Maddening Crowd

Note to Self: Fuck in a greenhouse.

Eyedrum, Saturday?

WRAS Benefit, featuring The Selmanaires, Daedelus, & "special guest"
Saturday, December 2, 2006(4:30 PM)

Eyedrum
290 Martrin Luther King Jr. Dr.
Atlanta
30312


WRAS is continuing the celebration of its 35th anniversary on Saturday, December 2 at the Eyedrum Music and Art Gallery (Eyedrum wesbite). Get in line by 4:30 pm when doors open to make sure you nab a limited edition tote bag chock full of free stuff and a slice of Album 88 birthday cake!!

Bands include:
Moresight
Psyche Origami
Boulevard
Aerial2012
Boulevard
The Selmanaires
Daedelus
AND SPECIAL GUEST!!!

Attention.

Why aren't you listening to this?

Sunday Morning

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion.

Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us- and in us- and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial. We feel that distrust has become nearly universal among men of affairs, and that the spread of public anxiety is poisoning human relations and drying up the roots of private freedom.

We see that people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity, and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom- the forced actors who take the consequences- are also without leaders, without ideas of opposition, and that they make no real demands upon those with power.”

- C. Wright Mills

Ode

Late at night like this, watching the fan and shadow of the fan move against my ceiling. The blinds were never open today, barely seen strips of world through their gaps. The shadow against my ceiling, the turn and hum of my refrigerator, the weight of my body against this unmade bed.

Sleep is for Panda Bears

Another don't want to sleep night. It's the first day of the week that does it. Sundays and Mondays, I always see sleep as a personal insult. Just god's way of saying "why don't you shut your goddamn eyes Ben".

I think I'm almost done reading everything I had been reading between assignments for school. I'll grab more stuff from the library tomorrow, if I have time.

A week ago my thanksgiving was going do be nothing but me reading and trying to avoid all human contact. That's a fun game.



Yeah.

Tasers

Just watched the video of campus security tasering an Iranian-American.

News report, subtitled version here.

They taser the student a third time about 1:45 into the video. How could you pull the trigger again, after hearing the kid's screams the first two times?

They taser him again at 3:13.

Fuck this country. I'm leaving after graduation.

Note to self: Be less sober around frat boys.

bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void

I've got a terrible urge to reread Neuromancer for the millionth time.

A Break from that Paper (Don't Tell Henry James)

My life has gotten a lot more interesting, ever since they legalized crack. And it's the good shit now. I mean, I wasn't a user when it was still a street drug like weed, but I've got friends who never went a day without a hit. They say Uncle Sam's new blend is miles above the usual junkie crap.

One minute, gonna set a little fire, just picked this stuff up at the store on the way back.

Holy shit that shit is delicious.

I just came back from like a two hour shower. It's funny, the tips my fingers are so pruned up it's like the wrinkles are creeping all the way down to my palms.

There's a pretty good palm tree outside. We, my roommates and I, live in Detroit, so I didn't really expect the tree to grow when the landlord planted it. I remember arguing against the tree in certain harsh terms, and I think I threatened to kill his dog, but we were sharing a pipe, so it didn't really come to anything.

Goddamn crack is great.

But I had read on Snopes or something about these parasites which were native to palm trees, basically little red dots that spread like chicken pocks after getting into you.

My fingers look like wood.

I actually have a few Stiff Little Fingers songs - they're pretty good. Plus, they were playing before punk kids knew what to do with themselves at concerts, before gobbing or moshing I mean. So basically, in any given video, the band will be in some one's basement, and start playing, and these kids, who are wearing punk gear they've actually made themselves, or repurposed at least, like spiked dog collars, these kids are standing around like an American Bandstand crowd, and the music keeps playing. For Stiff Little Fingers, just think Greenday or any other poppunk, then replace the singer's voice with a real voice, add some musical ability well seasoned by a suitcase of beer between the four members, and you've got something like their sound. It's good. Being in a basement helps.

Looks like the wrinkles are fading, guess I don't get to call in sick tonight.

And finally the kids realize they're listening to music. And someone decides that they'll start dancing and see if anyone joins in (I don't know if the guy who starts dancing is as drunk as I'd have to be, you never even see a flask in these basements). The one person starts dancing, and the amazing part is that soon it spreads, and even more amazing is that Stiff Little Fingers have been dancing for the last three minutes, and it's like the audience can't bring themselves to imitate the band until some one guy starts bouncing.

I'm gonna see if I can bum some coke down on Park Place. I'll be back.

Hobo Whisperer

Inner'esting thing about working near the park: random homeless stop by to chat and try to cadge free food. I ended up spending the last 15 minutes before closing talking to this really tall semi-retarded bum. Could have been my age, maybe younger, and I was telling him how long he'd have to walk to reach the Ponce shelter. Surreal's the word we're looking for, especially because the conversation was better than many I've had at Oglethorpe.

Topics:

Why he wants to buy the restaurants around where I work and change their names to better suit them (ex: Flying Biscuit becomes The Cafe, Subway becomes The Submarine Sandwich Shop)

Why he was kicked out of (some random non-ATL area county)

Why his mom's weight loss pills aren't working

The store closed, I gave him a smoothie, and he scampered.

