I devised a method for believing in an afterlife. It has to do with thoughts and lives leaving cosmic nudges at the fabric of spacetime that transcend the speed of light, aliens detecting these nudges aeons into the future then using them to replicate brains, and my one experience under general anesthesia in which I closed my eyes then opened them, and was told four hours had supposedly passed.
They hint at this in "Gladiator":
Maximus: Three weeks from now, I will be harvesting my crops. Imagine where you will be, and it will be so. Hold the line! Stay with me! If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!
[Cavalry laughs]
Maximus: Brothers, what we do in life, echoes in eternity.
The stand-out counter to my afterlife is, "why are humans so special?" -- why not painstakingly reproduce all the craneflies that have ever lived? That seems more outlandish, and we may not be all that different from craneflies to some alien super-intelligence or super-technological civilization, except craneflies don't write blogs about the afterlife and spacenudging (that I know of).
The main thing to keep in mind in this fantasy model is all the upcoming time that there will be; the universe was just born yesterday, on a timeline of the far future. They say it all will eventually experience heat death and deteriorate into particles so far apart they won't do anything to each other, but before that some intervention into physical reality might take place, or even is likely to take place, given the universe's propensity to give rise to occasional technological civilizations. Eventually someone is going to be advanced enough to recreate us, and from our perspectives, we'll just close our eyes on our deathbeds and then wake up in another life -- one where there are tiny oases of technology and consciousness in a vast starless void.
"How long has it been?", we will ask the aliens, who will have to use Knuth up arrow notation or some such to describe all the time that has passed. Of course this is all very hubristic, not only in thinking we are interesting enough to replicate one by one, but also in thinking there is a "we" to begin with -- that we are somehow separate from the universe. It might be that being replicated in the far future is a nightmare rather than a dream. Still though...if I were allowed to choose death at some point I think I'd like to maybe try it out, although I might regret it. I wanted to type "ragret" there as a funny misspelling but my ego would not allow readers to think I *actually* misspelled it. REEEEEEEEE
In the bible, the threat isn't hell, but death; "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." I guess if you don't want to live forever but are somehow convinced of Jesus's divinity, then you are in for a bad time. A Tillich-caliber liberal might interpret John 3:16 as "if you believe in the redemption of humanity, then you shall have it."
I chose craneflies because they are beautiful, conscious to a degree, as well as extremely stupid and exist only to make more of themselves -- no offense intended if any craneflies or cranefly allies are reading. Wasps and bees and ants are pretty smart -- their behavior is complex -- but craneflies, not so much. I've been over this before, and I first deduced that humans are special because humans create art, art being defined as activity or production with no overt evolutionary purpose, but then I backpedaled and said no, craneflies also do art by sitting on the wall and existing; by basically doing anything other than eating or mating, which in fact constitute a relatively small percentage of a given cranefly's lifespan, including both larval (eat) and adult (mate) stages. It's possible philosophy is a better candidate for tagging human specialness than art, especially post-photography.
Still getting used to new typing. Maybe I never will, totally. REEEEEEEEE #2
Good morning. I'm (MEEEEEEEE) still getting used to new typing ergonomics. I haven't blogged that much in part because of this, and in part because I am lazy. It's the same thing with walking: ostensibly I don't go because of mountain lions, but really I just don't want to and the mountain lions are a good excuse. But this morning I changed into my workout clothes and am now just waiting for sunrise. Once the workout clothes are on, there's no going back. Tendinitis still sucks. Why am I announcing all this to the world? What kind of fucked up person am I? I am a BLOGGER, that's what. So I have a diary but I can't say really personally resonant things because I can't have the public reading it, and then at the same time a bunch of people read the thoughts I do put out there and JUDGE ME. The whole web thing has been perfect for me, and not in a good way: it's a lazy place where I can do lazy stuff and have it feel like I'm productive. There are no standards and everything is low effort. Well maybe not, but there's a serious "no one gives a shit" problem with websites. But then I was just saying that I want more privacy! I dunno. WHY
Once a month, eh? Thass wat u got goin?!?! K. FINE!!! I'm trying to acclimate to typing with a wrist rest and it's not going swimmingly. I have dreadful debilitating tendinitis, and yes I am spelling it right, even though it looks wrong. It seems like it should be "tendOnitis," because it's an inflamed tendOn, but for some reason it's "tendInitis." HOWEVER "tendOnitis" is acceptable, although less correct. REEEEEEEE
I guess typing is doable and I just have to get used to it. I'm worried about my tendinitis: will it ever get better? Am I doomed? No more guitar? No more serving hard ice cream? If I ice it and wear pressure straps then I can sort of manage it and make it not-worse, but it's not getting any better. I hope I don't need surgery but if I do then just pile it on to the shit of life, I guess. And it just gets worse, until you die. I'm brain damaged, have vision obscuring floaters, occasional ocular migraines, periodontal disease (supposedly, or maybe just LONG IN THE TOOTH), obesity, tendinitis, a broken leg...and mildly ingrown toenails plus weird unexplained pains in the feet.
I've been reading about "sealioning" and I don't really understand it. Near as I can figure, it means bad faith debate in the form of unimportant or diversionary questions. This is fine, but I think autistic types get accused of sealioning when they are not actually in bad faith but only trying to clarify, understand, or have a fun conversation. It reminds me of the term "gaslighting" (attempting to cause someone to question reality): if you tell me you are not gaslighting, you are gaslighting. If you quibble with the definition of sealioning, you are sealioning. Both terms rely on assessment of bad faith and as such could very well be misapplied. It doesn't help that "sealioning" was coined in a webcomic so if you question it you are not only a sealion in bad faith, but have no sense of humor to boot. Being in bad faith means not being honest in intent; trolling, basically, or even teasing or comedy could amount to bad faith. Anything that's not assembly instructions is in bad faith.
You can find Reddit comments that are way better than my blog. That may be the issue: the kind of thing people did on personal sites in the early 2000s moved onto other platforms and if you keep it up on a personal site, there's a sort of redundancy there. Or am I seagassing?
I have been realizing more and more that I am not as good a guitar player as I thought. I've written about this, about how it's easy to think you are a genius at guitar just because you can make a noise that sounds like guitar. There may also be some ego there, inasmuch as it's ME making the noise so it's harder to evaluate fairly. But I can listen to Matteo Mancuso and then listen to my own SOUND SHOW archives and realize I'm not in that tier. It doesn't help that I have tendinitis now and am slower and clumsier, and that this is compounded the less I practice (play).
WTF is "practicing" anyway? Maybe there's noodling, which is just playing, and then practicing, which is more deliberate and seeks to improve deficiencies. My deficiency is that I am not Matteo Mancuso and I do not believe I can practice my way there. I guess I have "practiced" before, like when I learned jazz standards, but no matter how much I play I can't go any faster than how fast I go and I can't train myself to 'deeply hear' and replicate more advanced music (maybe). Perhaps the point is making little improvements on your own playing such that you "level up" yourself, regardless of achieving some standard. It reminds me of posts I saw recently about the New York Times mini crossword puzzle, where everyone in the thread was talking about solving it in 30, 15, 6 seconds, and there I was thinking I was doing well if I solved it in under a minute.
These new typing ergonomics will take getting used to but I think it's doable and I think it's better for my tendons. Small improvements, right? The problem with the internet is you're immediately exposed to THE BEST in every field. Maybe I should go back to painting; I think I have more hope of winning there. Wow it's 5:30am and getting light outside. Lots of mountain lion sightings lately and they say not to walk at dawn. Meh. I wish I didn't live in fire country and/or mountain lion country. It's pretty and empty here, but I think those are the only advantages, the second being questionable as it carries with it every convenience being a half hour drive away. Furthermore I think I've seen enough trees although I'd probably miss them if they were gone. In fairness it's not just the trees: it's the rolling hills and lack of people and wildlife (not so much the bugs and bears and lions), that contribute to the prettiness or grandeur or something. Unspoiled landscape. AWOOOOOOOO
I should start planning tomorrow's show. Maybe I'll just say FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK for the full hour.
Once a week, eh? Thass wat u got goin?!? K. FINE!!! I went to church yesterday and it was ok. Not great. I sort of hate it. I think it chips away at turning me conservative. This church attracts unconventional people (gay, trans, poly, general odd fish) and it makes me wonder about the endgame of non-economic leftism, where every behavior is permissible and there are no standards at all -- one day people may show up to church naked or in dog costumes, or spray everyone with water guns filled with their own urine, and we all just have to accept it and be comfortable with it, or we run afoul of the tenets of diversity, equity, and inclusion. What about me? What about what I like and don't like? Can I have preferences without being labeled a counterrevolutionary? Probably not. I just read an article on the split in Democrats between social justice leftists and liberals, and I think I may be more liberal. Of course this is an identity narrative and as such is false.
