time. sometimes going back to the same, sometimes being fresh.

my favorite pictures with people come from wasting 100+ shots in the span of 15 minutes. unleashing rapidfire mode as we interact, play, harass each other. some of my favorite shots of very dear people have come through this way.

in a sense it feels like cheating. like i’ve unleashed a claymore of memory-keeping.

but it’s that same reason why i’ve been taken by the lomography ethos. i like shooting from the hip. in photography. and in life.

…but why? I’m home, aren’t i?

once upon a time, home was my carry-on baggage. a carefully meted out rectangular box of storage containing mostly cloth and some paper. and a fluidly amorphous cloth bag with some electronics and more paper. when you live in your head, it’s easy to find home anywhere. carry it with you, throw it in the back of a cab, load it onto a plane, and unpack it in a room somewhere. a kind of unfolding base.

i think that’s partly why i like airports. spaces designed to be temporary homes – seats for passengers, gates for planes. no one stays, everyone leaves. just passing through. the one place in the city that is not home to anyone. mostly. it’s almost friendlier because of it.

if i call the airports the lungs of the city, tokyo taught me that the trains are the veins. the population circulates about, and things just… come into existence. the work of the denizens coming together in order to produce… what exactly?

most of my life has been transitory. maybe by definition all of life is… until it isn’t. until we “settle down”.

if i’m honest, it’s something i do think about, even if i deny it to others.
but my answer to my own question still hasn’t changed in years.

these days i’m chasing the unfettered mind. i once found liberty in constraint, and now these days i feel…

…what? what, exactly? i think growing beyond the basic levels, the simple levels, the obvious feelings that come to me, i’ve been able to grow past it. to break my own hated circuit of predictability.

you know, i think i’ve found real stuff. no longer feeling what i’m expected to, or what i’m told to. but feeling what i actually feel.

verb

1 [ trans. ] have a desire to possess or do (something); wish for : I want an apple | [with infinitive ] we want to go to the beach | [ trans. ] she wanted me to go to her room | [ intrans. ] I’ll give you a lift into town if you want.

• wish to consult or speak to (someone) : Tony wants me in the studio.

• (usu. be wanted) (of the police) desire to question or apprehend (a suspected criminal) : he is wanted by the police in connection with an arms theft.

• desire (someone) sexually : I’ve wanted you since the first moment I saw you.

• [with present participle ] informal chiefly Brit. (of a thing) require to be attended to in a specified way : the wheel wants greasing.

• [with infinitive ] informal ought, should, or need to do something : you don’t want to believe everything you hear.

• [ intrans. ] ( want in/into/out/away) informal desire to be in or out of a particular place or situation : if anyone wants out, there’s the door.

2 [ intrans. ] chiefly archaic lack or be short of something desirable or essential : you shall want for nothing while you are with me. See note at lack .

• [ trans. ] (chiefly used in expressions of time) be short of or lack (a specified amount or thing) : it wanted twenty minutes to midnight | it wants a few minutes of five o’clock.

The first one is the one we care about.

It is too simple.

There are many layers at play here, many things to consider.

I’ve historically measured want by the effort doled out in order to get it. In the past, mom pointed out that I did not, in fact, fly to the other side of the world to chase my dream. Therefore, I didn’t want it enough. And in some ways she was right, but in others it made me wonder why I didn’t do that.

I know when I want something. I feel it, it spreads across me outward from my core. You can’t deny the feeling.

But the defining characteristic when you want a thing is what you do to get it. To achieve it. To conquer it. To destroy it.

Inside my head, I break it down as so:

Say-want: You say you want it. Almost every want falls here. (Most do not fall anywhere else.)

Should-want: You want it because you think you “should” want it. (“of course I…”)

Do-want: You want it, and you dole out enough dedication to get it. Perhaps the most rare.

Do-not-want: You want it, even though you know you shouldn’t, and maybe even a little bit because you know you shouldn’t? (perhaps the most powerful)

Deny-want: You want it, but you deny to others (and even yourself) that you want it. (this has been perilous for me.)

What, then, does it mean to need?

You can break it down similarly.
Again, for another day.

It is with this mindset that I experience this break. Break in continuity as much as it is a vacation. Family time is important, yes, but I must also take from it what I must to understand myself and to project ahead.

Out of sight, out of mind. One would hope, but this has rarely been authentically the case for me. If only I had known, I might not have treated them as words to live by. That I would not have denied the roots of deep malcontent for so long. Admittedly there is nothing to do for it, what is past is passed. No, I can only look forward with determination.

The interesting bit about experiencing failure, and I mean all kinds of failure, is that it is something that most never experience. There is a change of mindset, an inner battle with oneself that one fights every single day. A mental struggle that can, at times, be overwhelming. With future abstract goals as the focus, it’s easy to ignore the self in the present.

And I finally realized that I have been doing exactly that. But no more.

To be true to myself, I have to sidestep the needs and wants of others, and especially those around me. It is not in my nature to be aloof. Or to ignore. Or to feign apathy. But then, I am capable of doing that which is most difficult, if I really must. And I feel I must, as much as I can. Lead others less and lead myself more.

I do not think everyone is selfish at heart, but it is easy to fall into a pattern of self-importance. For a friend to feel wronged at every step without due cause. For an acquaintance to feel entitled to profuse amounts of attention and time. For me to want to do things for people for the wrong reasons.

I must return to mindfulness before it’s too late.

Just in case I was seeing things, hearing things, I extracted the tiny Jawbone from my pocket, and popped it into my ear. People walking around with tiny earbuds embedded in their ear canal, talking into the ether seemed to scare me. They always seem to be used by people who seem like they’d use them the least. Permanent fixtures in some skulls, the audio connection to other-world was a bit odd. I figured I’d rather have people think I was one of those than have someone finger me to the security agents.

“Well?”

Her eyes drew narrow, almost squinting in suspicion. “You’re taking this rather well, considering.”

“I figure I can just pretend this is some kind of dream or hallucination or something”

“Fair enough. You see people much?”

I realized that I was a lot thirstier than I had been on approach, reached to my bag, and drew a half empty, near-crushed compressed half consumed bottle of water. Unscrewing the top, I took a swig as I stared at the wall. Specifically, a poster reading “People sold in Canada? The answer will shock you…” Pleasant material while waiting for a brief interrogation, that’s for sure. I resumed our discourse.

“No. Yes. Well, I’ve seen things most don’t see.”

“Because you want to see them.”

“Yes. Well, probably. I don’t know.”

“I hope you’re ready for this.”

“I always am.”

“By which you mean, you never are.”

I sized her up, saw that her eyes, matching her uncomfortably warm parka were perfectly black, screaming intensity. She knew a little too much. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

In silence, we waited.

As I approached the desk, she did too. But the agent spoke only to me.
“Eleven days?”

“Yup.”

“Any gifts?”

“A couple of toys / games”

“Any alcohol? Tobacco?”

“Nope.”

“Welcome home. Merry Christmas.”

“Thanks, have a good one.”

Thirty minutes of waiting for thirty seconds of interrogation.

My new companion walked alongside me to the door.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Gabriella. How’s that for some heavy symbolism?”

She laughed, tossed down her deck, and stepped on it, pushing off through the terminal. Tossed her head back at me, her perfectly silver-blonde (white?) hair snapping around. “See you on the road. Or see you back home.”

Home. Far.

She rode on through the doors. I followed her, finding my family. Walked out to the car, revved it up and head towards home on the highway. I shook my head, smirking. I’d seen more bizarre things.

A lot of us at some point in our life knew great potential. This holds true for macro thinking as much as it does for micro events (and this should be well understood). Hopes, dreams, aspirations – naive or not, they make up more of our core identity than we would like to think, even if your attitude is not to have them. It would seem that it composes a significant chunk of your identity, at least in the modern world, and especially in America today.

Ambition reveals itself in layers. Personal ambition is one thing. Most people have it, it is not rare. Learn how to cook. To read more Dostoevsky. To learn how to play the bass. These are things that just require being and doing and persistence. Admittedly there are hoards of folk unable to persist. There are no rose beds without thorns. Endurance, persistence. The first layer of definition.

Social ambition. To care for family. To protect. To provide. To be true to friends. Again, not uncommon, but I believe the ambition part of this is less frequent than the personal ambition.

Career ambition. This is the one I think most of my friends have felt or feel. And it is rare. Our generation finds it more acceptable to waft through life. And why not? After all, we live in Good Times. When the pursuit of dreams is the ideal goal, where breadwinning isn’t necessary for the abundance of trust funds and parents’ basements. But if you’re the kind of person who wants to feel… significant? It’s a little harder to stomach. It cannot be avoided, and I call this out in detail here because I think any of you reading this (who know me in meatspace) are most likely to feel this one.

Life ambition. Not to be confused with Personal ambition. Life ambition is about sculpting your life, molding your entire span so that it accomplishes something. This exists in varying scales, whether it’s being a father, a great big brother, a patron of the arts, or a patron saint. Or the emperor of the universe – this is the level of ambition that some don’t want, but require.

Everyone can trace backwards in their history and find a point at which any or all of the above had potential into the sky. Maybe you were a wee one who was a little faster at walking, a little faster at reading. Or in grade school when the teachers would tell your parents you would be Excellent one day. Or even so far as high school where in the process of exploring yourself you found something special, nurtured it, and wanted a little more than everyone around you.

Some people find their truest selves in their dreams. Day dreams are waking nightmares if they’re in discord with the reality of your life. It’s a very calming and reasserting process to run through and detail your potential. What you wanted. What you might want. What you do want. And by when you want to get it.

Looking backwards is hard, because we like to focus on the failures and the negative points. On all the things we didn’t do (you never regret… well, it’s amazing how true that stands). We focus on time lost and on failures caught. But looking into the near future isn’t just easy, it’s delightful. Because there’s this valley of hope-meets-potential where you can say the things you know you could do, if you really wanted to. And then, if you’re that kind of person, you can leave room for yourself to fail with the old adage of “I must not have really wanted it” if I didn’t go for it.

But if you want to release the bile shadows within, you need to start with the future perfect potential. It kickstarts a level of consciousness that’s hard to fake otherwise. After all, we each want to believe that if we really wanted to – we could do anything.

We believe that until we encounter reality. A sobering experience, as many know from hangovers and clearer still for others who’ve had to grapple with broadening self-awareness. This is, of course, Step 2.

But that’s for another day.

Thinking about the scattered, static, snow pattern next to the wing during landing. Coincidental? Maybe. But definitely not familiar.

Looked back out the window, and I saw it again. Or I think I did. The points of light bled together to form a white shadow, if you can call a light a shadow. Larger than life, the size of an Iroquois totem, complete with wings, spanning several feet. Continuing to bleed, shedding hazy whiteness. Leaving an impression on my visual cortex like a flash bulb in a dimly lit banquet hall. Smaller and smaller and smaller, too small. Like a child.

It snapped back to Goldilocks size. Normal size? Maybe, but in the size of people. Not too small, not too big. And it turned into a “she”, as features molded into place. Its cheekbones pulled in just a bit, leaving shadows – real shadows – on her face. The eyes retreated inward, took on a gaze of discomfort, self-doubting. It – she? at this point, I wasn’t sure – got… softer. In the way you can tell when a girl is going to be soft.

She looked at me, and I looked back.

She waved at me, and I raised my hand back. Faux-wave. Speechless.

The wings were gone, replaced with wrapped with just off-white woolen scarves. Ocean blue earmuffs. White hair. What I could see of her lips, flushed deep rose.

The rest of her? You’d think white, like I was describing an angel. Or at least I thought I was. No, she was decked in black, replete with tactical combat boots. Holding a skateboard.

Oh, yes.

She motioned to the terminal, and raised her eyebrow at me.

Transfixed, I paused, but caught myself nodding mindlessly, with a smile painted on my face.
And stared at her back as she turned about face, walked towards me, under the plane.

Peeking out through my neighbor’s window, she drifted – half translucent – towards the terminal. Walking, mind you, but with unquestionable grace.

Doors opened. Frigid air permeated the cabin. We shepherded down the aisle onto the concrete, engulfed in cold. Welcome to Canada.

Looking out onto the wing, there was definitely something out there. Something electric, flying alongside the craft, guiding it home. Watching over it, in side-step, in formation. On their right flank, there was something there, and the universe opened itself up for him to see it.

He waved.

It waved back.

Individually we are ever changing and the best interactions come when we change and grow together. For me the ideal path is akin to a double helix, traversing independently, but the bonds hold us together.

It’s also interesting to consider which people I have today would be bled if new incredible people were to emerge (as they oft do)…

As we migrate geographically so do we move mentally. Ever pushing forward, ever growing.

thus, i reconfigure.

central to this is the audit.

audit |ˈôdit|
noun
an official inspection of an individual’s or organization’s accounts, typically by an independent body.
• a systematic review or assessment of something : a complete audit of flora and fauna at the site.

They’re not always easy, but no one ever said it was.

If you surrender to it, it may disappear.

If you deny it, it may disappear.

Then one mustn’t surrender to it or deny it. No, instead we must conquer and master it if we want it to blossom.

Huh.

I walk in and notice that my shoes, merciless in the pain and struggle they provided me in Tokyo, are oddly comfortable. And they walk, and take me to a shelf where I see a name I don’t recognize but one that gives me the Uncanny feeling. Looking down, I find another short piece that harks from an older time. A different time. A time where clarity was not something that came to me, but something that I found. I’m sure that the invisible hand was not a construct in my favorite meta-world by chance, that it was in fact named after Mr. Smith’s musings. And that’s all fine. I take them both.

What strikes me is the immediate need to find the writings of Simone de Beauvoir. So I wander. And I wander. And I wander. And I find myself in literature, standing next to S, but looking at R. And I see a book that I have been meaning to read for quite some time. For a few years, at least. A most dangerous book.

I draw it from the shelf, and flip it to the back, my book ritual. Before I look at the cover. And as I skim the details of the posterior, I see that Mr. R is a member, an honorary member, but a member of my alma mater. Something that I want to say I should have known, or I should have read, or should have come to my attention before. So I cannot help but peek into the first few pages to see what kind of me this will withdraw.

The Myst games were fascinating because they took literal the idea that one could write into a book a world, and that the world would come into existence. In the game, this was literal, the reader could enter the book. In my world, I’ve found that the world enters me.

On the way back, I find myself standing in front of the embassy of ideaspace, and again, am stricken by a need to enter, and seek asylum. I am given a passport (a carefully drawn cartoon of a boy thrusting himself into the abyss, catching a single rope) to enter at will.

Today is only interesting insomuch that it will influence tomorrow. And every day following.

My usual state is to be sheathed in ruffled paper. Layers upon layers, wet in rain, bunching together, sticking together in dampness. Inseparable sheets, protecting the buds within. The folds themselves provide uncountable layers of breadth. The patient traverse the face of a sheet, and could spend a lifetime knowing just a single, cold, blue squared face of me. Perhaps it is my arrogant side. Perhaps it is my purple side. Perhaps it is my playfulness.

Except for red. The buds within are red-faced, paper fire, the heart of my passion.

These I encase in layer upon layer of intricate, near-geometric displays of simultaneous art and fear. Tucked away, kept safe from prying eyes, fingers, and minds. Parts of me shared ever with just a few, countable on a single finger. Unwittingly, the strands of paper were being drawn out. Nimble fingers, and nimble tongue, guilty as sin, straighten. To find mirror paper between the folds, paper reflecting the light that others would shine upon me. Mirror paper is a kind of sanctum, keeping the inside safe, that I might show people what they want to see. As you gaze inward upon a mirror, so my mirror gazes back into you.

And even this layer was unfolding itself, of its own accord.
Yes, I was like a lotus, unfolding into sunlight.
I was.

But today is a different matter altogether.

beyond anything else, it always requires a great deal of effort to enter and remain in character.
to sheath the cold sharpness of my tongue.

massive attack’s protection’s been with me since… what? 13?
Yeah. 13 years, I’ve known that song.

with my work? i can turn it on, but i cannot turn it off.

but with this? hahahah. I forget who I am sometimes. isn’t that a bit odd? it’s like the masques i wear for others consume me, for a time, until the real me resurfaces.

well, when all is at end, i enjoy the volatility of it all.

Once upon a time I’d write here every day, for myself, but I’ve stopped since. And even more recently restarted.

I emphasize that I write for myself, because I don’t even know who’s reading. I went through this self-discovery that I don’t tend to write much or well when it’s for myself (again, something I’ve changed recently). I was much more likely to do so when people on the internet might discover it, google stuff and find it, etc. And when some friends, somewhere, or friends of friends, out there, might link through to here and find it.

Recently, people have googled and discovered the following posts:

the laura paper was apparently a huge hit, especially from turkey. to the point where google has reindexed that specific page a lot lately.

surrealistic cityscapes

more on being sick

In June, a Korean discovered me via ameen and has been coming back since. (You know who you are! Leave me a comment if you read this!)

and finally

bounded infinity

But alas, as I’ve stopped posting, I feel this channel is mostly dead. I’ll continue to write here to indulge myself in a faux-public forum. At the same time, I can accept the fact that I need to accept that less independent channels (perhaps facebook or twitter or a “real” blog (like broadcastutopia.com keeps trying to be)) are needed to disseminate my ideas.

I know that my intentional fragmentation doesn’t help that at all.

But to be direct is to cut through, to carve inward, go further than most will go.
You bypass delectable uncertainty, the charge of confusion.
Vague allusions stir fear and doubt and a cornucopia of emotions and neurotransmitters.
Remove uncertainty and it’s all quite simple. Almost boring.

Then?

I take great delight when I can delve into someone’s reality, cut the crap in order to get there.
And then reintroduce nuanced interaction. To enjoy life, to enjoy each other, but now at a level beyond what most will ever experience.

It’s much more fun.

I think that’s why people seem to prefer to play with me than others.

“secrets”

– yes. It’s true.

I’ve been obsessed with secrets since I was a child. I read about spies. I learned cryptography and cryptanalysis for fun. You know. Just in case it might come in handy one day.

