Le nausée ou la bonheur?

One of the most depressing books I've read is La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sarte (1938). It's not the ideas in the book that depress me. It's the tone. As the story unfolds, the protagonist Antoine Roquentin begins to feel a "sweetish sickness" emanating from mundane objects — a crumpled piece of paper, a rock on the beach, a man's tie — and this nauseous feeling begins to overshadow everything he once enjoyed. Over time, he begins to realize that he has somehow pierced the veil and is seeing objects in their pure being. They no longer have qualities such as color or shape. Instead, all descriptors are separated from the thing itself, and he is confronted with pure existence.

Roquentin is immediately repulsed. He feels contempt for what he has discovered; he feels a pure disgust towards existence.

Sounds uplifiting, doesn't it?

Like I said, it's not the idea that depresses me. The idea is the central idea of Existentialism, which isn't so bad or depressing in itself. In fact, La Nausée is one of the canonical works of Existentialism and helped to foster it's growth. No, it's completely the tone. When reading, you identify with Antoine Roquentin. You begin to feel the nausea yourself. You begin to feel a repulsion towards existence wondering why something instead of nothing? You see, purely existential objects are devoid of the connections that cause meaning. In fact, existentialists feel that in human existence there is no purpose, indeed nothing, at its core. Finding a way to counter this nothingness, find meaning by embracing existence, is the fundamental theme of Existentialism.

The odd thing is that mystics also concern themselves with dissolving descriptors to get at pure existence. That is, mystics maintain that pure being is neither bad nor good, it just is. It's literally a nondual awareness beyond anything that can be described.

That's what prompted this post, riding on earlier posts talking about the work of Ken Wilber, arguably a mystic. Upon encountering pure being, existentialists walk away repulsed, horrified, and disgusted. Mystics walk away engaged. Why such polemic reactions to the same pureness? Well, my own feeling is that mystics build up to pure awareness, and that there is positive meaning in that process, where existentialists reduce to pure awareness, jettisoning anything that could be considered postive. And then...

There's something I didn't know before today. Years ago when I read that depressing book I didn't realize why it suggested pure existential awareness is something to recoil from. Don't get me wrong, it could be. It could be horrifying. What I'm arguing, though, is that there are at least two ways to react when encountering it. Apparently Sarte's was a bad trip.

Thomas Riedlinger, a contributing author to Charles Grob's book Hallucinogens, writes:

"Although awareness of the use of hallucinogens by prominent individuals in society is generally restricted to the period of the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, these compounds were available earlier in the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre, renowned French philosopher and a founder of Existentialism, had a single mescaline experience in 1935. He encountered a nightmarish vision, which clung to him for months after and became the inspiration for his acclaimed novel Nausea."

Nice. One of the most influential philosophical movements of the twentieth century and it was inspired at least in part by a bad mescaline trip. It makes you wonder what Sarte's tone would have been had it been a good trip. La Bonheur?

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

Self critiquing, I don't think I accurately represented what Ken Wilber is up to in my post from yesterday. Wilber isn't trying to validate spiritual claims through science or engage in an apologetics of religion. It's much more sophisticated than that. According to Wilber, there's several types of truth claims, of which science is only one. These validity claims run a more comprehensive and inclusive spectrum, and narrow or "hard" science can be improved upon by including these other forms of knowledge.

Rather than muck it up again, here's how he puts it:

Science — empirical science — deals with objects, with "its," with empirical patterns. Morals and ethics concern "we" and our intersubjective world of mutual understanding and justness. Art and aesthetics concern the beauty in the eye of the beholder, the "I."

And yes, this is essentially Plato's the Good (morals, the "we"), the True (in the sense of propositional truth, objective truths or "its"), and the Beautiful (the aesthetic dimensions as perceived by each "I").

These three domains are also Sir Karl Popper's rather famous distinction of three worlds — objective (it), subjective (I), and cultural (we). Many people, myself included, consider Jürgen Habermas the world's foremost living philosopher, and these three great domains correspond exactly with Habermas's three validity claims: objective truth, subjective sincerity, and intersubjective justness.

Of enormous historical importance, these three domains showed up in Kant's immensely influential trilogy — The Critique of Pure Reason (objective science), The Critique of Practical Reason (morals), and The Critique of Judgment (aesthetic judgment and art).

