I saw something fascinating the other day: enveloped by the canopy of autumn-hued leaves and richly scented earth in the midst of dusky near-darkness, the atmosphere of man-made naturalistic environs placed their warm, heavy hands upon my waiting shoulders. From the first touch of crisp, comforting air, leaves began to shadow the forms below them, then drain of vivid color, then curl, then, finally shed by the trees that created them, wind their way through the air to a random gentle resting place below.

I watched as they fell, one by one, around my feet; nestled on shoulders, slipping through fingertips as amorphous thought-forms do over time. All the leaves fell, one by one, then inevitably disappeared, leaving in their place the slow ascent of the moon taking cover above full, dense clouds.

Pressure changes in the air unlocked tiny pores in the stratosphere and brought forth a sigh from the barren branches bowed above me as their long arms stretched out to catch the drops and draw them down, down all the way to the root and place of peaceful nourishment... from pitter to patter to accelerating freefall, the rain began to span the sky all the way to the horizon, racing down to touch and saturate every dry, uncovered inch.

I felt something fascinating, the other day.

It struck me that one of the reasons for my wariness around certain people is the opposite of what it seemed to be.

Instead of being afraid of others, I've been too careful, perhaps, about hurting them... six years of bruised knuckles, psychological damage and steady training to become stronger, it would be interesting to know the impossible: did all of this actually mean anything?

Some of my pain belongs to someone else. All of it now belongs to me. And now I'll be glad to give it back, to those from whom I've borrowed more than my share.

Sometimes having no expectations is too mild an expectation. To expect the worst is paranoia, yet giving altruistically is to martyr one person for the exploitative causes of others.

I know how to fight. Now I'm learning when, and why.

How could it possibly have taken so long? perhaps I did know this once, and somehow, simply forgot.


audio: edit . crying over pros for no reason . twenty minutes

One of my favorite blog people wrote recently, completely as a surprise...

...personally, it was always rare to interact directly with other bloggers, even back six or seven years ago before weblogging was cool and the Web suddenly started to need version numbers (clue: it still doesn't).

So now it's been a few months since the last post, and suddenly an email message arrives from someone who couldn't possibly be a spam artist... because in that strange Internet way, we share memories. The name is immediately recognizable. Somehow it triggers a cascade of thoughts and feelings reaching back even to the seemingly unrelated real-life background circumstances surrounding our time together, connected as we were (and are) over miles of waves, wires and digital switches.

In a few days, the completion of a project that has taken over nine months to gestate will, perhaps, create more time for musing over what has happened over the past two years. Until then -- and, due to the inevitable time overrun in creating new bits of hopefully useful technology -- this, and any other lucidly non-programmatic moments will have to suffice.

This seemed to be a fitting way to respond to that entirely unexpected and completely welcome touch from a person who I've probably shared more with over time than many people who I know offline.

A song reaches me too, here, even in this place, where change is happening quietly, day by day.

Something that I had lost sight of recently, sometime over the past two years of (re)indoctrination into the "higher education" system. Buried in the hidden folds of an implied social order, the crisp smoothness of an immersive experience cleanly, softly layering its truth on top of my own; strange to only realize it now.

There is a difference between wanting to do something, and wanting to be something.

Five digits splayed outward. Index-middle-ring-pinky counted without differentiation, equally persuasive and urgently stretching toward destinations unknown. The intractable question suddenly becomes not what but which.

How many lives array themselves in formation from the palm of one hand, straight-line paths that upon further scrutiny are interrupted by bumps, callouses, intersecting wrinkles and faint outlines of quietly pulsating dark red blood vessels... life flows within each path, each ray pointing in a different direction, all from the same origin. one way leads to a longer travel than the others; another way has a wider latitude along its organic unpaved surface. superficial similarities give way to a more fundamental insolvable incongruity: the impossibility of traveling more than one path at one time.

perhaps, though, a touch of all can give the smallest push toward that one path that creates a fulfilling life. and it may even be a question of perspective: rather than moving outward, inward could be the key to relieving the need for desire-driven journeys into apparent expanse, and ultimately, the very same nothing that consumes it all.

Suddenly there is a button that reads "Monetize" above the "Title:" input box on this blog post page.

The Web seems to be imploding. Even IMDB is overrun with pop-ups. It would be fascinating to see how people would "monetize" if there were no get-rich-from-advertising "eyeshare" schemes in the world...

... but then, some walk around dripping logos from lapel top to tip toes and somehow are regarded as fashionable. A matter of taste, though, and not really up for debate; more toward amused observation of human billboards on parade. "Debate", right, on the blog with no Trackbacks, Pings, Comments, magical buttons that invite Twits and Blobs and Digging or whatever.

The metaphor is perfect: World Wide Web as a conversation between connected nodes, neural webs dancing in the electron-brightened darkness of insulated connectivity. The reality seems to be twisting around itself in a tightening ball of circular references back to its own potential glory -- now we have microblogging, as if blogging took too long and IM was too boringly one-on-one.

