Technical Difficulties

I broke my computer. Again. No virus this time, just rain and an open window. Hopefully, it's just the monitor as the computer seems to boot up fine but the screen is the dark blue of digital death. So... no posts 'cept from work until I can fix it. Soon, I hope.

Wasting Time at Work... A Lot of Time...

You Are 80% Cynical

You're a full blown cynic... and probably even skeptical of these results. You have your optimistic moments, but most likely you keep them to yourself.

How Cynical Are You?

You Are Changing Leaves

Pretty, but soon dead.

What Part of Fall Are You?

You Are Rowlf the Dog

Mellow and serious, you enjoy time alone cultivating your talents. You're a cool dog, and you always present a relaxed vibe. A talented pianist, you can play almost anything - especially songs by Beethoven. "My bark is worse than my bite, and my piano playing beats 'em both."

The Muppet Personality Test

Your Pirate Name Is...

Bloody Sheik of Rumps

What's Your Pirate Name?

You Are Bert

Extremely serious and a little eccentric, people find you loveable - even if you don't love them! You are usually feeling: Logical - you rarely let your emotions rule you You are famous for: Being smart, a total neat freak, and maybe just a little evil How you life your life: With passion, even if your odd passions (like bottle caps and pigeons) are baffling to others

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

You Have a Melancholic Temperament

Introspective and reflective, you think about everything and anything. You are a soft-hearted daydreamer. You long for your ideal life. You love silence and solitude. Everyday life is usually too chaotic for you. Given enough time alone, it's easy for you to find inner peace. You tend to be spiritual, having found your own meaning of life. Wise and patient, you can help people through difficult times. At your worst, you brood and sulk. Your negative thoughts can trap you. You are reserved and withdrawn. This makes it hard to connect to others. You tend to over think small things, making decisions difficult.

What Temperment Are You?

Your Penis Name Is...

Pumping Pole of Penile Power

Penis Name Generator

You Are Rain

You can be warm and sexy. Or cold and unwelcoming. Either way, you slowly bring out the beauty around you. You are best known for: your touch Your dominant state: changing

What Type of Weather Are You?

Your Career Type: Artistic

You are expressive, original, and independent. Your talents lie in your artistic abilities: creative writing, drama, crafts, music, or art. You would make an excellent: Actor - Art Teacher - Book Editor Clothes Designer - Comedian - Composer Dancer - DJ - Graphic Designer Illustrator - Musician - Sculptor The worst career options for your are conventional careers, like bank teller or secretary.

What's Your Ideal Career?

Your Personality Profile

You are elegant, withdrawn, and brilliant. Your mind is a weapon, able to solve any puzzle. You are also great at poking holes in arguments and common beliefs. For you, comfort and calm are very important. You tend to thrive on your own and shrug off most affection. You prefer to protect your emotions and stay strong.

The World's Shortest Personality Test

Your Political Profile:

Overall: 60% Conservative, 40% Liberal

Social Issues: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Fiscal Issues: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

Ethics: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Defense and Crime: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal

How Liberal Or Conservative Are You?

Your Boobies' Names Are...

Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding

Boobie Name Generator

You Are a Schoolgirl!

You're not quite as wild as a "kogyaru", but with your short plaid skirt and silly white socks, you're still a sexual fetish object. You can usually be seen hanging out in the girly section of the video game places, collecting photobooth stickers of you and your friends. You may not be as innocent as you look. Did those vending machine panties once belong to you?

What's Your Japanese Subculture?

In Which the Wind Has Curious Effects

07/25/2006 6:41 AM - 7:10 AM

I’m thinking that worrying is the evil twin planning. Men tracht und Gott lacht. But without planning, our actions are more likely to have undesirable consequences. I plan to go to work when I get up in the morning and dress and shower accordingly. The vast majority of the time, this is effective. I go to bed early, planning to get up early and work on something. This is not so effective. But these are the minors.

Perhaps what I’m thinking of is not planning so much, though. Perhaps it’s merely well thought out daydreaming. I daydream about my cabin in the woods, cottage by the water and then try to figure out how I’m going to get there. But the cabin is as far from me as a quiet pub in a backwater of Ireland. So I try to tack down the future, plan it, chart it, graph it, but this isn’t possible. All I’ve got is this vague box of the present. Sometimes, I find hope in planning for getting to the cabin by writing novels. Sometimes, by comics, sometimes by a bookstore, sometimes by a real job where they offer you a dental plan and pay you for eating lunch. These are exciting when they arise at the right time, but they have no more bearing on reality than the occasional bout of fear of ending up on the street again. Though the second would seem to be much easier to attain.

