Universa
April 28, 2006 | 12:58 PM
I have recently updated the 'Universa' portion of my site with the newest schematic for the Boblunne area's transport system. For those who haven't yet found out, I have a particular mania for creating maps and 'cultures' for places that do not exist. I've taken this lack of pure sanity to the extreme that I have several planets in mind, each with their own history and geography. I enjoy creating a free-form 'city' and then diagramming its subway and mass transit systems to a style that parallels existing networks.
check it out, here
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Some Alleys less Dark
March 24, 2006 | 10:39 AM
I begin to have a greater sympathy for those "agitators" who feel that modern construction is detrimental to a city. I have always felt a certain attraction to the cleanliness and safety of box dwellings--large apartment towers with gleaming glass and steel. Of late, however, I've been rumaging through the detritus of our local alleyways, finding surprising corners of beauty and personality. Suddenly I mourn the seldom seen brick and timber ramshackle structures, with their greenery and wierd grafiti poking from between the sandwich of industrial lots and extemporaneous parklands (also known as empty lots).
There's a certain strength in poverty, a sensual creativity born of neglect and need that cannot be satisfied in any way by the controlled power and grand management of "commercial property," with its multiple owners and shareholder values (to be uttered in the same tone as 'family values').
And now I find myself looking for a place to lay my head. I am growing increasingly less tolerant of lovely foyers and grand elevator lobbies. The swanky concierge and rental agents really don't make it worthwhile for me to spend that 4,000 dollars each month for my one bedroom box with its view of other boxes. Mind you, the suburbs are completely out of the question, but one wonders sometimes how the city lost its heart. I'm going to suppose that it has to do with some tax advantages of building a structure as apartments, then flipping it en masse to condominiums as soon as some specified term expires--ratchet one up for the attraction of 'wealth' to the city's tax brackets...
There are amazing alleys here, bluxome, tehama, natoma--all South of Market (SOMA), where industrial architecture, with its severity, meets the decay of urban America in a splendid fusion. Metallic siding and potted palms peek from brick rubble left over from 1906, and geraniums grow in front of a grafiti-tagged wall, its message a simple one of an individual seeking meaning as it conveys in every metropole everywhere. It isn't that I desire a return to bucolic, choleric ghettos, but to find "my" space, where the tagging speaks to me, doesn't involve a search through shiny brochures with stock photographed racially non-descript yuppies enjoying their drugs of choice together.
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Wierdness in Plain Villages
March 10, 2006 | 10:04 AM
I have this recurrent, waking dream. I sit, well suited, at a small table at a cafe in the south of France. A cup of the blackest coffee is served to me--it is perfect, limpid and hot in plain white porcelain. My collar is not too tight, and my bright tie reflects the sunshine. The sparkle of the nearby Mediterranean flashes in my eyes.
I gaze upon a stone village, long-ago eclipsed by the larger towns around. Clean and well kept, with colourful stuccoed walls and shutters, the village is dominated by a cool plaza with playing fountain and gnarled old trees.
No angry Algerians here, just delightfully absurd locals--scions of long inbreeding and geographic isolation. They are surprsingly savvy on matters of essential humanity. The baker sweats at the oven, the Dairy's smell longer impacts the cheesemaker. There's an odd old woman who sells lingerie from her livingroom...
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Being, American
December 30, 2005 | 12:44 PM
Boredom,less my ally than constant companion, never exceeds anxiety for my attentions, not to speak of my affections--for they are but affectations to the aspiring pathos of a man trapped in an American being.
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A Boy on an Island Loses his Mind, and Talks about a Boy on another Island
April 15, 2005 | 1:30 AM
There's a new lingo being referred to these days, known as 'mikeybabble.' Mikeybabble refers to the habit of covering awkward silences with seemingly meaningful sweet nothings. Why seemingly? In much the same way sweet nothings are delivered, the mikeybabbler reflects on happinesses of the moment, but the difference is in the nuance, for example: happinesses of the moment might be derived from a laughing observation of some painful moment, or a rememberance of slights past.
The danger in it is that the joy of silence becomes obstructed, and the harm of the past is exacerbated by increasingly hysterical attempts to trivialise similarities in the current moment.