Probably I'm just old. Something else I've been thinking about and wanting to attempt to flesh out more: the voices in my head, a lot of people's verbal responses, and maybe just thoughts in general, are a lot like chatGPT. Everyone has been exposed to language their whole life -- they continually parse an enormous database of word and phrases, such that some are more likely to occur than others, based on the previous word or phrase. Our brains are then left in this kind of autocomplete situation where stuff just comes up, and it has little to do with the unconscious mind in the sense of someone's TRUE identity, or any kind of solid target for psychology. These auto-playing words are confused with "the self" or personality, when in fact they only amount to brain echoes due to over-exposure -- some kind of neurological repetitive stress injury via text. Insight psychology, or therapy, or semi-Freudian analysis, is easily, maybe unavoidably captured by this phenomenon. I've written about this before and no one cares but briefly, what the therapist thinks is an insight based on observation of the subject is really an insight based on having seen too many movies. We're all just running on autocomplete, and this is largely a cultural, rather than psychological, phenomenon.
In other news, cities are, in large part, shitholes. Take a city that people generally agree is not a shithole, like Montreal -- still a shithole. I recently found my old hood in Hampstead (a small enclave on Montreal island, surrounded by Montreal proper), and it's depressing: ugly apartment building after ugly apartment building on a street with cars and very few trees and no hip cafes or anything like that. I dropped my streetview man down in another, supposedly better locale, in central Montreal, and yep still a shithole: grafitti, boarded up windows, etc. There are portions of cities that are nice, usually claimed by rich people, and I suppose it's a truism that to have a conventionally aesthetic urban experience you need to be rich, but the scenario where you just MOVE TO A CITY and plop down somewhere random and have everything look and feel good, is extremely unlikely; the hip cafes are far away, clustered together somewhere, and cordoned off from the hoi polloi by land value. The cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuntry (gyelk), on the other hand, specializes in this mythological universality. And of course, the obvious: who gives a shit about hip cafes? If you break it down, you're sitting in a building with art on the wall and buying sugarwater for $10 a glass. But it's in th'CITAAAAAAAY so everything is cool. It's all just status games. Status games and autocomplete! No, in theory, all the smart high earning aesthetes move to a city with the promise of hip cafes, and even if they are disillusioned, they find themselves next to other pioneers, marry them, and make high status babies. That's how it works.
TODAY IS EASTER. THERE WILL BE A MAGIC SHOW AT 09:30. CHAPLAIN CHARLIE WILL TELL YOU HOW THE FREE WORLD *WILL* CONQUER COMMUNISM, WITH THE HELP OF GOD, AND A FEW MARINES!!!
Happy Zombie Jesus Day, as they say or used to say in internetland before the internet was mainstreamed around about 2008 to all the Facebookers and DMV clients and high school reunionites. I told my aunt recently I'm not a devout atheist, but I may have been fudging. I was less an atheist before but I don't really have spiritual experiences anymore, at least none that I recognize, and so I think it's more appropriate to discard the "God" concept as useless, meaningless, empty, etc. SORRY. I suppose peak spirituality was around 2014-2017.
There's plenty of material around Easter for liberal Christians: spring, rejuvenation, a new start, and any number of metaphors around being born again. There are a few rational AND conservative theologians in modern Christendom, and I think for them, the life of Jesus encapsulates the only supernatural events on the universe's entire timeline (virgin birth, resurrection, and then the minor sort of embarrassing magic trick stuff like walking on water and water-to-wine).
I'm going to church today. When I do that, I sometimes try to have some kind of 'spiritual' experience...some kind of deep meditation or some such, on the pew. Christianity is by far the weirdest (requires acceptance of implausible events) contemporary mainstream religion, and I believe it is also the most popular. No one else claims God Himself was here on the earth, walking around, trying to free Palestine. You have to admit, even if you believe it, that it is a standout. But what I like about Christianity, theologically, is that this "Christ" concept that says "man was god" or "god was man" harkens to Hinduism, which is a much older and more inward turned philosophical system. In Hinduism, YOU, or the consciousness we all feel, is the same thing as the entire universe, or Brahman, which is the sacred godhead. So, in a sense, in both Hinduism and Christianity, man is god. You are god! But the connection ends abruptly before that, I think in most cases -- maybe a few very liberal Christians could go with "you are God" and cite concepts like "the inner Christ" but I think mostly Christian faith is more "supernatural theism" than "panentheism."
Marcus Borg presents these concepts as two polls in his book, "The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith." Supernatural theism means a bearded man in the sky, basically, although stated less crassly -- God is a person-like spirit who thinks and feels like a human. Questions around where God is or how big he is are accepted as meaningless and juvenile by spiritual theists, but questions around God's wrath, love, mercy, etc, are not. "Oh, so people designed this god after themselves," a smart little kid might comment. No! It's the other way around: God is human-like, and he made us to "look" like him. That's the party line, anyway. Furthermore, the Frances Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Maryland is available for purchase now for a limited time at a very low price.
The other end of Borg's continuum is panentheism, or "all in god." Paul Tillich's "ground of being" is a related concept. Basically, God is the most fundamental "thing," and He encapsulates all else, including (but not limited to!) the material universe with its stars and planets and galaxies and humans and pets and farm animals. But even in the case of these types of theologians, they will still read the bible and talk about God as if he were a spirit person. So I think there's a little bit of confusion there, or at least acknowledged inconsistency.
I'm pretty much an atheist, at least for all common definitions of "god." It's likely humans have a built in theology such that they want or need to think about what's behind everything, what the ultimate cause is, or what to name the great whole. And sure: you can call that God, for what it's worth. At least that way you won't get into trouble at family dinner. The last three questions my Grandpa asked me before he died were 1) have you accepted Jesus Christ as your lord and savior ("yes"), 2) do you go to church ("no"), and 3) do you have a job ("no"). I was put on the spot and decided the best thing was to lie about #1, in part because accepting Jesus Christ as one's lord and savior is kind of a loose concept and you can't really prove that I have not done this, whereas church attendance or putting on a McDonalds uniform is more concrete. Nevertheless I sometimes fantasize about having truthfully answered "no" to all three queries.
I'm doing an experiment where I try computing without wearing my glasses. I can sort of see, although it's blurry. I'm listening to "The Wall," by Pink Floyd, in its entirely, front to back, one track at a time, on my local app, via mp3s (no streamin'). I wonder how many mp3 hoarders remain among us netizens.
I decided to give reading another try, and I checked out a teen novel from the library -- easy reading. I haven't attempted it yet.
But the good news is that I've been feeling pretty good lately. I gave up coffee, and I have a walking schedule (M, T, W, F), which fulfills the "most days a week" requirement of the learn'd astronomers. And, also according to the learn'd astromers, I've been more conscious of the "5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day" thing, and I'm trying to do that. It sorta seems to help me eat less during the day, maybe, possibly. I don't want to jinx anything. Oranges, bananas, strawberries, pears, salad. I'm not sure if eggplant parmesan counts but I don't see why not. I did read somewhere that eggplant parm is not all THAT healthy, as far as vegetables dishes go, but it does have some of those ANTI OXIDANTS, which no one understands, sorta like magnets and batteries.
In other news I have terrible tendinitis in both arms. I dunno how this happened. I think I'm just prone to it -- I've always had a defective muscular system such that it gets indjured easily and randomly sore and I'm always pulling muscles, sometimes while sleeping, and I feel random pains everywhere. It's been about 3 weeks now and it doesn't seem to be getting any better so maybe it's time to call the doc and get some steroids and learn some physical therapy exercises. I dunno.
I wrote to my grad school friend, Robert, today, and he wrote back, but I couldn't really make sentences that sounded smart. I just sorta babbled and nothing made sense. I think the conversatin is over now. I think this is what will happen now: I get dumber and dumber until I die.
WE DON'T NEED NO...EDUCATION
WE DONT' NEED NO...THOUGHTS CONTROLLED
NO DARK SARCASM IN THE CLAHHSROOM (Wat? This never happened that I noticed)
TEACHER LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE!!! (I think this song misses the mark here; the problem isn't undue attention, but rather neglect)
In other-other news, aNONradio is fucked up: it now splits all archives into 30 minute segments. I might just change my show time to 30 minutes. Or, I might totally leave SDF and go off on my own, with my own domain and my own podcast, elsewhere!!!! FAME AND FORTURE AWAIT!!!! SDF is holdin' me back, man. I'm kidding. OR AM I? Yes, I am. I'm just not as talented as I thought I was. To illustrate, I will not spellcheck or edit. No, I will. Somewhat.
I sorta thought I would just do this for a while: simple stupid content-free entries that take up space. At the end of my life my bedside nurse will ask me what I did in my life, and I will answer "I HAD A WEBSITE." Unless I migrate off the metaARRAY or get my own domain, prepaid for centuries, or something, that will be the end of the story of Me. I have this ongoing bug in my head that I'm not famous...that I'm not some kind of writer or artist or movie maker or actor or etc. Something creative, such that I appear all over Youtube. I spend my life here behind a screen watching my superiors: guitar players who are good, actors who are thin, etc, and I fantasize about being on the other side of the screen.
OH WELL. Greatness can't be for everyone. In fact the world desperately needs losers and will probably pay losers to exist such that they make winners feel like winners, because it really is all relative -- the working poor today live better than royalty in the middle ages [CITATION NEEDED]. I'm stuck though...stuck here.
WELL IT'S BEEN 10 DAYS AND MAYBE MO'
SINCE I FIRST LAID EYES ON YEW
SOMETHING SOMETHING
GO 'WAY HEARTBREAKAAAAAAAAAAH
*riff*
I'm sorry I gave you the middle finger. But you deserved it!!!!
Good fuggin' LAWD time flies!!! Already the 10th and I have not written, in...*head math*...6 days. 10-4=6. Logic!!! I have awful tendinitis in both forearms and can't do much. I tried physiotherapizing myself with weights and made it worse, and later swept and mopped the kitchen floor and made it worse still. I suspect I'm continually making it worse by mousing, typing, playing the guitar, and even iphoning, but meh.
I read a very discouraging article on CNN about how obesity changes the brain and how weight loss is perhaps not impossible but certainly physiologically stacked against fat people. Basically I would have to embark on a titanic lifelong daily minute-by-minute struggle in order to be thin, or at least not obese. I would like to be 5% body fat with veins bulging from sinewy arms. I would like to be a highly paid and respected professional. BUT...I am brain damaged and obese, and long term unemployed.
So, fuck all of you. You offer me nothing, and I offer you nothing.
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I just came out of a 3 day weed bender, which consisted of only 2 grams...not much of a bender by societal standards. I feel better sober. I feel bad while I'm smoking, I feel bad immediately afterwards, and I feel a notable relief after the green wizard is mostly out of my body, and yet I continue to buy it and smoke it. DRUGS. Better than crack I guess.
I am making ham and scalloped potatoes for dinner tonight but I saw I have no white flour or cow's milk, so it will be a hippie version with whole wheat flour and almond milk. It'll be edible. I almost drove out to get those missing ingredients but decided I'd rather do the poverty simulator and make due; the poverty simulator can be fun, and who knows what will happen in the future -- we all may need to MAKE DUE when civilization collapses, food falls short, Russians sneak over the hill, etc. Only a few more years to go though. I can do it! I CAN MAKE IT. I CAN HACK IT.
I was going to go for a walk today and my narrative at this time is still that yes, I will, but I feel laziness creeping in. I kinda want to go down and see the creek after this big rainfall. We got an inch of frozen precipitation on the ground but it melted quickly. Nasty and cold and wet, though...I skipped church because of the weather even though I'd have been in a car the whole time (I admit there were other factors).
I guess it's ok to do mediocre art. It's not like I have a choice unless I put REAL MONEY into it. Hmm. I guess that's the answer, if I want to do something grand: buy a ton of stuff and set it up somewhere public. I think I'm only concerned with greatness because I am such a failure. If I'd enjoyed some normal middle class success such as a mortgage, career, and family, then I probably would not fantasize so much about aliens granting me superpowers so I could take over the earth.
Everyone is talking about the blizzard we're supposed to get, but the Wunderground forecast for my elevation says RAIN, which will be heavy, supposedly: 2 inches on one day, and every other day for the next 10 days shows RAIN in different amounts. They're saying 10 feet of snow high up in the mountains but my stepdad says PSHHH to that. I say "idk man." I wish I had some weed. I've been smoking a lot lately, having kinda said FUCKIT to abstinence or moderation or etc. I don't smoke every day, but a joint once every few days or every week...something like that. I smoked a half-grammer Tuesday and as a consequence slept basically all day on Wednesday (yesterday). So last night I underslept from 9pm - 12:30am, and then again from around 5am to 6:30am, when my alarm woke me up for grocery shopping. I did that and here I am. I bought chopped ham for scalloped potatoes and ham, on Monday, for my neighbor.
I also bought what I thought would be an inexpensive token breakfast at McD: two hash browns and a coffee, but it was friggin' $8.50. $8.50! I feel like it should have been $3. I think I just can't eat out anymore. Driving to a building and buying food was sort of a big part of my life and I might have to replace it with something. Walking the earth? But then when I arrive at one of the earth's buildings I often want to BUY SOMETHING. That may be the thing: addiction to consumerism. I might make more coffee in a few minutes which is REALLY the thing: general addiction syndrome (GAS), or a need for some kind of rush.
I suppose this would amount to a dopamine hit, but I dunno about that term as sub-in for "anything you enjoy," which is the way text seems to be going now-a-days. I was thinking last night that this is the age of information, the age of intelligence, the age of dimwits talking about globalism and dopamine. It's funny how everyone has to have a world view, has to do politics. Has this always been true? Maybe some people are inclined to politics while others are not. I like to think the second group is not so power hungry, but of course we seek status in other ways, like believing we are superior for not engaging or even wanting to engage in politics.
I've been playing a lot of Super Mario Brothers 2 lately and I've gotten worse at it, compared to my performance as a teenager and even a younger adult. One extremely clear example of my decline is Mike Tyson's Punch-Out: I used to be able to beat it -- beat Mike Tyson -- and now I can't get past the second Bald Bull. I'm pretty sure the main problem is slowed reflexes, although I used to blame the PC keyboard vs real NES controllers, which may in fact be a partial factor. At any rate, struggling through SMB2 is about my speed now. I remember thinking that game was too easy, and it probably is. But videogames, like martial arts schools, need to cater to a wide range of abilities and inclinations: real fighters as well as folks just looking for something to do.
I play Nintendo on my Mac emulator, and a few games on my iPhone, including the free-to-play New York Times set: Wordle, Categories, and "The Mini," a small version of their crossword puzzle; pure IQ tests, these are. Then I have Stratego, sorta like chess but not as smart, Snake, where you navigate a snake around the screen to eat pellets which make the snake grow and harder to navigate, Doodle Jump occasionally for just a bit til I invariably die somewhere before 30k points, and...what the fuck else? My phone isn't near me so I can't look. Oh yeah: Hangman, and I sometimes look the word up on Google afterwards if I don't know it.
Family dinner tonight: KOREA. KO-RE-A!!!! KO-RE-A!!!!
I've been working on the entry two down below, on "The Exorcist," for the past few days, making changes. There are more I wanted to make but I'm not seeing them now. I guess it's fine. I think it didn't help I was stoned when I did many of the edits. I can't even remember when I smoked weed. Everything is blending into one! HELP ME I AM IN HELL. Well it's right in the blog: February 18th, is when I got weed and smoked it. It hasn't been all that long since then.
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I kinda realized what's wrong with my work, my ouvre, all my shit here on this server that I feel is unjustly ignored: it's just a website!!!!! And by that, I mean, it has been "websitified": the projects here are mediocre and teenaged and underdeveloped, except maybe one or two like my Japan photo-journal, possibly. But the rest is low effort crap bolstered by the existence of tons of other low effort crap right next to it. That's the thing: it looks like a huge sprawling website, a lot of effort, wow just one guy did this???, etc, but it's an assemblage of turds. I mean, look at this. Actually that may be brilliant.
My podcast amounts to a mediocre guitarist noodling and then talking in an uninformed way about the news. My writing can be boring; I am good at crafting sentences and expounding on ideas but I am a bad storyteller and lose sight of FLOW easily. My music can be awful, like obviously awful -- it is what is is: a riff, extended to a 2 minute song with repeats and guitar solos and trucker key changes. Not in all cases but some or many or most. My 2D images and animations might be the best, or ironically, this blog might be the best. Where did I get this idea that I have to make things and show people? Maybe my MFA but that's not the whole story. An MFA gives you a lifelong license to say LOOK WHAT I MADE, LOOK WHAT I MADE, and not be dismissed as a childish narcissist, out loud at least.
I think about deleting my site and moving on with my life somehow but it can stay up in part as a testament to 'website syndrome': where you collect a great many low level projects and then they have sort of a bolstering effect on each other, giving the impression of a massive body of work, but when you look at each project individually, the impression is underwhelming. This is not as true about some projects as it is others; the Stupendous Chrissy Parker Project seems pretty interesting I think. Maybe someone some day will go through it all and pick one thing they really like.
Maybe what I need is some curation. The lack thereof is part of website syndrome: there's infinite space and you can just queue up a massive list of things you've done and feel better and better about yourself the longer it is. And no one looks at it, because it sucks, but also because it's so fucking enormous no one wants to take the time. And who cares about music, art, and writing? Almost no one. I'm up against "Breaking Bad" and a limited number of hours in life and there's just no hope.