It’s an odd dilemma. Those complex fantasies of the future, both the worry and the plan, bare a strong resemblance to making up a story, except that the main character in the story is me. My favorite protagonist is a character much abused and rewarded by his author. I identify so strongly with him, fictional as he is. I’m pleasantly distracted by this train of thought. Out of habit, I keep saying, “when I grow up…” but then I remember, “oh, I am grown up.” Oh, Magic 8 Ball, what will I be when I grow up? My toy is defective. All that is says, over and over again, is “try again later.” Mmm… that rain-wind blowing through the window reminds me of excellent fantasies of my madness. Flight. I do have to say this about when I was crazy – you could feel joy cut you through like ten thousand bat teeth. It’s just that the terror and self-loathing that followed the falls lasted for so much longer than the joy. No. Better to be small and sane than a crazy god. Yes. Better. But, God, the smell of that wind.

Which Is to Say, Work and Stop Worrying

07/24/2006 5:46 AM – 6:09 AM

You wake up again and forget the worries. Worrying does nothing. There is this thing that is awake and working. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with everything, forgetting that which is not which you are doing. Drink your drink in the evening; eat your lunch at lunchtime. Enjoy what is right here. Right here is all there is.

Tomorrow will come tomorrow, if it comes for you. And there will be a day after that, if there is one for you. So wake up and forget that which is worrying. Can you change what you are worrying about? No? Then forget it and get on with the business of being alive right here. That is enough. That is all the advice that you really need. So. So look out the window. Look into your mind where the parts of the story are scattered about. Pick them up and find how they go together today. When did they cut off the branches of the tree down the road? It takes some getting used to, but it’s still alive. Looks a little silly, but what wouldn’t?

So then, there it is. The day is outside the window. Wake up and work. Some days you will need to be that pirate bastard and it will be enough. Today, you don’t need a label and that is enough. Let it go and move on to the next thing. Breathing is the base nature. So breathe. When the car lights move across the desert road, you see only the flickering of the reflective strips. Where are you going? The story is the work. The work is the point. What is love? Baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me, no more. That’s as good an answer as any. This is enough. Forgetting those things which aren’t here, we make up a few things that don’t exist. This is the work. The work is the point. The clouds behind the trees, how will they look in black and white? This is enough. When we saw the orange in the sky, we know that another town was fast approaching. When we saw the orange in the sky, we knew that we were approaching another town. The work is to make it less literary. The work is to take it down to the bare bones and tell the tale. Laughing, we can see that the point is merely to entertain. Doesn’t matter what they did. They aren’t here. I am. Yar.

On Acting in Unknowing

07/22/2006 7:15 AM – 7:39 AM

It is quite possible that in the future you will come to believe that what you believe right now is wrong. But that does not relieve you of the responsibility of acting in accordance with the dictates of your conscience. The honest man must recognize that he will never have enough data to know what is absolutely right and wrong, but still, you must do what is right, right now.

Forget desire quickly. But what is forgetting? What constitutes desire? How long is quickly? You can’t answer some of the questions. The low clouds outside make me think of Bilbo. When we went out on the porch to smoke, the smell of dust rose with the rain. Always. Enough with knowing. Sometimes, it’s time to stop researching and start acting. Or, it’s time to do both, since you seem never to be able to let go of the former. Time to act, though that act may seem foolish in just a few months. It’s what you have right now and the you that you value needs proof of itself. So. So get up and write. Get up and draw. Get up and clean. Do something and let it not weigh anymore than that glass in the evening.

It’s just a story. It’s just words. Don’t let the flash thought of the future stop you. But, if it helps you, use it. When it’s over, let it go. Buy the cheap thing and treasure it as the expensive option. Value is assigned by a valuer, it is not inherent. If it all burns down, remember that it was the cheap thing and then go out and buy another. All that we have was given to us, but what we make of it is our own. When making, it is yours. When finished, yours. When gone, it was God’s in the first place. Naked we come, naked we will go. But lots of fun things in the middle. Silliness of sillinesses, all is silliness. The only good on noticing the weight is if it gets the cart to roll. If it stops the cart, stop noticing. Look! Man walking down the street! Look! Car driving down the road! Look! Light in the window! Look! Bilbo clouds! And then look! There is the story! It’s right there in two dozen pieces, scattered about your mind. Now, stop and sit and put them together. Means nothing. Means everything. Wrong question. Let it go. Sit. Forget. Write. Draw. Tell me a story. This is right now.

