Made me giggle:

“Scott, does the President know what two plus two equals?”

“The President has gone on record expressing his full support of the decimal system, and that the number two should be proud of its quantity. But we need to address the broader issue of shadowy variables, which don’t immediately disclose their actual value until the algorithms are complete.”

I’m a big fan of maps. Aerial photography. Atlases. Graphs. Charts. The kind of all-at-once multiple stories a map can tell. Follow the watershed, compare it to the towns. Find a town at the top of the watershed on the map, and then imagine what it’s like there. Imagine how the town came to be. Imagine how it continued until now, and how long it’ll be there.

I remember being a little kid and seeing a map, and thinking that all those dots with names next to them were so very permanent. A perfect black circle denoting something very specific. A town, a city. The lines between states.

I remember in geography class there was a discussion of the various kinds of borders that could exist between states (as in US states, or sovereign states, take your pick). We looked at US states like Oklahoma, whose borders are primarily straight lines decided by politics, until you get to the Red River border with Texas which squiggles and meanders like the most pissed-off earthworm ever to exist.

I remember being asked if the border between Europe and Asia was primarily geographical or political. The border was defined as the Ural Mountains. I couldn’t answer the question. The mountains are geographical, but the border is arbitrarily assigned to those mountains. I was supposed to answer that the border was geographical, but it’s not. It’s not exactly political, either; it’s wholly arbitrary. There are rivers on either side of those mountains; why do we not say the dividing line is one of those rivers?

Someone, once upon a time, said the Urals were the border, and that stuck. The various cultures of people living there don’t think they’re either European or Asian, at least they didn’t before someone told them there was a distinction.

So rather than illustrate how idiotic a question this was, I sat in a half-dumbfounded state, arguing with myself whether I was ready to defend my position.

That’s what school was for me, mostly: Asking myself if I was ready to defend my position. My arbitrary border. I was smarter than the teachers, or at least, had more on my mind than they’d know what to do with, and I was constantly trying to figure out what other students I dared make eye contact with. I was (and still am) bad at speaking in front of people, as in a class. In P.E. class I couldn’t win: I got beat up regardless of whether I made eye contact or not.

Maps are fascinating to me because you can look at old ones and compare them to new ones. Once upon a time a cartographer diagramming the west coast of North America would note that ‘there be monsters here.’ I’m not so sure that’s untrue in the present, but if that monster has a street address, you can get driving directions on MapQuest.

Today I don’t worry about eye contact. Today I fuck with people’s minds. Earlier today I was back in the University district beating a guy to the punch when it came to begging for spare change. It’s an emtpy satisfaction, however.

Towns and cities rise and prosper and crumble, and their dots on the map fade with time. The roads that connect them return to the soil. Human endeavour thrashes through, leaves a road, then eventually abandons it for something else. Soon there’s nothing left for maps to describe. New towns, new roads, new maps.

Earlier today, some errands took me to the U-district. After I was done with the important stuff, I went to one of the many, many used CD shops you tend to find near major universities.

Picked up a copy of the limited-edition remastered Japanese import paper-sleeve CD version of XTC‘s ‘Skylarking,’ and MAN. It’s like it’s a totally different record. It’s like someone took the cotton out of my ears. The re-mastering is masterful, and the packaging makes one happier than a ballet on a rainy day. It’s like a little tiny CD-sized LP record, with paper inner sleeve and cardboard jacket.

The track order is slightly different than the US LP release I’m used to, and it includes the bonus track of either Mermaid Smiled or Dear God (depending on which previous release you had; in my case, Mermaid Smiled).

Completely and totally worth it, and of course it was only $9. They also had the limited-edition Japanese import paper-sleeve CD (say that three times fast) of ‘Nonesuch,’ and while that’s not my favorite XTC album, it might be worth going back for, just so this one isn’t lonely. If they had ‘English Settlement,’ it’d be no contest.

And now for a little Mac geekiness:

I’ve spent the last little while installing Mac OS 9.2.2 on my Mac, because I need to use Classic (which is kind of like needing to use Windows 95 while using Windows XP at the same time).