This Really Didn't Work

Drunko post, go!

Um am writing in sort of stream of consciousness style except go back and correct spelling after write last sentence. Kerouac says to be excellent in your writing and not stop and write the first thing, am attempting with little luck.

Parties are great because they make you value the time when you're far away from the party that much more.

Drunk girls keep grabbing at my mohawk. I find this great.

But the problem, is that I'm selfish and conceited, so the thing is, I really value my time. I mean, if it's a choice between talking to a boring person and watching trees swing in wind, I'm all for the trees. Basically, you've got to keep my attention. As far as I can tell, keeping my attention means either saying something really brilliant, or removing items of clothing. Really, I like surprises, so either works for me.

Why isn't it spring all the time? This is bullshit.

I think required amount of water has been drunk. Next step is working on sleep. I should work on all those loose threads.

Note to self: people, solutions, James paper, Greece, etc...

This Really Didn't Work

Drunko post, go!

Um am writing in sort of stream of consciousness style except go back and correct spelling after write last sentence. Kerouac says to be excellent in your writing and not stop and write the first thing, am attempting with little luck.

Parties are great because they make you value the time when you're far away from the party that much more.

Drunk girls keep grabbing at my mohawk. I find this great.

But the problem, is that I'm selfish and conceited, so the thing is, I really value my time. I mean, if it's a choice between talking to a boring person and watching trees swing in wind, I'm all for the trees. Basically, you've got to keep my attention. As far as I can tell, keeping my attention means either saying something really brilliant, or removing items of clothing. Really, I like surprises, so either works for me.

Why isn't it spring all the time? This is bullshit.

I think required amount of water has been drunk. Next step is working on sleep. I should work on all those loose threads.

Note to self: people, solutions, James paper, Greece, etc...

Coffee, Party

I stopped drinking coffee about a week ago. The headaches were gone when I woke up this morning, and the sun was shining, and I had a windchime on my porch. Very jolly.

I'd like to write some more, but I haven't really been feeling the itch lately. It seems to come and go.

The party's tomorrow night. You should come. I moved the time back an hour, as every other group at Oglethorpe seems to be doing something that night. Assholes.

I'm assuming we'll get 20ish people, probably a more varied group than last time, possibly a bit larger. It's going to be interesting trying to fit so many people inside my place.

Quales and Quails and Lights

I should probably be studying for that Art n' Culture exam at 1:30. But I made the mistake of looking up the word "qualia" on Wikipedia and Everything2. An interesting idea, and one that we should argue about at length, around a campfire, with a half bottle of cheap whiskey, and some beers for dinner, and nothing around to bother us for at least a few miles. Goddamn I miss the woods.

Anyway. My thoughts on qualia: I'm coming from a geek standpoint here, so you should bear in mind that an idea central to my character is that every problem can be solved, given enough time. So, how many words does it take to describe the color red? Well, given the right words, surprisingly few. I don't think many things exist outside the human mind which are undefinable. That human mind bit's the difficult part. How many words does it take to describe one day of a person's life? Is it necessary to have a description of every day which occurred before the day you want to describe? And that person must have interacted with other people and things on each day you describe - should we go into the psychology of a house cat in order to understand how the person being described interacts with it? This leads to the more complicated problem of attempting to calculate and describe each person who has interacted with the subject of your description.

So, while it may be theoretically possible to describe the thought process of a person in a given minute or day, the amount of effort required may make the task near infinite.

See above as example of why I find the idea of marriage pretty damn funny.

Also, if you have funny colored lights, could I borrow them?

My Favorite Thing About College:

Beer and cake is an acceptable dinner.

Age, Dancin'

Every once in a while, I think to myself, "You're going to Israel", and then I sort of do a happy dance, Snoopy style.

I can feel this whole age thing hitting me harder every day. Except, the thing I feel, it's like only the gravity itself, the knowing that my best possible life can't really meet my hopes. And growing older is a narrowing of potentialities, so that every day I'm farther from the blank page of, say, a six year old, and closer to that reoccurring point between year 25 and death, the point when you realize you've become yourself, that the majority of change is over.

I think I need to ask really old people questions.

Concerts and Wind

The Mountain Goats were pretty fucking amazing. Songs about weeds and highways and tables, but in a good way. Then wandering around the city at night for a bit, looking for food, getting in a shouting match with random guy across street, and eventually the Majestic, which was as these sorts of places should be.

I'm trying for good words to describe the night, and I blame the only 3ish hours of sleep on not being able to find any.

Je vais essayer:

I remember earlier in the day, at work, thinking to myself something like "we're waiting around until we die" - an idea which I try to slip my brain around, and argue with myself about every so often. So I was thinking that, but not in a bad way.

From there, a few minutes later, I got to that question "if you could chose between living your life as normal, or taking a single moment of perfect happiness and repeating it until death, which would you chose?" Of course, I'm a living life as normal guy. But I was thinking about it again later in bed, sharing an ipod headphone and waiting for the covers to warm up, and that moment there, thinking and being warm only on one side of my body and sort of swimming in the parts of the concert I wasn't aware of until hours afterwards, that moment would be one that I could consider living forever in.