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Spats of Northern Bay Madness
March 14, 2005 | 3:40 AM
On the anniversary of my arrival in the Bay Area, it is appropriate that I should have some reflections to share. As those who follow my irregular blogging will know, I arrived in a shambles of emotional distress, and bloomed to a spring of unforseen bounty.
For the first time I was able to fend for myself financially, and though I had lost much, I also had the opprotunity to purge myself of much that was more burdensome than useful. For the first time I had a place to live that I enjoyed the idea of living in--I felt no pangs of desire to be elsewhere. I could look out of my window and see beauty.
For the most irrational of reasons I felt the need to engage in spite with some, and to engage in love-making with others--both equally unknown to me, and both equally harmed and unaffected by my ministrations. To all those who were stung by my pains, I offer apologies--know that the harm is recognized and atoned for on some ethereal level.
For these months intervening, I have been busy working, sloughing off the addenda of my life, buying new things and throwing them away; reinventing my surroundings, and in the process realizing who I am...
...who I am is now no longer certain. I am free to be whatever I want to be, a thing I had somehow lost sight of in my experiences in the city of hate (Washington, DC). Suddenly all the things I felt were true about me no longer needed to be true, and suddenly I was aware of that fact, like some cliff suddenly opening up at my feet, that could either offer me the refreshingist dive into blue water, or a splattering of my flesh on sharp rock.
Now, sitting in my office high above Market Street, watching the freighters ply the placid bay, I am in wonderment at my ability to take grace for granted. To become so calloused to bright sun, the clean wind, and the flowery perfumes, to ignore the pleasurable company, the enlightnened moods, the bon repastes...and I growl in pointless anger at things that don't have any need to affect me other than my awareness of them. But hasn't that always been the hallmark of who I am since birth--awareness? My parents were always remarking that I noticed much.
So after this year of loneliness, without friends to counsel or console me in any situation, I sit in an office high above Market Street, and ruminate on my home in the middle of a bourgeois village, and my self, growing fatter, wrinklier, and slower with each passing day...and I wonder how it is that I came to this pass. How did I become this person, all the excitement of my youth passing into the careful cynicism of old age, and my view of people diminishing below my lowest expectations, for I am surrounded by the most strange forms--humans living in the land of milk and honey who manage to be the most selfish, ignorant, and dull creations G-d ever dreamed of spawning. My heaven is distorted by people who, surrounded by bouquets of the lovely flowers and crisp junipers and pines must pull out some vile cigarette and puff poison into the air. The whimsy of birds and the chime of metals and the whosh of sailboats is dunned out by the roar of rampant children and the drunkard parents slouching through on some quest for fixations. The intricated mosses and ferns are strewn in the vomit of the gluttonous, the bulbs crushed by the careless, the grasses defiled by herds of oriental tourists agog at the sight of some trinket shop selling mass produced replicas of tawdry structures.
Why this bitterness? What happened to my wonderment? How did it come from a cool shadowed hillside and warm sunshine to some social security motel with rheumatic neighbors? Am I seeing clearly, or have my expectations risen beyond reason, or is my attention to finely honed on what doesn't matter, or, or, or?
And to share this, to share my wonderment and my disappointment--this is too much to ask of a man, and beyond belief for a woman. Will I always have to mumble slightly to myself, perhaps pretending that I am talking to G-d? Will my art sit stacked against my walls, waiting for disaster to destroy it, unseen and unenjoyed? Will I become a North Bay personality, lost in my own vision of a world somehow less beautiful because I am in it?
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Apartment Hunting
February 13, 2005 | 5:22 AM
Swanning about Sutter Street, in some deluded Kerouackian unreality, I delude myself into thinking I am bohemian, and complaining of cold feet, I hope to absorb the enlightened feeling that I am conceited enough to feel that I had lost.
What is the deal that to live well in San Francisco, one must pay three thousand dollars a month, at a minimum?
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Street of Consciousness
September 13, 2004 | 2:23 AM
In the glittering sunshine of a midday Monday, I find myself wandering into the Union Square storefrontage, the glittering merchandise of Valhalla--the technicalities that brought wealth to geeks resurfaced...
...Have I lost myself again, or am I simply drowing in some suffusion of words? You wonder, don't you, what sort of point I am trying to make, all the while missing the wonderment of words, and the allowance of a freer sensation.
