This Just In

Ronald McDonald taken in on drunken disorderly.

Just wanted to give a shout out to all my subscribers. I’m up to 21. (“It’s been a long hard life/but now he’s nearly 21/’I've read the sermons on the mount they’re not for me/I’ll never live to 23…’” –Stump)

Anyway. Particularly a big shout out to Anonymous, who no doubt has me on immediate email subscription. Howdy, Ann!

Added a review for K-PAX.

I haven’t been devoting much effort to ‘blogging lately. Losing MacXangaTools is partly to blame, but I’m also learning C++, the CodeWarrior IDE, and the REALbasic plugin API all at the same time.

I’ve got a top secret project happening. Woo.

It was an extrordinarily beautiful day today. I spent much of it riding my bike downtown and back. The 20mph headwinds were a nice challenge going down, but they sure helped out on the way up.

I ate a hot dog at a place on the one of the piers. It was strange, being more of a local than not, going to a hot dog place in one of the most touristy areas of town. Plus it was empty; a Tuesday afternoon when rain was forecast.

Went to my favorite store: RePC. Got a cheap USB hub and some cabling.

Rode back through beautiful sun and wind and spray from Puget sound and the bums in the park with the bike trail smiled at me, and everyone was riding their bikes today, and Seattle’s so great to have the trails and the sound and the drawbridges and the harbors and Ballard and the hills to make my legs do more work…

grandpaboy linked to an online museum of manhole covers. And since I have a minor fetish for manhole covers (think what you will…), I have to link to it, too.

(Back in the mid-90s, I went through a phase where I picked up stuff off the street. It started with lugnuts. You’d be amazed how many lugnuts fall off of cars, bringing those cars’ passengers incrementally closer to doom. I’d find them and keep them. I still have a box full.)

(Anyway, I had a housemate who also liked to pick stuff up out of the street. We had huge piles of crap we’d gotten from the street, from dumpster diving, from thrift stores… At one point we had at least a hundred continuous yards of 18 inch wide laminate from a laminating machine strung throughout our apartment like an immense post-industrial spider web.)

(But the thing we most cherished was our collection of manhole covers. We had a rule: stealing covers from holes = bad. But if the cover was somewhere not near the hole it was to plug, it was fair game. We used them to make tables and as hot plates and to prop doors open, and once we dropped one out the window to see what kind of sound it would make (we were on the fourth floor) (and drunk). It cracked the sidewalk.)

(So I was happy to see an obsessive collection of manhole cover photos on the web, and remember the days of yore, when I was happy to live with Darek, before he became an insane maniac. Really.)

Rented ‘Memento’ last night. Took it back today. Also watched ‘The Tao Of Steve,’ which was an interesting meditation on gender identity, though not the laff riot I was hoping for.

Earlier today, I got up from the drudgery of programming (it’s actually a joy, but it’s a drudge of a joy, if you know what I mean) to go eat dinner. I put on a hat and a coat, and ventured down the block when I remembered that I needed to return the movies! Doh!

So I walked back and a housemate joked with me about having forgotten something, and said, “I don’t want to see you back here in five minutes, mister!” So I took off the hat and the coat and put on the helmet and the bike jacket (it’s yellow, for to be seen) and went down and got on my bike and turned on the blinky light on my backpack and thought to myself, ‘I really need to adjust this deraillure cable soon,’ and rode off towards the video store, which is approximately 15 blocks away.

And about two blocks from the store, I realized the tapes were still at home. So I went back. And the housemate said, “Ooo, SEVEN minutes!”

Be Honest:

Did you read the poem all the way to the end?

I keep getting spam email from people trying to sell me patriotic geegaws and trinkets. What, my patriotism is Manhattan Island, bought for some baubles? (Irony intentional.)

Anyway, how would you like to wake up in the morning to read this on the side of your coffee cup: http://www.americanspirit2001.com/stonmugwitqu.html

Alien Anthropology

There’s already been so much science fiction written
What can I tell you? What can I say?
Listen to it’s quiet insistent backwards insideout
It tells you what you need to know

They’ve all said it already. The words hinting

Pulp is beautiful pulp is recyclable
Take it dissolve it grind it
paste it back together into something
new.