Since my Mac OS 9.1 installer CD refused to boot (even when I held down the shift key), I dug around for my iBook’s software restore disks. See, for a while there, Apple thought it would be a good idea to solve issues like this by making you boot off the software restore disks, which would then wipe your whole hard drive clean and restore all the software your computer came with. But! You can retrieve the disk image files that are stored on those disks, mount them, and then pick and choose what you want. So I picked the nascent System Folder and most of the Applications (Mac OS 9) folder.

So far so good. Start up Classic. It warns me that Mac OS 9.1 is too old, and that I should upgrade. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Reboot the computer into Mac OS 9. Download the updaters, so I’ll have Mac OS 9.2.2 goodness. They’re stored in .bin files, which is kind of stupid, but that’s no problem, since the software restore disks include Stuffit Expander, which is the de facto software for handling .bin files. (Stuffit is roughly the Mac equivalent to WinZip.)

However! When I double-click on the .bin files, my Mac urps at me. It says that there are some pieces missing from the installation of Stuffit Expander. The installation of Stuffit Expander APPLE MADE AS A BACKUP. Har. It tells me to reinstall from the installer.

No problem! I can download the installer from the nifty neeto internet! Yay internet!

I go to stuffit.com. I eventually end up at this page. It’s a form. They want me to tell them my name and my email address before I can download their software.

In the process of doing this, I tell them how I feel about that. When I click on ‘submit,’ it tells me that email addresses with the word ‘fuck’ in them aren’t allowed. I try a few other permutations. Eventually it accepts something a little less rude. And what does it tell me? It tells me that the link to the software has been emailed to me. If I want to download an installer, I have to check a non-existant email address.

Rather than go back and enter a real email address, I reboot my computer and use the Mac OS X version of Stuffit Expander, because I hate crap like that. I un-bin the files, and un-bin everything else I can find to un-bin. I reboot to Mac OS 9. I install the 9.2.1 update. I install the 9.2.2 update. Yay.

But now, I have the hankering to install the single most useful Mac OS 9 add-on ever to exist, FinderPop. I loves me my FinderPop. I needs me FinderPop! It’s a .sit file, for which I need Stuffit Expander. Time to bite the bullet.

I go back to that evil web site. I enter my email address. I use the webmail part of my ISP to get the link. I click the link and…

Well, it gives me four options of files I can download in order to install Stuffit Expander. Two of them are for Mac OS X, and two are for Mac OS 9. Of those two, one is a .sit file, and the other is an .hqx file. In order to use either, I MUST HAVE STUFFIT EXPANDER INSTALLED. Stuffit Expander is the software I’m trying to install!

No FinderPop joy today. And if I could, I’d delete all my Stuffit-related products out of sheer spite.

As I mentioned in the last ‘blog entry, I have a tendency towards chronic procrastination. Not in the sense of putting things off, but in the sense of having no forward motion in my life.

It’s not true that I don’t have forward motion; simply by sitting here breathing I have at least some forward motion. And yesterday I managed to knock a few items off my Master To-Do List Of Life. They weren’t exciting or interesting things, just easily-accomplished ones.

It always amazes me how much more freely I can move when I’m not weighed down by worrisome items from that list I mentioned. I’ve been trying to figure out if I weigh myself down simply so I can experience the freedom when they’re lifted. I don’t think that’s the case; I think I choose to weigh myself down on things that are trivial, rather than the inevitable weight of larger issues.

An example is that I had put off paying my utility bill for a few weeks past due. Not because I was out of money, but because I pinned the bill to the cork board and then neglected it. I’d wake up every morning thinking, “Gotta pay the bill…” (among other things). This is trivial. This is nothing. I should have paid it when it first came. In fact, when it first came, I thought, “I should pay this right now, while I’m thinking about it,” and subsequently went back to reading emails.

But when I imagine a world where I’m responsible that way, I wonder what other weights will sink in to fill the gaps. My experience is fundamentally neurotic, even though I have the ability to understand and filter out the parts of those neuroses that come from my broken neurology. The world, for me, is a membrane of potential threats that cocoons me like shrink-wrap. Not because that’s what the world is, but because that’s what my nervous system makes it look like.

So I think that what’s going on is this: If the threat is an unpaid utility bill, then I can focus on that and worry about whether I’ll have water and garbage pickup. Rather than opening myself up to the generalized neurotic dread that sometimes descends over me like the aforementioned shrink-wrap.