I really hate to be bound to meanings, or at least to subservience in chronology, in expectation. I expectorate on it.
Back to Union Square, watching my reflection in the mirror, and wondering at the well-clad, seeing that their style belies a desire not to see them in anything less than their chosen style--afficionado with retail-queens, bitchy trash with fancy rags aboard that heaving disease called carcasse...or is it bitterness?
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Tell Me, Please
August 23, 2004 | 9:02 AM
The weekend was a lovely combination of sunshine, water, sitting at the top of the stairs watching the crowds--sometimes the swarm, sometimes they mill--always they are too many. Away to feed the seagulls, and partake of the rock-balancing at the waterfront. This artist takes the shoreside stones and stackes them in impossible conjunctions so that several are able to stand one upon the other--it is simple and beautiful.
I am somewhat ambivalent about the blog--it strikes me that way often, and I don't want to pander/emulate tradition blogtics, but there it is, I ahve to again question the why...why am I doing this?
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But Fremont is Less Expensive
August 13, 2004 | 7:20 AM
There is simply nothing quite like this city.
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Rental Unreasonable
August 4, 2004 | 7:06 AM
I thought that I was getting tired of the poor parking situation and the relentless hordes of tourists at the weekends, and so I started to check out the listings for apartments in the city.
Yesterday I checked out two separate one-bedroom apartments on Corbett Street, on the rise of the twin peaks. The area has some beautiful corners and crannies, but the places I saw were horrid, half-degenerated hovels with views of their opposing neighbors--and at $1325 one wants a bit better. I might have offered $450 for a more likely rent--but things here are inflated beyond belief, with every realtor in town hoping to net some .com billionaire into a triple the real value rent--not knowing that the .com has gone.
And so I value again my little space in the village, with my views of the trees, and the bay, and the city, and the fountain, and the mountians--I am so very fortunate, and for the sake of some small annoyances, I allowed myself to forget the value of what I have...
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Good Things
July 6, 2004 | 6:55 AM
Home is truly where the heart is. I feel so good, so safe, so sound here; surrounded by my drawings, my music, those little bits of heavenly colour I can see from my window. I often get caught up thinking that I would be better off moving into San Francisco, for the sake of sociability, but when I see the shores of Tiburon dotted with pink and blue above the pine and golden desert sand, the blue and green bay and the blue and white clouds and the silvery fogs; it makes me think it a good thing.
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Amazing Revelations
July 1, 2004 | 6:26 AM
Amazing how money truly makes the world go round. It makes people anxious to please, anxious to be of service, and highly attentive. Funny too how all that 'respect' disappears when the money is gone.
Then there's the respect that is built on appearances--mutual interests or lifestyles; amzing too how quickly that respect dissipates in the face of revelations.
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What Is Love
June 25, 2004 | 2:09 AM
Stolen mercilessly from Groeg:
Never underestimate the ability of a child. They see more than you expect, know more than you think, and understand things clearer in many ways... This way of seeing the world is at the core of what every artist strives to achieve.
The question "What Does Love Mean" was posed to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds:
"Love is that first feeling you feel before all the bad stuff gets in the way." Charlie - age 5"When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love."
Rebecca - age 8"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth."
Billy - age 4"Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other."
Karl - age 5"Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs."
Chrissy - age 6"Love is when someone hurts you. And you get so mad but you don't yell at them because you know it would hurt their feelings."
Samantha - age 6"Love is what makes you smile when you're tired."
Terri - age 4"Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip beforegiving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK."
Danny -age 7"Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing,you still want to be together and you talk more. My mommy and Daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss."
Emily - age 8"Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen."
Bobby - age 5"When you tell someone something bad about yourself and you're scared they won't love you anymore. But then you get surprised because not only do they still love you, they love you even more."
Matthew - age 7"Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday."
Noelle - age 7"Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well."
Tommy - age 6"During my piano recital, I was on a stage and scared. I looked at all the people watching me and saw my daddy waving and smiling. He was the only one doing that. I wasn't scared anymore."
Cindy - age 8"My mommy loves me more than anybody. You don't see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night."
Clare - Age 5"Love is when mommy gives daddy the best piece of chicken."
Elaine - age 5"Love is when mommy sees daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford."
