My First Meet-Up with Bloggers
September 26, 2008 | 9:18 AM
How to be general, stay general, and know what "general" means--supposing people will actually enjoy generalities...
...I guess my attendance at the local blogger meet-up last night at CBS5's studios in North Beach caused me pause, because I had to wonder--back when I had 30K hits a day, it was flamewar city, but now that I am down to about 250, I am a more 'mature' blogger...
One of my burning questions for other bloggers was whether or not they went back in and edited their content--something I have been doing in spotty fashion since I actually tried to read some of the nonsense I have published. I thought, 'who the hell wants to read angry stuff?' Especially when what I really want to share is a balanced aesthetic.
The resounding answer was that 'no,' bloggers generally leave their thoughts stand--more in a fashion to allow for a look back to a 'then' sensibility--which makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure I want to revisit my personal 'then' (not to be confused with 'zen').
Thank you Brittney for a great party!
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Pregnant Ideas
April 6, 2008 | 11:04 PM
I was so excited to see a spike in traffic to my site after the recent cleaning up I've instituted--I, thinking that is was because of the improvements, had to be disappointed--my excellent traffic reports tell me it is mostly because of people from Indonesia looking up pictures of nude pregnant women...
...yes, I do happen to have published one, but I think that I may be pandering, and it certainly has no socially redeeming value, so I guess self censorship becomes a desirable choice--even though being forced to the choice is a reduction in the power to choose.
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Numb to Irony
February 22, 2008 | 8:05 PM
Some months have passed since I last felt compelled to share any verbiage in this medium. Who listens, who reads, who understands...who cares?
I wonder sometimes whether there is an anomaly in calling the statement "who cares" a question, for it so often takes the form of a definitive statement.
Have I cared? Some months have passed since I felt anything at all, other than the certainty that I was numb. Another irony: Numbness is a feeling.
Currently: I can hear music.
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Tragedy Matches Pleasure
May 4, 2007 | 2:46 PM
In equal measure, these
increase, in magnitude
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Between Need and Desire
November 19, 2006 | 7:57 AM
Identifying the thing that one wants is so often so much more difficult than obtaining it...Identifying one's self is equally more difficult than attaining it.
And when, once found, one learns the nature of these goals, one is again placed--forcibly--on a path of desire, where need is the motivation...or is our modern age completely inculcated in the motivation of desire, creating need?
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Skyscraper Caper
September 12, 2006 | 10:09 AM
From the very faintest beginnings of my memory, I can remember being awed by the skylines of American cities. Perhaps it was a sign that the tedium of long drives across country were about to be broken by traffic, and stimulants for the eyes and ears--knowing that that grey wall seen from afar would resolve itself into a jumbalaya of hustle and bustle, hurly and burly.
Now, in my more refined age, I know that these caves in the sky provide more than simple reprieve from the Eisenhoweresque interstate system. The American city has crime problems, is pricey, but provides wealth, as it takes from the lower orders and redistributes to the caring (for themselves). The city is a great engine for harvesting the American dream and turning it into real, tangible assets for those who know how to operate it.
The ultimate symbol of power is the skyscraper, and the corporation that can dominate the skyline is by extension the dominant corporation. And a corporation is a person, a body. Its cells are the workers who provide its various functions, from imagination to excretion.
But I fear skyscrapers have lost their perspective...no longer the utilitarian-minded housings for a corporate sensibility, they are suddenly being saddled with an expectation of usability--as if their workers would derive life from giving life to the shell. As if the corporation, not satisfied with dominating the skyline, must also bestow a mechanical life to the house as well.
But I am amazed to learn of the power of the smaller, less formidable edifices, the brick and timber warehouses, the lofts, the industrial spaces--the locales of creation, which, for whatever reason, have been relegated to the sidelines in the race to occupy the urban sprawl's heart. I learn of the sensuousness of the alley, the sublime pleasures of the dangerous corner, and the inherent art of decay. And revitalised, these spaces carry a majesty and power that far exceeds glittering towers--because they house the necessity, the creativity, and the knowledge of failure--which is not a loss of hope, but a form of wisdom.
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Reality Anguishes Me
August 7, 2006 | 4:00 PM
Sometimes I wonder if I live in a world of reality. I am consistently anguished by the difference between reality and expectation--of something improved. Reality, though, sometimes seems to be an exercise in disappointment--where reality dives below the level I perceive it to be normally.
People are a problem. It is always shocking to me to realize the level of ignorance, selfishness, and meanness that people contain--it isn't just people's ability to exhibit these manifestations, but the often intrinsic 'self' that is these things. I am incapacitated by my inability to understand how a person can be unreasonable.
Society is even worse, when its apathy and satisfaction lead the larger whole to expect nothing greater from its individual components...well, it is quite impossible to expect better when that expectation marks you as a deviant from society, when the offensive party can call upon a majority to support their offensive.
Ethics are a problem. Ethics are not morality, and ethics are often personal...yet, one wonders...with enough perceptiveness and compassion, would one not be able to formulate an ethical consideration that would benefit the greater good? I know the greater good is a misnomer, but there is an ability on my part to sense some longer-term gain; some benefit above and beyond the satisfaction of immediate desires--why am I so alone in this?
