| (no subject) |
[Sep. 1st, 2009|12:19 am] |
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Help. My life stopped being weird. It happened slowly. I can't find my way back. |
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| In Remembrance of the Fallen |
[Jun. 27th, 2009|02:22 pm] |
Dug this old favorite up out of the archives. I, for one, am going to miss the old tart. |
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| look alike |
[Feb. 24th, 2009|11:38 am] |
Looking back through some old comics of mine, I realized how much I look like Early Cuyler from the Squidbillies in my own mind.
( Compare ) |
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| For Your Consideration... |
[Aug. 6th, 2008|07:59 am] |
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What if God is real, and he judges us as a team instead of as individuals? |
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| god's own prototype |
[Jul. 4th, 2008|02:18 am] |
I wrote this line into a song recently:
"You're the fear, the panic and the paranoia / when your face gets redder than the perestroika."
Still got it, kid. Still got it.
Keep an eye out for a myspace link once we get these kick ass tunes out on the web. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 18th, 2008|10:47 pm] |
At the Arraignment
by Debra Spencer
The courtroom walls are bare and the prisoner wears
a plastic bracelet, like in a hospital. Jesus stands beside him.
The bailiff hands the prisoner a clipboard and he puts his
thumbprint on the sheet of white paper. The judge asks,
What is your monthly income? A hundred dollars.
How do you support yourself? As a carpenter, odd jobs.
Where are you living? My friend's garage.
What sort of vehicle do you drive? I take the bus.
How do you plead? Not guilty. The judge sets bail
and a date for the prisoner's trial, calls for the interpreter
so he may speak to the next prisoners.
In a good month I eat, the third one tells him.
In a bad month I break the law.
The judge sighs. The prisoners
are led back to jail with a clink of chains.
Jesus goes with them. More prisoners
are brought before the judge.
Jesus returns and leans against the wall near us,
gazing around the courtroom. The interpreter reads a book.
The bailiff, weighed down by his gun, stands
with arms folded, alert and watchful.
We are only spectators, careful to speak
in low voices. We are so many. If we—make a sound,
the bailiff turns toward us, looking stern.
The judge sets bail and dates for other trials,
bringing his gavel down like a little axe.
Jesus turns to us. If you won't help them, he says
then do this for me. Dress in silks and jewels,
and then go naked. Be stoic, and then be prodigal.
Lead exemplary lives, then go down into prison
and be bound in chains. Which of us has never broken a law?
I died for you-a desperate extravagance, even for me.
If you can't be merciful, at least be bold.
The judge gets up to leave.
The stern bailiff cries, All rise. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 17th, 2007|04:11 pm] |
All that is
is in this small box
this cubic foot or so
Except for a trickle
a drizzle of somethings
falling inward through the void
A poem
A film
A friend's anger
great stones from beyond the world
with many hieroglyphs to decipher
to translate clumsily into my language
So I build these words
like Voyager Probes
I put a sample of everything inside
They will never be found
but they might. |
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| Geppetto Builds an Albatross |
[Sep. 27th, 2007|10:36 pm] |
I've only recently discovered how poor the English language is when it comes to subtlety. I wonder if this is a weakness of all the romantic languages. Chinese uses only a handful of sounds - a few thousand words - with lots of synonyms and shit, so it's necessarily a very subtle tongue. I'm kind of jealous of that. I'm sure that has it's own problems, but oh well.
Especially in the context of romance, it's impossible to convey anything less than undying love with any clarity. Romance has such a vibrant, multi-dimensional quality that just gets glossed over by our Western bias against ephemeral experiences. I'm frustrated that I can't express these complex, intense and rewarding feelings without saying, between the lines, "Let's get married. I'm going to love you forever. I want you to have my children."