I started encrypting and signing my email in middle school. Crypto-gram was second only to Wired in my holy monthly reading.

at the heart of it, you don’t know who to trust. especially for me, I feel that since I tend to trust people earlier than most would, I have to disseminate a fair amount of misinformation in order to keep things balanced.

in most cases, if someone betrays my information’s integrity, I discard them immediately.

at least that’s how i used to conduct myself.

there have been exceptions lately (since high school) that i overlooked out of some misplaced generosity on my part. in truth, this is one of those places where my line is black and white, at least when it comes to me.

you do not betray my trust in you. period.

and even then, i find that i can’t trust most people.

ergo, secrets.

so i write in the hopes to better understand for myself how our states of mind have come to be where they currently are. i never want to repeat my mistakes with you again.

there’s nothing left to really say, except everything. i feel like i haven’t been able to tell you anything, that i haven’t yet made peace with my past and my past hopes, and that because of this i keep coming back to this place, in hopes of finding something that i lost. and i would only hope that the adage of time healing wounds holds true sometime in the future. that at some point i shift the nature of my way and that you shift the nature of your way, and then things are different. Different.

the very nature of our stasis suggests to me that all was not as i once hoped. it’s difficult for me to reject these gone perspectives, but they may very well be true. my unshakeable faith, while tested, is resolved to remain steadfast, holding the position that everything that happened, happened for a reason. and that everything played out as it should, as it would. and the future will continue to unfold itself before us, true and correct in the nature of its own way. but it has been more than difficult.

the one constant throughout this path? that there are no borders between us. only our selves. i have always been here, and i intend to be here for as long as possible. our paths shall cross again, i assure you – and when they do, i will be ready for you.

until next time.

My life is my own.

you don’t…
need to…
tear away.

feels good.

looks good.

sounds good.
looks good.
feels good, too.

feels good, too.

feels good, too.

i feel like i should have a daily reflection, a weekly reflection, a monthly reflection, ad infinitum, going forward, and making up for lost time in the past.

at the same time, sometimes i feel like i’ve reflected the same stuff over and over again. how to collect all the thoughts?

I’m starting to accept that not everything can be digitized, as much as i would like that. but at the same time, paper books are a black hole as far as memories are concerned.

the livescribe might be the simplest solution.

the perception of time is something that bothers me much more than the perception of color.

to me, time is something that cannot be grasped, fluid. I can grasp t sub 0, t, and t sub n.

but i cannot understand t+1. i was never good with induction, i can only snapshot in jumps. neither now nor later, always trapped.

realizing this allows me to re-inject confidence in the self, to remember what it is to be steelheaded.

when we are social, the social norms of the people around us consume us, ensnare us.

it’s a trap!

liked it. will watch it again. perhaps even procure the dvd, or the digital variant.

in turn, i find it especially odd to own the helvetica dvd and not watched it.

i wonder if such documentaries inspire me. it did make me think, about things that i haven’t thought in a while. not much new, but it refreshed a lot of old thinking.

lines of thinking that had become stale, in a sense cached from an earlier age that were different after a recompute. a variant of me that has come into being only recently navigates different lines than my past selves.

i’d started on reducing my life and then bringing it back up from scratch, but never with such purpose. with a little more deliberation on my part, i think i can carefully construct an environment that i can be at peace with, without losing the ordered chaos i apparently need to stay connected to myself.

and the poverty of hyperconnectedness revealed itself to me. you only want to connect when you have nothing worthy to say.

thus, emo. thus, talk. thus, poser.

fin.

it’s very simple. i’m outgrowing myself. at younger ages, i used to be able to deftly file away anything in my head, and i could maintain it.

i started to hit overdrive in high school when i started using a palm pilot. i’d also outsource reminders and nagging to my friends around me, sometimes passing people in the hallway in one direction, asking them to remind me to go to the bathroom as i headed in the opposite direction 5 minutes later.

typing this now, i’m even sceptical of myself, wondering how i could possibly forget that i might need to relieve myself. but it was how it was.

my personality hooks have also shifted over time. i’ve gone from trying to be friends with everyone to being a recluse to being almost a hermit to becoming a networking master. i’m still trying to hit that perfect balance between deep, meaningful interactions with people around me and keeping myself surrounded by a diverse portfolio of individuals and social groups.

business connections have skyrocketed, approaching exponential growth, and if you’re reading this and know me well, you know how they compare to my personal interactions. i can’t see pleasure before business happening in my life anytime soon. that’s not the kind of person i am, or want to be.

if it sounds cold, it is. i have a drive to do things that i don’t completely understand, but lately i feel more and more that i don’t need to understand them. i am. i will be. i know my intentions, i know the end.

and the end justifies the means. in my life, it always has. whatever they say about an eye for an eye, that’s the way i think.

it’s finally reached me that i will not be reached. you can try to convince me that i am wrong, but it won’t happen. i can’t convince you that you’re wrong, can i? how can you convince someone that their faith is wrong? that the religion they believe in, the science that they hold so dear, the relationship that has become their life is wrong? you can’t, not really, unless they’ve realized it themselves.

my entire life is one giant leap of faith. at least it was, before i started discussing it with people. i see the future. i can’t explain it to you, and i don’t expect you to believe me. i can feel the multiverse – i touch the vibrations that echo with its existence with my fingers. i don’t expect you to believe me, so don’t expect me to try to explain it any more than i have. it’s a regular occurrence that i tell my parents i see things they cannot see, and since they love me, they accept it. they accept me.

i’m starting to hit a very dangerous point in my life, and i don’t know what is going to happen. i can’t see it.

but i need to do things my way, even if they’re sub-optimal from an objective point of view.

i’ve said before that a general philosophy of mine is that if people in general think my thoughts, ideas, or even actions are a good idea – if they’re able to recognize and understand what is happening, then that is very very Bad.

the more i make people think wtf – the more i’m on my very own golden path.

my new goal in life is to make you think i’ve lost my mind.

it’s delicate. very subtle. how, depending on your social group, your society, the general shared consciousness of the people you interface with shapes your world view. there are nuances in the way we speak, think, share – that are shaped by these, but we don’t stop to think about it. conventions in thinking, in how we operate.

the one i’ve been most fascinated by recently is when someone says something, with the expectation that everyone else will agree with them. we inherit these from our upbringing / family / friends / school / insert random environmental factor here.

and more often than not lately, people have been saying such things to me, and i have been saying no, and people have been getting genuinely shocked. or upset? it’s hard to tell. probably both.

i’m not being clear. i will try again later.

i’m not yet convinced that i actually can’t concentrate, maybe i’m just telling myself that. but it feels like it’s hard to focus on any one thing, and keep it going. like anything worthwhile is simply not within my grap. i cannot focus, i cannot do, i cannot listen or read.

it’s “wah wah wah”, but at a whole new level, internally.

part of it might come from the emergence of physical symptoms unilaterally trouncing any higher cognitive attempts of doing anything. thirst. satisfy. cold. satisfy. overheating. satisfy. hunger. satisfy.

it’s scary to think how otherwise sound plans and judgment can be upended.

thirst. bye bye.

provided, of course, that you’re not cutting through all of that in your life.

but it’s one of the hardest challenges, when one is feeling oh-so-very soft.

i used to cheat – when i was sick, i’d pick myself up off the floor and switch back to the bed. i’m not retarded, of course beds are more comfortable. here, i thought i didn’t have the same option. the abandoned mattress along the wall had simply become a fixture. a ledge for my projector, and manly shaving things. and after my last nap, i won’t lie. i’m tempted to lay it flat and enjoy squishy softness to sleep on.

but part of me maintains that there’s no reason to go back on myself now. pain builds character.

wah wah wah. shut up, self, and suck it up.

Entitlement, vile and ever present, shooing away all wonderment while we sponge up soak up all self absorption we could have in the rings that encircle us the arenas to fight in where we might ignore our opponents by redrawing the lines.

We are prophets of doom, that which we consume, we unequivocably proclaim. That which we perceive makes us who we are, almost as much as that which we allow others to perceive defines us.

Image is indeed everything and Sprite should be ignored on account of water.

Flow. Flow, and all else follows.

there are many faces, many masks, and none will ever win, but in my heart i am each one.

i am a poet.
i hated english class, never understood the meaning, the bullshit we had to learn. commentaries. i thought it was just a pathetic means to justify a hobby. and in many ways, maybe i still think that’s the case. but at some point, it clicked. and i started to write. around the same time i started listening to underworld in greater depth. i felt freed from the rules and structure of ordinary language. my writing is freeform and unrestricted. i take others words and i make them mine, give them new meaning. when we share a special phrase, you and i, it makes us closer than most people in the world will ever be. not more intimate, but simply closer.

i am a painter.
it started in junior high. mom wanted me to get an A+ in art, and got me extra art materials at home. juniro high was an ice cream social, i spent some of it teaching kids instead of learning. trading in warez. the like. so i started painting. watercolor. again, a freedom i don’t experience with words, of expressing through color. even if i choose to paint the same bullshit landscape sunset or mash colors in whimsical layers i feel fulfilled.

i am a musician.
i never had the discipline or patience when i was younger to practice or sit through lessons. immediate payoff. patience is a virtue i didn’t have time for. i’d play with the keyboard at home, making chords, always playing with patterns and chords and combinations of notes. i’d get yelled at for playing with my sister’s violin. i did a single year of piano, with my year end recital being the pumpkin’s mellon collie and the infinite sadness. brilliant. lately i’ve taken up the bass and other electronic synth toys. i gave up my tenori in an effort to remain cashflow positive, but i miss it dearly. i can hear the music between my ears, but i cannot make it come out my fingers.

i am a writer.
i write here, don’t i? but even so, the narratives play out in my head. at times in my life, i can read the biographer’s passage in describing the scene, the change in emotion, the turning point of my life. i perceive these moments – a phone call here, an IM conversation there, a plane trip to the other coast. there are stories in my life, and there are stories in my head. and there are ideas that simply do not exist in code, or i’d have made them (even though i can be lazy).

i am an engineer.
i build shit. so i pretend, but lately it’s becoming more true. my new work forces me to practice the craft, and soon i will come home and continue. i love computers because they enable me to offload thought. i think with my closest friends, they let me do that as well. things i don’t want to think about, or that i cannot think about alone. i offload computation. my social network is a giant map reduce.

i am a designer.
i think about how things should be, not how they are. i like to play with shapes and forms. i am not really a designer, but the part of me that thinks about how we interface with computers kind of could be one if it really wanted to pretend.

i am an architect.
no i am not, but i used to tease steve before i began to deeply respect his trade.

i am a singer.
no i am not, but they wanted me to for grease put on by my high school musical club.

i am an actor.
more than i care to admit here, but it all began with grade 11 shakespeare.

i am a spiritual master.
this saddens me a lot because i am by no means a holy person. yet my spiritual depth is greater than many people i know (which says less about me than it does about them). but i am glad to serve wherever i am found to be useful.

i am a teacher.
i enjoy sharing what i learn. there are lessons that i have learned and there are lessons i have not grasped. but what i know i try to share, at all ages.

i am a dreamer.
i am not afraid to be naive. i am not ashamed to be innocent. for the rest of my life i will aspire to be like a child.

i am a leader.
i am always haunted by images, visions if you will, of what we need to do. not just me, but we. and i try to find people who will listen, who will participate. it’s been difficult, but not impossible. and i am blessed and i am cursed because people seem to listen to me. and i spew inspiration all over the place. some will never listen, not to me, not to anyone. i don’t care about them.

i am a walrus.
i don’t know if i really know that song.

i am a visionary.
i see things most people don’t care to look for. i am not special, others could see what i see if only they tried. but most can’t be bothered.

i am a critic.
in some cases, it’s the only way to truly appreciate – things and people alike.

i am a traveller. no, a wanderer.
home is my bed, and i now sleep on the floor. home is everywhere, anywhere that will have me. i fly from locale to locale to see things. i am limited only by papers and rules and governments. within a place, i am free, but to cross lines, we must be wary.

i am a player.
i play. in many senses, and in many arenas.

i am a surfer.
i’ve only gone once but i’ll be damned if i don’t go again.

i am a student.
i enjoy learning for learning’s sake. i enjoy the sense of wonder it brings me, and the appreciation it affords me. i learn from everyone and everything. i ignore nothing.

i am a hunter.
i enjoy the chase, but i have a habit of releasing my prey.

with all these things, i am the jack of all trades, but i am the master of some.

——
To give everyone a quick summary – my work visa expired yesterday, and as such I had to stop working today, until the new visa comes in. This left me feeling energized, excited, very happy about days off to pursue what I want to do – read, write, code, take pictures – all the things on my “someday / maybe” list that I could do now full-time. That’s the set up – the unedited mail follows.

This probably will not resonate with all / any of you because you may genuinely enjoy your day job, and/or have things in your life that sufficiently provide you with happiness (or at least contentment). Or maybe you don’t find it discordant to dislike what you do for a living in the way I do. In whatever case – that’s awesome, I just felt compelled to share the following, it is how I believe I feel.

——-

man – just like i was almost as happy as when i was leaving [xxxxxxx] yesterday…

i just got the e-mail that’s like i can (and have to) go back to work – and i was like BLEAHHHH (throw up noise) I’m gonna pretend I didn’t get that e-mail and stay at the library for today. yeah. I think that’s a definite decision.

But i found it so interesting how, functionally, today is (if you think about it) just like a saturday or a sunday – but my mental attitude towards the day was VERY different. like weekends are lazy days – I get up, putter around, see who’s up and about or the like. But today, no, today was a day of machista lifestyle. And it still is in theory – but the knowledge that I have to go to work tomorrow gave me a sinking feeling, like… wait – why do I have to do that again? And it’s not dissimilar for how I (and maybe you?) feel on Sundays about Mondays.

(I mean, yeah – great – I get paid, and that’s gonna pay my bills, and the like..but still…)

It makes me wonder if “weekends” are “week’s” “ends” simply because you slog through the week, tired from the day of working at the job that pays the bills, keeps us under a roof, and with food in our belly (speaking of which, sushi is awesome) – but weekends are where we can decompress from the week as a whole. At least that’s our default attitude, because that’s what people around us do. I think that’s what I’ve been doing – like I want to work on stuff on the weekends, but the weekends are also overshadowed by this.. knowledge of impending work again on Monday.

When really, I wonder if really I shouldn’t just take off from work as early as possible on most days – and come here (to the library, which is rather nice, and quiet), followed by starbucks – to do everything I want to do – write, code, think, draw, whatever. Like set up a place outside my home as my sanctuary for me-time, the place that I associate with doing stuff I want to do. That would be brilliant, so I should do that. Ok, glad we cleared up some common sense.

But it was a definite mental change, knowing that I couldn’t come into work today (or so I thought) yesterday made me leave work super up-beat, energetic, optimistic, full of… potential. Yeah, that’s the right word. And today was going so well – and really, I’ve already decided that I’m going to carry out today as planned.

It seems like there were a couple mental states: the one in which I’m used to / stuck in my normal routine here, and one where because of this HUGE change in my every day work cycle, I had the power to change all facets of the routine.

So the practical side in me wants to say that great – I should keep that momentum and chip away at my normal routine – fix it, be upbeat at work, spend less hours AT work, while finishing everything there – spend the least amount of hours possible – and immediately switch balance to my personal-work when I leave. And really, that “self-help” book by that designer guy I read recently talked about how even if you hate your day job, try to focus yourself to take pride in just doing good work period… and that’s something I seem to find difficult.

Don’t really know where I’m going with this – I think we both know what I’m feeling / thinking… maybe it’s stronger compulsion for myself to start going it on my own ASAP – whatever the cost.

Cheers.

Other people are neccesarily distractions. Often encouraging, or discouraging. For many people it’s easy to find others to fuel routine. Think the same, believe the same, live the same, talk the same.

Breaking free of routine is lonely by definition. It’s just how it’s got to be.

it’s what sales people (who aren’t michael scott) use to remember the little details about [potential] customers and their lives, etc. it’s supposed to help people retain the semblance of casual familiarity with sales people in a monolithic faceless entity reality.

the semblance of casual familiarity. is that what i have with my friends?

the weirdest are putting in todo’s. again, typically these would be “send thank you note” or “send copy of contract” – but it’s been an odd way for me to remember to catch up with some people. if nothing else, it makes it hard to let a relationship slip into the void.

twitter is different though. more on that later.

but then at some point, i started to grasp the social implications of what we share. that people might search for me on google, the modern oracle of sorts, and find this place. and so i wrote in vague terms, not using names, using familiar aliases. and even then, some aliases led people to find me here, connected to people they care about. or because they sought me out, myself.

now, when i sit to write here, i wonder if i should live in secret anymore. the world has become this place where we share publicly, as the people we are. real. raw. tangibly letting strangers and friends alike into our lives.

but that’s not how i think about my life. most of it is still private. kept only in myself, shared with few, if any. and on the other extreme, always trying to maintain a pristine PR-sanctioned image. with ever present smiles and hauntingly perfect presence.

but the fragmentation of identity isn’t just online. i see it happening in how i speak with people, in person.

i see it in how i perceive myself.

weird.

im in the same place i was 4 years ago, but its different.

some would say i should have taken the productive job the first time around, spent time at work that i enjoyed, been productive in an enriching environment like i feel like i am doing now.

but no. failure is the greatest motivator. the danger in submitting myself to the path of failure was that i might never re-emerge.

oh me of little faith.

i learned the way of the analyst.

i learned the way of the manager.

i learned the way of the politician.

and i especially learned the way of bullshit, mastered it.

but for me, the greatest change is that i’ve finally learned to follow myself. i had let others guide, distract, or influence me, leading me astray from my own way.

my way is not your way, and never will be.

i’m not sure who – but welcome, and thank you.

i think this blog charts a very interesting time in my life. i wish i wrote here more often than i did. really, starting spring term of senior year until now – it’s been an interesting story arc in my life if nothing else.

in the beginning, i wrote for the professor.

then i wrote for myself.

then i wrote for the audience.

then i wrote for friends.

and then now, again, i write for myself.

i’m not really sure what i’m doing anymore.

hell, these days i can’t keep up with myself.

like i’m in a perpetual state of leaving myself behind.

the entrails of the snake within casting off more than just my skin.

yeah.

these days, my skin is not my own.