The Web is now a medium for celebrity inflation, with everyone amassing "followers" and no one with anything to say to any of them. The circularity is perfect, as well, then, most likely because with all this talk, only the truly rare bird has any time left for listening. As if the Web needed version numbers, 2.0 is the blossoming of common thoughtless hubris seeking advanced intelligent technology. The newly chrome-laden broadband commercial break is an endless broadcast, infinitely varied in expression and accompanying intricately marketed demographic manipulation.

Is this not actually Television 2.0?

totally on impulse, writing this entry.

the irony is that i'm smashing up a local wordpress install to create an online community-type new business idea.

and yet, still drawn back to The Blogger for personal business. personal business of the anonymous Internet kind.

what in the hell was there ever to blog about? ah yes, the existential ambivalence. now that postmodernistic black humour is now old news, it seems oddly quaint and therefore natural to write about the incongruities involved in everyday life... not to be confused with nihilism (so '90s grunge) or pessimism (so '90s goth). the future belongs to a very personal kind of boom and bust, as the global becomes truly local in an oddly twisty sort of way.

the joke for today is that a young person sometimes feels as though "this" is the last shot. programmatically, then:

$this->last_shot($the_kitchen_sink)
{
/* if i were to instantiate this object from outside of the class itself, how would i name it? would the class members be public, protected, or private? am i suddenly channelling the matrix with all of this pseudo-code about stacked realites and re-booting myself? who is the constructor? who is the destructor? could i start over rather than live out the recurring dreams of death, and if so, how to write the system over from scratch? */
}

maybe this new business is more than just another idea. perhaps the spitball-in-the-oyster's-mouth within all this is that in the process of figuring out where to stop, it is all too easy to step over the edge, yardstick in hand.

standing at the interior opening of a two-hundred meter passageway, the vision of freedom available as a feast for the eyes only. a glance cast behind reveals deformed cast shadows caught in eternal distorted perspective. the sounds of arrested mutation, stunted growth leaving the monstrous forms writhing in between full-fleshed aliveness and the repose of mercifully accelerating decay.

two options. fight a constant grinding battle against the gravitational inevitability of rusted chains encircling ankles and wrists, or stay in place and be slowly twisted into the permanent deformation that has entombed the self-perceptions of so many others. their dreams, experiments in the use of pure psychological force, invariably ended in failure: unable to generate an impetus strong enough to upend the inconspicuous fallibilities of everyday perception, even the most valiant efforts succumbed to an accumulation of small errors repeated over time.

grim resolve. wounds, loss. pain and suffering. the tunnel could be a lifetime long, described in units whose standards of measurement are entirely arbitrary.

shadows roiling along the frigid uneven ground, reaching endless toward a collapsed paradise, mouth a silent warning for the already-weary prisoner: do not take our path. among them, many are tainted by corrosive elements that defy the pure intensity of dreams.

how can the prisoner, preparing to trudge forward as so many others have done, avoid their fate? to ignore them as failed and therefore useless would surely lead to becoming one of them, at best a variant on their disastrous theme. to listen too closely to their cries, however, would quickly create an indoctrinative echo that would as much ingrain the past as enable the present. to struggle heedleesly within the field of malformed options and unseen obstacles would allow the pitfalls of emotional attachment to become the energetic accelerators of self-destruction.

what then, truly separates this prisoner from the congealed mass of predecessors, those others who also sought escape but instead found the torturous nothingness of empty striving? how to release their impossible attachments, attachments so strong that they themselves became the attachment rather than attaining possession of the thing that they so terribly craved?

perhaps all dreams that prognosticate new worlds and bright futures end in garish nightmares of unfulfillment. what, then, is the opposite of a dream? what lies between the two opposites? and what of the path between the two extremes? can such a thing exist?

audio: saafi brothers . supernatural part II

yesterday, there was a lot to write about. covering all of the questions and ideas from the past two years. and now, my head is an empty drum, reverberating with those lost thoughts as i cast about aimlessly for a way to amplify them.

an added syllable immerges with a mantra from the past, heedlessly transforming the next few years of my life and beyond: school is not over. the insertion of "not" has repercussions that cannot be overstated, considering that at one point in time, the idea of embracing formalized education seemed completely alien. now it seems to be the only idea that makes any sense.

well, not the only idea.

"it's not what you know, it's who you know."

this once seemed to be true. now, though, the axiom lacks context and is thereby left floating among other idealistic naivisms disguised as unassailable truisms. context, then: who you know depends upon what you know. depending on what you know, the worlds of knowledge that are opened to you are populated by networks of individuals; a few key individuals illuminate the navigable paths within those worlds. a person's trajectory toward success or ruin is determined by a combination of preparation and luck.

it's not what you know, it's how you know who you know.

the connection is what matters. if the signal is strong but the connection is weak, communication becomes difficult or even impossible. on the other hand, if the connection is strong, even the faintest echo can have an immeasurable effect.

expectation is a form of assumption. assumption is death.

all activities involving others are a form of social life, just as an individual is fundamentally the same person regardless of the situation in which he may find himself. if the person's work life requires a set of personality attributes that are at variance with the values that he or she upholds in non-work life, there is inevitably going to be a conflict at some point. more likely, a crisis.

more later, maybe.