Chris - age 8"Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day."
Mary Ann - age 4"I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones."
Lauren - age 4"I let my big sister pick on me because my Mom says she only picks on me because she loves me. So I pick on my baby sister because I love her."
Bethany - age 4"When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you."
Karen - age 7"Love is when mommy sees daddy on the toilet and she doesn't think it's gross."
Mark - age 6
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Work Creativity not Creation
June 22, 2004 | 11:15 AM
Our days cooling off, in sympathy perhaps with some South American city, we experience a wintry mid summer. With increasing sleep I find my tasks at the work-a-day world somewhat easier to accomplish. With efficiency and flowers I enjoy an environment of cause and effect, and dispense easily with my work-creation prone colleagues.
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Bugs in Time
June 12, 2004 | 10:29 AM
Sitting in Blue Coffee on Ninth Street here in Durham, North Carolina, I begin to stare about me, and find these prosaic items, the clock, the torchon taking on a new importance--as found objects, or as adornments of meaning that are necessary for a venue to have a legitimate aspect.
Somehow, in all this commonality, many, many bugs have died--are they martyrs? Is the clock pointing at them in derision, or to point-up the sensless slaughter at the same time, twice a day?
Maybe there is an aggressive symbiosis between the clock and the torchon, with the clock rudely pointing in fury, and the clock disdainfully shoving dead carcasses at the clock...
...the constant is the dead.
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The Joke Is Always Funnier
June 10, 2004 | 7:20 AM
The terrible thing about being fluent in more than one language is being aware of more than one dull conversation.
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When Is Ethos Naivetee?
June 4, 2004 | 8:35 AM
All aboard, myself as well. Seeing each month's crop of new faces, indicating an improving economy. Our dear Regina, purveyor of oral pleasures, trying desperately to build an atmosphere of positive; her insecurities recognizeable.
The accreted stains of a thousand dripping ice cream cones overlie the eternal stone of these public benchesBayside and sunny, view the gray pallor and flickering crown
of this impenetrable fog shoving its way through the golden gateA great ship, stacked high with the emptied cannisters of our endless desire
fulfilling so many needs, moves effortlessly on the edge of the murkPow! My boat comes flying from the wrack--a golden shimmer of rust
under the fast-flying waters, these salt-burdened airs aloft...Ahoy!Am I facing reality, or facing away? the unreal, or any other prefixated form, cannot help but be real.
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Memorable Weekend
June 1, 2004 | 7:09 AM
Memorial Day weekend was interesting and full. I began with a trip to Vallejo (home of one of my favorite bloggers, WahLee) on Saturday to visit the roller coasters and seven-dollar soda water of Six Flags' 'Marine World.' Arriving early enough to get onto the Medusa without too much wait, I was suitably impressed with the fear-factor. At the Kong though, they upped the ante, with a malfunctioning seat and a shutdown, which involved us not only waiting to get on the ride, but also having to wait to get out of the line crawlers that keep the crowd crowded and cowed for the thirty-minute wait to get on the one-and-a-half minute ride.
By the time I reached the Velocity2 (vertical velocity) it was also out of service...and the crowds were growing, both in girth and in lack of mirth--so I felt it time to exit, which involved getting jostled and jabbed by hordes of fat American and trashy bitches--I left mad. I knew I needed to get it out of my system, and what better than a trip to Ikea?
Actually the weather was/is beautiful to an extraordinary degree, and though I spent too much time watching films, including Peter Jackson's hommage to bowel movements in ancient times, I did have the immense pleasure of seeing Gosford Park.
Altman is an artist of a definitive calibre, and Gosford Park equals or even supercedes Pret-a-porter as an exemplerary example of the satire genre in its subtler form. Eating pizza with pizza on top, and drinking budweiser in bed, watching the glittering bay, and the glittering gold-diggers of Sausalito qualifies as time well-spent indeed.
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The Bagel of Life, Filled
May 28, 2004 | 7:39 AM
There's something to be said for leaving one's badge at home, especially if the reason therefore is a night spent in another's bed. But that isn't the point. Leaving my badge means needing a temporary, which is obtainable through an office that doesn't open until about eight in the morning. Since I arrive rather early to work (as do many in this western town), the waiting necessitated a stop in a nearby cafe, or in this case, bagelry (replete with New York Jew-baiting decorations).
