Ecology

class User; has_many :issues # hehe

It's usually difficult to focus on the tiny passions, but it seems that I have prematurely achieved a life of contentedness and abundant leisure and that I'll be able to hold onto it for some time. I have always been a computer enthusiast and probably should have succumbed to that current earlier in life, but, well, you know, causality and serendipity and all of that other bad spec fic shit; now I have my girls and a happiness that I wasn't even seeking. I also have this job where I sit in front of a pair of computer screens for hours on end and write in a language that I learned last summer (recently, more in a language that I learned last month) and I fucking love it. I get paid to play Lego for a few hours every day, it's just that the blocks are significantly more complex and completely intangible. It provides such an intense level of focus that it is almost meditative at times. I have immersed myself in it so much that it is actually somewhat difficult to type in this text area; I continually find myself wanting to go kk up a couple lines or hhhh back to the previous word to fix something or jj escape to command mode. Above all, however, the most useful tool in my budding career is the environment that I work in. I went a bit hardcore and chose to learn how to use an industrial strength window manager called XMonad, which is configured directly in Haskell source and recompiled (this, in itself is a challenge as Haskell is a somewhat obscure functional programming language, and as such is non-linear in nature and difficult to learn - even now, I don't know it very well). It has become my most cherished tiny passion. My xmonad.hs configuration file has become something like a bonzai tree to me over the last few years. Rare is the day that I don't tweak something. Some days, I will take the day off to wade through it while perusing the API docs, trimming here, refactoring there. In it, there are subtleties of code that I genuinely find beautiful even before the consideration of what functionality they provide.

This single line, for example:

doTrans i = ask >>= \w -> liftX (setOpacity w i) >> idHook

The elegant solution to a long-standing niggling problem that this line of code represents is powerful enough to actually carry emotional weight for me. This one line allows the window manager to set the opacity of a window based on whatever window property flag that I want. It makes windows transparent. Not the most powerful example from a pragmatic standpoint, but to automatically set the opacity of windows as they are created without the need of an external utility is unheard of (XMonad is a tiling window manager, so without transparency, there is no concept of 'wallpaper' because you would never be able to see it and even programmers need pleasing aesthetics). There are many other solutions and I toiled away trying to get them all to work with moderate success, but the issue remained effectively unresolved for quite some time before I worked out this solution.

Another common task in the configuration file of every single XMonad user is window attribute matching. The built-in boolean comparison operators are, logically, equal to (=?) and not equal to (=!). Exact match is inflexible, so I wrote these:

q ~? x = fmap (x `isInfixOf`) q     -- includes?
q !? x = fmap (not . isInfixOf x) q -- excludes?
q ^? x = fmap (x `isPrefixOf`) q    -- has head?
q ?$ x = fmap (x `isSuffixOf`) q    -- has tail?

Native partial matching! It was a small revolution, but a powerful one. There are so many simple little efficiencies that I've worked in over time, and I am quietly proud of every single one of them. The file as a whole is something of a sacred treasure as it defines an environment that I have nurtured and improved for years. There are dated copies of it strewn throughout my various backup drives and file systems. There are obsolete versions of it that I dig through and pore over periodically to regain a bit functionality that I gave up in some underlying system changeover at some point. I don't get many opportunities to express the level of satisfaction that I get from working with code as I still refuse to have interactions with entities that I don't have a meatspace connection to, but I have the feeling that you guys will get it to some degree simply because you know what I was before I became enthralled with programming. Though, now, having written that out, I'm not sure what insights into my current affairs that would really afford you. Whatever. This is what I'm into now. Taye diggs.

I thought this might be helpful to visualize some of what the code does.

The title is an actual line from my client's code. I can't help but giggle every time I see it, though not because of the joke itself, but because of the image of the other guy on the project sitting at his computer giggling at it enough to have added the comment.

What has it got in its pocketses?

My advisor's Question: What do you see your thesis as doing?

I had an idea going into this thesis of providing some kind of ecological epiphany through a study of the labor of 'developed' commercial agriculturalists and their attendant societies/cultures/environments and, if I got lucky, to pull a fast one on old home town and old alma mater at once: lighting matches in the crawlspace where the tails of all the objects lead to things in dusty obscurity I vowed I'd bring back an image of the beast to the village. I lit out with with a determined curiosity, a shield covered in Said's writings on the crucial impact of positionality and my righteous library of ethnoecology texts into the maw of my matrilineal community and almost immediately realized some quantitative mistakes I'd made when estimating the weight of the project. 

While some of the interactions I would eventually have benefitted from my historical familial connectedness to the place, I was unable to secure any kind of sustained (cymbal!) agricultural work. My attempts to gain entry into the exciting field of commercial livestock production were complete failures. The farmers I spoke with were on autopilot, watching their crops roast in one of the driest summers on record, and readying their fleets to reap it. I found the working world and the workspace were more or less secreted, highly regimented spaces for interactions. Cultural anthropology in most cases elicits a group of responses similar to those I receive from New Yorkers when I say I'm from Iowa: "Ohio?"; "Idaho?": "Oh, you like diggin' up bones huh?"; "Wow! Hey, you ever read Jared Diamond? What tribe do you study?". Thus, I found myself more or less afloat. Lots of first dates and brief run-ins with people I knew growing up, but no protracted conversations, no admission. And I couldn't push it without alienating . No study, no researcher that isn't probing to cure some malady, or subtly vivisecting their subject would ever ask to just hang out and shoot the shit, let alone offer to help out with things. Where's the cool design in that? Where's the aloof magic? What is it you're trying to get from me? I could see these questions hanging over many interactions as they fizzled out in a haze of pleasantries and entreaties to greet my family members. 

My historical research of exploring the territory through records, writings, museum collections and genealogical materials proved excessively fruitful, and in the absence of prolonged success with formally sought or arranged meetings, I endeavored toward the second part of Geertz's characterization of fieldwork and just began hanging out, trying to catch my needle in a groove. The bars, the street, the organized festivals of the summer and all the doors opening out from these events became my milieu and suddenly sparks began to fly. In these spaces I met with consumption, the risky, sloppy, dark drunken communions, the slipstream of sacred stories and the not infrequent sovereign guffaw. Through its waste, the place suddenly related to me, identifying me as one of its confused dispossessed, returned somehow but not apparently making or productively rebinding to kin, not sublimating my raw energy into daily responsibility. 

For the thesis I want to give a general economy of Winnebago County that looks at the creation/production of nature (labour) and the destruction of its surpluses. I intend to do this primarily by telling stories that explore the surreal, shocking, humorous moments I encountered talking to people there last summer. I want to work from a point in your transgression piece where you characterize Modernity as the transgression of the sacred, Bataille's zone of radical negation. In this transgressed sacred terrain the old dichotomy of high (conscious? intellectual?) and low (ecstatic? corporeal?) splits the already corporeal sacred, giving an absurd moral hierarchy to the division of labor and the forces it organizes, disorganizes, naturalizes and denatures. The ethnography of 'development' exceeds the etymology of the term as it reveals but also conceals and must contain its opposite. This vibration manifests in the historical record (documents, landscape, stories), which silently guards the fragments of an unabridged, not for TV version of the 20th Century pioneers and Indians story, flattening and straightening it into an origami vector of natural-history, as well as logics of country and city, rural and urban as they bubble and burst from erection to impotence, as well in the slippery practical and theoretical distinctions between animals and machines. 