Even into the spiritual levels of development, these three domains show up as, to give only one example, the Three Jewels of Buddhism, namely: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddha is the enlightened mind in each and every sentient being, the I that is no-I, the primordial awareness that shines forth from every interior. Buddha is the "I" or the "eye" of Spirit. Sangha is the community of spiritual truth that is realized, the "It" or "isness" or "thusness" or "suchness" of every phenomenon.

- Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit

My mistake is that I characterized Wilber as trying to mash spirituality into the narrow funnel of hard science. That's not the case at all, and I didn't mean it that way. Hard science looks at something like consciousness and sees a bunch of sparks flying around in the brain, reduced to information bits of 1s and 0s. That's a valid claim, but it's only one aspect of what's really going on. We don't actually experience consciousness as 1s and 0s flashing across our mind. We experience something else entirely. Hard science truth is only as complete as it relates to the sensorimotor part of consciousness. What other levels can we explore? Wilber's answer is expand truth seeking to all levels. He doesn't want to mash meditation into science. He wants to expand science to include it. Knowledge, he reasons, isn't just the True. It's the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Sense and soul in couple's therapy

I'm re-reading two books by Ken Wilber. The first is One Taste, his personal journal kept over the course of a year (1997), and the second is The Marriage of Sense and Soul, which is his attempt to integrate, or at least find common ground between, the often at odds realms of science and religion. I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I all that scientific. I am always interested in the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, however, and have more than a passing interest in how we actually come to know or believe in things. I don't think religion corners the market on that, and neither does science since it's always in process. Free thought is what I'm about, but in coming up with a consensual reality there has to be some agreement on what's valid ways of knowing something.

Typically in science a valid idea is one that has been put through the scientific method and arrived unscathed on the other side. It's been tested and confirmed to be true. That's an extremely simplified version of events, however. There's actually a lot of debate in the epistemology of science over what makes up the scientific method and what things can actually be tested. This is a pretty good question if we're setting out to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. How do you test ideas that on the surface seem entirely subjective?

Wilber says it has a lot to do with having an injunction, an idea he borrowed from philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). An injunction, as Wilber uses it, is some type of action that one can perform to test an idea. As he puts it: If you do this, you get that. I should point out that Ken Wilber is widely considered to be one of the leading philosophers of our age, working on what he describes as an Integral Theory of Everything. In the case of science testing spiritual beliefs, the injunction Wilber suggests is meditation. If you perform meditation or contemplative awareness, you get X. X, he feels can be confirmed by anyone who performs the injunction. In other words, something seemingly subjective becomes objective by comparing the results of the injunction with the experience of peers who have also performed the injunction. This technically satisfies the testability part of the scientific method (the injunction is the observation), and the repeatablity part of the scientific method (the confirmation of peers who have also performed the injunction). He explains it much better than I in The Marriage of Sense and Soul. It's not half as crazy as it sounds.

Hey, maybe it is a bridge between science and religion. If nothing else, it at least hooks sense and soul up for a one night stand, even if it doesn't go so far as marry the two. Sadly, though, it's unlikely to be adopted anytime soon. Those two camps have been at each other's throats since around the Middle Ages. If they were actually a couple, Dr. Phil would have advised them to part company long ago. The other problem is that most practitioners of contemplative awareness generally agree that you need to spend at least twenty years of daily reflection to see any major payoff. Buddhist monks shun the world for years at a time. What scientist is going to go through all of that on a hunch?

The little drummer boy

A number of years ago I took a trip to Savannah, Georgia. The place is incredible. I wouldn't mind moving there actually. I don't believe there's any other place quite like it in the world. In fact, I'd even be willing to say that if the South itself still has charm, Savannah is where it's most apparent.

I have a lot of great memories about that trip. Without diminishing the rest, one that sticks out clearly is that of a little islander boy sitting off to the side of River Street. He was sitting on a paint pucket pounding away on another with splintered drumsticks. Not sure why it impressed me, but here it is years later and I still recall it clearly. Poor kid wasn't even all that good. Not like this guy who reminded me of him:



Who knows, maybe the little drummer boy grew up, got good, and that's him there?