Not that there's anything wrong with those statements. Those are good things. But that's not what you feel when you get that first jolt of chemistry with a person. And that's not what you feel when you love someone but are coming to grips with there being no future in it. And so you can never really talk about your feelings with the person that you most want to discuss these things with. You can only commiserate with folks of your own gender, through the strange language of past experience and similar outlook.
Blah. Maybe I should learn Esperanto. |
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| Furry: The Drunkening. |
[Sep. 4th, 2007|02:10 am] |
This clip explains my weekend better than I ever could...
...that said, I should give it a try.
Sam, Matt and I went to Memphis to hang out with Clay and see his band. I immediately got drunk as hell. Drunker, even, than hell. Then we went and crashed a furry convention, as has become something of a tradition for me. I tried to score some coke off these dudes, knowing they couldn't get any. I was right. I ended up ranting about communism to some fat dude while this other guy filmed it. Expect youtube videos aplenty in the coming days.
I blacked out for awhile and woke up in Clay's house. Then we went to another of Clay's gigs. His band is called the Yazoo Shakes, by the way - and they are totally badass. Incredible fucking band. Clay is like this rabid street preacher pounding on the keyboards. Kate makes the band, totally, playing the trumpet and belting out these vocals. These other dudes, Alpha and Taylor are bass and lead guitar respectively - both very talented. And Kate's coworker (a research biologist (hubba hubba)) plays the drums (also hubba hubba) and basically sits around looking hot all the time.
Fuck, what then... right, so I went with Clay to this gig and it was so lame. Like they were playing this parking lot for this place that was just like a mini-mall, but wasn't Flea Market Montgomery. The Yazoo Shakes ruled, of course, but the 'venue' was totally bogus. I use out-dated lingo because you sort of have to to describe this place. It sucked.
Then we lured half of the band back to the Furry convention where I proceeded to get super drunk again. We got stuck in an elevator for about twenty minutes with two guys in fursuits - one of whom pried the doors open to reveal that we were between floors. Someone shouted, "I saw this in a movie! The dude got cut in half!" It was great.
I left the gang in some kind of furry rave where dudes were dancing to a techno remix of some Pink Floyd song. It was fucked up. Then I had a show down with dreaded Con Security. An earlier encounter with this retarded force is quite well documented here:
But this time, it was me and four of these dudes in a hallway and I called them out and they just acted like cowards. Then I was escorted from the premises by hotel security, which is a different lot entirely. The hotel security dudes were real nice about it though, and were asking about the freak show inside and we laughed and laughed about how useless and cowardly those wannabe fascist dorks were. The reason I was accosted, by the way, was for having an open container in their precious artists area. But I mean, the bottle was practically empty by that point, so who cares? And furthermore, how are you supposed to stomach a festival of the debauch like that without a little something toxic in your bloodstream?
I don't know. Anyway, that was my weekend in a nutshell. There was more, I assume, but I don't really remember it. I do know that those four cowards are going to pay for this affront. I am going to put their nuts in a fucking vice.
PS: I'm drunk again if you couldn't tell. I just wish I had pictures. If I turn some up, I'll be sure and post them. |
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| Extrapolation on David Hoffstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop" |
[Aug. 21st, 2007|09:13 am] |
Imagine a very simple computer. Sort of a Turing machine. This machine operates in a way similar to many strings of dominoes, except that the dominoes can also work in reverse - "standing up" the next in the chain if it's already lying down. These strings intersect and loop in on themselves and so on, and this is how it calculates in its cumbersome, simplistic way.
Now say the machine is put to the task of determining whether a number is prime. This could be done in several ways, but to get to the point - there is one string of dominoes leading away from the rest that will only be triggered when the number in question is found to be divisible by the number currently being considered by the machine.
Suppose you put the machine to figuring out whether 641 is a prime number, and suppose an outside observer wanders in without any understanding of your machine to watch the dominoes knock each other around. He might take notice of one of the dominoes in the divisible string and ask, "Why doesn't this domino ever fall?"