The point I wanted to make here, though, is that for the past couple of weeks I haven’t slept well and haven’t dreamed. But the night after paying the bill (at the neighborhood center, handing a debit card to an actual person so they could swipe it through a machine and everything) I had vivid dreams and only needed 6 hours sleep. I woke up dancing, and not just because I had to pee.

If you could stop time, or at least slow it way, way down, and directed your attention toward some giant boulder somewhere that’s been drilled and packed with dynamite, dialing in on the exact moment of the detonation…

Step forward like the single-frame advance on your DVD player, the instant of the initial shudder as a result of the blast, the beginning of the powder and flame coming out of the holes, the first hint of vaporized granite pulled into the atmosphere like water vapor…

You know the story about what’s to come. The boulder will split apart, crashing to the ground in a pile of rubble. But right now, paused as it is on the timeline, that boulder knows nothing about the energy that’s just starting to move through it.

I just tried watching some TV. I couldn’t muster anything but contempt for those people trying to sell me things, those people trying to entertain me. “There was a mouth on the TV, and the mouth was saying to me…” (So say the Android Sisters.)

Earlier today I was listening to Bjork’s Vespertine CD, considering how long ago I bought it. Listening to it made me think it was still new, as though it had been released yesterday. It reminded me of being ahead of the curve about Sigur Ros, also from Iceland. That seems like yesterday also, but was four years ago.

I’m looking at my camera, in a box, on the desk. I have to take it to the post office and mail it to Olympus so they can fix it. I’ve been needing to do this for two weeks. There’s a pile of things like this, things that need to get done but don’t for some reason. And then, for some reason, I have to feel like crap about them before I can get over the threshhold. I have to find a financial advisor, I have to take the car for maintenance… I’ve needed to do these things for months.

I’m the exploding boulder, on eternal pause.

Techno remixes of campaign ads, alledgedly by ‘an influential Congressional staffer.’

They’re not that enjoyable, but the notion of some staffer somewhere doing this is intriguing.

The other day I picked up some LaserDisc movies at the used bookstore. Some smart person had bought all the Hong Kong action movies that were there last time, so the pickin’s were a little slim.

I thought about getting ‘Blue Velvet,’ but I just wanted to be entertained, not whacked over the head with weirdness. Oddly, even though that was the case, I ended up getting ‘Boogie Nights‘ and ‘Unforgiven.’ Grand total: $9.

‘Boogie Nights’ is the breakthrough film for Paul Thomas Anderson, a director I admire. He did two of my favorite movies: ‘Magnolia‘ and ‘Punch Drunk Love.’ ‘Boogie Nights’ explores the world of the people who make pornography, and the wacky weirdness that ensues in such situations. Much of it also takes place in the perfectly-lit urban night, which is always a plus for me; the donut shop scene in particular is perfection unto itself, even if it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the movie.

P.T. Anderson movies are all the same movie, in many ways. Compare the donut shop scene with the prelude to the rain of frogs scene in ‘Magnolia.’ Compare the gay bashing scene with Barry Egan getting beat up in ‘Punch Drunk Love’… Both sets of assailants are even in pickup trucks. And it’s always at night.

Spoiler alert. Turn back now if you haven’t seen:

‘Unforgiven’ is a western with high ambitions. It’s going to dispell myths and transform the American western into an interplay of character studies. No one is going to be purely evil, and no one is going to be purely good. Everyone will be victimized as surely as everyone will victimize someone else. Basically, it’s a picture of life made hard not by the land, but by the desire of all the characters to protect what is theirs and keep their sanity. Clint Eastwood directs the thing, and it’s obvious he’s been watching lots of Kurosawa. It’s expertly crafted, beautifully shot, and does a pretty good job of fulfilling its ambitions, though the ending goes too far back into the realm of myth. At the beginning of the movie, Eastwood’s Munny can’t shoot a tobacco tin with a pistol at 10 yards, but two weeks later, for the movie’s climax he’s able to gun down six men in quick succession.

My main problems with this movie have to do with the ending, and with the fact that Richard Harris simply disappears halfway through. Also, the prostitutes have no personality except as a group. We’re not allowed to get to know them, except the way the men in the movie know them: A class of people who are oppressed by circumstance.

Finally, the message here is that there’s no way out. You simply can’t escape the life that surrounds you, no matter how dark or horrible. Munny’s life of subsistence farming is a facade, just as the aspirations of all the characters are shams. The sherrif’s carpentry skills, for example.