In Praise of Stories With Ending That Don't Suck

07/11/2006 6:00 AM – 6:26 AM

Ain’t nothing at all, just one long mistake. If you put too much weight on it, the truck won’t move at all. Just unstrap the load and step on the gas, let it all fall off the back. Clarity. Brevity. No purple prose. Nope, no purple prose. It’s just a story, no matter what kind of words you use. King and Marquez are both just spinning tales on the back porch.

Too literary, much too literary. See things as they are, not what they’re like. Step on the gas, I said. Don’t matter a thing. The odd thing is that the silence that I’m talking about is spoken by two apparently different sources. The one is the Word that God speaks, the other is that thing which the reader does as he reads. You find yourself praying when you don’t realize it, and that’s pretty much the way it should be. The paths through the books on the tiers are brown and yellow – the color of old pages. Picking up the train of thought at the station, we sit down and wonder about “it all.” Leave the imagery to the crazy singers you listen too, you’re writing down a story. But there is a train in there.

Don’t worry about it, follow delight, it’ll lead you wrong, but anything will if you follow it too closely. At least with delight you’ll have a fun time getting to the place where the story ends. You start with that first thing that you wrote as fast as you could. You let it sit. Reread it. Reread it again, making an outline. Study the outline, fixing the structure where necessary. Study the outline again. Sit down and write – from memory – a synopsis of the story. Now you know how it goes. Writing is rewriting. It’s all just a theory, but a theory will give you permission to move, besides, this way, you’ll never have to throw a story away again. Partly cloudy today. Maybe I’ll actually walk to work today. That would be nice. Onnahanna means family. This is my family. It is small and broken, but still good. Yeah. Still good. God, I love that movie. Stupid cartoons that make you cry. Crying must be paid for with laughter and an ending that doesn’t suck. A sucky ending is generally one of two things – an unpaidfor happy ending or a depressing unhappy ending. This is why “The Bicycle Thief” sucks. All that work. All that beautiful imagery. And he gets hit by a fucking bus. Assholes. No, he didn’t have to discover pirate treasure and live happily ever after. Actually, that would have been funny. Moody emo kids deserve to get kicked in the balls. Look around you! All this sparkly, shiny life around you and you spend your time singing about how bad you screwed up with the one and only girl you could ever love. Bullshit. As your life will demonstrate. A bus hit him. What crap. When I tell that story, he’s going to find pirate treasure. Yar and by the balls, me lads (and lasses, though then there’s a problem with balls, hmmm… fuckit, by the balls and be damned). Yar and by the balls for me. That’s a story to tell yourself on the back porch.

On A Throne At Cair Paravel

07/10/2006 7:48 AM – 8:09 AM

And so you don’t feel like sitting still. And so you want something more. Like anything, it will pass. Let go. Be here. Be alive in your life. None of this matters. Nothing matters except the fact that you do exist at right this moment and can’t know. It’s raining today. Is it raining where you are? Are you waiting for that kiss of peace from the rain clouds?

You think that if you were left alone to do whatever it would be that you’d do when you were finally left alone, you’d be more real, more safe, more strong? Maybe. But you’d still be the mind that gets sad in the body that will die. You’re not dead and you’re not in pain. No one is threatening you. Except the universe. And it will always threaten. It will also always caress. It will also never care. You can’t escape the scary facts of existence, so look at them and forget them. That’s how anyone does it. Wake up from your bad dreams and look out the window at the trees and leaves and water, water, water.