Beyond these more traditional things, the elephant in the corner of the room with anthropocentric little anthropology and its schizophrenically-culled, socio-culturally conservative frankenstein assembled eclectically from the academic temple of the conscious sacred in the name of humanity is the electronic digital computer and its growing cybergothic world. Ubiquitous computing orchids while we wasp, to recycle a popular natural trope, accelerating, enlivening and enveloping by the moment. For instance, deepening corporeal alienation by compressing social encounters into sequences of electrical impulses shot around the world at light speed for communion via baroque assemblages of oriental mountain ranges and puffed hydrocarbons. 

Sustainable development amounts to the project of converting these machines for animation (energetically and algorithmically) under general economy (fauna?,flora?, only harder, faster, arguably already intelligent - stones that walk like men). An anthropologically derived shot at ecology then would have to be a radical negation of the inter-eating biomass and its reterritorialization, something which no machine is yet able to provide. Cybernetic totalitarianism points to an emergent existence of vestigial immanence in a newly autonomous restricted ecology, not some kind of cushy 'co-evolution' implied in the recurrent romantic robotic leisure society visions of optimistic capitalists. 

Nick Land ends his collection of writings Fanged Noumena with the ominous challenge:

Level l, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-conifgured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to Level 2!?

Several of my experiences speaking with farmers and farm workers made me shudder with the uncanniness of the scope at which this process of cybernetic penetration already seems quotidian in big agriculture, which was already impressively hulking before it became an integrated network. 

Skyfall and Fieldwork

I wrote this odd review last November with the intent to stick it up here. Now, here it is. The figure of the spy is a very peculiar one to imagine from the perspective of the anthropologist. The seamless mimic, versatile, adaptible, and charged with the exercise of public violence by the state. James Bond is back this fall and in a tale that responds to a recent tendency among film franchises to recast the sometimes vague and sometimes explicit and fundamental origins of the particular (super)hero-protagonist. In this film we see a somewhat sullen, aging Bond who, after being sacrificed by his mother, buried by the state, and then returning, Huck Finn-like, becomes nearly convinced of his own obsolescence in the face of the information revolution and its effects on the terrain of global threats vis a vis the UK. There is a corresponding shadow-bond villain (MI6 seems to have a hell of a time finding proper Bonds who don't explode under the tasks set for them, see Goldeneye), and some "Bond girls", but the meat of this movie, and the part that set my ears ringing is the argument over the necessity of Bond's very career, his role in the empire, the usefulness of what they term, again and again, fieldwork. Bond's body: old, experienced, knowledgeable, hardened, conditioned, does things in space and time that elude even the highest of technologies. No gadgets in this film. Just put ol' James in there with a gun and let him relate to the situation. Information technology and systems control alone can't get the results of a human, sure, we as anthropological fieldworkers can relate to such feelings, but what about the things James is actually doing? The film does a bit to suppose the psychological underpinnings that afford our nations these sorts of mercenaries. In Bond's case, early family tragedy and probable ptsd combined with an effective adoption by his older femle boss beget the kind of wanton devoton upon which empires rest their hopes. What does this film want me to think about its discussion and juxtaposition of the new and the old with respect to the strategies of the nation-state. What do characters like James Bond really mean for you and me and our imperial underpinnings? Is this some kind of pastiche wherein the contemporary world and its information hegemony bring on a desire a weird sort of nostalgia for less nebulous oppression of days gone by. Knives in the dark, viscerality, gore that runs hot and smooth before turning cold and sticky. Traumatized tools. This is what your government requires of you.

Memoir Of The Sacred (for the Rotten Sun)

Tonight, the eve of my 28th birthday (talk about attraction and revulsion) seems a suitably weird occasion to attempt a memoir of the sacred in my experience. At last Friday's Anthropology Department party, Juana told me that living on the farm had made me much too calm. I replied that this was something I'd not always been aware of, but had been trying to work out ever since I left, that in fact it was likely this precise quality which put me in this position in the Anthro department. Her laugh broke the maternal chastising expression of her teasing schtick, and she covered her face.

The sacred tingles in my neck, then in my calves, then thighs and then extends up and down in two waves of piezoelectrical goosebumping which crash into one another in the small of my back before fading into soft warmth. The sensation chills and excites, the reflection of the first step outdoors into a frosty gust, but emanating apparently from nothing so much as thoughts, inside to out. Sung harmonies, whether I'm singing along or not, and the stroke of a bow on a double bass move me this way.

This was the feeling that gripped me as I looked out from my bedroom, standing tiptoed on the brown blades of the heating duct, watching the trees across the yard sway in the moonlight, finding familiar shapes, no matter the weather. The trees and the shapes are still there and I still do this. I think this watery gaze of shifting, distant focus generally informs my habitus with respect to windows.

Spaces of collectivized belief and imaginative continuity brought this frantic excitation to the fore. The great flag-capturing, ball-hurling battles of field days and camp, where legions of screaming children hunted one another through fields and forests like packs of velociraptor. Likewise, the delusional space maintained by school chums: the stories, the ongoing tales of analogous parallel worlds which existed only in the interstices of the school day. We leapt, kicking our feet together in practiced patterns, avoiding particular cracks in the pavement and riding others to safety. We stripped the bark off branches and read the worm trails beneath, orienting and orienteering in an occult topography.

One morning before catching the bus to third grade I played with my father, batting a balloon back and forth, keeping it aloft but not making it too easy on one another. Suddenly his body jerked and seized, his right arm locked aloft and he screamed, a twisted squawk of bugged eyes and impossibility, after which he broke at the waist like a shotgun and stood on his hand, cradling his shoulder with his opposite hand, panting "Oh GODDAMNIT!, OH DAMN, OH DAMN, OH SHIT, OH FUCK, OH DAMN, OH SHIT, OH FUCK…" I lingered, the game had shattered and the balloon limped around. I could only gape as my father bitterly cursed his agony.

The endless, immanent time spent with my dog, weaving paths through the woods, following one another, me imagining and him smelling for and inevitably attacking rabbits and 'possums and woodchucks and skunks. I wonder sometimes just how much Ole relied on my presence in gauging his strength in these encounters, or whether his nose worked more like an unthinking magnet for the right aroma. In any case, these were the first times I saw a friend bloodied, shrieking with pain and rage, lost in a blur of red-orange murder, and turned the stick I'd been pretending was a rifle into a ragged staff for transforming fur and teeth and bone into fetid mush. In the heaving breath that follows, few things are more reassuring than the killing shake, sanguine grin and victorious wag of one's intact companion.

The sacred was there in church too, I suppose. I felt it in the unholy boredom of the esprit de corp of holiness on long hard benches, the hypnotic drone of litanies spoken and sung by quavery old men and women, the pretty dresses and tights and little glimpses of the beyond in a staggered cycle of crossing and uncrossing and re-crossing Sunday School legs, and the fleetingly vacant, vast hiding spaces available to those who excused themselves from the spectacle of the sanctuary.

The newest iteration of the sacred I know, buried in the parties where we young adults gather to really dive deep and grasp at childhood pearls, emerges phantasmagoric in a cloud of dust and smoke that melts walls.

Happy Belated Ground-New-Hog's-Year-Day!

Boy! What a finish for 2011. And now, for the last year of the internet *wink*, let's really go out BIG!