Perhaps the realm of myth is the only way to find meaning in any of this. Maybe we mythologize the American west today because it was settled by sadists and murderers, and transforming sadism and murder into heroics helps reduce our shame. So here’s Eastwood, an icon and manufacturer of American west mythology, rubbing our noses in that shame.

Complex movie, worth seeing.

I’ve been reading about the need for blood bank donations, given the FL hurricane destruction and a general low level of available blood in banks.

This got me thinking about making a donation or two, which in turn got me thinking about selling a donation or two. I realize the two aren’t the same thing… Blood you sell goes to research and ultimately pads some corporate bottom line somewhere, while blood donated to the Red Cross or whoever ends up being used in medial procedures. But I figure, why not do a little of both? I’ve got plenty of marrow, right?

Anyway.

So I’ve been looking around on the web for discussions about selling blood plasma. My first google search and generally random link led me to this paper, which is a total hoot. It’s on a web site called sociology.org, which has a staid and conservative mission statement, but the article itself says things like this:

I was in what appeared to be a typical examining room in a doctor’s office. There was a desk with pamphlets and advertisements and an examining bed. On the wall was a poster that showed a living, smiling middle-aged Caucasian couple standing in the front yard of a single family home with their hands on a boy in a baseball uniform. They were all happy and smiling and living because of plasma. The caption: A PLASMA DONOR SAVED OUR GRANDSON’S LIFE. Implicit: DONATE TODAY, MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE PEOPLE WILL BENEFIT FROM IT. Implicit: HOMELESS? POOR? DESTITUTE? DEAD? AT LEAST YOUR PLASMA WON’T BE! THAT’S RIGHT, IF YOU’VE SOLD YOURSELF YOU CAN TAKE COMFORT IN KNOWING THAT YOUR PLASMA WILL HELP ONLY THE BEST FAMILIES IN AMERICA. YOU MIGHT BE DEAD, BUT YOUR PLASMA LIVES ON!!!

The rest goes on in a bizarre, William S. Burroughs kind of vein (pardon the pun), where “donator/seller/victim/hosts” are attacked by giant mosquito machines and so forth.

To my left lies the corpse of what was once an elderly white man. He was close enough to me that I could see the bruises on his exposed arm.

Narcissus- How are you today?

Prometheus-[Bound] If I was doing okay, do you think I’d be here?

Let’s hear it for academia!

stargzr asks if I ever gaze up into the stars.

The answer is yes.

And no. My mind is really busy all the time, so ‘gazing’ turns into a bunch of different kinds of consideration. My mind starts cranking through all the stuff I know about stars, a guesstimation of how far away a given star is, a reverse-engineering of what I know about weather to judge how clear it will be for the next little while, internal discourses on the arbitrary quality of named constellations and how that relates to astrology, the correlations between astrology and other magic-y things I happen to know a thing or two about, the vertiginous sense that all those stars are really very, very close, and closer still is the moon, which seems about to scrape against my nose, the breathing metabolism of the thin layer of life that stands between the idealized euclidian perfect sphere in elliptical orbit and the dark forest of mystery the flowing creek the million beautiful things that could kill me at any moment as easily as I swat a fly… Things like that. Mostly all at the same time.

Last night I watched a documentary called ‘The Mystery Of Chaco Canyon.’ It was really good. Well-produced, absorbing, and walking a fine line between exploring the facts about the place and speculation about its use.

The basic idea is that the various pueblos in Chaco Canyon form an immense solar and lunar observatory which marks not only the solstices and equinoxes, but also the 9 -1/2 year cycle of variation of the moon within its ecliptic. Some of these cycles are marked in the geometrical relationships between buildings that can’t even be seen from each other, but which were, as the researchers put it, ‘in the minds’ of the people who lived there. We’re talking about buildings which are scattered across an area 100 miles wide. The main buildings are within 10 or so miles of each other, but some don’t have a line-of-sight between them.

That is to say, when they gazed up at the stars, or at the sun or moon, they could know that their architectural system, and their whole culture, was designed around what they were seeing. They had a whole culture’s-worth of frames of reference in which to understand not only the heavenly bodies themselves, but their relationship to each other. Their culture was, for them, the bridge between the solar and lunar cycles.

And that had to have been an amazing thing to see when you gazed up into the sky.