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One and Two Make Three
July 11, 2006 | 2:37 PM
I'd like to study the force of motion on the definition of shape. Shape, defined as "all the geometrical information that is invariant to location, scale and rotation," loses relevance as points along its attendant factors move--especially where that motion varies in time, speed, or perspective.
This interests me greatly, in that two dimensional images gain a three dimensional reality through the consciousness of point--a nominally one dimensional concept.
I've already made some catalogue of relational points, where points in motion compare with points designated non-energetic (static), but that is fraught with difficulties, as a point must always be in motion to be perceived. To explain:
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Literary Vagary
June 27, 2006 | 11:20 AM
How silly of me to think that happiness depends on things, places, or anything else that can be quantified. How trite of me to state, in this public forum, something both personal and clichee simultaneously. If I even have an audience at all, which I rather doubt, it would be most unpleasant to read of my meandering musings in mindsets that have no relevance to reality...what absurdity, this inimitable alliteration, alluding to less than literary vagaries.
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Lebanese Pragmatism
May 10, 2006 | 7:48 AM
The fertility of my imagination is only moderated by the whine of a borderline insanity, threatening constantly to encroach on my reason and make a ridiculous figure out of my staid self.
To dispute on the purposes of Judas Escariot, all the while tracking an unquantifiable human propensity to lose accuracy over time, makes a two-thousand year old manuscript impossible to view with anything approaching certainty...and the concept of kilts intrudes, with their attendant propensity to obtrude:
Cetainly venturing into the connexions between Chinese industrialism and French communism is asking for much...what manufactures will remain in Europe if economics prevail as they are currently interpreted? Will we again have kilts, but maybe something more like this:
I do so enjoy the hystereia of caffeinated thought, but when shared with the otiose personalities that inhabit American suburbs so happily, the grind tends increase the whine of something approaching the edge of its rated capacity.
What luxury to have the ability to simply let go, to glory in the fraught antisociality that is the obvious end result of civility anyway.
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A Test of Something Odd
April 19, 2006 | 1:43 PM
propaganda
sheets
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Issue a Permit
June 18, 2005 | 7:19 PM
"Issue" is at hand--the hand no longer directly manipulates, fashions, generates, or destroys...the hand achieves irrelevance.
"Permit." Irrelevance is the greatest fashion for the modern man.
The power to remit power, to grant power, in terms of the permission granted...taken for it.
Is remission renunciation?
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Thresholds in Reality
May 12, 2005 | 10:12 AM
It occurs to me that a threshhold to reality indicates that reality has a boundary. The perception of a boundary indicates something which can be crossed, yet the question begs asking: "if a boundary to reality is perceived to have been crossed, is it real, or perceived?"
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Flowery and Laconic: A Stream of Thought Damned
September 2, 2004 | 10:39 AM
With a certain amount of personal quietude, I sit and write again--this less publicity-driven venue actually allows me to spend time organizing my thoughts, and does not drive me to invent some sensational garbola to garner 'interest.'
I went wrong in being impatient for feedback, not caring whether it was good or bad feedback, and whether or not I explored ideas that were important to me. What ended up happening is that I wrote about things others were likely concerned with--according to my estimation (based on my own readings).
So with all of this preliminary, I neglect again to actually write about anything. I would normally bit a bit bothered by this, but in view of the eight-hundred or so entries I have made in the last year, I feel somewhat justified in taking a few moments of a lifetime to set a preliminary to the stage--to explain better to those of my 'connecteds' who take the time to read not only the most immediate blog entries, but delve into the mindset that created them--for that, after all, is the cancer of impatience that is not my woe alone. How is that for launching into unwonted prose without provocation?
I am like that. Not only given to flowery language, but also given to a return to laconicity (if that is a usable suffix), even in the same sentence.
I remember how this would prejudice my school papers, which I did have the sense to preface with some snippet of James Joyce (to enhance the supposed stream of consciousness I was feeling). But truth be told, I was just as guilty as Joyce--we both are lazy sods without the strength to mold our wit to a task for the sake of our 'connecteds'...I suppose this is some sense of the egoism both Joyce and I appear to vaunt and vilify simultaneously.
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A Long Time in the Making
August 31, 2004 | 10:18 AM
I have been remiss in so many ways--namely using words. Words are well-known to be pretty poor tools for expressing oneself, and my words are no exception.
In my various incarnations as an online writer, I have delved into skeins that I think may be of interest to some, but often as not, they are uninteresting to me in pursuing, and less interesting to the casual seekers of erotic stimulation--after all, in my cynicism, I find all too many people are trolling not for enlightenment, but for some mode of creativity; the most general of these is sex.
So in trying various shades of personality, some small distillate of me does come through, but I am so much more than the easily limited evidence that I pick and choose for public dissemination.
Thus, I am here, in an anonymous form, without links, without publicity. Perhaps I will be freer by being unknown, and perhaps I will be more interesting, by resolving that distillate.
