i think i think this blog is worth something

last night i dreampt that i was painting a picture of a photograph of a building that had a map of the world painted vertically on it's 4 story facade.

i merged america and europe in my version and left out the atlantic althogether. when i was finished i was very pleased with it, it was dark and imposing and whimsical. and an older authoritarian type came and looked at it over my shoulder and said "you know that's really quite good"

i was happy about this and i pulled a little silver button off of the original that i had been saving, and on the other side it turned out to be a silver nazi vatican coin (worth quite a bit) and underneath it was an even larger nazi vatican coin, and between them was a tiny tiny nazi vatican diamond, which was worth an absolute fucking fortune, as the authoritative figure confirmed.

on using madness to escape tedium

i was walking by the river (on my lunchbreak) and i reached the end where i turn around and walk back but first i stood by the railing and looked down the water at jersey. and the waves in the glinting sunlight danced like bathroom tiles do when you state at them for too long or with tired eyes--dance and shimmer with diagonal lines though ceramic squares.

seeing this i felt my heart surge and i searched the water and new jersey, hoping against hope that some hallucination, some hidden bulge behind my eyes would give me the impetus to fling myself over into the frigid water. not just to fling myself not knowing why, or out of hopelessness, but really a real reason, a reason that made sense to me to come leaping up through my terrified mind and make the plunge essential--something that would make drowning with cold shock or facing the ignomeny of rescue crews either inconsequential or completely without reality to my new understanding.

madness would free me, i thought, free me from the vectors of cause and effect that i know so so well, free me from the future that i build in my mind step by tedious step, bring about a new and more exciting world where my true place is not to be grasped and clung to but already won, floating free on the rise of a flood--rising and not knowing if i will fall, not being able to know.

no such excuse came, of course, and now i'm back at work, staring at this keyboard like a magic eye until the two fields of keys under my two eyes merge to form a new keyboard. the letters on its keys constantly morphing its highlights and shadows more intense it is more 3D and much more real than the original.

Guess what the truth is about Barak Obama

his real family name is osama bin laden. that's right. his real name is OSAMA BIN LADIN! but that was just a coincidence until one of his ancestors went and visited the real osama bin ladin (or should i say, the more imfamous osama) and they became buds.

so anyway when his family came here they changed their name to Osama bin Osama, so that they could fit in better and not be harassed as foreigners (and this was even before 911, mind you). So anyway the kids at school started calling little barak osama bin osama barak o'bammaramalama, because osama bind osama was too long. so then when he was going to go into politics he changes his name to barak o'bama, because he thought it was catchy. and now you know the truth and my point is that unless the democrats can get together behind a good looking southerner like edwards the election is totally up in the air because the yankees will vote for a southerner but the southerners will never vote for a yankee and nobody is voting for O'something-even-a-little-bit-arabic at all.

oh and about schrodinger's cat

the whole controversy of the cat boils down to scientists being shocked that not only do they not know, but there there is no way of knowing, which apparently to them is a novel and disturbing concept. personally, i tend to equate that which i do not know because i am not going to bother to find out, that which no one else knows either, and that which is unknowable. i suppose to the platonic scientist who rejects schrodinger the last option does not exist?

whats the harm in saying that we are going to assume quantum processes to be random until we figure out what causes them (but maybe nothing does)?

i guess my ability to continue thinking with unresolved logical paradoxes in my mind means that i will never be a very good scientist.

and who could be! that chemistry stuff is boring boring boring.

how old people can't understand computers

i recently experienced a full does of the smugness and frustration that comes from the generation gap. a certain superior here at the company asked me for "all the updated electronic sales report for this month". As i have explained to him countless times, this cannot be run as one report (because of the archaic nature of the accounting software "reports", ie, printable text document versions of the data, can only be run in specific ways according to a series of DOS prompts--indeed most accounting programs seem to work this way, but more on this later) so the "report" is actually 3 separate reports, and they don't just print, i have to email them to my gmail account (my office outlook blocks the impersonal emails with attachments that come from the accouting sofrware program, and when i complain to the IT manager he just says, "earthlink sucks, what do you want me to say?") so i have to send them go gmail, hit "view", copy, past into notepad, save as a txt, and email to this certain superior. so anyway he expects that i'll be able to run these three reports immediately, but then, when he asks for a report "of all sales made by all salespeople for all of 2006" he is very appologetic and sorry that he needs it on such sort notice.

but running that report is exactly the fucking same steps as running any ONE of the three that he just seemed to think i could make magically appear out of my ass and why hadn't i sent them over ALREADY...

and so, you see, the problem is that in his mind logically a small ammount of recent data must be easier to fetch than a large amount of old data. lord, he probably is imagining me rummaging through dusty filing cabinets, sweating over missing pieces of paper. but no, you dummy, i just type in the dates and there it all is.

and if any of it's not there it's not MY problem because it's not like i'm the one who entered that stinky old data anyway. plus if i had data entry is so far beneath me now that it's serve you right if i was careless and got it wrong.

On the Merits of Babies and Population Growth

part of my grand theory is that the brain is a meat machine designed like any organism with continuence foremost as it's purpose, and i like to try to relate this to human experience as an underlying cause for our emotions. this also goes the other way, because if this theory is built on anything other than a desire for an understandable grand scheme and wishful thinking it's based on a recognition of the simplest and most discernable things that all cultures have in common, which are provisions about the essentials of life (food, shelter, clothing, etc) and the continuance of life (sex, family, the protection and raising of children).

this has led me to think that, as the concious mind has been developed along the same lines and for the same purposes as what we term instinct, there is no reason to expect a separation between concious motivation and instinct, which could also be subconcious motivation.

and so in the question of what one should be doing, if one leaves onself open to determining this question for onself (a relativistic position, to be sure) one must recognise the possibility that even when trying to merely gain pleasure, repel pain, and tend towards happyness, without any sort of compass other than one's experience to point the way, there may be underlying directions taht we can predict the path of due to our knowledge of their development.

This causes me to largely reject those impulses which society has an interest in promoting, such as moral imperatives. i do not know that these bring happyness to me because i would know them due to outside pressure even if they did not. certainly they should not be openly defied but they should prove ultimately unsatisfactory as an end in themselves to a skeptical observer (true, the acceptance by society, one's peers and family that can only come about through observance of moral codes is laudable and one of the essential goals of the human animal, but the same effect can be achieved through mere observance of moral custom rather than deep seated belief and arrangement of one's life path according to these principles).

Therefore, due to my understanding of my connections with other peole, indeed, my intractible enmeshment with their minds in this web, as a mere contrivance for the preservation of that which my conciousness, also, has been designed to continue (coded in DNA), i must conclude, assuming that any happyness is to be obtained by alowing my being to pursue the purpose that surely it was designed (designed by the creation of similar models and then the process of elimination) to pursue, i should indeed try to have as many children as possible while maintaining standing in my social sphere and the necessary resources to raise them in fulfillment of my own likewise instinctive attachment to them.

immensely powerful attachment, i should also mention, that cannot be experienced otherwise.

and therefore it seems to me that the malayse of comparatively wealthy life might just be due to spending too much time in the aquisition of resources and their subsequent dispersal (oh shallow, empty passtime!) rather than in the creation of variations of our supreme reason for being.

therefore i say let us see how many this eath can hold and then send them forth into the stars there to multiply until god himself comes to stop us.

and i think that those european countries that have declining populations is that saddest thing i've ever heard and i hope for everyone's sake that it's due to the migration of the young rather than a genuine lack of interest in life.

change of habitation leads to dreaming

i had my new apartment dream last night. i always have a nightmare about my old apartment when i move to a new apartment. i am sure that i had one when i was living in baltimore and i moved out of g-------'s house to my own place, but i was too stoned all the time back then to remember it now. anyway living in his slobbish house with his dog was nightmare enough, although he is a good drinking buddy.

and when i moved to sunset park i had a nightmare in which i dreampt that i had in fact moved out of that newly renovated, high ceilinged new york apartment TO the low ceilinged, funky, ramshackle baltimore apartment (that was nevertheless larger and half the price, even though it didn't have a bathroom sink)--and i stumbled around in the mess and dust holding my head and saying "what have i done, why did i do that".

so last night i dreampt that instead of moving to my nicer park slope apartment i had in fact moved to a similar apartment with a roommate, who was John that lived next to me in River dorm senior year. now john isn't a bad guy but i can't stand roommates and having to sleep in the same room as someone every day is so horrible, but in the dream i had just put down a large broker's fee to get this apartment and, apparently, share it with him. our beds were sparated by a low wall.

i was looking over his shoulder as he was showing me a computer game and then suddenly i thought that i wanted to jerk off, so i went to the other side of the wall and realised that it was only a low wall and not a separate room and that there was no way i could jerk off there with him right on the other side. so i went to the bathroom but it was a public bathroom. so i went and stood by the window and held my head and said "what have i done, i'll have to move and waste so much money"

and when i woke up i was really relieved that none of it was true.

on how i am immortal

all that is came into being when i first felt it

and it will go away when i don't

and all that was to be

won't.

(so don't bother buying a funeral plot)

if you're waiting on the apocalypse...

Our world will not end for millions of years (never).

it will just grind on the same way it has been doing,

more people

more people

more people.

animal "rights"

animals don't have freakin rights.

not like people do. at least to the extent that even people can be said to "have" rights. rights are only had if they are recognised, like: legally.

now unbridled cruelty in the streets in public view would obviously be a bad thing, and it is, rightly so, illegal.

and i'm not saying that animals don't think or don't feel pain or don't recognise the horrible things that are happening to them (they recognise them about as much as you would if you had been separated from your mother at a tender age and then raised in a bare room and never spoke or talked to anyone until you were fat enough to be eaten--i don't think you would be able to articulate your distress very well, and needless to say you wouldn't have anything to compare it to... but i have a feeling you would be perfectly distressed the whole time anyway.)

my point is that this is a cultural decision and that societies a lot nicer than ours have been a lot crueler to animals. the pastoral ideal that is so prevalent to our way of thinking, after all, involved the daily and wholesale slaughter of animals by the very men, women and even children who had raised them from infancy and fed and cared for them every day of their lives.

our lack of contact with animal butchery is due to the increasing specialization of our society, and it presents us with a moral dilemma.

This dilemma would disappear, however, with use. if you were hungry and had a live pig or chicken, you would kill it and eat it and

"it might bother you at first but then you would get over it"

and killing, bleeding, skinning, butchering and eating things with your bare hands would seem normal after a short while.

another point is that all those minks that got raised to make a fur coat wouldn't have been running around in the courtyside being dignified and carefree if they hadn't been killed for their fur, they would never have been born--the countryside already has all the minks it can support. so at least those minks got to be alive for a bit, right?

by all accounts there is a spirit in the sky

By all accounts there is a spirit in the sky

In the sky,
In the sky!

That's what you see whe-en you die

When ya die,
When ya die!

Oh it's, allabout that spirit in the sky...


or at least under the earth, inside of you, or in a neaby dimension-- at the very least, there IS one. religion it is so fundamental a part of human society (and all human societies have it) that even atheism is widely considered a religious affiliation, and the statement there is no god does require a leap of faith to grant it certainty. I do not think that this excuses the agnostics from religious activity or adherence, because the assertion that there is even a question that could be answered, or even that it could not be answered, requires faith for it's coherence.

by faith i mean having intellectual/emotional certainty that defies proof.

so for example if we believe that the X number of grams that a body looses when it expires is due to the departure of the soul and then find out that this is not the case it is not the existence of the soul that is disproven but rather the corporeality of the soul.

the human mind is a machine designed to make sense of stimuli and leap to safe conclusions. god is our attempt to make sense of stimuli too wide and too much for us to make sense of, so wide and too much that any plausible conclusion we could leap to would have no bearing whatsoever on the human condition.

Still, we cannot help but try for that is our nature.

Sometimes and some people jump to conclusions that are useful for other reasons: do not kill, do not adulterate, etc., which are especially useful when disemminated through the community created by the cultural unification that common religion provides.

because we use our (non)sense of religion to define and draw conclusions about the world as a totality, sometimes people think that they will not be able to make sense of the world without their religion, or that if their religion changes or is challenged the sense of the world will collapse. This is not the case, and apart from the behavioural proscriptions that a given religion advocates there will be no change whatsoever if a religion is changed or collapses.

