I am well aware that I don't update this blog enough to even say "I have a blog."But I once had a blog. Those were the days, maybe.
I play keyboard and keytar in a band called Triangle Forest, and we're going on tour. Tomorrow. Which is to say: if you are in or near any of these 14 cities on these dates, please do succumb to our collective magnetism and allow yourself to be drawn to us like iron filings. Our craft is a 18-foot-long Dodge Ram that does not fit neatly into any parking space I've ever come across, and inside it is all blue. I should have lots of free time as we drive across our hot, flat nation and I will change it into something else, such as photographs and weblog entries.
8/2 New York, NY - Fat Baby
8/3 Philadelphia, PA - Space 1026
8/4 Baltimore, MD - Wham City!
8/5 Charlottesville, VA - Tokyo Rose
8/7 New Orleans, LA - Circle Bar
8/8 Austin, TX - Headhunters
8/10 Tucson, AZ - Hotel Congress
8/11 Los Angeles, CA - The Smell
8/14 Portland, OR - Disjecta
8/16 Denver, CO - Monkey Mania
8/18 Lincoln, NE - The Chatterbox
8/19 Chicago, IL - Big Horse Lounge
8/20 Toronto, Canada - Sneaky Dee's
8/26 Providence, RI - AS220 (FancyFest)
It is 3:27 a.m. and I can't get to sleep any way at all. I've been banging at sleep's door for hours and I know that sleep is in there but I know also that it has a cruel spiteful spirit and is snickering behind the door at my frustration. I've tried counting back from 100, I've tried imagining really hard that I'm dissolving into (super-sleepy) fog, I've tried not thinking at all and thinking about everything extremely rapidly, I've tried glasses of water and listening to the night sounds and reading about Indian logic and I've attempted more sleeping positions than there are positions in the kama sutra--but alas they all turned out to be waking positions, not sleeping positions, and I am tired and grouchy. I am listening to the quietest music ever, it sounds like diffident water vapor falling on shrubbery. Nothing works. I am a perpetual motion machine!
Obviously, the sort of people who shout at others from the windows of passing automobiles have never been shouted to from the window of a passing automobile--otherwise they would know that no more than one word is ever remotely intelligible during a drive-by shouting. For example, "kloztf", shouted at me from the window of a passing Chevy earlier today, probably contains a number of embedded words, but "clothes" is the only one that is even remotely intelligible. The rest is dissipated in the wake of car exhaust and cannot be reconstructed.Boys in cars, if you really want to get your message across and get my attention, show your mastery of the craft of catcalling and drive past me repeatedly, circling around the block over and over, shouting one word at a time, until they string together into a glorious, grammatically-correct sentence (e.g. "prithee, lend me thy ears! Thou art lovely, and I do covet thee and would fain mistake myself worthy of touching the hem of thy garment"). Now that would impress me.
Double points for iambic pentameter.
Since I last logged my position with the internet weblogging community (June 5, 2006--now it is 25 days later), I have been replenishing the parched aquifer of my restfulness. The extra free time fell upon me like a sack of bricks, and I don't know what to do with myself sometimes, so I've been pointing my excess energy directly at books and reading a bunch of them. Now that I've spent a month being a rather unproductive Man of Action (meaning that I attempt to do a lot and run into many problems along the way, or that I do a lot that does not really have to be done) I think I am ready to collect up the fragments again and become once more a torrential downpour of effectiveness. I may begin wearing a samurai sword to highlight this psychological change. A new era has fallen upon the earth! And it shall be ruled by my (highly-effective) iron fist.Up until this point I have been having trouble even committing to a bottle of shampoo. I've been on four or five trips specifically designed to yield up a replacement bottle of shampoo, and have found myself stumped each time by an impassive (and apathetic) wall of bottles. I know that I will habituate to whatever I choose in the end, but until the choice has been made it is very daunting. I'm not sure I like how any of them smell, and I don't know which of the special powers each type promises is msot right for me. In cases like mine they should have a vat of shampoo wherein they have mixed equal amounts of every type, and then I can just fill a pailful of that and be done with the whole thing. Fortunately I found a bottle of shampoo in my closet so the problem is solved and I don't have to decide. Unfortunately, I am almost out of conditioner. And I've checked my closet and I don't think I can bank on one materializing out of thin air.