Physical fitness can be fun

I was joking awhile back that I'm somehow a sportsman because I sometimes play video games (rarely, but whatever). Part of my reasoning was that it involved competition even if it doesn't involve physical activity. Boy was I wrong. Apparently you do get fit the more you play. Check out these numbers from the May 2007 issue of Wired:

If you spend 1.5 hours weightlifting, you burn 842 calories.
If you spend 1 hour doing Dance Dance Revolution, you burn 900 calories.

If you spend 30 minutes doing aerobics, you burn 242 calories.
If you spend 30 minutes on Wii Boxing, you burn 250 calories.

If you spend 20 minutes jogging, you burn 198 calories.
If you just sit on the couch and play PS3/Xbox for 1 hour, you burn 204 calories.

If you spend 15 minutes having sex, you burn 33 calories.
If you spend 7 minutes playing Wii Tennis, you burn 46 calories.

These calories that you lose playing video games are probably dependent on you not swigging beer and overdosing on nachos. Still, it's friggin' physical fitness through video games! What's to complain about?

In fact, I think I'll change my personal daily exercise routine to one hour playing Xbox and five hours having sex, then pretend like I lifted weights for 1.5 hours.

What? You don't even think that's possible? Hey, I'm Mr. Stamina. I can play Xbox for at least two- three hours, no problem.

Some sketches I remembered to scan

I don't spend nearly enough time creating paper art as I'd like to. I do get around to creating a few sketches every now and then, but they're almost always for other people and I give them away as soon as they're done. As such, I don't actually have that many laying around to scan. Here's the pathetically few sketches that I've done over the last few years that I did remember to scan. I'll post more if I find any or create new ones.


Woman Sleeping - Never quite finished this one.


Fairy in the Grass - Very simple water color pencil drawing for my niece who loves fairies.


Dave and Annmarie Fultz - These are my in-laws.


Mr. and Mrs. Downing - Friends of mine from Maysville Kentucky.


Sean and Lisa Callahan - My brother-in-law and niece.


Lisa and Mochaccino - My niece and my dog (she wanted a portrait with my dog).

Again, I'll try to create/find more. This is a sad sampling considering how many drawings I've actually done over the years : ) If anyone out there has received a drawing by me, please do me the favor of scanning it and sending it to me so I can add it here.

Building a RC tank that's actually web controlled

About a year ago I attached a video camera to the top of my remote control PT Cruiser and drove it around town just for fun. This got me thinking of different ways to remote control a camera equipped vehicle, and naturally my thoughts gravitated towards the web. I had heard about a number of web controlled devices but never followed up on how exactly they were done. Nevertheless, armed with the desire to create a web controlled camera equipped device, and a bit of knowledge on how the web works, I drew up a plan on how I could create a web controlled tank that could navigate an obstacle course and snap photos of various objects as a game.

The basic architecture of the web is server/client. A server houses information and clients access the server to retrieve and post information. That's the really simplified schematic of most web systems. You have P2P, of course, where each server is a client and vice versa, but that's still a server-client system. Knowing this, and knowing a bit of server programming, I realized that it'd actually be very easy (at least in concept) to create a web controlled device if the server is embedded in the vehicle.

The idea is to take a remote controlled tank and mash it up with an old laptop I have that's still good, despite not being powerful enough to do much more than light Internet surfing. The body of the tank will be modified to make room for the modified laptop. Attached to the turret of the tank will be a stripped down web cam wired to the laptop. The motors of the RC tank will be replaced with stepper motors wired to the laptop as well. This allows for a software control of the tank device and greater precision in movement. Both the motors and the web cam can be controlled through server software running on laptop.

So, everything's controlled through the server, and that's how we get remote. The laptop server can be accessed through the Internet the same as any other server, for example those that serve up web pages or games. The server on the laptop is connected to a main local area network through the laptop's built in Wi-Fi card, and the WLAN is connected to the Internet through an ISP. The web cam provides for remote viewing of where the tank is heading, so the user at the controls can steer the tank. The controls for operating everything are built into a web page. In short, through software a remote user can control the internal laptop devices (motors, cams, etc), and it is possible for someone in India to control the tank and run it through an obstacle course I set up in my United States yard, snapping photos of targets I set up. It can be someone as far off as India, or it can be me sitting on my back porch surfing the web wirelessly. It's nonlocal. The range of where this tank can go is only limited by battery power and the extent of the Wi-Fi signal, which can extend pretty darn far. This whole thing can be moved to one of those cities that are entirely covered by wireless signals and that's a pretty big area to play.