Now here's the point, and laud me to the skies for getting to it less than three paragraphs: Its a lot of fun to watch people. In this town, where every variety of human is represented, where people do seem to rise early (as evidenced by the 7.30AM crowd), where the Irish bloodlines are so clear; it is an adventure to sit and watch.
So my jalapeno and cheddar bagel, with the lox, chives, and egg filling is going well with my extremely black coffee. I enjoy the repast, and watch the worker-ants slogging their way to their cubicles, and await my chance to nestle into mine. The variety is special, and in this very western area, I feel some metaphysical connexion to each and every one.
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Carriage into a Tunnel
May 26, 2004 | 1:01 AM
I saw my reflection in a beveled mirror, it was distorted, I was on a train, and other riders' countenances were there distorted alongside my own. An amused horror at the grotesque pattern of humanity I view; am I inside looking out or outside looking through?
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Ended without A Whimper
May 6, 2004 | 5:47 AM
Another gallant ending to a day which leaves me exhausted. Knowing that tomorrow I will depart on the journey of a definite end, and a longer new beginning is exhausting in its anticipation.
Will I spend five full days behind the steering wheel of a mechanized inconvenience, or will I enjoy an adventure through the vastness of a pan-continental nation? Will I feel the pang of leaving those behind in whom I have invested so much? Or will the freedom of beginning anew assuage the regret for that which has been encapsulated by time痴 passage?
A matron sits before me, bags: Saks Fifth Avenue, Crate and Barrel, Diptyque, others beyond my line of vision or economic ability for recognition. I had an early day, and waiting now I wonder if my bosses are unhappy楊nowing that they don稚 know I come in at 7.30 each morning.
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Strange Days Made Stranger by Strangers
April 21, 2004 | 9:56 AM
No thanks to Ray for making my day...odder.
And I hearken to the memory that he would seek out a scabby one.
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As Personal As Otis
April 16, 2004 | 12:14 PM
Never before had I realized, with such clarity, just how much personality an elevator can have. Sure, I had read of such things, but only as amusing works of fiction, not as a dreary reality...but lo! There are eight elevators in this building's bank, and each maintains its own idiosynchracies.
There's the first south elevator, which closes its doors very slowly, and no matter how many times I push the "door close" button, it takes its own time. The third southern has a tendency to enjoy quick jumps between floors, and will leave your big mac lurching about. The first northern never opens its doors, and remain elusive even in the busiest usage times. Second northern is always an express, and going from any floor to ground level is a hair-raising experience--this lift is a speed demon!
The fourth northern has been relegated to goods--its doors are taller and its shape is duller, but more robust; its mind-numbing duty has left it with buttons apart from the others, and ensonced away from the public. I always feel a desire to get in this one, as an exercise in fairness.
Fourth southern is another lurker, but offtimes are when it will occasionally condescend to raise a duller mind to the twenty-third floor for a coffee...
...and off I go, with my button suitably pushed.
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Stuffing Tacos, Unstuffing Me
April 8, 2004 | 10:46 AM
Brisk morning breezes with only the faintest hint of salt tang invigorate me on my walk down Market Street. Yesterday I ventured to Sausalito, looking for some green, suitable studio where I can bathe and draw in some peace--the grime of San Francisco proper is already getting to me. Sausalito is beautiful, perched on terraces overlooking the bay, and shielded from the Pacific aggression by the Marin highlands. The light is a morning type, and evening falls early, giving the water an aspect of Atlantic, rather than Pacific hues.
At this hour of a weekday Market Street offers a grand catwalk for skaters, tramps, art students, bankers, and secretaries--this is not the exhaustive list, for if I were to sit and catalogue the panoply, the end of the list would happen just as some new 'type' appeared. Boudin bakery gives me a pseudo-Parisian vantage point, where I can sip espresso and watch the crowd, and occasionally be seen by the points of light in these thousands: Which phrase brings me to a point I feel welling up inside me...
