I’m really frustrated with myself. I have cycles where I can deal for a while, and then for a while I’m less able to deal. With emotional stresses, responsibilities, my own inability to stay on track.

I just want to bitch and moan about it. I want to have a pity party and bring you all along. I want to open the cracks and blab all about how difficult it is to just be me. But I’m sick of that. Sick of thinking about it.

So on the one hand, I’m frustrated with all this stuff, and on the other, I don’t really want to talk about it, because talking about it just cements it more in place somehow.

In other news, I went for a walk last night, up to a park on top of a hill that overlooks the sound. It’s a lovely place, looking down on Shilshole marina. It was about midnight. There were some people there, and as they got up to leave, I recognized their voices… It was the Media Night crew. Some friends of mine meet every Thursday to absorb media together; they’re currently working on something from ZBS, and in the past they’ve watched the whole Twin Peaks TV series a few episodes at a time, but apparently last night it was the sea lions down below the cliffs. We chatted. They left. It was amusing.

Tonight I was cruising around in my car, and I ended up at the same park. I just sat in the car for a while, since it was late, and I didn’t want to attract the ire of the nearby homeowners. A limousine pulls up and parks, and about a dozen teenagers get out and start yakking to each other, acting up, making a lot of noise. The noise wasn’t what caught my attention though. It’s that these kids could have been anywhere, and they’d still behave in exactly the same way.

And I guess that’s my cultural criticism for tonight. We seem to live in a culture of non-locality. That is, we seem to expect ourselves to be socially finite and static. We have an identity, which we build like a house. We expect that the house will never move; it’s built on a foundation. If we transplant the our identity, and take it someplace new, or someplace we only visit occasionally, we tend to try and make the situation fit our identity, rather than being open to newer and perhaps better possibilities.

Like, deep, man. I’m too close to being in bed asleep to go further with it.

I haven’t had much to say lately. I’ve been in the land of distraction, thanks to the new cable modem. I’ve been sucking down music files. Fear for me; I found the Library Of Congress.

I’ve also been in codehead land, putting the finishing touches on a free REALbasic plugin I’m releasing, and slapping another, for-pay one into shape. I like programming. It’s abstract in the extreme. It’s haiku for computers; how little can you get away with?

More Noise

Dictionaraoke, the singing dictionary.

More Noisy Things

There’s one noisy thing I forgot: The Droplift Project. You for sure want to hear ‘Thunderclock,’ ‘Rub My Face,’ ‘Mr. T Adventure Story,’ and ‘King Brian.’ Have fun.

Just wanted to mention that Zane finally did the Xanga thing. Now if he can just post more…

Dayum. Now I’m thinking about TFPs add-on story board, where Zane and I were driving around in the middle of nowhere and we got lost, and wanted to get to the other side of the map, so I folded it and Zane drove the car up.

Of course this doesn’t make any sense to you. Why should it?

A Beginner’s Guide To Noisy Things On The ‘Net

What you gotta understand is that there’s more to music than music. There’s noise, and there’s collage, and there’s all kinds of other stuff, too. And the real fun comes when you end up listening to this stuff and realizing that it’s making you smile.

We’ll start easy, with Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast. Aside from having a really cool name, SEB is quiet. It’s easy to understand the attraction of this music, even if you aren’t attracted to it. Go and listen for a while, or better yet, start listening and then come back and read this. I’ll wait. Note that it doesn’t have a beat, or if it does, the beat is subdued.

Next, we’ll head off to negativland. negativland are masters of the form. Listen especially to their ‘U2,’ the cover of U2′s ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ that got them sued by Island records. It’s also important to understand that these guys have a couple of hours of air time on a very large radio station in the San Fransisco Bay Area. Rawk.

Next on the list is People Like Us, who I’ve only recently discovered, which prompted me to write this ‘blog. I’ve been listening to their totally radio broadcast, which is excellent (that is, if you enjoy this kind of music) (which I do).

And last, but not least, for the piece de resistance, you must, you absolutely MUST listen to Evolution Control Committee‘s ‘Rocked By Rape,’ which is samples of Dan Rather rapping over samples of AC/DC’s ‘Back In Black.’ Also, DJ Pantshead’s remix of ‘Love Shaq.’

Now, the most important part:

The best part of all this is that if you have enough media players, you can LISTEN TO ALL OF THESE THINGS AT THE SAME TIME, AND IT’LL SOUND JUST AS GOOD. I know it should be the other way around.. It should just be too much. But it isn’t. Ahem, er… That is, if you can deal with the individual sources themselves.

