I’m sitting here, drinking coffee at the kitchen table, reading Xanga on my laptop, and I’ve realized that there’s a tiny noise coming from inside the calendar on the wall next to the table.

It’s the kind of sound you hear on nature shows where they show some kind of caterpillar munching on a leaf, or a beetle walking across a rock surface. It sounds artificial.

So I carefully look at the calendar. Now, the calendar isn’t just alone on the wall. There’s a vine plant (named Spivey the Ivy, even though it’s not an ivy) growing past it. And for some reason the last person to change the month just let last month drape over one of Spivey’s coils. So I look under the tented page, and there’s no small animal, no spider crawling around, no caterpillar munching on leaves.

What I’ve been hearing is Spivey growing. There’s no breeze to blow the plant around against the paper, the house isn’t shaking, the only other person here is fast asleep so they’re not dancing upstairs… I’m listening to a plant grow.

How The Homer Got Its Name

Despite rumors to the contrary, ‘Homer The Brave’ didn’t come from that Laurie Anderson song, or that time I adopted a midget in a pub.

And even though only Sadzi came up with a whopper about it, I suppose I’ll spill the whole unvarnished truth.

You see, once upon a time, I was horribly pretensious. No, really. I was. Not only did I read books by William S. Burroughs, but I also talked about them as if I had any insight into the man.

Now, Burroughs wrote a really excellent book called Exterminator!. Many of the stories deal with the idea of Control, not just as a concept, but as an actual organization made up of people out to keep their control. One of those stories is ‘The Coming Of The Purple Better One,’ about a baboon rigged up with electrodes and trained to look Presidential. Control is running this baboon for elected office by remote control; they have a control room where some guy pushes buttons to make the baboon look like it’s making a speech, while the tape recorded speech plays, and so forth.

Now, I thought I was being horribly clever by adopting the handle Homer Mandril, the name of the baboon, on the BBSes of the day. You remember BBSes, right? Anyway, part of me even thought that I’d say something interesting and through some twist of fate my words would make it back to Burroughs, attributed to his remote control baboon. Ah, delicious irony. Or something. As far as I know, that never happened, and now Burroughs is dead.

So then, one day I was logging in to a chat system. If you didn’t have an account, you’d get logged out after five minutes, and need to re-login. So I kept re-logging and re-logging as Homer Mandril, and I decided to get creative. And lo and behold, the name Homer The Brave came to light.

But no one got it. People on the chat system asked me, ‘Is that some kind of indian thing?’ as if I were a local native american. No one ever asked me about the Mandril name, though, so I guessed that it was an improvement.

And now you know.

A Ruse By Any Other Name

The Duchess asks if my handle (Homer The Brave) comes from the Laurie Anderson quote.

Tellya what. If anyone can make up a really good LIE about why my handle is Homer The Brave, I’ll tell the truth.

More Song Lyrics because everyone loves them, and because, for some reason, a significant chunk of my experience happens in terms of songs I’ve heard.

“Hunger for the world travel
Stimulating discussion
Lift me
Faster into the weakenss
Off the wall into blackness
Gifted”
-Neil Finn, genius.

In response to that Matt Johnson quote, BluePassionFruit and donelly66 opine that the opposite of love is fear. Donelly66 goes on to wish she’d never experienced fear.

I dunno. I think fear isn’t any more suspect than love. In fact, I sometimes think that love is the fear you like, while fear is the love you dislike.

I sometimes suffer from anxiety attacks. I’ve had full-blown panics, too. Reflecting on these attacks has led me to believe that fear is like yawning or burping or blinking to get something out of your eye; it’s a reaction you have to some stimulus. You’re free to react to it however you want, if you can understand it for what it is.

Never having felt fear means never having experienced sudden newness. An acquaintance of mine described her way of dealing with onset of anxiety this way: She transformed fear into excitement, and excitement into joy. I never could manage that, and I don’t really think she could, either, but it’s something to think about.

“I turn around, and it’s fear
I turn around again, and it’s love.
Nobody knows me
Nobody knows my name
Deep in the heart
Of darkest America
Home of the brave
You’ve already paid for this.”
-Laurie Anderson

“I ask myself why love…
Can never touch my heart
Like fear does…”
-Matt Johnson

One thing I really really really hate about the fact that my van is incapacitated is that it’s 10pm and there’s no food in the house, except for ramen, which I had for lunch and I’m craving a chicken sandwich from KFC, which closes at… 10pm.

(Originally, that was three sentences, but I decided to smash them all together for a sense of breathless excitement.)

xanGAH!

Today there’s a little extra message at the top of my Xanga private page that says maintenance is over, but that it’ll happen again on August 31st.

And try as I might, I can only come up with one question: Whose lives have been taken over by Xanga, the company, so that we can have our narcissistic playground? Who’s working those extra hours without pay, coding the heck out of some active server page, doing backups, answering phone calls, calling home to tell their spouse they’ll be late again?

Whoever you are, THIS BUD’S FOR YOU! Now go home and be with your kids (or your cat or your plants or whatever).

Experts Agree: Xanga Not Suited For Conversation

To donelly66 and everyone else, too: No, I didn’t take the pics of Prometheus’ Revenge. I guess I should have made that clearer. They’re stills from a few gigs worth of digital video that was shot of the event. They hope to tour the show, and they’re making a promo video. And I should add that they’re in the SF Bay area.

Fold Differenter

Just an update: More Paper Macs. These ones are nicer and more recent.