Doesn't that just sound like fun? There's so many different ways to have fun with this. Two tanks could even be set up and pitted against each other. If I could adequately protect the interior electronics, I could probably even rig up paintball guns to the tanks. Web controlled stepping motors open a lot of doors. Like I said, a number of interactive games could be built upon this idea.

Similar devices have been built by other people, of course, and were built long before I came up with this idea, but as a thought project I purposely didn't want to look at them until after I had mapped out my own project to see if I could devise something on my own. After I completed my plans, I realized it's very similar to how that Texas group did their highly controversial online hunting (mine's just a game where nothing gets hurt) and that Bradley University students in Illinois created almost exactly the same thing as a senior project. When completed, my tank will hopefully look like the Magnus Ivarssons tank (pictured left), which is exactly what I had in mind before realizing he'd already made one. To my knowledge his tank is the first web controlled tank ever built. Clever Swedish people! I'm never upset on finding that someone else came up with an idea first, as long as I independently came up with the idea on my own. It shows that I'm not always a quick thinker, but I can still figure things out : )

At some point I am going to tackle this project completely. I haven't yet because I'm still collecting parts. Sufficiently large RC tanks can get pretty costly, so I might just model my own. Everything's complete on paper and the parts aren't all that expensive compared to the fun that awaits. The only thing putting this project on hold is the build time.

No more Jeremy spoke in class, thanks

I like my name, Jeremy. Unfortunately it's not as common as John. Even more unfortunate is that the name is most widely known for Pearl Jam's song by the same name and porn star Ron Jeremy. I can live with Ron Jeremy jokes, but the Pearl Jam song really sucks. Don't get me wrong. I love Pearl Jam. The song sounds great. The problem is that every now and then, on meeting someone for the first time, I have to endure them semi-singing, "Jeremy spoke in class today," as if the song has anything at all to do with me. The song has nothing to do with me. The song was inspired by a newspaper article about a 16-year-old boy named Jeremy Wade Delle from Richardson, Texas, who shot himself in front of his English class in Richardson High School on the morning of January 8, 1991. I am deeply saddened by that, Columbine, and the Virginia Tech massacre that led to this post. I think we can retire the song "Jeremy," at least around me.

Gimme the red stuff

I don't know anything about wine. I just like drinking it. So I'm not going to spout off some pompous whatevers about how you've got to swish it around and taste the flowers that were growing in the field along with the grapes and such. Nope, according to me you just open a bottle and get real friendly with it. When out and about, I tend to just ask for something red. I love wineries. At home my default is [yellow tail] Shiraz.

Apparently I'm not the only one who likes this stuff. I read recently that the Shiraz is currently the number one selling 750ml red wine in the US. Spiffy, I guess I'm completely wine-generic.

Anyway, [yellow tail] is from a vineyard in South Eastern Australia. Beats me what kind of flowers grow there. It all tastes strangely like fermented grape juice to me, but this is what the "tasting notes" say:

A vibrant, deep purple colour leads to a nose of lifted berry aromas with spicy notes. The full-bodied palate shows generous ripe fruit characters with underlying earthy tones and lingering sweet berry flavours. A touch of vanilla in oak adds balance and softness to the long, enjoyable finish.

Um, sure. Whatever.

The originial laptop

My original laptop. I'm not exactly sure how old it is. It's an Antares Parva, which is a series of Italian portable typewriters first produced in 1954. Mine's probably from the early 1960s. I got it as a gift from my folks in the mid-90s. It's in surprisingly good condition considering I've beat the crap out of it over the years : )



Countless examples of bad poetry, bad short stories, and bad love letters were written on my little friend here. Unfortunately, they were all written by me.



Obviously I've moved beyond this typewriter. Since I stopped using it, I've burned through three laptops so far. For all their conveniences, laptop computers don't seem to last long enough to make it to the status of "an old friend". Score one for analog.



In fact, four decades after it was built this thing still works. Heck, it's been at least five years since I last used it and the ribbon's still good. Look, you can barely see it, but I typed out "Blogger Sucks". Blogger doesn't actually suck. Blogger's awesome. I have a lot more confidence, though, that my typewriter will still be working forty years from now than I do in Blogger.

Forty years from today, I'll be typing just by thinking words. Then my poetry will really suck, and so will the short stories. The love letters might get more interesting.

I thought we made up the Oxford ghost

This is weird. I seriously thought we just made up this story, so imagine my surprise when I found a reference to the Oxford Motorcycle Ghost in a book I'm scoping to buy. I've been meaning to get around to reading Weird Ohio since it came out in 2005. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. It's partly written by Loren Coleman, an expert on oddities who just happens to also be a really nice guy. Though I don't know him personally, he sent me an email about a blog post I wrote way back when (a different blog). Read everything he writes, starting with Cryptomundo.com.

I'm off track. So anyway, back in high school I was sitting around with some friends talking about nothing when the conversation got around to an urban legend about nearby Oxford, Ohio. I went to Colerain High School in Cincinnati. Oxford's not too far off, about a 45 minute drive. It's a college town so, you know, we spent a lot of time up there.

So we're just sitting around talking and someone says up in Oxford there's a ghost of a motocyclist that will show up, but only under very specific conditions. The specific conditions are that you have to go to Oxford-Milford Road, drive around the bend there, pull into the first drive to the right, turn off your lights, return the short distance back to the bend with your lights off, flash your lights three times, flash your brights three times, and wait. All of this must be done after midnight. Eventually you'll see a single headlight come over the hill (the ghost on the motorcycle). There was some backstory to the ghost as well, but I don't remember it. Something about lost love and whatnot. It didn't matter to me. I just wanted to see the ghost.

My friend Chris Walker and I figured we'd go up there that night and check it out. It was a school night and I was like 15 or something, so I had to sneak out of the house. My friend had a driver's license but no car. What we ended up doing is stealing my parent's van for the night — Hi Mom! : ) (The things we confess only after the statute of limitations have expired, heh).

Now here's the weird part: The whole thing is actually real, or at least it was for us. We showed up. We did the little ritual thing. We waited. Sure enough, a short time later there comes this single white light — a headlight obviously — floating over the hills where the road would be in the dark and stopping not too far from where we were parked. Suddenly the white light changed to red and headed back in the opposite direction, dropping over a hill and disappearing.

It - f-r-e-a-k-e-d - us - out!

So much so that we sped out of there going at least eighty miles an hour, so fast that we accidentally hit a post at the side of the road, smashing one of the rearview mirrors.

It's one of the weirdest things I've ever personally seen. Over the years I figured, you know, right timing to just happen to be out there when a living person rode by on a motorcycle. I even thought maybe there's a conspiracy where some guy waits for idiots like us to show up and flash our lights, just so he can ride around on his moped and freak people out. To be honest, though, I have absolutely no idea what it was, just that we saw it. I didn't even realize this thing was so widespread. And yet, here it is. It's in the book. You can check it out yourself.

P.S. Sorry Mom about the broken mirror and blaming it on drive-by teens : )

No damn cat, and no damn cradle

Tiny little personal mourning: they're dropping like flies. Kurt Vonnegut lived a full life (1922-2007) and lived his life his way, right up until the end. It's a life to be celebrated so I don't mourn for that. To quote Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, "So it goes."

Vonnegut was the holy father of a great karass, engaged in a sacred wampeter, avoiding granfalloons wherever they may be. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you're truly missing out. Read the books.

I'll miss Vonnegut to be sure, but missing doesn't exactly equate to mourning. To mourn there must be a loss, and we've gained so much through his books, how can there ever be a loss? Thank you Saint Vonnegut.

The true loss is that they've all died off. Maybe a rogue prophet or two remain from the great literary movements of the 60s and 70s, but over the last decade... I don't even want to list them all for fear I'd leave someone out. I only started paying attention after Ken Kesey (2001) and Hunter S. Thompson (2005) anyway. It's a collective loss that isn't pinned on one individual, but I honestly feel something actually ended when Kurt Vonnegut passed away. I don't know if the loss can be defined exactly, but it's very real. Maybe it's enough to simply say that an epoch passed April 11, 2007.

So it goes.

"No wonder kids grow up crazy," the midget says. "A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's..."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle."

- Cat's Cradle (1963)

When did Kentucky become cool?

What's this? I was reading through MIT's Technology Review and came across this ad. Kentucky seems to really, really want to shed it's hillbilly image, like big time. Forget Silicone Valley in California, or even Silicone Alley in New York, make way for Silicone Holler! The whole damn state is wired and now Kentucky is out to seduce high-tech companies through matching funds. It's not just tech either. Last year, Esquire named Kentucky the most stylish state, based largely on the amount of hipsters it's produced, including the likes of George Clooney, Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp, Muhammad Ali, and others. Last October, Louisville was even tapped to play host to the IdeaFestival. The IdeaFestival is a world-class meet up bringing together the most diverse and leading thinkers from across the nation and around the globe to explore and celebrate innovation and cutting-edge ideas. It's a huge think-tank filled with some of the most brilliant and extraordinary problem solvers on the planet. It's no small thing that it was held in Louisville. Guess where the IdeaFestival is going to be this year... Louisville again! It's all just a little too weird. Kentucky's not supposed to be cool.

The easter bunny hates you

if (u celebrate e) {
     print "Happy Easter";
} else {
     print "Happy Spring!";
}

Beware of the Osterhase!

Behold the tale of a creature so unimaginable, so diabolical, I fear for my very life in just mentioning its name: The Osterhase! A white furry beast from your nightmares, red glowing eyes, razor-like teeth protruding beneath chubby little cheeks, and ears that will whip whelps into your back as you are running away. Legs that will pounce on you like a cheetah, making sure you don't get very far. And just to distract you from its true lethal nature: a cotton tail.

A cotton tail! My God, it is cruelty incarnate!

Some say the legend began with the disappearance of small children in the Pennsylvania Dutch area of the United States in the 18th century. These disappearances coincided with sightings of a strange white-haired bunny, carrying multi-colored eggs in a basket. Some parents tried to downplay the coincidence of events, telling the children that an egg-laying bunny would leave them gifts of colored eggs in their caps and bonnets if they'd been good. They tried to portray the "Osterhase" as a silly rabbit, playing tricks for kids.

They were all of them deceived.

The Osterhase is as deceptive and cunning as it is deadly. The truth of the Osterhase is not one to be taken lightly. Charming bedtime stories told to children are lies! Yes the bunny will bring you colored eggs, eggs colored in blood!

The real tale of the Osterhase dates back at least to the 5th century and the Arthurian search for the Holy Grail. People went missing there too. Knights even. Armored knights even! One such encounter with the evil creature is documented in an ancient text from the period. Only read this tale if you can stomach sheer unholy carnage:

Tim: Behold the cave of Caerbannog!
...
Tim: There he is!
Arthur: Where?
Tim: There!
Arthur: What, behind the rabbit?
Tim: It is the rabbit.
Arthur: You silly sod!
Tim: What?
Arthur: You got us all worked up!
Tim: Well, that's no ordinary rabbit!
Arthur: Ohh.
Tim: That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!
Robin: You tit! I soiled my armour I was so scared!
Tim: Look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer!
Galahad: Get stuffed!
Tim: He'll do you up a treat, mate.
Galahad: Oh, yeah?
Robin: You mangy Scots git!
Tim: I'm warning you!
Robin: What's he do, nibble your bum?
Tim: He's got huge, sharp-- eh-- he can leap about-- look at the bones!
Arthur: Go on, Bors. Chop his head off!
Bors: Right! Silly little bleeder. One rabbit stew comin' right up!
Tim: Look!
[squeak]
Bors: Aaaugh!
[dramatic chord]
[clunk]
Arthur: Jesus Christ!
Tim: I warned you!
Robin: I done it again!
Tim: I warned you, but did you listen to me? Oh, no, you knew it all, didn't you? Oh, it's just a harmless little bunny, isn't it? Well, it's always the same. I always tell them--

[s]

Beware of the Osterhase. He comes for you tonight!

All set for the shakes

Got rid of all the smokes last night and the cigars today. The cigars were definitely peer pressure. I only started smoking those after watching the Sopranos (damn you Gandolfini!). I was a little worried, then, that I wouldn't have any bad habits. I don't want to be a puritan. Then I remembered that I'm absolutely obsessed with coffee. That's a bonus! I know way too much about what makes the perfect cappucino. Having a fallback bad habit helps in getting rid of the truly detrimental habit.

I'm all set to wait out the 72 hours. I'm such a baby though. I'm treating it like detox, like a heroine habit. I'm fully expecting shakes and hallucinations of babies crawling across the ceiling.

I love that movie, by the way, Trainspotting.

My favorite quote (Renton narrating):

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchased in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday night. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons.

I'm such a baby : ) People do this all the time.

Gotta quit sometime

On a whim, quitting smoking. Whoohoo! (<-that's sarcastic) I can't really say that peer pressure got me into it, but it definitely has to do with me quitting. I've been smoking since I was eighteen-nineteen, and back then you could smoke while walking around the mall. Today it's much more conspicuous. I mean, there's like actual work involved in lighting up. You have to go outside. You carry gum with you cause it's stinky. You never light up until the other guy does because you don't know who you're going to offend. I don't remember it being all that involved when I started.

I started when I used to hang out at the pool halls and at a club in Over the Rhine (Cincinnati). Like I said, I was nineteen. My girlfriend at the time was still in highschool, so she had a bedtime. Me and my friends would go out to the pool hall or down to the club and stay out till two in the morning. It had nothing to do with peer pressure. None of my friends talked me into it. It just seemed like part of the atmosphere. So I started when I was nineteenish, and I'm thirty-one now. So I guess that's my twenties. Whoohoo! (<-that's sarcastic)

It used to be just a couple of smokes a day. Part of the reason I'm quitting now is that it gets to be more than a few over time. Plus some guy I used to hang around asked me once why I smoke. I couldn't think of any reason why, which sort of shows it's pure habitual/chemical.

"Ah, don't worry about it. How old are you?" he asked. "Twenty-three." I said. (I was smoking roll-ups back then. Buglers.)

"Don't worry about it until you're thirty."

For some reason that always stuck. Of course I didn't bother quitting when I was thirty like I was supposed to. Didn't even give it a serious try. Fourteen days 72 hours it stays in your system they say. I could be wrong on that, but what's fourteen days 72 hours?

Screw it. Gotta quit sometime.

I plan on replacing the bad habit with a good habit to help me quit. Anytime I feel like having a smoke, I'm going to do a couple of pushups. So if you see me out on the street, and I just drop to the ground and start doing pushups, I haven't gone insane. I'm feening.

Save the cheerleader, that's what she said!

In case you haven't noticed, I'm going through my profile list of interests. I've already covered music and books, now it's television. This one's easy because I don't watch that much TV.

Heroes



I am absolutely entralled by this show. It's genius (though obviously based on earlier ideas of X-Men, etc.). What makes this show genius is that every other comic book based television show does suck. This is how I would translate a graphic novel to the small screen. I mean, it's totally geeked out. Save the cheerleader, save the world? If that's not a geek statement, I don't know what is. This show doesn't make fun of graphic novel enthusiasts, nor insults their intelligence, like, again, every other attempt at translating comics to television. Nor does it try to take the subculture of graphic novel lovers and try to make it pop-pop culture. The result: It's enormously popular! It's just a smart show that remains true to comics. I love it.

The Office



There's nothing funnier than awkward humor and uncomfortable situations. That's the reason I love this show, and of course everyone loves this show, because its premise is of being a reality-based documentary... and that's how it really is! People who don't know they're funny are funny. It's all about the small things here — that's what she said!

HBO Sundays



Well, duh. And it's not just one show. The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Carnivale, Rome, Entourage, Big Love, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Extras. There hasn't been a show yet they've put on Sunday that completely sucked (even the ones that aren't around anymore). HBO + Sunday = Good.

There's some other television shows that I watch and enjoy, but I don't schedule around them. The Daily Show, Colbert Report, Scrubs, Mythbusters. There's quite a few that I can't even remember off the top of my head. But on Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays I drop everything and get comfortable. Save the cheerleader, save the world!

I like the stuff that doesn't suck

When people list books that they like, they usually talk about the fictional ones. That makes sense. There's a lot of nonfiction books that I feel approach a subject well, but they're still more boring than books with a good story. No one but mad dogs and Englishmen list the textbooks that influence them.

Some might be surprised that I don't actually read many tech books. Watson was surprised to find that Sherlock Holmes didn't know or didn't care that the earth revolves around the sun. He considered it useless information, which it sort of is to a detective in Victorian London. Likewise code books and whatnot are pretty useless because tech changes rapidly. It's all, like, sooo last week. You do better reading magazines and gleaning snippets from the web than whole books. And boring!