—
Awakening. There is light. More gray, less green today.

Walk in step, spread saccharine joy with my chocolate shirt, flowing and moving frozen in the wind.

Waiting for the light to change, green arrow, white walk man. Cars drive on by, pausing, asking:

who is that chocolate man listening to chocolate song
standing on that corner, over there
dancing uncontrollably.

As they drive on by, in their lovely broken things.

Then I get to work

“That’s what a hacker is.”

i wrote the following junior year, while in the Kendall Marriott. sf had already gone to bed, haha.

The Dichotomy

It seems to me that there are many people in the world who think in very concrete, perhaps empirical, or discrete terms. As a computer engineering student, we are taught to strive towards a 1 or a 0, yes or no, black or white. We try to transcend the confines of the dirty, real world to attain a higher system of judgment or truth. However, I believe that this notion of concrete separation, this barrier between two truths may be misguided. The dichotomy is better-put, a duality.

The Abrahamic faiths preach in some sense a discrete notion of God, and this notion permeates into society. Whether we follow Unity or the Trinity, God has been quantified. Something that has been lost here is the sense of connection between the self and God. The duality lies between one and his God, and none other. For whatever reason, it seems that people would like to disassociate the notion of God from themselves.

Perhaps a bad example, especially if the reader does not believe in God, but I want to stress that there is a need for balance. In any case of conflict, with two endpoints, we need not wholly choose one side over another. Instead of black and white, we either superimpose one on the other, or we become grey, and tending either towards black or white as we will, adjusting our position as we live, and learn more.

In the design of any system, whether it is a lifestyle, product, or society, there are often seemingly binary choices. These choices need not be made between discrete results, but made in the gradient space between the two, or by combining the two choices. Binary decisions have carried over from on/off decisions to deciding between two items.

Society vs. Individual
Central vs. Personalized
Recommended vs. Serendipity
Philanthropy vs. Self gratification
Connections vs. Barriers of separation
Happiness vs. Pleasure
Bliss vs. Ecstasy
Real vs. Fake
Actuality vs. Image
Custom vs. Unilateral monolith
Encyclopedia Galactica vs. Individual know-how
Psychohistory vs. Speculation
Planning vs. Spontaneity
Causality vs. Chance
Thinking vs. Doing

While these examples may not apply to everyone, I have found that either myself, or my personal contacts often make decisions between the duals presented. The choices made in 2-dimensional domains can influence mindsets, approaches, and paradigms. Therefore I believe it is necessary to retain some, if not all, of all domains.

inertia is terrible.

in work.
in family.
in relationships.
in life.

my neck writhes uncontrollably in step with each bar.

pressure and release, the most fundamental dichotomy in my life.

to realize the pain of misunderstanding.

to know self-inflicted pain, and profound regret.

all for what?

misunderstood words, not easily corrected.

fresh hazelnuts snapped to a paste, delicious.

red haired man wearing hot pink suit strutting his stuff down the street.
short midget on a short scooter zipping down the hill.
the city has characters, the characters give the city a play to sing.

emergent, conversant – impressions impress themselves on each other. when you need to release, you need to let go. permit a full flow – the words just come out, formants.

leading to know, now, your big blue eyes looking all baby cute looking up at me, at the head of the most perfectly composed lines along your mouth, smooth down, drawn down the jaw, along your neck to places in open enticement, revealed. concealed.

i am thinking of you still.

how much of the past is retained in the present?
how much of it is meaningless?

ooooh shiny!
or deliberate decisions?

a fundamental question that makes me think about who i am, who i really am.

i just can’t shake the feeling…

one can only hope.

additionally, “[i] will have good luck in the autumn”

bow chaka wow wow.

intrusions

connections

spark flow

Darc.

Amsterdam.

Color.

Over the head, thick blue cloth, shrouded from the repelling water, falling deeply. Under the hood, body and shadow become one, and I walk. In step with the beat, heel-toe, heel-toe, humming to the tune of the riffs.

Water, salty water, it blends. Walking in the flow of a cold shower, with tears streaming down my face. Knowing happiness and sadness all at once, all the same. The aberration from water, pure on my face, on my skin sinking in slowly. The sky drops and soaks through the cloth. Damp. Moist. Engulfing me in shivers.

The greens fill me up, overflowing. Water crashing through the leaves ruffle noises just the way I want, shuffling in motion. Pressing greens push to fill me, searching for the entryway. Too much green, more than my irises could handle, doubly.

Heel-toe, heel-to, step, splash puddle after another puddle, and salty water comes freely now. Sorrow. Regret. Pain. The delight of memory brings with it hard burdens, blame, doubt. The ultimate fear of abandonment.

Apathy.

To fight it is to force an intrusion. A penetration of the defensive surface raised – keeping the complex thoughts and feelings at bay cannot keep me away. I challenge your simplex.

At home, the fingers move quickly, beyond thought, acting on their own will. Stroke, stroke, stroke – and it is done. The future has been written.

to know the line is to know our past.

the follow through takes us forward.

but if the body rebels, then what?

then the mind must be still.

mind 1, body 1.

wake up with another.

ignore, avoid, forget consciously – go through the night in peace.

wake up under duress.

pain.

stronger than usual.

my body’s way of punishing me.

i could converse with the self, yes. i could. but why? the fallout from reflection would be lost, kept secret. to write is – for me – to share. there are conversations that i have with myself, of course. but those are quite different. quite. the thoughts i express to myself, reflexive, you could not relate to. most of you anyway.

to write in an enigmatic form is to share vignettes of my day, my night, my head with any who care to ask. the details lie with those who care to ask. rarely are most important, most are trivial.

every now and then, the tinniest little thing is the most delightful.

how true of everything in life.

to be surprised, to be delighted.

to live fully.

may we all.

tokyo?
california?
boston?

but last night i dreamt of hong kong.

HE was there as well. Perhaps because his son is engaged, so I stewed in my head. He was always nice to me – friendly, kind, the like. I didn’t mind his antics or his ways.

To live on the path your whole life, and to throw it all away in the end.

No matter the fear, no matter the pain – i will not end like that.

and still last night
i touched
i wrapped
my arm around you
pulled you close
and you touched warm
like i know you would

why were you there at all? my dreams are no place for your spirit to dwell.

each day that goes by it feels
like i draw closer to
sleeping forever
and waking never

i do the words.

the words, images, sounds we think in change over time, don’t they? the written record of our consciousness leaves traces – ghosts in the spaces between the characters. the unsealed spaces row after row.

the devil’s place, for me to trace.

soft bio matter.

i heard my boat-mate calling for help, and made my way over. we talked about this at house a while back – being sharp and decisive with people in a panicky situation. until people snap out of shock. once calmed,
i started barking commands… to the point of forgetting to hand off the bag to another boat to free my hands.

the snap to disorientation and back was the interesting part. when you realize you’re tipping over, and it’s too late. back in school, when we tipped over the tech dinghy’s – it happened almost instantly. a gust of wind and the wrong sail, and fwoosh!

but it’s the slow tipping point, and being stuck in the boat underwater that messed with my dreams last night.

you cannot prove anything.

to believe, to want to believe – these influence our perception of the world.

to trust, to want to trust – it is all just the same.

and yet the frantic dreams of late make me question my own state of balance.

can there be balance when i am awake, if there is no balance when i sleep?

direction comes from silence, within.

know well what pushes you forward.

know well what holds you back.

the more we learn, the more we know, the less we ask stupid questions.

stupid questions are what bring greatness to life.

does that make sense? maybe not.

i’m half awake, half dreaming right now, and i have been for some time.

hm.

my, the internet is full of people.

there’s a lot of power from these connections. to date, i think most of it is junk. there are very simple things, simple questions, queries – what have you, that should be possible, but are not.

I’m surprised that there’s no easy way for me to find the community that wants to talk about AI at my level.

Lion says he’s surprised there aren’t more scheduled conversations on IRC. ( I am surprised, too ).

to live in the moment or to live in the future?

a little bit of both, please and thank you.

but now it’s back to the old self. continue reading if you must, but i write for myself once more.

green green green fluids swirling downwards, would you believe they’re all solid at the tiniest scales? little particles float and free, moving erratically. brownian motion is a beautiful thing. it makes sense that we can model life, systems, people, the planet based on chaotic motion. sometimes chaos theory DOES explain the mystical. i feel a burning need to create and not to care about the typical notions of what is good and bad. i refuse to give in to what you want me to become. i will do things my way. when you look in my eyes you should know – there should never be any doubt in your mind – that i can, and WILL, walk.

i can always walk away. that’s something that i can do that most people cannot. they cannot think. to be unburdened. what a terrifying thought.

there was once a time when i lived, i dreamed, i thought how wonderful it would be to live in a hotel, never sleep in the same bed twice. disturbing to most, that the self’s notion of home could be so transitory, almost ethereal. coming into existence one night, and leaving another.

i need continual inspiration. you are bored. you are boring. entertainment is meaningless, for the blind. i backspaced that, but i mean it. people who are truly blind can see clearest of all. i don’t envy you, i don’t pity you. you are you, and i am me. you should do what you do, and i should do what i should do. our difference, not our similarity, is what lets us share and be the same person. to fear is to live. to have problems is perhaps the most admirable goal. deviate from the norm, but live within it.

perhaps the only thing worse than being the same as everyone else is trying to be different on purpose. to be true to the self is a tricky thing.

you need to know what you imagine you would become.

and then you need to know what you are today.

and then it will become exceedingly clear to yourself and everyone around you that these things are either consistent or inconsistent.

i think when you talk to me – like, really talk to me – you don’t think i’m losing it, going nuts, or thinking, reflecting, or acting in a way that is entirely irrational and makes complete nonsense of how you look at the world, it means i’m not going far enough. slap me.

to burst free. the ultimate. it comes out. pressure and release. the unfinished essays about the dichotomies of life sit. are they written are do they, themselves write? who exists more, my self or my reflection? how can i exist if i don’t leave a shadow, an imprint. physical impressions on neural pathways, on wet concrete. the brain is gray for a reason – solidifying concrete.

lick it. wet and salty. keep it doused with fire, running hot. hot ears and cold pillows happen for a reason. to change, to follow the flow of the tides. i feel like i’ve been caged up for too long, living patterns that are expected of me, fearing things that others want me to fear. i will smile when i damn well please. and i will cry in secret, without your knowing.

guess who’s back.

it burns. it hurts. it pains.

but it feels… glorious.

“where are you?”

“the grocery store.”

“you should eat running for dinner”

and you know? I did.

it taints my world with delight and soothes the abrasions throughout the day.

this is why the RyPod is an integral part of me every day. i dj my own soundtrack, to my life.

i remember sitting in 10-250 watching mattuck jump around teaching us calculus. i’d hit up dark n long (dark train), an immeasurable surreal experience. the two fit together unreasonably well.

don’t get me wrong – electronic bleeps and bloops and all of the wave processing can get heavy moody too – but it’s still different.

contemplative, not emo.

i rock the baby bok choy.

on the streets. in the sunshine. in the dark.
at home.
in the car.

but most of all…
most of all

i rock _________

*wink*

how much do we repeat ourselves? are we cyclic?

this is why i build the brain. to know this, to grow from my past as much as i grow every day.

the brain.

daedalus.

….but also icarus, the evil step brother.

What would JC Denton do?

to live in yesterday is foolish.

to live in today is to live fully.

to live for tomorrow is fastidious.

to see, be, and live all three is intensity.

i wish i could photograph the way my eyes see.

if i stopped correcting my vision, would my dreams become blurry?

in darkness, sight is focused within.

without my lenses the primary lens abstracts the world to colors, all blended. fuzzy. sight of a refrain of an orchestral piece, with no distinctive shape, no distinctive definition.

i am forced to take in the world as a whole, and no specific small part itself.

to work is to think.
to think is to create.
to create is to play.
to play is to work.

breaks in the loop result in interrupts with others for no particular purpose.

but if you want to be in my conscious loop, i better associate you with work before i can begin to associate you with play.

to choose is to play is to live.

we live always in a state of flow.

most allow themselves to be carried by it.

feel the flow changing, follow it, and move in that direction.

swim. in the direction of flow.
to swim is to live.

they have a touch of honey.

they’re grrrrrrreat!

now, i live for Saturday.

but soon, i will live for Monday, and every day.

please make it stop?

who’s gonna take care of them?

focus.

in either case, you break me gently.

separating my two sides from different spaces.

much of the weekend was spent in a secluded cabin in the mountains.

no phone. no e-mail.

how liberating.

and i’m not being sarcastic.

k-dub brought me back some tokyo banana.

de-lish.

k-dub is teh rul3z0r.

it just is.

die and let live, silenced always
tied up, unspread wings

The metaphors we have used in the past for the brain have not stood the test of time. I doubt that our current metaphor of the brain as a network of computers doing computations is going to stand for all eternity either.

…off i go to contemplate lambdas…

…when really i should be writing them.

side step side step
like i’m dueling a most worthy adversary
a most fateful dual
the endarkened self that shares the shell
by day i rise
by night i fall

escape across landscapes
a dreamscape forging a hyperreality

even the computer can’t keep up with me anymore.

i will become light.

and i will save her.

under a fire of glory

exploding into colors of red and blue and similar hues

an angel of darkness finds an angel of white

the drums of war sound to carry us home

strike strike strike the sound echoes inside

reflective, reflexive kick kick kick

tomorrow brings a day unlike any before

i can feel it in every tinniest essence of me.

we live in interesting times.

(12:44:50 PM) lawgiver: hahaha
(12:44:58 PM) lawgiver: you should write a teen soap opera
(12:45:02 PM) lawgiver: i bet it would be the next oc
(12:45:03 PM) me: DUDE
(12:45:06 PM) me: i’d write it if you’d help me
(12:45:09 PM) lawgiver: ok!
(12:45:15 PM) me: that actually sounds like a lot of fun

[much discussion ensues]

(12:47:26 PM) lawgiver: google docs time?
(12:47:32 PM) me: this is why we pay you
(12:47:38 PM) lawgiver: but we don’t pay me
(12:47:50 PM) me: we pay you in hugs and kisses!
(12:48:04 PM) lawgiver: true dat
(12:48:09 PM) me: this is going on my blog
(12:48:27 PM) lawgiver: hahaha
(12:48:28 PM) lawgiver: uh oh

one by one, oh how they fall.

on reflection, it was poor judgement on my part to trust college friends about their ambition. after all, every pre-frosh goes to college with dreams of triple majors. every freshman wants to rule the school. sophomores are maybe still sophomoric. junior and senior years were when true character was revealed.

all of this is of course true for myself as well.

at the day’s end, when i’m alone with my own thoughts, i find myself perpetually lonely… but not in the way you might typically expect.

i connect with strangers daily.

i have the most excellent friends.

i have wonderful family.

and really, the amount of love in my life could cause an ordinary person to burst.

but when it comes to the core – my core – i can’t seem to find anyone else still… machista enough to be Great, to conquer the world.

yeah, in retrospect, i guess that should have been expected, seeing those just barely ahead in similar light cones.

but i veto. i refuse. i will remain naive and i will stay the course.

i’d rather drown than swim… if i can’t walk on water.

were it so easy

on the erg every day, suffering the shame of self comparison between what i am today, and what i once was.

junior iap, redux.

but really, i won’t believe myself on this one until a month from now.

egg me on.

but that’s not what this is about.

don’t think about it…

…do it.

don’t walk about it…

…do it.

don’t write about it…

…do it.

dreamoperator’s last visit kickstarted the self on this, but lately i’ve been thinking…

it’s time to take it up a notch.

i was talking with the lawgiver and decided on a whim to cut my infostream. for a time anyway. after being disconnected for a few days, i realized that i really didn’t want to go catch up with 400+ source nodes.

in another time i couldn’t imagine skipping over anything, always with a backlog of stuff to… consume, digest, process – stuff stupid into my head. stupid on a daily basis that didn’t really matter.

i’m brought back to the thirsst for updates. i don’t really care unless i do, you know?

had a discussion this weekend about seeking and being sought. i’m relatively certain that information that belongs in my brain will make its way to me at the right time.

that’s how my brain works. it digests in chunks of epilogue, each chapter writ at the right time to be read, known, redistributed.

information, i trust you to come to me now.

i scream ice cream i scream so much
you know what i mean

hurt, the necessary feelin

i’ve maybe listened to this song 2, maybe 3 times, every day, for the last 10 years of my life.

[EDIT] – turns out I got there fine, but for a good 3 hours less than planned. just long enough to know I don’t miss the city like I miss others. but seeing the old place brought back a flood of most excellent memories. Good times.

Glad the days turned out as they did.

The counter dude asked for food at tosci’s, feeling “hungry” he said. I offered half my sandwich, kinda weird in retrospect, but he said yes, and took the rest. He gave us ice cream in thanks, we stepped out of rank, and he hugged me with his eyes.

Uncertain phone calls begin in empty halls and piss the night away. The world works in interesting ways, ever honed and true.

Purity. Innocence. Truth. Suppressed fires after silent wires reveal too much to heed.

Now I’m off to Chicago, until tomorrow, after far too long indeed.

For the glory.

lately, i’ve been reading a lot more.
thinking a lot more.
writing a lot more.

understanding, grasping, and yes, even designing.

bit by bit, my life is beginning to transform. you have to know me too well to know what i mean by this, but i feel that i will be able to temper time. not yet, but the beginnings are there, laid out plain. unshaped white hot steel, waiting for a smith.

antonelli shows great respect. he walks with a step that is both forceful and light. in his cuts, he is delicate but firm.

i wrote an essay once, “the dichotomy”. a complex piece written in a complex time – and when i wrote it, overlooking kendall square, i thought understanding the dichotomy of the world might be the key to understanding life – and this was written during some of my most confusing days.

these days, i walk differently. like the world is a pond, calm and still.

it’s been a while, but guess who’s back.

draw your weapon.

sometimes i would that i were silicon.

though bio matter has it’s benefits.