Lift up your chin, oh son of Adam. So what? You are a pirate bastard and still there is a throne for you at Cair Paravel. It’s in the trails the raindrops leave on your dirty window. It’s in the squelching sound that the feet makes on the wet pavement. It’s in the sent of water on the wind. If you can’t find them there, you won’t find them anywhere except the manic state that precedes the drop into the fearful fixation. What are you becoming, oh son of man? You are whatever you were when you were four, when you were six, when you were sixteen, when you’re seventy-eight. So let the terrible things go and look into the perfect things that are right now. There’s only this and this is more than enough. One second, two seconds, three seconds. Each passes and there is a new one waiting a few ahead. Can you earn more time? No? Then each is a gift of providence. Be thankful and let go of the “but something better.” Try again to save your money. Try again to be happy with this part of your life. Try again to be kind. Try again to be a good man. All there is is try. The do or do not are only done or not done. Wake up. Wake up and open your eyes. See and accept that this is enough.

On Finding the Pony

07/08/2006 6:35 AM – 6:57 AM

Freud said that the proof of mental health is the ability to love and the ability to work, but still there’s Isaac Newton. One out of two ain’t bad, but I’d take delight over top of it all. Where are you coming from and where are you going? Don’t know. Can’t know. So it doesn’t really matter to right this second and right this second is all there is. Once you figure out how to do that thing that everyone else seems to do so easily, think how good at it you’ll be.

Is there really such a thing as a good life? There is that life which has a greater impact on society, but who really cares about that? There is the life that was enjoyed by the one that lived that life, but once he’s gone, the light stops shining out. To condemn that which has a self for being selfish is like condemning that which has blue for being bluish. But it’s not the totality. No such thing as pure blue, no such thing as pure self. You pick up your life where you left it, put it on and get back to the work of it. You can’t know the story until the story is told. You can’t tell the story until you know it by heart. So you let it all go and listen for the quietness that tells your story between the words of someone else’s history lesson.

And you keep saying leave me alone, leave me alone, but you know that that’s not going to happen. So figure out what you really mean by that. So crumple the let goes into a pile and let them go. Grow up and grow past the edges. Hide yourself for yourself and keep the pirate treasure buried deep. Walk the beaches that line the sidewalk of this silly city or you won’t find the beaches on the other side of the Cape Cod marshes. Be here and be alright with that. If you can’t have peace and tell a story, then damn the whole thing as a lie. Then lie right back. Pick up and go. Pack up and leave. Be the pirate bastard. But then you laugh at it. Do, but keep it hidden deep down where no one can take it away. Doesn't matter. There is no rehearsal for this, but there are no valid critics anyway. Pack up and go, follow delight until your feet drop out from under you. Nomads, tramps and gypsies all. Someday, today I think, we’ll find our beach to bum on. New York is just a state of mind and your enjoyment of Billy Joel validates your enjoyment of Billy Joel. You can’t prove anything to anyone. Just be kind and save your money. There’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere.

On the Eye That Sees The Universe

07/03/2006 8:18 AM – 8:41 AM

And when you have nothing to write about, write about nothing. The gray haze settles down and hides within it the promise of adventure. What is adventure? A possibility of danger? Why would that attract? When you don’t know the answer, keep it in mind but move on to what is before you.

Who are you today? Who will you be tomorrow? Doesn’t really matter. When you’re there, be there. Let the highs and lows be highs and lows, let the good enough be enough. Responsibilities taken care of. Remember to have less of them. There is only this and this is more than enough. Get up in the morning. Go to work. Make money. Save as much as you can. Enjoy the things that cost less. Better, enjoy the work that doesn’t cost a thing. Eat your food with joy; drink your intoxicant with a merry heart. Always in moderation, of course. Everything that you could do is enough until that last moment when you stop saying, “not yet.” Then it doesn’t matter anymore. Or maybe it does. Who can tell?

We know these things in the soft sense, but it is enough – you were born, you will die, you’re right here in the meantime. Delight is better than sorrow, but each is beautiful in its own time. When life is most boring, it has the most to teach, but no one can teach you that but your very own self. Recall sometimes that you are insignificant to the subtle strings that move the universe. Recall sometimes that the strings of the universe are insignificant to the you. The eye with which you see God is the eye with which God sees you. Well, sort of. I doubt that Miester Eckhart would recognize that twisting of his words, but it doesn’t matter anyway. The real statement is “the eye that sees the universe is mostly inconsequential to the universe, but the to the eye that sees the universe, the universe is mostly inconsequential.” It is perhaps a fallacy of the “two not one” perspective, but sometimes the sweat on the brow is closer than the mind within it. Bah and bauble. Look out on the world with your own eyes and see that it is very good enough.