(I think the blog has officially come full circle in terms of its clean look and web 1.0 retro-chic.)
(I put the little sub-banner up initially thinking {hoping?} that someone would eventually change it. No one has done this, so I've plucked it pending subtle arbitrary re-branding. Questions, comments or retaliatory/complementary/complimentary acts of symbolic or aesthetic violence are welcome.)
(I recently received comments on a graduate paper asking me to avoid using parenthesis. I think I may be trying to work something out right now)

This has been an unusually verbose parenthetical list. The Project is as follows:

Eric showed up while I was in the throes of a semeiotics paper, which I eventually finished. While in this post-paper+holiday+friday stupor, we decided to have a writing exercise. A mixtape, to be exact. Tyler (or anyone else who reads this and happens to listen to all the music that we used to have in high school), you are highly encouraged to join if time and inclination permit.

The Rules -:

1 - 12 songs - Alternate Selections a-la road trippin'

2 - Songs Permitted Include only THE LIBRARY as it was preceding College EXODUS

3 - No Formal OR Stylistic writing restraints to be enforced

(do what the fuck you want clause)


4 - Explicit Nostalgia

(Adult's [sic] imagination of the child's imagination?)

SIDE ONE

TRACK ONE:





An education on space and time and slide guitar.
I learned there's still such a thing as straight lines
that spit in the eye of cracked asphalt and its turns,
curved roads, and ice salt: cars. That cacophony is tucked

away in the folds of especially melodious silence.
With your hand on the wheel and the wheel fucked
you steer where winter will have you go, and pray.
Not to god, but Luck. The motion is of a hand, knuckles-up,

moving forward, cocksure that nothing can top the power
of sea green bottle-glass trajectory. There's a perverse peace
that comes before crashes, when you've got a few moments
to cover your sockets, when you've finally found the pocket

where nothing you might do could matter. Guess the pattern
the pole will draw when the windows don't quite shatter.
This is desert music, played over frozen tundra. The engine
cuts, abrupt, your power door shorts out and dares you to unlock it.

Sometimes you've got to slide all night just to feel like you're okay.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This song and the album on its back are crocheted into a webby mesh with points affixed to memories as various (or perhaps as related) as untimely death and road-head and bodily triggers that are as likely in a given moment to radiate searing, acid, heat or dump torrents of electrified, frozen mercury through my veins. It's perhaps one of the hardest songs I could try to write about, given this sort of semeiotic perfusion. To be fair - though this is a blatant violation of the foundational tenets of this project - my first recollection when thinking of this album is one that I've somehow short-circuited out of the fraught, manic-depressive, emotional terrain with which this song for years presented me. But let's go back further.

1.

I put my hands on the gray steering wheel of the Ford Escort and aimed the nose away from the rush of purple darkness and twinkling light and into the increasingly searing orange light of dusk. It was September, some day after cross country practice, and Cyndee and I met the tepid, dusty air in a loose interface of cotton sweatpants and long-sleeved t-shirts.

My father had officially disqualified my hulk of a rusty, wood-paneled space/time capsule from making trips outside our county, and Cyndee always made me drive her clattery, matte-silver, chariot when we ventured to Mason City. We'd gone to the mall and there, in the first shop on the right, were the c.d.'s. I found Sea Change on the rack and picked what I guessed would be the least popular of the four covers. I hadn't gotten Midnite Vultures, i was still too rock and roll, but I hadn't forsaken the wizard of Odelay and Stereopathetic Soulmanure and Mellow Gold.

We were fucking in earnest at this point, having figured out the logistical hurdles of curfews and school and parents and space, finding ourselves naked, together, a pair of praying mantises, foam-wrapped pvc bodies, thudding, hands and tendrils knotting and undulating: nervous, anxious, exhilarated, vociferous, new. We stopped on the way back from the mall to buy condoms in the social semi-obscurity of Super Target.

So, like I was saying, I put my hands on the gray steering wheel of Cyndee's car and headed the bow up into a windy solar wash of magentas and oranges. The surrounding cyan to cobalt expanse threw its weight on the horizon: pressurizing, roiling, rattling with electro-ferrousity around the edges of the shadow overpasses and clouds and spindly signage. On my right, she barely seemed to sit in the seat: whirled ass-forward, rustled, tore cellophane, loosed lid, slid plastic platter into waiting slot, whispering with gears, then sloshed halfway out of her bucket seat and into my lap.

I'd always thought Mellow Gold was a funny album title for what Beck offered with that album - more like lyrically jarring, pared-down indie rock - and so being met with the jangle/soar of acoustic over slide paired with smooth, slow vocals and lyrics unusually un-oblique was almost too much to parse. "Shit, he's made a country album. I just paid twenty bucks for some really lonely, affected, experimental country-pop". I had a musical ego to protect from my girlfriend, I kept quiet. Two bars into Paper Tiger, it had me.

***

The task we've set ourselves, this grand spelunk in stale caverns to grease gears and hinges of erstwhile mechanisms, is fraught with the ticklish funk of insistent, resilient, polymerous cobwebbery. Look one way, tug a thread, loose a torrent of shadowy god-knows-what. The space fills, and not just with the old, but with the new piled atop, slid into its cracks, scribbled in next to crossed-out passages and redacted sections of sensitive recollection. The terms themselves have changed. I can't make Eric forget how to pronounce "row", and I can't remember the precise moment at which my writing started to include words like liminal (2004, this is a bad example) or conflate (2003, shit!).

But pretend for a second that I'm writing this all at once, and that I'm not really writing it at all, but we're just talking. This is what I'm trying to do. Of course it's difficult with you not actually talking there, filling up your sides and letting me riff off of them, but I imagine you anyway, what you'd say, and I imagine the place my mind would go. I imagine until I practically shake with the kernel of my next utterance, the thing that I'd hold-to even if your next statement threw me off track and gave me another. I'd wind it back in and knot it to the rope and then spit words at you until you feel it. As I feel the tugs pull in all directions, some pop loose, and though it might seem like what you get is a mere filament to knit onto your own ongoing text-ile, you've seen sections of my afghan before, maybe we've even managed to share some patterns over the years. Maybe we do know, if we can hold that certainty gently enough.

2.

Spat Spot Spit Spot Sput! Rain on the windshield. Tunes in my ears catch and swallow me back into long corridors of tears and flowers and marker fumes. Sad sagging bodies slump heavy on old, orange, squeaking, metal sheet. My head is drenched and I push back into soft blue embrace and sigh a mist that hangs in the shadowy wet light of the street. Two fresh bodies ground in simple transit. One dead girl, one smashed friend, infinity of feeling and sensation and contemplation.

Age of Gold - Titans and heroes and legends before the degeneration of man into forms of lesser metals. Eventually swapped for an upside-down world built on humble stone, and now something even more ephemeral: a confused, nostalgic metaphor of loss or expectation, of eras bygone and foretold.

She was dead, she was younger than me. Guhhhhhhhh, how incomparably shitty. She was dead and my stomach seemed to be on fire, and my forehead and my shoulders. I pulled off the headphones and blew into my hands, turned the key back a notch and checked the time, which read something like 3:46, but which made sense to me @ the time. Flipped the key forward three notches, tugged on the lights and dropped the handle to bring an orange box around a bright green D. I rolled down the hard black iridescence.

Had she fucked anybody? Gotten drunk? Fulfilled the trite cinematic fantasies of the coming decade? Let alone the strange scenes of adulthood that still only danced, shadowy on the horizon. She was cooler than me at least, I thought. I took some comfort there.