…and i thank you for that. more than you (or anyone) will ever know.

it’s time to relive them again.

for the glory.

i met a friend of a friend this weekend.

he lost his legs when he was 5.

wow. just. wow.

can’t even picture what that can be like.

but hearing about him (and then meeting him) was like being sucker punched by a brick.

i’ll come back later when my thoughts have crystallized.

but stop to think about that for a sec.

the same shit over and over and over. like a time loop. looping all loopylike.

like the freshness has been exhausted. playing the same cliches again and again. the snippets of reality that i stole to compose myself finally crumbling from all the wear of overuse.

maybe it’s time to go back to slate grey, to dissolve into the aggregate of everyone and everything. stale goo, uniform and unassuming.

then again, today i’m wearing yellow.

sunshine fridays.

but it’s been kept private.

I’m toying with the idea of putting my thoughts online – i dump them into this program called VoodooPad (I used to use OneNote, for intarwebz who care) – and it lets me dump my thoughts like a wiki.

Part of me wants to upload them… minus the private bits of course… just so that people can dig through my head. it’s literally the same as you being able to open a browser and navigate to brain.[me].net

In fact, if you’re clever, you’ll see that the addy does exist.

^_^

a little odd – but it’s only the private bits I don’t want to share with everyone. Some of you who read this (even after the drought of posts) – you could prolly have full access to the whole deal.

just an odd way of thinking about outboard brains.

so now i’m trying to figure out what to do for the next few months. it’s like the last several months have established my proof of concept – i can ramp up learning, but focus on fiscal responsibility and health management.

time to shower. cheers.

but at least one milestone is up. time to think about the next 4 months.

coltrane’s playing in the background, and yeah, i think it’s gonna be THAT kinda 4 months.

smooth.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

who’s the dumbest of them all?

damnit. that’s what i was worried about.

dark shores, originally uploaded by brainyark.

my secret place.
at once, both real and fake, this is my world

Oh fortuna, originally uploaded by brainyark.

contemplation is important.

that doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone else who can’t.

in fact, i know it to be true.

and that’s just awesome.

and at the end of the day, do it all, just fucking do it all.

just fucking do it all

all

night

long

now that’s what i’m talkin about

you couldn’t find me if you tried.

machista lifestyle 2007

FTG

most definitely

evil
ornery scandalous and evil

most definitely

the tension

is getting hotter

i’d like to hold her…

…head under water

when the mornin
gather the rainbow

want you to know
im a rainbow too

to the rescue

here i am

want you to know yeah

can you understand?

im a rainbow too

im a rainbow too

* * *

ok.

let me tell you what you do not do.

you do not, knowing otherwise, tell me that you’re going back to your motherland for a few years.

you do not use this transmission of misinformation to falsely induce me into giving you an artificially increased sense of importance.

you do not leave the country, causing us to think that you’ve left… inducing semi-friends to be concerned about your welfare, and former friends like myself wonder about the validity of your plans.

you do not continue to lie to me while you are on vacation, under the pretenses of preparing to working in the motherland.

and finally, you do not forget that i am someone who has knowingly, and wilingly, severed friendships with best-friends, close friends, and people i deeply care[d] about over such things that i, perhaps foolishly, consider important: things like trust, integrity, honesty, and dependability. the seemingly innocuous simple white lie to you is betrayal to me.

you lied to me. you deceived me. you have exploited me. and you used me.

each of these alone is an unforgivable crime against any friendship of mine.

goodbye. forever. i look forward to our never speaking again.

i’d tell you i’ll miss you – but really, i won’t.

 basically – pictures (or installations?) of large numbers of objects – to reflect the scale of something. some of them aren’t as clever / interesting, but some of them are.

enjoy.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php

(should be said that i’m testing some shit out at work – hope you can deal with a possible deluge of posts. i’ll try to make them half-interesting.)

just. wow.

i prolly should just sleep on it.

basically we can distill it into the following

* friends are excellent. good old homeys are priceless. growing new interactions is rewarding. patience between friends is remarkable.
* people are magnificent to watch. this quality redeems modern art.
* women are wonderful. in every sense of the word, and at all ages.
* water is powerful. today it taught me fear. engulfed in such a powerful, graceful keeper of the planet. to know water is to know life.
* driving can be very productive
* i might take up my coffee habit again
* i miss taking the subway
* the japanese are awesome… HAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA

but say little.

actually i like all of his stuff. mostly. but the piano pieces fill the void.

[edit: and apparently when i do this, my body decides that i should wake up < 4 hours after i go to bed. you win this round, body... you win this round.]

***

slow (read: relaxed) day at work. i am growing to sincerely appreciate japan in its glory. if nothing else, it is different. the creativity that they produce is in truth unique. the people who do it love their work for sure.

i have a reverence for the food. seemingly simple, but prepared with patience and respect. the parts are cut with mastery, and composed together. never carelessly, but with razor focus.

***

when i first started playing squash, i was running around the place, unprepared, unable to plot my opponent’s path. i could not feel the ball, but only see it. a poor state to play in, in this sport especially. after warming up today, i began to know the ball. a sphere of rubber for my enjoyment. warmed (after much abuse) to the touch, lovingly handled.

(shhh – the secret to warming up the ball is that i pretend it’s the distilled form of everything about you i hate – and i whack it, yes i whack it good )

today i found myself dancing in slow tempo. knowing the paths and knowing the ball – no longer driving power into the swing, but a graceful direction – conducting, if you will, the ball to a place on the court. the strategy isn’t mental – the game is pure emotion. a game, just a game – but with supple motions i wave my racket around, carrying myself forward and backward – and being carried when necessary.

***

modern technology can be best understood by understanding the crumple zone of a car. how an artificial exoskeleton that surrounds us – not unlike a fiberglass shared womb – retains protection, even whilst being brought to a dead stop.

dead literally, because the design – the form of cars today, constructed in order to be optimally destructed when necessary – this is the stuff that saves lives and protects children.

***

you can never ever leave
without leaving a piece of you

the smashing pumpkins have got me through a lot. our mind states are separate states running in tandem – but we are also furthered by those that surround us. the people that we permit access to our time and space and places in our mind – they impart themselves on us – whether we like it or not. talking to them, even if you never listen – leaves a permanent influence on the wet-ware. thus i choose these people very carefully.

i spoke with a mentor briefly. not an elder, but a mentor. perhaps a partner? my equal, but not my identical.

two bars, not three.

men and women -> two bars, not three.

the process of conversing about attitudes imposes a necessary reflection, to realize my values and my morals. my ideals and everything i hope to find and to see in myself, and others. the people that surround us. my world was blown wide open the day i realized that there are people who do exist (proof by example) who i know could cause me (without any intention of doing so) to compromise myself.

unacceptable.

but to be fluid (especially about fluids) is to be wise. such as it were, i try to understand. i cannot find myself adhere to un-reason.

***

the tenacity of people astounds me. inspires me. in the face of continual rejection, to seek me out, time after time – there is much to be learned. nights like tonight remind me of a couple things.

i am reminded how similar we all are as people – and all things considered, that’s quite remarkable.

i am also reminded how different we all are as people – and i do not regret that my life is, by design and by compulsion, different from most.

such is my choice, such is my life.

it leaves me wanting – for others who are completely unlike me, and for those who are alike.
and everyone in between. people can be wonderful, and people can be poison.

california in a week, road-trip down, along the pacific coast – then surf’s up for the weekend. we’ll show up. hopefully the waves will too.

good times ahead.

’nuff said.

there is honour in difficult truths.

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it has been suggested that to start, maybe i needed to hand pick a more diversified portfolio.

there are trade-offs either way – when you’re more attached to fewer positions, you grow and mature with them, but with a diversified set, you can always substitute alternatives.

maybe it’s good to be hedged against substantial losses, considering the events of the past couple years.

(if you didn’t pick up on it, i’m actually talking about people)

and then when there is a new vase, we rid ourselves of an old vase.
disciplined, enforced states.

does it not then follow that as we meet new people, we sever interactions with old people?

haha. well, maybe it’s not so unfair.

there are some people who will never be severed.

but there are others who will.

there is balance.

fluidity, in motion.

seriously, just shut up. i’ve had enough.

actually, from days yonder, it was “stfu and die” (good times)

do you have any idea how insincere you sound?
really.
excuses are for the irrelevant.
for the dishonoured.
for the uncultured.
for those unworthy

your intent is irrelevant, the reasons dissipate, because of your repeated mistakes.
to perceive is to know, so it follows that how you are perceived is how you can be known.

there is little else, and this is why i try to find that slit that can be probed – to penetrate through to the inner depths. to turn the illusion of perception inward. only if we trust one another can we transcend that limit.

or maybe there’s nothing there, and you’ve just danced around me, feeding my eyes with a whirlwind of flashing lights and colors, singing sweet songs and inducements into my ears.

but i know you – yes, i know you the moment i close my eyes.

ha. is it possible to be less interesting than your own shadow?

perhaps you might find yourself trading places, in different spaces. our reality would lift up and fold into a hyperplane, and your shadow might walk the earth

literally, my dreams come true.

Champion of dreams.

Voice of future perfect angels

singing blindingly bright.

Swim through the echoes of the river.

Flow.

We see, we read, we hear, we listen, smell, taste, and — touch. We take these inputs and they become us. This is always powerful, and at once dangerous.

We surround ourselves with inputs – books, movies, pictures, cuisine… * people * … and are, ourselves, constructed. We melt into each other.

My songs, my truest songs that become me, these are empty of sensible words.

So that I may find my own words and fill the music myself.

So many words. So few to share them with.

It always is as it must be. Such is the way of my world.

you can see this week’s here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rkabir/sets/72157600245633063/

obviously if you want to look at private pictures that were posted previously, you need to make a flickr account, and have me add you as a friend.

* mind-blowing conversation.
* imparting knowledge upon others.
* good food with good company.
* talking smack.
* reeling around, hanging on for dear life.
* vroom vroom.
* futball.
* my stuffed animals.
* mornings without calls, e-mails, or alarms otherwise.
* storming of the brain.
* dumping of the brain.
* driving in sunshine.
* walking in sunshine.
* beecher’s mac n cheese.
* ginger ale in glass bottles.
* augmentations of the self.
* family.
* incredible intensity with others, leaving me utterly and completely spent, physically AND mentally.
* blue powerade
* sharing my loves with you.

and the weekend’s not even over yet.

at a place that exists only within, unless we learn to tease it out

hand in hand with the instrument of this creation.

orange orange yellow.

water in flux.

white and noise.

*squinty grin*

sometimes i think that the people in my dreams are actually instances of those people. plausible to myself when those people themselves are asleep – like a shared subconscious connection, permeating throughout the background noise.

other times, i think that the people are really myself manifested as those separate entities – saying the things i think to say, asking the questions i think to ask – asking myself presented as separate entities to keep my self – that self that binds it all together from tattering apart, fragile wet threads coming apart.

like a violent unfolding.

mind you – in the mornings, i know how much i want – but that’s a bit of a biased reading.

http://wwff.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/capn-crunch/

EDIT: kdawg just pointed out that i’m freakn retarded.

i remember at the age of 5, one night i refused to go to bed. the level of frustration exhibited by my parents went beyond anything i could ever see.

and as a naive kindergarten student, i told my teacher that yes, i didn’t listen to my parents last night to go to bed – and SHE punished me.

but even now, years later – i refuse to go to bed, defying no one but myself.

my, isn’t there just so much to take in, so much to think about, so much to say.

so much to do. every day.

and every night,

i do what i do…

because you cannot have everything you want…
and i will tease you to remind you.
lest you forget to appreciate what you are given.

because great things come to those who wait.
we teach each other patience
and learn to embrace time.

because you once were something that you are still today.
and i was hoping you would have grown.
even if that is unreasonable.

because you cannot control others –
they will see you how they wish
whether or not you wish it.

because there are things greater than any of us
that we cannot ignore – they are too pressing
and you must learn to act on them.

because i live in my world, and you are not always welcome.
if you keep me out of your world
you have no right to mine.

because my mind is never silent, it overflows.
too much comes out from my lips
but this is a part of who i am.

because if you don’t like it, you can always walk.
if i didn’t like it, i could always walk.
our greatest abilities come from our power to choose.

because i think there is something great here
i expect great things from you
and thus i (perhaps wrongly) treat you as great.

because i want you to learn many things
beyond anything i could teach
i can only suggest and guide.

because i hope you learn to control yourself
embracing desire, but wary of those unworthy
there are many who would lead you away.

but beyond any of these reasons – there is one above all.

because i follow the path revealed to me
the self that has gone a step beyond speaks back to me
and tell me where the next step is.

i follow the flow that shows itself to me, and in this i trust.
this flow brought us together.
it will keep us as such, else brutally tear us apart.

such is the way of my world.

and i’ve come to realize that some people give me energy.

and some people don’t.

and echoes of other people, seriously drain me.

it makes me wonder if i should revert to my high school self

- and start severing some of my connections.

in the process, some conditioner found its way into my mouth – and let me tell you, that stuff smells great, and tastes REALLY bad.

exiting the shower, i couldn’t help but feel like the universe had just washed my mouth out with soap.

in the eyes, and in the language of expression.

i find ultimate truth from the shivers of touch.

our conversations have fewer and fewer words, while we say much more.

i see things very differently. what a curse – to be normal.

predictable.

expected.

boring.

what a day. goodnight, moon unit.

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just as i had the impulse to write,

i had the impulse to erase…

…lest we reveal too much.

how we know each other is a bit odd.
we talk, we look, we touch.
and all of these things are on the surface.
but how do we truly know?

in our own ways, we (whether we like it or not) measure each other, hold each other to some standard (not necessarily a positive one), expecting things, guessing things about each other…
at least in the general case.

i used to do this – definitely. and then there was the one person who i completely misjudged, and i would posit that person led me to construct a misinformed image of them, encouraged me.

there are people who seduce us, in body, mind, and heart – that lead us to believe they are greater than they are, because of the way they talk – about and beyond things they know about; because of the way they walk – with a bounce in their step, broadcasting something that’s not there; because of the way they plea – to convince us to believe they are everything they promise. and they do this, and they are supposed to, and because we may be naive, we believe them.

maybe you do. maybe you don’t. people who aren’t pure awesome must find ways to entice. and they do, often very well, leaving you wondering how you were led to think such things. the mind can be a powerful ally, but the mind is also our greatest foe.

really, people are people. we know them, we meet them, we interact. and we must let them blossom in their own ways, our knowledge of them will grow to meet them – and we accept that they are not what we want but they are who they are. and when we find they don’t meet our bar – we accept it and move on, difficult as it may be, and we learn to accept them in what other capacity we might have them.

some people talk in circles
some people dance in shadows
some people will stare at you with shrouded eyes.
but sometimes – sometimes it’s because there’s nothing really there.

personally, it’s absolutely critical that we keep our own internalized ideal construct image of perfection.
it helps us remember what we’re looking for – as long as we’re not looking for anything more perfect than ourselves.
and as long as we look to know someone as much as we would let someone know us.

and one shouldn’t compromise when it comes to people.

what is quality?

and this, this is my problem. i think (in my head) that i go too deep. i let people get too close. and i try to walk on water, and thus expect the same aspirations from others.

but to really know someone?

i try to see things you don’t try to see, but these things i see, they are actually there. you can’t fake them.

the world seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at the decision to inhale from the outdoors. i love to stare at the trees as i walk by, how green they seem.

last night’s dream was momentous. life changing. if nothing else, it made me respect the subconscious in a completely new way. to the point i think i want to force myself to start waking up just before the end of dream sleep.

it’s not like i forget to wonder this, but i guess i’ve let it go for the most part. as a secret. but it kind of makes me want to learn more about this dual part of myself that i have little contact with. remembering fully the vivid images, the events, the transitions between acts, really as bright as watching a stage play, or rather performing. it makes me wonder what processes through every night, whether i remember or not. what stories play out between us, the words that are spoken between us.

i wonder if my fake memories come from our interactions, my subconscious and its manifestation of you.

kind of odd, eh? there’s a copy of you, as i perceive you, pegged away down there.

and at night, we play.

like a rhodes – my sails are drawn tighter against and into the wind

like a viper – tilt and yaw preparing for jump of precision power

like a red car – leaving the past in my dust

like a tower – rise tall and Seeing into the distance

like the fire – burn hot and bright, sharing my light

like the surfer – pressing my body against the power of the water, carrying through it and over it, into the very forces from whence we came, returning there again to know the saline womb within myself.

i am become Balance, Symmetry, and Form.

i bring Order to Chaos

much has suffered.

health.
our interactions.
my inspiration, excitement, and spirituality.

so i’m gonna audit myself – slash and burn what’s using up my time, take things up a notch elsewhere.

at least that’s what i’m gonna tell you i’m gonna do, while i really go do some other things.

*snicker*

Brief notes:

• I love the rain.
• I love how when you take off, as soon as you breach the cloud cover, it becomes a cloud carpet.
• In the past week I have been called insane or crazy no less than 5 times, by different people. Not a single one has ANY idea.

* truth: knowable clarity. difficult to ascertain.
* purity: natural, manifesting itself. increasingly rarely found within, as we’re all too open to test impurities abound.

in my world, i destroy:

*grin*
actually, these might be better kept secret.

in the r— tradition of post-processing, i’ve done post-processing some of the longer-term trends and bits of my life that have begun to stabilize. it makes me realize that certain situations, environments, and people can make my perception of time-scales compress, or decompress as it were.

there were days in college, the cocktail (pun intended) of conflict, debate, and chemical selves, that made each day seem inexplicably meaningful. and in many ways this illusion is necessary to foster the rapid growth of people. at least the non-fake people.

i hate fake people. hate is a strong word, i know. yes, i hate them.

and then there is decompression – where all that you can perceive expands out, and the over-arching strategies that are played carry out on slower and slower scales.