Bless you neuromancer.

Anyway.

You people are crazy
in a self-referential
distinctly twentieth-century way

You stand there asking,
Wha?
Me?

Now is the time of science fiction time
The time of interstellar travel
and viewscreens
and dystopian fantasies made flesh
and we can remember it for you
wholesale

Mediation isn’t the problem
The world has always shone itself
through imperfect slits through tiny pin
pricks of experience and revelation.
It chooses this way.
Please give me a dime for every self-styled
seer of the unseeable so I can go and buy
some better drugs

the world
it isn’t
it self
you see what you see
she shows you only what you can understand
and not a single thin dime’s worth more

O seer! Tell me what you can about what’s out there and around you and more than I can see and more than the world is and more than society and consumerism and sport utility vehicles and cell phones and Starbucks and Nike and the WTO tell me tell me tell me tell me because it’s all just words and even if it’s real I can’t hear it I’m not ready and neither can anyone else so let’s just be beautiful, OK?

You people are crazy thinking you know more and I’m crazy for calling you crazy.

she hovers around
she’s a wallflower
and you don’t know how to dance
and if you did
you wouldn’t know how
to ask
her

You people are crazy. I’m really pissed.
I’m so pissed I can’t tell you how pissed I am.
‘Anger’ is totally the wrong word and
it can’t begin to.

Mom slaps her kids and tells them
listen to me, cuz I’m telling you
something important here
that you better pay attention

‘Anger’ falls from the tongue like the
most ineffectual thing ever
‘Pissed’ begins to. There’s a class distinction
to it. it’s got streetcred. I’m pissed. You
people are crazy.

Everything important is gone. It vanished and you let it.
It became important and vanished. The wildnerness
vanished and was paved over by man and society and consumerism
and Starbucks and Nike and the WTO
And all of it’s real and I’m pissed.
Tears run off my fingers onto the computer keyboard pissed.
The screen lights with phosphor tears
the typewriter of my imagination clogs
with faint granularized salt
from tears
the tears fill an empty wine glass on the desk
the tears short out the computer
but the poem is recorded on the disk by
sheer force of being pissed.

You crazy people piss me off.
And love is all there is, not because of ideological
bent but because: it’s all there is.
And that’s why I’m pissed.
I’m pissed because I have to love you and you’re crazy.
You’re stupid and fucked up and ugly and graceless
and love transforms all your unexcuseable fuckedness
into beauty. Fuck you.

It pisses me off.

It would be funny.

Rod Serling says to you, “I once had an affair with a woman from Alpha Centauri. She looked like a normal Earthling except when she came, a strange blue fluid came out of her belly button. The fluid was the exact color of last year’s bath towels in the Martha Stewart catalogue, the towels with the ‘MS’ monogram that no one bought because very few people have the same initials as Martha Stewart.” And Rod means it. He’s for real. He’s shown you the error of your ways and you have no clue what he means. Because you people are crazy. You didn’t listen to the science fiction.

Do you realize how beautiful you are when you get drunk and vomit in the street and then harass passersby? Seriously. I’m not being sarcastic. You’re beautiful. When you lie to each other, when you stab each other in the back, when you trip each other up just for sport. You’re beautiful.

When you declare war on each other, you shine like Jesus overturning the moneychangers’ carts. When you pull the lever and the electric chair sizzles and the criminal dies, you glow, too, with amazement and wonder and angelic beauty. When you push the button and blow up the bombs you, in that moment, are worth more than all the art humanity has ever created ever.

Beauty dwells not just within you but around you and all over and everything and I’m here to tell you you’re crazy for not seeing it. And when you deny your beauty, when you snuff the candle that lights your nascent understanding, that, too, is beautiful, and perhaps most beautiful of all.

What did you do when you got drunk?
Did you scream and yell?
Did you explode into the world?
Did you retire and sink and withdraw?
Did you go to sleep?
Did you vomit in the street and harass passersby?
She wants to dance and you’re learning

She tells you exactly what you can hear
She says, “You’re crazy.”
She says, “Not crazy enough.”
And finds it within herself
to laugh
And your silence response
your tragic silence
your tragic magic
beauty.