No, I like nonfiction books that think about thinking rather than those that think about ____. I figure that if I have a pretty good mode of thought, I can apply that to any subject, or as Holmes would say, it's more useful than a specific fact. Along those lines, I read a lot of books that talk about how to mash-up different ideas, even those that might seem polar opposites like science and religion, into something you can use. Integrating two subjects that didn't seem to have a connection is a great approach to operate under, and it's no surprise that the basic concept is being applied to life everywhere and, sure, tech too.

That's the boring stuff : ) Let's talk fiction!

I love stories! I love any and all stories because something, anything, is happening. There's always something unfolding. We may not know what it is at first, but by the end of the book we can look back and say something happened, and we can even say it all happened for a reason. You know, a meaning. I mean, even ideas about how meaningless everything is still have meaning when they're put into a story because, if anything, it's a series of events that show there is no meaning. The meaning of the series of events is that there is no meaning. It's great! There's always a meaning when it's put into a story book.

I don't really have the time, nor am I obsessed with, staying on top of the literary world and knowing what's the best of the best, or what different literary movements are coming about, or anything like that. But speaking generally I like the books that have a perennial message. In other words, it doesn't matter what context the story is put in, the message of the story is the same whether it was written 400 years ago or if it's a new release. Old, old classics that I like are still relevant in our times. They've drifted up through the years, and though in many ways are out of touch with today's culture, the message, meaning, or whatever still applies. It's perennial.

That's not to say it's all been done or all been written. New ideas come all the time. But those, or rather the good ones that I like, either have stood the test of time as well or can be expected to stand the test of time. Plus new voices have new perspectives on old ideas and that's new too.

So, to recap, I like nonfiction books that think about thinking, fictional books that have a plot, and like fictional books that are relevant more than those that aren't. Guess I really narrowed that down, huh? : )

What can I say, I love everything. Do I discriminate at all? Sure. I don't like the stuff that sucks.

Here's a specific: I absolutely love-love On The Road by Jack Kerouac.

The best music you've never heard

I like all manner of music and listen to whatever's good. That said, let me talk about what I listen to most often.

I usually listen to indie rock but sometimes jump over to trip hop and acid jazz. Mostly it's indie rock. Indie music is hard to speak of in concrete terms because it encompasses a wide range of styles collectively lumped together. There's a few loose definitions of style that tag them to each other. You might think that it's simply independent music, but nah, not really. Some of what I listen to is truly independent, but the better known stuff can't really be called that. I mean, they did sign to a label.

It goes like this: In indie rock there's "i"ndie rock and "I"ndie rock. The little "i" is what's usually called indie rock, and that is what I usually listen to. But like I said, it's not really independent. They sign to a label. They have agents and managers and producers and a whole bunch of people telling them what to do. So it's really hard to call them independent in a true sense. They're also pretty well widespread (which is partly why I listen, see below) and stop just short of pop music. In fact, Sub Pop, the label that became famous for signing Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and many other Seattle bands got it spot on with their name — sub-pop.

Big "I" Indie rock is a little different. It's a whole lot more obscure. That's the stuff played in local bars and city scenes and when it does branch out, it still stays pretty well under the radar. There's a lot of great stuff here. Music as a biz, however, is dependent on a great many factors and most of big "I" Indie rock doesn't float to the surface. You know, some bands don't even want to float up and that's fine too. It still rocks.

Now, I dabble in everything. Like I said, I'll listen to bluegrass music if I'm in the mood. I love the sound of Gaelic music. I love jazz. Classical doesn't put me to sleep. I'll even listen to hip hop and country music if they come up with something more interesting than a song about how much money they've got (hip hop) or how little they've got (country). But I mostly listen to little "i" indie rock. I like the experimentation there, the lyrics, the sound, but I still want to be able to say, "Hey, have you heard ___? That rocks!" and I can't do that with most big "I" Indie rock because it's a little too obscure.

So, here's my online stations based on the above:

Indie 103.1 FM, Los Angeles, California - Little "i"



Great playlist. Because they're based in Los Angeles, it's almost like going directly to the source for the more widespread indie rock.

97X WOXY, Cincinnati, Ohio - Big "I"



Hands down one of the best online stations for true Indie rock. I'm not saying that. That's the press they receive, and with good reason. They actually have two stations. One's big "I" Indie music in general, the other only covers the vintage stuff. Extra weird because they're local and I was listening to them long before they went online.