“your hopes and fears – how trivial they seem from up here.”

on that note – i’ve been obsessed with fractals lately.

other than the fact that the malaise that was plaguing my mind for so long has migrated into my body, i feel fucking awesome.

but nothing to say.

i’m in the process of violating my brain in said manner. and while i thought that doing this would confuse things… it’s really done the exact opposite.

to program the engines of my sleep. to know myself from within my dreams.

this is my task tonight.

who knows what a mind might find
if only it could have found all that’s in a mind.

i want you to find happiness.

i will say a few:

* my office room has decided that it does not want to illuminate my workspace.

The consequence of which is that I fully expect someone to sneak into my office behind me and strangle me at any time with a cat5 lan cable, while i’m busy enjoying the yellow orange hues outside the window on the empty street, and the rhythmic flips made by the stoplight.

* the brain in the middle of the night is capable of drawing incredible, simply incredible logical conclusions that would baffle any mentat.

it doesn’t help that i’m coming off a hit of starbucks brew, but there are no fewer than 6 independent trains of thought converging on the same wreck. none of which (of course) relate to the task at hand.

* my ipod has a song that i titled “Happy”.

I confess – it’s a piano tune ripped from the soundtrack of the Sims (the original mind you). It comes on and evokes an interesting image of the future, one that I can’t (at least not anymore) see coming to fruition, not naturally anyway. Smiling at me, with a tilt in your head, baring teeth for some reason, but perfectly so. You smile characteristic of someone else, who rarely smiles like that anymore – but I do miss it. The scene itself is silent, no words spoken between us – not in the dream state, not in the aftermath. it’s one of those songs that i’ll prolly hold on to for a while – and yet, all of this is just a stray thought from the above.

the song changed. better get back to work.

from a while back:

[15:21] me: wtf
[15:21] me: why does everyone think
[15:21] me: i make up people
[15:21] kd: cuz you make up so much other stuff
[15:22] me: what are you talking about
[15:22] kd: nothing
[15:22] me: what the hell
[15:22] kd: hahah
[15:22] kd: j/k
[15:22] me: you bastard

Neil Voss’s “End If” starts us off. D starts singing along with make pretend believe words, over shadowing vocoded voice. simple brilliant lyrical magic

“greens like that mean that we go”

“summer means no more snow”

fucking hilarious and gentle awesome.

round out the cd, hit track 3:

Covox’s “Switchblade Squadron”

D and S start top of the pants slapping jeans drumming – stereophonic magic from the driver’s seat, in time, perfectly synchronized with the bleeps and bloops from the speakers – imperfect memories stack into perfect living.

makes you realize that you have things no one else have, surely they must have haves that i cannot have.

this is the nature of balance. displacement and equivalence.

and of course, we can know how it all turned out to date.

exhibit A –
our first REAL hangout – that is to say, hangout which resulted in a greater likelihood of future hangout was one day in the summer when i decided to punt research, and convinced her to punt her work. we went up to the penthouse and laid in the sun and let the conversation ferment. and so it did. she was the one who introduced me to the idea that friendships would be spatially dependent, rather than bond-dependent. i hated the idea. and even today – it seems she was right – definitely with respect to her, but even in addition to others. you know you can call (and you have!) late night and find me up and awake at whatever hour – and it’s like we picked up where we left off – with the mini football and lounging on the floor.

exhibit B –
i hate you so much these days. leaving us all behind, severing the past and disappearing. at inception, i thought there was little difference between your attitude towards friends and A’s. but the key difference of course is if you cut off contact completely – there is no regrowth. basically, all that is left is blackness in the absence. in the void. thanks for disappearing. goodbye.

exhibit C –
an odd one, inciting odd response. i realize, upon contemplation – that our friendship has traditionally (at least after the very beginning) been quantized. packets of friendship, consumed in very controlled, very careful quantities, intentionally planned and plotted ahead of time. it’s odd – because i always thought i’d look down on such a thing – like an almost forced relationship, consumed in digestible chapters. but in many ways – this is the one connection that has managed to stay constant, or even grow – albeit slowly – over the years, forgiving transgresses. it’s the quantized nature of this that results in my missing you when you leave – especially since that spacing these days isn’t the weekly lunch it once was. i’m oddly certain that you’ll be there for me, and i’ll be there for you. for a while – and that’s both surprising and comforting to think. in the end, i still wish we “interfaced better”.

i think that’s enough for tonight. i learn a lot from you people.

no remorse.

is the realization that history is coming into existence… exactly as it should.

there is a certain beauty that you can appreciate if you only understand

that everything in the world is exactly where it should be.

that the set up is brilliant for all that is to come.

—–

last few nights are like living in the shadow of emptiness at peace yet feeling the chaotik emptiness that is possibility. the possibility space that the self chooses to explore swings deftly inward, and further inward ever shifting, finding its direction in the motion that guides it before. thus it repeats as do i – these actions have happened before, and yet they repeat over and over and over – until i snapped. snapped the neck of the elders that kept me here, the airy hourglass bottled tight over my world. i couldn’t see through the opaqueness of the blood. i am become the color orange, tainted with impurities but still overflowing with brightness and attention. grab it all away, and keep some light for myself. this is the dance i choose to sit out. each round we roll around and again until, exhausted, collapsed we think of our relief. not to escape but to drown, to breathe in the dark salty waters, all i wanted was your dark salty water in my mouth, gushing forth, overpowering me, compelling me to sink deeper and deeper into the secrets. grabbed by the eight arms that would pull me away into the aspect of time. this is how i wank and wane away the hours of my day, until the final day where i meet my nemesis. a worthy adversary, who might defeat me in battle, the most pure of all conduct, with clarity and sound mind to make a decisive incision. until then my head carries on high above the water, unable to force a gag reflex to expunge the bile building up within. the cavernous orifices that remain open, always relaxed and open are the breeding ground for the brightest demon forces that frolic about. never caring, sucked into the stenched folds of doubt. ah – to find the core that would replace mine, ejected – and take my core within. engulfing it tight, near a seal ever squeezing and pulling it in. in that we find meaning not because of our minds but because of our programs. soft wear in the skull runs software in the brain that is in effect hard codings of predetermined patterns. to know randomness is to know creation. last few nights have been smoldering with understatement. so i relax and force it out here, for you to sniff and taste.

they better shut up before bedtime.

i’m out walking because it’s freaking warm here. not warm like you have it down in the south, but it’s not ass cold like boston is tonight!

and something about the mix of sounds, atmosphere, temperature, and ambient noise make it feel like boston – sophomore summer. specifically that summer, definitely.

with all the feelings that went with it – the certainties, the ambition.
damnit that LCS building was ugly and dreary.
the summer was a little carefree, and a little energetic.
like i could do anything…
so i channeled some of that,
and anything is exactly what i did today.

* * *

the best part about painting is the mixing of the colors. really, i just splash around with my brush and the pigments, and mix random splotches… and sometimes a color begs to be found and used.

the brilliant bit here is that because i just splash around – i can never remember how to make that specific hue ever again. so any color that brings itself to my attention must be used to the fullest. there is a cyclic relationship between self and color, and when the colors emerge, they are used accordingly.

i learn a lot about emotions from colors.

i think abstract colors understand me better than i understand myself.

hecho en mexico, tutifruti jarritos have gotten me through a lot. that and the other traditional beverage of choice at anna’s – the lemonade.

but in this case, tonight i write with jarritos in my system.

the week has been stupendous. stupendous man. lets run down, in brief.

getting moved to the corner office. more windows = more sunshine = more awesomeness that feeds into me every day. i even have room for a couch. we’ll see.

today i’ve been super giddy. the simple act of actually sharing photos reminds me that i like what i do. left early, after a talk with kbear about how some women fear being replaced by someone younger. she spoke for her people especially – and i wouldn’t have thought it at all. interesting tie in to some fears expressed to be by she-who-shall-not-be-named. interesting. i love being able to roll in late – really, they’re awesome for that and my employer gets more than what they pay for out of me in return. that’s for sure.

this week i found sausages with sheep casings (important if you know me), and a new line of veggie potstickers. the line i saw the panda bear buy in the chicagoland area seems to be MIA from store shelves around here now. unfortunate.

the past week i’ve been beginning to re-remember how awesome it is to enjoy learning and projects. after sufficient break, writing code is fun again. and i totally bought a science book discussing whether the universe is a giant quantum computer or not. i look forward to it greatly.

and really, since we already know that the universe is discrete, or at least composed of voluminous pixels, i want to believe that quantum states give us a bounded continuum… at least until a discrete state is stabilized.

new tubes of pigment have been squeezed out, mixed, and applied. the colors are briliant.

and my back porch is simply magnificent when it rains. i could tell you about the waters of my planet.

what is unexpected to myself – and perhaps to those of you who know me best…

is that i take no joy from hearing about old… “adversary”s

there is no pity either, no one wants pity. but simply a profound sadness that they (or anyone) was unable to find what they were looking for. and incredibly more so if they’re even unsure of what they’re really looking for.

i would not wish that upon anyone.

you have to ask yourself the right questions if you want to set yourself up for the right answers.

in the end – you know what you know, and beyond that – it’s anyone’s guess.

maybe – just maybe – at some point i can stop… crunching the numbers… analyzing… computing even.

maybe… hopefully… some day…

but not yet.

in a somewhat related note – i’m extremely happy to see he’s got full-text feeds on his blog now

(feed: http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/index.xml )
(blog: http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/ )

I e-mailed him about that… a couple years ago? a while ago – requesting them. Add ads, whatever you will – but as it were, feeds are convenient. you lose the full page experience, and that’s important on some pages – but in other cases, it’s just parsing the news, to make sure we catch the snippets that might, you know, change our lives irreversibly.

simplicity.

so simple.

stop. clear your mind. reduce. simple.

in somewhat-related (not really) news – the new game at work is Joust. it’s really quite simple to imagine. (and a lot like balloon fight, if that’s the way you roll)

the two players ride on giant chickens… ostriches if you will. and you flap your wings and fly around, carrying giant lances with which to… you know… joust the bad guys that magically teleport into the level. right. the level seems to be these platforms in hell, with red lava on both sides of the middle.

and there are devil hands that appear if you get a little too close to the lava that suck you in.

seriously, wtf – but i have to admit it’s devilishly addictive.

which explains a lot – considering the relationships i’m trying to build between two passages of text.

i think comparing two objects is the same problem across any object given the proper framing. this might seem like the most obvious thing to you, because you probably have common sense.

lacking such a thing, this conclusion has taken a long time to percolate in my brain.

this simply fucking rules.

Scroll down for her buildings (not the dome)…

generally.

and as much as i can’t leave it alone, this is one of those things that i can’t seem to deconstruct and over-analyze the way i’d love to. it just is how it is. and i can go nuts trying to figure out what it all means, when really it doesn’t mean anything, and it can mean everything. at the end of the day, the response seems to be the same, regardless, and it doesn’t matter.

miss people?
i generally don’t.
but there’re just a few that i do. i confess, it’s true.
and aren’t those just the bloody hardest goodbyes.

it’s probably best we keep em that way, eh?

And I live in your dreams. I used to.

At the tipping edge of consciousness, I ride the rush that comes with peeking ever voyeuristically into another’s innermost chambers. I’m not a Violator – I’ll tell you right now. Don’t give in to any suspicions you might have – I’d never Violate any dreamer. The Laws are sacred and true – I swear by ‘em, more than my mother or any other.

F’real, I believe that there are secrets meant to be kept. Serious. Ironic, eh? All considering, yeah, it’s ok. I understand.

I beseech you – trust me for a moment. I’d let you Dreamwalk right in if they’d let me, and you could see for yourself. Barring that, until then, just trust me. Things aren’t as they seem.

Obviously not in dreams, but we forget to remember this possibility in our reality. Every day, we forget that we can’t see the entire probability distribution. We’re just content to know whatever we see. Believe it when you see it, eh?

Say the blind men and women.

Wake up.

I used to say that I saw clearest without my glasses. And in many ways, it’s very true. I apologize if you don’t have the option of turning off clarity of sight in order to get clarity of mind.

It’s analogous to being carried from place to place on a ferry. You have this thing, that is moving from once place to the other. And while it’s doing so, you have the pleasure of disembarking your car (another such device, but one that you control), and enjoying the scenery, sights, thoughts that come while you’re being carried there. The difference is that you can choose never to really get on that ferry, or be a part of that experience.

But guess what.

So I guess while we’re really being carried along – to this
destination we don’t really understand or know. This place that has caused endless speculation in our time, and those before us – while on the way there – we’re just trying to find ways to pass the time. Cause everyone knows that you get on a ferry to get somewhere, right? At least that’s what it feels like. But this – this ferry we’re born on – we’re not quite sure where it’s taking us. But I bet it’s good.

So as we stumble around, unable to really see where it is that we’re truly, really, in actuality, moving towards – might as well deal with what we can see, and can do. We eat, sleep, get up, walk around, do things, interact with people – just passing the time until we reach the other dock. And because of the way things are, the beginning of the ferry is on the first dock – and the end of it is already at the end.

We can wander around, aimlessly, trying to see where we go – and eventually, sometimes on purpose, but usually by accident, we end up at the end. And that’s that.

And that’s something to think about. Not too often so that it bugs you mind you – but every now and then, it’s really something to think about.

that’s just the way it is.

ok. so the reason this whole shindig was started back in the day was to write 20 lines a day (20lines.blogspot was taken, so i made it 25…). And the point of the exercise (as handed down) was that one day you’d go back, and put pieces together and see how it all goes.

ok.

that said – i’m considering a few things – and yeah, input requested.

a – i think i’m going to go through all the old posts, starting at the beginning, one by one – and rework them. i’m trying to write some scripts that can index and relate posts based on whatever heuristics that might help me flag down dupes as well in the process. the 2nd pass through would probably be posted online – it’s the same material, reworked.

b – obviously i want to continue to write – and while i haven’t been keeping this daily – i do like to get it out here every now and then. How i continue to write is what I’m thinking about. some have complained that what gets posted on teh intarwebs by me is a little tuttifrutti sometimes – very vague, ethereal, and leaves them feeling generally used and unsatisfied. i relate to that. part of it is the mood i’m in – but part of it is at least the fact that it’s online – and hypeless.net comes up when you search my first and last name. (WTF).

b – 1: i’m thinking about making this in the future be password backed – i give the password to my homeys – and anyone who wants in can always ask. (i should state up front, i reserve the right to refuse…) – but this would let me… open up a bit more to you en masse. if you can handle it.

b – 2: we could make it e-mail-based, like the vault. ’nuff said – i don’t particularly like this idea, but it’s an option if people want it.

b – 3: business as usual, no big deal.

so yeah – that’s what i’m thinking about… and i guess we’ll see what you have to say (if anything)…

in mildly related news, i really want to write a kids book. before it used to be just because it would be awesome – but now i think i feel like i want to fill some gaps in kids education… something all subliminal and shit – you know?

and “the sunshine underground” by the chemical brothers can always get my booty shakin. ALWAYS. it is SUCH an UPLIFTING song like you WOULDN’T BELIEVE. like HOLY FUCK. i’m sitting here, bobbing my head up and down and side to side as i type this shit out.

sunshine. underground. brilliant.

water, land. near the same on each
last night was water… the coast is a most beatiful place.
when we return to the water, we are going back to where it is we emerge from.

at night, the unawake taps into the fabric of spacetime itself. we collide with people, and never dare to share these most private of visions. we see the past and future present of ourselves and people and shouldn’t that frighten us?

i tell you it scares the shit out of me sometimes.

to be genuinely well intentioned i believe is to transcend the usual barriers.

discipline. honour. focus.

sharp, very piercing qualities.

but to harness them all, you need flow

the society of minds…

and maybe we run with one – and follow where it wants to go, until it becomes weaker and another takes over.

some voices are directly influenced by others, and some are contrary and others still fickle beyond anything we might explain.

combined together, form the randomness of our actions, they keep in step with all that’s blasting at us.

i think i’ve designed an almost ideal room for myself. i have yet to implement it.

it’s basically empty. glowing white, with furniture, yes – but a misty, ambient white glow emanating from the room. no colors, no flashing, blinking, interruptions. basically a faraday cage for social interruptions, a place to unplug.

i’ve been thinking about making my office room like that – but that seems a bit odd – considering the war room’s computer configuration.

the other option is to enforce a no-comm channels policy in the bedroom.. which is doable, for sure. and this i guess goes back to the question posed elsewhere – whether i’d be able to do it from myself.

i’m already partitioning work and home – come home, no contact with work – if they really want me, they can phone.

and maybe now it’s social vs. me time. there are many minds in my mind – and they all tell me different things.

and some of them need to stfu and die.

an oddity no doubt.

that’s ok – it can be fixed soon enough – hopefully.

the nature of friendships is very interesting. excruciatingly fascinating.

to me, anyway.

how we can trust or not trust – how information is distributed, and not. i called up my bff the other day – and how easy it is to divulge secrets to the right people – and yet from others…

…near deceit?

…

perhaps.

i was learning to see the emptiness between spaces, and allowing that to express itself within me.

one of them can always be learned.

the other, never to be taught.

egg whites

sourdough english muffin
half slice of swiss

steak seasoning

orange juice (of course)

all to the sounds of wiij’ing (start the youtube video, and skip ahead…. BOOTY SHAKIN)

and chased down by white mousse pocky.