In a way this website has ruined my life. It sits here, existing in space and time and AS A THING, and with it I hold on to a bit of identity and ego: artist identity, professional identity, all the turn of the millenium glitz and glamour of HAVING A WEBSITE. I'm not sure it does anything good. Google certainly doesn't think so and punishes my pagerank accordingly. I don't have a choice though.
When I run out of things to write about I can default to people, and movies, which are equivalent in some way. I think about how I would feel if I discovered some person from my past blogging about me, and I might not mind so long as my last name were withheld, which is what I do. But who knows; maybe I'm a hypocrite. Do Unto Others as Ye Wouldst Havest Others Do Unto Thee, amirite gaiz gaiz gaiz??? And, relatedly, behave in a way you want others to behave. Not the same things, though! The first is the golden rule, and the second is the categorical imperative; the first is based on how you'd like to be treated, and the second is based on what is best for society. But they are similar.
Changing the subject, here is a paragraph that was full of point-counterpoint that didn't add anything to the overarching concept, from a few entries ago, that I took out, but didn't want to just delete because it HARKENS to something interesting:
Thinking of famous actors, not all are strikingly manly even though it's possible a majority or a slight majority are seen that way, for expanded definitions of "strikingly manly." Jim Carrey and Tom Hanks are compelling performers but aren't known or recognized for masculinity, in particular, unlike De Niro and Pacino, I uncontroversially claim.
Are male movie characters distinctively manly, compared to the general population? What IS 'manly' anyway? Bravery, mostly, I think is the main object here -- facing and overcoming fear. And more broadly, not being put off your feed by every little thing. I suppose you can FEEL fear and FEEL discomfort, but so long as they don't deter you from the mission it's fine.
Mike Tyson, paraphrasing his trainer Cus D'Amato, talks about fear and how it can be a good thing, how instead of pretending you are not afraid you can actually use and channel fear. Tyson was and is a smart dude. I remember in high school my friend talking about how dumb he was, which is I guess just pure racism, or maybe "big tough boxer"-ism, but I suspect mostly racism. Listen to Tyson interviewed by Dick Cavett in the mid 80s: he's obviously thoughtful and sensitive, even at age 20. In fact now Iron Mike is a little messed up I suspect due to the constant weed smoking (or possibly punch-drunkenness; I think three knockouts and one TKO is enough to do that).
But anyway, bravery along with something like insensitivity/non-reactivity, and also competence: being effective out in the world, getting things done, making a difference, effecting a change, etc. And especially these things in conjunction. That is MANLINESS!!!!!!!! So women can't do that? And if women do that, are they then betraying their gender and being masculine? This is the problem: that positive traits are seen as manly and negative traits are seen as womanly. This is not universally true though; compassion is womanly, but positive. But other than that, mostly to be effeminate is to be childlike, not a real man, and women are seen as underdeveloped men.
What's another movie?
Denzel being AMAZING, as a compelling villain, a real scumus bagus. Ethan Hawk is also good as the rookie, the naive squeaky-clean losing his innocence. Lots of bad guys in this movie: the Mexican gangsters are scary, and the corrupt cops are scary. Everyone is scary! OOGA BOOGA.
I give up. Should I go get w3333333333d today? SHOULD I??????? I need to take tomorrow off from hiking as my leg is starting to hurt a bit. Only a few more years then I can die. I'm looking forward to my Maryland trip, coming up this fall. It will be strenuous, though.
I haven't wanted to write lately I think in large part because I've been smoking a lot of weed. But not "a lot" -- only about a gram a week. But that's enough to diminish me. Weed seems to have that effect: I speak less, think less, do less. Luckily I always come back although what if one day I don't? I'm looking at my list of movies and there are things I could say.
The main purpose of the Catholic Church is to provide psychological and cultural resonance for horror movies. If it weren't for that, wax tits and a dick on the Virgin Mary would not bother us. Well...bad example. Come to think of it, a little girl spewing vomit and sadomasochistic profanity while her head turns all the way around isn't dependent on Latin phrases to be off-putting, but they do add a certain special something, and I maintain my claim: Satanic horror is rooted in Christianity, which is uncontroversial put that way.
"The Exorcist" scared me the first time or the first few times I saw it, but I was scared of a lot of movies. The first one I remember was "The Horror of Dracula" (1958), which I saw on my granny's black and white TV in the 80s alone in the middle of the night. What set me off was Aunt Lucy: a nice normal loving family member transformed into a monster, but still a recognizable one, residing in "the uncanny valley" (altered enough so it seems off, but still looks kinda basically like the thing in question). Probably this harkens to deep human instincts around diseases, drugs, mental illness, etc; how someone can look almost-right but still be dangerous if they are afflicted in some way, such as with fangs. Every night for a while after watching "The Horror of Dracula," I'd demand to check my mother's teeth after she tucked me in so I could be sure she was not a vampire.
"Exorcist" is scary in the same way: this is a little girl, who looks like a little girl but who is clearly demonic, according to an expanded definition of "demonic" -- not necessary possessed by the fallen angel Lucifer or his minions, but behaving so profanely, disturbingly, violently, that she's no longer human. "That little girl is acting demonic," an atheist might remark after that little girl says "YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL, KARAS, YOU FAITHLESS SLIME" and slaps a doctor hard enough to knock him down. What a tough movie for Linda Blair, age 12, to star in. I would not have allowed it, if I were her father or in charge in some way. Blair was 12, on screen, stabbing herself bloodily between the legs with a crucifix and then shoving her mother's face in it yelling "LICK ME!!! LICK ME!!!" Who argued this was acceptable, back in 1973? Artists, I suppose.
Later in her life, Blair posed for a nudie magazine. She believes in the paranormal, according to her Wikipedia page. She's 65 now. I read she is something of a free spirit type and perhaps that, as opposed to trauma, was responsible for her nudes and drug problems and so on. But there was stated, printed, then and I suppose now, concern about her 12 year old self and what it went through during the filming of "The Exorcist." No one says Linda Blair was unconvincing as Regan MacNeil.
The interesting thing about "Exorcist," and what makes it scary apart from uncanny valley zombification and Catholic tropes, is that we never REALLY see the supernatural or unequivocal proof of Satanic/demonic possession and it's sort of plausible that this is all just neuropsychopathology in the little girl. Objects do move in the room but this is not that strange a claim: "The furniture moved on its own" (earthquakes, imagination, forgefullness, being moved by someone else, etc); it's nothing like "there's a flaming horned demon in the kitchen demanding my soul." Things like projectile vomiting, feats of strength, etc, are not impossible. And there are even moments that I think were built in to suggest this sort of tension or balance between the supernatural and the earthly, between the implausible and the possible: Karas tells Chris, Regan's mum, that Regan speaking a language she's never studied could be a sign of possession, but when Regan does speak Latin she does so in a superficial way: "Ego te absolvo," "Mirabile dictu," and then in French "La plume de ma tante! ACK" come out of pop culture and are within the domain of an intelligent 12 year old, maybe.
At the end, the demon appears to exit Regan and enter Father Karas, whose eyes turn yellow and who then jumps out the window onto the now-famous Georgetown staircase, rather than strangle the now un-possessed Regan at Pazuzu's command; at least we in the fandom have come to identify Pazuzu as the culprit, but Regan says she's The Devil Himself, and maybe it's all just mental illness/bad behavior, in spite of the floating girl in a room made icy by evil itself, a head on a neck turning 180 degrees, and Father Karas's snake eyes.
Pazuzu is so tricky he claims to be Satan, to throw the exorcists off, and speaks Latin like a midwit trying to prove they speak Latin, to throw them off some more. I thought the scariest bit of "The Exorcist" was at the archeological dig near Nineveh, where Father Merrin unearths a Pazuzu head and sees two dogs fighting under a statue of same Pazuzu, as if his evil just permeates forth and causes bad things to happen. I will have to spellcheck Pazuzu later.
Pazuzu is the head of the evil spirits of the air (storms, locusts, B52s, etc -- "death from above"), and was invoked by Mesopotamians to fight Lamashtu, another evil spirit who harmed mothers during childbirth; "evil against evil," as the unnamed Iraqi says to Father Merrin. Why did Blatty pick Pazuzu, of all available demons? Just random maybe, or he found that little stone head and went with it.
Turns out that a small medallion, not the Pazuzu head, was responsible for Regan's possession. I didn't understand this for a while, and it explains Merrin and Regan both being afflicted by the same demon. Regan shows her first signs of possession vis-a-vis an Ouija board, so we think maybe that was the thing that did it. "Exorcist" has uncertainty about Regan's possession built in, but I'm pretty sure we can finger the Pazuzu of Merrin's experience, because the medallion was Pazuzu's vehicle, passed from Merrin to Regan through some evil happenstance, and Pazuzu/Regan yells "MERRIN!!!" when Father Merrin walks in for the first time. Merrin hears of Regan's possession from Karas via Catholic channels, and he goes to fight the same demon he faced years ago in Iraq. Did Pazuzu orchestrate this coincidence? Maybe it was Satan, pretending to be Pazuzu, rather than the other way around.