This is because religion, being not-real, cannot compete (except in examples which are exceptions that prove the rule: martyrs and saints) with the concerns of real existence. religion is a comparatively weak instinct when compared to eating and reproducing, as it's constant battle with these shows--even with the full blessing of society and culture, relition is still notoriously bad at enforcing it's prohibitions against inclinations "through faith alone".

Religion as a cultural entity is extemely good at modulating itself around the things that we were going to do anyway. it does this because if it did not or could not it would cease to exist and be re-invented by our continuing need for it.

but the truth is that when you die your brain stops working and you don't think any more :p

on drinking coffe and putting off eating

it makes me see things. the edges of objects are more easily burned into my eye and shift and float when i look away. time also slips by very fast. very very fast. have to be careful to remember to go out to lunch before 3 (coming back from lunch at 4 looks so shabby). after eating day slows down again, becomes very boring again. also, wouldn't want to work too hard. also, wouldn't want to be obviously so much smarter than coworkers. hungry = stupid = humble = interested = 5:30pm allready.

Subway Optimism

is totally disgusting. all of you who willfully underestimate your subway transit time, and it's everyone, are... very very bad. you know you do it. i have had confessions. if you're doing it because you're aftaid your friends won't wait for you if you tell them the dismal truth that's one thing, but if you're just deceiving yourself and everyone else for the hell of it you need to FUCKING SHAPE UP. please see the below table for your reference.

SUBWAY PESSIMIST TIMETABLE:

WEEKDAY / WEEKEND / LATE NIGHT times (in minuites)*

UWS to/from lower manhattan:
45 / 60 / 90

Williamsburg to/from lower manhattan:
20 - 45 / 30 - 60 / 50 - 90

Bed Stuy to/from Anywhere:
60 / 75 / 120

Crown Heights to/from the UWS:
75 / 90 / 150

Sunset Park/Park Slope to/from the UWS:
80 / 90 / 120

Sunset Park/Park Slope to/from Wburg:
70 / 80 / 120

UES to/from Lower Manhattan:
30 / 45 / 60

UES to/from Sunset Park/Park Slope:
65 / 80 / 100

Bushwick to/from anywhere:
60 / 100 / 150**

I will be happy to porvide more times upon request.

*Please note that these times do include travel time to/from the subway station, as well as time spent waiting on the platform. As such, they can be considered somewhat on the outside, but certainly not the maximum. After all, the subway could never come until you had already died down there.

**If you think that any of the preceeding times are outrageous, I don't want to hear about it, and I also don't want to hear about the one time when the subway was pulling into the station just as you stepped on and it took you 15 min until you stepped off at your destination, etc. You are a foolish optimist and you can be late all the time for all I care.

Please also note that if you are traveling by bike it will take you only 20 min to get anywhere from anywhere, except to Coney Island, which takes an hour and a half, and Breezy Point, which takes 2 1/2 hours. Hooray for biking.

Sales

i've been working with salesmen for some time now, and hard-core salesmen, too, and it occurs to me that although i know their ways very well some of you may not. i am going to attempt to convey, therefore, how thuroghly despicable actions can be carried out by person who are not, in themselves, despicable.

do not be fooled. the smile in the eyes of the sales person is genuine, and so is his or her charm and ebullient hope to help you. the value of his or her offer, however, is most certainly trash if it requires someone as talented and aggressive as the person you are talking to to pitch it.

the first thing to understand is that sales people, or rather, people who are good at selling things, are much more charismatic than you or i and so are able to get away with much more. i think that this gives them a warped sense of consequenses and of truth. they are specialists at convincing others of things, and they also have a great facility for either not knowing the exact truth themselves or at least not being able to figure out what it is. icorrigible optimism is also a great sales tool, so these also tend to be the type of people who ignore bad indications at all cost, just like you fools who continuosly underestimate subway transit times.

this frees them from having to specifically lie most of the time. they don't know anything, and if anyone does know they can convince them that they are wrong, so their lack of knowledge gets spread as though it really were something, and then it starts to really seem true.