You could say, "Because the domino before it hasn't fallen." And that's true, but it sort of misses the point. You could also say, "Because 641 is a prime number," but that's not going to make any sense to him. Both answers are true in their own way, but both miss the target for different reasons. This is because they are answering the same question on completely isolated levels of discourse. One is strictly concerned with the physical interaction of particles while the other is strictly concerned with a high abstraction (namely, the primality of 641).
What's interesting to me about this parable is that it's a perfect example of a system in which an abstraction is the prime mover. Much like how a war might be fought for religious belief or a murder might be caused by jealousy. We human beings are able to translate incredibly elusive concepts like loyalty, love, hatred, fear, desire, etc... into our universe of particles and cold numbers. We are, in a sense, links through which a concept that is wholly locked away from the outside world might suddenly manifest as action - transmuted into energy. Perhaps desire to appeal sexually to others (three steps of abstraction, by my count) leads me to take up exercise.
And then maybe a friend sees me exercising and getting into shape, and there my action has crossed back over - as light striking his eye and a pulse shooting up into his brain - back over into the realm of the soul. It becomes a concept again and my friend reacts, moving his particles around, stomping the dirt, burning calories and transmuting matter into energy and so on.
I'm trying to say something very difficult, so forgive my bumbling around.
The primality of 641 should not, from the perspective of current, reductionist modes of understanding, have any impact whatsoever on the real world. The kind of scientific approach that dismisses free-will (as I have in the past) as an illusion allowing organisms to function in a chain of events that is as static and predetermined via the laws of physics as any string of dominoes - that mode of thinking is done some serious harm by this revelation.
Take the comet that hit Jupiter a few years ago. We detected it and there were articles written about it that went into wide circulation. There was a flurry of activity on our planet as newspapers were printed with first-page stories about the comet. People read those articles. Maybe some of them reread a particularly interesting phrase and ended up coming to a stop-light a few seconds later than they would've otherwise. Scientists calculated down-to-the-second when the collision would take place. Maybe some folks took an interest in the event and forged life-long friendships with others who shared that interest. Maybe two astronomy enthusiasts ran into one another in some park that night and ended up having a child that never would've been born otherwise.
Whether any of these events actually happened is irrelevant next to the their possibility and the certainty that similar events most definitely did take place. That comet, hurtling through the vacuum of space, touching nothing, interacting with nothing, nevertheless affected the universe in very real ways. It (or the concept of it, anyway) changed the direction of particles many millions of miles away. But not through crashing crudely into other particles and sending them bouncing around everywhere - it was through the connectivity of the human mind, translating some abstractions like "comet," "Jupiter," "collision" and "future" into activity that is entirely beyond the kin of mere particles to predetermine.
I don't know. I have to think on this some more. |
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| (those that) mind and matter |
[Aug. 20th, 2007|10:21 pm] |
I'm watching this movie called "Quitting" while sitting in the room where I first slept with my ex.
What depressing shit are you guys doing tonight? |
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| Jokes |
[Jun. 18th, 2007|03:19 pm] |
I like jokes. What follows is an experiment in telling jokes to make new friends/enemies:
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
Some of the jokes are lame, but I like them.
And if at first you don't succeed, try and try again. I'll be adding a link to this post as soon as my latest ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) whatiworetoday post is accepted.
Update: Possibly for a limited time!
I'm happy and fun to talk to again. Friends should message me on AIM: goatunit612. |
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| In Mine #60 There's Blood on the Coal |
[Jun. 17th, 2007|08:47 pm] |
Britiney let me get really excited about the circus, spend money I didn't have on tickets and just generally look forward to seeing Levi again for about three weeks. When the day finally came, I got out of working an overtime shift and rushed home to get a shower. She called to let me know that I couldn't take Levi that night.
I got really upset, so she thought it would be generous of her if she went to the circus with Levi and her mom and met me up there. Now, the seats are numbered and you have to sit where your ticket says, so I was supposed to go up there and see Levi for five minutes, then sit through a fucking circus by myself. Instead, I just gave her the tickets and got a supervised visit with Levi that lasted about five minutes. I gave him a tiny little toy horse that I got for him in Oxford and he tried to ride it while repeating, "Horsey! Horsey! Horsey!" It was very cute.
He seemed to be excited to see me. I got to pick him up and everything, so that was nice. Brit asked if she owed me anything for the tickets, and I said just to call me afterward and let me know if he had a good time.
Then I went to a funeral with Matt and Sam for a teacher they'd had in High School named Doug Walls.
A few hours later, while lying in bed reflecting on my stupidity over expecting Brit to do even one god damn thing that she said she would, I got a text message: "Went well. Thanks."
I was really insulted by this. It's difficult to express why, exactly, without boring you all with the entire list of slights against my dignity of the past few months, but suffice to say that my anger wasn't an over-reaction - though my execution of that anger may have been. Who knows? Anger is a normal step in the process of accepting a great loss, and Britiney's actions lately have forced me to relive my loss over and over again. There's been very little room for healing in all of this, thanks to the constant twisting of the knife that I've endured.
And that concludes the Britiney saga as far as this livejournal is concerned. Love is exactly the crock of shit that I painted it as prior to her entry in my life a year ago, and I am no stronger or wiser for having had the experience of that relationship. I have learned nothing other than the fact that I was more right a year ago than I have been lately, and that's a discouraging discovery to make in your mid-twenties.
Re: Other Shit
I've been listening to the "A Mighty Wind" soundtrack a lot lately, as well as some really great songs by Josh Ritter and Tift Merritt. I also picked up some magazines with sampler CDs today and expect to have some new favorite songs within the next two hours.
Here's a funny story: A few days ago, I helped these cops chase a cow around Crosstown in Tupelo. For those of you not from around here, Crosstown is the intersection of our two major streets. God Bless Mississippi. One of the cops got pissed and threw a rock at the cow. That was the highlight.
As a result of realizing what a lying shithead my ex is, I've suddenly come into a sum of internal tranquility which I intend to fully levy upon the completion of my novel. Progress has slowed considerably in the past month, but I feel really good about everything in spite of that.
I've been completely insane for far too long, which is good since one of the themes of the work is an epidemic of madness in our society. Maybe this whole experience will assist in my attempt to observe, understand, sympathize with and define my generation's outcasts and their totally gay crisis. The gayest crisis in history. That blase, smarmy pacifism which everyone seems to use as a cudgel against having to deal with this world's crueler truths. Against the risk of every being seen as taking life more seriously than it deserves. Against ever being the Jerry Lewis to God's Dean Martin.
There's a dignity in failure, you cocksuckers. There's a nobility in reaching out beyond your grasp. And if it takes a degree of megalomania to get yourself crucified then count me the fuck in.
To quote the other great Marx, "These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others." |
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| another excerpt from my novel |
[May. 13th, 2007|03:45 pm] |
Describing the drive through Northern Tennessee:
The patches of farmland took on the sprawling infinity lent them by vast agricultural industry working in tandem with the black sky. They lost the charm of my grandfather’s soy fields, which followed creeks and ditches and hollers. Where a kid could walk a dirt road littered with animal bones and ancient equipment. There was nothing to discover in those fields. No arrowheads or old, ceramic shards. No weird bugs or oddly shaped stones. No makeshift scarecrows. No collapsed barns jutting out at the edges – the ruins left behind by the long-dead ancients of White America. No abandoned tree forts of grown cousins, stuffed with faded beer cans and water-logged lingerie catalogues. Just row after row of whatever that particular farming interest hoped to convert into capital for the production of more capital, for the production of more capital, ad astra, ad infinitum. |
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| another joke |
[Apr. 29th, 2007|02:45 pm] |
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A hipster walks into a bar and says, "This bar sucks. It's full of hipsters." |
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