They should start a company called "Hand of Fate Enterprises," and you should be able to hire them for however long to make those decisions for you. They'd leave your week's groceries on your doorstop (you might find they had chosen nothing but collard greens and sandwich cookies, but oh well, you would make the best of it because obviously it was meant to be) and clean the snow off your car in the winter or maybe let the air out of your tires, and you could go about your everyday life with the sense that, somewhere, there was a higher (or at least in-human) power watching over your life and guiding it subtly (or unsubtly, as the case may be) towards some convenient or inconvenient end.
It is alarming how illness invades your thoughts as well as your body: sickness has a sort of gravitational pull that makes all the other events of your day seem to orbit around it. I go from thinking about my body only as much as necessary to running my mind over every part of it, checking to see that everything is in order. I notice slight tinglings in my fingertips that could be healing, hurting, or simply my own attention pooling at the ends of completely normal, functional nerve endings. Any snack I have is immediately compared to a list of folk-remedy foods (soup, orange juice, tea) that I once heard were good for me, any thought I think is neurotically juxtaposed against "the sort of thoughts I usually think" in an effort to find out whether I think differently when sick and should correct for this difference in future thoughts--and all this effort leads almost inevitably back to the first thought in this paragraph.It seems unlikely that letting my mind immerse itself in sickness, like my body, is at all effective in curing things. Probably I should direct all my thoughts toward remedies, meditating upon chicken soup and antibodies and reading the military speeches of Napoleon or the scientific papers of Pasteur. Or compose perfectly metered odes to proper cellular function etc etc. Oh well. My dreams shall find their inspiration in cherry-flavored codeine cough syrup.
I finished my last two finals yesterday, and though I know that my regular summer work (a research project in the same speech lab I worked in last summer) is scheduled for this Friday, this past day has felt like water for the thirsty. Bewildering water. I do not have an itinerary and a plan of attack for this free time. I am like a cartoon character that has been running for a long time and now I've run off the cliff, but I'm still making those running movements. I have a hard time getting to sleep still, and find myself feeling guilty if I am not reading or doing something else along those lines. I have read 700 pages in the last 24 hours, because it is hard to ignore how fast my heart is still going, and if I read it at least serves as a distraction. I am looking forward to the moment when (to return to the cartoon character analogy) I stop, mid-air, and look up, then down, then at the audience, and with some canned sound effect (like "spoing!") I begin falling. Falling, hopefully, asleep?I don't know if it's clear from this weblog, but I am really exhausted. The tiredness is knots in my muscles, and in my thoughts. I did a lot this semester. It has all been really wonderful, but it was hard to keep from feeling like a clock or a public bus: something made solely for use, and working all the time towards that use. So that you feel less like you are getting things done and more like things are getting you done.
So that time is not done, of course, but its parameters will shift a bit and I will make sure to do something utterly unutilitarian tomorrow, like spend an hour lying in bed thinking about oysters or making a sandwich really slowly. Excess and waste! Or, rather, the tender stretching out of an activity to the very limits of its length, like how you ration out the ending of a really good book, measuring it in teaspoons or smaller.
The night smells sky-blue, and that is a start.