I got to Eric's and things blur in my recollection. The day was fucked: a bad, sick, reminder of three years prior with different actors and slight rewrites. Of course we ran from his parents: their emotional trip was far from ours. Think about it. What does it mean to confront these things afresh, at most having read a few scribbles on the responses of characters, historical, fictitious, to the full-on weight of phenomena that a human can receive in the fallout from mindless tragedy.

I fended off their soft but probing questions for a minute, weaving around between the back door and the bottom of the staircase, eventually going wild-eyed/sarcastic/bombastic to compensate for the soft mournfulness in their tone and their faces watching me.

Eric slid down the stairs and we vanished with a thwack into the rain.

We brought it up then, a compelling multivalent topic of social, existential and emotional wilderness. It was all rain.

We got soaked and came back and decamped in his basement and, I remember this, I tried to show Eric how intertwined the day's events and this new album had become in my mind. Maybe it wasn't exactly, explicitly this. The thing is, it was true. The conversation we had was something about the album and the way I was hearing it.

I led with "vaseline".

"Huh? Like the STP track?"

"No, like being suspended in a universe of it. Like radical closeness and stillness and connection."

"Huh! … I'll have to listen for it..." he said. But that just seemed impossible. I tried again.

"Okay, it's like flying, but not. Like floating, but not. It's a weird suspension with no real momentum or inertia, no jerks or jars or bounces, no acceleration or deceleration. It's a fundamentally smooth, elevated glide through a wide-open landscape."
I think I tickled something that time. Eric cocked his head back, looked up and rolled his shoulders. After that we started talking about dreams and fantasies and concepts of flying, and we let go of it.

The next summer I was lucky enough to befriend and start fucking the dead girl's best friend - not the one who she'd died on in that fetid sardine can, the one who hadn't been in the car - and when we finally got around to discussing that time, I told her much fresher versions of these accounts of emotion and grief and music. I hope it wasn't an excessive thing to do. It's warped this vinyl for me forever.

A Minor Procrastination

OH BOY DO I SUCK RIGHT NOW!
Sitting in an unheated makeshift office in Forest City on Christmas Eve, waiting for a call from my sister to remind me that yes it is christmas, and yes, we are going to make food this afternoon.

I'm having a bad case of holiday-exacerbated can't finish my paperitis, so here. Hopefully by the time christmas finishes, i'll have snuck out enough time to actually finish saying something intelligible, or at least defensible.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Decision Brainstorm Argument Vomit

Alright, so I titled this paper before I started writing it. Weeks, in fact, before I started writing it, I got so tickled by the notion of calling it "A Feeling of Greenness" that I committed my mind to building a paper around this complex of sentiments. The source material that I drew on in proposing this topic, before the title came even, is an article by Alf Hornborg arguing on the ascendancy of processual contextual models in theorizing ecology, ecology being in no insignificant part a system of meanings, a semeiotic in all of its triadic, Peircian madness.

I could write something over, something mostly borrowed, something along the lines of
Cartesians:
Steward - Niches or dialectic of determinism and adaptation or whatever
Rappaport - Neo-functional, cybernetic, balance/harmony, objectifying, energetic, science model

Non-Dualists/Monists:
Descola - Societies of nature, ontological/epistemological disembedding, processual
Hornborg, Ellen, whoever

Okay, so these later guys are smart - combine them with some articles about indigenous practices and ecological studies carried out by like Erickson, and maybe that Kogi Water system study - talk about good models for socializing nature - blah blah blah, hippie drum circle, ox and plow and hunker down on your farm, etc.

And this is pretty much what I believe at this point, and it's a thing. I've fetishized it as some bit of magical provocation that might bear out repetition in the population, but I feel like even though I've never written this down for this professor, or precisely any professor, I talk through it, I think through it, all the time. It needs a rest.

I want to envision something much more horrible and challenging to glimpse. I want to look at what wizardry governs this space. What is going on here? Who are these tree-like figures, engaged with massive structures forged improbably from raw earth and fantasy.

How did we get to this place? Why come so far to maroon ourselves here? How has the vision of this space changed in the imaginaries that festoon it?

How does all this get thought? How does all this get done? What's good about it? From what perspective? What does it take to grow "food"?

It is weird to try to imagine the leapfrog that has taken place in the agroecology of the midwest over the past century, or even half-century. Turn of the century farmer - embedded in corporeal relations to the beasts of the farm, the wider community of like-arrayed beasts who collaborate in applying their instruments to the earth and tickling nature into fruit - gives way to mid-late century farmer - one to whom are available the heavy machines of a causal superstructure that has blown a complete, Taylorized, factory inside-out over a vast landscape at the same time as reduced the black earth to a pile of tailings, mined in the open and washed out.

What is my argument here without being a part of any of this? Can I make any sense of all this meaning? Am I just viciously picking at an aporia that will not close?

yes

Double Dippin'

Until I can produce some original Triad material, I suppose I can stick up the writing of the semester that relates most directly to you fellows:

How to Be a Casual Smoker

Do it only when dark runs deep enough to make the cherry matter, let the glow

look like a funeral for a firefly, like a pyre.

Smoke when the streets are singing love songs to the traffic that won't come, smoke like the

last Marlboro man who doesn't know he's out of time.

Don't stand; sit on steps, or stoops, or stain your white washed denim lime and lie in un-mown

grass, make strangers' yards complicit in all your ploys.

Breathe. Stunt your breathing. Now, drink in the contradiction, see those Kamel Reds burn up

and brighten 3 a.m—barren of all but boys.

Do it even though you've never known addiction, do it like a crossword puzzle:

curled up and cozy, wasting/fighting/killing time.

Flick the ash without aiming, let your dust lie where it settles, say a secret prayer

that it might find the strength to start a minor fire.

Ramble On

I've been wanting to write a triad piece this fall. I'm sopping with language. Sloppy in it. But every time I start to freeze parts of it and just chunk into it with my ice pick, it melts away in a great splash and evaporates with a swirling flourish out into the street. Yeah, I live on a street again. The last time I tried to do this I made gifs instead, they're one post back, and a definite copout with respect to the kind of shit I feel I ought to be reflecting on at the moment. My street is chattery, it's weird to pick apart the sound that leaks in through the windows and the walls into its constituents. As far as I have been able to discern, there's no great bird wakeup overlap point in the early morning where I am, relatively near to central park. I haven't gotten up early enough to go to the park and listen yet, but heavy paper season isn't quite here, and I'm still sleeping a lot.

Question: When you wake up in the morning, how do you know if it's rained? My first clue comes before my eyes open, wet paved traffic squelch/sffffft.

Wait, so, yeah, I live on television. Television?! Television. Two blocks down is the Seinfeld diner. I'm plagued by people talking about their Ivy-Leaguedness, as though this particular corner of the beehive/anthill/macroprocessor were clearly peopled by enlightened souls, reeking of destiny and floating gently above the slippery, gritty surface of the earth.

Someone outside is at this moment screaming: "HEEEEYYYY, HEY HEY, HEYYYYYYYYY! I'm NOT IT! WHY YOU CALLIN ME A IT!" She's barely audible over the sound of police and ambulance sirens, and a barbershop chorus of sadistic leaf blowers revving over and over and over at medieval trip stair intervals.

So yeah, it's a television show about …? Not important at this point. Probably not even possible to pin down.

----------------------TWELVEHOURPAUSE------------------------
Last Night: Screaming/Slapping match; Pimp/Ho?; Husband/Wife?
Reading, I heard some commotion, but didn't immediately focus on the loud voices issuing from the sidewalk. The tone rippled my torso from taint to deep guts.
Him: (gravel) … Bitch! You betta gi me what I needa get off, NOW!
Her: whimper, Awright Awright
(presumably she hands him something)
Him: Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?! Thas all you got for me!?
(pauses, then she starts making noise as though being searched/groped)
Her: GET OFFAME! GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF OF ME! AHHHHH! HELLLLLLLLP HEEEEEEEEELLLLLPPPP
(Fades off into indecipherable speech)
Him: (interrupting) OH YOU CALLIN FA HELP NOW? GIMME DAT HIT, BITCH!
(he must be squeezing or menacing or something sinister, because she's freaking the fuck out by this point, hyperventilating)
Her: PLEEEASE OKAY OKAY OKAY, OKAY
(a big pause in the dialogue and i hear her kind of panting, can't see them out the window, tucked under the cafe awning. can't smell crack, suspect he's ingesting somehow)
Him: (almost persecuted) THAT AINT GONNA WORK, SLUT! HOW-MY SPOSA GET OFF LIKE AT? THA WUN'T NO ROCK AT ALL!
(abrupt change, voices under diesel, fading, conciliatory)


So, I was rambling about TV, and how I get the privilege of waltzing around bleeding money into these fancy sets and their nights of heavily creamed blackness. That shit is boring. Yesterday, in Central Park, I saw a group of Native Americans, presumably, playing drums, dancing and having a fire while the sun went down behind the buildings. I was so jealous; couldn't stop looking around at the sunset colors splashing through gaps and into this municipal courtyard.


I want snow - I want the world wrought in bleak potential, wind-scoured and sun-flashed and its soft and malleable bits clinging together for warmth and feeling. How are you guys? I can only hope better than me, as I rack-up vague credentials, tangible debts and monstrously radical theoretical that too often seem hopelessly irreconcilable with, well, seriously? capitalism. How is the future-vision morphing for you both?

Thinking about semeiosis and what it suggests about the capacities of appreciation, mimesis, and memory is something that always loops me back to you guys. Last summer, in terms of what we did together, albeit as mere dyads, was frankly transcendent. Modes of appreciation reembodied, grammars resumed, interpretive chains plumbed, memories re-narrativized. We need to get the rings together - bind ourselves in the swirling grayness, really summon captain planet.

If Rico ever calls me I'll make definite plans for travel - hope to see you both there!

MORE SUMMER GIF TIME

Can't Stop

LAKE AND BAKE

The Art of Dialing Drunk

he had a bad habit of revisiting the past

(cruising in her parents' van and fucking on the overpass)

three strong whiskey gingers and he's calling up ghosts

sayin' thought about that summer

how's your mother?

I propose a toast

to doomed flings and ill-advised plots

groping in the parks

naming body parts

fall asleep

woken up by rent-a-cops

to minor car crashes on gravel roads

to getting one hand up that swimsuit that you wore instead of underclothes

to drive-in movies

sneaking friends through in the trunk

back when your dad wasn't sick yet

wasn't dying

took us sailing and the sailboat fucking sunk

to staying friends with exes once you've given up on love

to having drunken conversations with the people who remind you of the past you never think about until you're past your limit and you're drunk

Bibliography

Oh, and I almost forgot to nod to my sources. Courtesy of a Moleskine notebook of many years past, the original lists:

list

-today we will begin our prepwork for the coming day of enlightenment

1 tranquilizer gun for large animals and/or ty
laffy taffy
exciting water device
baloons (baloon juice not included)
chewing gum
bubbles
fizzy lifting drinks
munchies kidz mix
salt and vinegar chips
my watch
flashlight batteries
muzak
orange juice
boats
elton john
random silly things
ice cream
jello

activities

croquet
foxtail
bike rides
sprinkler
wiffle bat time
lego time
diablo 2
hackey
frazbee
kites
sit on asses, look at shit
walkie talkie games
lotr
corn starch
sex with women
jello
cut green island in half with metal heavier
expose ourselves to multimedia
masks
painting/art
whooping
fire
build fort/create society

kits and general attire stipulations

shoes, socks discouraged
short pants
sunglasses
writing/recording utensils
hats/headwear
uniform emblem/icon for purposes of continuity
quantities of liquid, cigs, gum, and tool
shirt
jacket *a must*

I don't know what it is, just look at it

As promised, a recollection submitted to the collective memory, albeit with some cringe-worthy sentimental BS abruptly edited out (and a little abruptly left in). Petros and I were just discussing the lawn mowing in the dark, but I did not remember it being on this day. Is this true, or have I completely conflated several different occasions? You know I rely on you guys to keep my past and childhood in order, so I will defer to the rest of the Triad on this point. Regardless, I give you a mostly accurate and true except for where I probably made shit up if I felt like it account of the trip heard round Leland:


“Naaawat?” Tyler asked, as a stream of saliva overflowed his bottom lip.
“Kee ih on yo tongue,” Peter said. The three of us were sitting in Peter’s living room, relaxing with our feet up in reclining chairs as if we were enjoying an ABC family movie, rather than holding small squares of paper on our tongues, trying to make sure we absorbed all the acid from them before swallowing.
Several factors had contributed to us finding ourselves in this situation. One was that Peter lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest neighbors being miles away. Another was that my parents and Peter’s parents had driven to Wisconsin for the weekend to watch Shakespearean plays. We had been invited to go along, but the third factor was that we had reasoned that, while Shakespeare was great, we could watch plays when we were 92, while taking acid and running around in cornfields was an activity that would get less feasible with each passing year.
And so began what our “hallucinogenic farm party.” We were dressed for the occasion. Tyler wore tight blue jeans, brown cowboy boots, and a child’s sized tie-dyed t-shirt. Peter was dressed in a pink button-up shirt and gray Goodwill sports jacket, ripped jeans, and a cowboy hat pushed down over his long blond hair. I wore shorts and a used youth soccer jersey with the words, “I’m the space invader, I’ll be a rock n’ rollin’ bitch for you,” stenciled on with black paint. I had a a plaid Scottish cap with a fuzzy blue ball on top, and aviators as accessories.
We swallowed the squares of paper and decided to have art time while we waited for something to happen. We sat around the dining room table and scribbled with colorful ink pens on a huge roll of white butcher paper, something I hadn’t done since elementary school. I began doodling and drawing terrible stick figures, which was all that my artistic ability generally allowed for. The three of us drew uneventfully for 15 minutes or so, until I suddenly started grasping at the pens frantically.
I knew exactly what I had to draw and I started sketching in quick, purposeful strokes. I drew an elaborate blue and orange monster with swirly eyes and a square face in the upper right hand corner. Next I drew a series of very simple, yet elegant, triangular trees, and finally a small purple bird on one of the branches. I drew a caption bubble for my bird, and began writing him some dialog. Finally, I looked up and found Peter and Tyler staring at me with their jaws hanging open. They looked like wooden puppets, and I could almost see the metal hinges at the corners of their mouths.
“I think it might have started,” Tyler said.
“Why?” I asked. Peter pulled my edge of the paper towards him and studied it.
“You, my friend,” he said, “are officially tripping balls.” He grinned like a Disney character, reached across the table and shook my hand, while tipping his hat to me.
“What is the bird saying?” Tyler asked. Peter picked up my drawing and cleared his throat dramatically, then began reading from my caption bubble.
“I have lived in many places,” he said, “but never in a shoe.”
We walked back to the living room to begin our adventure. We gathered around the table where we had assembled our supplies, and tried to decide what to do next. The table was covered in a ridiculous assortment of items. We had made several lists the day before, in preparation for this event, one of them being a shopping list.
It had been nice to pick up our shopping list and find, instead of things like eggs and milk, items such as silly string, Laffy Taffy, and small American flags (for burning). Our shopping expedition had taken us back to our youth, when our mothers would take us to the store and we would toss Oreos into the cart whenever we thought she wasn’t looking, only to have her discover them and put them back on the shelf. This time we were three orphan children, tossing in anything and everything that caught our eye, with nobody there to veto it.
The result was that we now had balloons and Munchies Kids Mix and assorted party favors at our disposal. I ripped open the Laffy Taffy and stuffed as many pieces into my pockets as I could. I picked one up and read the joke. It was embarrassingly awful. We decided that it might be more fun to read the punch lines and try to guess what the jokes were supposed to be.
“Beef jerky,” I said.
“Umm, what do you call a cow that masturbates a lot,” Tyler blurted out.
“He didn’t say beef jerkoff, dumbass,” Peter pointed out.
“It’s ‘what do you call a twitchy cow,’” I explained. “What should we do now?”
“Let’s consult the list,” Peter said. He opened his little notebook and looked at the list of activities we had compiled. “We could play croquet,” he said. “Or cut green island in half with a metal heavier, or set things on fire, or sit on our asses/look at shit.”
We walked outside for the first time, and it became immediately apparent that we hadn’t needed to make a list. We would clearly be spending most of our trip sitting on our asses and looking at shit. Outside was incredible. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard explores the phenomenon of seeing. She describes the documented experiences of the only generation of blind people to be given sight for the first time after cataract surgery was invented by Western surgeons, and I imagine what I saw must have been a little like that—like suddenly having sight after years of relying solely on your other senses.
There were colors I’d never seen before, and everything seemed to be shining brilliantly, so that the whole world was full of glint and glare. I lost my sense of depth, so that all was two dimensions, like very detailed and beautiful cardboard cutouts. Peter walked in front of me and he looked like a paper doll, sliding fast past a flat backdrop attached to a popsicle stick.
I flopped down onto the ground out of confusion and exhaustion, and pressed my left cheek into the grass and dirt. I felt as if I stayed there for several hours, but I had lost all grasp of time by then, so there was no real way to know. The world started peeling away, layer by layer. I saw everything in my field of vision, and I watched it all intently—the base of a nearby tree, the grass, dandelions, a few fallen leaves and twigs. Then suddenly all I could see were a few blades of grass, as if there had been a zoom. They loomed up in my vision and I saw the tiny wedges where they had been nibbled, the different shades of green and yellow, and the individual grains. And then I was looking beyond the grass, and I saw an ant walking along the dirt beneath, navigating between the obstacles in his path. He began climbing up one blade, then paused halfway and seemed to think better of it, turning himself around and heading back to where he’d come from. I watched him, and wondered if he would turn into a man-eating sloth-toed cheetah, or grow spines, or turn yellow, but he just stayed an ant, walking around on grass. It was fucking fascinating.
When I eventually remembered that I wasn’t alone, I sat up to look around and my face was numb from the hard ground. I saw that my friends had been occupied the same way I had. Tyler was petting a tree branch and Peter was investigating a dandelion. We gathered our wits about us, grabbed a pair of binoculars and set off into the woods. I brought the binoculars up to my eyes as we walked, and let out a yelp.
“Look at that!” I shouted.
“What is it?” Tyler asked.
“I don’t know what the hell it is, just look at it!”
After looking through the binoculars they understood my comment. You couldn’t always tell what you were seeing, but anything you pointed the binoculars at was amazing. It became a kind of mantra for us over the course of the rest of the day. It never really mattered what the hell it was, as long as we always looked at it.
We spent the rest of the day checking a variety of things off the activity list we had made—we rode bikes around the yard, sprinted down the gravel lane, watched Fantasia, climbed into an old deer stand to watch cars pass by on the highway, and made jello. At about 10:00 that night, Peter suddenly remembered that he was supposed to mow the lawn before his parents returned. We quickly realized that the only solution was to mow the lawn. In the dark. On acid. We set up some small floodlights, which barely lit even a portion of the yard, and prepared for our most challenging adventure yet.
Peter gave me his Ipod and clamped his noise canceling headphones around my head. Some kind of dramatic, classical march to hell seeped into my ear canal and rampaged around inside my skull. There was thundering percussion and the brass sounded as if it was trying to win an argument with someone. It was the kind of music that you would hear at the opening of an epic battle scene in a movie like “Braveheart” or “The Lord of the Rings.”
My task was to use the little push mower to do some of the smaller areas, and Peter began to give me instructions as to where exactly I should mow, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. I could see his lips moving, and the music in my head made it seem like he should be explaining the importance of the upcoming battle—a fearless leader motivating his troops to victory—but instead he was grinning and making gestures that were supposed to indicate the act of pushing a mower. When I finally stopped laughing long enough to realize that I’d be able to hear him if I removed the headphones, I caught the tail end of his last sentence.
“. . . and try not to mow over those fucking flowers over there, or the extension cord for these lights, or your foot, or those cats,” he said. It was less inspiring than I’d hoped, but I nodded solemnly, slipped the headphones back on, and we walked out onto the porch to a soundtrack of war songs, as I glanced left, right, and left again, on the lookout for Orcs or Scottish warriors.
We accomplished the task without injury or property damage, although in the light of the next morning we would see that the yard looked as if drunken toddlers had romped through it with machetes, and we would have to do the entire job over again. But for then we were proud and satisfied, and we retreated to the basement to watch television and fall asleep as the effects of the acid wore off.
The next morning we engaged on a massive cleanup mission. We discovered Laffy Taffy wrappers everywhere we went. I had apparently left a trail—most every room in the house, the fields, the lawn, the woods, in the trees. We picked everything up, stashed the leftover supplies in Tyler’s car and plopped down in the recliners where it had all started a day before.
I remembered the sunset of the day before, and I thought about how we’d watched the clouds and talked for over an hour.
The three of us had laid down like parallel lines in an open field, flat on our backs. The clouds moved horizontally across the sky faster than planes, and it looked like time-lapse photography. But we tracked them as they moved, and found faces and mythical animals and construction equipment in them.
“That one looks like a really old woman eating a cupcake,” Peter said, tracing the outline of her cheekbone with his index finger.
“I can’t even believe that I could agree with you,” I said, “but it kind of does.”
“I haven’t seen images in the clouds since I was in elementary school,” Tyler said. “Do you think we’re hallucinating these things, or are we just remembering how to be creative, and reverting back to a younger age?”
“I kind of think that everything we’ve seen today was real,” I said. “Like it’s always there, and we just never look. Old women and cupcakes must always be in the clouds. Maybe we can do this whenever we want, without drugs.”
“Dude,” Peter said, “if you can ever manage to catch a frisbee one-handed while riding a bike and looking through binoculars again without drugs, I will be impressed, but predominantly frightened.”
“We should not do this often,” Tyler said.
“But we should do this again,” Peter said.
The front door opened, snapping me out of my daydream, and bringing me back to my position in the recliner. Peter’s parents were home. They told us that the lawn looked nice, and all about Shakespeare, and that we really should have come with.
“You have to come next year,” they said.
“Maybe when I’m older,” Peter told them.

Gentlemen: The Future

First:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070521175721AAsT339

Poop My Dad Utters

Today, on a visit to the office to inspect my progress in walling-up a basement door, my dad offered me the tasty option of a lunch at SUBWAY. Being both cheap (like my father, thanks dad) and hard-up for social interaction, I initially forgot about and afterward worked to ignore the fact that I looked like a very muddy, unkempt person, and walked with my dad toward the green and yellow glow.

The room was full of Forest Citizens, and I immediately felt highly self-conscious about my dirty clothes and lack of a smart phone to stare at. The people at Subway in Forest City are a peculiar bunch, and I always think about the politics of lunch here. The Subwayers, as opposed to the Hardeeans, the Sum Hingers and the mad one percent of the town who eat lunch at Shooters or Bills or Pizza Hut or even Taco Jerry's (A&W is still closed for the season), are a mixture of the wannabe health-fashionable consumers of GMO compost and the obedient, fetishist, accountants/mystics of calories and nutrients. While there might be laudable ideas here and there in the mixture, the overall act of eating at Subway pretty much always feels like an act of bad faith on my part.

I was thinking about my Subway angst as I watched one of the women preparing what seemed like a very tiny sandwich. Why was this sandwich so tiny? I looked down and saw the corresponding child dawdling while her mother attempted to interview her with respect to the design of the sandwich in progress. And then it dawned on me: in this bizarro future there was no longer a deli roll sandwich, just a three inch. By the time I'd made it past this heavy paradigm shift, it was time to order. My dad requisitioned a tuna melt, speaking to the robotic, forest-green, assembler women in curt bursts that anticipated the scripted back and forth that would have otherwise played out. This drove me nuts, first, because it made my dad seem like some kind of brusque robot himself and then more-so because the women at Subway were nowhere near tuned-in enough to the process of sandwiching to parse dad's uninterrupted string of commands, and everything had to be repeated, slowly.

We got the sandwiches, paid, sat, chewed for two or three minutes. Somehow we happened onto a fragment of conversation about British squatting laws and the fact that the police in the UK treat such disputes as civil matters, that is to say they ignore them. Then my dad pipes up with "I have this recurring dream..." [nom nom nom tuna nom]. I stopped chewing and began laughing rather uneasily through my most recent hunk of bready, compost with assorted cured meats so homogeneous as to be quite sinister. My dad leaned back from the very end of his sandwich and looked up, scratching his chin, exceedingly obviously preparing some recollection to share with me. I guess I felt ready, but somehow not expecting this sort of lunchtime revelation from my father.

"I have this dream where I realize that I own this building that I totally forgot about... in Mason City"

At this point my eyes are completely bugged out and I have no idea anymore how to deal with what he's explaining. I know that he's brought this up because we were talking about squatters and property, does he dream about having to deal with squatters? Regularly??

"Dad, wait, you're saying that you have a dream about discovering you own additional property that you dream over and over?"

"Yep. I think it started around five or six years ago." I mentally subtract; this date would place the headwaters of this dream right around my father's 50th birthday.

"Have you ever like researched this at all? Googled it?"

"No."

"Dad, this is the whitest guy dream, let alone recurring dream I've ever heard of." He lauged at that. I directed the conversation back at the dream. I wanted to compare it to the sorts of formal similarities that I've noticed in my comparison of my own dreams. I've never really had a dream that I remember repeat more than once, though my dreams often contained warped elements of each other, like a communal bunch of props and sets.

"Woah, okay, so how do you actually perceive this? What're the shots and the stage directions of the dream?"

"Well, I don't really remember that too well..."

"I mean, where does it happen? How does your realization occur?"

"Well, I'm just doing stuff and all of a sudden I remember that I've got this property in Mason Cit-"

"Doing stuff? Doing what stuff? Like anything specific?"

"No, not that I remember. Just anything. But then as soon as I realize that I've got this building, I'm really stressed out, cause how do you forget about a building? And then I go to Mason City and it's always a huge hassle..." He trails off, presumably picturing the squatters or the meth cooks or the stray animals or the neighborhood gang of kids or any manner of interlopers who might upset his building. Now I am doing the laughing.

"Dad, you're telling me this is a nightmare, or like a stress dream, about property about very specific pain of dealing with the bureaucratic hassle of removing people from your fallow property?"

"Yeah, it's always something. The building is usually different, but it's kinda industrial, maybe a warehouse or somethin'."

"Is it always in Mason City?"

"Yeah."

"Like, where in Mason City? Do you have to actually travel there once you've had your epiphany?

He thinks about this for a minute. "I don't know. I think it's usually like I realize and then the dream changes and I'm standing in front of the building, whatever it looks like, and I just know it's Mason City."

"Wow," I say. "That has got to be one of the strangest dream descriptions I have ever heard." Dad seems pleased with this and smiles.

At this point in the conversation I tried to explain the one form of dream that I have experienced occasionally for years that is (usually, with rare exceptions in which it seems downright prophetic) tantamount to his dream's opposite.

First, let's review briefly. In dad's dream, he discovers something he'd forgotten and is overwhelmed by the impenetrable mystery of its omission from his memory. When my dad wakes up, he feels better, though with perhaps a little more paranoia that he might be buying and forgetting giant objects in the world (something that it is just inherently weird for people to be able to do in this crowded a world).

My dream, on the other hand, occurs when I've actually lost something in the real world, something that I seldom do, and therefore obsess about when it occurs. Again the issue is memory error, but this time I go through the triumphant experience of seeking out and actually finding the object that I've lost, only to awake disappointed, frustrated, enraged at still having a lost whatever.

I wish I could say that I had looked up this dream and had a snappy wrap-up to this anecdote. I do not. However, I can say that I really like chatting with my dad when things go well. His banter is WEIRD, no doubt, and not just because I'm talking to the previous version of my brain.

Thunk!

Woah!

It was the Lest of Times, it was the Wurst of Times.

Tonight, I realized that I'd been living in a pile. I started making smaller piles. This process was undeniably stupid, but I felt, once I had all the wee piles, that there was no stopping until I had resolved the situation. I started examining bits and pieces that had been squirreled at one point or another. I made tea out of the decade preceding this one. The tea was a little stale and also contained a few pre-millenial bits. I dredged up a bunch of flavors that tickled and were generally so dusty that I sneezed, violently. But somewhere between when the steeping took place and the point at which the tea reached the temperature of erstwhile bathwater, I encountered two leaves, actual printed hojas from the past. I swirled my cup around, gazed in, focused my attention, then turned it over on my saucer. Having waited a couple of minutes, I lifted my glass again and began to puzzle over what was left beneath. Unlike future tea, this tea-stalgia is detailed in the extreme, and despite its surreal form and content, yields a definite emotional response. Here's what we printed:





I like these lists. They're chock full of mildly disturbing crap, and you can see us pushing one anothers' buttons, alternating entries. There is something to be said for that level of creative comfort and rapport. Our patience with one another and our shared frustrations get to play out, not simply in silent gazes or utterances bandied lazily. For some reason we formalized, we collaborated zealously, playing on the contrast between the generic simplicity of the list and the vast, fluid scope of our aspirations. What came out was rough, of course, but a fantastic artifact nonetheless, and a great indicator of the depth and breadth of boredom and desire. That's pretty much all for the moment. Hope you guys are swell.

P.S. Hey Ty, while I can imagine that this isn't high on your list of personal priorities, please make sure your state legalizes it on the second. It would be so excellent.

Rock and Roll Weather:

Sometimes when I'm summering, I can't wrap my head around my own music library. I feel like a temperamental pregnant woman with visceral, irrational cravings which make weird and unpredictable the various aesthetic qualities of the songs I've collected. Songs that I poured over my brain innumerable times with no diminution of emotional response, suddenly feel lapsed, dull, and unmistakably obtuse. Additionally, I find myself stuck on new music. Sometimes it's really legitimate, and I can see how it fits in with all the old canon, where the sound comes from, where it's going. Often though, I don't care and I tolerate listening to things whose parameters clearly exceed my normal thresholds of listenability. Examples of this: soundtracks, music with lyrics I will never learn, noise, ____ metal, bluegrass, instrumental psych, Crawling With Tarts, and many others. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but I don't think it used to happen quite like this.

I hate this feeling of obsolescence when I encounter it, and I take care to prevent myself from experiencing this wrong-place, wrong-time, aural toothache sensation by only bringing out these pillars of the sacrosanct temple of rock and roll when I know they'll ring true to willing ears: in the car with eric/tyler/jon/gina/a few others. Social environs would seem to trump, but when I want to really get down with the division of my music to which I was first drawn as a collector and an investigator of tunes, I wait for the magic that arrives following labor day weekend.

A week ago, I took [sic] elesdee with David on a day sandwiched between early morning trips to MSP. At some point in the middle of the afternoon, standing the between the fire and the pond and holding a stick that flamed great red-blue-orange feathers and crackled loudly, I suddenly felt like I was hearing power chords, strumming loudly and building in the distance to the South. Was someone playing music somewhere? I tried to get my ears wrapped around the sound, but it was still very faint, and there were a lot of available sounds for my brain to play with and collage, which it did. The sound built to somewhere between "Back in the USSR" and a Led Zeppelin riff, energetic, regular, rolling, pounding. I burst out with "Sounds like Rock'n'Roll, man!" before I could think about whether I had actually figured out what I was listening to. David looked at me and listened. The sound was a jet engine, and he took my statement not so much as complete misrecognition, but more as a kind of cheesy joke. It didn't matter, I had already felt something shift back into place. Electric guitars made sense in my brain again, and they sounded sublime.

Now, the weather has changed. The sky has darkened, the clouds pack low, slate-colored down comforter. The wind below them moves with the kind of urgency that one sees in migrating geese this time of year, and is not so much warm or cold, dry or wet, but a pure electric mercuriality. I am drenched in a kind dim longing for an identity so long amputated as to feel phantom. I look out the window as I drive and I want to hop atop motor vehicles, to get thrown out of a shitty restaurant, to hoist someone into a tree or a second story window. I have been cast back to a time so dark and deep, that when I first left home I had almost forgotten what it meant. This is where Rock and Roll gets me today. Our saturating communality still comes back, fills the chords, and reconciles my human-centipede of minds when the memories of our times of institutional parkour re-appear and rush by in every direction. The sets are still up, more or less, and sometimes I think I see us, flitting ganglyly out of the lit portions of the street as my car passes in the middle of the night. I can go out and put on Thru the Eyes of Ruby, and it makes my spine tingle and my feet feel light.

I've got more thinking to do on these topics, but for now I just wanted to bring the post count for this year up to one. I've got a total friend crush on you guys; write something sometime. Tyler, you are officially excused on account of you having an actual dependent to feed, and I hope she's doing really well.

Love from the museum,
Petros

Stolen Facebook Flotsa

9:17pmPeter

whoop whoop!

9:17pmTyler

yo...

what's goin'?

9:18pmPeter

oh, you know, just warwhoopin...

how's the yay area?

9:18pmTyler

like...our old high school newspaper?

it's good...

9:18pmPeter

yeah, I never could give it up

9:19pmTyler

I forgot it existed until you used the term just now...still a little surprised I remembered...

9:21pmPeter

i was not surprised, it's deeply ingrained in the more annoyed parts of my consciousness

9:22pmTyler

understandable...

9:24pmTyler

speaking of annoyance...I've become inextricably fixated on finding a small linux distro that'll boot from a cd on powerpc machines...and I can't explain why...I don't need it...I mean, anything I want to do from the command line in Linux, I can do from the command line in OSX...it's the same fucking command line...but for some reason, I just can't stop myself...

9:26pmPeter

woah... that is a weird goal... you've come to one of the chosen few that could even hope to empathize with that... yeah, in fact, I have a machine for which I could use such a disc at this very minute... but I'm going to try just sell it for parts...

I got the too many old computers blues...

9:29pmTyler

that's probably a better plan...it's becoming apparent that if you want a lightweight ppc machine, you're going to have to build the thing yourself...though, I hear Debian still runs decently on some old ppc machinery...

9:30pmPeter

yeah... dinosaur footsteps in the distance...

9:31pmTyler

so, what's new with you, abe?

9:32pmPeter

oh, not too much, officially homeless as of one week ago... couch surfing and grad app writing for another week or so, and then driving midwesterly....

9:32pmTyler

sounds like a time...

9:32pmPeter

it certainly is...

I'm feeling alright about it though... some kind of adventure is better than none at all... especially at the ripe old age of 24...

9:34pmTyler

indeed...adventure is in the air lately...the apes are getting restless...

9:35pmPeter

I'll raise a rock and drink to that...!

and you sir? what strange new frontiers are you probing?

9:38pmTyler

I've been spending whatever time that isn't used up on job hunting and domesticity learning Python...

9:38pmPeter

RAD!

9:39pmTyler

hence the origin of my burning need for a barebones linux machine...but I've been realizing lately that the easiest solution is to just use the shit that comes with unix...

9:40pmPeter

i suppose that makes sense...

9:43pmTyler

I've also been looking for a decent homebrew curriculum for learning Russian...

9:45pmPeter

that also sounds like a serious task

9:45pmTyler

indeed...luckily, I have a built in language tutor!

9:45pmPeter

I was going to say

9:46pmTyler

I figured that if I didn't get here in time to enroll in classes, I'll just be homeschooled for this semester...

9:47pmPeter

well, sounds like a good t-term syllabus

9:49pmTyler

it's serving me a hell of a lot better than World of Warcraft did last October...

9:49pmPeter

eeeeeewwwwww really?

i'm currently living with a member of the hive... it's debilitating

i keep pressing his talk button and screaming insanities into the retardverse

9:50pmTyler

good...

they all deserve it...

9:50pmPeter

"fire magic pretzel juice!!!!"

9:51pmTyler

I've seen past the dark veil...it's hideous...

9:51pmPeter

"please let me be your mage! Please Please, my DPS IS LEGENDARY"

9:55pmTyler

I retained one shred of human pride throughout the experience by never using a fucking microphone to actually talk to people who aren't in the room with me...

9:56pmPeter

bless you... others are not so strong

well, must dash...! adios compadre

9:56pmTyler

later...