for example: my hypothetical company offers some crappy service. I'm the salesman/woman for my company. I just don't have it in me to really asses the service and determine it to be crappy. even if it is obviously more expensive than the superior product of a competitor, I will be likely to say to myself that everyone really would be better off buying from me because "I provice better customer service anyway" or "it will be more valuable for them to develop a relationship with my company in the long run". these are the kind of vague statements that i am certainly not going to have the patience or pessimistic knack to recognise as either boldfaced lies or pitifully empty hopes.

and its a good thing that i don't, because that would definitely hurt my chances of making a sale. the kind of people who are good at poking holes in company services and policies never make it as sales people. rubes can smell cynicism, see it in the eyes.

given this protectively un-cynical personality to provide a basis of deeply fuzzy morality, combined with the pressure and perception of victimization that comes from living on commision (living, "on a smile and a shoeshine" [death of a salesman]) your typical sales person is likely to be thorougly not-evil, and yet still engage in what someone else might label vicious deception in order to get people to give up their $. in companies that employ salespeople but are not run by them (most business owners are former salespeople--being able to convince people to give you money is a big advantage to have if you own a business), this tendancy is encouraged to the fullest extent possible in much the same way that normally friendly dogs are teased and starved so that they become vicious.

An Addendum to that Waking Dream

Oh, sometimes there is snow on the ground in a white blanket and the trees are black but not in a bad way because their branches are covered in snow.

And yet the sky is red, glowing brilliant orangish red. which is really just novel and it looks so nice with the white snow and the woods and the black lake that does not ripple and does not reflect. But the snow does have a red shine where it rounds on the branches of the trees.

it recalls when i was in the boy scouts and they had us all in the planetarium and the guy who was showing us the planetarium because this was a private show (i think we were sleeping over, "camping", in the science center) started playing around with that great spinning armned satellite of a projector they have there and he made the whole dome glow red and he said:

"If you ever step out your front door and see a sky like this RUN, no, or, I guess you just shouldn't go outside, or, well, call your parents.... hmm... I guess it doesn't matter what you do because it's the nucular apocalypse or something... well, lets just hope none of us ever see a sky like this."

and maybe that was also what i was thinking of when i was on a long walk down the beach in the middle of the night and i looked out over the dark ocean to the horizon and was shocked and horrified to see a great immense blood red glowing ball perched there just above the surface of the sea looking like nothing so much as an optical illusion or a hallucination. and i thought that i had better sit down in case i was feeling dizzy because i was obviously either totally fucked up or that was a mushroom cloud and europe had exploded or a ship had a bomb dropped on it or maybe a volcano erupted... in the middle of the ocean... but it wasn't moving, and i wasn't dizzy, so i figured it was a ship with a red circular sail the size of a city and a huge spotlight on it but that was rediculous and so i just kept walking and it wasn't until i looked back out and saw that it was a little higher and oranger that i realized that it was, of course, the moon.

Between the Towers were Vast Parks

or, i hate cars so much

i remember i saw this model city designed by corbusier or some such fellow and it was of giant highrises that looked like + from the air and they were a fair distance apart from each other and between them was vast parkland and under them were railways that also connected them to the nearby city.

but of course amerians don't like to live so close to their neighbors.

so then anyway you would have an aboveground raiway connecting the cities.

so you could go from your apartment in the middle of a park or a wood and get all the way to your friend's apartment in LA or new orleans or DC or toronto without ever even going outside or needing to be sober or needing to take your eyes off your feet or your book or even needing to be able to see or to have hands, for that matter.

but if you did go outside the air would be clean and there wouldn't be any monstrous highways to block your way.

and in the cities all the traffic would be either trucks carrying goods from train to ship to factory or taxis or public busses carrying people to and from the railstops which are all over the place anyway.

and the gov't would have to pay for all this and there would be a tax hike and if you don't like it i'll throw you in jail.

and if you're rich and try to leave the country to avoid paying your taxes i'll make my secret service make you disappear but really you'll be in a bunker getting cold water dumped on your head, just like in europe.

Another Vision like a Waking Dream

is when i picture a wire that is a broken, bent guitar string, that sproings forward and cuts my field of vision to ribbons out from the center like a broken mirror. it turns black, it turns red, the shards peel away, and i'm moving down a corridor like in that cruddy "3d maze" screensaver that's based on the DOOM graphics engine, only slower, the floor and cieling are pixilated tan stone but the walls from knee height up are windows on either side, with an identical window at the end of the corridor. I know that i'm in a funny spit of building on stilts jutting out from a larger structure. What i see outside the windows varies according to my mood, or rather, the color of it varies because the landscape is always the same. today it's dark brown mud leading to black and grey trees with a pure white overcast sky, which means i'm in a pretty good mood. in the very best mood i've ever seen it in the woods were lush and green proceeded by green grass with a deep blue sky and scattered white clouds. the sun was shining. if i walk to the end of the corridor and look out i can see the shore of a lake. on that day the water was blue and rippling, today the water would be black, depite the white sky. other times black woods are preceeded by red mud with a grey and boiling sky, which isn't a very good mood. one time i leapt out of the window, through dark and blood-caked pitted ground to the edge of black water reflecting flame beneath a burning red sky; entered dark and howling woods, wallowed in depression and anger. (another time i relaxed on the green hillside above a shimmering lake, indulged in laughing selfish joy.)

a story for you

there was a bird, and it was in a tree, and the bird fell out of the tree, dead.

and then a little boy picked it up, and was confused, and brought it to his mother, and she said:

"oh my god i can't believe you picked that up it's FILTHY put it in the garbage can, no, put it in this bag and then put it in the garbage can right now and don't touch anything and don't put your hands in your mouth and then we're going to have to wash your hands really well, what a hassle, and don't pick up dead things any more if you see something dead in the yard tell your father. but really you're going to put that in the garbage now, right?"

and that was how he learned about death.

That's my Chopper

which in my minds eye i seem to be holding an immense weapon. it's shaped like this:

XXXXXXXXX
X.................. X
X.................. X
X.................. X
X ..................X
X.................. X
XXXXXXXXX
XX
XX
XX
XX
XX
XX
XX
XX

now that i look at it looks just like the letter p, but that's not the point. the point is that it's made out of steel or iron (depending on where we are in history) and the handle is about 3', topped with a rectangular 1/5' blade. it's very very heavy, and i could cut you in half with it. i see it as a red dotted line (because it's not really there), crossed in front of me or in a sling on my back.

I think it symbolises hostility, or else superiority, or else fear, or else hopeless dorkyness.

when i was in college i had a similar vision, but it was of three long transparent geometricly paneled triangles or spikes coming sideways out my my head. i could use these spikes like triple chopsticks to pick up transparent balls and fling them around, and the class i was sitting in had no idea. i had a tangible grasp on the concepts being discussed, while they were just flapping their gums, you see.

speaker

the speaker cone is certainly one of the most unfortunate inventions of the modern age. before we learned how to reproduce canned airwaves with vibrating paper, the only source of music was instruments and singing. As a result, nearly all educated persons could read a write music, play the piano, and probably the violin. drinking parties devolved into drunken song with great regularity, and no gathering of friends over cocktails in a sitting room was complete without at least a song or two. now, however, horrid music produced to the tastes of the fat masses follows us wherever we go, learning to play instruments is generally regarded as a complete waste of time, and the only drunkend singing that still exists is relegated to those same rancid pop songs though karaoke (another unfortunate invention). There really should be a law against those horrific car sounds systems that shake the ground and rattle the windows of buildings as they pass, too. some day i'm going to get a bb gun or at least some water balloons and let those fuckers reap what they sow (which is hate).

so excited to be speaking with you now

my mother said to me that she read that the parents of a young man who killed himself said that the most important thing parents can teach, must teach, their children, is optimism. she asked me, with tears almost just welling in her eyes as she thought of that dead young man, or perhaps of me dead, a suicide, hadn't she taught me optimism? and i said no, mom, you told me to always hope for the best but expect the worst and that is what i have always done. and she said oh! well this guy that i read said that you have to know that everything is going to turn out all right in the end and I said well it's too late now.