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Dates and Brazil Nuts
July 7, 2004 | 1:35 AM
As an example of vegetative matter, my brain makes a good case for the invigorating properties of embalming fluid.
There are those of you who would click away from this statement, and those who would wonder what it means.
Damned if I know, but I have some idea that it means something, after all, it is the result of letting my mind go; so, imbued with ideas about a long workday, an exhibition of clarified corpses in Los Angeles (not necessarily the Rethuglicans).
I wanna go home now, this thing called employment, which I value so greatly (especially since the social and economic policies of the current administration seek so plainly to enslave me) is itself sometimes slavish in its feeling.
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Gritsphere Elevated
June 19, 2004 | 1:22 AM
Thank goodness for the Cirius Cybernetics Corporation and its happy verticle people transporters...what would I do if I was lit and didn't know help was on the way.
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A True Wageslave, to Form
June 15, 2004 | 2:43 AM
Why isn't it Friday yet? I worry constantly that I am not on top of my workload, like a hooker; but I spend too much time browsing around for inspiration instead...
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Creations of the Night
October 20, 2003 | 8:56 AM
Maybe creatures of the night have seen too many hollywood-born epics celebrating the enlightened status of those who spend their waking moments in dank bars or caves...what lends better force to the seeming (though unseemly) belief in the hearts of the insomniac that there is some greater glory in shunning the sun?
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The Me Erration
September 11, 2003 | 3:09 AM
I am getting tired of having to say inflammatory things just to get you people to add some input.
Hello!
I'm stuck in boring middle-America and I post artsy things without a comment. Do I have to make one entry on sex or death (or both) to get a string of feedback?
...this is NOT the way I want it, and damn it, it IS all about me.
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Eroism
August 29, 2003 | 12:29 PM
As I consider the sexual segments of this website, it occurs to me that there is a disconnect. The disjunction occurs between being a creature of lust, and one who has found happiness, and satiation in that happiness.
It strikes me as having a great deal to do with the acceptance of reality, versus the drive of fantasy and the improbabilities of possibility. Where I once found myself hoping and wishing for one thing, the availability of another thing has moved my mind from a rough and puerile plane, to one of contentment and insight?knowing that I need so little, and that it is there for me.
To all those who reached this missive in their search for stimulation, I offer an empathic plea: understand the principle of your desires, compass your heart, and allow your true perceptions reign, in that they might speak the truth in your conscience?s ear. The satisfying of need is foremost the knowledge of the true necessity, and the resultant ability to find sustenance.
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Referrers Are from Hell
August 4, 2003 | 10:41 AM
"Slapped Greek Woman," why do people search for these things?
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Refined?
May 19, 2003 | 8:44 AM
Lacking perhaps in graceful refinements, in raw talent, at least, I can provide something...
...but I cannot provide anything to those with no wish to admit a need--those with a fear of weakness, those who have achieved refinement...
...of appearances.
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Ode to odd personalities
May 6, 2003 | 11:32 AM
Being an observer, I am myself somewhat odd; I sense the oddities of people as a passive stimulant, rather than a projection of self. Willpower and objectivity do not go hand in hand, even to the point of manifesting 'unwilling' observers. Unwilling is an exercise of will, however. Thus the only observers truly without personal inflection in the relation, are those that through the agency of their observation, no longer have the power to relate their experience.
If a tree falls in a wood, and someone heard the sound, how might they describe that sound to someone who had not heard it? If a tree falls in a wood, and you ask two people who heard it to describe the sound, would they both describe the same thing? If you required an impartial relation of the experience of hearing the sound, would you rely on a person?
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Sense, Nonsense
May 1, 2003 | 11:58 AM
The issue of sense versus nonsense isn't relative to a particular codec, or axiom. If a thing is essentially nonsense, it can be made sensible by an axiom, but the sense is not essence, it is invented through the expedient of the axiom--where sense, when 'scrambled' through the use of some codec, can be 'renaited' into sense, the thing that was fundamentally nonsense remains so, despite its appearance of sensibility.
The speech of nonsensical persona sounds perfectly sensible, but what it is is nonsense, passed through the filtering axiom of the persona, and takes on the semblance of sense through that expedient, but it is not essentially sensible, where sense, when passed through the scrambler of your average retail queen becomes a scrambled and insensible garble, can be pressed back into sense in its fundament.
The laconic statement: Sophistication in dissemination is not weightier in the pursuit of truth that apparent discontinuity based on ethical principle, where sophistication converts the unethical in fact to the ethical in perception.
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Dating Games and other Serious Concepts
March 4, 2003 | 3:09 AM
Dating, is a funny word for this unreasonable fascination we men seem to have with self-destruction.
As if it weren't bad enough that we have to figure our selves out, but we are desperately seeking someone else who needs to figure themselves out.
The secret to success is boundless and manic egoism. Make someone love you, and care nothing for it--it is the penultimate timeless bond, the ultimate being slavery.
Be not interested, lest you be taken for too interested. The artistry is in the 'aloofistry' (sounds like a fetish involving bath sponges and rubber gloves...)
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