Two more things:
1) "Exorcist" shows up modern medicine, the kind of BS doctors say when they don't know the answer, and put patients through painful, damaging procedures on a hubristic hunch; in fact neurology isn't a whole lot more concrete, advanced, or understood than demonology, and we just replace filler words with other filler words, often both in Latin.
2) This is a high level movie: it's expensive, accurately researched, sensitively directed, balancedly cinematographed, naturalistically acted, and takes place on culturally resonant sets. I suppose there are a few horror movies that are up to standard like this but not many.
I will write about another movie today. I like to use movies to write about broader topics, like ego, masculinity, and race. Today I'll do...
...and continue "masculinity" and perhaps "ego" (and/or whatever comes up), because I AM A MAN!!!!! Eam and I were discussing finance movies. He brought up "The Big Short (2015)," and I remarked that "Margin Call" was better competence porn (see previous entry) but "The Big Short" was a wiser movie. "Margin Call" seems to valorize the financiers as competent, masculine, smart, and even ruthless or sociopathic in a positive, necessary, or secretly admirable way, like Patrick Bateman. On paper men will agree they don't want to be ruthless or sociopathic but in fact being a nasty SOB is part of evolution, part of the war machine, part of the human experience...certainly part of capitalism, which is a fundamentally sociopathic construct. In "The Big Short" the financiers are clueless and greedy, and these things lead to the Crash of 2008; both movies are about that event, which caused grad schools to be harder to get into for me, supposedly, I was told.
I like "Margin Call" because of the competence porn, which is compelling no matter what the subject, but especially because it is about finance, something I'm afraid of and that can make you powerful and respected. Supposedly the best and brightest end up in the financial industries instead of as scientists, professors, doctors, or whatever idealized society-building role they should end up in. In "Margin Call" we see one of these, a rocket scientist, who goes to Wall Street to be a quant, because of the money. Another guy, his boss's boss's boss, is just so sociopathic, remorseless, etc, that this places him in his competency rather than smarts: "kid's a fuckin' killer," says another character, about this character. And maybe that's "Margin Call"'s theme: that the finance world, although purported to be run by smart people, is actually run by people with no sense of social responsibility and this is what engenders its success rather than intelligence, strategy, etc.
I saw on Reddit that finance people are not in fact super smart but I don't know that I believe that. I suppose the quants are, like my friend's wife -- she has a PhD in statistics. But maybe the sales guys aren't. I said I am scared of finance and it's true, but in fact I have firsthand knowledge of that world: I temped as an administrative assistant for a company selling mortgage backed securities, but I can't remember when...it was either pre dot com crash or pre housing crash. Anyway the guy in charge was sort of quant'y, and had an electrical engineering background, but the salesmen were just big loud schlubs who could have and should have worked at a used car dealership.
MONEY and INTELLIGENCE are two resonant areas of human experience, often intersecting, and there's just no way the finance world would not be rife with ego. Anyway I think I need a break from doing movies. The past few went well, I thought, but I could easily get myself into a slump. Happy Black History Month, to change the subject. Without Black people, the USA would be as dull as Canada! That's the new slogan.
I gotta go make dinner soon. I will at least start an entry and then finish it before the movie. Speaking of movies, I will pick another from my LIST to write about.
I've always thought this is the manliest movie ever made. The masculinity of and in "Heat" is so overbearing, like the stench of an elephant in musth, that it can present as a kind of parody to the self aware and correctly educated, but I think "Heat," like "Good Will Hunting," is an earnest movie; it takes itself seriously and won't stand for mockery. "Heat" would beat you up if you laughed at it. Or no -- "Heat" wouldn't even notice if you laughed at it; "Heat" is nonreactive.
Research tells me Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have enjoyed four collaborations: 1) The Godfather Part II (1974), 2) Heat (1995), 3) Righteous Kill (2008), and 4) The Irishman (2019). I had never heard of #3 and apparently, supposedly, it was not a good movie (Rotten Tomatoes tells us only 18% of critics and 37% of audience members liked it). The other three, though, are highly regarded.
Not only does "Heat" have Pacino and De Niro, but also Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Danny Trejo, Jon Voight, Henry Rollins (!!!), Wes Studi, Ted Levine, and a few others I recognize and who generally play tough guys, mean guys, angry guys, bad guys, stoic guys, antiheroes; it is a cast of swingin' dicks. Then there are the Women of Heat -- all of the ensemble cast deal with some woman in their life who serves to complicate things and take them away from their work, but I think the lesson is that this is worth it -- that relationships, with women, are a fair trade for a slight reduction in masculine efficacious competence, in work for work's sake ("Well you know for me, the action IS the juice," says Tom Sizemore's character in agreement to rob a bank in spite of not really needing the money).
In "Heat," we see another arguably masculine quality, or subject, or theme: I call it "competence porn," amounting to people doing difficult, dangerous, stressful, highly skilled work that I and most other popcorners would never be able to do; "Heat" makes me wish I were a supercop or a supercriminal. Of course competence, or doing your job well, or employability, is what we are told, or perhaps what we observe, most women value about men and what most men value about themselves.
In another universe we find Dr. Cox, another hypermasculine character but one written with some self awareness and self parody, telling his protege JD in an episode of "Scrubs" that the only reason he is there, that the only reason anyone is there, in medicine, doing a difficult and thankless job that doesn't really pay THAT much or confer THAT many advantages considering the sacrifices that are made (an arguable point), is...to woo women. Amen! That's why men do anything, amirite??? If you cut off everyone's cock and balls they'd just sit in their room on their computer blogging and cooking and eating and napping and playing the guitar instead of engaging creatively and productively with the world.
The psychologists in my head sneer at me after I write all this and say, "So you feel unmasculine and the movie 'Heat' seems to illustrate how." MAYBE. But this touches on something else: you know how men will use the word "bitch" to insult other men? It's as if feminine = bad, and masculine = good, oftentimes in our culture. And even those behaviors and traits like compassion, that are sort of begrudgingly seen as positive by men even though they personally would not want to express or even experience them (Al Pacino and Robert De Niro hold hands at the end), will get you called a bitch, or a fag, if you're in high school, or a punk, if you're in prison. All of this amounts to GENDER -- behaving as a man, or as a woman, is supposed to behave. In "Heat" the men work for a living and the women love them for it, and at the same time hate them for it. But they'd rather have a distant, unavailable, emotionally broken Al Pacino than some chubby ass-kissing lazybones, although on paper and in the abstract, many or most women might disagree, or say "are those my only two choices?"
"Heat" is nearly three hours long, might be called "noir," and has a tense, haunting, understated, classy, beautiful original soundtrack. It was written and directed by MICHAEL MANN (seriously). It's just another heist flick.
G'day m8. I have been fixating on IQ lately, like Trump, and like my Nazi Friend. It's unflattering but I can't help it. The truth is I am broadly concerned with status/class/hierarchy and who is better than WHOM. As I said my IQ is around 120. But in addition to my midwit ranking, I have cognitive impairments: I can't remember or focus or proceed logically very well. I can write, though, which fools administrators into taking away my welfare payments. They say IQ doesn't change much after a TBI and I can believe it. I've never been totally clear what IQ is, and what cognitive ability is. Nearest I can figure, with the help of ChatGPT, is that IQ is a kind of cognitive ability; that CI is broader than IQ, which is pretty much defined as the ability to do well on IQ tests. And the thing is, these are all soft terms that are describing physiological and physical processes: neurons firing and brain chemicals seeping.
I think, "How can I contribute with a midwit IQ?", and more importantly "Should I be writing essays and blogging and so on?" I guess the answer is "sure," but no one will pay attention. And maybe that, rather than bad luck, changing cultural values around websites, residing on a subdomain, being weird, or whatever, accounts for the fact that my OUVRE, here on dis website, has been almost entirely ignored; there's just nothing special about me. I do art therapy, blogging therapy, music therapy, then friends and family clap their hands and say "very good!, A+!".
My Nazi Friend cancelled our visit, scheduled for today, because my Genius Friend is sick and NF is kinda too busy anyway. So, next week, maybe, but people are always cancelling and changing plans, and atmospheric rivers move in and threaten snow. It drives me insane because I am autistic and have a low IQ -- if I could FLUIDLY REASON better, changing circumstances wouldn't bother me because I could adapt quickly. I should find the hardest book in the house and force myself to read it. I wonder if these friends who are one or two standard deviations above me look at me like a chimp or a dog; if they dumb down their speech and concepts, maybe unconsciously, for my sake, and when I leave the room they resume calculating infinity. I guess I can extrapolate from the way I am around "slower" people: I only try to relate and largely this is an unconscious process. My sense is that I do involuntarily dumb it down when I'm talking to someone I experience as less able to understand, or not well educated, or any number of related filler concepts, but I'm not thinking "HAHA THIS PERSON IS STUPID" the whole time.