...I am a known contrarian. In my eagerness not to be told what to do, I seek to exert my own identity against the backdrop of society. This occasioned a liberal mindset in Washington, the grand dame of Texas, currently. Here I find myself stifled by the liberality, and offended by the tolerance of those who would muzzle intolerance in the name of free speech. Its funny that a city whose bargoers can't smoke and pote simultaneously seem to get glee from flinging their fiberglass filters all over the town, and filling the atmosphere with noxious fumes. Much the same as smoke, is the opinions of the dovish peacenicks, which waft about stiflingly, allowing for no gust of alternative thoughts--even alignment with something--damn tacos from last night, BRB.
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Again Charting A Course
April 5, 2004 | 5:42 AM
Through eyes of fair and balanced perception, I notice the skewed truth that rings truer than that reality we are fed so consistently by the purveyors of inconsistency, a meager meal of mealy mouthed aspirations that leave one needing an aspirin to assuage pounding lobes of oafish dinning (not dining, that's loafish, though).
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Say "Boo-Dan," not "Bo-Deen"
April 2, 2004 | 12:12 PM
It has been rather longer than usual since my last posting, and I feel it necessary to write some of my impressions, lest they get lost in the passage of time--which for me can mean about five minutes.
Sitting in the bakery named Boudin on Market street, shivering in the cold, fogless spring of San Francisco, I wonder about the mental derangements that walk by in steady stream. Why are there so many feeble minded folk? Am I, by my presence, party to it, but unaware? I ask myself if the sea tang blowing over the hill somehow addles the wits with some ionised property...or if the argentine hills, bereft of their wealth, leave some other maleficient ore to magnetize the synapses into choas.
This is a beautiful city, and at the same time filthy. Glittering towers soar above, and shadow the many, many bums that lie in puddles of their own filth before the kiosk McDonald's and Starbuck's outlets. Pavements smoothed by spittle, and rubbed with excrement lead into foyers of hotels grand beyond prior experience, and their mosaic tiles, surviving tremors aplenty, could never for a day stand the ministration of these indigent irish descendants.
It is a funny thing that people in this part of the country seem to need to say things three times before they feel comfortable with having delivered themselves of logic. Any shop or other communication I have, is thrice repeated for the sake of 'making me understand,' I guess. What need is there for this threefold statement?
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Garçon, Je veux aussi une Macaroon
March 25, 2004 | 12:53 PM
Sitting again in the Café de la Presse on Grant, I am confounded by the constructive sounds of the neighboring shop being torn down. I think it is Lucy Liu sitting across from me, but as this is the border with Chinatown, I would be making a gross mistake to approach her.
I've been thinking if PR of late, especially how America both requires better PR, and also requires the true leadership that facilitates positive PR, not just the spin.
Yesterday I took the ferry from Embarcadero to Embarcadero, one being in San Francisco, the other in Oakland--shoring up a square named after Jack London. Walking in the brilliant sunshine, I found a downtown old Oakland that I fear few are aware of; a beautiful, elegant city of palisades and colonnades. Naturally the marina area is fraught with the obligatory sports-themed bars and national franchise bookstores, but it is not ruined for all of that.
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Love Is A Whore, and Your Name Is John
March 19, 2004 | 12:52 PM
A time of contradictions...so much that I had hoped for proved vain, and so much that I would have deemed vanity is proving so much more essential to happiness, that I am bound to suspect my happiness.
Sitting again in ever less pleasant airports, travelling on ever commoner aircraft to ever more similar destinations; I contemplate decreasingly lofty ambitions and solidfying hopes.
Love is a whore, you're named John...
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Early Riser
January 15, 2004 | 6:21 AM
I awoke early this morning, early enough to hear the hum of the highway and the distant screech of railcars on poorly maintained tracks. I looked at the moon, it was a bright orb, hanging insecurely in the sky, accompanied by some few spare stars that peeked around the flying clouds.
One star seemed to shine on me, as if it were emitting some 'ray' of higher power, and I had the good fortune to feel it on my forehead--and I thought to myself, will today be the day that we make contact with 'alien' intelligence?
And almost simultaneously I felt great shame for humanity, that aliens would be greeted by the Bush administration, not the proudest accomplishment of mankind these 200,000 years past.
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Caffè Driade, Harpo Speaking
January 12, 2004 | 4:30 AM
Eww, there are books around me. Heavens! This is the only coffee shop in town with currently operative internet access, which is scary. But such as it is, it allows me to post something, after a traditionally lengthy hiatus.