Have fun ruining your hearing.

You, with the homemade bomb and the rifle you stole from a sleeping guard…

JUST STOP THAT SHIT NOW.

One Long Rambly Mofo Of A ‘Blog

It’s like breathing for me. It’s like if you try to hold your breath, you can’t after a while. Some kind of autonomic system takes over and you inhale. Or like a dog barking at people walking by on the sidewalk; we say, “Bad dog! No bark!” but it’s just instinct for the dog. It’s in their genes.

And so, being distracted, or falling into ritual (neurological, not religious), or feeling the skin-ache that drives me to hyperfocus… these are like breathing to me. I’m born to do them. I’m born to feel them.

They’re me, in as much as anyone’s breathing is them. What can one identify with? Do you identify with your breath, your sweat, your poop? Do you identify with your body? Is it you? Is it not you? What valid arguments are there, either way?

Is it true that because I’m broken in a number of easily-recognizable ways, I’m the sum of those deficits? Those deficits make me who I am, of course, as much as my strengths do. And in fact, some of my ‘deficits’ are actually ‘strengths’ and vice versa, depending.

So the question is: Depending on what? Does one go around pursuing the circumstances in which deficit turns to strength, just so one doesn’t have to call a deficit what it is?

I’m blind in my left eye. I have been since I was 7. I’m 34. Think of the years’-worth of experiences my right visual cortex has never had. Consider that the hemispheres of the brain are specialized; my view of the world is thus specialized. Weighted toward the rational and solid. Literal. I see things and I understand their function and functioning in detail almost immediately. Things I see are associated by linked lists; I see a tree and I see an associative tree of data about it in my mind.

I don’t see love or hate or fear. I had to learn to recognize those things. I’m still learning. This is something people can’t relate to; they say, ‘Everyone has to learn the subtleties…’ But I’m still having trouble with the unsubtle!

It’s like when someone approaches you on the street, and you can’t remember their name. You fish around for clues, like asking about the guy’s wife, so he’ll say her name, and then maybe that’ll jog your memory about his name. Or you ask about work so he’ll say the company’s name, for the same reason. The difference for me is that it’s not just the person’s name I’m guessing, and it’s not that I only have to do it occasionally. Imagine always having to do that, in order to reverse-engineer some understanding of the inner state of whoever you’re dealing with.

This is why I isolate and talk through mediation such as this very ‘blog. My identity, to myself and to others, is dominated by the physics of my body, most notably my neurology. There are rules and borders. To me, the mapping between the borders (neurology, fitness, beauty) and the rules (social- and self-identity, taboos, celebrity) seems horribly arbitrary. The rarity of my exception kills any chance for the exception to change the norm (and that’s how the mechanics of all this works: there’s an identity-norm, and then exceptions stretch and mutate the norm as if it were an ecosystem or organism evolving).

Some folks tell me that I spend too much effort thinking about my physical situation. That I’m something of a hypochondriac, which is a sort of narcissism. The narcissism I’ll cop to, but the body my soul decided to take off the shelf and inhabit is broken in some really quite fascinating ways. I don’t think it’s unhealthy to consider it. And even more fascinating are the ways in which people react to the unusual, and the universal it implies.

All of this applies to everyone, you see. Everyone’s climbing over hurdles. At some point in their life, everyone’s looking at the world as if from the bottom of a well… removed, distant, alien, unreachable. Not that everyone stays there, and not to say that I’ve stayed there. But it’s a place I’m intimately familiar with.

I say stuff like this and people act as if I’m three years old, telling me how beautiful life can be, and how I’ll find what I’m looking for one day. Well, here’s some news for ya: What you think I’m looking for? I’m not looking for it! I’m looking for something else.

I’m looking for honesty. No unflinching honesty can sting more than my life already does. This is the curse of the well-intentioned. They think they’re doing you a favor by being dishonest. Don’t tell me everything’ll be OK, because I’m fully capable of deluding myself already, without your assistance. Things won’t be OK, unless you define ‘getting used to how hard things are’ as ‘being OK.’ That’s just a fact, neither hard nor soft, bad nor good. I’m not stuck here… This is who I am.

Which brings us back to the question. Where does identity come from? Am I my breath? Am I my skin-ache and hyperfocus? Am I the last time I bought groceries? Am I the last poop I made?

Am I my blind left eye? Am I my good right one?

And speaking of the President, you should all check out the White House web site to see what America’s all about.

Our President, doing everything in his power to start WWIII.