In fact it sort of feels like a stupider person is "smarter" in a way, because they can be harder to talk to and harder to make understand. So you put in more work; it's more of a project. But all of this talk makes me feel dirty. Who am I to jump on board the IQ bandwagon, and think that this single number defines human mental ability and capacity, and, more darkly, human worth? As I said before, I don't think it can; cognitive tests are cognitive tests, and they aren't everything. But this is all something a midwit would say.
I'll get over this fixation soon and then I'll resume reviewing movies and sharing recipes.
PYARE IS A PIECE OF SHIT. Funnily, he always felt like the dumb one, he said, hanging out with Nick and me. There's levels to this game. Maybe P charmed the pants off the high school guidance counselor with his dark eyes and curly locks and persuaded them to enroll him in AP English in spite of a lack of credentials; I would not put any of that past anyone.
I drank a McD cawfy dis morn and had to get that out of my system. I've been called a narcissist, repeatedly, so there must be something to it. I used to admit to it happily, which was taken as another red flag. But I think I've changed. At least, I'm more aware of those tendencies. As an attacker pointed out, I don't have much to be narcissistic about -- I am an ugly narcissist: obese, on welfare, live in proverbial parents' proverbial basement, and flop around most of the day doing internet, guitar, napping, etc. This is what happens (do you see what happens, Larry?) when you are raised as an only child by an overly-attentive mother! No, I dunno; Freudian psychology is out the window and it's all neurology now, right?
I felt bad about writing about Pyare (another friend and I called him "Pra," or P-R-A...pee-ARE-ay...get it?), and so edited until I felt legally and morally safe(r). I've written about Serena on dis here blawg. Today I can write about...TIM. I knew Tim in junior high school and then early high school, before he moved to Florida. He was king of the nerds -- he fully embraced his nerdery and was not socially anxious or ashamed of it. He held get-togethers at his house where we played role playing games and watched classic nerd movies like Heavy Metal. He was kind of ahead of the nerd curve, like Pyare was ahead of the "alternative" curve. I think Tim was dyslexic or ADHD or etc because he really had SOMETHING to him: some kind of creativity or intelligence or humor, but never really found that one thing where it could come out shining. He drew, but was frankly not a great artist. He tried writing but couldn't spell or form grammatical sentences. He did bad in school. I think he would have made a good comic book writer -- someone who teamed up with an artist. He had good concepts; he was an idea man. I still have electronic copies of some of his comics, really horribly drawn, but that's part of their charm ("Why Must I Kill At Night?" and "Me From Shallow Grave"). And really they are more ideas or concept art rather than full comics; I don't know that he had the focus for larger projects, which may have been the main issue.
Of course he ended up on the internet, where I found him in the early 2000s, and we enjoyed a brief AOL Instant Messenger relationship during which he sent me lots of ironic heavy metal, such as Grim Reaper - See You In Hell, in which the vocalist jumps an octave plus a minor third. Beavis and Butthead did "See You In Hell," which may have been where Tim got it. I don't know what happened to him but he may be a lifelong NEET like me, although ah got mah degrees, mang. That was really my one accomplishment in life and on paper, at least that the masses agree with: getting not one, not two, but THREE higher education degrees, AFTER my traumatic brain injury and resultant retardification! AA, BA, MFA, boom boom boom, like that.
Today I'm going to write about Pyare (pronounced "pee-ARE-ay"). His is an uncommon name, and if you search for him on the web, you see miscellaneous stuff, but perhaps oddly not his own website, where he posts professional info and a couple of small photos (there's a better picture of him on his IMDB page). The name means "one who is loved" or just "love" in Punjabi, and comes from the Sikh religion. Indeed, everyone loved Pyare; he was popular. My other ex-friend Serena, in high school, didn't believe me when I told her I used to be Pyare's best friend. "OH, EVERYONE WAS BEST FRIENDS WITH PYARE, HAHA", she mocked. What can you answer back, at that point, so I just let her have her way.
His parents were hippies, was his explanation of his unusual first name. I've met them both. I slept over with him at his mom's DC apartment overlooking Rock Creek Park, in the 80s, and I got in trouble for putting my dirty socks on the radiator and stinking up the place. His dad didn't say much to me over our acquaintanceship but he seemed tough-but-expressive in a workin' class Eye-talian sort of way, friendly, etc. I'm remembering now I did see his dad in town once around the turn of the millennium, and he told me his son now had hair like Kramer from Seinfeld. Pyare told me his parents liked me, and that I was their favorite of his friends.
I met him in 1986 in 6th grade through our mutual friend Nick; this was so long ago I'm having to think back and look off into the distance as I recollect. I wrote to him almost 10 years ago in 2014 telling him what's been going on in my life, and, perhaps more resonantly, that I remembered he ditched me and that I still hold a grudge of sorts; it was a creepy, stalkery, serial killerish email to write and probably a better empath would not have written it. He may not have seen it; who knows. I have on my calendar "write to Pyare" on the upcoming 10 year anniversary of this last attempted contact, but probably I will not; instead I'll write this blog entry and be done with it, like my high school reunion. In fact, I haven't seen Pyare in the flesh since senior year of high school, 30 years ago.
He's a big time cameraman now -- a Steadicam operator, according to his website. From Wikipedia:
Steadicam ... was designed to isolate the camera from the camera operator's movement, keeping the camera motion separate and controllable by a skilled operator. ... The operator wears a harness, the Steadicam vest, which is attached to an iso-elastic arm.
Maybe there's Steadicam discourse about 'the space between heartbeats,' as there is with target shooting; it seems like it could be one of those things, like getting a PhD in playing the guitar, where a mountain is made of a mole hill. But, it also seems like it could be a pretty interesting way to make a living as far as things go, maybe. I told Nick, whom I've kept in occasional touch with, that Pyare had ended up as a cameraman, and Nick replied that this made sense inasmuch as they used to shoot lots of play movies together back in the day.
Pyare the Steadicameraman was my best friend for maybe a year. He and I conspired to ditch Nick for being uncool and a jerk, and then Pyare ditched me I think only for being uncool although maybe there was some other reason; I would like to know except probably he never really figured it out himself, and in fact, shockingly, has not been thinking about it much since 1986. I remember when things started feeling iffy between us, like when one romantic partner wants to break it off and starts acting out instead of ending the relationship: he called me "disgusting" in a movie theater because I ate too-large handfulls of popcorn, and the last time I saw him in the context of friendship was one day, during the summer between 6th and 7th grade, when he biked over to pick up something, and affected being so out of breath he was unable to talk to me. And then that was it. He joined the skateboard/metal/punk crew, and I joined the nerds. It's possible or even likely that he remembers our severance differently, more as a natural falling out rather than a conscious betrayal.
Ditching me worked and Pyare became a lot cooler vis-a-vis the aforementioned skateboards and adjacent punkery. Then I, like many others, was privileged to watch his further flowering in high school, where he became sort of an aesthetic celebrity, with ridiculously long curly hair tied back with a fat girly headband, being the lead screamer in an alternative rock band, and taking AP (Advanced Placement) English, which was just fucking unfair: a fully enlightened modern day hippie-hipster. This was the 90s, and the rock band "Nirvana" had come along and transformed many wallflowers into long-haired flannel-wearing counterculturists, but Pyare had a head start.
He was never unfriendly the few times he was aware of my presence or sort of semi-interacted or responded to me, after a coffeeshop concert in DC one day, and in the high school halls one or two times. But then finally at the end he spoke to me outright at some end-of-school art show: he approached me and told me in good humor that his mom had attended and had seen me, and I had seen her, and that each of us had sort of pretended not to recognize the other (in fact, I believe I remember seeing what might have been her, and being actually unsure it was her, because she looked so different). I suppose I responded with something like "heh heh," and that was the end of it. So after all those years in public school, Pyare finally fully acknowledged me and our friendship, at the last minute. THANK YOU PYARE!!! Just kidding...fuck you, Pyare.
What we did when we were friends was just typical stuff: ride bikes, have sleepovers where we fantasized about the prettiest and most popular girl in school, made food and ate it, played a few RPGs and vidya gambs, did some drawing/video/writing stuff, watched movies, blah blah. I'M NOT ANGRY AT YOU ANYMORE, PYARE!!! I FORGIVE YOU!1! As I intimated and am now more aware of than I was before writing this entry, it's not QUITE so clear he outright and consciously ditched me like a bad habit, but for the record I think he mostly did.
The thing about the web is, it's easy to get totally wrapped up in your own bubble. By that I mean, there's no curator or jury telling me that my work is bad, so I just keep posting it and doing it over the years. No one in art school told me what I did was bad, or good for that matter. And I wasn't doing REAL art, like painting, clay pottery, etc -- something conservative and established and crafty like that. Instead I did my undergrad in "imaging and digital arts," and then further drilled down into the "interactivity track." Basically, this meant making game-like projects in Macromedia Director, some expressive or unconventional web pages that didn't make sense, and then some sound work. This kind of scratch pad stuff flew around the year 2000 because of the newness of the web then; people kind of ooh'd and ahh'd at it regardless of how it compared, in terms of complexity or care or cost, to big oil paintings or bronze sculptures or etc.
In grad school, every once and a while someone would blurt out that my work wasn't very "good," audibly pronouncing the scare quotes as if they knew very well that speaking on quality or standards was a no-no and a no-go, but most of the time no one said anything like that. My work was experimental and avant garde and that's what you're supposed to do. I was aware enough of myself, the culture of fine art, and the culture of my school, to sneak by.
And then I just kept on doing it. Not a good enough writer to publish, or not a good enough musician to play in a club? Well, just shelter under the umbrella of "fine art" and no one can say anything; art re-writes all pre-existing cultures under its own postmodernistic non-rubrik. This is also the hallmark of culture studies, which has been married to fine art so it can be academically rigorous enough to support university degrees; culture studies purports to understand everything, while actually understanding nothing. In a way I feel like I was the only one in art school who took what I learned seriously, and you're looking at it now; everyone else just paid lip service to the theory and then made what they could. I guess I did too. THIS IS MODERN ART. LOOK AT IT!!! LOOK!!!
There's something I was trying to talk about yesterday but it didn't come out right, so I deleted it, and I'm going to try to tackle it today. This whole year, 2024.html, is very RACE focused so far. I hope I don't get attacked but I have a plan: "So I post stuff for 25 years and no one says a word, but suddenly now, when I try to give a very reasoned, compassionate, nuanced take on a topic everyone avoids out of fear, you jump on that? FUCK YOUUUUUU"
Anyway the thing I was avoiding is inspired by a relative. Being smart is very important to her, as is her belief that people are equal, and so when she's confronted with race and IQ research that tells her Blacks score lower than Whites, on average, she can't accept that part of the reason might be genetic -- it ALL has to be cultural, or cognitive dissonance results. But, her view may in fact be true or mostly true -- cultural issues may be mostly, or even 100%, responsible for these disparities. My intuitive clue supporting this has to do with human neurological evolution and time scales; the human brain evolved over millions of years, whereas migration from Africa to the rest of the world only took place a few thousand years ago. Furthermore, the tasks and challenges of primitive people in Europe vs primitive people in Africa don't seem that different -- they don't seem like they would require different brains to accomplish. But I'm mostly speculating; I'm not well informed enough to draw conclusions.
It may be that we will never know the answer and that it's unwise and unethical to pursue this question, because, as I said yesterday, it doesn't matter what the group differences are; it has no bearing on how a given individual performs. It seems to me like there must be (perhaps slight) neurological differences across biogeographic groups, just as there are other physiological differences. The brain doesn't get a pass because we modern people cherish intelligence so much, and at the same time cherish notions of human equality so much. HOWEVER I think it's more a 'different brains for different tasks'-type situation, rather than one set being "better" than another.
Western white people happen to be dominant in the USA, in Europe, and to some degree in the world, so their rules, their tests, and their ranking systems prevail -- their CULTURE prevails. This dominance is related to "white privilege," a concept that a lot of people don't like, because there exist poor white people, disabled white people, etc, which contradicts the notion that ALL white people are on top. But "all white people are on top" is a misunderstanding of white privilege; WP means that because you are white, society confers certain advantages on you (people don't avoid you at night, your kids get better pain management in medical situations...there are tons). You can be poor and dumb and covered in pustules, but if you're white and have these issues, your experience out there in the world will be better, easier, less painful, than a black person who also has these issues.
Let's say the worst is true, and sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants have less brain power on average and by certain measures -- that there are inherent, genetically determined neurological differences, just as there are skin color differences, that cause the average IQ of Blacks to be lower than that of Whites. Would the world end in that case? I don't think so. I think the issue is our fixation on groupings of people and on differences between these groupings. So what if people with curly hair, or people who like "The Cure," or any arbitrary grouping, don't come out exactly even with their counterpart? 1) Why would or should they, and 2) it doesn't matter -- group differences are a statistic that is called up mostly by racists -- people who WANT "Blacks" to be less valuable than "Whites." STOP TALKING ABOUT RACE AND IQ, commands Slate.com, and I basically agree. I guess there's a 3) -- why is intelligence or "intelligence" equated with human worth? Don't answer that -- I know IQ leads to programmer jobs which lead to money which leads to status.
In practical terms, you have two job applicants, one identified as White, and one identified as Black, and one can do the job better, and you give the job to that one, regardless of abstractions like supposed group differences. But I run into problems here -- my efforts to be non-racist paint me as a racist in some eyes, just like when Steven Colbert's right wing pundit character says "I don't see race!" This is bad, because historical injustices lead to modern inequality, so we have to do a reverse course on that, with affirmative action and so on, to get things back up to par. I don't necessarily disagree! Furthermore, intuitively, I don't think this worst case scenario, one paragraph up, is true or even can be true, considering human neurology and human evolution. Instead I think that culture and neuroplasticity can and do account for a lot.
One thing that's interesting that doesn't get talked about a lot I don't think, is that all this identity stuff, with race and gender and so on, pretty much flies in the face of Eastern "no self" wisdom, and in fact, Western "ego is ultimately counterproductive" wisdom. Why do you have you tell yourself a bunch of stories about who you are, or about who other people are? The demands of capitalism, perhaps?
HAI.
I quit coffee again. Today is my second day without it. Usually the headaches start on the second day but it's possible I've quit and restarted coffee drinking so many times now that I no longer get them. Last time they weren't bad; I barely noticed them in fact. And this time, so far, knock on wood, they seem entirely absent. I gave myself a pay cut because I was tired of mooching money. We'll see how that goes. Mostly it means I can't comfortably drive around and buy restaurant food anymore, which is probably a good thing. No coffee, no eating out, no weed. I also put the kibosh on bible study with my stepdad/housemate and McD with my aunt. Admittedly I was in a terrible destructive angry depressed mood when I made these decisions, but sometimes I think that's not entirely a bad thing; in that state one can chop away fat that might be hard to do under ordinary circumstances.
So all I have left, really, is walking, and cooking. I had better make the most of it. Some brain injury clinic has as its slogan, "Making the Best of It," which is depressing, in my opinion.
Petey said my movie reviews were interesting *blush* and that I should do more of them. Specifically, he wanted me to write about...
When I first saw it, or the first few times I saw it, I was thinking that Verbal Kint fabricated his entire story told to special agent Kujan, and the whole movie then became only a pointless exercise in fleshing out Verbal's imagination for the audience. But then I realized the story was true, and Verbal just changed the names and other superficial details based on what he read on agent Kujan's bulletin board, along with creating filler and embellishments to lull Kujan to sleep. Obvious, maybe.
There's something "too cool for school" about "The Usual Suspects," inasmuch as I don't think anyone really talks or lives that way, even in police-world or crime-world. I think maybe we should be watching "The Wire" for realism, if that's what we want.
One funny thing about "Suspects" is some people online don't seem to accept that Verbal Kint definitely was Keyser Soze. I think it could not have been clearer, but it just goes to show: if you don't OVERTLY STATE something there will always be at least a snippet of uncertainty. One thing that should have tipped us off is that Kobayashi, or in fact "Kobayashi," lifted by Verbal from a coffee mug, is a Japanese surname, and the character is played by Pete Postlethwaite, an Englishman, with an inexplicable Indian accent. I guess he could have been adopted by a multi-ethnic couple. I sometimes wish I were a cop, or a criminal -- something manly and ultracompetent and risky like that. I guess I've seen too many movies, which are, to me, oftentimes, "competence porn": people doing stuff I could never do myself. Most of the time I can do the grocery shopping without losing my temper. That's the movie they will make about me.
I took another online IQ test recently and I got 117, which about matches my other online IQ tests, one paper test given by the Scientologists ca. 1995, and my SAT scores, ca. 1992. They all point to my IQ being *about* 120 (the average comes out to 122, actually, but...you know). This puts me in the range of "upper midwit." But the story I tell myself is that IQ -- pattern recognition and problem solving -- is not where my strengths lie, as a ponytailed creative. In fact it does seem like a narrow way to measure mental ability.
I've thought about the whole race and IQ thing and I'm hesitant to write about it, of course. One thing I CAN say is that based on the IQ findings for (much of?) sub-Saharan Africa, the people there should be nonfunctional, which is obviously not true. So from that I might conclude that IQ is in fact a narrow measure of real world competence. IQ tests are what they are -- "which one of the following shapes best fits with these other three?" But also, I have heard that it is difficult to design a test of IQ-like mental ability that does not correlate in scores closely with all other similar tests. So IQ or "IQ" is somewhat robust -- call it cognitive ability, maybe?
But I think that "cognitive ability" might itself be a fairly narrow attribute, designed by a particular culture (Western science or academia?) and then applied to other cultures. Probably sub-Saharan Africans could design a test that White Americans would do poorly at.
I made plans to drive 2.5 hours WEST, then another hour SOUTH, to visit FRIENDS. FRIENDS!!!! They both have higher IQs than me, but you know what they say: if you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room. I sit there and chew my hamburger while they talk about coding and stuff.
Greetings fellow ugmanzees. My heart does better when I exercise. I was born to be active!
I was going to write about "Goodfellas" (mid 90s?) but I don't know what to say about besides "I RILY LIKED IT."
Fuck my movie review project, for now. Fuck this blog for now! I can't think of anything good to write.
FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Here is the second entry for 2024. AS YOU CAN SEE, I implemented the same system I have always done for bloggin' -- namely, make every page an archive, and then readers just click the most recent one to get the news. It's not the way the pros do it, with the blog root pointing to the last entry, but watevz. Back to the movies:
My favorite thing on this movie is a Louis CK bit:
Matt Damon plays -- great performance! -- he plays a very complicated young man, wearing a tight t-shirt for a whole movie. And here's the thing...here's my issue with "Good Will Hunting": Matt Damon also wrote the movie. Ok? So he basically sat down, and he's like (Louis CK makes typing gestures and affects a mock creative inflection), "First of all, I'm AMAZING. Mmmmmmm. I'm a CONSTRUCTION WORKER, I'm like WORKING CLASS. And I DRINK BEER, and I get in fights, I get in SO MANY FIGHTS. My friends are like 'You're outta control, man!' And I'm like 'Shut up -- this is the WAY I AM.' Mmmmmmm. But then, also, I'm a GENIUS. Ooooo. I didn't even go to school! I just KNOW THINGS. I dunno why, I just KNOW THEM. And all the nerdy geniuses that studied for years are like, 'HE'S SOOO MUCH SMARTER THAN US, IT'S MAKING US UPSET!'" It's insane! It's fuckin' insane! It only makes sense if he wrote it for himself to be the guy.
So yeah...GWH comes across as kind of a cliched masturbation fest, but it's still fun to watch in spite of or because of this. Ever since I heard that Louis CK bit, I have wanted to know if Damon or Affleck did too, and if so, if they were able to laugh at themselves. I don't know. "Your ego is showing" is a brutal takedown and "Good Will Hunting" is a very earnest movie; it feels like the writers are bearing their souls, for better or for worse, so hearing and accepting this, in my opinion, stark and now-obvious criticism, might sting.
The theme of GWH -- a misunderstood and misplaced genius -- is resonant because we all [CITATION NEEDED] like to think of ourselves that way: as somehow special but the world just doesn't see it; we never got our shot, and the only reason we are not great is due to circumstances.
It's easy to feel like a genius. A lot of guitar players think they are fantastic because they can play the guitar -- they can make a noise that sounds pretty good. They don't or can't or won't compare their playing to Steve Vai's or Andres Segovia's, but picking up a guitar and executing an idea in a recognizable way sounds and feels good, like you're doing just what the pros do. And, I suppose, the grand error here is being unable or unwilling to appraise your own output, but instead immediately putting it with Vai's or Segovia's playing because it's BASICALLY the same; Vai and Segovia are playing a guitar and making some sense with it, and the amateur player is doing the same thing. He must be a genius! The only thing keeping him from fame and fortune is bad luck.
"If I only tried hard I'd do well in school...I just 'don't try', and that's why I fail." On a deeper level GWH is about this kind of self congratulation or consolation. But superficially it's a feel-good story about social status and talent and how the first can affect the second, which is also undeniably, uncynically true. So, take your pick, I guess.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, 2 days late. I had wanted to blog on January 1st but decided my final entry for 2023 needed more time on the index page. Now, as you can see, the entries for 2023 have been moved to 2023.html, linked above. I'm not 100% sure about my DESIGN SOLUTION to all of this, but fuck it...there's only so much I am willing to do, and that I *CAN* do, with websites dually designed for mobile and PC browser. I pat myself on the back, in fact, for doing as much as I have done with static HTML.
I think I have SOME ability in coding. When I did a bit for teachers and projects and hobbyist stuff and so on, I got comments like "hm I guess you could do it that way" (NEW APPROACH), and I managed to write a Perl script that was shorter than what some other people did ("Perl golf"). I'm not sure what I'm missing; I think somehow programming gets too hard when I try progressing.
I wrote a BASIC program to randomly generate sentences from parts, and then I had a CS friend do it over for me in Javascript. When I wanted random hex colors on my main index page, I asked Randy to write that script for me. I dropped Pascal class a few months in because it was just getting to be too much. Maybe my programming roadblocks amount to my learning disability somehow kicking in. Maybe I'm lazy. I dunno. But I have, or more had, PHM'ish fantasies of "I coulda been a genius at this."
I had a cuppa real joe today and not that decaf shite. I discovered with this mornings headache that I have grown dependent on the minute amount of caffeine in decaf. So, then, I suppose, my next thought was "screw it, I'm going to have the REAL THING." Real coffee makes me jittery, but it seems to taste better; there's an umami richness to normal coffee that decaf seems to be missing. Or, maybe I'm full of shit and just like the caffeine.
I thought today I might continue my movie review project and at least write more about:
...the civil war movie starring Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington that I glossed over back in '23. I accomplished said glossing with "really beautiful movie," I think, and I suppose that's true. It's about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an all-Black army division that fought for the Union. I don't think you're going to find a better justification for fighting than former slaves doing so for the very real freedom of their own people, so right away, audiences have a moral cover for enjoying a war movie, just as the 54th enjoyed moral cover for killing. The plot comprises the 54th in formation, then in training, then not being taken seriously, and finally in proving their mettle in a battle to take Fort Wagner in which they fight valiantly but are all killed in the attempt.
"Glory" is a pretty perfect movie, I think, and perhaps there's not a lot to say about it beyond "beautiful movie," so maybe I was roughly on target back in '23. Some good quotes: "YOU ARE ALL UGLY, MEXICAN, AFRICAN, FUCKING WHORES!!!!" (by the drill sergeant) and then, relatedly, "The Irish are not noted for their fondness for the coloreds." The drill sergeant in spite of his language turns out to be a good guy with everyone's best interests at heart, which illustrates my main criticism, only now just emerging: there's not a lot of REAL racism to be seen in this movie, whereas I think back then, people dehumanized Blacks in a way that's now hard to comprehend; even Lincoln did not, maybe could not, see them as equals.
I'm not sure racism was so much worse, in the sense of mental attitudes, in the South than it was in the North, during the Civl War Era. You had abolitionists in Boston, and people opposed to slavery, but that doesn't translate into thinking of slaves and escaped slaves and free men as equals, as fellow humans, as being the same as you and yours. This is not to say that we're "there" today, but I think the kind of inequality back then was considerably worse, and pervasive, and completely saturated American society to the point where it's hard to imagine and hard to communicate with a modern movie script. The dominant world view, I believe, even among otherwise good, normal, moral people, was that Blacks were some kind of lesser species and were suited if not for slavery, then for menial work, deportation to Africa, or some such.
You can't get inside someone else's head and ascertain how they actually think -- see how racist they are, or are not. But, as the little Amish boy says in "Witness," "I can see what (people) do." Remember that Harvard racism test a while back where they showed you black faces and white faces, then positive and negative words, in quick succession? I took it twice and got two different results ("not racist" then "racist"). My friend's neonazi father would get angry when called a racist, which illustrates the kind of power the word has now-a-days; even if you secretly think racism is fine, you know that society has made the grand decision that it is not, and unless you want to be an outcast, you will agree out loud.
When I moved to the USA at age 10, I lived in an apartment complex with tough little black kids, whom I came to fear and mistrust, and hate. Later I had more experiences with Black people and sort of realized on a gut level that they are humans -- they make the same faces and have the same feelings, and you can relate to them and talk to them and go over to their houses and have dinner and so on. This is not to say that I am some perfectly open hearted non-racist now...as recently as 2007 I was giving Blacks the "white people smile": a sort of tight lipped fake mouth smile a White person gives to a passing Black person because they don't know what else to do. I haven't been put to the test much now as I live in a place where I rarely see someone who looks like their ancestors resided in sub-Saharan Africa, but I hope I can behave more naturally or normally or whatever in the future.
I've heard if you look away and avoid eye contact, that this constitutes a "micro aggression." So, it starts to look like there's no good solution and as a result people just throw their hands up and say "whatever, not my problem." I once got semi yelled at (by white people) at a Black church event in DC -- I think it was something like a Black-White race relations symposium -- for suggesting that things were getting better, slowly. Admittedly stuff like this makes me want to avoid the issue rather than tackle it headlong and get called racist for my efforts to be non-racist. And then frustration at this is mocked as "white fragility." But we soldier on, like the 54th! Right?