I found such a magical place this morning. Called Caffè Driade, it is essentially a juke joint, a small woodsy shack off the main road, that has the benefit of a classy shift to espresso shop. There is a magic about it, something so wonderful about the trees and silence about it, even the most egregious cellphonistas couldn't ruin the effect, as if spirits enjoyed hanging out there too.
And so I had the energy to revamp the aquarelle section of my website, not so many new items are there, but the organization and interface are much improved, and I think it will behoove you, my dear visitor, to check it out, by clicking the left hand link titled 'Aquarelle' for a clickable-list of the sections.
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Heaven Can Wait For This Ranting
December 29, 2003 | 8:58 AM
A certain fatigue in the body supresses a tendency to energy in the mind, and yet, at each repression, some ascetic lockbox is infused with a static potential; and a later moment in this relaticity deemed time may see some greater issue, some deft emission that would otherwise be watered-down by elemental poverty (at least in comparison).
Perhaps this hogwash is as good an excuse as any for a lazy and indolent mind, confined by a lack of will power and egged-on in its turpitude by the lack of general acclaim for prior efforts, or is that too a symptom of the senscent sentience?
Forgive the Monday babble, dear rabble, for you might have clicked the link that brought you here expected a parallel transition from the cheerful commonality you peruse of a purpose, and instead were dropped into the quagmire of artistic autism, and find yourself seeking (albeit vainly) erotic stimulation as the least evidence of creativity in the lost paradise of virtual whining.
Or is that a pattest of excuses for the proclivity to procrastinate? Is the creative urge stymied in your own breast, perhaps by the voice of the wind that never blew in the mouth of men? Or the deviance of defiant breasts, their protruberance evidence of gravity's irrelativity and a boon to the bosom of thoughtful people, stymied everywhere?
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (3)
Possession
October 1, 2003 | 8:29 AM
It has just occurred to me that Sex and The City has become what George Lucas would make if he were asked to do the prelude to the Golden Girls. Yawn.
On a side note, am I wierd because I watched the Exorcist for the first time at age 31? Or am I wierd because I really want to be possessed now?
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (11)
Stalking Richard
September 11, 2003 | 7:54 AM
I've been trying much too hard to find Richard...and he's not often 'in.' My guess is that he spends a lot of time reading--how else could he construct such forceful blog entries? So now I begin to feel like a stalker, but it raises another question--is trying to meet a blogger in person bad manners?One of the issues surrounding blogging is anonymity, and that is broached by personal contact, the idea being that personal contact somehow prejudices a person's absolute freedom of expression. So what happens when, like me, a blogger is not anonymous? Is it still rude to try to track them down? Maybe I am just a bit too needy for attention, and that carries beyond the therapeutic circle of blogging.
Digression, I know; but I must point out something I've noticed while sitting these days in Blue Coffee Company--people without fail go outside to make their phone calls! It is such good manners, and I am shocked that it seems to be so universal.
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (1)
Bawdy Dog-Houses
September 10, 2003 | 9:12 AM
I had an odd dream last night. I had adopted a little black dog. It wasn't the sort of dog I would normally choose, nor was its name; 'Mitzi.' For some reason the dog and I were in a bawdy house...
I can pretty much explain the presence of a bawdy house in my dream, and my presence in it; lately I have been obsessed with women (it seems to be seasonal...), it could also have something to do with my current paranoia at being in a large, open house--I need womb, and also on the way to Target to satisfy nesting instincts, I have seen a place called Tom-Cats, which advertises an all-girl staff. I think its quaint.
So anyway I am sitting having a drink, which by the way is reasonable enough, and my little pile of money is fine...but the hostess comes by and offers a special treat for the dog. Fine, the dog would enjoy a treat, so she heads off to get it, muttering that it is the best dog food ever for five-thousand dollars. Okay, is she kidding? The dog better damn enjoy this, and how on earth am I gonna pay for it, since I purposely have a low-limit card with me...will they keep the car, or the dog, or open a credit account for me? The plate arrives, and it is fruits--which coincidentally my parent's terror (dog) loves, he eats grapes and tangerines and loves peanuts (which I love to feed to him right before I leave).
The dream pretty much ends at that level of uncertainty. Thanks to Matt Groening for the imagery of what the inside of a 'bawdy house' looks like, 'cause I have no real idea.
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (6)
I Trusted Truth to be True
September 5, 2003 | 3:20 AM
If I learn no other thing, never call truth true, or was it just never to call?
Truth, carrying weight falls harder when it is doubly propped with falsehood.
I wanted truth to be true, I wanted beauty to be beautiful.
Just as truth true should be, so too should beauty beautiful be.
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (0)
Documentary Evidence of Unreason
August 29, 2003 | 12:47 PM
A colonnade along a busy highway, each column of which offers respite to the traveler. Each column harbours a secret; each can disguise myriad possibilities, and also engender motivations otherwise to be left uncreated.
Trees along the avenue add that element of border, thereby defining the avenue, and giving it a sense of direction. What is a lifeless tarmac is allowed to appear vigorous by virtue of the grasses and rodents, which find shelter in the boles of these trees.
The chairs aligned with the boardroom table give comfort to the delegates, which occasionally occupy them. The occasion is brought about by the will of those who would have the board find a way to work their will, and so the stakeholders find willing hands in the filling of those seats溶ot without reward.
The dots, so carefully, even artfully arranged, to appear random fill a plain page. Yet through the expedient of connecting one dot to another, by a seeming chance association, the pathways that form some complex nexus can be marked-out in deliberate fashion. What a joy to know that wherever the line may be drawn, a new point is always handy. So, seemingly chance associations are made more obvious by proximity謡ould the colonnade be such if the columns were miles apart? Would the boardroom buzz with thoughtful activity if each chair were located in a separate room?
Those railway ties, so common and ignored. Each one placed in such a way that the tracks don't over-cross each other, but connect in a meaningful fashion, allowing the speeding vehicles alight them to pass without harmful concussion. The steel of their fundament reinforced by concrete to keep their parallel exact. These ties, that bond, also maintain separation.
And what of letters, of words, of phrases, of paragraphs輸ll the errata of grammar? Each mechanism designed to keep comprehension comprehensible. A commonality meant to ensure that originality can be disseminated with dispatch. Each letter spaced so, and the order of words, just so預nd spaced likewise regularly. A register system of hierarchy, employable by anarchists to give organized vent to their theories of disorganization. So nimble and useful, these constructs, giving convention to the unique babble that is human thought.
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (0)
The Conceit of Personality
August 29, 2003 | 1:06 AM
January 17, 1998
Taking a thing personally, the responsibility of a grouping. Either the self-righteousness of superiority, or of oppression. And in arguing, not allowing for the certitude of the other. And having, after such intimacy, to return to the civilities of unacquaintedness--insecure, as distance from a subject is not maintained.
Are you enjoying the cruel game of ignorance? In your self-righteousness you feel a deserved remonstrance with all who would cross you. Justice serves revenge for perceived wrongs.
People speak of seizing opportunities and succeeding, but sacrifice is not success. What are the rewards of furthering someone else's creativity? Shall I continue to struggle, fighting a losing battle to maintain winnings that are but the symptoms of loss? Having defiled myself with worldly ambition--I do not remain what I was feigning to fight to be. Is understanding equivalent to control?
How to create a thing bearing no reflection--without reflection a new thing must be created.
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (0)
Knowing Better
August 29, 2003 | 1:04 AM
didn't I know better, but didn't I do it anyway? and knowing better made what of doing? and doing, was it better because it was done? but in a way unconceived-of at the outset--verily developing from nothing. everything is better than the one thing that is worse-- and to be worse, makes it possible for something to be better. knowing better, doing better, being better, seeming better --knowing doling seeming being: understanding
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (0)
Creationism, Simplified
August 28, 2003 | 12:32 PM
So on my walk to work this morning, while listening to Meat Beat Manifesto and Velvet Underground, the following "words" filtered into my consciousness:
--Republipussy
--MiddleclassholeIt might have been the lifting of the Clean Air Act, or it might have been the convoys of equal citizens pushing the commuters to the sides, but something certainly set of my aristocralarm.
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (2)
Lack of Opportunity
August 25, 2003 | 3:20 AM
A lack of opportunity doesn't justify settling for ignominy.
perma-link | suffusions of delusion: (0)
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