WHY.

additionally, i think pokemon is teaching kids bad habits.

you do not have to catch them all.
you can have just one, and that’s just great.

thursday’s the day that’s so close to the weekend, but not quite.
but at least the morning feels farther away than the evening – so even when doing quite nothing thank you – it feels like something has been accomplished. even if it’s just passing the work day.

off to work.

all at once.

here.

and now.

to people who’ve given me the pleasure of receiving hand-written notes – expect returns in kind… soon… …i hope…

…if you’ll admit that

you

were

wrong

then we’ll admit that we’re right…

i would that we compromised, and you let me live as i would. Left to my
own devices, what might i do?
Instead i am left confined by your grip, ever modulating my daily tsleep how i love thee and thine escape from dreaded daylights
and how you pain me in my best moments

Instead i am left confined by your grip, ever modulating my daily
tempo

but that’s not why i’m angry. no. that came much after the anger rushing blood red vengeance blasphemy explosion.

act of aggression will be met with war.

interpersonal relations are diplomatic, there are exchanges, there are messages, there are insinuations and flirtations and speculations.

nations after nations described by ations forever.

intimidation? no intimidation.

but you, dear you, you have not known the meaning of warfare in your life.
in your life have you seen a force to be reckoned with

you shall find me fierce
my teeth sharpened
like a beast i will stalk you
and claim my prey.

upon your life
you have not known such dedication

classic.

http://whytheluckystiff.net/

an excellent source to learn ruby.

and the bottom bit is trixy.
i find not too many people to know, not too many at all.
i can count the the number of people i’d like to take in, get to know, learn about…

…i can count them on one hand.

people dynamics are fantastic.
seriously fascinating.

i’m a bit of a finicky reader – need the right atmosphere (audio, air, lighting, whatever), and the right mood for separate books.

Design Yourself seems to require energetic places – i read the bulk of it while waiting at the airport.

took a great chunk out of Unbearable Lightness in pitch black (with the trusty mag-lite flashlight from high school leading the way) when the power was out.

Wisdom of Crowds i simply cannot continue. that book just makes me so angry. so so very angry.

Society of Mind is a bit head trippy at times. been mostly bathroom reading (i know, i know)

Book of Five Rings… i’ve had this for a long time, and have read vignettes from it. some… force is keeping me from really getting into it – not sure whether it’s the environs or the time itself. like The Prophet, i deem it the kind of text that requires a certain reverence. The Prince will follow in this thread.

while we’re at it, might as well detail them all.

Product Design Now i’ve mostly gone through – but not cover to cover. it’s been superceded by designing interactions. Emotional Design is in my neat little pile as well. i’m not sure if Rules Of Play is in this thread, or should be its own. there is of course a compendium of readings recommended from this textbook that i’ll be following up with.

Sci-Fi for now has been the first Halo Book – which is surprisingly compelling. seriously. i haven’t been able to finish Market Forces. the world was interesting, but the plot just hasn’t done it for me. Shockwave Rider was dj’s rec – it’s there (it was rare, so that’s a start) but just haven’t picked it up. i’m a huge fan of charles stross.

good authors must be treasured.

the entrepreneurial set: Getting Real, The Art of the Start, and The HBR on Entrepreneurship amidst other.

i’m overwhelmed by the texts i have found compelled to commit to reading. nevermind my periodicals (which, i don’t think i want to tell you about anyway, thank you very much – the question of one’s human capital arises here).

all thru the windy city, i think i felt the need to cut loose from inputs, and focus solely on processing and outputs.
processing referring of course to the act of thinking things through, and not the design-ish media lab language (dabbled a bit in that, more to come).

there is too much to see
and there is too much to do
and there is much to hear about and know and learn
and there is far too much that i wish to say
and i have not yet begun to speak.

the world is a wonderful place.

the harmonics we love and appreciate

the dissonant chords we allow to overwhelm us. many of us do anyway.

the beautiful path through the points in our possibility space is that which takes us through not the optimal path, but through it all. monotone. repetition. homogeneity. these are what i avoid. mostly. mostly.

personal space is a reflection of the mind. not the bit about the clear desk mind you – but the colors, the shapes that are our physical environment. the forms that we surround by form our mind, as much as the other way around.

ambient white lights, glow gently. colors giving vibrant cues.
dark tones in seriousness all come together.

my description of who i am was challenged to its core recently. i will respond in time.
i am the sum of my greatest moments, my favorite inputs, and my darkest hours.
in the chaos that binds them, i am the harmonics that emerge.

i knew exactly what to do.

at some point, i’ll put facsimiles of what was writ during the outages.

at the least, it puts a lot of stuff in perspective.

(i apologize in advance for this entry.)

[snip]

don’t hold back

[snip]

kjsfd93kne93jksdf;lkxmnsdfie9ruj3kjfs
d90fu3jklfjas9fuk3ljfsad9fasldfjasZxm
dfjaslkfjd9asjok3nmfksjf9s0ajkl3klfjds
90ajedf83jnsfd892jkfhefjk2njsdfyu89
dfifiue 9u3 r39uknsodih u29u93 39rfj
k;fe93ukljasf-9i3kjsdkpfi03ju39rijefp
pijdf90j3oij2r982yhjk3d0h3okjlksjd39
jsdf9j23kldf90eij39-weklfjowe93knlfe
9epwef9-wfejwef9-efuekjlkjsdjkzd/,o
wdf9sfdakljasfd93jlkwf09ufj3ifre9u2r
df09u3ijfr90uu2r3jio4ej139ue3ffiohfe
fe9cjwfe90udf9-uekjsdlfmewf09ekjfe

[snip]

i am the spark that makes your idea bright
i want you to find happiness
the same spark that lights the dark
i want you to trip like i do
so you can know your left from your right

[snip]

10101000101000101000101110011000010111101100110100001110101
10101010111010101010101001101011010100111010100110110101101
10101001101010101010101110110010101001010110100110100110001
01100101101010101010010101101010101001101011000101010110101
01010101001010101010100100110101010110101010100101010101010
01011001010100101010111010110101010101101010101010100101010
10000101010101010101101010101011010101010101010101010101010
10010110101011011011101010011101011110111101010001010001010
10101010101010101010101010110100110101010101010100011001000
10110101101010011011101000011111100101011110010110101011100
1110110011101010001010101110010101101001101010

(the sequence was strummed out by the fingers on my left hand, drumming along to the dust rhinos’ cover of where the streets)

[snip]

hey you’re just too funky for me
i gotta get inside
of you

[snip]

why is it that when my ipod and my thoughts are aligned – that in shuffle mode, songs queue up as i’d want them to – it’s always a coincidence? why isn’t it a karmic flux that binds everything together? i’ll just pretend it is

[snip]

kinnie starr’s alright (original, not to be confused with the veritably most excellent hybrid dub mix)

Is it alright for me to feel this way,
Put my head in your lap, the world will go away
Well well, we can go there, we can go anywhere
We can go there.

But is it alright
Is it alright
Is it alright to hold you through the night

Is it alright for you to feel this way,
Put your head in my lap, the world will go away
We can go there, we can go anywhere
We can go there.

But is it alright
Is it alright
Is it alright to hold you through the night

You’re my knees, my right to a world more beautiful
You’re my knees, my right to a world more beautiful
You’re my knees, my right to a world more beautiful

(I want to hold you)

And that’s alright
That’s alright
That’s alright
It’s alright
It’s alright
It’s alright to hold you here tonight

It’s alright to hold you here with me… tonight.
(It’s alright)

[snip]

i know a guy (american) who’s glad that pearl harbour was bombed.
he wouldn’t have been born otherwise

[snip]

super tree run.
super truck throw.
super drift.

[snip]

wow, guess i never posted this in my stupor last night

whether we live in the best or worst days

these are enough to get us through them.

and aren’t they really enough? what more is there?

i think most people live in reality, and then are sometimes able to make the jump into the dreamworld of imagination.

and they’re very lucky for that.

i think i generally space out and live in dreamworld, and my brain tries to make the jump and extrapolate what reality must be like. that’s why i phase in and out of conversations.

i think anyway.

so the basic idea is that everyone has a value.

let’s keep it abstract to keep it a bit digestable. but you could replace points with dollars to get the original contemplation.

everyone has a point value.

if you wanted to save a specific person, you’d sacrifice other people, at a certain point level – through negotiations, such that their points added up to greater than the subject.

basic utilitarianism. different people have different values on people (but likely rarely think about such).

this is the shit that churns through my mind when i can’t sleep.

as in, every night of the week.

i’m not sure why i’ve always been a fan of pens. could be my educationated childhood, but i’d ALWAYS, and i mean ALWAYS steal my dad’s pens. He’d bring new ones home from work, and YOINK – in my backpack.

in high school art class, i was obsessed with the pen and indian ink we used. it smelled like grass. for some reason, having to dip the nib in the inkwell every few strokes really appealed to me. i’ve written a few letters to a few people that way, but alas i grow tired.

i refuse to use cartridge pens. They’re an abomination. Real ink goes bad after a year, nevermind how long the cartridges have been on the shelf. and you pierce the plastic. ugh.

the odd history of my current letter writing pen… dates back to before we met. i don’t remember why, but their brand presence definitely penetrated my perception of the world at an early age. and i have no idea why. seeing later marketing materials from them (who could resist einstein writing with one? not I) caught my attention as well.

it never fails to amaze me that thus far to date, mostly, and i do mean mostly, anything i’ve ever wanted, i’ve got.

shields down – there’s no arrogance here – i am ever grateful for that. i just hope i can keep up to spec to continue to be blessed with such rewards.

the beautiful thing about getting everything you want is the hunger that comes with it. to move to greater and greater things.

(in case you lost me, i stopped talking about material goods at the pen)

* blogging replacing other social mediums for maintaining contact with friends, individually and in groups.

i’d take this further and look at digital communications vs. analog, how with some people most bits are carried in explicit text, and with some, there is a tremendous amount of data loss every step away from in-person interaction.

the hierarchy of processing maybe then is:

1. direct touch
2. in person, close quarters
3. in person, distanced
4. vid conferencing
5. voice
6. IM, real-time
7. IM, casual asynchronous
8. E-mail

The anomaly that I dare not place in the list myself (really, it depends on who is writing and who is receiving) is handwritten letters- while increasingly rare in today’s world, the ink and strokes that bear the information do carry much.

(i know from letters that people have received from me, they might have placed as higher then 3rd on the list, or as low as 7th.)

there’s a demo application that runs on tablets that analyzes your handwriting and decomposes your personality based on it.

i was really rather frightened to see that the program seemingly knew me better than 99% of my friends through a cursory examination of my penmanship.

or rather even 99.99% of them.

weird.

at sundown the most magnificent luminous dark blues emerge

sometimes i look at the world and i wonder what i’ve done to deserve such beautiful paintings.

every

single

day.

i will make an attempt to do so for some of them.

on the roster:

* what’s the master plan, how everyone comes together
* the impact of new media, and how it can be used for good
* academia vs. otherwise
* economics
* perfect vs. imperfect constructs
* possible and unimaginable universes
* the self-limiting nature of human imagination
* universal truths / constants in the multiverse
* specialization vs. generalization, and how we choose to limit our own thinking
* do people who are not me really exist?
* choosing to be great
* being great vs. being a good citizen
* why i am annoying, by design
* who am i, and what do i want to do with my greatness
* why videogames?

I’ll try to give treatment to some of these in the coming days. some will be public.

others will not.

let me know privately if you have a keen interest in any that doesn’t appear online here, and i’ll be sure to… ahem, edit it for your consumption.

i made an attempt to read the wisdom of crowds on the way coast2coast, but found myself unable to digest the stupidity of the author. i made an attempt to read the book of five rings, or better translated, the book of five spheres, and yet found myself without reading light. instead i experienced the graceful accidental refreshment of verbena, visually attentive to the inflight movie, and otherwise allowed new wrinkles to soak up their impressions in the matter.

the minor details of home are what make it home. i returned to wet darkness, and golden yellow leaves scattered throughout the parking lot. i find hypnotic beauty in the blurring between nature and society. leaves catching rain on asphalt.

scratch that – it’s snowing!

to outside

to the leaves

i’m off shadowwalking.

i will likely write, decompressing from the trip.

the one constant in all planning is that they break apart and we adapt and readjust on the fly.

whether

not sleeping the night I get in, and driving to new york regardless (good thing i kicked the caffeine habit!)

getting to NY super late (but getting awesome awesome breakfast on the way)

not really liveblogging for wiitrip (wow, turned out to be a lot more work)

or having a bathroom that doesn’t lock (seriously, wtf)

or actually getting a wii (totally unexpected, and how completely fucking awesome)

not being able to play the wii the moment we got it… and then yet, being able to play it (both ab and pre senses combined)

or having an unideal bed setup in NY both times (sexytimenot… sexytime……………not)

never getting to go to MoMA (but did get to see Nokia / Apple, phew!)

not finding the time to meet up with emily, but finding double time for others

….actually, my private trip and meeting went as planned – the one stable point in the whole trip….

realizing that everything, and i mean EVERYTHING, was closed on thursday – but still having fun nonetheless (did i mention i didn’t get to go to MoMA?)

or coming back from NY as planned, and missing out on, ahem, the dancing (for better… or… better), and having an unplanned mindshifting conversation along the way…

or getting chocolate on my face (if i wasn’t brown enough already…)

and getting home 2 hours later than planned.

my trip was full of nots, and really, like most things in life, could not have been any more perfect in any way.

it’s seriously not even a great word.

it sounds like a way that someone spoke something or something.

dark clouds dark demons damage my visions preventing me keeping me away awake and conscious of the reality club we live in, details, grains of sand coming together into materials, physical forms

but the truth is i don’t really live in this world at all

been taking a hiatus from blogging. sorting out my thoughts and emotions.

they are being writ offline.

i’ve read the book, and it never really seemed very odd – but the film was…

odd.

if you haven’t seen it, i guess check it out? the entire beginning and ends might not make any sense to you though. i think he took the first 10 pages of the book and turned it into 30 minutes. same goes for the last finale of the book. i think the last 5-10 pages are the final 30 minutes of the film.

the middle seems quite accurate, with a strong emphasis on the forecasting of the future, with video calls, simu-gravity through rotation, and space floatingness to the tune of a classic classical piece, oft used in loony toons.

interesting to see what they thought the future would look like in the 60′s (also interesting to note that the movie takes place 5 years ago.) We seem to be behind by a few decades according to the past. i guess we actually, you know, did stuff back then.

well, i’ll be happy if we can convince nike they need power laces in time for 2015.

(back to the future 2 if you didn’t catch that)

The new Starbucks growth strategy is “infill” — putting Starbusian embassies on the top floors of office buildings that aloready have one in the lobby, putting them across the street from each other — I’m waiting for the little “Starbucks Mini” to open inside another Starbucks.

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

[Update: From same boinboing post comes link to onion article New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks from late june, 1998.]

I was getting ready for Mathcamp back then.

No, seriously.

or maybe a pseudo resting state that i recess into

seem to repeat – stuck to rewind and replay over and over.

i know this because firefox autocompletes post titles for me – and tells me what they’re not new.

and i mean the exact

same

title

over

and

over.

a most beautiful dream

and at first sunlight

my dreams become me

- Brian Tracy

View my calendar here (don’t forget to scroll to November to when I’m actually coming)

if you do the whole gcal thing.

Try to view it here

[23:45] kd: what am i looking at
[23:45] kd: for the local live
[23:45] me: LOL
[23:45] me: that’s
[23:45] me: UPS routing
[23:45] me: of my amazon shipment
[23:45] kd: ohhh
[23:45] kd: lol
[23:45] me: from oklahoma
[23:46] me: like
[23:46] me: wtf is my shit doing in california

and by some magic, I’ll surely have my package tomorrow.

the story behind the night is not so important as the connotations it has to me – after all, if you want an information dump, you can go on your merry way to google, wikipedia, or your knowledge broker of choice.

we are at heart rational creatures. parts of us are bounded by irrationalities, anchoring us down – binding us. and in some ways, people who eschew the contemplations of irrationalities are limiting themselves as well. two separate occurences that are utterly the same.

if it’s not immediately clear – this is a spiritual-like-ish post. not interested? feel free to tune in next time – cheerio!

right-o, moving right along.

my view on this matter is simple. the causal case is clear. If there is no Creator – then existential questions become meaningless. Why contemplate the meaning of life if we emerged from a rand function inside the container of the multiverses. if we are random – then isn’t our meaning similarly random? i fail to see the connection between the question and the cause. and i admit that a large part of why i don’t share the empty view point is because it, and its consequences, frightens me. I mean, that’s it. If there is no higher order in the universe – there’s no meaning except whatever we assign – and that in itself is arbitrary.

let’s not get into worthless arguments over believing in higher order but not in God. I am the last person to complain to that you don’t believe in God because the religious views you grew up with were irreconcileable with your thoughts. Maybe that’s part of my short sightedness.

Religion to me has always been a very personal affair. I do not recognize hierarchy and I do not recognize an external opinion to be superior than my own. I am immediately skeptical of any affair that expects me to contribute any amount of capital to specific causes. (it should be noted that my religion does require monetary contribution – but the allocation is supposed to go to “the needy”, NOT the institutions of the religion.

A personal religion is a personal understanding, or even a level of comfort with one’s self and one’s place in this Order of Things. It’s no secret (and surprise! if you didn’t know this before) that I feel a profound pity, yes – despicable pity – for people who are uncomfortable with the idea of their existence. (and i’m doubly sorry that my belief that if nothing else, you exist for my entertainment, is no consolation to you).

Personal religion allows for the contemplation of the world. My desktop background these days is a galactic tornado of sorts. This splattering of pixels represents something that is several lightyears in length. I started the other day, realizing that likely 99.99% of the population can’t begin to comprehend the meaning of a lightyear. Maybe 90% can’t comprehend the scale involved between the earth and the sun, no matter how hard the museums try. and then i realized that most (if not all) of you, my elite-educated friends probably don’t grasp the distances involved either. This contemplation makes me wonder if at the end of the day – the quibbles really matter. How many people today forgot the lessons we learn in history class – how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Does a soul split as existence travels through the multiverse? These questions are the same – in what they’re asking, and in the fact that they’re irrelevant.

My view on things – again, Surprise! if you’re not familiar with this already – is that we’re all in the clear.

This is a fundamental inconsistency with many religions out there. Why is it that no mattery how many people there are in the world – the chosen are few? I say that politics can be explained by school-yard playground dynamics. Similarly, the standard baseline, expected religious view – can be reduced to a club that’s trying to justify its selectiveness by maintaining exclusivity. Join and Be Cool. Or Be Left Behind.

Bullshit.

Admittedly – this is the easy way out. Follow the leader[s], unquestioning. This kind of mentality is what’s used to control people – to ascertain a certain level of power in a group. Brilliant on the part of those who are leaders – kudos to them. But that’s not what religion is about. Religion is about Thinking About This Shit Until Your Head Hurts. Contemplation, for a more elegant term.

This is one of those things where it’s either black and white, or it’s grey.

If God is out to get us – we’re screwed. Can’t mess with God.

If God isn’t out to get us – we’re ok – be good, don’t abuse His favor – and we’re all ok.

If God is messing with us – (the so-called grey area) – it really reduces either way – to one of the above. Either He’s messing with us in a good way – and we’re ok – or we’re still just plain screwed.

The one universal truth across all scenarios is simply the contemplation.

Paradox upon paradox emerges if we try to explain the expected religious view to an outsider. These paradoxes are hilarious to observers – (as observers know) – and yet seem to be non issues to the explainers – as the explainers know.

And it’s because a paradox is the simultaneous co-existence of two plausible, yet inconsistent answers – the two parties fall into the default buckets – siding with one answer, when really we’re in a paradox. free will vs. predestination? a good, loving God that sends people to burn in hell. A God that doesn’t listen to your prayers – but you still pray to Him anyway.

Isn’t that in some ways a qubit? (quantum bit – not the standard of measuring). multiple coexistant states, all at once, not consistent – until disrupted. I’m not a physicist – i don’t really know.

AND THIS IS THE BEAUTY OF IT ALL. If spiritual beliefs were provable, we wouldn’t run around telling everyone that they’re true. ZATAOMM (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) had some great quotes about this. I mean, you don’t find people coming up to you on the street fanatically waving that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. It’s this contemplation of things that gives us – individuals – the power. Think about things. Enrich your ok-ness about existence. And – perhaps most importantly – make a fucking decision. You have the power to choose how you look at things. When you listen to others – you don’t get that power. The decision is made for you, you follow it, well, because, well, you don’t know why – and that’s when you run into problems when people ask you about it. Reconciliation isn’t just hard from an algorithms point of view.

In my view of things – I’m not screwed. And this is a fundamental difference between the way I think and the way many people think. And there are many differences.

I resign myself to the fact that I’m not in control – I’ll switch waves when I can, but ride the tides freely, reigns loose, where the wind blows. Others want to exert control, even try to enforce control over every situation.

I can do anything because I’m supposed to do anything, because that’s what I’ve been given. You dismiss the ideas because that’s not what you want, even though you could never explain to yourself why not.

I think big – because I’m big. Big people do big things, and little people do little things. What makes a person big? Nothing. – they wake up one day and decide that they’re big. The curse with this one – is if you ever wake up and decide that – you can never go back. You just can’t.

I can’t lose in my fire stingray. More than you know. Because everything, down to the tinniest vibrations of the bits that comprise our universe is out there to help me. It’s all on my side. Why? Because I want to do good. Goodness is a natural harmonic that falls out of the higher orders in our existence. So if you want to do good – things become effortless. Our motion through the multiverse – ever splitting and dividing through the multiverse pushes us in that direction.

In all of this – we find ourselves stuck. After all, we’re only human. We like to think that we deserved something. That we’re independent. That we earned something. That we’ve done something meaningful. Human desires for humans – and we’re all humans right, so that’s ok.

Sure. It happens.

But just like things find you when you stop looking for them -

if you’re able to let go of these human constructs
then they let go of you.

let the world take its course
and be happy with the course that it is leading you on
find the rhythm in this relationship between you and the world
and deny yourself that ever-wanted self-importance.

to cease the obsession with the self’s point of view
is to embrace the self’s lack of importance in the world.
this is the way to embrace the meaning of life:
collective harmony emerging from dry chaos.

simple.

Work isn’t a big problem – I can roll in late, not a big deal. But it’s really not fun to be stuck in this off-cycle routine.

Stomach / dehydration been catching up to me. The problem with your stomach shrinking from not using the capacity for most of the day is that it has become difficult to eat, and re-hyrdrate simultaneously. This has led to much uncomfortableness.

while trying to re-attain the sleep, eat, wake routine, i’m also trying to fend off certain advances towards other routines.

there’s no better information
than misinformation.

my writing is now super fragment partitioned – i guess, let people find what they want to find – otherwise if i had one central repository, it would too chaotic for most readers, except friends. some like philo, and others want the tech. the biggest smorgasboard will still be the hypeless root blog – interface, design and tech i guess is the byline for now. we’ll see where things fit in as i think of them – and i think i realized that if something fits in more than one place at the same time – i’ll simul-post it.

and on that note – i’ve been entertaining the idea of keeping a password protected blog – where i could write in less general terms – and give you a legitimate update on my week to week (day to day you either know, or don’t care to know ) life happenings. it’s a bit of a pain for people, which is why i’m less inclined to. i guess you could always just use authenticated RSS feeds, if you go that route – and those that don’t could authenticate and have their browsers save the username / pass.

working on a better solution – still in my head, but we’ll see where it goes. it’s been discussed with more than a few people.

i’m not really that paranoid – but i guess i have a strong aversion to being re-discovered by people from my past. in some ways, as i move forward, all the people i was forced to deal with in the past get left behind. it’s like the dynamics of most any long-distance race – the gap between the players gradually widens. just as there are concrete partitions between social groups, contexts – even spaces – there are implicitly enforced partitions that keep the Now separate from the Old co., and then even from College. And the biggest wall of all of course is with College and the Pre-College.

Perish the thought if that barrier came down. Well, maybe not – it did last night in my dream. Can’t tell you how weird it is to dream about people I haven’t seen in maybe 10 years? I don’t doubt that you already know, actually.

I think I decided not to attend my high school reunion while still a freshman. (in high school).

I’m aiming to post weekly, maybe bi-weekly, my scratch material.

we’ll see how this one is – actually, 30 seconds into the song, i like the mix way better, haha.

but the vocals are spectacular.

obligatory link: Kinnie Starr’s SWSW page from 2005

tangible, at least enough to share.

until then, you really don’t know what you’re missing.
unless you figure out a way to knowthe insides of my cerebrum.

i realized today (finally, yes, i know) that the ideas i spin are half.

half idea, all inspiration, but no substance.
they do not come to fruition, they are empty.

memories of thoughts from the impulses that drive me through my motions – but this must come to an end.

there comes a time every now and then in my life
where i wake up and ask myself what is it, exactly, that i am doing.

and this time it’s for real.

so my new project is to actually write out the ideas, in full. maybe they won’t be developed, and maybe they won’t quite exist after this – but at last then they might be shared, with the implicit information laid out and structured in a most explicit way.

this is my new task.

On a daily basis, I create lush landscapes inside my cognitive window. I take sounds (currently “The Internal Locus”, a fitting title, I know, and oddly cinematic too), along with images, moving pictures, and sometimes even text. I take them all and mixed together I find something created for me, without any effort at all. It is this ideaspace that I slip into when I want to get a little more comfortable. If you saw me in this state, you’d see the form of a person, but not the person himself. The essence tucked away, and external are only tears and laughter and strangely enough, at my ripe old age, some babytalk as well. This is physically real – I kid you not.

Music that we listen to forms the basis for our life’s soundtrack. Then doesn’t the song we listen to influence the action that follows? Like how the stuff we read as a child (or are read, by elders and peers) influences us into who we become.

Looking back, people don’t fully grasp the extent to which Deus Ex has actually, in the most literal sense possible, molded my personage. My personality is a direct extrapolation of The Saint (the new kind, not the oldschool one). And the song of the moment always seems to define the moment. Generally not the other way around.

When I listen to a song, I can imagine the scene that goes with it, but not always the other way around. Does that mean I think in audio before I think in visual depictions? Because as people, a lot of our processing happens in the visual circuits.

I feel like blech, so I will go lie down now.

thus i spend my days
soul seeking, trying to lift that curse

it’s probably worth it.

10 points to you if you know where that’s from (know-know, not google-know)
I haven’t seen it yet, but I think I will this weekend. The soundtrack got me, the opening snakeblood feels like a travelling sound. 8-ball is the most delicious underworld song I know (a soundtrack exclusive, except they did manage to include it on their best-of album recently, somewhere deeper than the harmonica-beat intro). And bits of the opening sequence was composited by tomato.

the other movie (many thanks to evhan!) that’s gripped me at the moment is the science of sleep.
this of course deserves a link

http://www.apple.com/trailers/warner_independent_pictures/thescienceofsleep/large.html

you will enjoy it.

at zombocom

like cutting myself with a butter knife.

not kidding.

but the digital era also lets us delete people from our sphere of existence.

literally with the click of a few buttons.

or at least their impact on us.

the net effect is the same, there is simply a displacement in the temporal plane.

the sound design at http://www.blackberrypearl.com has a uniquely unusual depth to it. the sound resonates inside the very essence of me. lori says it reminds her of myst… and so maybe it is. a very surreal and ethereal sound, maybe even ominous.

i listen to it on infinite loop, i kid you not. the only thing keeping me from slipping into a nether state while listening are the damned pops in the sound at the disconnect between repeated waveforms.

otherwise i’d slip out of this world.

anywhere from last year to college to high school.

it almost feels as though the past is chasing me, all to be resolved in one final showdown when it confronts me about my existence.

i thought i should preface it.

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sksfjasfd90 sdkfs0df k3rm3km kjkasfdi

bubbles

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]qj rt’;JF L’kw fjd gjwjE ‘LKJFDAS SPIDkl:FJD [OSIFDEJLKENJKLFJD kjf s;aoifjdf
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captain ducky pants

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jfaslkfdju isdfljas flijsdf kl jsdfi

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when you’re tired brain garbage accumulates. i guess i should say rather when i am tired.

and it comes out in various ways.

and when i’m thirsty i mix myself some blue powerade, the most formidable drink.

and i think i fancy sxsw next year.

a “minor” detail that we forget that it is such

and we distress so much.

just pick something!

because around the world, there are people who have these choices picked out for them.

what i wouldn’t give for one of the signature green bottles, with a blue cap.

how is it that we allow brands to entice us? is it because the marketing and psychology really works?

i’m an ocean person, if you can’t tell. while i love the mountains here when i experience them, i long to find the ocean coast. perhaps I’ll actually give it a try this weekend, before it gets too cold, even for me.

i find myself simmering, gently. not cold and stagnant, but neither boiling uncontrollably. simmering. pasta sauce. my brain is pasta sauce.

yes.

our objects identify us. in ways, they mark us as members of a club of sorts. handheld objects are the most important. we fidget, and we fidget with things. Things that we hold in our hands. my lighter feels good. i like to touch it, wrap my hand around its surface. lighting it for the sake of lighting it is a pleasing action. the double cylinders makes it easy to hold, and wrap fingers around the one cylinder and rest the tips in the recess.

and so it is with other things. the ipod nano, while yes, agreed, impossibly small (i can’t wait to take pictures with it beside my first-gen)… is surprisingly NOT a pleasure to hold. it’s fun to weigh it in my hand, and bask in its small size and lightness. but now i understand why the shoulder straps are marketed profusely for these things. they are not meant to be held. i think i have the same concern about the 5th gen ipod, compared with my current iteration (likely 4th gen). part of it is thickness, and part of it is heft (the lighter isn’t a featherweight). but regardless, the entire experience with the unit itself is indeed pleasing.

it translate upwards. a computer can be a cold object, a tool. or it can be a very personal, almost intimate affair. phones even more so.

how is it that we fall in love with objects? is it because that is the one love that money can buy?

the absence of thought is the presence of something slightly greater, and that is peace contradiction.

there is a narrow, yet razorsharp, fence between sucking it up and giving it up.

razorsharp.

in its stead, one should be certain of the greatness that may be lent them.

so at an early age…
i was told by my parents that some of their friends had chosen to name their son after me.
…an early age being early high school.

the first time i heard of this, i was shocked.

when i found out about the second family that did this, it was still, you know, odd.

the third instance is what made me realize how many kids borne to family friends have names that are distinct variants of my own.

every one after just seems commonplace. I’m not even flattered anymore.

…..and people mutely wonder why my ego is undoubtedly the size of a planet.

doesn’t <3 look like a mouse?

what a souper funny joke.

what are games but abstractions of reality isolating specific elements of existence while deftly sidestepping actual issues in an effort to entertain us

my knees they dont go weak
they don’t go giddy-up
when you don’t call me
and my head
it does not spin
so don’t try me, with your sweet nothings

interrupt requests come from all parts of our lives, and whether we choose to accept or ignore heavily influences the rest of what we do. makes sense? digestion of information (or lack thereof) that comes from this kind of interaction is difficult, tedious, and manipulative.

it’s good to get it out.

or the fact that i couldn’t travel back to the motherland as planned (nor could i last weekend, to see my dear annabelle)

or maybe the duality observed in personal lives, and personalities, and in technology

the contemplation of higher order, grander schemers, and the puppeteering-like zen mastery of the warping of spacetime.

the thought that maybe we should have an NYC trip, reduxed

the extreme futball online

the gluttonous use of weekend minutes, talking with long-lost (and not so lost) friends

the surreal space at work on a sunday night

and likely all of the above contribute to the fact that this weekend was a very, very connected weekend.

not digital, but human.

can’t lose in my fire stingray…

…and may i find what i am looking for

eye to eye

and ask yourself –
what am i doing
why am i doing it

when you realize that it’s not the mirror image who’s providing the answers for you

that’s when you step back and decide to sort it out

or not

depending on what you’re made of.

It feels weird to feel sleepy at 2:00 AM. And I think I got enough sleep last night… Maybe I actually am getting old.

I love to sleep in but I hate actually going to bed. Go figure.

Especially now that it’s much harder to remember my dreams.

It should also be said for those who are keeping score that I dictated this entire post. In fact I haven’t used my console in about half an hour. Badass. See what I mean? I just taught my computer the word badass.

“I’d like to take care of my parents, since they always took care of me,” she said. “But I feel like he wanted me to buy something for myself, and there’s a Jeep that I’ve had my eye on for a while.”

the pre-…. is at the very beginning of the news article.

the post-…. is from the very end.

Exactly.

Sortie the alert fighters
UNSC authenticate 479er.

we exchange an unfathomably large number of 1′s and 0′s, configured in a certain pattern, that i will consume and enjoy.

much like a pizza actually.

because of the physical constructs that allow us to actually construct intangible realities, we are able to manifest for our viewing pleasure hypothetical oddities that are surrealistic and absurd.

that’s a directive, not a past-participle or whatever.

seriously, you should peruse all three pages of this article.

actually, let’s insert a block quote right here:

JOSHUA KEY

and in case you don’t know who timesonline.co.uk is – it’s the online version of “The Times”
ie – the people who “The New York Times” are named after…

likewise, reality blends together with masterful artistry and fakery – a slipstream between this world and other, alternate worlds.

i think it was p k dick who was nearly frightened by his own power to create, compositing characters into stop-go strings describing fantastical (and worrying) futures of our lives. alternate realities that may or may not exist, we just don’t know yet.

the last couple days i’ve been living in an alternate reality, and surprisingly find myself compelled to stay.

wake up. go to work. come back from work. grab food. and jack in. it’s no hosaka, but from my console i plug into this social quantum entagled space with people. in tandem, using virtual space in sound, it’s uncannily surreal. like my subconscious wants to be drawn in, perhaps engulfed in this…this… painfully beautiful world.

it’s scary to think if this is just a pre-alpha version of things to come.

Unless you know what reg exps are, and find them similarly tasty.

randomly brain vomiting in text is oddly like therapy.

these days i feel like i talk to no one… even though i do?

talk to no one, talk to everyone. don’t even want to talk to most.

and people too busy to talk, fuck you too.

i’ve even stopped caring if people read this, it’s just where i can dump. which is odd, because writing real private notes to myself is where i can get more deeper into the self-psyche, talking about my events, my reflections on them – but that seems so very pointless.

at least here it’s a cached public archived mirror reflecting my mindstate whenever I post.

am i making any sense still? i don’t know, i stopped reading what i was writing a couple para’s ago.

we speak differently, even think differently.

and i must confess that i feel that of everyone that i know, tina is the one who gets by far the best letters from me.
at least on retrospective contemplation, in my opinion.

but lets not play favorites and share just a delicious morsel with you, shall we? i hope she doesn’t mind…..

I completely think you’re right. We are only beginning to understand the different inputs that affect us internally, whether aural, haptic, visual, or even emotional. The seattle public library I told you about is very dear to me because it immediately evokes the memory of CSAIL and stata. That summer we used to penpal, many of my letters were written from there in the dead of the night. All the older staff, professors or otherwise would go home, and us UROPs and grad students would pour in. some always kept hours of 2 PM until midnight or later – with the overlap intentional to keep contact with day-goers. The vivid colors and angular spaces in the lab had soothing energy always pulsating into my being. Walking into the lab at night would send a shiver up my back, like I was entering a hidden domain most would never see, a place where brilliant things were happening.

boring? excellent. that means my partitioned, or even compartmentalized mind is operating well.

on the other hand, if you wish our conversations flowed more like this, we should talk.

whether or not we like it
they awaken something within us.

i used to go to bed with music if i couldn’t sleep – would let me focus my thoughts.

kinda the opposite of reading before bed, and going to bed when tired…

reading would definitely force a disconnect – at some point the book gets tossed and you’d pass out.

the music was more continuous – you’d wake up with dead batteries, and the weird feeling of headphones crunched into your ear.

difficult, mentally and realistically to create it.

so i fired up some of the training programs, and yeah, i guess i got lucky on the test… a few seconds behind on all the time tests, and generally a few points behind on all the points tests…

my difficulty is that my ability to decide what to do with myself is very lacking. in anything else, i am a decisionator.
so i’m still working on the whole “pick something and do it”… getting there slowly.

today i did the loop – the 520 across the lake to the city, down the 5, back across the 90, up the 405 to home.
just because. pick something and go, and go i did.

and i also played robots today. unfortunate that the cool ideas i have would require multiple kits…

but sometimes we need to be constrained to innovate.

introduce people into the mix, and they unknowingly introduce complexity and constraints.

just the way it is.

and yet, when we have such freedoms, we are foolish enough to desire the endless plots within plots
that come with close companions.

hypeless blog – tech / design
gummybrain – philosophical discourse, societal pushes

and finally
howtobeinteresting – coming soon…

during our chat i had the odd thought that we were meeting for lunch on a weekday back at school.

what i guess i don’t like about teenah’s vision (a vision that she found appealing, if i remember…) was that this is the way it’s supposed to be. i mean, i’d rather actually stay in touch so that the transit lounge meetup is just like the old times…

…because the old times never really stopped.

for most people anyway, mostly. there are some ( ^_^, not japanese smiley, but catlike-sneakiness smiley) that would best be forgotten.

on that note, my uncle used to call me ryan-cat. does that make any sense at all? like ryan the cool cat maybe? i don’t know.

almost to the point to never leave.

they market that you can feel the soul in their instruments

and from the heft, the balance, it’s true.

but i kinda wish they never became a luxury brand. i mean, the reason einstein wrote with them was because they were common, standard.

nevertheless, one should not be without a great instrument of writing, not matter how digital we do become.

and then you can have highway mixes, stuck in traffic mixes, thinking in my own world mixes. each for its own disc.

i might forgo the direct ipod linkup in favor of always keeping 6 homebrew discs in the changer. except when the new hybrid comes out. that goes in slot one, without saying.

but i said it anyway.

the shortest distance between two points might be a line, but the fastest distance is not.

…they tell me everything

you can be with someone, hell, even surrounded by people and still feel alone.
there’s something that’s more important (sometimes, anyway) than physical touch, contact, presence.
obviously the realness of interaction is much more importance at other times.

in comparison, it’s interesting how winston now thinks (at least, as of 2 years ago?) that input output channels are where our intelligence is embedded.

that means if you have no one interesting to talk to (or you’re not very good at talking to yourself) – you can’t develop your ideas?

i think it helps that it is THE cereal of choice for Cayce Pollard.

unfortunately, i seem to be incapable of enjoying such luxury, even on a day to day basis.

pity.

i am blessed and i am cursed.

i need to unplug.

A Brief History of Credit Cards [Design]

and yet, as i’m about to send links to people, i think to myself

“what have they done to deserve this knowledge through me?”

and i close the e-mail.

i am a bad kid.

something Clicked this weekend. still not sure what, but you know how people (and maybe even some of us) try to develop longer-term plans… but there’s always this level of uncertainty. something inside me snapped, and i think i’ve got it nailed down.

many impatient and greedy personas try to zip through the interim to the endgame, but really, you can’t. everyone wants the quick leap, the low risk super high payoff, but it doesn’t work that way, it just doesn’t work. and why should it? that’s the way of Bullshit.

there are interim steps and interim goals that need to be Seen and Completed.

something that always got me, whether at home or at school, was the different of a series and parallel circuit. seeemed like those concepts carried through my schooling and education (if you can call it that). no wonder it might emerge yet again.

life is not a series circuit. life runs in parallel.
you cannot, you simply cannot choose to focus on one thing at a time
maybe you did in school
maybe you did in college
maybe you thought you could shut everything else away and focus only on one thing, and that’s how you solve it.

you can do things that way, but i suspect there might be trouble.

all things every day we focus and must triage and deal and complete and fix and finish and pay bills and do and maintain.
let any one slip, and it all could dismantle itself nicely and politely, but deconstruct regardless.

or something like that.

* fresh cheese curds must be used within 24 hours to keep their signature “squeak”.
* said cheese curds are excellent in poutine, but not as important as the sauce
* poutine, for those who do not yet know, is a sinful (and by sinful, i mean heart-attack inducing) dish of fries, gravy-sauce and fresh curds of cheese, generally a whitish cheddar i believe.
* vegetarian soap was procured during this same trip.
* more exciting was the bucket of lego quatro i was able to get for my ltitle cousin.
* i am going to train him to become a secret mini ninja. a secret mini lego ninja.

* watched the movie pi. wow. um. yeah. wow.
* The problem with thinking all of the time is that you never sit down and do anything. I think the dude in pi was a bit like that.
* anyone up for a game of Go? with all you asian homeys, someone must play, no?
* not certain which is more odd – experiencing the main character through the film or relating to him

* waiting for LEGO MANIA to call me this week so i can get my mitts on one of their new robot kits. seriously, if you don’t like robots, then maybe you would like Chess For Girls
* It’s a joke people, Chess For Girls is an SNL skit. You have to admit, it makes a convincing saturday morning advertisement.

* Not having cable means not having the Weekenders, and The Emperor’s New School.
* Not having cable also means being able to channel those funds elsewhere.

* Having a porch is fantastic. Having duckies out back is even better.
* Driving across the lake in the middle of the night is awesome.
* I love water, even the virtual kind.

* There’s a certain feeling of accomplishment that comes from doing stuff. It’s oddly fulfilling and reassuring. A nice change from feeling like time has been wasted.
* To secure this feeling, I have been reading, listening, watching, playing, thinking, excercising, driving, writing code.

* “code poet.” yeah right. – but there is something about punching keys in this secret language of ours that’s oddly thrilling. the creation of logical constructs operating in a wholly abstract space, doing things, churning things to spit them out, answering my commands.
* anxiously anticipating bit generations. i heart independent japanese games. you can check it out here (it would help to know japanese, but I don’t know it – try to find videos by clicking on stuff.)
* there’s Utility in importing something a bit rare that allows for the illusion that i know things other people don’t know.

* i should really go to bed instead of typing up all this random crap.

…

wait a minute…”

going for a drive.

i think it’s more that i shy away from saying it.

after all, who would i say it to? it gets old, talking like this all the time

don’t talk about it

do it.

but i guess the problem is…

well, that quite simply, i can’t.

i’m rigged for silent running.

will call is this way – be in touch.

but there’s a store called pink godzilla on the west coast.

what a great name

i mean really

what a great name.

would the biologists / chemists / biochemists please stand up and tell me what the hell those are. amino acids combine to form proteins? then again, i didn’t do so well in bio.

but it reminds me of this comic, a veritable classic.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/11/25

like the extra fluffiness of pillows

cold ice in the ice bucket, before you enter the room

hot towels just after take off

that look you get when you say those things

just-dried flannel pyjamas, rounded off with broken in socks

your meltingly soft nape and back

the right feel of a comforter, that lets it comfort

catching a whiff of that shampoo you use out and about
(when you don’t even know i know it)

the scent of your the soap i use

and the giggle that escapes you in the bestest of moments.

in balance

clarity of vision

clarity of mind

focused intensity

steel stone cold stare of destruction

burn away the clouds of fears

to melt away in a shroud of tears

and yet, sometimes the best thing
for everyone concerned
is to crush it.

oh, and in case it’s not glaringly obvious to you already, self-inflicted guilt is infinitely worse than external guilt.

in c town it was generally cars and/or gunshots.

in b town it was usually people or cars on mem drive.

in home town… yeah, i guess it was the family.

but here, everything is so quiet here.

it’s very peaceful, but it can definitely get to you sometimes.

i definitely see where it can be useful for some people, maybe people who never reset their alarm? i change my times on a daily basis…

why isn’t there (or is there?) an alarm clock that you can set by the amount of time from now that you’d like the alarm to go off?

yes, it’s 11:20 PM, i’d like the alarm to go off in 6 hours please, thank you!

it’s amazing how tiny details, the tinniest details stack up and impact Life.

i FINALLY managed to find chinese takeout… it’s not great, but it’s not bad. and apparently they deliver too. sweeeet.
and it’s funny, cause you’d think you’d find lots of ummmmmm asian and indian food around here, right?
being a Brown Man, and not a White Man I maintain my right to make fun of my own people.

life updates…
i am interflux, as we wait for the great tentacular entity that is the federal govt to decide that they would like to allow me to be employed and contribute my Sheer and Utter Genius ™ to the nation’s gross domestic product.

new dwellings have been found. there is waterrific landscaping in the back, and i am walking distance to both work and the corp gym.

dong, where is my automobile? it will hopefully be mine (on paper, at least) next week.

aloutte, bicyclette… looking into a mountain bike. believe it or not, i used to (a long time ago) be athletic. like, school’s Athlete of the Year athletic… (yes, I was once a closet jock-nerd, it’s embarassing, i know). my bf (that’s BEST friend) pointed out that since leaving home, i haven’t been biking at all, which is basically all we did all summer every year before college.

i have in the area a 14 month nephew. a perfect test subject for my child development experiments. blowing in the eyes is an effective stimulant, and ears work too. for mind control, we walk around, and whatever side i snap my fingers on (left or right of his head), he turns and walks in that direction. HAHAHHAHA. lego will soon be procured. (did you know they make lego quatro in addition to their old “duplo” style now? unfortunately they don’t all fit with duplo blocks (like duplo fit with normal lego)

speaking of lego…. the lego mindstorm nxt kit comes out soon. hellooooo auto-turret defender.

(can you tell i’m hyper?)

today i went driving into the mountains. literally. i looked out and about, and drove in the direction of the mountains, noting the route. i think it was a 4 hour loop around the cascades, and parts of it definitely ruled, but the downtime (ie, transit to the awesome parts) were kinda long. there must be better routes to take…

and to top it off, they sell blue powerade in powder form.

have you heard Joe Satriani’s song “Flying in a Blue Dream” (from album of the same name).

i can mix a drink that tastes like that.

lather, rinse, repeat.

on the other hand, i think everyone whines too much.
after living in my hometown, i don’t think there’s weather anywhere that i’d complain about
(except hot weather)

in other news, wtf.

Sitting in my day care, yard is decopainted
Blessed by the drink
Upon the corner where we’ve seen it
Chased by the planet
Haunted by the medium
Too high to flow toward to break the tedium
Glow from my tv set is blue like neon
Activated the remote I put the BBC on
I’ve seen this city somewhere
I’m looking out for no-one
Pallor in my eye it get blue like neon

Hell is round the corner where i shelter
Isms and schisms we’re living helter skelter
If you believe i deceive then common sense says shall you receive
Let me take you down the corridors of my life
And when you walk, do you walk to your preference
No need to answer till i take further evidence
I seem to need reference to get residence
A reference to your preference to say i’m a good neighbour
I trudge so judge me for my labour
I walk in a bar and immediately I sense danger
You look at me, girl, as if i was some kind of a
A total stranger

Hysterical, ecstatical no matter, call me stags(?)
Have to get a drink, i go to relax
Upon phono, no go zone i go through
Aching aways just to relocate you
Kill us with your fist
Now baby mix it with me
You see me function better when i get approximately
High by my technical flyby
I function better with the sun in my eyes
So goodbye

Take a second of me you beckon i’ll be
And when you’re sad i’ll mourn
And when you tear i’m torn
Take a second of me
Take a second of me
I stand firm for our soil
Lick a rock on foil
So reduce me, seduce me
Dress me up in stussy
Show me and i’ll stick em
Will you be my victim
Take a second of me

Mad over you, mad over me, an analogy
Baby taking up up all of my stationary
Sitting in my daycare, mediocre painted
Colliding with the jam
Until the drink got dated
Window when they go when they go boom
I run inside my room
No sense you can trust me
Climb on my sofa
Roll in a daydream
Spliff make daddy go sleep-a-trip dream

apparently frog legs are supposed to taste like chicken.

to look out onto a scene, and see it escape from one end of vision to the other
such an expanse
taking a quick look me over from afar
imagine now looking back on the way you came
and being able to pick out the tinniest imperfections in your path

we are blessed
and we are cursed

with our powers of retrospection

i mean,
to the point where
i’m having the best day ever
and i mean THE BEST DAY EVER
(really)

i got to watch how people interact with technology for 3 hours
play with the stuff i’d only otherwise read (and maybe even dream) about
my boss gave me cookies
my manager yanked me out of my office to the lounge next door for some competetive snood action, which we played for a good half hour…
and later told me i should go home (at 5:30?!?!?!)
(and did i mention I GOT PAID during all of the above?)

and thus i leave, not forgetting to stop and play some xbox 360, and some practice snood on the way out, carefully noting that I should come in early to start my day off in the massage chair outside my office. i’m walking on a cloud carpet, floating, listening to my jamming tunes, swimming through the swarm of traffic…

…and then you call
and in that… way

unbeknownst to me always
(but that I am ever presently vulnerable to)

you unintentionally
manage to
singlehandedly
turn an otherwise
entirely awesome day

into an

ethereal
beautiful
perfection

i mean seriously, how awesome can you be?
it’s not even fair.

the night is beautiful when i stop to enter it
there’s a day and a night and a day and a night
when you wake up, you’re entrapped in that which is,
that surrounds us, constant, ever unbreakable

but in that half-asleep stupor i escape to each night
with my cast of players, and you and i
i direct the masques, round and round we dance
in silence we bathe in the dreams.

and for the record, the company has the best muzak ever… for me anyway, i thought they stole my ipod at one point… even had some relatively obscure (??) songs… makes you wonder if they can read minds, like them xm commercials…

do you ever wonder if people can read your mind? sometimes i’m thinking something… over dinner with a friend, or in a seminar, or a classroom, or on the subway. and then all of a sudden, there’s a look in her eye, or someone beside me looks at me quickly, or someone on the train looks at me funny, maybe even suspiciously. and i look around, like shit – they reading this? they seeing this?

but you can’t, can you? and that’s prolly best.

heh.

i’ve been contemplating this question for a while, bothering some of you with it, recessing into my dark caverns to contemplate it, and generally living my life not really bothered by it either. as we are now components of western society, our desires are generally unconstrained. that is to say, yes, we might pose some restrictions on our life, the most oft-cited, wrongly considered being finances – but life is a big Systems problem, with relatively few constraints… and every time we reach a certain milestone of sorts, one that forces us to reevaluate, reconsider, retreat – then we reoptimize our solution for that, yes?

many, or most, if not all of us have talked about this in varying threads, in different veins in the past 7 months or so (yes, it really has been that long…) – and it’s true in anything. there’s a natural inertia that keeps us comfortable with stagnating in some aspects of our life, if not all. whether in the people we deal with, our career paths, our location, our perspectives.

what the original post got me thinking on is maybe the optimality of our choices in life as a benchmark for our propensity to seize the day. as perhaps the person with the least to show on my transcript from our college, any single one of you would be hard pressed to convince me (or yourself for that matter) that you got more out of college than i did.

if life is indeed a problem, the first step in the solution – and the step that people really aren’t very good at in general – is the definition of terms. it’s so easy to go through life beleiving that we’re living optimally, considering ourselves, but really isn’t that so much of a facade? Do we really know what we’re doing? Do we know what it is that we hope to accomplish? What is your goal? to relax during retirement? to breed successful offspring? to live a generally unaware existence without any contemplation to purpose?

do we know? do we WANT to know?

of course not, and no again. so the easiest, and for some, the best way – is yes, to optimize the small problems. If we allow ourselves to be THRUST forward each time we finish the small problems, we can proceed through our lives while deftly avoiding these two difficult memes. and on the complete other opposite end, you have people who know, and do want to know – but never do anything about it, never get there – always hold the long term, global maxima in perspective, sidestepping any local and global minima.

needless to say, both are bad – and this is what i have learned in the last 7 months.

reduce. solve. recompose.

it’s the basic tenet of engineering that you deconstruct a problem into parts, and focus on solving each part. when the parts are complete, reconstruct, and the problem is solved. elegant. efficient. not bad at all. the problem with LIFE is that it’s such a large problem, construed over such a (seemingly) long period of time. But we are creatures of the moment. We can’t solve the big problem all at once, but if we take the time to reduce the big problems, then they’re easily compromised. all you have to do is isolate what you want. figure out different ways to get there, do that. and then the key step – figure out what you can (and maybe should) be doing RIGHT NOW.

that’s what we don’t do. that’s what most people don’t do.

the people who solve problems without constraints are the creative class in society – the designers, the artists. they are taught to identify the constraints within which they, or us as a whole operate under, and cleverly remove one or more – thus creating something new. this is the heart of innovation. this is what we have to learn to do – and yes, actually do it. forget the biggest picture goals for a bit – reduce them down. what is just barely beyond your perceived realm of practicality? aim for that. optimize accordingly.

all of a sudden, where there was at first no constraints at all – a beautiful, natural structure falls into place.

if you understood that at all, consider yourself Englightened.
if not, it’s ok, i don’t fully Get It either…

http://marveled.blogspot.com/2006/05/life-is-just-big-systems-problem.html

however, i must to bed now if i hope to not miss the sky train tomorrow.

i welcome any thoughts – but unfortunately due to comment spam, i have to approve them manually, and will not be able to do so during the transcontinental disconnect.

what do we say when we talk to each other
in our heads
opposed to the real world…

…what keeps us from saying them
for real, verbalized – would that you take it with you to your silent death.

things are shaping up to ship out.
things should be shaping up interesting
we’ll see how thing start to play out.

i’m learning to be patient
in all these little games we play
ever waiting
ever watching
making slow advances

steady and sharp.

brush her soft back
with ceremonial eloquence
navel radiating wet essence
tremors warm in my cherub
soaked unreachable orion

bloody warm
interior

weak blond body lay
in side of ocean
donkey balls
here

elliptic tunnels flicker
whirling into the vacuum

the chic chain kite
lost his sizeable ballyhoo
and chewes myself

full conflict occurs to us
ie kitten abduction
intrepid button oaf

first love?
is tough
her deep drama eyes make
quakes stand ever gone

off unjust sparrow
you can scorchingly fall out
softly enter this

vainly flowing uncleanness
leave the cats glow
go face the unreal abyss within
burn feel love sleep push
only I died supernatural

it saves it / updates every few seconds.
supposedly if the two of us play at the same time, we’ll see our words move around. wowowow!

oddly calming.

http://hypeless.net/fridge/

EDIT: If you want, I’d gladly host your own one. somebody already did…
http://www.hypeless.net/prefroshfridge/

nice peter: i think it was the name of the last song that compelled me to pop in their demo cd.
http://www.nicepeter.com/songs/index.html

the song you are looking to download would be “I Quit, You Fat Mother Fucker”