9/24/2005
01. Something - Sam Prekop
02. Fear of Drowning - British Sea Power
03. Parallel or Together - Ted Leo
04. Is This Love? - CYHSY
05. Oh Fine - French Kicks
06. Lives of Crime - Fruit Bats
07. Gideon - My Morning Jacket
08. Farrar, Straus & Girous - Destroyer
09. Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong - Radiohead
10. The Stars & Stripes Forever - Matmos
11. I Felt Your Shape - The Microphones
12. Don't Forget To Breathe (Demo) - Beulah
I'm a mystery wrapped in a connundrum swaddled in a riddle. I'm a belugah whale belched into twelve hurricanes sunk to the bottom of a sea hung out to dry. Where I come from you gotta play it straight. You gotta dress smart, stand tall, and always take your eye off the ball. Where I come from there ain't no bologna, no tussle, no malarky, there ain't no colorful ribbons, no top 40, no brown hullabaloos, there aint no snakes! where I come from. I'm tougher'n nails tipped with dragon poison brewed in hell. I'm longer than forever twice over. I'm susceptible to falling in love.
Currently Listening:
Cripple Crow
By Devendra Banhart
have you ever tried to take one aspect of your life as it is today, and trace it as far back as possible through your memory? admittedly, it's not an easy thing to do. for one, many aspects of our lives at any given stage are only remotely connected to who/what/where we were, say at 3 years old. how many threads of the tapestry of your life are woven from the one end to the (rapidly expanding, sorta ragged, unfinished) end you're at now?
I found one a few days ago.
it's a picture. I just pulled it out from under two large boxes of VHS tapes that I keep under my desk. before that, it was pinned to a stained, blowzy, disarrayed bulletin board I have up on the kitchen counter to give the cockroaches their own little back alley. before that, I think it might have resided on my mother's refridgerator door for quite some time.
in the picture, which you can see in my collection of images on my profile, two children embrace. the little boy in the green pants and snazzy striped shirt is me. the little girl in her daddy's tube socks and a precious lacy dress (with bloomers!) doesn't need to be named. I'm not sure I'd be able to pick her out of a crowd or recognize her at lunch somewhere today.
but I knew her when I wore diapers. I after-schooled at her house my entire kindergarten year. I crushed on her in high school. I saw her occasionally around town during college, always in passing. and now she makes me smile from all the way back at Thanksgiving 1983.
she's a memory, an entity, a thread through almost my entire life. whether she was present in person, or just represented (like in this picture), she's been around since I was two. perhaps what gets me most about that is that how you see us in that picture is probably the closest we ever were. I was never friends with her after kindergarten; I moved to a different school for first grade. then another school for the rest of elementary. we ended up at the same high school, but there was 670 kids in the graduating class, so the chances of us having a single class together out of four years was rather low (also, I suspect we just ended up on different tracks), and we never socialized. sure, I knew her in HS as the girl I hug in the picture, and as a really cute blonde who wouldn't give me the time of day at age 17. but nothing ever came close to that hug.
anyway, I like tracing cracks in asphalt. I'm fond of fractals. and I like remembering between mes; conjuring up the emotions and connections of a self that I am no longer to the me I am now. that cute little girl in her red and white dress is a big connector.
while I'm at it, I'll mention that I have the picture in question available for ranking. I do so only because it's been ranked twice, to the composite score of 4.6. that, in and of itself, is hardly worth mentioning. however, I did mention it to a myspace friend back when the picture had been ranked only once, to a composite score of 4.6. weird.
Currently Listening:
12 Etudes, Op. 10
By Chopin
Performed by Cecile Licad
I get a little giddy when I can tell if a person's unsure of my sexual preference. I think I'm just entertained by the idea of ambiguity.
Currently Listening:
The Glow Pt. 2
By The Microphones
If you've scanned my profile at all, you'll have noticed that I'm currently reading a book entitled "Metamagical Themas" while taking shits. If you didn't know, it's an annotated collection of articles written by Douglas R. Hofstadter for Scientific American back in the late 70's and early 80's. The subtitle of the book provides some context for the content within: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. It's pretty dense reading, stuff written by a really super-dooper smart guy for an intellectually active adult audience.
In other words, it's over my head most of the time. But I make my way slowly, reading and re-reading until I understand what the fuck he's talking about, and I find myself totally enrapt with this guy's thoughts. His brilliance is, well, illuminating. So far one section of the book has been about self-referentiality ("self-referentiality is hard to type!" works better with "self-referentiality"), which quite obviously influenced some earlier posts on this blog. The second section of the book works through perception and people (it's called "Sense and Society"), and in it today I read an article called "World Views In Collision: The Skeptical Inquirer versus the National Enquirer."
This article addresses the issue of knowledge and skepticism, specifically mentioning things like tabloid articles, ESP, and paranormal happenings. At one point it mentions the idea that humans have a really great time of noticing oddmatches, or coincidents. We pick 'em out with ease, as if we were a super-awesome car stereo that can pick up pop stations loud and clear in the middle of nowhere on some lonely interstate. But when you think about it, the probability of hearing one certain continuous pitch of static is essentially the same as hearing a crystal clear broadcast in the long run. What us humans suck at is recognizing how high long-term probabilities of those oddmatches are. As Tyler Durden (maybe, almost--I'm paraphrasing here) said, "on a long enough timeline the survival rate is 0." Everyone dies, there's lots of static on the radio, and weird shit is bound to happen.
So, odd enough, some weird shit happened today. Thing is, it's really only weird because I spent the day reading that damn article (or dozing off with it in my lap) during the slow moments. I should mention that I took it to work with me, so the time spent reading the several-page article was not all on the crapper. Only some. Another result of the article (which I recommend reading to those who poop) is that I am uber-skeptical today, and tempted to accept only very solidly common-sensical things. I'm having a bit of trouble sorting out all of the contributing issues, so I'm going to try to sketch them out here and ask for your input:
1. The first girl.
- Some time ago we start hanging out in a socially neutral setting, and to get to know one another a little bit.
- We hook the intarweb thing up. She knows I'm interested in seeing her in non-socially-neutral settings, and I (naively) only suspect the same of her.
- She accuses me of being Martin, and when I tell her I have no idea what she's talking about she forwards me a love letter that ended up in her mailbox. It's a sappy, head-over-heels, tongue-in-cheek sort of affair that reeks of spam. Unfortunately, Martin's writing style is similar to mine own.
- I guess I finally convince her I'm not Martin (I'm really not), and we hang out on occasion in honest-to-god socially-active situations. I think I might kinda, you know, like her.
- And so on, but things are currently awkward on my end (it could only be because most anything you could think of--like grating cheese or riding a bike or sock drawer reorganizing--is fairly awkward on my end).
2. The Article.
- Keep in mind I've been reading this article all day, and it has me in a skeptical bent. I'm watching out for odd matches, being wary of finding signal in the noise where there isn't one, that sort of thing.
3. The second girl.
- I get a charming message in my MySpace inbox from this second girl, whom I don't know. She's new to Tucson (she spelled it Tuscon, heh)--wait! coincidentally, Girl no. 1 is also new to Tucson! what's going on here?
- Her charming message has all of the ringers of a spam-type situation: no MySpace buddies, pretty skeletal profile.
- In Hofstadter's article there's a paragraph that's a description of you. That is, when you read the paragraph, it describes you just like, oh i don't know, a horoscope describes you. Her profile is like that, in the sense that she seems pretty ideal and the guy she says she's looking for sounds just like what every guy will believe about himself when told the same.
- But I don't get the same bells and whistles I had when I read Martin's love letter. Martin came off like some asshole who would send a love letter to random girls on the intermanet just to make 'em wonder.
- Girl no. 2, given my reading choice for today and a little natural innerneb paranoia, comes off like Girl no. 1 getting ideas from Martin.
- Girl no. 2 proposes to continue to "chat" online via email (oh, that's another thing: her email is spammy-smelling too) and maybe hang out in her initial message. The just friends thing, you know, which is fine by me. Meanwhile, as honest and objective an evaluation as possible hints that that is exactly what Girl no. 1 might want.
Putting all of this together, what I'm left with is a few questions:
1. Is Girl no. 2 really Girl no. 1? They have different pictures, yes, and there's no way I could really be sure based on the evidence currently accumulated; I don't know either near well enough.
1.1 Could Girl no. 1 be both Girl no. 2 and Martin?
2. Do I respond to Girl no. 2 at her word? That's a good question even without the article and Girl no. 1 fuzzing shit up. I'd hate to be taken in by spam and made the fool. I'd also really like to get to know more people in this town. I need friends. Like, tangible ones that'll knock some sense into me when I get paranoid. On the other hand, Girl no. 2 could just be Girl no. 1 offering the same thing as a way to clear up any awkwardness that might afflict our current relationship.
3. Should I take this whole situation in all its glorious paranoia to Girl no. 1, the way she took Martin to me? Like I said, it's awkward even without me bringing up this weird shit.
4. Or should I just make light of it in a post, get drunk, and wait for everyone to read about it? The intarmanaweb shitstorm would be awesome.
I can answer the last one myself, but any input on the other questions or the situation in general would be greatly appreciated. Also, there's one more question from a previous post that I really would like some feedback on, and is sort of related to all this shit:
5. Am I a moron any longer if I recognize and accept the idea that I'm a moron, then factor that information into my action reasoning? Does pre-supposing moronness obviate it?
I think the answers to those last two are "yes" and "no" respectively, but I'd like to hear what you have to say on the topic nonetheless.
Currently Listening:
The Unseen
By Quasimoto
I'm not sure what it bodes stylistically, but I think apologizing for each post in the next is a pretty good way to keep writing here. i never change or remove anything i may indulge every once in a long while by slightly (really, just barely) changing a post a bit later on after i'd "finished" it, but for the most part I like to leave things be and just try to explain away any, um, odd instances of my writing after the fact.
I'll probably also wind up using most posts to set stylistic rules to break, or awkwardly point back at some linguistic quirk i employ (in case you miss it on your own), or to explain everything in fuzzily exacting detail. I'll probably tell you what I plan to do (and how I plan to do it) instead of actually doing it. I'll probably never use simple sentences (there'll always be parenthetical--or break-in urgent--ideas to tack on/plug in). And, oh, the self-referentiality and contradiction will be ridiculous.
anyway, to this post's apology (about the last post): that wasn't really meant to sound like bad poetry (does one ever aim for that though?). I understand that it does. but look, can you really write something expansive and explanatory about a love for small complexity? you just gotta be terse. gotta be terse. be terse. terse. .
Currently Listening:
Home Is In Your Head
By His Name Is Alive
there are mini highlights in every moment, movement, mount. small joys enjoyed in small parts. wonder in the smallest, innermost.
to have miniature highs and monumental lows. to be happy with the random wrinkles, and angry at smooth surfaces for secreting their smallest interesting parts behind a facade. to eat and be digested. disgusted. regurgitated.
grandiose is not expected, except of the sky. (fiery sunset)
 | Currently listening: Holopaw By Holopaw |