On the structure and mechanics of wishing
As long as there is something to wish for, there will be the desire to wish for it—a desire hovering patiently over each day, waiting for some eyelash or shiny new coin to affix itself to. This instinctive natural urge is inevitable as altitude or climate, for in particular frames of mind absolutely anything may be transformed into a vehicle for wishing, being as the only material required in the alchemy of straightforward object to significance-laden symbol is an element of chance or surprise or beyond-our-control, which is in the end as common as air and as inescapably abundant. This enveloping substance, chaotic and insouciant by turns, serves as the raw matter that a wish is widely presumed to act upon—as though the habit and practice of wishing were a pair of scissors that we wield in order to snip away at the fabric of potential and make such alterations as we see fit. In this sense, we craft a tool from raw intention each time we craft a wish, extending the reach of our desires past the reach of our actions or our luck, extending our intentions far into the future. We craft wishes as we craft hammers to pound down a nail with more force than can be mustered by palm or fingers alone.
Having established that there is something to wish for and that the universe seems to be a logical and reasonable system that can be influenced (even if its logic is too complex or unwieldy to diagram) and that there are systematic ways of successfully influencing it in a goal-oriented fashion (for example, cutting down a fine old oak by gathering hatchet, helmet, gloves, goggles, and then applying hatchet-blade to the approximate midsection of the tree, etc) and ways of attempting to influence it that are bound to fail (for example, cutting down a fine old oak by writing letters to the editor, learning abstract mathematics, or knitting beautiful scarves out of high-quality yarn), then it is logical to assume that the effect of the wish is likely to be modulated by and dependent upon the structural characteristics of the wish itself. This places additional pressure upon the reasoned choices of the wishmaker, whose discipline is currently in a state of epistemological disarray analogous to that of empirical science in the dark ages. Lacking a clear scientific method, governed largely by haphazard superstition and religious mysticism, the modern wisher is, as it were, wishing in the dark. Sifting by default through a massive and highly disorganized body of folk-belief, the wisher is forced to weigh intuitively the comparative merits of, say, repeating a favorite wish to cumulatively maximize its chances of success or fashioning a new wish with a greater likelihood of meeting criteria for fulfillment with little to no reliable data or probabilistic models to draw upon while reaching a reasoned judgment. And thus the wishmaker arrives each time at a final uneasy decision rife with untested assumptions, from which he or she will construct and convey a shoddily-conceived wish.
The task that lies ahead of us as a progressive society steeped in the backwards tradition of muddled wishing is to exert upon the contemporary practice of wishing the same rigorous and methodical formalization that has transformed the study of fields such as chemistry and biology into successful intellectual enterprises. Modern technology and paradigms of experimental design can be used to investigate the unseen mechanisms of wish-fulfillment, teasing apart the invisible strands that form the living fabric colloquially referred to as “luck.” To this end, we report a controlled experimental design for the methodical testing of wish effectuality that has the potential to shed light upon variables crucial to the formulation and function of successful wishes. Our proposed design investigates the effect of automatized wishing at times corresponding to 11:11 in each of the 24 standardized international time zones, in order to compare and contrast their relative rates of success. This experiment may even be conducted by amateur scientists lacking access to fully-equipped laboratory facilities in the relatively informal setting of their own home.
Materials and Equipment:
- 24 empty identical paper cups, labeled #1-24
- a clock
- a very dry room
- a very accurate scale
- a chair (optional)
- a tape recorder (optional)
Procedure:
- Carefully arrange all 24 paper cups on a flat surface in the very dry room. This arrangement should be neat, orderly, and scientific-looking. Try a square, or a rectangle.
- Synchronize your clock to a more authoritative clock (usually a larger one, or one found on an electronic device). Place the clock in a highly visible location within the very dry room.
- Beginning at 11:11 a.m. or p.m. in your time zone, stand up commandingly and declare, “I wish that cup #1 would contain water.” Take a seat facing the clock. If you have a chair, you can sit in it.
- Repeat repeatedly. At each hour-long interval stand up and repeat the phrase from Step 3 with conviction, altering only the number of the cup (cup #2, cup #3, etc). If you have a tape recorder, you can pre-record these to control for the effects of fatigue and sleep-deprivation upon the voice.
- After 24 trials, immediately cease all wishful thinking. Stand up. Weigh each of the cups using a very accurate scale. Record your measurements to four decimal places. Then analyze your data and make a graph.
[Insert figures, schemata, and diagrams of experimental setup here]
To this date, many of the central philosophical issues in the theory and practice of wishing remain unresolved. Is, for example, a meta-wish for further wishes valid content for the wish-bearing vehicle, or is the carrying capacity of a wish bounded by factors such as practicality, concreteness, economy? (Ditto the fervency of the wisher, his or her purity of heart, the presence or absence of counterwishes from antagonistic individuals, etc.?) Does the frivolity quotient of a fantastical wish (such as those frequently made by the artless minds of children for ponies and superpowers) bear an inverse relationship to its likelihood of realization? Is there an upper limit to each day’s wishload? Is there a daily quota? Is the wishing capacity of a coin tossed into a wishing well determined by monetary value or by surface area or by international exchange rates or by a complex algorithmic relation between all three?
Even our carefully-controlled experiment described above is suffused with enigmas and unanswered questions. When making wishes at precisely 11:11, are prospective wishers to be confined to the time-zones that they currently occupy, or may they make wishes hourly in accordance with the steady forward march of the international dateline? Or is there, perhaps, a temporal system specific to the time-course of wishing that differs from our metric standard by five, ten, even fifteen minutes, that is unrelated to and unconcerned with the atomic clock or Greenwich Mean Time? Are wishes made at 11:11 unusually effective or ineffective in certain locales? And if so, might this have something to do with, say, the gravitational pull of the moon, or with solar winds?
As we press through the dark, dank cave of our ancestors towards a bright, sterile light at its mouth, we must ask ourselves how can we best harness and make effective use of the vast untapped resources of the wishing process. Though modest in scope, our proposal has the potential to serve as a basic framework for the systematic investigation of variables such as volume, frequency, and velocity upon wish-fulfillment, bringing the awesome force of scientific inquiry to a thoroughly unscientific field. Closing my eyes, I can imagine a future in which the shiniest of hovercars zoom by, fueled solely by the wish-power of their drivers.
What startling discoveries will the results of this experiment yield, what magnificent advances in culture, art, medicine, and overall quality of life? What astounding new perspectives on existence, what new insights into our own deepest desires? Dear reader, I wish I knew.
I like walking. I like the pace of it, how walking at a reasonable clip you can notice a reasonable number of things out of the corner of your eye--when sitting still there is the temptation to try to see it all (it is just sitting there, after all, and you have nothing better to do) and when driving it all turns kaleidoscopic anyway, smearing and spinning and rendering the whole vast changing landscape, invisible. I also like the aches that come after a couple of hours, pains that, paradoxically, indicate that you are becoming healthier. I like that you can walk intrepidly anywhere you go, but you can only drive intrepidly if traffic permits and I don't know if there is any way at all to public-transportation intrepidly. I like walking and stopping and the resumption of walking and I also like: 1. handclaps 2. cellos 3. civil-war era tin drumming 4. rock songs that rhyme "fine" with "mine" 5. songs that use that thump-thumpthump beat that the Ronettes used in "be my baby" and that Eddie Money ripped of in "take me home" and that Kicking Giant ripped off in "she's real" (I also like it when people rip off the Ronettes) and that the Jesus and Mary Chain used in "just like honey."And while we're in enumerative mode, there are green and red grapes for $1.00 a pound near South Station in Boston, the onset of spring in slow gorgeous spasms, chocolate-cherry cupcakes and chai, power chords and skinned knees, chrome, and stubble. And, on a final antienumerative note, there is exactly one boyfriend who is superlatively fine, and he is mine.
I was thinking of making my Valentine's Day an isolation-day, one of those holidays you take from the outside world in general (well, outside world minus one person). I would do something utterly unproductive, like take the bus to a suburb and collect paint samples from Home Depot.Then I remembered that, given a choice, it is usually better to be enthusiastic about something than unenthusiastic. Therefore:
